Native American traditions

Ceremony was illegal in the United States until 1978 and in Canada until 1951 — which is the fact that makes the appropriation argument what it is.

What it is

The religious traditions of the Indigenous peoples of North America — with 574 federally recognised tribes in the United States, hundreds of First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities in Canada, and Indigenous peoples across Mexico.

They are not one tradition and the differences are not cosmetic. Haudenosaunee, Diné, Lakota, Inuit, Anishinaabe, Hopi, Coast Salish and Cherokee traditions differ in cosmology, ceremony, language and social organisation as much as European religions do. The composite "Native American spirituality" of popular books is an assembly made by outsiders.

This article describes public history and the terms of a current argument. It does not describe ceremony.

Where it came from

Traditions of long standing, disrupted by invasion, disease, dispossession and deliberate policy.

The legal suppression is the essential context and is frequently unknown.

In the United States, the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Religious Crimes Code of 1883 prohibited traditional ceremonies, and enforcement continued for decades. The Sun Dance was banned. The Ghost Dance movement, a revival prophecy of the late 1880s, was suppressed by force — and the attempt to stop it culminated at Wounded Knee in 1890, where the US Army killed some 250 to 300 Lakota, most of them women and children.

In Canada, the potlatch — the great redistributive ceremony of the Northwest Coast — was banned from 1885 until 1951, with participants imprisoned and regalia confiscated.

And in both countries, generations of children were removed to residential and boarding schools where their languages and practices were forbidden, with consequences documented by Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) and by the United States' Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.

Free exercise was not restored in the United States until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, and even that proved to have limited legal teeth — in Employment Division v. Smith (1990) the Supreme Court upheld the denial of unemployment benefits to men dismissed for sacramental peyote use, a decision so unpopular it prompted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Specific protection for peyote use by members of the Native American Church was enacted by amendment in 1994.

NAGPRA (1990) established a process for the repatriation of ancestral remains and sacred objects held by museums and institutions, and that work is still under way.

How it is practised

Not described here, and the reason is in the history above: these practices were criminal within living memory, much of the knowledge is held by specific people with specific responsibilities, and a great deal has already been taken and published without permission.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the appropriation objection is made by the communities themselves and is on the record. The 1993 Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality, issued by a summit of Lakota, Dakota and Nakota representatives, objects specifically to non-Native people selling sweat lodges, vision quests and pipe ceremonies, and to those who claim credentials no community granted. The term plastic shaman comes from this context.

The strength of the objection is the timing. Practices that were illegal to perform until 1978 are now sold by people who faced no risk in taking them up, while the communities they came from often struggle for access to sites, plants and ceremony.

We can say the consequences have included deaths. The 2009 sweat lodge deaths at a self-help event in Sedona — three people, at a ceremony run for profit by someone with no training in the tradition he was imitating, who was convicted of negligent homicide — are covered under cultural appropriation. The protocols that were absent exist for reasons.

We can say plant supply is a real pressure, from white sage harvesting discussed under smudging to peyote, whose wild populations in south Texas are under strain and which the Native American Church depends on.

And we can say the communities are not uniform. Some Native teachers have shared publicly and deliberately; others regard that as betrayal. Both positions are held by people with standing, and anyone claiming to speak for "Native Americans" on this is describing a faction.

We cannot describe ceremony, and it is not ours to describe.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is practised

What we can and cannot say

Further reading