Last summer, a Navajo student approached me after class to get an absence excused. She had to run back down to the reservation in Arizona, she explained, for some sort of emergency cleansing ritual for a cousin, of which the entire extended family needed to be present. The cousin had been haunted by dark dreams of late, but the kicker was when a snake slithered by her cousin one day and whipped her ankle with its tail--a super-bad omen, all the more ominous in its physicality. "In Navajo religion, evil is, like, very literally, physically real," she explained--and hence only a very physical ceremony would cleanse her.
The student herself implied that, having lived most her life in Salt Lake City, she didn't totally buy into these rituals, that this was more of a family-duty sort of thing...but she also implied that she didn't totally disbelieve it, either.
Anyways, I excused the absence, but it remained on my mind, especially when I took a Native American Readings course this Fall semester. The moment I saw that class listed, I knew I needed to take it--here I am an aspiring Post-Colonialist, looking abroad at Ireland and Latin-America and India et al, but here was regular Colonialism, right here in my own nation! Momaday, Silko, Welch, McNickle, Harjo, Ortiz, Erdrich--these are writers from the Reservations grappling with Colonialism in the present, in real time, in my own backyard, where there's nothing "Post" about it, and it behooves me to pay more attention to that.
But as the class progressed, my interests progressed from the academic to the personal. My religious faith, you see, is peculiarly interested in Native Americans, for the Book of Mormon claims to provide at least a partial explanation for their origins; specifically, it purports them to be the decedents of diasporic Israelis from the ancient Babylonian invasion, brought to pre-Columbian America by the hand of God--that is, Mormons consider the Native Americans to be children of Prophets.
Hence, the aforementioned physicality of Native American religious experience deeply intrigues me, because of how literally physical Mormonism often is. For example, we take James 5:14 quite literally: when we go in for healings, we place a small daub of real, literal olive oil on the subject's head before proceeding with the blessing.
We've been mocked for wearing ceremonial undergarments ("magic underwear" is a derogatory term, by the way), as well as for worshipping a literal, anthropomorphic God. But then, much like Native Americans, having a figurative, abstract, distant God, one that is separate from this physical, tangible world, one that doesn't touch our skin or interact with our senses, bores us and doesn't make sense to us.
More examples: just before Joseph Smith had his first vision of God and Christ "in a pillar of light...above the brightness of the sun," he described being attacked by Satan thusly: "I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being." For both Joseph Smith and the Navajo, evil is something literal, physical, tangible, real, something that can touch us and harm us physically. But then, in both traditions, good is also something physical, tangible, real--and hence in Mormonism, God is a literal, physical, exalted man who demonstrates our own potential.
From the poetry of Joy Harjo, I better understand the Native Americans belief in the thin permeability between this world and the next, in the multiplicity of worlds (not just possible worlds, but actual worlds), in the realness of spiritual impressions, in visions and dreams. All these are also core parts of LDS doctrine that I fear I have not taken seriously enough.
Perhaps most significantly, for both Native Americans and Mormonism, salvation isn't just individual (as in Protestantism), but communal. It didn't surprise me when that Navajo student told me her entire family needed to be at that cleansing ritual--for we are not saved individually, but with and through our families. "He shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the children to the fathers," reads the only scripture to appear in all four volumes of the LDS canon, "lest I come and smite the earth with a curse." Native American thought is the only other place I've encountered thus far that places such an emphasis on redemption through connection with one's family and ancestors.
For in Native American thought, our ancestors aren't just in our genes or "cultural heritage" or whatever, but literally there. N. Scott Momady writes, "memory is in the blood," and that quite literally. I think of how anytime I've displayed a sardonic sense of humor, my Dad has said I sound just like his Dad--a man who passed away while I was still in the womb; or how Victor Villanueva in Bootstraps hears his son who's never lived in his native Puerto Rico nor learned Spanish, call his toes "fingers of my feet"--dedos de pie, obeying the Spanish syntax of his ancestors. Our ancestors may be more literally with us than we realize.
Simply put, this class in Native American readings has altered my own relationship with my own faith, with my ancestors, with myself, causing me to take more seriously things I hadn't before but probably should. It's caused me to quit keeping the divine at arm's length, and to see it more, unironically, sincerely, in all that surrounds me.
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