Spirited Away : Native American rituals are trendy. But is this homage or another rip-off?

The people of Cochiti Pueblo have made offerings at secret shrines in the quiet mountains near their homes for centuries, playing their part in an intricate dance of prayer and ritual that seeks to bring human life into harmony with the rhythm of the passing seasons.

Now, strangers are visiting some of these holy places.

They may tamper with what they find, or perhaps leave behind crystals, feathers and other objects, in an attempt to honor Native American beliefs.

The unintended result is that the Cochiti may avoid a shrine that has been trespassed for fear their offerings will be disturbed.

“It’s real painful to see people having to deny offering prayers or making pilgrimages to these areas because the invasion has desecrated these places,” laments Regis Pecos, a soft-spoken Cochiti tribal council member.

The people of Cochiti are not alone in their anguish.

Across the nation, the Lakota, the Hopi, the Cherokee and others are angry over what they see as the appropriation of their religious traditions and sacred places by non-Indians. They resent having their practices imitated by others disenchanted with their own spiritual heritage.

This perceived theft takes many forms: back-yard sweat lodges and vision quests conducted by self-styled shamans; drumming and chanting by men’s movement followers, and the mass merchandising of books and sacred ceremonial objects to New Age adherents attracted by the holistic, Earth-centered spirituality of Native American beliefs.

Increasingly militant objections to such practices call attention to renewed spiritual vigor in many Native American communities, but also raise the knotty question of whether non-Indians should be exploring these rituals in the first place.

But many non-Indian practitioners, while deploring commercial exploitation of Native traditions, vigorously defend their right to study and practice Native American spirituality.

“The last time I heard it, Spirit is transcultural and transracial,” says Timothy White, editor of Shaman’s Drum, a magazine based in Willits, Calif. “My experience with Spirit says that Spirit is not something that can be possessed. It is not a limited quantity.”

In fact, many traditions that Native Americans claim as their own, he argues, are practiced by tribal people around the world. Variations on the sweat-lodge ceremony, for example, occur among the Sami and Finns of Scandinavia, and chanting and drumming are universal expressions of human spirituality, White says.

The outrage of many Native Americans took shape last fall at a summit of Dakota, Lakota and Nakota leaders in the form of a “Declaration of War” against “non-Indian ‘wanna-bes,’ hucksters, cultists, commercial profiteers and self-styled ‘New Age shamans’ ” as “exploiters” of Native spirituality.

The proclamation, later adopted by the mainstream National Congress of American Indians, also decried as “sacrilegious” the staging of sun dances by--and for--non-Indians and selling sacred pipes through the mail.

“I think all Indian people recognize that the spiritual traditions are the core of Indian survival,” says John LaVelle, a Santee Dakota tribal member who helped draft the declaration.

LaVelle, executive director of the San Francisco-based Center for the SPIRIT (Support and Protection of Indian Religions and Indigenous Traditions), sees the practice of Native American spirituality by non-Indians as a part of “a process of genocide” under way since the 19th Century.

“Now we have white people who want to be Indians. It’s forcing an accommodation on Indians,” he says. “We’re being assaulted by people who are so lost that they can’t see the violation of the healthy boundaries of our culture as an assault.”

In LaVelle’s eyes, offenders range from non-Indians who pass themselves off as Native American holy people, publish books and purport to hold traditional ceremonies, to tribal members who charge visitors $50 a head to sing sacred songs in hotel ballrooms.

But there are those who scoff that the uproar only reflects the opinion of a few “activists.”

Thomas Mails, a Lutheran minister living in Lake Elsinore who has written about Native Americans for 30 years, says, “There’s a strong difference of opinion between Native American peoples as to whether religion or spirituality--a person’s relationship with God--should be shared with others, or whether it should be kept to themselves.

“The really great people, like (medicine men) Black Elk and Fools Crow, feel that religious understandings are given by God--they don’t belong to the people.”

Fears that outsiders may steal Native American spirituality are unrealistic, Mails says, because non-Indians don’t know the necessary language or procedures to perform rituals.

“The average activist doesn’t understand this,” says Mails, who also has written about Hopi religious practices. “If you confront an individual who is complaining about this, you find they don’t understand a whit.”

There is little question that Native spiritual traditions have been grossly commercialized in some quarters, especially since the romanticized portrayal of Plains culture in the movie “Dances With Wolves.”

For example, the pages of Shaman’s Drum carry ads for a portable sweat lodge (“comes with FREE carrying case and handbook on the history and health benefits of Native American Sweat Lodge Ceremonies”), recordings of Lakota sun-dance songs (“16 songs with booklet of words in Lakota and English”), and a deck of cards that “access the powerful imagery and sacred wisdom of the Inipi --the Lakota sweat lodge ceremony.”

