graybear13 wrote:Darrel, I'm sorry some truth and wisdom came along and you got all upset about it.
Something isn't "truth and wisdom" because someone asserts it is and you find it comforting to want to believe it is. Nor is it true because they start their claims out with "according to the teachers..."
I think you owe Hyemeyehsts an apology for attaching his name to your absurd diatribe.
I changed three words. Explain why "lonely" is true in that quote and "stupidity" isn't true.
I have a little time this morning so I think I'll do a little checking on this Mr. Storm and see where you are getting this "truth and wisdom."
D.
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"Hyemhoyosts Storm" fancies himself a new age Indian shaman. Turns out many consider him to be more of a Sham Man. And you, quoting such a person! I'm so surprised...
A review of a Mr. Storm's 1972 main best selling book: "Seven Arrows"
***
HYEMHOYOSTS STORM DESECRATES CHEYENNE BELIEFS
By Rupert Costo, President of the American Indian Historical Society and Publisher of The Indian Historian
Seven Arrows brings disgrace to its publisher, Harper and
Row. It falsifies and desecrates the traditions of the Northern
Cheyenne, which it purports to describe.
This reviewer withholds judgment as to whether Mr. Storm is a Cheyenne as he claims to be.* He certainly shows little or no
understanding of the Cheyenne Way. The publisher circulated a letter giving Storm's enrollment number. But an enrollment number does not an Indian make!
Quite a few Anglos and some blacks were adopted into Indian tribes. Sometimes the Indians were forced by the US government to accept them. In other cases whites were deceitful enrolled.
If indeed he is an Indian, the tribal chairman states "I don't know how he got on the tribal rolls." Shame on him for making a blasphemous travesty of the Cheyenne Way in Seven Arrows.
This is a book put together with considerable pretensions.
The first thing that strikes the eye is the illustrative work:
1) The color plates are a solid disaster, in extremely poor taste, and the end result desecrates the Cheyenne religion. The Cheyenne do not use such garish colors. Theirs were the colors of the earth.
2) The designs are actually blasphemous to Cheyenne religion,
portraying their religious motifs in the worst possible manner,
making a mockery of the religious beliefs and the theological system of the people.
There are so many irreligious and irreverent inaccuracies in this book that a committee of the Northern Cheyenne
is now examining it in detail.** The reaction of Cheyenne people at Lame Deer was disbelief and anger: "Bunk!"
1) His description of the Sun dance is WRONG.
2) His drawing of the Sun Dance Lodge is NOT Cheyenne.
3) The Four Sacred Directions are INACCURATELY described as north-south-east-west. They are in fact the northeast-northwest-southeast-southwest.
4) The sacred number given is WRONG.
5) The Cheyenne shield colors are WRONG. They are red, black, white, and yellow, not the monstrosity of color shown in the plates.
6) The shield designs are WRONG and actually BLASPHEME the Cheyenne religion.
The publisher has boasted this will be a best seller. Not surprising. This is a White Man's interpretation of the Cheyenne.
A reader searching for a true interpretation of the Cheyenne people will not find it in this book.
It is most unfortunate that this author, who has no religious
or secular status in the tribe, is so presumptuous as to bestow "Indian" names upon his White benefactor, Douglas Latimer,
a vice president of Harper and Row. Only the tribe and religious leaders can do this. In performing such an irreligious act, Storm
has outraged and insulted the Cheyenne, their tribal traditions, and religion. On the other hand, it is inconceivable any self respecting
individual would accept a pseudo-Indian name given by one who is not authorized to do so. No self respecting Indian would do it either. It is ump quah, as we say.
This reviewer wonders whether Storm is attempting to create a new theology for the Cheyenne.*** If so he has failed, and succeeded only in vulgarizing one of the most beautiful but least known religions of man.
------
This review originally appeared in The Indian Historian, Vol. 5, No. 2, Summer 1972.
*Subsequent research has turned up two possibilities not known at the time Costo wrote his review. Storm's real first name is Charles or Chuck. At other times he has also taken the pseudonyms "Wolf Storm" or "General Storm." He is, in fact, German-American, and is blue-eyed, blond-haired, and fair-skinned. A few Native people have come forward claiming to be relatives of his, and it's possible he may have a small amount of Crow ancestry. These distant Crow relatives in turn have Cheyenne relatives, which may account for how he was
deceitfullyenrolled.
** Storm's publisher Harper and Row escaped a lawsuit by publishing the book as fiction. (They also paid what the Cheyenne openly called "reparations" for the damage done by Storm's book.) At the same time, Storm and the inner circle of his cult followers maintain his books are absolutely and literally true.
***Storm remains a pariah to the Cheyenne. There is no sign of any Cheyenne accepting his blasphemous take on Cheyenne belief. Storm himself has never lived among the Cheyenne, and today lives near the Crow reservation on the profits from his books. His appearances to promote his blasphemy of Cheyenne beliefs are always heavily protested.
Amazon
Also interesting:
A Theft of Spirit?
by Christopher Shaw
originally published in New Age Journal
August 1995
Excerpt:
"FROM high-priced sweat lodges to imitation rituals, Native American spirituality is being debased and exploited, say Indian activists. And the culprit, they say, is “the new age movement.”
