Notes on Julian Rice, Before the Great Spirit: The Many Faces of Sioux Spirituality

[endymions_bower]

My own comments here are relatively few; I've set them off with italics. Right now I'm working from a pdf, with uncertain pagination. I have a paperback on the way, and once I have it I will add page numbers to the passages quoted here. I've kept them in quotation marks, just as I posted them to Twitter, in order to avoid any confusion. I've also kept them in the condensed form which was necessary due to Twitter's character limit, just removing artificial breaks.

"In this book, the Great Spirit is seen as a foreign concept."

 

"Some of the beings the medicine man knows are Wakan Tanka (great spirits), while others are wakanpi (lesser spirits), but all are 'above mankind' and all 'govern' various aspects of life."

 

"Good Seat, born in 1827 … asserted that the Great Spirit was a missionary imposition: 'The white men have made [the Lakota] forget that which their fathers told them… In old times the Indians did not know of a Great Spirit… There is no Nagi Tanka [Great Spirit]'."

 

"Like Good Seat, White Hat believes that the 'Great Spirit' was either a missionary imposition or an oversimplification of Lakota belief offered by elders attempting to explain their spirituality to non-Indians."

 

"A trader … observed lively intellectual debates that he predictably condemned as anarchic: '[T]he Dakota, with all his infinity of deities appears a creature of irreligion. One speaks of the Medicine Dance with respect, while another smiles at the name'…"

Throughout in Price's reports of the accounts of early informants, we see the polycentricity which is typical of living polytheisms.

 

"Since there was no consensus of devotion to a single Wakan Tanka (God), adherents of competing spirits like the Wakinyan and Unktehi felt no obligation to pray to each other's several wakan tanka (great spirits)."

 

"In 'The Feast by Tate' the plural Wakan Tanka (Great Spirits), who include Wi (the Sun), Wakan Skan (the Sky), Han Wi (the Moon and wife of Wi), and Inyan (the Rock), 'made the world and all [the good things] in it', while Iktomi (the trickster) made the bad things and initiated strife by inducing the four winds to fight."

 

"But Iktomi does not just counterbalance good in Little Wound's account, he often overwhelms it. It is Little Wound's trickster who grants the theoretically greater spirits their virtues and then simultaneously inserts a weakness…"

 

"Though Little Wound contradicts his myth of how Iktomi made the spirits by stating that no one knows how they were made, Lakota storytellers emphasize a concept of creation that has more to do with finding methods of use than with origination per se."

 

This is akin to what I was thinking when I wondered if Omama, in the Yanomami myth, was "creating … the possibility of invoking the xapiri, rather than their existence in an absolute sense."

 

"The word wakan itself does not translate to 'holy' or to any attribute of a supreme deity but rather to a power that circulates everywhere and that is visibly concentrated in certain transient forms."

 

This seems to be true of many terms in Indigenous traditions that get taken as translations for the monotheist "God"—something that is a property of the Gods (or "spirits", if you must) is reified and placed over Them.

 

"In each trickster story, tellers and listeners went to war against Iktomi. When in the course of the story they finally counted coup on him, they augmented their wakan by taking the trickster's energy for themselves, much as a warrior seized an enemy's power…"

 

"In each story where he appears, Iktomi provides grist for the hero's growth, according to a cosmic pattern of potentiality."

The trickster keeps power circulating by continuously wagering it, whereas the monotheist God accumulates and retains it. In this respect, the trickster, when at a "high" position in the pantheon, secures polytheism and prevents monotheistic consolidation. I am reminded of Clastres' theory about Amazonian warfare as preventing the consolidation of the state.

 

"'The Iktomi stories, we tend to look at them as entertainment. But we asked one elderly man … He said the Iktomi stories, it's real because somebody fulfills that role throughout history … Those stories are told to prevent you from being caught in that role'."

 

Contrast this negative/agonistic source of goodness with the goodness imparted by the monotheist God to His "creation".

 

"Shooter added that each man and animal is 'an independent individuality' that must first 'rely on itself'."

The point here isn't reification of the individual, but rather the polycentric nature of the entire field.

 

"Scourging the trickster is a waste of time. Sooner or later he will take every person and every community by surprise. And no wonder, since at one time Iktomi was the virtual equivalent of God."

 

"Considering his changeable character, Iktomi is rarely an object of prayer for the people who granted interviews to 19th-century ethnographers, but for the Canadian Dakota who spoke to Wallis … 'There were other things to pray to, yet they must pray most of all to Spider'."

 

"Though one Canadian Dakota narrator made Iktomi into a supreme being, Ella Deloria remembered a children's rhyme that made the trickster inimical as a teacher and beatable as a foe."

