Focus; Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality

In this hour of focus, our guest is Philip Jenkins. He is a distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Penn State University and has published widely on contemporary religious themes, including new age and esoteric religious movements. And this morning we'll be talking about his most recent book, which is entitled Dream Catchers, How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality. It's published by the Oxford University Press. And in the book, he writes that it is a book that aims to describe a radical change in mainstream American cultural and religious attitudes over the past century. Or so, namely, in popular views of Native American spirituality. When the colonists, European colonists first came to America, they had nothing but contempt for Indian religions. Today, however, there are goodly number of white Americans that are in fact drawn to Native spirituality. They admire it. In some cases, they have tried to imitate it. And in this program this morning, we'll be talking about how it is this change of attitude took place. Also, a guest says that while we may indeed associate this kind of interest in Native religions with the counterculture of the 60s,

it in fact goes back quite a way more than a century. He says that mainstream America has often seen Native spirituality as a means of fulfilling a hunger that could not be satisfied from its own cultural resources. As we talk with our guest Philip Jenkins, questions, of course, are welcome. The only thing we ask of colors is that people just try to be brief and help us move the program along, and give us the opportunity to have as many different people as possible. But of course, questions are welcome. Here in Champaign or Banna, the number, 333-9455. We do also have a toll-free line that is good anywhere that you can hear us, and that is 800-222-9455. So at any point here, if you have questions, comments, you are certainly welcome to call. Professor Jenkins, hello. Hello. How are you? I'm fine, thanks, and yourself.

Pretty good, thank you. Good, I appreciate you giving us your time. Well, I think that it's interesting, maybe to start out with as sort of overall statement, as you say in the book, that your main observation here is that this, over the last, something like hundred and fifty years, that the mainstream view in this country of Native religion has more or less reversed itself. And if you consider what it was, how does the European colonists thought? It's certainly pretty dramatic when you observe that, in fact, when they came here, they looked at Native religious practice. They saw it as satanic, nothing less. Right. You know, quite literally, they saw Indian religions as being a kind of devil worship, when they looked at Indian priests and medicine men. They saw them as exactly the kind of witches they were trying to persecute and wipe out back home. And so when, for example, lots of Indians perished in plagues and diseases,

some Puritans thought that God was intervening to clear the land in order to establish his church. It was a kind of religious as well as ethnic cleansing. So it really couldn't have been a worse view. And there was certainly a number of American white Americans who felt that kind of devil worship image right into the 20th century, certainly in some of the churches. It also seems that in some people's minds, at least, if you go back to early America, there was this association between Native ritual and violence against Europeans. Right. The assumption was that if the image we've seen in many films, I suppose, is when the drums are beating, it means that people are getting ready to go on the warpath, they're getting ready to attack the settlers.

And that was very strong when you had movements like the ghost dance in the 19th century. That was thought to be the prelude to a major attack on the settlers, which goes some way to explaining why the US Army came down so hard on movements like the ghost dance, the thought of them being just a peaceful movement, or even a religious movement just did not register. Interestingly, the whole idea of Indian religions being religions didn't even establish itself for a long time. So people use words like superstitions, barbarian customs. But the idea that Native peoples might have a religion, just like Christianity or Judaism, was very, very slow to get established. Yeah. And something else I think that perhaps you also can see from the earliest times and a kind of an attitude towards Native religion that persisted past the point where the Native people were not so much seen as a threat anymore,

was this idea that traditional beliefs, traditional practices held back Indian people from becoming, quote, we put it in quotes, modern, and that it was that kind of idea that lay behind, at some point, government policy that discouraged, or perhaps even made illegal religious practice. And also that was the idea behind the establishment of the Indian schools that were set up in the 1890s to try to force the assimilation of Native Americans. Yeah. When we look at the whole idea of religious liberty in the United States, it's useful to remember that American Indians do not even officially get the right to religious liberty until 1934, well into the 20th century. In practice, it doesn't happen for long after that. And this is related to the idea of what exactly is a religion. And the analogy I use in the book is almost as if a government was to tell Jews that they were welcome to worship God.

But they weren't allowed to have superstitious customs in quotes, like keeping the Sabbath or observing dietary laws, because the government ruled that that wasn't part of the religion. Equally well into the 1930s, the government tried to stamp out, for instance, dances, drumming rituals. In some cases, even wearing native dress and long hair on the basis that these kept Indians from assimilating. So it's a long and really a very painful story. Our guest in this hour focused 580 Philip Jenkins, he's distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Penn State University, and has published widely on contemporary religious themes. He's the author of the book Dream Catchers, how mainstream America discovered native spirituality. It's published by the Oxford University Press. He's author of a number of other books as well.

