Chosen by the Spirits: Visionary Ecology and Indigenous Wisdom. (original) (raw)

Teaching Mysticism, edited by Dr. William Parsons, Rice University. Oxford University Press, 2011: 121-137.

visionary ecology and indigenous wisdom L ee I rwin Teaching Native American religion and spirituality is a diffi cult and demanding task; one that requires constant attention to formative issues within Religious Studies and within the interdisciplinary context of Native Studies. Th ese diffi culties stem from shallow or artifi cial representations that mask a long history of brutal political and religious oppression, false characterizations, the denial or underevaluation of native epistemologies and spiritual values, and the constant tendency to rewrite, reinscribe, and reassimilate native beliefs into alien, nonnative constructs of meaning. Th e need to avoid essentializing attitudes and falsifying "trickster hermeneutics" ( Vizenor 1999 , 15-18) in native interpretations of religious practices creates a context of tension, uneasy resistance, and oft en anger and suspicion on the part of native persons toward any (false) claims to represent native religious thinking. As a scholar of native religious history, I am keenly aware of the ambiguity that informs a fi eld of study whose history is overshadowed by 400 years of oppression, denial, and marginalization through aggressive colonialism and government control, followed by an unexpected late-twentieth-century turn toward romanticization, commodifi cation, and a naive fi xation on native spirituality unmoored from its usual grounding in place, language, tradition, and required social relationships. An authentic context for teaching native religions requires conscious commitment to bring fully into view, for discussion and debate, the long and painful history of religious denial and constant mis/reinterpretation that has dominated most discussions of native religions .