The day’s pounding rain and driving winds had shut down much of California, but still more than a hundred people turned out one evening last February for a reading and book-signing at the new Barnes & Noble store in Santa Rosa. They had come to hear the sixty-year old writer and workshop leader Hyemeyohsts Storm, perhaps best known for his 1972 best seller, Seven Arrows, the book that had introduced the counterculture to Native American spirituality—and, in the process, helped trigger a controversy that, some two decades later, continues to divide traditional Native Americans and contemporary spiritual seekers.
As the crowd wandered into the seating area, an Indian activist quietly threaded his way through the rows of chairs, placing a leaflet on each one. “STOP EXPLOITING THE SACRED TRADITIONS OF AMERICAN INDIAN PEOPLE!!!” the angry one-page missive began. “We are members of the Bay Area American Indian community, and we are outraged by non-Indian wannabes and would-be gurus of ‘the New Age’ shamelessly exploiting and mocking our sacred religious traditions... These sacred ways have enabled our people to survive five centuries of genocide. We will not allow these most sacred gifts to be desecrated and abused... OUR SACRED SPIRITUAL PRACTICES ARE NOT FOR SALE, AND IF YOU TRY TO STEAL THEM FROM US, YOU ARE GUILTY OF SPIRITUAL GENOCIDE.” Along with the flyer was another document, identified as an “American Indian International Tribunal Elder’s Statement,” which echoed the complaints against the unsanctioned use of Indian ritual and ceremony. “Our young people are getting restless,” the statement ominously concluded. “They have said they will take care of those who are abusing our ceremonies and sacred objects in their own way.”
Not exactly the type of greeting one expects at the neighborhood bookstore. But in recent years, as the popularity of Native American spirituality has grown, emotional confrontations of this type have become increasingly common. One need not look too hard to find the targets of the activists’ anger. Teachers of varying legitimacy—some Indian, some not—now charge considerable fees for what they describe as Native American sweat lodge ceremonies, sacred sun dances, shamanistic healing, and vision quest workshops. Sites such as Bear Butte in South Dakota and Mount Shasta in California, long revered by Native people, are regularly converged upon by spiritual seekers, who too often leave behind a multicultural trash heap of offerings, crystals and talismans. Alternative book and gift shops do a brisk business selling genuine and faux dream catchers, smudge sticks, pipes, herbal remedies, and other traditional Native American items for home use by curious non-Natives. Some of the abuses would be laughable, were they not so offensive: sun dances held on Astroturf, wine and cheese served at purifying sweat lodge ceremonies, and sex orgies offered as Cherokee spiritual workshops are among the worst cases reported."
"...given the long history of colonization of Native peoples and their ongoing cultural struggles, say Native American activists, such groping toward a vague spiritual “Indian-ness,” often by wealthy whites, can be deeply offensive. Ward Churchill, author of several books on issues facing Native peoples, including Indians R Us?: Culture and Genocide in Native North America, notes that over the years the federal government has systematically stripped Native people of their land, their resources, and even their identity (by recognizing as Indian only those who meet certain blood quantum criteria). “What’s left... is a fairly thin repository for something truly Indian,” he says. “And now we’ve got every yuppie new ager in the universe deciding they have an inalienable right to take that, too, and use it for whatever purposes they see fit.” John LaVelle, a Santee Lakota and director of the Center for the Support and Protection of Indian Religions and Indigenous Traditions (SPIRIT), calls this “the final phase of genocide. First whites took the land and all that was physical. Now they’re going after what is intangible.”
Native political organizations have taken the same position In 1993, the National Congress of American Indians issued a “declaration of war” against “non-Indian ‘wannabes,’ hucksters, cultists, commercial profiteers, and self-styled new age shamans.” (Earlier that year, at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, in Chicago, activists also denounced the commerce in American Indians’ sacred traditions and spirituality). The issue dates back at least to the early ‘80s, when Indian activists, reacting to events such as the Medicine Wheel gathering of Vincent LaDuke—known to his many followers as Sun Bear—and the expensive workshops of Wallace Black Elk, issued forceful condemnations of commercialized spirituality. In 1992, the American Indian Movement (AIM) warned a number of practitioners that “our patience grows thin with them, and they continue their disrespect at their own risk.”
The case of Hyemeyohsts Storm is illustrative. Over the years, the writer has been widely criticized by Indian activists who consider him a false teacher, an ersatz Indian who has commercialized and distorted Native spirituality through his books and seminars. (Storm, who is of mixed descent, claims he was born and raised on the Northern Cheyenne and Crow Reservations of Montana and is “an enrolled Indian,” although his status with those tribes could not be confirmed.) His name—pronounced Hi-yuh-may-yohsts-— appears frequently on activist blacklists, alongside those of teachers and writers such as Brooke Medicine Eagle, Lynn Andrews and Jamake Highwater....
...In the Journal of Experiential Education, Gordon W.A. Oles, a Mohawk/ Cayuga Indian from the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, Canada—responding to the use of vision quests, sweat lodge ceremonies, and other rituals in wilderness education programs—notes that, from his perspective as a Native American and outdoor leader, “these contrived, psuedo-Indian activities [are] tantamount to a nonbeliever taking the Emblems of Communion and passing them out along the trail as a snack.”
http://www.thetrackingproject.org/write ... spirit.htm
