[MD] Teachings from the American Earth (Part I)

[Arlo Bensinger]

All,

I've recently pulled off my shelf a copy of Dennis and Barbara 
Tedlock's "Teachings from the American Earth, Indian Religion and 
Philosophy", published in 1975.

In the Introduction, which I will include in a series of posts to 
follow, I think you will see a lot of similarity between Pirsig's 
exposition on Indians in LILA, as well as some groundwork for 
considering the non-S/O culture (painted broadly) which draws Pirsig 
to use the Indians as exemplars. I am about halfway through the book, 
and I do recommend it (your public library should be able to get you 
a copy). I've made a few notes within the text, to point out specific 
points of commonality or interest. (No, I did not type all this in, I 
used a scanner, and its been known to produce a typo or two, I've 
tried to catch all I could, but you know how that goes.)

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"The American Indian has already taught us a great deal, whether we 
remember it or not. In the far north of this continent, life is still 
dependent in part on the technology of the Eskimo and Indian, who 
gave us among other things the parka, snowshoe, toboggan, and kayak. 
Maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and manioc, which today make up more 
than half the world's tonnage of staple foods, were first 
domesticated in the New World. Most modem cotton, including that 
grown in the Old World, is the long-staple cotton of the American 
Indian. Some 220 American Indian drugs have been or still are 
official in the Pharmacopeia of the United States of America or the 
National Formulary. Even in these practical areas, we have sometimes 
been slow to learn. As recently as thirty years ago, Indian oral 
contraceptives were dismissed as mere magic; later, when these same 
botanical drugs were found to suppress ovulation, they set medical 
researchers on the road to "the pill."

Although we have accepted a great deal of technology from the 
American Indian, we have not yet learned his more difficult lessons, 
lessons about the mind and spirit. Some of these lessons concern the 
very things we have borrowed, as in the case of that most famous of 
Indian stimulants, tobacco. For the Indian, tobacco always had a 
sacramental meaning: the smoke was exhaled east and west, north and 
south, above and below, and then the smoker blew smoke on himself. In 
this way he joined the self with the cosmos. When we adopted tobacco 
we turned it into a personal habit, and we have overused it to the 
point where it has killed many of us. The final irony is that there 
should be a righteous public campaign against this sacred gift of 
America, as if there were something inherently wrong with smoking. 
Beeman Logan, a Seneca medicine man, suggests that the trouble is 
with ourselves: tobacco kills us, he says, because we do not respect it.

An easy way of reading Logan's message is to say that the Indian has 
a different relationship to the natural world than we do. If he can 
"respect" a plant, he must be "closer" to nature than we are, and we 
imagine ourselves more like him in our own distant past, before we 
started to dominate nature. Those of us who are believers in material 
progress see our task as elevating the Indian to our level by 
teaching him how to make nature better serve material ends. If, on 
the other hand, we are suspicious of material progress, we envy the 
Indian and wish that we could somehow "return to nature," suspecting 
all the while that there is really no way to recover our own 
innocence. The trouble with both of these views is that they allow us 
to picture the living Indian as a fossil from which to learn about 
the past. If there are any lessons to be had about the present, we 
think they are ours to teach him, whether we wish to initiate him 
into the present or to warn him away from it "for his own good."

There is quite another way to approach Logan's message, and that is 
to defer the question of its meaning and call attention instead to a 
supposed error in the thought process which produced it. "From the 
point of view of Lucien Levy-Bruhl, it would be argued that the 
Indian's characteristic participation mystique, his feeling of 
oneness with the world, has here blinded him to the difference 
between himself and the tobacco plant. If he only had a "logical" 
mind, he could see that a plant is an inanimate object and is neither 
owed respect nor able to punish [scare quotes on logic point towards 
S/Oism- Arlo]. From the more recent point of view of Claude 
Levi-Strauss, the supposed error is not in a lack of logic but in an 
overzealous and premature application of it, which in this case 
seeks" to link facts from the disparate realms of psychology (the 
attitude of "respect") and biology (tobacco and death) in a single 
system of cause and effect. ["... to be part of the world, and not an 
enemy of it", ZMM - Arlo]

All of the approaches presented so far permit us to sidestep the 
possibility of learning directly from the Indian. It is true that 
anthropologists sometimes describe themselves as students of the 
Indian; they may indeed appear to be his students while they are in 
the field, but by the time they publish their "results," it is 
usually clear that the Indian is primarily an object of study [sound 
familiar? -Arlo]. If anthropologists would seriously put themselves 
in the position of being the Indian's students, they would have to 
take more seriously what he considers to be important. But instead of 
learning to experience respect for tobacco, for example, they simply 
wish to find an explanation for why someone like Beeman Logan might 
respect it, thereby keeping him and his lesson at arm's length. They 
may listen to him, but they do not hear him.

In order to become the Indian's students, we have to recognize that 
some of what he has to teach transcends cultural or historical 
boundaries. Paul Radin took precisely this position with respect to 
American Indian religion, saying that we would never make any 
progress in our understanding "until scholars rid themselves, once 
and for all, of the curious notion that everything possesses an 
evolutionary history; until they realize that certain ideas and 
certain concepts are . . . ultimate for man. " Mircea Eliade, in his 
classic study of shamanism, puts the matter this way: "The various 
types of civilization are, of course, organically connected with 
certain religious forms; but this in no sense excludes the 
spontaneity and, in the last analysis, the ahistoricity of religious 
life." And the Sioux holy man Lame Deer, fully aware of the diversity 
of external religious forms among American Indians, says, "I think 
when it comes right down to it, all the Indian religions are somehow 
part of the same belief, the same mystery." [recognition of 
metaphoricity? -Arlo]