Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality [Hardcover]

Philip Jenkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 21, 2004

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.
While early Americans had nothing but contempt for Indian religions, deploring them as loathsome devil worship and snake dancing, white Americans today respect and admire Native spirituality. In this book, Jenkins charts this remarkable change, highlighting the complex history of white American attitudes towards Native religions from colonial times to the present. Jenkins ranges widely, 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, to films like Pocahontas and Dances With Wolves. He looks at the popularity of the Carlos Castaneda books, the writings of Lynn Andrews, and the influential works of Frank Waters, and he explores the New Age paraphernalia found in places like Sedona, Arizona, including dream-catchers, crystals, medicine bags, and Native-themed Tarot cards. Jenkins examines the controversial New Age appropriation of Native sacred places; notes that many "white Indians" see mainstream society as religiously empty; and asks why a government founded on religious freedom tried to eradicate native religions in the last century--and what this says about how we define religion.
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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Jenkins (The Next Christendom; Mystics and Messiahs), a professor of history and religious studies at Penn State, here trains his keen eye on the appropriation of Native American spirituality by those in the white mainstream. What do liberal white Protestants gain from sitting in sweat lodges, visiting shamans and taking pilgrimages to New Age "hot spots" like Sedona, Ariz.? Plenty, says Jenkins, who posits that interest in Native spirituality peaks when white Americans are dissatisfied with one or more elements of mainstream society. Refreshingly, he doesn't just trace this disenchantment to the 1960s—that easy target of a decade isn't even addressed until 150 pages into the book—but offers a sweeping overview of American religious history to prove his point. In particular, Jenkins sees the early 20th century as a crucial period of transformation; whereas Victorians were likely to dismiss Native American belief and ritual as godless superstition, the interwar years saw more Americans turning toward indigenous practices and products, with the rise of "native tourism" and the proliferation of crafts (such as the jewelry worn by Grace Coolidge at her husband's 1925 presidential inauguration). Although Jenkins is critical of whites' appropriations of Native American culture and belief, and particularly of their tendency to repackage New Age ideas with a veneer of indigenous authority, his tone is never unfair; he does a masterful job of setting such uses-cum-exploitations in historical context. Anyone wishing to understand the ongoing romanticization of Native American spirituality should read this book.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The prolific Jenkins follows the attention-grabbing, cogent prognostication of The Next Christendom (2001) and the careful though controversial analysis of The New Anti-Catholicism [BKL Ap 1 03] with a third magnetically absorbing book, a historical overview of white American attitudes toward Native American religions. Early white conceptions of Native religion generally ranged from devil worship to mere paganism, from which Indians had to be won to Christ, but by the time white military victory was nearly complete, new respect for Native religion had arisen among white intellectuals, especially those also attracted to Buddhism and Hinduism. The sacred dances and ancient structures of the tribes of the Southwest inspired the first great wave of white enthusiasm for native religion, to be largely supplanted by the practices of Plains Indians during later, twentieth-century surges of interest. Since the 1980s, those Indians newly empowered by legal changes in status and by wealth from the development of Indian-owned gambling businesses have reacted against white entrepreneurial expropriation of Indian religions. Jenkins fills in the major details of the last two centuries of deep white interest in Native religion with his customary thoroughness, and he scrupulously avoids judgments about the validity as well as the theological truth of the many practices and cults he sketches. He relays fascinating history with scholarly care and in prose as clear as it is precise. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First Edition edition (September 21, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195161157
• ISBN-13: 978-0195161151
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,698,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Philip Jenkins is the author of The Lost History of Christianity and has a joint appointment as the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of the Humanities in history and religious studies at Penn State University and as Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. He has published articles and op-ed pieces in The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe and has been a guest on top national radio shows across the country.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How White Culture has variously used Native Spirituality, January 13, 2005

By 

Craig Matteson (Saline, MI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality (Hardcover)

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars sheds light on a largely unknown area of history, November 10, 2006

By 

Stephen C. Getman (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality (Paperback)

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.

1 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Disappointment, July 30, 2009

By 

Gregory Simkins "Christian Computer Guy" (Pittsburgh, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality (Hardcover)

I was very disappointed with this book. I expected better as I had greatly enjoyed Jenkins' book The Lost History of Christianity. This previous work documented the depressing story of the extermination of Eastern Christianity, primarily by Moslems, but it presented a history of which I was mostly unaware and found quite interesting. At least this earlier book was sympathetic to Christianity.

Dreamcatchers covers a more recent history and one closer to home. It divides American history into two periods: Prior to 1890 when white settlers were bent on eradicating the Native American population along with their pagan religious practices and after 1890 when whites felt sufficiently secure to study, preserve and appreciate the religious practices of Native Americans. Jenkins creates a caricature of the former period, pretty much ignoring the friendships established by the Quakers, Moravians and others with the native population and their sensitive documentation of Indian life and sincere attempts to accommodate their culture into the more highly structured European Christian culture. In the latter period, Jenkins goes beyond the valuable efforts to document and preserve the memory of the Native American culture and fawns over the high value of these practices. Jenkins seems to repeat these two themes repeatedly like a mantra until after 78 pages, I wearied of continuing and set the book down. I gave up hope of finding something helpful to me.

I give the book 2 stars instead of 1 because it does present a point of view that I had not previously considered, yet I cannot give it 3 stars because he fails to convince me of the validity of this point of view.