Bear Heart

I guess a short description will have to do. This book is a collection of essays by Bear Heart, a Native healer, and his friends. I have only a few Native books—two literature type books, a novel (The Plague of Doves) and a folklore book (Lenape), but this book is more religious. It’s not really unmixed Native but an ecumenical book; I learned a bit about how the Native Americans have been able to create their own church. It’s not a history or sociology type book, but a spiritual/psychological one; he talks about medicine a lot (Western and indigenous). He’s very universalist. I guess a detractor might say he’s a soft, likable Indian—he admires Lincoln, for example—but as much as we don’t deserve someone like Bear Heart I think it’s fair to say he’s taking care of himself too. It’s sad how much the old Native ways have declined due to whites and racism and also the modern world and the dismissal of the past, but there are indigenous people still in the new world, too.

…. So this book is Native ecumenism, for me, which is different from simply being both Native and Christian. It’s possible to be Native, and authentically so or however you want to say it, without being consciously, explicitly ecumenism-like, you know. Some Native people are simply Christian people who practice faith in Jesus and simple living, and also come from diverse Indigenous backgrounds, you know. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But since in this book we have a guy who’s both Christian and explicitly talking about Native American Christian ways, and being a specifically Creek Nation Christian as an explicitly central thing, it’s clearly Native ecumenism and not the different path of something more of a generalist, you know.… (mehr)