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Talking to Wiccans about Cultural Appropriation

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Defend the Sacred:
Hi Nicole,

My point about "enlightenment" is that it's a framing of the goal of religion that comes from Eastern religions. "Salvation" is a rather Christian concept, based on the idea that we are sinners and the world is an evil place that we need to be "saved" from. In my experience, traditional, earth-honouring lifeways usually tend to conceptualize these things differently.

As far as who gets access to community and ceremony... I think your analogy about not being welcome in everyone's home is more accurate. For instance, I know Hindu teachers from India who say that anyone and everyone can pray, privately, to the deities of their tradition; people are usually free to have their own beliefs in their own heads and homes. But if someone is going to attend formal ceremonies, they have to observe certain community standards. In some cases it's just a matter of knowing the proper protocols, but in others it's about being a member of the family, and living your life in a way that meets their standards of purity, including living by certain vows and obligations for a set period of time before one is allowed to participate in certain activities. I'd say to ask the Wiccans if they would run naked into a Hindu temple, insisting on leading prayers of their own devising and climbing up on the altar... but the truth is, I've seen some eclectic, self-absorbed Neopagans be almost that offensive in similar situations.


--- Quote from: NicoleK on May 23, 2012, 11:10:22 am ---
--- Quote from: Yells At Pretendians on May 15, 2012, 08:26:44 pm ---In terms of source material for Wicca, I would say it's a tossup between Gerald Gardner's fantasies about Plains NDNs and stuff stolen verbatim (once translated into English) from Hinduism.

--- End quote ---

I'm not aware of any Plains Indian influence in Wicca. Are there any specific practices that you've noticed that resemble stereotypes or fantasies about Plains Indians?
--- End quote ---

There's no real material from the Plains tribes, rather, there are fantasies about Plains and Hollywood NDNs via a white man from Connecticut, Ernest Seton (who was also one of the founders of the Boy Scouts, another organization that has appropriated, twisted and misrespresented NDN traditions). He created "tribes" of "Indians" who, as far as I know, were all white people. I have a copy of the original article by Cooper and Greer around here somewhere, but I don't think it's available online. This article in the Utne Reader summarizes the relevant bits:

The Wicca That Never Was: The real story of the world's newest "ancient" religion
by Andy Steiner, Utne Reader

"In Gnosis Magazine (Summer 1998), John Michael Greer and Gordon Cooper discount the long-held belief that Wicca is a religious tradition surviving from pre-Christian times. Rather, they argue that modern witchcraft has its roots not in ancient Europe but in turn-of-the-century Connecticut."
... ... ...
"Modern Wicca's true origins, Greer and Cooper theorize, are in the Woodcraft Tribe, a nature organization established in 1902 by naturalist and writer Ernest Thompson Seton that in 1915 became known as the Woodcraft League of America. In an effort to placate the rowdy local boys who lived near his wooded estate in Cos Cob, Connecticut, Seton created a lodge called Woodcraft Indians, a nature club that by 1910 boasted some 200,000 [non-Native - ed] American boys and girls as members.

"For adults interested in taking part in the rituals of the [non-Native - ed] Woodcraft Indians, Seton established Red Lodges: spiritual, initiatory groups whose practices and principles, according to Greer and Cooper, closely resemble those of modern Wicca. From the Red Lodge - and from other offshoot organizations such as the British-based Kindred of the Kibbo Kift - eventually grew the religion we now call Wicca. These nature-focused groups employed similar ritual meeting styles, secrecy rules, initiation rites, and even practiced mysticism and "magick" - hallmarks of modern-day Wicca."

HCSpirit:
That there is a universal Truth that underlies all human spirituality is not merely Jungian. It's an understanding shared across disparate traditions among mystics (though, generally not, within the faiths they are embedded in). This concept gets bastardized into variations of a simplistic "we're all one!", which it isn't. Nothing in the understanding suggests or condones mix-and-match spirituality. But genuinely understanding mystical ideas can't come from any amount of talking about them, only through experiencing them.

To me, cultural appropriation -- or more aptly in my personal experience, a kind of privileged denigration -- isn't an abstract. My family on all sides are Gorali -- a people from the Orava and Spis areas of the High Tatras, mostly divided between Poland and Slovakia (the Polish Gorali are often known as "Polish Highlanders"). My father's side of the family, in particular, held onto and preserved more of the turn of the century folk culture they brought with them to the US, and even in the immigrant Goral community I grew up in, we were known as "superstitious". I adored my Grandmother and tried to learn and hold onto the traditions in her memory, even as our immigrant community slowly dissolved, our family moved to a very un-Goral suburb, and I came of age and found myself 9999 times out of 10000 the only Goral in the room.