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Timothy White, editor of Shaman’s Drum, concedes that commercialism is a problem. He prints a disclaimer that advises readers “to follow, and take responsibility for, their own beliefs in such matters.”

He says it’s important to distinguish between committed practitioners and those looking for a way make a quick buck.

“Some people have sold books for big money and have embellished psychological processing with some cultural trappings to make them look like they’re associated with one cultural tradition,” White says. “In my opinion, the truth will be borne out, and these shams will be exposed and their success will be short-lived.”

Among those who count themselves as serious students of Native spirituality is Jim Lundy, an engineer living in Santa Monica, who has participated in more than 40 sweat lodges over the past seven years.

Lundy, who is white, says a “sweat”--where participants gather in a small structure to chant or sing while hot rocks superheat the air--may lead to profound emotional and spiritual release.

Pursuing such practices in a disciplined way is “hard work,” Lundy says--and not for spiritual gadflies. “There are a lot of white people who feel these religions are chic and cool and something to get involved in.”

Another practitioner who has committed himself to Native tradition is Bill Stites, owner of a New Age bookstore in Silver City, N.M. Stites belongs to the mostly white Peyote Way Church of God, which, like the better-known Native American Church, uses peyote for sacramental purposes.

“There are certain practices we engage in that are engaged in by Native Americans,” Stites says. “But we try to follow these practices in our hearts without there being a violation of ethics.”

Stites agrees that many Native American religious rites should remain private, but he thinks it’s possible for non-Indians to explore Native traditions in a sincere and respectful way.

“It’s a tough one, because you don’t want to go out and commercialize Native American religion,” he says. “But there are a lot of people who genuinely go out and seek new knowledge. Do you say to them, ‘No, you can’t do that’?”

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Tim Giago, editor of Indian Country Today, a national newspaper based in Rapid City, S.D., which has covered the wanna-be issue in depth, thinks so.

He notes that Lakota rituals are only meaningful if performed in a particular dialect of the Lakota language. They are not accessible to outsiders, he says.

“Like everything that has become a fad, like Hula Hoops, it passes,” says Giago, a Lakota Sioux. “Our spirituality has been here since before Christ. It’ll not only survive, it’ll get stronger.”

In the meantime, Giago says, many medicine men are closing their ceremonies to outsiders, while tribal governments are considering sanctions to prevent members from revealing too much to outsiders.

Yet, Gary Adler Four Star, an Assiniboine spiritual teacher living in Claremont, says he tutors non-Indians about Native American values and even admits some to sweat lodges, provided they understand their responsibilities.

“We don’t discriminate against people participating,” he says. “What we tell them is, don’t attend once and go telling people you know something.”

He acknowledges some participants ignore such warnings.

“There are 10,000 books on Indian spirituality, most of them not written by Indian people,” he says. “All these people attend a ceremony, and then they think they know something. You have a lot of people out there that are emulating, but don’t have the knowledge. A lot of people are fooling with things that they don’t know about, and that’s dangerous.”

Some critics also contend that the faux Native Americans lack a fundamental respect.

Wilmer Mesteth, a spiritual leader and instructor at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, recalls visiting a Lakota sacred site at Bear Butte State Park last Memorial Day at the request of some tribal elders.

“There was a camp of 200 people there,” he says. “The majority of them were non-Indians. There was no room for our people to go use that sacred site. Some of our own medicine men were sitting with these people.

“There were all these altars all over the place--just total disrespect for our sacred items. It felt like they were toys.”

Poverty on the reservation is partly to blame for some tribal members parting with religious secrets, Mesteth says. They realize there’s a buck to be turned from spiritual enlightenment.

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And the disrespect isn’t limited to living Native Americans either.

At Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico--home to a large gathering of New Agers during the August, 1987, Harmonic Convergence--visitors tuck letters, crystals and homemade prayer sticks into the crumbling walls and kivas of thousand-year-old Anasazi ruins, says Rory Gauthier, a National Parks Service ranger.

Worse, some sprinkle the cremated remains of loved ones amid the ruins of communities built by the ancestors of today’s Pueblo people. “That’s a very big problem for us,” he says. “Among Native Americans, that’s viewed as a horrible thing to do. Within their beliefs that’s unspeakable.”

Park personnel gather the debris and take it to the state Office of the Medical Examiner while fielding complaints from Native American leaders, Gauthier says.

Cochiti’s Regis Pecos, who is also executive director of the New Mexico Office of Indian Affairs, says the Pueblo people adopted secrecy to protect their religion during more than 400 years of oppression and missionary activity by European settlers.

“I hope it’s not misunderstood that Indian people are against others seeking a sense of spirituality and balance in their lives,” he says.

“It might sound contradictory that if our Indian way is encouraging balance, how can an Indian person speak against someone who is trying to attain that same balance through the same means? It sounds hypocritical, but there’s an appropriate way to do it.”