Black Elk, Lakota Visionary by Harry Oldmeadow

Author:Harry Oldmeadow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936597611
Publisher: World Wisdom

Cultural Adaptation and “Dual Participation”

In the late 1980s William K. Powers noted that anthropologists had long been puzzled by the “dual religious participation” of Native Americans in both their own indigenous tradition and Christianity. He argued that this conundrum only persisted because these traditions were understood primarily as belief systems: as traditional and Christian beliefs clearly contradicted each other, Powers maintained, one could not believe both simultaneously. He then suggested that “Christianity and Oglala religion coexist because they serve quite disparate functions. . . . I regard the participation by Oglala in Christian sects as social, political, economic, and religious strategies.”28 Conversion to Christianity was seen as a creative adaptive move by which Lakota values and practices were protected by a Christian overlay. “Thus the Oglala were not so much to become Christianized as Christianity was to become nativized. . . . The Oglala in fact used Christianity consciously and positively in order to survive.”29 For instance, church membership provided access to literacy skills, food and clothing, and provided a means of preserving traditional forms of social organization. Catherine Schuon recalls that Elva One Feather once remarked, “Indians liked to go to church on Sundays because it was for them the only way to come together and meet old friends since their homes were built by the government on purpose miles apart from each other to prevent possible uprisings.”30 This supports Powers’ claim that, “As a means of survival and adaptation to the unalterability of the white man’s dominance, Christianity has been used in such a way that old cultural institutions and their associated values may persist under new labels.”31 On the other hand, Powers contended, Lakota beliefs and practices continued (sometimes covertly) to serve their religious and spiritual needs.

Powers has been one of the more vocal critics attempting to puncture what he calls “the Black Elk myth,” believing that there is no reason for distinguishing Black Elk from other Lakota medicine men. Powers is clearly hostile to Neihardt, Brown, and to Black Elk himself because of his “Christianizing” of the Ghost Dance and his supposedly opportunistic conversion to Catholicism.32 Not surprisingly Powers’ anti-Christian animus and his structural-functional model have not found much favor amongst those who see Black Elk’s conversion to Catholicism in positive religious terms. It must also be said that while Powers’ model yields some insights its overall effect is reductive: it takes neither Lakota tradition nor Christianity seriously in their own terms, which is to say that Powers, like many anthropologists, etiolates religion by treating it as no more than a cultural production, a sociological phenomenon, thereby exemplifying what Eliade called “the religious illiteracy” of much modern scholarship.

A more sophisticated and supple version of the “dual participation” interpretation of Black Elk’s religious affiliations is provided by Clyde Holler, who is more sensitive to the religious and spiritual dimensions of Lakota-Christian interactions. Holler is surely right in pointing out that Black Elk did not see the two traditions primarily in terms of theological propositions or doctrines which

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