When I heard that there had been a Native American prayer at the memorial ceremony in Tucson, I was not surprised.
When I lived on Indian Reservations, we commonly had such prayers at most ceremonies or meeting. But for memorial services, we often also had Christian clergy (usually either Anglican or Catholic) give a prayer. Tribes recognize what Americans used to: that there is one God, and often we approach Him in different ways, but we need to respect that God is being honored in these prayers.
Yet having the only prayer delivered by a Native American, not a local Medicine man, but a Catholic physician from the local university is a bit strange.
One also wonders why the White House didn’t ask a local medicine man to give the blessing. The local tribes in the Tucson area include theTohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui,
The doctor, however, is part Yaqui, so I guess it’s okay.
Most Yaqui mix their own customs with Catholicism.
This tends to drive the theologically strict up the wall, but actually, mixing what is good in local customs and beliefs is what Paul did.
I laugh here in the Philippines when stricter Protestant fundamentalists criticize Catholic customs here as “pagan”, but they don’t realize their interpretation of Christianity is based on American culture: full of intellectual nit picking (seeing each verse as literal) and assuming both literacy and the availability of cheap books.
The sociology of cultures stress different things, and when we approach God, we not only do so according to our cultural upbringing, but we do so according to our own psychological makeup (see William James’ book on this).
So Catholics don’t see traditional religions as “evil” but as good, and present Christ as helping us to see more clearly the deity that their ancestors sought in customs and ceremonies. In other words, we take what is good and “baptize”it.
For example, here in the Philippines, Mass or the Rosary are often part of the fiesta parades, and every Catholic home has a small “shrine” of lots of statues decorated with flowers. Usually they include Mary (Our Lady of Lourdes or one of the local Madonnas: here we have a lot of “Divina Pastora”, Mary with a lamb and a shepherd’s hat). They usually also include the Santa Nino (the happy chubby Christ child).
Filipinos stress the extended family, so Christ is our “kuya”, God is our Father, and of course never never insult Mama Mary, who can boss both of them around. Similarly, there is an identification with the Passion of Christ, because suffering here is alas common, and it helps to know that our Kuya understands our sufferings. That explains why 1.7 million folks attended the Black Nazarene fiesta last week.
Yet Americans don’t always recognize that they too have a culture.
In the US, Irish Catholic ethnics usually had crucifixes on the wall (does this hark back to the sufferings of the potato famine and the “coffin ships”?), but I’ve never seen that here in the Philippines. Not a lot of sad Madonnas or suffering Christs either (so beloved in Italian communities) and no Guadalupe images, where the Virgin appears as pregnant, in Aztec garb (so beloved of Mexicans).
American Catholicism once had ethnic parishes so people felt comfortable worshipping in their own language, music, and customs, but now, usually the parish is mixed, and full of assimilated ethnic Catholics. Of course, now instead of Hungarian or Polish parishes, we have a common parish that may offer one mass each week in Spanish if there are a lot of Hispanics in the area (and many non Hispanics attend, because the music is a lot better). So the music in an inner city African American parish may differ from that in the suburbs, and Native American parishes may include chants in their own tongue, or Pendleton blankets warming the Virgin at the Nativity scene.
What modern American Catholics call the “Vatican II Mass”, so common in suburban parishes, is actually inculcating the American-Protestantism culture’s style of worship, while folks like Father Z, who want the Latin mass reinstated, again is based on wishing to reinstate the beauty of the Baroque culture more than theology.
What few Americans realize is that what their Protestant churches promote is also base on culture: The literalism of some Fundamentalists who insist on strict truth, honesty, strict ethics, and hard work has a lot in common with the culture behind modern science, that also insists on intellectual honesty over niceness.
And the “God loves you no matter what” culture of the more charitable mainline churches is, of course, based more on modern Psychology that permeates American culture.
Some Protestant circles have both:the reaction against both of these trends is in the Pentecostal/charismatic movement: that replaces the lost emotion to a dry, intellectual Christian world, but keeps the emphasis on godly living. If one believe in God “tweaking history, one can almost imaging Her saying: Those Baptist and Episcopalians are both starting to over-do it. Let’s liven them up and remind them what I meant when I said “God is love”. So the deity found some believers in the remote Southern US and zapped them, and fifty years later, the fastest growing Christian churches are those that stress Biblical living with a happy pentecostal approach to worship.
This is far from the Native American prayer, of course.
But my point is that humans are limited by psychology, culture, and experience.
American culture accepts a “civil religion” that celebrates God, but also insists that the civil religion not be exclusive but respect the fact that we might not agree with the details. In a country where 90 plus percent of folks are believers in something, and even 15 percent of atheists pray every day, recognizing the deep set religious impulse behind civil expressions that include religion is important to understanding mainstream American culture.
Good politicians, such as Bill Clinton, know these things almost by instinct, and can use their ability to be comfortable in the various cultures to get votes and to successfully run a country.
That the White House did not include prayers by clergy of several faiths to comfort the families says more about their cluelessness about American culture than it does about the Native American prayer that was actually given.
If I were being cynical, I’d wonder if the White House was pandering to the agnostics in their party, who see Native American prayers as quaint (i.e. not to be taken seriously) but might actually be offended if a rabbi said the Kaddish…
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Nancy Reyes is a retired physician living in the rural Philippines. She has worked with many different cultures in her career as a physician.
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3 users commented in " Thoughts on That “Native American” Prayer in Tucson "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackCarlos Gonzalez is NOT Native American. He is Mexican. There is a big difference. Just because a Mexican grows his hair long and holds some feathers does not make him an Indian. The cultures are very different and people need to learn their history.
