Dreamer Prophets Of The Columbia Plateau

Seekers after wisdom have always been drawn to American Indian ritual and symbol. This history of two nineteenth-century Dreamer-Prophets, Smohalla and Skolaskin, will interest those who seek a better understanding of the traditional Native American commitment to Mother Earth, visionary experiences drawn from ceremony, and the promise of revitalization implicit in the Ghost Dance. To white observers, the Dreamers appeared to imitate Christianity by celebrating the sabbath and preaching a covenant with God, nonviolence, and life after death. But the Prophets also advocated adherence to traditional dress and subsistence patterns and to the spellbinding Washat dance. By engaging in this dance and by observing traditional life-ways, the Prophets claimed, the living Indians might bring their dead back to life and drive the whites from the earth. They themselves brought heaven to earth, they said, by “dying, going there, and returning,” in trances induced by the Washat drums. The Prophets’ sacred longhouses became rallying points for resistance to the United States government. As many as two thousand Indians along the Columbia River, from various tribes, followed the Dreamer religion. Although the Dreamers always opposed war, the active phase of the movement was brought to a close in 1889 when the United States Army incarcerated the younger Prophet Skolaskin at Alcatraz. Smohalla died of old age in 1894. Modern Dreamers of the Columbia plateau still celebrate the Feast of the New Foods in springtime as did their spiritual ancestors. This book contains rare modern photographs of their Washat dances. Readers of Indian history and religion will be fascinated by the descriptions of the Dreamer-Prophets’ unique personalities and their adjustments to physical handicaps. Neglected by scholars, their role in the important pan-Indian revitalization movement has awaited the detailed treatment given here by Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown.

The United States has long thought of itself as exceptional--a nation destined to lead the world into a bright and glorious future. These ideas go back to the Puritan belief that Massachusetts would be a "city on a hill," and in time that image came to define the United States and the American mentality. But what is at the root of these convictions? John Howard Smith's A Dream of the Judgment Day explores the origins of beliefs about the biblical end of the world as Americans have come to understand them, and how these beliefs led to a conception of the United States as an exceptional nation with a unique destiny to fulfill. However, these beliefs implicitly and explicitly excluded African Americans and American Indians because they didn't fit white Anglo-Saxon ideals. While these groups were influenced by these Christian ideas, their exclusion meant they had to craft their own versions of millenarian beliefs. Women and other marginalized groups also played a far larger role than usually acknowledged in this phenomenon, greatly influencing the developing notion of the United States as the "redeemer nation." Smith's comprehensive history of eschatological thought in early America encompasses traditional and non-traditional Christian beliefs in the end of the world. It reveals how millennialism and apocalypticism played a role in destructive and racist beliefs like "Manifest Destiny," while at the same time influencing the foundational idea of the United States as an "elect nation." Featuring a broadly diverse cast of historical figures, A Dream of the Judgment Day synthesizes more than forty years of scholarship into a compelling and challenging portrait of early America.

In this fascinating new collection, an all-star team of researchers explores lucid dreaming not only as consciousness during sleep but also as a powerful ability cultivated by artists, scientists, and shamans alike to achieve a variety of purposes and outcomes in the dream. The first set of its kind, Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep provides a comprehensive showcase of the theories, research, and direct experience that serve to illuminate how certain people can maintain conscious awareness while dreaming. The text is organized into two sections, covering science, psychology, and education; and religious traditions, creativity, and culture. Contributors to this two-volume work include top dream experts across the globe—scholars sharing knowledge gained from deep personal explorations and cutting-edge scientific investigations. Topics covered include the neuroscience of lucid dreaming, clinical uses of lucid dreaming in treating trauma, the secret history of lucid dreaming in English philosophy, and spiritual practices of lucid dreaming in Islam, Buddhism, and shamanic traditions. The work also addresses lucid dreaming in movies including The Matrix and literature such as the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien and explains how modern video gaming enhances lucidity. This set serves as an ideal text and reference work for school libraries and academic courses in anthropology, psychology, religious studies, and cognitive science as well as for graduate-level study in holistic education—an increasingly popular specialization.

Describes Nez Percâe culture and their friendly relations with whites; recounts the move to put them on reservations and their almost successful escape to Canada.

From the moment European settlers reached these shores, the American apocalypse began. But Native Americans did not vanish. Apocalypse did not fully destroy them, and it doesn't have to destroy us. Pandemics and war, social turmoil and corrupt governments, natural disasters and environmental collapse--it's hard not to watch the signs of the times and feel afraid. But we can journey through that fear to find hope. With the warnings of a prophet and the lively voice of a storyteller, Choctaw elder and author of Ladder to the Light Steven Charleston speaks to all who sense apocalyptic dread rising around and within. You'd be hard pressed to find an apocalypse more total than the one Native America has confronted for more than four hundred years. Yet Charleston's ancestors are a case study in the liberating and hopeful survival of a spiritual community. How did Indigenous communities achieve the miracle of their own survival and live to tell the tale? What strategies did America's Indigenous people rely on that may help us to endure an apocalypse--or perhaps even prevent one from happening? Charleston points to four Indigenous prophets who helped their people learn strategies for surviving catastrophe: Ganiodaiio of the Seneca, Tenskwatawa of the Shawnee, Smohalla of the Wanapams, and Wovoka of the Paiute. Through gestures such as turning the culture upside down, finding a fixed place on which to stand, listening to what the earth is saying, and dancing a ghostly vision into being, these prophets helped their people survive. Charleston looks, too, at the Hopi people of the American Southwest, whose sacred stories tell them they were created for a purpose. These ancestors' words reach across centuries to help us live through apocalypse today with courage and dignity.

In books such as Mystics and Messiahs, Hidden Gospels, and The Next Christendom, Philip Jenkins has established himself as a leading commentator on religion and society. Now, in Dream Catchers, Jenkins offers a brilliant account of the changing mainstream attitudes towards Native American spirituality, once seen as degraded spectacle, now hailed as New Age salvation. Jenkins charts this remarkable change by highlighting the complex history of white American attitudes towards Native religions, considering everything from the 19th-century American obsession with "Hebrew Indians" and Lost Tribes, to the early 20th-century cult of the Maya as bearers of the wisdom of ancient Atlantis. He looks at the popularity of the Carlos Castaneda books, the writings of Lynn Andrews and Frank Waters, and explores New Age paraphernalia including dream-catchers, crystals, medicine bags, and Native-themed Tarot cards. He also examines the controversial New Age appropriation of Native sacred places and notes that many "white indians" see mainstream society as religiously empty. An engrossing account of our changing attitudes towards Native spirituality, Dream Catchers offers a fascinating introduction to one of the more interesting aspects of contemporary American religion.

Partial summary: Includes information on the 1831 Flathead/Nez Perce delegation to St. Louis.