These are not contradictory, we should say, but complementary.

 

"By himself [Falling Star] is no miracle worker nor is he monotheistically dependent on a single sponsor … He respects a multiplicity of powers outside himself, no matter how small each power may be."

 

"Only the accumulated powers of many spirits can give him and the people he personifies the ability to survive."

 

The intensity with which Good Seat rejects the "Great Spirit" notion is especially instructive, I think, because of the recognition it shows that this posit is neither beneficial, nor harmless, but is in itself an active forgetting, that something is lost through its presence.

 

"In the ceremonial descriptions … for The Sacred Pipe … Black Elk implied that Lakota spirituality would be enriched by blending it with Christianity … but the emphasis on multiple spirits in 'Falling Star' is more typically Lakota and virtually free of monotheism."

 

"In the universe Good Seat describes countless spirits pursued their own agendas … Some were so-called 'Great Spirits' or Wakan Tanka like the Thunders and the Sun. Others were animal spirits, while still others were the spirits of dead friends or enemies."

 

"Even though Black Elk believed he had actually seen Christ in one of his Ghost Dance visions, he says that abandoning the Thunder Beings was his 'great mistake'."

 

"Prayer with the pipe occurs at the center of the earth because an individual human being is the focal point of wakan energy. Devotion is not directed upward to a single source … Instead of depending on 'God', people must become their own creators."

I would argue that in many polytheisms the role of the "creator God" is properly understood in this intimate relationship to an individual spiritworker's cosmogonic work.

 

"In asserting that 'there is no Nagi Tanka [Great Spirit]' in the 'God' sense, Good Seat correctively reinstated a world of smaller spirits that required greater human assistance and cooperation."

 

"In the Lakota scheme the strongest 'god' is also the most dangerous and must be understood, respected, and channelled into goodness by his worshippers."

 

"When several mid-19th c. Dakota said that the 'Great Spirit' created everything except the Wakinyan (Thunders) and wild rice, their staff of life, they may have been appeasing their interviewers while playing it safe in regard to the fiercest and most intense form of spiritual being that Sioux tradition had conceived."

 

"Dakota ethnography, from the mid-19th c. to that of Wallis in the early 20th, suggests that the Stone, the Spider, the Unktehi, and other spirits had their competing devotees, but that the Thunders were more feared, respected, and invoked than any other power."

 

"The 'supreme being' among the Sioux often depends on the partiality of the speaker."

 

"The same narrator has the Thunderbird tell the man to call upon the 'stone in the center of the earth' … because that stone, not the chief of the Thunders, is 'leader of everything on the earth'…

 

"Another Canadian Dakota told Wallis that the trickster, Spider, 'was the head of everything on earth' … Some Dakota informants told Lynd … that Tunkan, the 'stone god', received most of their prayers with Wakinyan a close second…

 

"Some of Walker's informants directly contradicted the relative ages of the trickster and of stone cited by the Canadian Dakota: 'Inyan, the Rock, [is] the first in existence and the grandfather of all things. Inyan is older than Iktomi. He is entitled to the red paint [praise and worship]."

 

"Lynd … had a hard time consigning them to the kind of nature worship he was prepared to understand: 'What one believes another appears to deny; and though pantheism rears itself prominent above all, yet the skepticism of the one part seems to offset the earnest devotion of the others'."

 

"Though the Sioux found spirits in every living thing, their presence did not create the tranquil reveries of New Age contemplation. The aggregate 'divinity' was far from pantheistic, because it was composed of powerful beings at cross purposes, rather than a single creator with a deific plan."

 

"Eastman … wrote of the high honor accorded to the Unktehi and of their battles with the Thunderbirds. She learned that both were equally strong and that they competed for the worship of the most promising young men … 'Unk-ta-he', said one of the oldest men … 'is as powerful as the thunder-bird. Each wants to be the greatest god of the Dahcotahs, and they have had many battles."

 

"Spiritual rivalry within the tribe augmented and concentrated energy in the circle, much as did the competitive games previously discussed. Even stories about the battles between spirits generated vitality in ways that paeans to an omnipotent god could not."

 

"He says that while the Thunder Beings have the power to kill, the water has the power to heal because it is the source of the power in all the curative herbs that the medicine men use."

 

Polytheisms recognize that different Gods can be ultimate in different respects, that is, in accord with different ontologies.

 

"Sword had become a Christian by the time he worked with Walker … By mitigating polytheism … Sword helped Walker present a monotheism that admitted the Lakota to the circle of 'high cultures' as defined by theories of religious evolution still prevalent today."

 

"One of Deloria's informants commented, 'Hoh! He is making over the bible story', referring to Skan's fashioning of the human shape."

