The World We Used to Live In

 

Imagine attending a ceremony in Spring (in this case with the Zuni in what is now New Mexico) where the local medicine men gather around a square of compacted yellow sand in which a single seed of corn is planted. As they chant, pray, you watch emerge over the course of hours, not days or weeks, a fully-fledged corn plant, glistening green, emerge whose cob will be closely inspected for its prediction of the forthcoming autumn harvest. What do you make of this? If you are a white person, observing this in the nineteenth century, you tend to presume a trick but what kind of trickery? All of your explanations sound either hollow - the use of a corn plant from the previous year but then how is its greenery maintained? Or equally fantastical to what you have just witnessed - for example, mass hypnosis or a secret accelerant growth chemical.

Later, reading this historical account, you can fall back on the assumption that it is a piece of fantastical literature - except the mostly moderately hostile or condescending witnesses (there are honorable exceptions) do not appear the imaginative type, and their bafflement rustles off the page. Nor is this an isolated account nor confined to only this group of indigenous inhabitants of 'America'. Interestingly the nature of the hostility shifts over time - the Jesuits in the seventeenth century presume what they witness is possible but caused by devilry but by the nineteenth century, the witnesses assume it must be simply trickery even if they do not know how because what they have witnessed cannot be possible!

Vine Deloria Jr.'s 'The World We Used to Live In' might be described as the Varieties of Native American Medicine Man (and occasionally women) Power Experiences (after William James' pioneering exploration of religious experience). He has structured an unfolding picture of what, according to the best possible, most reliable accounts, medicine men were able to experience of, and utilize with, the cooperation of the sacred and its accompanying powers, cleaving to the phenomenology of that experience, without seeking to place them in any contemporary reductive, materialist framework. 

Visions and dreams guide, stones speak, travel and de and re-materialize, animals collaborate and correct, people are cured, hidden, found, kept from danger, the weather is manipulated and the future foretold - all within the given limits of the overarching mystery in which we live and the ability of the medicine man (and their wider communities) to understand, learn from and, importantly, live up to the gifts they are offered.

The examples, structured as they are, are meant to have a cumulative effect - and they do. The world you step into is rather akin to that of Marvel, though more homely and domestic (rather than what we take for 'reality') but, of course, as Jeffrey Kripal has deftly shown - the world of Marvel and its kin owes not a little to their creators own encounters with the 'paranormal'. 

Nor is 'paranormal' the right word here because though these practices and their accompanying powers belonged only with exceptional individuals, they were seen as everyday realities, accepted within the diverse communities that composed pre/post-Colombian America as beautifully witnessed to in James Welch's novel, 'Fools Crow' https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-wholly-realised-different-world.html These are very practical powers with an everyday consequence, finding a lost horse, for example, being renewed in the lives of countless practitioners over the generations.

Deloria was a scholar (science, law, religion) and activist for indigenous rights, and his purpose here was both to defend indigenous ways of seeing and being in the world and, tentatively, connect them to contemporary shifts in our own scientific understanding of the world (in which he clearly, if very briefly, takes an 'idealist' position - the world is mental, the material 'frozen thought' and this may account for its greater fluidity/flexibility than materialism would allow) - and ponder the meaning of his title - the world we used to live in. 

For it is clear for him that a tradition that was so pervasive in multiple indigenous, communal contexts is if no more, seriously attenuated. What is the relationship between traditions of deep practice and the world's response? Are there seasons to 'magic' and if so does this seasonality lie on the side of the sacred powers withdrawing their favor or of our ignorance occluding our ability to see the world aright? How difficult is it to practice if either your (or the wider community) is not sufficiently attentive or their epistemology/ metaphysics is indifferent or actively hostile?  

Equally, it raises fascinating questions about why certain of these powers were not, apparently adaptive, on the white man's arrival, carrying, for example, new and terrible diseases for which the medicine men and their sacred helpers had no cure. Are the powers localized and so too subject to time, change and learning? There was no time to adapt and the sheer pressure of the colonial juggernaut demoralized any attempt to. You can see a whole interface/dialogue here between distinct theologies/epistemologies. But it was a road not traveled.  

For this was Deloria's last book, completed shortly before he died, and it does have an unfinished feel to it. You wanted him to pick up certain of these threads and go deeper - in the implications these accounts have for how we understand how the world works and in why what was so common appears now uncommon though possibly not as great as he thought - since the 'miraculous' seems, if not as structured as here, highly resilient and persistent, whatever our mainstream patterns of thinking maintain.  

Yet the book does achieve (for this 'outside' reader), one of its aims which were to speak to its own communities of the rich's of its past - and potential future - and again for this outside reader honor, the ancestors of multiple yet interwoven indigenous spiritual traditions.