Most recently, the new anti-catholicism, the last acceptable prejudice, and also another book that got a lot of positive attention titled The Next Christendom, the Coming of Global Christianity. And I think those are also published by Oxford. So if you're interested in reading some of his other work, you can seek it out. And I'm sure that you will also find the new book Dream Catchers in the bookstore or the library. Questions here are welcome to 333-9455-123-800-222-9455. Well, as I mentioned at the beginning, that I think that a lot of people will have this idea that interest in native spirituality is something really associated with the counterculture with the 60s and the 70s. 1960s, 1970s. And you make the point that in fact that it goes back further, and that attitudes did indeed start to change really around the mid-1800s. And there were a number of things that caused that to happen and among them, the fact that there started to be at that time really serious scholarship devoted to the subject,

to studying native ritual and myth and cultural artifacts. And that helped to legitimate the idea that it was indeed a religion, and it did deserve to be spoken about in that way. And that started, one of the things that started people thinking differently about it. Right. And related to that was the idea of, in some ways when white America looked at native religion, it saw the opposite of what it had. So when Americans were extremely confident about their own religion, they looked down on Indian faiths, but during the 19th century, you get more and more doubts about the mainstream religions, especially Christianity. And as people look further afield to try and find religious traditions they can live with, they especially looked at native traditions and really idealized them.

And very often it was people who felt themselves marginalized in Christianity who looked to the native religions, and especially that meant women. Many of the new generation of very intellectual, very educated women in the late 19th century looked to native religion to find the kind of earth-centered faith that they could not find in Christianity. So you get great writers like, for instance, Mary Austin, who is the first person I've ever found who actually goes to an Indian medicine man, a shaman, and seeks him out to receive teaching in prayer and meditation. And that sounds like a very 1960s new age kind of idea, but she actually does it in the 1890s. So I'm suggesting this, like an inverse relationship, the unhappier people feel about mainstream religions, the more willing they are to seek out native religions, and often to idealize them.

And it's in the 1870s, 1880s that you do get a lot of this, partly when people discover the great monuments of the southwestern United States, places like Chateau Canyon and Canyon de Chey. When people say that it's very hard to carry on with this old idea that native peoples were primitive or backward, and people understand that there were, in fact, great civilizations there with probably great religions. And we need to start paying attention to them. I think it's very, you touch on something that I think is a very interesting notion. At one point, in the book, you write, through American history, romantic Indian images are most sought after in eras of alienation and crisis. And that's something that we, again, we think about in terms of the 60s, but there certainly were other times, previous times, in American history, that were indeed also eras of alienation and crisis, times when perhaps people who came from European culture were questioning it

and were raising this question, is this really the high point of the development of humankind, European culture? And those, there have been times before, when people were turning to native practices, native traditions, and looking at them for inspiration. Right, and where you get that most of all is during and immediately after wars. I think when we look at American history, we tend to think that the Vietnam War was the first great period when people, if you're like, rebelled against war. And in fact, that's not true. At the turn of the century, many, many Americans really were disaffected by the long guerrilla war in the Philippines, and they protested against imperialism. But where that was most strong was after the First World War, which many people saw as the, as was the breakdown of Western civilization, and around about 1919, 1920, you have great many intellectuals, especially from New York and Boston, who think that civilization is finished.

They travel to the southwest, they go to places like Santa Fe and Towers, and there for the first time they see these native cultures, native rituals, and they see things that they never thought they would see before. They see religions that they can really identify with. And there is a great love affair with native cultures. It's very much like the world of the 1960s. Then again, after the crash and the Great Depression, where can people find, if you like, a refuge from Western culture, and they often do it by going to the southwest, looking for Indian cultures. One of the most famous books, I suppose, of that period, is the Order of Saxony's Brave New World. And if you remember, the world in that book is a world in which industry and modern civilization has come close to destroying humanity, and the only real refuge for humanity is on an Indian reservation,

