American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The Montagnais kin groups which entered the Canadian mission at Sillery in 1639 throw signrficant light on the process of religious change. The Jesuit Relations richly document the Montagnais’ culture, and describe in detail their struggle to comprehend Catholicism. As a result, it is possible to achieve an Indian history grounded in the reality assumptions of a particular Native American people. The Montagnais demonstrate that when religious change is described as conversion, both Native Americans’ role in missionization and their syncretic intentions are missed. The Montagnais resisted Jesuit teachings for the better part of ten years, but some of them settled at Sillery for their own reasons. The challenge remains to reconstruct the reasoning by which some Montagnais adopted what appears to be the radically alien lifestyle the missionaries offered. To begin with, it is useful to ask how we can achieve the insiders’ view of missionization. The answer consists in identifying the common theoretical ground which has emerged between religious studies and several social science and humanistic disciplines. A good place to start is Susanne K. Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key. Langer heralded what might be thought of as a radical humanism focusing on meaning as an empirical, cross-disciplinary field of inquiry. Although Langer is seldom cited in social science literature or, for that matter, in the study of the humanities, the problem of meaning she highlighted has received concerted attention in the post-war era.

INTRODUCTION On December 29, 1986, exactly 96 years after the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, I sat in a dark nightclub on L.A.’s Sunset Strip and heard a performance by the Grafitti Band that made me realize just how well Indian people had survived. My mind kept returning to Wounded Knee, the photos of the murdered Sioux people, frozen in contorted agony. Black Elk had described that bitter day for John Neihardt, the butchered corpses of women and children “heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch.” According to Neihardt, Black Elk felt that ”Something else died there in the bloody mud . . . A people’s dream . . . It was a beautiful dream.” Nineteenth century Indian resistance to the destructive waves of white settlers had manifested itself in the philosophical core of the “Ghost Dance” vision. But that vision met with more than symbolic death at Wounded Knee, and from the depths of disease, starvation and death, many Indian people agreed with Black Elk that the ”nation’s hoop” had been “broken and scattered.” Black Elk’s recollections through Neihardt ended on a final, bitter note: ”There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.” Yet the two American Indian men who had formed the Grafitti Band proved the opposite to Black Elk’s fatal vision. In the smoke and wine smell of the nightclub, beneath hazy, purple-red disco lights, John Trudell, a Sioux poet, and Jesse Ed Davis, a Kiowa-Comanche guitarist, played a series of songs that were living testament to a People’s dream that will not die, to a cultural endurance, powerful and lasting. That dream is the spiritual resistance of Indian people to the genocidal wars-both physical and ideological-of more than four centuries of continuous conflict with European peoples. Cultural pride and resistance have changed to meet the times, as have the Indian people themselves; however, in its purpose and effect, the ”Dream” remains integral, whole and alive.

Louise Erdrich’s much praised first novel, Love Medicine, presents interesting problems similar to those encountered in Alice Walker’s more widely acclaimed The Color Purple. A careless reading of either can confirm ugly, dangerous stereotypes cherished by whites: the drunken Indian, in the former; the crude black man, in the latter; violent and promiscuous figures in both. The Color Purple, because it was a best seller and then a Steven Spielberg extravaganza, has been widely discussed in this context and, one trusts that in the long run the novel will be recognized as the subtle work of art it is and not “a sociological tract or a handbook for life” as one of my colleagues at the University of North Dakota said when the furor over that novel erupted here. Love Medicine, even though it has not vaulted to mass national attention, has distressed some Native American readers for similar reasons, as I discovered when I had the privilege of teaching the novel at Turtle Mountain Reservation. Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewas, though not a resident of the reservation. Many students feared white readers would see the novel as Turtle Mountain history, not a work of fiction, a document that would confirm white stereotypes, strengthening racism rather than helping to heal it with a dose of “love medicine.”

Lost and Found Traditions: Native American Art 1965-1985. By Ralph T. Coe. Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with the American Federation of Arts. 1986. 288 pp. $35 Cloth. A Persistent Vision: Art of the Reservation Days. By Richard Conn. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 1987. 190 pp. $35 Cloth. $19.95 Paper. The Song of the Loom: New Traditions in Navajo Weaving. By Frederick J. Dockstader. New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Montclair Art Museum. 1987. 132 pp. $35 Cloth. $25 Paper. Bill Reid: Beyond the Essential Form. By Karen Duffek. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. 1986. $12.95 Paper. Robes of Power: Totem Poles on Cloth. By Doreen Jensen and Polly Sargent. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. 1986. $18.95 Paper. Bill Reid. By Doris Shadbolt. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 1986. 192 pp. $39.95 Cloth. This group of books opens a dialogue on some issues that recur repeatedly in any discussion of American Indian art today: issues of tradition, innovation, continuity, and individuality. These are loaded words in Native American arts. They are often used indiscriminately, with implied value judgments. In some circles, ”traditional” art is considered more authentically “Indian” than innovative art. In other circles individuality is paramount, with continuity being less important. These divisive labels for Native American art obscure more often than they clarify the situation. All of the volumes under discussion are concerned with the tension between the past and the present. All demonstrate that Indian art is, by its very nature, a dialogue between old and new, tradition and innovation, individual and culture. All insist that the future of Native American art is a hopeful and vital one.