Cosmic Scholar by John Szwed

Author:John Szwed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Rooks failed to mention that when Harry did meet with him, he brought along a bushel of peyote, which Rooks kept.

An ad appeared in the Daily Oklahoman on February 16, 1964: “WANTED sound man to operate Kudelski Nagra for film Co. Contact Conrad Rooks after five o’clock, at 89er Inn. Phone JA 5–5595. Must be familiar with Nagra.”

* * *

Harry had read James Mooney’s 1897 book, The Kiowa Peyote Rite, and saw that for seventy-five years peyote had served as a medicine and a means of teaching proper behavior. It was the center of Kiowa all-night sacred gatherings for the most critical moments of life—birth, baptism, healing, marriage, and funerals. Peyote, a cactus containing the mind-altering substance mescaline and other psychoactive alkaloids, was the first psychedelic encountered by Euro-Americans, and was largely condemned by them. Over time, its use had become part of a new pan-Indian identity and a form of resistance to the culture of white colonists, a parallel to the Ghost Dance religious movement. After the Native American Church was formed in the early twentieth century and the religious use of peyote was declared legal for use by the church, it gave birth to new forms of art, jewelry, music, and musical instruments. These artistic uses of the drug by Native peoples, and the power of peyote to enable altered visual and rhythmic sensory responses, was especially influential among non-Indian musicians, artists, and filmmakers.

The history of the Kiowa is very different from that of the Northwest Coast tribal people that Harry knew. In past years, Kiowa were hunters and gatherers who traveled by horse or dogsled and carried their lodges—the teepees—with them. They were known for their warriors and their skill in horse riding, but also for their artistry in painting, sculpting, and beadwork. The Kiowa migrated from Montana to the Rockies, and then to the Southern Plains early in the nineteenth century, then were forced to relocate to reservations in Oklahoma in the middle 1800s. “They differed from other Plains tribes,” Harry wrote, “in that they possessed a social organization so diffuse that its outlines can be ascertained only by statistical methods. They had no moieties or clans—those things would have been inappropriate for a group that was constantly absorbing refugees and lovers from the far-flung tribes that the Kiowa came into contact with.”

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