the Zuni reservation in New Mexico. So the more people feel disaffected from modern civilization, the more look towards the Indian world, Indian spirituality, and Indian religions. It's interesting that, also at this point here, where we do have many people, artists, writers, creative people, thinkers, philosophers, attracted, drawn to the West, it also was a time when, let us say, more average Americans had the opportunity to experience Indian culture in a direct way as tourists. And perhaps it was also the opening up of the West, making it more possible, the easier for more people to go and travel there, to see the landscape and to see the people who live there. Perhaps also played some kind of role in changing the way people thought, average mainstream Americans, the way they thought about Native American culture. Sure. One of the examples I use of that is the famous ritual of the Hopi peoples in Arizona called snake dance,

in which the participants hold and carry live rattlesnakes. And when explorers first came across that in the 19th century, they were appalled and they thought, you know, this is devil worship, and you think of the serpent in the book of Genesis, and this is obviously the devil, and said what a dreadful thing this was. And the more they publicized that in the cheap newspapers that were then becoming available, the more tourists wanted to go out and see this kind of bizarre ritual. So it was almost as if you did not need to go to the other end of the world to see, quote, primitive rituals, unquote, you could just get on a train and travel within the United States. So by about 1900, several hundred people, and soon several thousand people are turning out to see the Hopi snake dance, which rapidly becomes one of the biggest tourist attractions in North America. And then when you get cars, when Route 66 opens in the 1920s,

this becomes, basically, it's the Disneyland of its day. And people go to see these events. And part of it is a desire to be shocked, I suppose. But I think people are also looking for a spirituality that they don't think they can find back home. Because I think many of them feel their churches have sold out. They're not offering the kind of mysticism, the kind of ecstasy that you see in the Indian cultures of the southwest. And that's when you get this real love affair. And pretty soon after that, of course, there's a huge tourist industry that develops of selling jewels and sand paintings and rugs. So it actually becomes quite a big business. We have a caller here to bring into the conversation. Let us do that.

Someone listening down in Southeastern Illinois on our toll-free line. Line four. Hello. Yes. First, Mr. Ange, a quick question to you. Do you have to know off the top of your head when Mr. Warren will be on the program? We're going to have him on sometime soon, but I can't tell you for sure. I hope with the next month. Okay. Thank you. Sure. Yeah. To your guest, sir. How many, you speak of Indian religions? How many religions were there? And it was, who were the gods in the snake dance? Was the snake a god or who were the gods of the Indian religions? And did each tribe have its own religion or were there regional religions? Or how was that? No, that's a very good question. There were hundreds of Indian peoples. And each of them very much had its own traditions. They had some things in common, some kind of practices, but it would have very enormously from people to people.

In the case of the snake dance, the snakes themselves were not worshiped. They were seen as, if you like, messengers to the forces of the underworld, the forces who could actually bring the rains. And so for many Indian peoples, the key forces were the forces of nature, the sky, the earth, and so on. And whether some of those represented gods in the western sense is a natural debate. Most Indian peoples, most Native peoples, also had an idea of a, if you like an overall force, if you like a great spirit, which is often called by the name that the people of the plains called it, Wakantanka, a great spirit, but a huge, huge variety from people to people. I remember seeing a book advertised years ago, 500 nations,

which indicated that I assume that there were at least 500 tribes, Indian tribes, and I don't know whether that took in just North America, or all of South America too, but what were the gods? For example, the eagle and the bear were those gods, or were those just sort of pertinences to their worship like the snake you say the snake was. Yeah, they would have been connected with the idea of clans that a particular group within a community would identify with this as a spirit. So, I'm a little bit nervous, but the word gods, because it suggests something almost like the god of ancient Greece, or Rome for example, and you think of like Apollo,

or one of these, and very often they were not like that. They were more seen as tribal spirits or totems. I'm sorry, somebody came on the line here, and I really didn't hear that. I was suggesting that they weren't so much like the very personified gods that you get in say Greek or Roman mythology, that they would have been spirits representing forces within the community, or within nature. How much are these, how much in force are these religions today? I mean, how fairly are they believed in, or are they mostly tourist attractions? No, far from it. For many years these religions were driven underground, but in the 1970s there were a series of federal laws

which absolutely restored the right to practice these religions. They're very widely held, widely practiced today. For example, if you go to a southwestern community, I mean if you go to somewhere like the Pueblo communities in New Mexico, then the religion is certainly practiced as a very full, very living thing. And often what the events that you can actually get in and see are only a very small part of it. A lot of these rituals are still kept hidden from outsiders. They're felt to be too sacred. So many Indian peoples were really living two worlds in that way. Many Indians of course are Christians, and what they will do is they will incorporate some elements of the old religion which are seen as being social customs.

