When Time Takes Place: The Mythic Landscape
While all land is alive, mythic events can layer certain places with further spiritual significance. Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday explains how mythic time and sacred place converge: "Time has a spatial extension, that which once happened literally took place, and still has a place."[10] Mythic events become deposited in the landscape and continue to reverberate in certain springs, buttes, coves, and bluffs. For instance, the waterfall where Coyote got into trouble or the place where a tribe emerged into this world continue to embody the power of mythic time. People return to these sites to pray, fast, or gather special herbs, for they know the places have the power to respond to their entreaties.
Salish people, for instance, tell the story of how Coyote and Fox passed through the Bitterroot Valley in Western Montana preparing the world for humans. Down in the southern tip of the valley, Coyote got into a fight with Big Horn Sheep. Coyote made Big Horn Sheep so angry that the ram charged after him. Tricky Coyote, however, stepped out of the way and the ram crashed right into the trunk of a ponderosa pine. That happened in the long ago, but Big Horn Sheep's horns are still lodged in the tree. Today, the Salish drive from miles around to pray at the tree, because they know that special power continues to resides there. The tree is laden with the colored strips of cloth, tobacco offerings, small feathers, and special stones that people offer in return for the blessings and power the place shares with them.
Often, after a mythic event, a mythic figure will come to inhabit a certain land form. People can feel their presence lingering as they walk along a ridge that is the twisting body of Great Snake or see a rock that is a monster's heart. Lakota elder Lame Deer says that a long time ago when the world was still new, a water monster named Unktehi caused a great flood that flushed all the people from the soil. After the flood, Unktehi turned into stone and came to live in the badlands where her backbone forms a long ridge and her vertebrae stick out in a neat row of red and yellow rocks. The story does not end there, for it is not a mere explanation of why a land form looks like it does. Rather, it is a key to why the land has the power it does. Lame Deer goes on to say, "It scared me when I was on that ridge, for I felt Unktehi. She was moving beneath me, wanting to topple me."[11]
Events that set these mythic cycles in motion are not limited to "the long ago." In 1863, for instance, while Kit Carson was leading a United States Army campaign to intern the Navajo at Fort Sumner, a small group of Navajo fled to the western edge of Navajoland. In the distance, they saw the Head of Earth Woman (Navajo Mountain), a mountain shaped like a loaf of blue cornbread. They slipped behind it, and as the army closed in, a miraculous event took place. Monster Slayer, Changing Woman's son who cleared the earth of monsters in mythic time, was suddenly reborn on top of the Head of Earth Woman. Like a rain cloud in the monsoon season, he was born and raised in the course of one day. He and the Head of Earth Woman formed a shield between the Navajo and Kit Carson's army. The army was repelled, and the band was one of the few who escaped the Navajo's four years of confinement and starvation at Fort Sumner. Since Monster Slayer's appearance, the Head of Earth Woman is a source of power for the Protectionway, a ceremony performed to ask for protection, avoid misfortune, or pray for something to happen within a single day.
While mythic events give significance to certain places, it must be stressed that the entire Navajo landscape is thought to be sacred by the people. For many tribes, the landscape is not a surface of patchwork sites physically and spiritually isolated from one another. All created forms of the landscape have a spiritual essence. All are alive. In their 1994 study of Navajo sacred places, Klara Bonsack Kelley and Harris Francis write that while there are qualitative differences between places, Navajo elders believe that no one place is more "sacred" than another.[12] There is a unity, a series of relationships that binds all places together. For instance, Kelley and Francis write, no place can be "singled out for preservation while the surrounding landscape which the place both gives significance (power) to and takes significance from is destroyed."[13] Such an attempt at preservation, says Blackfeet activist G. C. Kipp, would be like saving the altar as you tear down a church.
"These Mountains Are Just as Alive as Anybody"
Don Good Voice tells the story of a Chippewa-Cree man who went to fast in the Sweet Grass Hills. On his way there, the man stopped to ask a rancher which access road he should take to the West Butte. After the rancher gave the man directions, he asked him, "So, are you going up there to fast? When you get up there, could you ask those spirits to come down and give me some rain for my crops?" The man agreed and headed into the West Butte. As he prayed for the rancher during his fast, rain came and drenched the fields. Don Good Voice concludes, "To me that is like a small example of the power of those mountains. You ask for something as simple as water, as simple as rain, and you get it. Just think what we could ask if we were serious as human beings going there to ask for peace, to turn world events around."[14]
This story reveals something of the power and possibility most Native American traditions recognize in the land. In this type of lived experience, all of the themes I have broken down for the sake of this essay remain tightly woven together. Seeing what a specific place means to a specific culture can help non-Natives understand how land plays not an auxiliary or symbolic role, but is a central, necessary force in many Native traditions. The Sweet Grass Hills in North Central Montana is one of many examples from the American landscape which holds such great significance. Far more than mere hunting or camping grounds, these Hills give meaning to countless religious ceremonies. Since my first experience camping there, I have spoken to many Native people and gained a better understanding of what the Hills mean to their traditions.
