The most recent science is confounding and terrifying as it tries to completely rewrite what we know about the world. The 19th century people were so confident that they had found and named most of the living beings and had them all sorted into boxes. Then the boxes exploded. All the stuff we thought was unique and assigned turned out to be processes, not even objects with predictable known qualities. We already knew that the American animals were often misnamed because the Europeans called them according to the Euro experiences, not least being the "Indians" who are not from India.
But the biggest mistake is not understanding that all these categories are processes, even "Indians". We have to come up with new names for them. They are time-streams, edited and moved as things unfold. As individuals, native Americans in the indigenous sense, change as they mature. We can accept that mostly, though some essentialists want to make early identities permanent. What's much more difficult is the idea of communities changing. And more difficult than that is the idea of the planet changing, because the time frames are long.
Let's take an explosive sub-category of a hot topic: "Indian artifacts." One of the most interesting books I read when I was researching Sacred Bundles was an old (1904) ethnological research paper reprinted and published by the U of Nebraska Press. It's called "The Hako: Song, Pipe, and Unity in a Pawnee Calumet Ceremony." The original was written by Alice C. Fletcher, assisted by James R. Murie. Both of them were old-fashioned anthropologists and meddlers in governing of "Indians." Few "disciplines" -- the name-box for kinds of thoughts -- are changing as quickly as anthropology, partly because of scientific reinterpretation of humans and partly because of political points of view. The book is about the development of Pipe Bundles, how they were first designed, and how they spread.
The story is parallel to the development of the present Catholic Mass when the Judaic idea of studying text while praying was joined to Jesus' directions for Communion. As the years passed, the natural shape of liminal space for deep meaning developed, taking in new ideas (the Passing of the Peace, genuflecting) and dropping out less important ones. As the People moved, they picked up some practices and forgot others.
DRK used to speak of the "hydraulics of the tribes" which referred to the named groups of people (identified at first contact by Euros or by "nicknames" from adjacent tribes, not always flattering). The term meant that as outsiders pushed in from the East Coast, they forced the original people to move West, which bumped other people out of their own territories, and when disease or war decimated a tribe, they sometimes threw in with another. But if things went well and a tribe expanded, it might split and separate to slightly different territories. This is true of animals as well. The "Hako" or calumet, a sacred long pipe with a feathered shaft, was a response to this, spreading through time and space from one tribe to another.
The original "Hako" of 1904 which is pictured on the original cover of the first book is relatively simple with fewer embellishments and no talk of a Bundle. The Blackfeet "Thunder Pipe Bundle" in the Sixties was much more elaborate and included skins of animals, each indicating a song and dance. Materials include the full tail of a Golden Eagle, brass falconry bells, the ribbons, and the skin of a remarkable bird. The Sacred Pipe we cared for had the green skin of a parrot that had been prepared by a taxidermist. You can see it in the book Bob Scriver self-published, "The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains." The major part of the book does not discuss materials but rather is interested in the structure and content of the ceremonies that went with the Hako.
Scriver's book includes other smaller and simpler Bundles with special significance. One was full of surgical hemostats that looked like scissors except that they had a clamp at the point that opened and shut. We were puzzled until a person came along who did quill work and explained that they were very useful for doing quill work. They were bundled to keep them together. But since everything creative has spiritual significance, it was legitimately called "Sacred." Blackfeet had always carried their materials in bundles and parfleches rather than boxes. Humans have always saved objects with special meaning for them.
Scriver tried to claim the process of making Sacred Bundles when he made a lodge of his own, the one on the cover of his book. (above) The theme was the badger and most of the content of the Bundle came from a dream he had, undoubtedly his subconscious as poet. I wrote a paper about it. So had he become a Blackfeet? He was born on the rez, raised on the rez, lived there all his life except for military service and college, but was buried in Cut Bank, just off the rez, when he had asked to be buried about where this Badger Lodge is pitched in the photo. Was he a pretendian? His parents had no indigenous genes, if you believe there is such a thing. Euro-style rather than heart-style, he was buried with his family.
When I was serving as Unitarian clergy, I tried organizing a bundle and asked the people to bring precious things to use in the way Blackfeet used animal skins of various species, forming a kind of hymnal reminder since each species had a dancing song. My experiment didn't work, because this aspect of religion is a community function, not from individuals. What did work, almost to the point of overwhelming everything else, was lighting candles dedicated to important issues, people, events. At first it was the idea of lighting something inside the chalice, a candle or small fire because of the metaphor adopted from John Hus' martyrdom in defence of free speech. That was our "Bundle."
I'm saying that community-shared religious positions (which only occasionally include "faith" in the sense of commitment) are often centered on an image, a poetic representation with immense emotional power. Both the Blackfeet Bundle and the flame in the chalice are examples. Despite morphing over time and space, they are simple and vital enough to survive as long as their meaning is remembered. They are processes based on place markers, the icons that to some people become sacred themselves. The objects changed around a core meaning. The religious task of our time is to find that focus again.
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