In Lame Deer, a Lakota holy man shares insights about his own and other Native Americans’ spiritual attitudes, along with his often funny perceptions of the behavior and attitudes of Americans of European descent. In the process, he reveals a great deal about Native Americans’ understanding of their place in the universe. His insights and stories of his own life and the oral tradition of his community demonstrate how different his view and habits of mind are from those of European descent. He shows in his stories of his family and the sad history of his fellow Native Americans how they approach to nature, family, and property ownership, among many other aspects of life.
His insights demonstrate how much variety there is in the spiritual and religious beliefs and practices that motivate people on this continent. This book thus serves as a cautionary tale for a nation that is still attempting (often with little success) to help its citizens co-exist and cooperate with people from different religious backgrounds. The details of spiritual and religious beliefs and practices are demonstrated through the pages of Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions to actually shape the way Native Americans perceive and interact with the world. Thus, Lame Deer’s testimony is a reminder that religion thus affects every aspect of civic life, in spite of the legal separation of church and state.
According to John Fire Lame Deer, Native Americans live and move through a natural world that is all alive and all holy. As he states, the very rocks are “sacred” (Lame Deer 188). Every single thing in nature is sacred to Lame Deer’s people, in fact, including the thunder, and water (Lame Deer 114). The living animals are considered kin to the Native Americans, as for example, when the author refers to Brother Buffalo (Lame Deer 270). This kinship with all of nature is explained through a foundational myth about the arrival of White Buffalo Woman to his people. Lame Deer recounts for the reader this vivid and revealing legend. White Buffalo Woman is a holy person, which is recognizable by the fact that she travels by flying or floating through the air.
When she arrives, she instructs Lame Deer’s people on how to be good caretakers of the world around them. She demonstrates the use of the sacred pipe, and the circular walking ritual that acknowledges all four cardinal directions. She addresses men, women, and children in turn, directing them to share the responsibility for maintaining and safeguarding the world. When she leaves, she transforms into various colors of buffalo. The buffalo, for the Native Americans, became the source of meat for food, hides for clothing and laces, manure for fuel, and bones and horns for structural members for sleds and many other useful items. Thus, the Lakota founding myth directly connects their very survival to cherishing the world through a received tradition. This is distinct from the Judeo-Christian directive to multiply.
Lame Deer does remind readers that his kinship with the stones is not unique. He points out that European traditions also include sacred rocks (for example, Stonehenge, the cave paintings of Lascaux, and the stone tablets of Moses). However, he says that Americans of European ancestry have forgotten that their spiritual history included a similarly intimate relationship with nature (Lame Deer 195). There are actually several parallels between Native American religious myths, symbols, and practices, and those from other cultures. The fact that a Native American holy person floats or flies, for example, sounds like traditional descriptions of deities and saints from other traditions flying or being taken up into heaven. However, this apparent similarity does not lead to similar behavior.
The Native American stance of cherishing all of nature as part of one family is, in Lame Deer’s description, different from the attitude of white people that Lame Deer characterizes as “arrogance and self-love” (Lame Deer 89). Lame Deer differentiates his world from what he calls the “green frog-skin world” (Lame Deer 39). This is the world of green paper money and private property, and of aggressive extraction and exploitation while “never giving anything back” (Lame Deer 119). For Lame Deer, these attitudes are unsurprisingly congruent with white people’s religions, practiced in a square building, sitting on hard benches, “showing off they’re fine clothes” (Lame Deer 189). This is contrasted with the Native American’s spiritual practices which are largely outdoors in communion with nature, or in a dark sweat lodge with no clothes on at all (Lame Deer ibid).
Native American spiritual attitudes, which affect every aspect of life, even shaped Native Americans’ ability to learn English and to cooperate with the schools and other institutions with which they have been forced by the US Government to interact, as reiterated by Lame Deer throughout his book (Lame Deer 26-27). This raises a very relevant question for present-day communities that include people with profoundly different religious beliefs, arriving from all over the world. Their beliefs may shape their perceptions of the world, as well. Religious beliefs may lead to difficulties in fitting in with schools, child protective services, the armed forces, and the legal system, just to note a few examples. The news has been full, over the decades, of incidents of conflicts between the civil authorities and religious and spiritual groups over such practices as pacifism and avoidance of the draft, refusal to pay taxes, religious marijuana use, headscarves and face veils in school or the workplace, child marriage, polygamy, female genital mutilation, blood transfusions, objections to same-sex marriage, and a host of other issues.
This book reminds us that vastly different attitudes, exemplified by Lame Deer’s narrative of his people’s unique traditions, persist here simultaneously. Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox denominations, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Mormonism, and the many other religions practiced here, all compete for members, and advocate for their own agendas and impose their own rules on their participants’ behavior. This book helps to reveal the depth and severity of the obstacles that this religious diversity throws across the road to creating and maintaining a civil society here in the United States of America. The founding notion of the separation of church and state is admirable in that it is meant to prevent the sort of religious persecution that European history demonstrated to the colonists. However, the practitioners of varied religions may adopt wildly different approaches to the way that they live their lives. These varying attitudes can impact all phases, choices, and details of daily life. This has the potential to sabotage efforts to create order and a society that functions well. Lame Deer’s book poignantly highlights this ongoing challenge to civil peace posed by the variety of the American religious experience.
Works Cited
Lame Deer, John Fire. Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Print.