Gyasi Ross: A modest proposal for those hippies and new agers

Thursday, July 28, 2011  

"It seems that lots of Indians are very upset about James Arthur Ray and the actions that led to the manslaughter charges against him. They don’t like his “Spiritual Warrior” training and think that it’s offensive (and presumably dangerous too).

Lot of talk about “cultural appropriation” and whatnot. Heavy stuff. Especially when the appropriation led to the death of three people; those deaths were mainly due to James Arthur Ray having really no clue how to perform a sweat lodge in an appropriate manner. After all, cultural appropriation is a big deal to Native people. I mean, if we do not have our spiritual ceremonies and cultural practices, what do we have?

Still, there’s another contingent of Indian people who say, “You know what? Dang, I wish more crazy western people would host these lethal sweat lodges. On second thought, is it possible that we went about things the wrong way when we found these hairy, pale people? Maybe when they got off those big boats, and we realized that they weren’t quite as goofy and harmless as we originally thought, maybe we shouldn’t have shot arrows and counted coup. Perhaps we should have considered just partially teaching them some of our religious ceremonies and let them knock themselves off. Maybe we shoulda taught them the wrong way to do our ceremonies, like James Arthur Ray did!”

It was effective for him, no?

Those folks might say, “I mean, three fewer western folks hippie-dancing at pow-wows? Hell, that doesn’t sound like much. Three million fewer western folks? NOW we’re cooking with fire! We might get someplace now.”"

Get the Story:
Gyasi Ross: A Modest Proposal on Hippie Sweat Lodges (Indian Country Today 7/27)