Traveling through the open windows of time

Since completing the PAC Tour Grand Canyon bicycle trip, I have reshaped the columns first posted on KeithWatkinsHistorian into a more complete travel narrative. It includes a new introduction and material that is not in the original postings. The new introduction and a link to the full essay follow. I hope that you enjoy the read. The Colorado Plateau is a high, dry, desolate land, with a scattered population that attracts vast numbers of sightseers and scientists year after year. The best known attraction, of course, is the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River—a 275-mile long breach in the earth, which from rim to river is more than 5,000 feet deep. From viewpoints along both rims, the canyon displays layer upon layer of rock—as many as forty discernable bands. Although there are many tones and hues, the dominant color in this iron-oxide world is red. Tourists revel in the rich tapestry of colors and shapes, but geologists exult in the record these layers give of the geological processes that created this plateau, its mountains, and rivers.

Two hundred seventy five miles east of Grand Canyon Village, by roads winding through the Navajo and Hopi Reservations, a second canyon also attracts sightseers and scientists. In comparison with its grander neighbor, Canyon de Chelly is a modest place. Instead of multiple layers of granite and sandstone, it features layers of human habitation, beginning with a hunter-gatherer culture, which anthropologists date from 2500 to 200 BCE.

Then come the Basketmaker culture, the Ancestral Puebloan, the Hopi, and the Navajo. From charred remains of campfires and dwellings, long preserved evidences of ancient agriculture and hunting, complex dwellings high on cliff walls, designs on rock walls, and the stories remembered by the people, a 4,000-year record of human life is on display for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

A phrase used by the National Park Service in a brochure describing Canyon de Chelly can accurately be applied to both of these remarkable gashes in the Colorado Plateau. They are “open windows” into the history of the people who have lived since ancient times and into the even more ancient land that has sustained them.

There was a time when the only way to travel through this land was by walking. When horses came with the Spanish conquistadors, transportation processes and many aspects of cultural interaction were transformed. With railroads and then automobiles ever-greater speed and ever-larger multitudes of visitors came to this high plateau. Some will declare, however, that the best way of all—faster and easier than on foot or horseback, slower and more satisfying than by train or car—is by bicycle. That’s what this essay describes: a bicycle journey through the open windows of time.

To read the rest of this travel narrative, click here:  Open Windows of Time.

Religion that holds things together

What can mainstream Americans, with our rapid-change culture and economic structure, learn from the Pueblo culture of New Mexico and Arizona? This is one of the questions that will occupy my mind as I bicycle through North America’s most enduring cultures that for a millennium or more have inhabited the high Colorado plateau of New Mexico and Arizona.

My reflections are focused by Ake Hultkrantz’ description of Zuni culture, which he describes as “one of the most interesting aboriginal cultures of North America.” He acknowledges the fame of Zuni art in pottery, silver, and turquoise jewelry, and also notes the lasting achievement in architecture and a “conservatism that has managed to retain both traditional and spiritual culture, and its beautiful ceremonialism.” He then writes:

“Basic to this cultural flowering have been the achievements of horticulture and, since Spanish days, sheepherding. Nowhere else in native North America has the tilling of soil been as intense as among the Pueblo Indians. Not only has this distinctive agricultural practice formed the basis of their economy and sedentary life-style, but it has also been an integral part of their religious beliefs and aesthetic expressions. Their success in keeping out white intruders has enabled them to preserve their ancient traditions intact” (89).

This portrait of a culture in which everything seems interconnected and complete has parallels among the people who have more recently occupied the United States. A similar portrait is sketched by Harvey Jacobs, who described a rural community in the hill country south of Indianapolis during the 1920s and 1930s. As I remember his story (forty years after reading his book), the economic base was small farms occupied by families—father, mother, and children—whose crops and livestock provided much of their food supply and sufficient cash to purchase most of their other necessities. There was a little town nearby, with stores, professionals, churches, and a school. By interurban train, that could go to the city. People understood their place in their society and seemed reasonably content to live according to the community’s norms.

Jacobs tells of a summer when his uncle came back home from his new life in New York City. One day as they sat on the porch, the uncle waved his arm over the panorama of field, forest, and village. He exclaimed that here everything was in balance, though they hardly realized it, and he wondered how long it could be retained in such a wonderfully intact and satisfying form.

Not long! World War II erupted, shattering the simple culture of communities such as the one that had nurtured Jacobs and countless other people, including my own Watkins ancestors in another Indiana village a few miles to the west. The young men went to the war and came back changed in fundamental ways. The G.I. Bill opened up new possibilities. Horse-powered transportation and machinery were replaced by vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. Village schools were consolidated, village business died out, and the theological heart of village churches was transformed by modernist theology.

Pueblo culture and the village life described by Jacobs are examples of traditional society, which is the way that most people of the world have lived until recent generations in the West. Everything has its place and religion provides the interpretive structure that explains reality, validates its major elements, and shapes people to live contentedly with its supporting (confining?) systems.

Whereas Pueblo culture has been able to hold things together, partly because the communities have remained closed, American society has broken apart.