The three conical buttes of the Sweet Grass Hills are visible for over a hundred miles as they rise 3,000 feet from the prairie floor. The view, however, can differ, depending on what culture you come from. A group of non-Native business people from Minnesota recently looked at the Hills and saw an opportunity to open pit mine for gold. In contrast, when local Plains tribes look at the Hills, they see a part of an intricate web connecting the people to the elements, animal beings, plant beings, tribal ceremonies, and the Creator.
Just as the Hills define the horizon in this flat country, they have also shaped the traditions of the Chippewa-Cree, Blackfeet, Mandan, Arikara, Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Salish, Kootenai, and Northern Cheyenne and their ancestors for millennia? Many of the tribes who used the Sweet Grass Hills were traditional enemies, but the Hills comprised a neutral zone in which no one could be attacked. As long as people did not carry weapons on their journey to the Hills, it was clear they had come to pray. People went alone to fast for visions or gathered together for ceremonies. Aerial photographs of the Sweet Grass Hills reveal two to three thousands tipi rings etched by centuries of Sun Dance ceremonies? Some traveled from great distances because the Hills are linked to far away sacred sites such as Chief Mountain in the Rocky Mountains, the Medicine Wheel in Wyoming, and the Black Hills in South Dakota.
What draws so many Native people to the Sweet Grass Hills is their sacred power. Like the Navajo, many Plains tribes recognize that while all land is sacred, certain places have qualitatively distinct sacred power. Some of this power is revealed through mythic events. For instance, when a young Blackfeet man named Scarface set out to talk to Creator Sun, he went first to the Sweet Grass Hills to fast for the knowledge necessary to find the Creator. On the last night of his fast, the spirit of the East Butte came to Scarface, infused him with its power, and told him where he had to go next. Scarface's fast in the Hills launched a journey that culminated in meeting the Creator Sun and returning home with instructions on how to perform the Sun Dance, one of the Blackfeet's most important ceremonies.
The Chippewa-Cree believe that the Hills are where the Creator began remaking the world after the great flood. They also say that when the buffalo were annihilated in the nineteenth century, they descended into a large cave in the Hill's West Butte, a belief underscored by the fact that the Hills were one of the last areas where the buffalo remained before their demise.[17] Contemporary stories, such as Don Good Voice's story of the man praying for rain, tell of the powerful events that continue to occur in the Sweet Grass Hills.
It is because of this power that the Hills have become embedded in Chippewa-Cree religious tradition. "Since time immemorial, the Sweet Grass Hills was one of the focal points of our tribe to seek out spiritual guidance, a spiritual sense of belonging," explains Don Good Voice. People journey to the Hills to fast and communicate with the Creator. Fasting for a vision is a physically and spiritually exacting ceremony in which individuals go without food or water for four days and expose themselves to the elements and the spirits. Chippewa-Cree elders say that when people fasted in the old days, they accepted the possibility that they would die in the process. The Sweet Grass Hills repay that sacrifice by giving the people spiritual power, endowing people with the strength to heal illnesses or face life's challenges. They also give over 350 plants for medicinal and ceremonial use. Perhaps most important, the Hills give songs the Chippewa-Cree use in their ceremonies, songs that allow them to communicate with the spirits. Tribal elder Pat Chief Stick stresses, "Those songs are not composed. They are spiritual songs." Indeed, they are given by the spirits in the Hills.
