377 - The Sacred Vision: Native American Religion and Its Practice Today

The Sacred Vision:
Native American Religion and Its Practice Today
By Michael F. Steltenkamp
Ramsey, N.J., Paulist Press, 1982. 133 pp. $5.95.

The author is a Jesuit priest who, after graduate study with Harold Driver (author of the classic Indians of North America) and a course with Joseph Epes Brown (best known as author of The Sacred Pipe),

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moved to the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota in 1974 to teach at Red Cloud Indian School. His resulting book, The Sacred Vision, is a very modest volume of three chapters, mostly drawing upon his experiences with the Lakota or Sioux people he met at Pine Ridge, augmented by briefer experiences in the American southwest, and with the Ojibwa of northern Ontario. The first chapter discusses the sacred pipe among the Lakota. The second describes peyote spirituality associated with the Native American Church, and the last chapter provides a "kaleidoscopic" smattering of comments about the vision quest, the sun dance, pow-wows, "cemetery-reverence," respect for nature, and, in general, the relevance of Native American spirituality for seekers today.

The most interesting portions of the book tell of the author's opportunities to participate in a sweatlodge, to visit and pray before the original sacred pipe, and to partake in an evening-long peyote ceremony. Steltenkamp's narratives illustrate the continuing vitality of native traditions along with their adaptations and accommodations. His accounts also exemplify the diversity of Native Americans, which non-Indians often miss in creating a single, stereotyped category called "Indian." The writing is not difficult, apparently intended for popular consumption, but the style is sometimes distracting, vacillating between a basic prose that could be more lively and direct and a novelistic descriptive style that does not quite succeed.

Steltenkamp appreciates Native American spirituality, believing that the same God works through both Christianity and native traditions. One should be "capable of appropriating religious insights wherever they can be found" (p. 119). Directing his comments toward religious seekers, he attempts to avoid fanciful romantic portrayals, on the one hand, and arcane academic treatment, on the other. Steltenkamp's personal struggle to integrate his academic knowledge with his more pastoral impulses is especially interesting. Overly academic discussions of Indian religions, he suggests, are often inaccessible to the general public, sometimes trivial, and unable to communicate a sense of the "lived-experience" of native peoples. However, Steltenkamp cannot leave his studies behind, and his alternative treatment contains repeated qualifications and asides obviously intended to protect himself from academic criticisms and to indicate familiarity with certain academic discussions. How do we keep personal quests for meaning from skewing discussions of Native American spirituality into forms of wish-fulfillment and yet on the other hand avoid the kind of "objectivity" which squeezes life out of the subject? That kind of struggle is common when Americans consider native religions; it is especially apparent and not fully resolved here.

For a description of Lakota ceremonies and spiritual traditions, Joseph Epes Brown's The Sacred Pipe: Black Elks Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux is more powerful and complete. Jamake Highwater's The Primal Mind is more effective in building bridges between the understandings of native and Western cultures, trying to

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make sense of native perspectives in Western terms. Yet, in addition to the knowledge that might be gleaned from such sources, many of us who are non-Indians largely removed from contact with Indian people might enjoy an opportunity to chat for an evening with a priest who had spent several years in a reservation setting. "Do the traditions continue?", we might ask. "Were you able to view or participate in any ceremonies? What were they like? As a Christian priest, how do you view native spirituality?" This book is at its best when it forthrightly offers the author's reminiscences and narrates his experiences, providing a written substitute for such an evening conversation. When it wanders off into generalized historical backgrounds and interpretations, it is far less illuminating and satisfying.

Bruce David Forbes
Morningside College
Sioux City, Iowa