Spiritual colonialism & the "Castaneda Complex"

So here I am, a scientist who's interested in building mutually respectful dialogue between science and indigenous knowledge, and it's beginning to look like there's no way to do that without also talking about spirituality. The spiritual dimension of life is not separable from knowledge in Aboriginal life, it seems. Now, as scientists go, I'm one who pays attention to spirituality – I don't cynically dismiss it. But…there's a historical reason I'm hesitant to talk about spiritual matters, and I guess I would call that reason "spiritual colonialism." I'm wary of participating in it.

For many years in the U.S., it was against the law for Native Americans to practice their spirituality. In a nation that was allegedly founded on the principle of separation of church and state, the state felt free to exercise its power in this one area of religion. Apparently the principle doesn't apply to non-Christian religions. The law changed (need to look up the year), and Native Americans were free to have their ceremonies, but the law has never recognized the importance of sacred places. The U.S. government has never acknowledged that by denying access to, mining on, or dumping nuclear waste on a sacred place, the state is interfering with the free practice of Native American religion.¹ Obviously, many practices must have been kept secret during the long time when practicing their own spirituality was illegal. I don't know his source for this, but my friend Ken Cannon said that one hundred years ago, Native Americans were very secretive about their spirituality, and would not talk to whites about it. He didn't know about the law, but if Native Americans were punished by law for practicing their spirituality, keeping secrets would make perfect sense. This secrecy appears to have changed, and Native American elders began to talk about spirituality.

As a result, just as the U.S. government appropriated the land, some white Americans began to appropriate native spirituality. Particularly during the 60's, the disaffected youth of the U.S. were looking for alternatives to Judeochristian views, especially any alternative that seemed to be earth-based. The need for Americans to look for an alternative to the spirituality of their parents and grandparents was real, and continues to be real. But how does a culture whose own ancestral traditions have gone extinct go about re-creating a genuine spirituality? No one knows how to do this, so people tried anything they could. Many tried to find out what they could about Native American spiritual ways. Some turned to any information they could get about pre-Christian religions from Europe, which continues today as the neo-pagan movement. Even more turned to Asia, becoming Buddhists or Hindus or Hare Krishnas. At the same time, anthropologists were starting to write about native spirituality in Mexico and South America, with particular emphasis on their own participant observation in ceremonies involving hallucinogens. Carlos Casteneda wrote his first book on Don Juan, unleashing a 50-year tide of curious whitefellas to harass and pester the brujas and healers and tabaqueros of North and South America: "please, tell us the secret ways of knowledge and power." It is this seeking that I call the "Castaneda complex," the idea that you will be special enough, chosen from your culture to be given access to some spiritual knowledge and power from another culture. Some seekers may have been genuinely interested in knowledge or meaning, and had respect and some understanding for the cultures they spent time in. Others were clearly just interested in having a far-out groovy trip on some exotic Mexican mushroom, and others were attracted by the possibility of having "power." If one feels powerless in U.S. culture (people who aren’t rich), or if one has a position of power in that culture (rich people) but doesnt feel secure in that power², of course one is going to be attracted to the idea of having some kind of secret power that other people in U.S. culture don't have.

In the U.S. today, many white New Agers feel free to say that they're practicing "Native American spirituality", or "indigenous spirituality." I hang around a lot of hippies, so I've seen this many times. Some whites conduct sweat lodge ceremonies, or medicine wheel ceremonies, based on their own understanding of what these ceremonies are, and don't provide any background on who taught them, nor have any awareness of political issues facing Native Americans today. A ceremony comes with a cultural context and a history. The white people do not have the same cultural context or the history. When they do such ceremonies, they are in fact doing something quite different from what Native Americans are doing. They may mimic the external forms, but the internal meanings will be all different, and the power of ceremony is in the internal meanings. The meanings for Native Americans are inside knowledge that the whites can't have. What I don't understand is why white people think it's not OK to say, OK, we lost our ancestors' cultural and spiritual traditions, Judeochristian religion isn't working, so we're going to have to re-invent some kind of spirituality that's our own. It seems they feel more valid or more comfortable borrowing from other cultures' spiritualities.

There's a market for this need. In the U.S., hundreds and hundreds of weekend or week-long workshops on "native spirituality" are offered. "Spend a weekend with us, and learn the secret ways of Toltec mysticism," as if these could be taught in a weekend. Not on offer over that weekend is any instruction in what kind of history the Toltec people have had, particularly since colonization. Highly paid corporate executives pay huge sums to go away on weekends to learn the secrets of "shapeshifting and shamanism" so that they can use these secrets to be more effective corporate managers. Again, no training is offered in the cultural ethics that may have given birth to such practices in whatever indigenous culture(s) they come from. Native Americans have decried the appropriation of their spirituality by whites, and many communities have been sharply critical of any native people running such workshops. But for every 20 who protest that this is not real spirituality, and that exploiting it for commercial gain is wrong, there is one who will give a workshop, and thousands of spiritually starving whites who will register. Given that the U.S. has denied Native Americans access to ways of generating wealth, and grossly financially mismanaged native lands, it seems understandable that some people will do anything they can to make a living.

The ads for these workshops bother me. The more compassionate part of me thinks that it's understandable that whites are desperate for some approach to meaning that their own culture isn't giving them, and so I try not to judge their motivations for going. I just think it's sad that people are gullible enough to think they could get genuine spiritual knowledge in a weekend The harsher, more judgmental part of me jumps right into judging the motivations of anyone who goes to such a workshop. It's the fast-food approach to spirituality, part of what Chogyam Trungpa³ called "spiritual materialism." I notice that such workshops are never advertised as, "Spend years working hard and being interdependent with the people whose power you're trying to get, gaining a real understanding of the lives of the people in this culture. Maybe they'll tell you a thing or two and you'll really understand what it means."

What I cannot know, as an outsider, is whether what is on offer in these workshops bears any resemblance to true Native American cultural or spiritual practices. For all I know, it's a cartoon version, and the real spiritual knowledge is kept for insiders. I guess I hope that is the case, but I can't know.

As far as I can tell, spiritual matters are inside knowledge for Aboriginal people, not to be discussed in any depth with outsiders. That was true of Native American spirituality 100 years ago, and look at the situation now. I would hate to see Australia in 100 years be filled with New Age workshops alleging to teach white executives about Aboriginal spirituality in a weekend. I don't think that Aboriginal people will go down that path, but as a white Australian, I would like to avoid any kind of appropriation. I now don't know how to engage in a dialogue between science and indigenous knowledge without touching on spirituality. I would like to avoid entering into anything that smacks of the Castaneda complex, to avoid appropriating anything about Aboriginal spiritual views. I don't know exactly how to do that while talking about different approaches to knowledge. I'll try to follow a right path, but it will mean feeling my way.

¹ Vine Deloria, Jr. God is Red: A Native View of Religion. 30th Anniversary Edition, Golden, CO: Fulcrum Press, 2003. An exception is a minority opinion written in a U.S. Supreme Court case, Sierra Club v. Morton. The dissenting opinion was written by Justice William O. Douglas, and is reprinted in Appendix I of Deloria's book.
² Power gained by having taken resources by force can never feel secure.
³ Trungpa was a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who wrote about the particular difficulties Americans have in approaching other forms of spirituality. His major book is Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Boston, MA: Shambhala Press, 1973.