SEEING WITH A NATIVE EYE: Essays on Native American Religion

This assemblage of mostly informal lectures, giver at UC Santa Barbara, addresses the problems and promise in the burgeoning interest in native American religions. Their vogue, all here agree, stems both from native Americans' renewed pride in their traditions and from disenchanted Anglos' search for alternatives to technocracy. Both groups, Joseph Epes Brown says, are seeking lost heritages in order to recover values which express human nature authentically, and the native Americans have the advantage that their roots are in this land. Several talks explore the distinctive character of the native American world view--its circular, non-linear, sense of space and time; reverence for the land; feeling for the interrelatedness of all life--which it takes considerable adjustment for outsiders simply to perceive. Unfortunately, few pieces break new ground: Brown and Momaday, the big hames, give perfunctory rehashes of old material. Ake Hultkranz does argue persuasively the academic importance of studying native American traditions and sets an agenda for future work; and two younger scholars offer some original ideas--Sam Gill on the relativity of ritual symbols and Richard Comstock on the myths that have shaped the Euro-american view of ""Indians."" An easy introduction to the theme, but not a collection of much consequence.