* God Is Red (and White and Red and . . .)

As a volunteer for NASCA (the Native American Spiritual & Culture Awareness group), at NSP (the Nebraska State Prison), I attended a fine get-together last TU night, of a buffalo-stew supper & speech-making. But I was troubled when another volunteer gave a talk himself, a wasicu who claimed to have had a vision of Leonard Crow Dog's father at age 6(?), and claimed that Leonard himself later told him that, yes, that was his father. He was embarrassingly apologetic (& understandably so) thruout his speech about how he wasn't trying to "over" on another people's religion, and that he still didn't "know much" about Lakota ceremonialism per se. And yet he went on to recount his own hanblecia (vision quest) from a few years ago, spoke cryptically of the heyoka, and generally put himself forward as an earnest initiate into Lakota "religion." (An awful word, at last, in this context.) I'm still not sure what to think of the fellow. He may well be an earnest & wonderful & enlightened dude. But in my teaching of NatAmer lit, etc., I've come across so many Indian wanna-be's & "Plastic Indian Medicine Men" that my initial response HAD to be negative, or at least suspicious. . . . But then, what about MY motives for this negativity—jealousy? As someone w/ Indian blood whose "red-skinned" mother herself had been raised an "apple," both of us less "close" to Rez ceremonialism than this guy? As always, such issues transcend any simple binary of "Red" & "White." Well, he ended with a fairly eloquent appeal to "us" Natives to be true to our traditional religious ways. But I suddenly wanted to ask him whether he had been true to his. Or wasn't that tradition (i.e., Christianity) good enough for him? Or why couldn't any Indian there that night have had a vision of, say, St. Francis, circa age 6, and have left his hopeless Hopi ways for good?!