 

"Although the gods applaud Skan's proclamation, in the end Walker reduced them to the ranks of angels. He had noted that the younger generation incorrectly referred to Wakan Tanka as a single person and yet he himself asserted (and helped to create) a Lakota monotheism…"

 

"Bushotter describes occasional meetings of all persons possessed of supernatural power. The only qualification for membership was the individual's relationship to one of the takuskanskan, 'things' in perpetual motion… This pluralization of takuskanskan does not depersonalize the term, although Bushotter implies that takuskanskan may be composed of hundreds of spirits."

 

(This takuskanskan appears to be the source of Walker's supreme being, Skan.)

 

"The probable Crow equivalent of both wakan and takuskanskan was maxpe, an all suffusing cosmic energy … Many spirits may be its personified manifestations but no single spirit, no Great Maxpe is its source."

 

"Since Densmore indicates that she intuitively believed the Lakota to be monotheists, it is possible that she asked leading questions and then interpreted the translated responses to accord with her supportive intent. As a sympathetic investigator she may have wished to enhance respect for the men she had come to know by showing that their spirituality was as pure as that of her non-Indian readers, who presumably believed that the worship of a Supreme Being revealed a refined sensibility. In fact, much evidence in her book indicates the presence of Christian influence wherever monotheism is mentioned or implied. Still other evidence, however, suggests that even when her informants spoke prayerfully of Wakan Tanka, some of them thought of visionary experience and ceremonial practice as a personal relationship to an individual spirit or a distinct higher power, like the Thunder or the Sun, rather than to God. Wakan Tanka was actually a more amorphous term when used in prayer … some of Densmore's ritual descriptions and song texts in conjunction with several of Walker's interviews imply that Wakan Tanka was the most honorific way to address any of the great mysteries."

 

"One of the oldest holy men interviewed by Walker applied the term Wakan Tanka solely to events and relationships rather than to spirit persons or entities."

 

"Instead of referring to Wakan Tanka, Pond reports that Taku Wakan is the general term for all the 'gods' … 'Whatever, therefore, is above the comprehension of a Dakota is God. Consequently, he sees gods everywhere. Not Jehovah everywhere but Taku Wakan'." The Dakota are therefore beset by tens of thousands of 'divinities', some of which are more wakan than others. But no one of them is ever conceived as a Supreme Being, 'expressed by the term Great Spirit'. Pond asserts that this term and the monotheism it expresses '[have] been imparted to them by individuals of European extraction', and that the Great Spirit is never mentioned in prayers or ceremonies … 'When the Dakota appeal to Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, in formal meetings with white men, they are either making respectful reference to the white man's God, or they are Christian converts…'. In the councils Pond observed, the interpreter often substituted the singular Wakan Tanka (Great Spirit) for the original speaker's Taku Wakan (sacred beings)."

 

"The need to insist that the Dakota had a word for God came as much from the centuries-old belief of some Christians in 'natural religion', as it does now from the universalizing eclecticism of the 'New Age'."

 

"Fire Thunder rightly resented Walker's invention of Lakota myth. Such well meaning Indianists as Frances Densmore, John Neihardt, and Joseph Epes Brown have similarly tried to help the Sioux by consolidating their spirits into Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit. These advocates consciously countered the 'devil worship' slur … by saying, 'No! The Sioux did not worship evil spirits. They worshipped the same God we do. They are just like us.' In retrospect, it is hard to say which attitude is more insulting."

 

"One of the most consistent convergences between those who condemned Indian religion and those who appeared to defend it occurs in Radin's elevation of the sophisticated many-in-one godhead of the 'priests' over the superstitious animism of the people."

One will note in many of the accounts of early missionaries and colonists reported by Price the reciprocal tactic of treating the Indigenous spiritworkers instead as shameless frauds, insofar as they establish contact with actual Gods/spirits. These strategies concerning polytheist priests and spiritworkers can be observed in missionary, colonialist, and academic discourses old and new around the world.

 

@true_concinnity: Growing up in South Dakota, the wide spread impression is that ancient Sioux religion was basically monotheistic. They've screwed up so much history it's...just baffling.

 

My guess is that the process described in this book ultimately begins on the east coast, with the Gitche Manitou or "Great Spirit" concept which I suspect was imposed in a similar fashion upon the Algonquin-speaking peoples, and then used as a template for peoples further west. The most depressing aspect of this is that as the concrete practices for engaging with actual Gods or spirits which Price describes largely from 19th c. sources decline, the reification of the class term for "God/spirit" into a singular God no longer has a counterweight. Once the technologies of these spiritworkers have lapsed, all that is left is an increasingly hollow and subjective pantheism, in comparison with which Christianity can actually appear richer, and perversely more "authentic".