So they'll primarily be Christian, but there's no problem about having drumming rituals, dancing rituals, which are social events. So there's often a very rich, very lively religious life in Indian communities. These religions are very much alive. Are the things shown to the tourists? Are those authentic or are those just sort of things made up for the sake of the tourists? There is a lot of variety about that. In the years persecution, but some Indian peoples would do is they would create things which were for the tourists. I mean the Seminoles in Florida used to be famous for that. They would invent these things for tourist attractions, and then they would go back to their own communities, and then they pursue their own rituals very seriously and very passionately. But it varies from community to community. If you go to say a Pueblo village in New Mexico,

you can certainly see very authentic rituals, but the ones that you see are only the lower level, more public ones. You will not get to see the serious, the very sacred ones. And in fact, Pueblo people will not even talk about these. These are extremely secret. They won't talk to outsiders. The Navajos, for example, have no concern at all. They're very happy to let other people watch their rituals, watch their religions. So it varies a lot from people to people. You would say then that all of the religions are basically nature religions, but that the various things are like... I've often wondered, for example, you know, the Indians, I don't know whether you're familiar with the mascot question. Sure. People are annoying. Yep. But why they would be so concerned with Chief Alain Awik and ignore the Chicago Bears and the Philadelphia Eagles,

which it would seem to me would be more sacred to them than the Chief? Right. But the Bay as such or the Eagle as such is not worshiped. It's just, you know, the particular Bay of a tribe or a community that is sacred. And you know, once again, if you look at the mascot issue, different peoples feel strongly about this in different ways. There are some native peoples who object strongly to trying to remove Indian mascots because they feel, you know, this is a source of pride. Other people regarded as highly offensive. But no, the idea of the Bears or the Eagles isn't an issue because it's just generic Bears or Eagles. It's not their particular Bay or their particular Eagle. I know in Florida, for example, once again, you know, the Seminoles are, that's the name, the mascot of one of the great college football teams.

And the Seminole people are perfectly, perfectly happy with that, most of them, because they just regard that as a symbol of recognition of pride. Other people do not regard that as a legitimate or permissible. We have a couple of other callers. I hope the last caller will forgive me for jumping in here and wanting to move on to some others. And also because we are now a little past the midpoint, I want to introduce again our guest and for people who might just have to and in. Philip Jenkins, he's a distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Penn State University and has published widely on contemporary religious themes, including new age and esoteric movements. He is the author of book entitled Dream Catchers, how mainstream America discovered native spirituality. It's published by the Oxford University Press. And as he explains in the book, it's not so much the book itself. Dream Catchers is not so much about Indian religions per se. So I guess I want to make sure that people who are listening,

if you're looking for a book on Indian religion, dream catchers may be not necessarily the book. The idea of Dream Catchers is to take a look at the ways that Americans, that white Americans have looked at native spiritual practices over time and how that changed from the early days of America where it was extremely negative to more recent times when it was really very positive. And again, as we've discussed a couple of times, people probably will think about this as being something that was a phenomenon of the counter-culture in the 1960s, but in fact, as he explains in Dream Catchers, it is something that really goes back a century back further from then. And really, you start to see the changes and attitudes around the mid-1800s. And they have continued in interesting ways to the present. We have some other callers. We would be happy to get anybody in here who would like to ask a question, any comment, 3-3-3-9455, till 3-800-222-9455.

And we'll go next to somebody here on cell phone. That's line one. Hello. Good morning, again, David Inches. Good morning, Peter Jenkins. Good morning. Professor Jenkins, do you find monotheism in Native American spirituality and if so, please discuss it. Thank you. Well, that was one of the hot debates when white Americans were looking at native religions through the 1920s and 20th centuries. They always look for things which to them looked like what they regarded as real religion, that looked like Christianity or Judaism. And you can certainly find ideas of a great spirit that runs through all things. The idea of a Manitou in the Eastern United States, the plains, used this idea of the Wakantanka, the great spirit.

