A short excerpt from In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations by Jerry Mander

PART THREE

Suppression of the Native Alternative

INDIANS AND THE NEW AGE

While most of our society manages to avoid Indians, there is one group that does not, though its interest is very measured.

I was reminded of this recently during my first visit to a dentist in Marin County, an affluent area north of San Francisco. The dentist, a friendly, trendy young man wearing a moustache, looked as if he'd stepped out of a Michelob ad. While poking my gums, he made pleasant conversation, inquiring about my work. When he pulled his tools from my mouth, I told him I was writing about Indians, which got him very excited. "Indians! Great! I love Indians. Indians are my hobby. I have Indian posters all over the house, and Indian rugs. And hey, I've lately been taking lessons in 'tracking' from this really neat Indian guide. I've learned how to read the tiniest changes in the terrain, details I'd never even noticed before."

In this expression of enthusiasm, this young man was like thousands of other people, particularly in places like Marin or Beverly Hills, or wherever there is sufficient leisure to engage in inner explorations. Among this group, which tends to identify with the "New Age," or the "human potential movement," there has been a renaissance of awareness about Indian practices that aid inner spiritual awakening.

A typical expression of this interest may be that a well-off young professional couple will invite friends to a lawn party to meet the couple's personal Indian medicine person. The shaman will lead the guests through a series of rituals designed to awaken aspects of themselves. These events may culminate in a sweat ceremony, or even a "firewalk." There was a period in the seventies when you could scarcely show up at a friend's house without having to decide whether or not to walk on hot coals, guided by a medicine man from the South Pacific.

Those who graduate from sweat ceremonies or firewalks might proceed to "tracking", as my dentist had, or else to the now popular "vision quests." You may feel as you read this that I am ridiculing these "human potential" explorers. Actually, I find something admirable in them. Breaking out of the strictures of our contemporary lifestyles is clearly beneficial, in my opinion, but there is also a serious problem. For although the New Age gleans the ancient wisdoms and practices, it has assiduously avoided directly engaging in the actual lives and political struggles of the millions of descendents who carry on those ancient traditions, who are still alive on the planet today, and who want to continue living in a traditional manner.

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The roots of the current New Age Indian revival lie in the hippie period of the 1960s, and in the early drug explorations. In that era, young people sought to define new modes of being that were non-acquisitive, spiritually oriented, non-hierarchical, tribal, and communal. The hippie community did have some awareness of the political dimensions of Indian societies. In fact, when a meeting of the hippie activists, now thirty years older, continue to show up when a meeting is called by Indians trying to spread the word of a problem. It is still Wavy Gravy's Hog Farm that goes down to help the elders at Big Mountain on the Navajo Reservation. It is still the Grateful Dead who play at the benefits.

It was also during the sixties that Carlos Castaneda offered, through his books, a window into a different reality construct. I was among the people in those days who found Castaneda's work fascinating and important. Castaneda did not avoid political realities. In each of his books, Don Juan, and sometimes others among the shamans, spoke passionately about the prejudices they experienced as children. But few reviewers commented on those passages; they were not the reason the books were devoured.

Castaneda was able to immerse millions of Americans in a system of logic truly different from our own. He created Indian heroes who were irresistible to middle-class whites seeking a pathway out of rigid Western modes of thinking. He led millions of readers through experiences designed to reveal unknown dimensions of our nature. And he did all this by imitating Indian storytelling style. Like the stories, myths and histories Castaneda emulated, it scarcely mattered to what extent the characters were real or not real. They were teaching systems. They brought us a new way of mind, and they delivered experiences, images, and perspectives that ran counter to the prevailing imagery and paradigms of our society. In these ways, the books approximated Indian thought, and were subversive and political and even dangerous.

Americans went for them like dry roots seeking water. We still do. For like Castaneda himself, born of Indian heritage in an increasingly Westernized Peru, we are all caught between chairs. Drawn to the subjective, longing for the naturalalistic, the moody, the sensory, the mythic, the magical, and desiring to integrate these elements in our lives, we are stuck in a world of concrete, time-bound, homocentric, mechanical logic. Castaneda's images, like firewalking and sweat lodges, offered pathways back to nature within ourselves.