The Chippewa-Cree's relationship with the Sweet Grass Hills is a part of the larger sense of relatedness the tribe maintains with the world around them. Pat Chief Stick explains:
Here's what the old people tell us. The mountains, the air, the water, the wind, the rock, the wood, everything in the ecology- we use every bit of the ecology in our religious ceremonies. These things, wind, air, mountains, water, rock, Indian religion, are connected. Whenever we do the ceremonies, we gather all that stuff. That's the reason why they're so powerful.[18]
And if one of those elements is destroyed, the ceremonies and the tradition could suffer. "It's like when you make medicine to cure some one," says Chippewa-Cree tribal member Don Good Voice. "If you are missing one ingredient, it won't work. That's how it is with the Sweet Grass Hills. Our medicine, ceremonies, prayers- without the Hills, none of it will be as effective." With the proposed mine project, which will release cyanide into the water table and turn the mountain peaks into gaping holes, all the tribes who pray in the Sweet Grass Hills must face such a possibility.
The conflicts that arise between the miners and the tribes highlight some of the differences between the two cultures. Although the federal government has prohibited mining on public lands in the Hills, it claims that it cannot stop mining on private lands. Private property, it seems, takes precedence over First Amendment rights of freedom to exercise religion. Most court cases related to religious freedom refer to practices, such as a Jewish soldier wearing a yarmulke in the Army or an Amish child going to a public school. The courts fail to recognize that sacred land is essential to Native American religious practices, and that when the natural state of sacred land is disturbed, the whole tradition suffers. A National Register of Historic Places report on the Sweetgrass Hills makes that crucial connection:
Native American cultural leaders teach that this spiritual presence is not necessarily a permanent condition, but can only exist with the context of an undisturbed natural setting. Substantial disruption of the natural pristine qualities of the Sweetgrass Hills will displease the spirit life and spirit powers, and may cause them to leave forever.[19]
Protecting a few vision spots while mining the rest of the Hills does little to solve the problem, since the spirits of the land are interconnected. "These Hills are not just sacred in one place. Every bit of those mountains are sacred," Pat Chief Stick says simply.
With a temporary moratorium on mining in the Sweet Grass Hills, the tribes continue to seek legal and legislative ways to protect this essential force in their religious traditions. In the meantime, many also turn to prayer. Don Good Voice says that at an annual, intertribal camp in the Sweet Grass Hills people pray "that owners of the mines will change their minds and see that these mountains are just as alive as anybody and that they want to live too. We pray that they will respect that sanctity of life and the spirituality of those Hills."
When the tribes pray for the miners to respect the life and spirituality of the land, they are essentially praying for the miners to understand a relationship to the land that is foreign to them. Nonetheless, such a request is appropriate, since many non-Natives make decisions that impact the land and endanger tribal religious traditions. Coming to understand Native American interactions with the land, however, does not mean non-Natives should run their own sweat lodges and play at "being Indian." Such a response would be superficial at best and at worst offensive to Native Americans and their traditions.
More important than copying rituals is learning about the land and how to interact with it. As newcomers to this continent, non-Natives are still becoming acquainted with its landscape. Dakota novelist Susan Power reminds us that underneath the map of America lies a ghost geography--a network of Native American trails, villages, and traditions that has existed since long before Europeans arrived. Most non-Natives remain unaware of this terrain. They might stroll down a Chicago avenue without knowing that it was once a Pottawatomie trail, or they might hike through the Great Smoky mountains without noticing the plants the Cherokee use for medicine. Learning this history can help ground non-Natives in the American soil. Native creation stories can call their attention to distinct landforms, while traditional farming and hunting practices can reveal positive ways to interact with certain ecosystems. In his "Afterword" to the volume America in 1492, Vine Deloria, Jr., encourages us to reflect on the degree to which non-Native Americans "have responded to the rhythms of the land--the degree to which they have become indigenous."[20] In this context, "becoming indigenous" does not mean becoming Indian. It means knowing the land where we live and showing it respect.
Learning about Native American religious traditions can help non-Natives in this process, because they offer a model of what constitutes a spiritual relationship with the land. Seeing this model may encourage non-Natives to reflect on their own traditions and cultivate those strains which foster a sense of sacred land. For Jews, that may be the wisdom of the Psalms, or for Christians, the lessons of the Desert Fathers or Saint Francis. Placing a relationship to the land in a religious context, as opposed to an economic context, may help make the life force of the land seem less remote. In may also help non-Natives come to see the land as a distinct being deserving of respect. As Navajo elder Mamie Salt says in reference to a Navajo mythic figure, "This is Changing Woman's land, only she can say, 'It's my land.' Only hell is everybody's land."[21] According to Mamie Salt, hell is land that has no spirits to claim it.
http://www.crosscurrents.org/mountainsalive.htm