But this would not have been a one great God. It would not have been like a personified God who felt love or felt anger on the analogy of the Jewish or the Christian God. So really, I don't think in anything like the sense that, if you like traditional American cultures to be familiar with, you would find that sort of monotheism. All right, hope that gets to the question of the call. Let's go to somebody else here. It's champagne and line two. Hello. Good morning. My impression in terms of sacred spiritual and religious ceremonies among Native Americans is that one of the things that's held very sacred is their dance ceremonies. Right. And with regards to the debate about chief line, Iwak, one of the things that people are so exercised about is that this,

you know, it's a young, collabale college student. I don't think they've ever had one that was actually a Native American but at any rate, dances up or dresses up in what is sensibly, I think, a Sue garment, which isn't having to do with the Align Eye Indians, but anyway, it goes out and prances around either the stadium or the assembly hall and does fly in splits and all sorts of things that don't have anything at all to do with any kind of traditional Indian dance practice. Right. And I just would like you to, you know, weigh in on that whole issue. Yeah. What you're absolutely right when you say that, you know, the dancing is a very basic part of Native religions and Native customs.

When I think white America looked at this, that was one of the things which really puzzled them because in their traditions, you know, you do not dance. The physical is very separated from the spiritual. And when, say, sports mascots emerged and you had to do something which looked Indian, you were trying to do something which looked, you know, bizarre or excessive. So obviously, you can understand why Native peoples might find that troubling or shocking. If, you know, in my personal opinion, and this is, as I said, not something I talk about in the book, but I think the whole mascot issue depends on why a Native person or why a Native image is being used. If it's to represent forces of strength, courage, endurance, then I think that is, you know, a harmless and even a complimentary way.

But if the Indian image, the Indian chief is being used as an eccentric wild figure leaping about or indeed just a war like savage image, then I can certainly understand why a Native peoples would object to that very strongly. So I suppose my view is, you know, look at that on a very case-by-case basis. What do you think of the ethics of educational institution that would expropriate the symbolism of, you know, other peoples and especially ones that had been so abused in this country without any, you know, explicit permission to do so by the, you know, the peoples that, to symbols they're using or trying to. And some way emulate, I mean, you know, it's not in any way a, I mean, it's a real mishmash and a little to do with, you know, reality, but I just wonder about the ethics of that.

Yeah, and that runs through all the different, you know, people in communities who are trying to adopt Native religions and adopt those. That's a very sensitive issue for Native peoples. Just one word, I mean, if you go on the internet and just look at some of the Native groups who are trying to protest against that and fight against that and some of the things they expose are, you know, really shocking. For example, when white people are trying to adopt sacred Native customs like the sweat lodge and make it almost like a party atmosphere, then you can understand why people would be poor by that, just as Christians would be appalled if some other group adopted say the Eucharist as a, almost like a play acting thing. So, you know, my question would be, why is this being done?

What is the purpose of it? Because in some cases, and I can think of some sports teams and some sports controversies where the university, for example, has gone out and asked the tribe in question specifically how they feel about this, they have sought permission. In some cases, the tribes have come back and said, that's fine with us. And it seems at that point that it's difficult to object to that. But it's when, as you say, it's expropriated without permission. Or in an insulting or demeaning way that that's when you have the very, very sensitive issues. I want to thank the caller, we have some other folks here to get to. And now that we've gotten onto this subject, we may not be able to talk about anything else. But I do want to get back to some of the central ideas that you talk about in the book. And it connects with this last point where the fact that some people certainly have criticized

this appropriation of elements from another culture, turning them to our own needs, which is something that we certainly have done now going back to the 1800s as far as native cultures is concerned. That's really the argument that the book makes. Is that, if we view that as positive for us, is that a loss for Native people? Is that a loss for American Indians? You know, I argue something in the book, which is that very, very often when white America borrows or steals these images, you know, it can be insulting or demeaning, it can be a loss. But I would argue something much more fundamental, which is it's because white people were interested enough in Indian affairs in the particularly early mid-20th century to try and defend these customs that those customs survived. And this may sound sweeping, but in the 1920s, the US government came within an inch of prohibiting all Indian religions,

of suppressing all the dances, all the rituals, and all that prevented that happening, a cultural catastrophe on that scale, was that there were enough white people often maybe doing this for entirely the wrong reason, but who were prepared to go out and sign petitions and organize protest marches and buttonhole and lobby the government, that they managed to save it. So while recognizing all the bad stuff that did undoubtedly go on, I think it is worth remembering that the sympathy for Native religions has given Native peoples really a huge constituency that they never would have had otherwise, which ultimately resulted in a very, very pro-Indian legislation of the 1970s and 1980s, which has really done so much for Indian peoples today.

