American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The distortion and misrepresentation of Native American spiritual tradition is nothing new. In many ways the process has been ongoing since the first moment of European arrival, and it has been functioning in an increasingly systematic fashion, under rationales ranging from sheer commercial speculation to that of ”pure scholarship,” ever since. During the last twenty years, the list of those lining up to share in the supposed prestige of American Indian Religious Studies” has come to include a whole bevy of ”New Age” personalities as well as a significant sector of the nation’s academic elite. This is true to the extent that the two groups have become inseparable in some ways, in terms of both outlook and “methodology.”