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A Dakota man, in fact a direct descendant of Charles Eastman, said at a conference I attended last week that he carried his great-grandfather's book, The Soul of an Indian, with him wherever he went. Then he reached in his pocket and pulled it out, a book I've never read.
So I listened to The Soul of an Indian yesterday on the way to Chicago and loved it. I'm not silly about such things. What Charles Eastman describes as the religion of Native peoples may well be a bit over-the-top in its generous portrayals; it struck me as being--how shall I say it?--a bit "golden-age-ish." But then who am I to judge the authenticity of another person's spirituality or portrayal of such--red or yellow, black or white? Nope. Yesterday, I just listened.
There's a line that's just a paragraph or two into the book that's really stuck with me, although other things have as well: "The religion of the Indian is the last thing about him that the man of another race will ever understand."
That strikes me as absolutely right. I don't honestly know why I've become so fascinated by the stories of Native America, although it may have something to do with the fact that I live in Sioux Center, in Sioux County, which is 12 miles east of the Big Sioux river and about equa-distant between Sioux City and Sioux Falls--and yet I don't know that in the 40 or so years that I've lived here I've ever yet encountered a Sioux Indian. For that, I've had to head north and west and south.
I've spent long hours reading about the Sioux Indian wars, about Navajo and Zuni histories--novels and chronicles, new and ancient. But what Eastman says struck me totally as true: after all that reading and travel, I don't know that I still understand the traditional religion of Native people.
When we visited Japan several years ago, I read a great deal about the Japanese and decided their faith was vastly too difficult to understand. Here you have a people who, in some ways, have few of the vestiges of what Western folks would consider "religion." A corner shrine in one part of the house maybe, somewhere in the community a temple--but no family alter to speak of, no Sabbath, and few rituals. Yet, travel books make it very clear that religion is central to Japanese life.
This morning I got an e-mail from an old friend, one of those viral things you're fully expected to pass along to all other concerned American citizens. It's deeply anti-Islamic, a screed that promises all of America will morph into Detroit in a decade or so if good people don't stand up and vote the scoundrels out. It's a Christian thing. Of course, it's a Christian thing.
Eastman says in The Soul of an Indian that Native people couldn't really understand what the missionaries were talking about when they brought "the white man's religion" because so many white people they met didn't appear to share the love and peace and moral character that this Jesus guy preached.
All of which leads me to believe that Eastman was only half right. Let me edit the argument this way: "The religion of the Indian [add: any human being] is the last thing about him [add: or her] that the man [add: or woman]of another race [add: or tribe or fellowship] will ever understand."
So I listened to The Soul of an Indian yesterday on the way to Chicago and loved it. I'm not silly about such things. What Charles Eastman describes as the religion of Native peoples may well be a bit over-the-top in its generous portrayals; it struck me as being--how shall I say it?--a bit "golden-age-ish." But then who am I to judge the authenticity of another person's spirituality or portrayal of such--red or yellow, black or white? Nope. Yesterday, I just listened.
There's a line that's just a paragraph or two into the book that's really stuck with me, although other things have as well: "The religion of the Indian is the last thing about him that the man of another race will ever understand."
That strikes me as absolutely right. I don't honestly know why I've become so fascinated by the stories of Native America, although it may have something to do with the fact that I live in Sioux Center, in Sioux County, which is 12 miles east of the Big Sioux river and about equa-distant between Sioux City and Sioux Falls--and yet I don't know that in the 40 or so years that I've lived here I've ever yet encountered a Sioux Indian. For that, I've had to head north and west and south.
I've spent long hours reading about the Sioux Indian wars, about Navajo and Zuni histories--novels and chronicles, new and ancient. But what Eastman says struck me totally as true: after all that reading and travel, I don't know that I still understand the traditional religion of Native people.
When we visited Japan several years ago, I read a great deal about the Japanese and decided their faith was vastly too difficult to understand. Here you have a people who, in some ways, have few of the vestiges of what Western folks would consider "religion." A corner shrine in one part of the house maybe, somewhere in the community a temple--but no family alter to speak of, no Sabbath, and few rituals. Yet, travel books make it very clear that religion is central to Japanese life.
This morning I got an e-mail from an old friend, one of those viral things you're fully expected to pass along to all other concerned American citizens. It's deeply anti-Islamic, a screed that promises all of America will morph into Detroit in a decade or so if good people don't stand up and vote the scoundrels out. It's a Christian thing. Of course, it's a Christian thing.
Eastman says in The Soul of an Indian that Native people couldn't really understand what the missionaries were talking about when they brought "the white man's religion" because so many white people they met didn't appear to share the love and peace and moral character that this Jesus guy preached.
All of which leads me to believe that Eastman was only half right. Let me edit the argument this way: "The religion of the Indian [add: any human being] is the last thing about him [add: or her] that the man [add: or woman]of another race [add: or tribe or fellowship] will ever understand."
You don't have be aboriginal to be misunderstood. Most of the time I think I don't understand my own faith.
At the college where I teach--a deeply confessional place, really--I've had wonderful students, students I really, really loved, who graduate to becoming sanctified disciples of Jim Wallis on one hand, or Glen Beck on the other. It's hard to imagine their brothers in the Lord.
At the college where I teach--a deeply confessional place, really--I've had wonderful students, students I really, really loved, who graduate to becoming sanctified disciples of Jim Wallis on one hand, or Glen Beck on the other. It's hard to imagine their brothers in the Lord.
I loved The Soul of an Indian, but I bet I'd love The Soul of a Christian just as much, as long as it was written as generously as Eastman's portrait of Native spirituality.
Telling the truth--at least about white Christians, my people--would be a whole lot thornier, or so it seems to me.
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Charles Eastman's life is quite incredible. The son of a white military hero and a Dakota chief's granddaughter, he was raised Dakota, but taken by his father into Christianity and reservation life once his father returned from the 1862 Dakota War. He graduated from Dartmouth and Boston College's School of Medicine and served at Pine Ridge in the years surrounding the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. HBO used his life selectively for a TV movie titled Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. He married a woman almost as interesting as he was--Ellen Goodman, who taught school at Pine Ridge at the same time he was there. I used Ms. Goodman's character as prototype for a character in my own novel Touches the Sky. Eastman wrote 11 books in an attempt to allow white America to better understand Native people.
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