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To be or not to be ... a shaman

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DIGOWELI:
I knew Joan Halifax years ago when she was an anthropologist and protege of both Joseph Campbell and Don Jose Matsua the most respected 106 year old Huichol Shaman of his day.   She lived with and studied with him for several years.   She also studied in India with a major teacher as well.  (I don't remember his name)  I attended a deer dance all night ceremonial that Matsua sang in the 1970s.  Amazing.   He had lost almost all of his fingers due to age but he could still sijng all night long and bring the spirits.    She was also one of the most scholarly writers on hallucinogenic drugs at the time.   She wrote with her husband Stanislav Graf.   That she became a Buddhist is her path.   But the narratives in shamanic voices are the shamans themselves and from many different places.    I think you shouldn't stereotype people.   Everyone has students that have failed and brought back bad Karma on themselves.   If you afre not able to stand that then you can't teach.

As for the Kilpatricks, I have all of their books and one book by the son, I don't remember it's name but I would like to know what happened to Kilpatrick's music.   He was a major composer in his day and the head of the SMU Music School.   Kilpatrick was the one who pointed out the parallel between Shamanic formulas and the Roman Catholic Mass.   That is something that I believe the RC church absorbed from the cultures they took in.   Like the Cardinal's Hat that came from the Mithrian religion.  

Are you familiar with the Francis Jennings volumes?   I'm not familiar with the Walters volume you said, I will look it up.   Wado

REH

educatedindian:
Like a lot of people in the pseudo-shamanism movement, she sees what she wants to see. Halifax is not much of an anthropologist. The book of hers you love so much has a lot of "shamans" who were clearly not, one a notorious and very obvious fraud, Brooke Edwards AKA "Medicine Eagle."
http://users.pandora.be/gohiyuhi/articles/art00060.htm
http://users.pandora.be/gohiyuhi/frauds/frd0010.htm
http://www.geocities.com/redroadcollective/NewsletterS93.html
http://shameons.bravepages.com/

What's kinda funny is that "Med Eagle" was claiming to be "Nez Perce and Sioux" at the time of the book when now she claims to be Crow, even has a phony enrollment card and certificate posted online.

"Prem Das", a white guy who poses as a Huichol shaman, is another exploiter.
http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy/carlos_castaneda.html
"Chapter Three, The Marketing of Huichol Shamans
American youth, suffering from a crisis of meaning which became especially acute as the credibility of the "establishment" diminished in the mid-1960s, abandoned tangible political objectives to pursue "tales of power," of a "supernatural" sort, disseminated by a disorganized group of collaborators interested in profiting from meeting the unmet demand for gurus and mysticism. The Delgado-Furst-Myerhoff version of Huichol culture was inherited, and is being passed on with little if any modification, by Prem Das, Brant Secunda, and others. Their version of Huichol culture and "shamanism" is the version known to today's New Age consumers.
Like Gordon Wasson, I am outraged by marketers who bastardize ancient rituals and cheapen the tremendous personal sacrifices, unbending dedication, and humility required of bona fide Huichol and Native American healers and ritual specialists (those defined as "shamans"). My admiration for authentic aboriginal American ritual practitioners is what animates my criticism of those who prostitute and trivialize their teachings."

Halifax also claims Nicholas Black Elk was a shaman. Nope, he was Catholic and had been for over 30 years at the time the book was written. The famous book on him is pretty much Neihardt's words far more than Black Elk's.

Matsuwa was misrepresented and his name was misused by another exploiter named Brandt Secunda, so I have to wonder if she did the same.

Her being a Buddhist has nothing to do with why she's an exploiter. Claiming to be a "Buddhist shaman" does. Buddhism is more of a philosophy.

Ghost Singer is a fiction work of Walters on repatriation of remains, very accessible.

kosowith:
When in the Southwest last summer I picked up a flyer in Sedona last summer for Trisha where Bilk Med Eglett was now claiming to be a "traditional Metis Medicine woman"  She lost her claim to be Crow when the tribal president who sold her a membership was impeached and her "membership" and a number of others were revoked.  She is also advertising  $500 sweats through the Featherd Pipe Ranch, Helena, MT (we just call it the sewer Pipe Ranch around here) as Metis.

DIGOWELI:
AL you said:
Like a lot of people in the pseudo-shamanism movement, she sees what she wants to see. Halifax is not much of an anthropologist.

REH:
That was not what both Campbell and others thought in the early seventies.   Her work with Graf on Hallucinogenics is still quoted as seminal.    

AL:
The book of hers you love so much has a lot of "shamans" who were clearly not, one a notorious and very obvious fraud, Brooke Edwards AKA "Medicine Eagle."  (snip)

REH:
There were a number of people who were rethinking relationships to Indian religion in the 1960s as a result of Hallucinogenics.    It destroyed the way they were taught and so they looked around.   Many Indian practitioners took them on.   The most telling story in that book is the one about the one who failed because he wasn't from that culture.   Its not easy sitting forty days in a ice hut on a piece of leather with no movement, only ice for water and two pieces of meat.   Reminds me of that Christian who walked across the big Sandy desert in Australia for 41 days with nothing but his hands to gather sustainence.   Changed his life but he was still a Christian when he finished.   There are many older Shaman narratives in that book and I still stand by its usefulness.   As for BME:

Never met the lady but do know a lot who did and they liked her at the time, including some famous Lakota.   The Medicine way is a tough one.   Religion is divided just like music.   Traditional, Contemporary and Commercial.   There are many people who sell out.   Rarely is an academic challenged for that but they do it all the time in the name of scholarship.   It takes generations to undo what they did.   Their books go out of print and it still hangs around in people's lives.  