People were unwilling to stay in their place. Many found that the central stories of their faith failed to explain the world and their experiences within it. New narratives and rituals with widely differing social systems came into the picture. Rather than being the unifying element, religion became a major source of division between the communities of America.

Now that the old harmony, with simple folk Protestantism as its religious binder, has disappeared, is our nation doomed to a continued process of breaking apart into more and more fissiparous sub-cultures? Or is a new harmony emerging, a harmony greater than the old traditionalism because it draws together entities so greatly different from one another?

If a new American harmony is emerging, how does religion enter in? Will a new kind of inter-faith ecumenism emerge that is supple enough to hold evangelical Christians, traditional Muslims, meditative Buddhists, free-thinking Unitarians, traditional Catholics, and progressive Protestants together? Or will a new pattern for human society emerge, with a philosophical binder rather than one that is religious? Most important, will it teach everyone to realize that personal happiness and social well-being are inextricably inter-twined?

As I bicycle through Pueblo country, this is what I’ll be thinking about.

Native American religion: a persistent way of life

For two weeks in late September I will be bicycling through America’s desert plateau country—Albuquerque to the Grand Canyon, through Monument Valley, along the rim of Canyon de Chelly, and back to Albuquerque—1,000 miles through some of our country’s most amazing terrain.

One of the most interesting aspects of this journey is that it travels through long-established, highly resistant, and internally coherent Native American communities. Evidence points to continuous occupation of the Hopi pueblo of Oraibi since 1100 B.C.E. (a century before King David occupied Jerusalem), and the Zuni pueblo may be even older. Even leisurely journeys through this country offer only limited opportunities to learn first hand about the religious culture that helps to sustain these enduring communities. Since I will be doing a rigorous tour sponsored by PacTour with long days in the saddle and a tight schedule, it will be even more difficult to learn first hand. The trip does encourage me to renew my reading about Native American religion—a subject interesting in its own right and useful because it helps me understand my own Christian faith a little better.

Ake Hultkrantz (1920-2006), a Swedish scholar and “renowned expert on Native North American Religions,” has provided an overview of this complex subject. Because I read this slender book (144 pages) a long time ago, it has been necessary to read it a second time, adding a new set of underlinings to those I made in red ink twenty years ago.

In his introduction Hultkrantz offers several generalizations that help us understand dynamic factors in all religions, the ancient ones of North America and the contemporary Christianity with its equally ancient origins in the desert lands east of the Mediterranean Sea. The sacred authority of religions lies in an ancient past but all religions are affected by new experiences of the sacred by people who are devoted to the old stories and ideas. “The balance between faithfulness to tradition and openness to new experience,” Hultkrantz observes, “is what constitutes the religious life” (15).

What may be the most important structural difference between the ancient religions of North America and those with roots in the Middle East is that those of the old world had founders and have been handed down as literary traditions, whereas those of the new world “were handed down by tribes as oral traditions.” The result is that they “have not been so dogmatically bound by what was handed down from the past” and are “quite charismatic and innovative, modifying and even replacing older traditions with new revelations. Probably no other cultures have given visions such importance in daily religious life as those of native North America” (16).

While acknowledging the widespread variation among these religions, Hultkrantz claims that “four prominent features in North American Indian religions are a similar worldview, a shared notion of cosmic harmony, emphasis on experiencing directly powers and visions, and a common view of the cycle of life and death.” He then summarizes these elements in a concise paragraph:

“North American Indians have worldviews that in many respects are remarkably similar, particularly in the way they perceive the interrelationship of humans and animals. Many North American Indians also share a notion of cosmic harmony, in which humans, animals, plants, all of nature, and even supernatural figures cooperate to bring about a balanced and harmonious universe.

“North American Indian traditions emphasize a direct experience of spiritual power through dreams and visions; as we have already seen, the sacredness and prestige of these striking revelations often results in the modification of previous traditional elements. Native Americans have a common view of time as a recurring cycle; they are interested mainly in how this cycle affects people in this life and have only a vague notion of another existence after death” (20-21).

Hultkrantz makes one more distinction that is important in understanding Native American religion. Noting the close relationship between religiously shaped culture and economic system that sustains physical culture, he identifies “two kinds of religious orientation in Native American traditions, a hunting pattern and a horticultural pattern” (38). The major part of the book is then devoted to a description of these two types. He uses the Wind River Shoshoni (among whom he had done extensive field research) as an example of the hunting pattern. My interest in this chapter rests, in part, because an Episcopal mission on this reservation served as the model for the Yakama Christian Mission founded in 1921. (I called attention to my book on the mission to the people of the Yakama Nation in a column earlier this summer.)

Hultkrantz’s illustration of the agricultural pattern is the religion of the Zuni, which brings me back to the focus of this column. My forthcoming Grand Canyon Tour will take me through the corner of the ancient homeland of the people who “are famous for having constructed the most complex ritual organization of aboriginal North America” (87). That’s where I will take up the topic next time. While I’m at it, I expect to bring feminist theologian Dorothee Soelle into the conversation, for she too discusses how religion is connected to the economic and political systems in which people live.