But however enlightening this may be, confining our knowledge of Indians to their "spiritual" pathways continues to deny what is most important to the Indian people. While we experience and explore Indian-ness in ourselves, Indian people experience our culture in terms of its drives to expand and to dominate nature and natural people. We have managed to isolate one or two aspects of Indian life�the spiritual aspect and sometimes the art�and to separate these from the rest of the Indian experience, which is something Indian people themselves would never do. It is a fundamental tenet of Indian perception that the spiritual aspect of life is inseparable from the economic and the political. No Indian person could ever make the kind of split we wish to make for them. So why do we?

For one thing, it is a way that we can skim the "cream"�arts, culture, spiritual wisdom�off the Indian experience. We can collect it for our museums, while discarding whatever we find in it that challenges the way we live our lives. We can make ourselves feel good about "saving" something Indian, as if it were meaningful support for living Indians.

It is little wonder, of course, that we choose such a course. The average person does not seek information that will make him or her feel badly. In fact, if we ever became more personally engaged than at the present, and let into our hearts and minds the full spectrum of horrors that Indian people have faced, and still face; if we ever accepted that American corporate and military interests and surely American commodity and technological visions drive the juggernaut, the pain of these realizations would be overwhelming. So instead, we avoid the subject, which allows us to avoid re-examining the premises upon which our current lives and this society are based, premises that sanction the destructive behavior against nature and native peoples that is now rampant.

CULTURAL DARWINISM

There is yet a deeper widespread rationalization for our avoidance of Indians and the news they bring us. On some level we think that however beautiful Indian culture once was, however inspiring their religious ideas, however artistic their creations and costumes, however wise their choices of life within nature, our own society has advanced beyond the stage of evolution. They are the "primitive" stage and we have grown beyond them. They have not adapted as we have. This makes us superior. We are the survivors. We are the "cutting edge."

A good friend of mine (who now works in television) put it this way: "There is no getting around the fact that the Indian way is the losing way. They are no longer appropriate for the times. The are anomalies."

In saying this, my friend was essentially blaming the Indians themselves for the situation that befell them. They failed to adapt their lifestyle and belief systems to keep up with the changing times. Most importantly, they failed to keep up with technological change. They were not competitive.

This statement reflects a Darwinist, capitalist outlook of survival of the fittest, with fitness now defined in terms of technological capability. If you can use the machine better than the next fellow or the next culture, you survive and they die. This may be sad, the reasoning goes, but that's the way it is in today's world.

This view sees Western technological society as the ultimate expression of the evolutionary pathway, the culmination of all that has come before, the final flowering. We represent the breakthrough in the evolution of living creatures; we are the conscious expression of the planet. Indians helped the process for a while, but they gave way to more evolved, higher life forms.

Our assumption of superiority does not come to us by accident. We have been trained in it. It is soaked into the fabric of every Western religion, economic system, and technology. They reek of their greater virtues and capabilities.

Judeo-Christian religions are a model of hierarchal structure: one God above all, certain humans above other humans, and humans over nature. Political and economic systems are similarly arranged: Organized along rigid hierarchical lines, all of nature's resources are regarded only in terms of how they serve one god�the god of growth and expansion. In this way, all of these systems are missionary; they are into dominance. And through their mutual collusion, they form a seamless web around our lives. They are the creators, and enforcers of our beliefs. We live inside these forms, are imbued with them, and they justify our behaviors. In turn, we believe in their viability and superiority largely because they prove effective: They gain power.

But is power the ultimate evolutionary value? We shall see. The results are not in. "Survival of the fittest" as a standard of measure may require a much longer time scale than the scant 200 years' existence of the United States, or the century since the Industrial Revolution, or the two decades since the advent of "high tech." Even in Darwinian terms, most species become "unfit" over tens of thousands of years. Our culture is using its machinery to drive species into extinction in one generation, not because the speicies is maladaptive, but by pure force. However, there is reason to doubt the ultimate success of our behavior. In the end, a model closer to that of the Indians, living lightly on the planet, observing its natural rules and modes or organization, may prove more "fit," and may survive us after all. Until that day, however, we will continue to use Darwinian theories to support the assertion that our mechanistic victory over the "primitives" is not only God's plan, but nature's