When I first got my bath in mainstream white American culture, I happily shared whatever I knew of my culture with anyone who was interested. I thought what I had was cool and that, frankly, much of the world would be better if they absorbed a little bit of my culture (I was also, in a less positive light, somewhat lost in the world of mainstream American culture, and a part of me fantasized that sharing my culture could turn my friends into my own personal imitation Gorali immigrant neighborhood). But after about a decade of spreading Goral folk culture. I stopped. Not just stopped, but damned if anyone was going to get another word from me of my traditions unless by some chance they shared them.

Why? Everything I shared was not seen as me sharing another way of looking at things and doing things. It was, without fail, turned into an anthropology project. No, I'm not talking about anthropologists per se: none of the people I shared this with had any formal background in anthropology. What I mean is that it was eviscerated of any of its context and content -- all feeling and meaning and significance was drained from it. It became a quaint custom of a backwards peasant people, something to examine and analyze and study and tolerate in good humor. Here I am doing things that intimately connected me to a long chain of ancestors, that tied me to my family and with which I especially honored my grandmother, and in the middle of all of it I'm expected to field these dry, cold, lifeless, often inappropriate, anthropological questions, questions that came with a heaping helping of condescension.

You can't turn a generic European-American into a Goral. You can however turn even the least educated of them into an instant anthropologist.

So I shut up.

I cannot imagine the rage I'd feel if I then found any of my former amateur anthropologists selling bits of my family's traditions, mixed with a boatload of their own, under the rubric of "the secret wisdom of the High Tatras." I'm thinking if anyone had done that, I might have first had to raise bail money before I next met them.

Yes, fundamental truth is still a universality. But what I learned from my grandmother isn't, and neither is it a business plan. Nor is anything you learned from any of your ancestors.

Atehequa:

--- Quote from: earthw7 on May 14, 2012, 12:52:45 pm ---What are Native American Deities? We believe in one God so what are people talking about,
We dont have goddress nor do we have many gods what is wrong with people!
People want to take our belief change them and make them something they are not,
and wonder why we would be upset.

--- End quote ---

And what is the name of that one god who is worshiped by all American Indian tribes ?

Defend the Sacred:

--- Quote from: Atehequa on July 28, 2012, 07:22:08 pm ---
--- Quote from: earthw7 on May 14, 2012, 12:52:45 pm ---What are Native American Deities? We believe in one God so what are people talking about,
We dont have goddress nor do we have many gods what is wrong with people!
People want to take our belief change them and make them something they are not,
and wonder why we would be upset.

--- End quote ---

And what is the name of that one god who is worshiped by all American Indian tribes ?

--- End quote ---

Atehequa, Earth did not say all NDN cultures have the same name for the Creator, or that all NDN Nations have the same traditions. :) She was speaking from her perspective as a traditional Lakota woman who lives in her community. Please don't try to grill her. She is well known to us and well-respected - both here and in the community where she lives with her people. You'll also find that people don't usually discuss details of beliefs and ceremonies here.

Atehequa:

--- Quote from: Yells At Pretendians on July 28, 2012, 09:15:15 pm ---
--- Quote from: Atehequa on July 28, 2012, 07:22:08 pm ---
--- Quote from: earthw7 on May 14, 2012, 12:52:45 pm ---What are Native American Deities? We believe in one God so what are people talking about,
We dont have goddress nor do we have many gods what is wrong with people!
People want to take our belief change them and make them something they are not,
and wonder why we would be upset.

--- End quote ---

And what is the name of that one god who is worshiped by all American Indian tribes ?

--- End quote ---

Atehequa, Earth did not say all NDN cultures have the same name for the Creator, or that all NDN Nations have the same traditions. :) She was speaking from her perspective as a traditional Lakota woman who lives in her community. Please don't try to grill her. She is well known to us and well-respected - both here and in the community where she lives with her people. You'll also find that people don't usually discuss details of beliefs and ceremonies here.

--- End quote ---

Greetings.

That wasn't grilling.  I was speaking from the perspective as a traditional Indian who is not Lakota and did nothing to disrespect Earth in responding to her statement about god and beliefs that are not usually discussed here. I have been at places where the one god or single great spirit concept for all Indians has been pushed.

I have to ask, in this endeavor to reveal new age frauds and plastic medicine people, one would think the discussion of what is true and what is false when it comes to those who rip off our spirituality is necessary. Of course I'm not asking anyone about their personal spiritual paths, nor claiming all Indians worship one god.

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