Within the past 15-20 yrs Mexican people have been trying to suddenly claim to be “Native Americans” as it has become a popular fad, distancing themselves from being Mexican, especially with the whole immigration issues taking place today. Historically, true blooded Native Americans went thru such hard times, becoming few on reservations, living in extreme poverty, losing their language, culture, and traditions due to assimilation.
The few today who remain traditional carrying on the tradition of their people have it hard enough with the fast pace of American culture that surrounds them. We do not need Mexicans like Carlos Gonzalez faking his way thru life playing Indian and becoming a virus, spreading fake ceremonies that others will copy because they feel it is real because he uses one Indian word that he learned from a so-called elder who gave him so-called permission.
There are exactly 564 federally recognized Native American Indian tribes today. Many of the tribal members within these nations know little to non of their language fluently or their own cultures. But many are trying to re-learn them today. One term standardized today is called Native American powwows where many different tribes come together to sing and dance, remembering the old ones in a celebration of life, never forgetting who they are or where they came from. Powwows originally started in a place called White Eagle, OK at the turn of the century where tribes of the great plains such as the Ponca, Kiowa, and other northern & southern tribes came together in prayer. These ways have been adopted by tribes all over the US and Canada where many dances of the Sioux and great lakes nations can be seen.
What Carlos Gonzalez began doing in his prayer, as mixed up as it sounded to me, was an attempt to pray in the way you might hear an elder or respected leader within a tribal community at a Native powwow. Again, it was an attempt….a really bad one, but an attempt. These prayers are listened to by many in the audience who memorize them and standardize them in their own lives. They then believe they have the right to go out and mimic what they heard at these social tribal gatherings. They’ll throw in a few Indian words here and there, grow their hair out, put a few feathers in it, shake some rattles, hit some drums, and believe that they are suddenly Native. Being Indian has nothing to do with having feathers in your hair, having long hair and braids, tattoos, or even wearing a bunch of beads. Being Indian is much more spiritual. And I believe that Mexicans like Carlos Gonzalez will not understand this because they were not brought up as a true Native American. They were brought up in a Spanish community, speaking Spanish, and most likely in a Catholic church.
Please do not call him a Native American and please do not think that Native Americans pray this way. He was completely mixed up in his words and his teachings, which I believe was nothing more than the teachings of individuals he must surround himself with who I believe are also not real American Indians.
If a true ritual leader would have spoken of a Native American community that was respected, the prayer would have been very different and would have been spoken in a Native language fluently and possibly translated into English. When a true Native is doing a prayer, the individual is brought up understanding or believing the Great Spirit or Great Mystery of Life, would understand the language of the individual giving the prayer. The Great Spirit was considered an architect or the artist of life.
We as Native American people take death very, very seriously, regardless of what religious background they come from. A true Indian prayer would have been very focused upon those whose lives were cut short in such a tragic and horrible way. As he began talking about creatures and the four-legged, the winged, etc…I’ve heard these prayers before. But again, his was extremely mixed up and had no place in a prayer for those who lost their lives, especially a 9 yr old little girl. The man seemed to speak more about himself than anybody else. This was a memorial for those who left this world and it should have been much more spiritual than a self promoting circus that Mr. Carlos Gonzalez promoted. Today, because of Native American movies, fashion, and a whole spiritual fad that seems to be taking place in the US connected to Native Americans, it has become extremely fashionable to connect yourself to being some kind of spiritual Indian.
Will my words make some Mexican people angry? Yes. Do I care? No. I believe many Mexicans playing Indian are becoming a virus, infecting people with false information in Native ways. This is destroying our culture even more. It is not only Mexicans doing this, but others who also do this for self-promotion and financial gain. Do Mexicans have some form of Native blood within them? The answer is yes. But most of them know nothing about it and all of them grasp and hold onto the only tribe they know of and that is the Aztec. The 3 most famous nations in South America are the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incans. So when one asks a Mexican of their culture, they will usually grasp onto one of these, not understanding there are hundreds of other tribes in South American who historically were conquered by the Spanish and intermixed, creating what is known today as the Mexican.
But the Mexican culture itself is not an Indian culture, and especially not a Native American culture. Mexicans historically killed many Natives as there is a bad history there amongst them. Today it is so easy for people to bluntly say they are Indian or Native American because most people do not know any better and it is easy to get away with it.
The reason why I write this is because people like my father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on grew up during hard times because they were Indian, forced into boarding schools and living in extreme poverty because of who they were born into the world as. I write this in respect to people like them and others who have Native relatives who grew up in such harsh times upon reservations that were nothing more than prisons on reservations, forced into assimilation.
Carlos Gonzalez and others like him did not truly go thru what my relatives and other Natives have gone thru. It was not popular to be Native a long time ago. And I guarantee you the Carlos Gonzalez’s and other Mexicans out there would never have played Indian in the 19th century or even in the turn of the century. They would have stayed with their more dominant Mexican culture who frowned upon Natives. Be proud of who you are and wherever you may come from. But to the Carlos Gonzalez’s out there in the world, please think before you do such things.
The main difference with prayer would be that the Catholic side of him said
” I come to give you all a blessing”.
The Spiritually side of him would have said “Creator (God) please come and give a blessing to us all”.
Many thanks for the responses from trueblood1 and walkingfox.
What more can be said?
Not much.
What appeared to be child like and simplistic was/is more pure and complex than their minds/spirits could/can comprehend.
And even though the laws have changed in favor, the drive to understand and align/assimilate is continually skewed by conditional ignorance.
We did not assimilate. We acclimate.
We are still here.
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