AL:
What's kinda funny is that "Med Eagle" was claiming to be "Nez Perce and Sioux" at the time of the book when now she claims to be Crow, even has a phony enrollment card and certificate posted online.

REH:
So go challenge her face to face yourself.   There are many people whose parents told them wrong things to throw them off and try to assimulate them.   I know one, who is a well respected doctor,  who was first three different peoples before she found her grandfather at Standing Rock.     That is what happens when you depend upon myths and writing instead of people.  

We in the Nuyagi Keetoowah Society don't bother.   We don't authenticate people, we simply worship as we were taught and have experienced.   The Creator decides who is and isn't and a card is just a card.  We don't judge people that way.    If someone claims to be from us and we don't know them,  then we challenge them.  I pointed that out on this list to Joseph about whom he asked.   If we don't know about it then we trust the Creator to work those things out properly.  

There are also students who were bad students and who claim to be teaching our work.   The only way out of that is certification like Ilana Rubenfeld and Moshe Feldenkrais or trust the Creator.   Certification is relevant only if it means merit and not descent.   No one really cares about descent when faced with dying from cancer.   They want someone who has diminished its complexity and can help them be cured.    That is merit.

continued  

DIGOWELI:
REH continued:
What were nations are now tribes and are becoming corporations with branding based upon descent.   What it has brought us is the Unkten in Oklahoma casinos.    We are in the Arts business and know these rules.   We elect to keep our spirituality our own and we have registered it with the government.    They will authenticate the registration and we like it that way.   One of you did make a stupid statement about 501-C-3 religious institutions.   All religious institutions have to prove that they are such.   Expecially during this touchy tax time.   They don't just give them out up here.   There are plenty of sophisticated tax lawyers who will take you to court in order not to have to pay more school taxes for their children themselves.   Your comments are em-bare-assing.

AL
"Prem Das", a white guy who poses as a Huichol shaman, is another exploiter.

REH:
When I met Matsuwa and spent a whole night in ceremonial with him he had a very smart white guy as his apprentice.   He was intelligent, well traveled and very respectful of his teacher of several years.   His name was East Indian where he had also studied.   He also marketed yarn paintings from Huichol artists at Matsuwa's Rancho.   His name was Prem Das.    That is all I will say.

AL quotes:

"Chapter Three, The Marketing of Huichol Shamans
American youth, suffering from a crisis of meaning which became especially acute as the credibility of the "establishment" diminished in the mid-1960s, abandoned tangible political objectives to pursue "tales of power," of a "supernatural" sort, disseminated by a disorganized group of collaborators interested in profiting from meeting the unmet demand for gurus and mysticism. The Delgado-Furst-Myerhoff version of Huichol culture was inherited, and is being passed on with little if any modification, by Prem Das, Brant Secunda, and others. Their version of Huichol culture and "shamanism" is the version known to today's New Age consumers.
Like Gordon Wasson, I am outraged by marketers who bastardize ancient rituals and cheapen the tremendous personal sacrifices, unbending dedication, and humility required of bona fide Huichol and Native American healers and ritual specialists (those defined as "shamans"). My admiration for authentic aboriginal American ritual practitioners is what animates my criticism of those who prostitute and trivialize their teachings."

REH:
Al, here's the citation on the net for your quote:
(Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties
Kikes, Jay Courtney (1993)
Victoria, BC: Millenia Press.
ISBN: 0-9696960-0-0 paperback
Description: Paperback, xxviii + 285 pages
Contents: Foreword by Phil C. Weigand, acknowledgements, introduction, prologue, 5 chapters, Appendix A: Peyote: Divine Cactus or Dangerous Drug?, Appendix B: How Maize Was Acquired by Huatacame, Appendix C: Peyote Song, Huichol Glossary, bibliography, index, about the author.
Excerpt(s):
Foreword
by Phil C. Weigand)  
http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy/carlos_castaneda.html

REH:
What is interesting to me as a man of the theater is that Wiegland calls him Jay Fikes but the title calls him "Kikes."

These arguments are like the psycho-analytic arguments of Indians from the 1950s.  They were ethnocentric and ultimately genocidal in character.     They are also like the arguments against Rodin in Paris by the Academy that caused their students to destroy the first "Thinker" statue.  

When we left home to escape such rigidity we weren't the first or the last to elect not to stay and become alcoholics or commit murder or suicide.    These academics have an agenda which is to claim that their photographs of the culture are still relevant.   All cultures add to their life or they die.   They don't only add cars and dishwashers.  

continued  

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