Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality

By Philip Jenkins

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195189108
• ISBN13: 9780195189100
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.4" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

sheds light on a largely unknown area of history

Jenkins book is a journalistic-style account of the history of a particular type of cultural appropriation: the importation of American Indian spirituality, either in large chunks or tiny fragments, into mainstream white spiritual practices. The first part of the book is devoted to the background history of Euro-American attitudes toward Native spirituality, from the 16th through the 20th centuries. There are many "aha!" moments here, as Jenkins skillfully connects the many fascinating facts and stories from these centuries into a remarkably coherent narrative. The latter part of the book explores late-20th/early 21st century white beliefs and practices that incorporate Native symbols and ideas. It also details the industry that has grown up to feed the hunger for "authentic" spiritual products and experiences with a Native inflection. Jenkins is clear that his book is about the images of Native Americans and their religions as imagined by the white mainstream. You will find very few Indian voices in this account and even fewer references to actual religious beliefs and practices of Indian people. There are good books by anthropologists and others that fill that niche. What Jenkins provides is something rather new -- a history and analysis of a colonial and post-colonial cultural appropriation that seems actually to be sincerely meaningful to the appropriators. Jenkins doesn't hide his discomfort with these uses and misuses of "stolen" spirituality, and he debunks a few cherished new-age myths along the way, but he ultimately presents a balanced and subtle account of a complex phenomenon.

How White Culture has variously used Native Spirituality

This is one fascinating book. Every now and again I run across a book that takes me off in a direction I had not even suspected would be worth examining. Heck, this is a book I could not have even imagined. It is such a treat to be surprised and delighted. In "Dream Catchers", Philip Jenkins guides us through the story of how the Native American (Indian?) culture has been variously (mis)interpreted, (mis)used, and (mis)adapted over the centuries. It is essential to remember that this is NOT a book about the religion or spiritual beliefs of Native Americans. In some ways this seems strange because as I read it I had to keep reorienting myself to this fact. As I read about how White Culture found new ways to use Native American symbols as a label for issues in its own culture, I wanted to learn more about what the actual beliefs of the various North American Native cultures were. This is a topic for study in many other books (it would require a whole library of books and a lifetime of study to really grasp them in a meaningful way, I suppose). Mr. Jenkins takes us on a lively tour through time and through changing culture and purpose. While I cannot do an adequate job of summarizing the book here, and I really want you to enjoy the surprising ride on your own, I can say that there really are three broad periods: 1) Rejection: The Indian as pagan, lost, benighted and in great need of Christianization, 2) Tolerance and Transition: the Period after the Indian Wars and particularly after WWI when Christianity and Western Culture had a great crisis of meaning. There was a huge turning to Indian culture as if it were a monolithic thing. White writers wrote supposed guides to this Spiritual "system" and ended up writing about their own beliefs as much as any insights they had to Native American spiritual systems, and 3) Acceptance: the Sixties and New Age creation of all kinds of spiritual paths that used (and almost always misused) native totems, symbols, and words and incorporated White Culture concerns with matters such as the Environment and Feminism, all the way through to UFOs and Magick (sic). This really is a most interesting book. I was exposed to so much I did not know that I honestly did not suspect that reading this book would be such a satisfying and enlightening experience. I urge you to take the time to read this book. You will learn more about American Culture as it exists today from this one book than from a whole shelf full of less competent books. Highly recommended.