One of the questions that I'm going to get back to the phones, and that is this phenomenon that we have seen of people embracing, adopting, perhaps, changing these Native American religious practices and making something that is in some way new, does that qualify as a new religious movement? And that's one of the very tough questions I try to answer in my book, because what I argue is that so many of the popular ideas we have about Native religions that emerge in the 1940s, in the 1950s and so on are largely fake, they're made up by people who sometimes made up pretend Indian rituals, they frankly lied or plagiarized or they did all these dreadful things. But yet thousands of people, in some cases hundreds of thousands of people bought the books and tried to pursue those ways.

At what point does an idea which is based on a lie come to be authentic? And that's a very interesting question. I would say that if enough people are prepared to treat it like a religion and treat it seriously as a religion, it has become an authentic religion. It's not the authentic kind of Native religion, it believes it's trying to be. But nonetheless, it has that kind of authenticity. So it might well be that what we're actually seeing is the creation of a whole new kind of religious movement, much to the horror, by the way, of Native American people who see their older ideas being appropriated or travestied. Well, let's talk with some of the colors here. We'll go next to someone in Champagne. This will be line one. Hello. Yes, hi. I guess I'm just trying to sort out the different ways that we represent Indian culture.

And I think from perhaps from the cultural studies movement, and maybe me and maybe people wouldn't even identify with that movement in particular, comes the idea that we take defeated peoples and we appropriate qualities from defeated peoples. You know, that's a process by which a conquered people and a brutally treated people are adopted into the dominant culture. And it seems like that relates to the whole mascot issue. And while religious identification for whatever reasons, at least is a, you know, people are engaged in a spiritual journey. They're looking for other cultures to appropriate ideas from that's a little bit different. And certainly different from say somebody appropriating an artist, a visual artist appropriating or music for that matter, appropriating Indian motifs into their work. And as a white person, as a person of European heritage,

I don't think it's just the idea that Indians are offended by mascots. Although I do think we might consider the fact that there really ought to be a kind of veto power that if it offends anyone, if it offends any Indians, then you shouldn't do it just like you wouldn't do it. You know, you don't say certain things to people of you know that what you say is offensive to them at a fundamental level. But even as a white person, I would say that we should consider the idea that the idea of appropriating qualities of strength from defeated people. And all of the ambiguity of that, you know, that's something that we have every right to oppose. And in a sense have a kind of veto power especially, you know, in the case of the, you know, the show that you happen to be on, that you're talking to people who send their children to the University of Illinois, or work at the University of Illinois, who don't want to be identified with this.

Yeah. By the way, I should say I very much understand the sensitivities here. I myself teach at Penn State where I say semi-seriously, you know, sport is a religion, almost. And, you know, there are a lot of, so you understand why people are very sensitive on things like that. You know, in the case of Native Americans, there is a wonderful irony there. Because just in the last 10 or 15 years, the Native American peoples have largely enjoyed a massive cultural, economic revival. So we have a situation where you had people that was, I suppose, you know, defeated and seen as in some ways on the verge of extinction, which is the way they were written about 50 years ago. And they've come back to be big economic players. In some ways it's almost amusing to see the response to that and the resentment to that.

You know, why can't they be grateful that we are trying to look at them in this way? But I suppose in response to the call, right, I would just say one thing, which is if you have a situation where a university, for example, makes every effort to go to an Indian community, goes to tribal authorities, gets permission to do something like this. The tribe in question sees no problem with this, that they're, you know, perfectly happy with this. Personally, I would say that if they've made every effort like that, then you just have... It's a much more legitimate kind of thing than if it is just a simple expropriation. I don't know what the caller feels about that. You know, are there any circumstances in which he thinks that this kind of Native mascot thing is acceptable? Well, it is just something which should be a dead idea.

Yeah, it's hard to see it as being acceptable. I mean, you're a historian, I'm studying history my entire life. And what we need is real Native American history. We don't need people saying that because we have this symbol, this mascot, we're honoring Indians and keeping them alive, have the university, you know, require offer, real courses in the complexities of Native American histories. You know, that would be a better way of dealing with this whole thing. It's a way of people avoiding, you know, for people to be able to say that they're honoring Native Americans in this way. And then, you know, forget about it. Let's understand what that history is. Yeah, I would also add as a footnote to that. You know, Native Americans are much more in the limelight these days, but if you look at Native reservations, you still have some of the absolute worst economic problems, problems of pollution, problems of substance abuse,

and so on of any community in the United States. There's still a huge number of practical problems to be dealt with apart from just teaching the history. Yeah. Again, I want to thank the call. Let's go to somebody else here in Urbana. This is line number three. Hello. Yeah, good morning. Uh-huh. I'm wondering, why do you think Europeans would be so interested in Native religions when they have their own religions, a nature-based religions originating in Europe, you know, for example, Druidism or maybe others? Do you have any comment on that? Yes. Through most of the 19th century and well into the 20th century, those religions really were not in evidence or not known. A lot of the pagan and earth-based religions that you see around today, you know, like a wicker, for example, were pretty much brought into the limelight and some people would say invented in the 1950s.

