Blackbear

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FROM: INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY NEWSPAPER

_http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096411609_
(http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096411609)

Native American Church deserves its sacrament

(javascript:PrintWindow();) Posted: September 22, 2005 by: _Staff Reports_
(http://www.indiancountry.com/author.cfm?id=263) / Indian Country Today
The continuity of practices and constructs of religious service -
ceremonies - by American Indian people is remarkable. No lifeway or religion, of
course, no matter how traditional, can claim to be practiced exactly as it was
one or two or three hundred or a thousand years ago, in the context of tribal
culture and history. Nevertheless, despite adaptations and change, many
Native peoples sustain practices and ceremonies around various traditions that
directly emerge from the long-standing history of tribal cross-culturalization
and ritual growth in the Americas.

Thus the widespread and very adaptive way of worship called the ''peyote
way,'' or the Native American Church of North America, is an amalgam of various
traditions that came north and west and east over the Native geography; yet
it has become a deeply Indian religious way, spanning nearly two centuries in
its journey north from its primordial tribal base among the Huichols of
present-day Mexico. Today, the chapters of the peyote church in North America
encompass tens of thousands of Indian adherents and practitioners.

These days, the Native American Church is in danger of being hurt by the
constant number of cases in criminal drug situations where people claim American
Indian status to use or transact peyote - which is a controlled substance,
according to federal law.

We extend our acknowledgement to The Washington Post for its recent fine
piece on the subject (Sylvia Moreno: ''A Rare and Unusual Harvest,'' Sept. 18).
Moreno captured the dilemma of a genuine Native religious practice caught up
in the cross hairs of drug war operations and the confusion of countless new
''religions'' of the past few decades, each challenging the right of the
more established traditions to their own exemptions and unique status.

Wrote Moreno: ''Though not considered addictive, peyote is included on the
Drug Enforcement Administration's list of Schedule I controlled substances
along with heroin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), marijuana and methaqualone.
Although the DEA acknowledges the importance of the hallucinogenic cactus to
the religious rites of Native American peyote users, the agency says the
drug has a high potential for abuse and has no accepted medicinal purpose in the
United States.''

In one instance, a James ''Flaming Eagle'' Mooney, ''self-described medicine
man,'' a non-Indian by law, has monkey-wrenched the Utah Supreme Court into
backing his 1997-vintage religion, apparently designed to deliver peyote to
his followers. In another case, a Brazilian-based vegetable spiritist group,
seeking to import an Amazonian ayahuasca drink, cited the Native American
Church exemptions from the federal drug designation, thereby dragging the
long-fought-for understanding of the peyote church into a self-serving court battle
for the new syncretic religion at the U.S. Supreme Court.

These court cases are as unfortunate as they are dangerous.

We would offer this much:

The peyote church - still too easily misunderstood among many people - is a
rich and highly humanistic approach to family life and culture, ritualized
with great poise and respect, around the ingestion of the peyote cactus
(lophophora williamsii). Usually organized as an all-night ceremony and often held
in a Plains tipi, the prayer service includes intricate song cycles and
individual songs by men and sometimes also by women singers, who hold what are
considered a sacred staff and rattle and are accompanied by the ''tied-up''
peyote water drum.

The adaptive peyote sacrament is well-traveled. From its highly
sophisticated origins in the cosmology of the Huichols of old Mexico, it found its way
north through Texas and the Southwestern tribes, often through the life
experience of prominent tribal leaders (notably Comanche Chief Quanah Parker).
Yaquis, Apaches, Kiowas and others passed it north, and it became an embedded
backbone of reservation revival of Indian identity and culture through the period
of restricted reservation residence. Seeking acceptable and workable ways of
reinforcing tribal and family honorings with humble and sincere prayer, the
solemn and yet very soothing peyote ceremony reinforced an Indian lifeway
that can support family, honor children and elders, discourage or ban alcohol
and concentrate prayer on behalf of the afflicted.

The use of peyote by American Indian peoples, dated from some 10,000 years
ago, diffused quickly north once railroads and other transportation allowed
it. Oklahoma tribes refined its reception among northern Indians, from where it
has been taken up in a wide arch of reservations. Love and filial affection
- plus the capacity to better contemplate life's situations - are often the
central identifiers of the peyote, which reportedly has a quality for opening
the mind and heart, rather than it being considered simply a
''hallucinogen'' that induces weird visions. This is one misconception, in fact, that
perhaps misrepresents the actual experience of practitioners.

As with all churches that grow within the context of other traditions, the
Native American Church has had its share of controversies. Christian
organizations have charged the church with the use of a ''drug.'' The peyote sacrament
itself is stigmatized with the designation of being a ''hallucinogenic''
drug. Legalization of its use by Native tribal peoples was a hard-won and
often-challenged right.

The Native American Church was incorporated in 1918 and has struggled to
sustain public respect in the face of many ill-informed attacks. It has
survived and thrived because of overwhelming evidence of the consistent use of
peyote ritual today in many of the same ceremonial elements that were identified
in the early chronicles. This is an old religion, as peyote historian Gary
Fikes wrote: ''Sacramental smoking of tobacco wrapped in corn husks, the staff
of authority, feather fans, gourd rattles, incense, a central fireplace, and
emphasis on the four cardinal directions all have their parallels in Mexican
peyote rituals that continue today, [while other] features of Mexican peyote
rituals - outdoor dancing and elaborate ritual pilgrimages to collect - have
disappeared or were diluted as peyote meetings moved north into the Plains.''

Evidence of peyote practice constituting a social good by helping stabilize
families and communities is abundant among peyote congregations or chapters.
With excellent antidotal qualities to alcohol (the addictive drug often used
in Christian ceremony), the spiritual use of peyote has been presented in
court as a proven healing component in battling alcoholism. Hearings in Congress
and during various court cases have generally supported the Native American
Church as a bona fide Indian religion, to be respected and accepted.

The all-night peyote ritual constitutes one of the most Indian-defined
cross-cultural belief practices, even as it has incorporated elements from more
tribally-specific ceremonial cycles, as well as certain elements of
Christianity. Thus one of two types of ''fireplaces'' is usually built - the Half-Moon
Fireplace, which is more traditionally based, and the Cross-Fire Fireplace,
which uses the Bible instead of tobacco as the main prayer. The Christian
approach sometimes grates with the tobacco and four directions prayer base,
although peyotists are remarkably tolerant people. Then, too, the Christian
approach also has created wider understanding by non-Indian society. Thus a letter
from Pope John II praising the religious sincerity and urging the legal right
of the Native American Church of South Dakota to its sacred medicine
provides strong credentials in religious circles.

While the structure of the peyote ceremony is fairly constant, a particular
''road man'' or ceremony leader will incorporate the unique approach of each
chapter or congregation or prayer circle. There is diversity in the
similarity of vision and in any given language and with whatever emphasis of Indian
belief involved, the Native American Church of North America deserves
acknowledgement and respect as an authentic religion of Indian peoples of North
America.

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Don't worry that it's not good enough for anyone else to hear... just sing, sing a song.