American Indian Culture and Research Journal

There are issues worthy of discussion that arise from Ward Churchill’s comments on Mother Earth. There is also the need to state clearly, where he did not, the concerns, perspectives, and conclusions of this study. Further, I have been contacted by several journals to respond to or comment on another version of Churchill’s critique, which was published in The Bloomsbury Review (September, 1988) along with a review article about Mother Earth co-authored by M. Annette Jaimes and Jorge Noriega. The research that led to Mother Earth was motivated by my awareness of a remarkable incongruity between scholars’ descriptions of a figure they call Mother Earth and the ethnographic record. Many notable scholars have described a figure or goddess, usually a personification of the earth, they hold to be central to the beliefs of peoples all over North America since ancient times. The incongruity was all the more complex since I was aware that some contemporary Native Americans often describe similar figures. These claims are not substantiated in the extensive ethnographic records for hundreds of tribal cultures. When I examined the descriptions by scholars to determine their evidence and sources, I found that nearly all are based on the same two statements alleged to have been made by Indians. The descriptions also make an occasional reference to specific North American cultures, most commonly Zuni and Luiseño, where the Mother Earth goddess figures. I went to the historical documents to determine historicity and to the ethnographies searching for evidence of Mother Earth and earth-related concepts (the results of this search are summarized in a bibliographic supplement to Mother Earth, 181-191). Remarkably, what emerged were several lines of narrative, several stories, that reveal much about American history, particularly about the encounter between Native Americans and Americans with European ancestry. These stories continue in this encounter with W. C.