So they just were not available options back in 1910, 1920, when people wanted to look for say a nature-based religion, with, you know, dancing and ecstatic ideas and mysticism, they really had to look outside the Christian or Jewish traditions. And, you know, even within Christianity and Judaism, you certainly get ideas like that, but they were really buried and they weren't there as available options. Today, of course, you have a lot of, you know, white, Euro-American pagans, and they are often using ideas which are drawn partly from the Native American traditions themselves. Do you see any parallels with the Native American traditions and the Shamanic traditions, say, of the Siberian peoples? Sure. In fact, one of the great changes that happens and that allows people to recognize Native religions as religions is in the late 19th century, scholars start describing Shamanism and they realize that what they've got there is something like a worldwide tradition that people around the world

in all sorts of prima religions follow, follow Shamanism, and that does more to see what Native peoples are doing, not as, you know, some kind of bizarre superstition as its portrayed, but as a real, authentic, ancient idea which may link modern Indian practice right back to the Stone Age. And you realize that when you look at people in the European cave paintings, they look a real lot like Indian shamans or medicine men in the 19th and 20th century. So I think that has a big impact. Among modern neo-pagans today, there's been a big revival of shamanism by folks very often looking at Native American traditions. Again, I want to thank the caller. We just have a couple of minutes left here. One question that I was interested in having you talk about, you write in the book, you make the point that much of what we associate with the contemporary New Age movement, something, again, we sort of think of as a 60s and 70s phenomenon, much of that was really in place by or before 1950.

And I guess I'm interested in why it was that at that time, it didn't really become a mass phenomenon. And it wasn't until, until later is the late 60s, perhaps, even into the 1970s. Yeah, in fact, if you look at American history, these ideas just, they keep coming in waves. So the idea, you'll find people run about the year 1900, for example, using ideas about New Age. Think of any idea that you think of as New Age, whether it's lost continents, telepathy, the great pyramid, any of these ideas. And they're all around before 1900, the only one which is really new in the mid 20th century is UFOs, which come in in the, yes, was the mid 40s. And as mass popularity, they just come and go in different, different waves of interest. And I think if you like the tide went out in the 1950s, partly because people were very happy, very content with their own society.

Many things were going very well in 1950s America. And it's only in the 60s when there's a general social, political, and spiritual crisis that people feel the need to look for some of these alternative views. And once they do it, they can just dig into their own culture. One of the people I write about at Lent is Frank Waters, who invents a lot of this pseudo-Indian religion back in the 1940s. And he writes this book of the Hopi in the early 60s, and that becomes a kind of New Age Bible. It's in many, many college dorm rooms through the 60s and 70s. And maybe we should see him almost as the prophet as a kind of a kind of new religion based ultimately on native ideas. Yeah, I'm glad we got a chance to mention him, at least mention his name and that book because it is something that people will think of certain books and certain writers being important in this, people like Carlos Castaneda, for example. But that here we have Frank Waters as a figure that was doing this, that was doing this kind of writing significantly earlier than some of the stuff that we saw in the 60s and 70s.

Right, for example, let me just take a very popular modern book. You look at the interest in something like the Gnostic Gospels or the Da Vinci Code and all these ideas about mystical ideas about Jesus. These are very familiar 100 years ago. There really is nothing new then. Waters is quite happy to use Native American ideas, use Buddhist ideas, use Gnostic texts. So anything that you get from a standard new age package today, he has in his books published in the late 1940s, maybe one of the myths about the new age is that people always have to believe that it is new. In fact, America has a new age before it has Pentecostals. They go back a long, long way. Well, there we must stop because we're at the end of the time. For people who want to read more in the subject, I recommend the book.

It's titled Dream Catchers, Al Mainstream America, Discovered Native Spirituality. It's published by the Oxford University Press by our guest Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State. Professor Jenkins, thank you very much. Thank you for your time.