Back when I still taught in Salt Lake, a Navajo student approached me after class one day to get an absence excused. She’d had to run down to the reservation in Arizona over the weekend, she explained, for some sort of emergency cleansing ritual on behalf of a cousin, for which the entire extended family needed to be present. Her cousin, she explained, had been haunted by dark dreams of late—a menacing enough portent on its own, but one that became horribly real when an actual snake slithered by the cousin in question one day and whipped her ankle with its tail—a “super-bad omen” as she described it, all the more ominous in its physicality. “In Navajo religion, evil is, like, very literally, physically real,” she explained quickly—and hence only a very physical ceremony would heal and cleanse her.
The student herself implied that, having lived most her life in Salt Lake (describing herself as more “city” than “rez”), she didn’t totally buy into these rituals, that this was more of a family-duty/obligation sort of thing…but she also (almost more for her own sake than mine), kind of implied that she didn’t totally disbelieve it all, either.
Anyways, I of course excused the absence, but it remained on my mind, especially when I ended up taking a Native American Readings course the following Fall. The moment I saw that class listed, I knew I needed to take it: there I was an aspiring Post-Colonialist, but here was regular Colonialism, right here in my own nation! N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, James Welch, D’Arcy McNickle, Louis Erdrich—these were writers from the Reservations grappling with Colonialism in the present, in real time, in my own country and backyard, where there’s nothing “Post” about it, and it behooved me to pay more attention.
But even beyond the professional appeal, that class also impacted me on a personal level. My religious upbringing is, of course, peculiarly interested in Native Americans: the Book of Mormon, after all, claims to be the record of a lost colony of diasporic Israelis scattered by the Babylonian conquest, guided to pre-Columbian America by the hand of God—that is, the Book of Mormon considers the Native Americans to be children of Prophets. This was the logic that undergirded the idealism—and the colonialism—of the highly-fraught Indian placement program of the Spencer W. Kimball years. Indeed, for years the McConkie-penned Introduction claimed the Book of Mormon to be a record of the “principal ancestors of the Native Americans,” until the growing corpus of DNA evidence made that adjective “principal” untenable. (Though it should also be noted that in 1952’s The World of the Jaredites, a year before Watson and Crick discovered DNA themselves, Hugh Nibley argued that the vast majority of Native Americans were of Asiatic origin, decades before the geneticists drew a similar conclusion themselves—which fact has not been sufficiently addressed by either the critics or the apologists in my opinion, though that must remain the topic of a different day).
Yet even tabling genetics and apologetics for now, it is the apparent physicality of Native American religious experience that has its strongest intersections with LDS theology. For example, in our Priesthood blessings of health, we place a daub of real, actual olive oil (taking James 5:14 quite literally) upon the head of the sick and the afflicted, and do not consider the blessing fully efficacious without it; we daily don real, physical undergarments—considering them both symbolically and literally endowed with divine power—which we first receive in real, physical Temples that sit upon prime real estate (here there be no Augustinian “Invisible Church” or “temple of the heart”), through repetitious religious rites that involve highly physical ceremonial dress, prayer circles, signs, tokens, and ritualized reenactments; God Almighty in this theology does not exist outside of all space and time but firmly within it, dwelling on a planet in orbit around a specific star; and perhaps most controversially, LDS doctrine casually rejects 1,700-odd years of Trinitarianism to insist upon a physical, anthropocentric deity—not Gods who “neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell” (as Talmage and LeGrand Richards sneered once upon a time), but a real, actual human being. “As man is now God once was/as God is now man may become” became our couplet, concretizing a celestial lineage with our Father Who Art In Heaven as literal as it was spiritual. “Not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal”, reads our Doctrine and Covenants, “for my commandments are spiritual; they are not natural nor temporal, neither carnal nor sensual”, which has had the paradoxical effect of rendering the carnal and sensual spiritual.
More to the point: just before Joseph Smith’s First Vision of an embodied Father and Son “in a pillar of light…above the brightness of the sun,” he describes in his 1838 account of being attacked by Satan thusly: “I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being.” That is, evil for Joseph Smith, as it also was for that Native American student, is something literal, physical, tangible, real, something that can touch us and harm us physically. “Of course it is,” said my Native American professor, as I recounted my anecdote of the Navajo student to her after class one day, “I actually prefer the thought of evil as physically real. It gives me something tangible I can resist! Don’t you think?”
The physicality of evil—and thus the need to physically resist it—becomes a recurrent theme in much of 20th century Native American literature. In Louis Edrich’s 2012 novel The Round House, the antagonist Linden Lark is not only a white-supremacist and murderous rapist, but the personification of the “windigoo”, a demon from Ojibwe folklore that devours all that it touches. But it is here important to emphasize that the windigoo is not merely a metaphorical representation of greed, gluttony, and famine, but a literal, physical spirit that can possess any human body that welcomes it. A similar situation appears in N. Scott Momoday’s Pulitzer-Prize winning 1968 novel House Made of Dawn, featuring as it does early on a murder of an albino man by the Native protagonist, Abel— although, as the text itself is at pains to point out, the English word “murder” does not come close to capturing the event that occurs here. Says a priest commenting on the act, “We are dealing with a psychology about which we know very little…I believe that this man was moved to do what he did by an act of the imagination so compelling as to be inconceivable to us.” Even the descriptions of the white man that Abel kills are similarly monstrous: “Now and then the white man laughed, and each time it carried too high on the scale and ended in a strange, inhuman cry—as of pain.” There is something inhuman about this creature, an apparition described with similar vocabulary to Erdrich’s wiindigoo, drawing upon a pain as profound as Linden’s; consequently, it is something that must be sacrificed to arrest the further spread of violence.
Likewise, Leslie Marmon Silko presents us with a similar tale in her famed 1981 collection Storyteller, in which two young Native men are targeted and harassed by a racist highway patrolman. The sinister nature of the cop is described by the story’s protagonist, Tony, as he and his friend Leon are forced to exit their vehicle by the Officer late one night: “It was like the time when I was very little and my parents warned me not to look into the masked dancer’s eyes because they would grab me, and my eyes would not stop.” Like Linden and the wiindigoo, the cop in question not only represents, nor merely symbolizes, the corrupt Anglo- American legal system imposed upon the Native populace but appears to be inhabited by some other-worldly presence, malevolent and consuming, something to be avoided and exorcised. Tony describes the approaching officer: “He moved toward Leon with the stick raised high, and it was like the long bone in my dream when he pointed it at me— a human bone painted brown to look like wood, to hide what it really was.” The pronouns shift here, from he/him to “it,” such that the cop is no longer a man but an entity, vicious and cruel, that must be put down; thus, Tony says to Leon, “We’ve got to kill it, Leon. We must burn the body to be sure.” And sure enough, Tony grabs a rifle (as does Joe in The Round House) and kills the patrolman while he is busy intimidating Leon. Right to the end of the story, Tony refuses to grant humanity to the cop, who had in turn denied it to Tony. He says to Leon, “Don’t worry, everything is O.K. now, Leon. It’s killed. They sometimes take on strange forms.” The cop remains an “it” that had to be killed, and the idea that this killing was in fact a sacrifice, religious and ceremonial in nature, is hinted at by Silko’s final line of the story— “in the west, rain clouds were forming”— as though a drought or curse upon the land had been broken, and prosperity could now return.
Satan, similarly, is a malevolent, physical presence in Mormon doctrine who must be resisted physically as well as spiritually—but then, as D&C 29 reminds us, there is no functional difference between the two (“there is no such thing as immaterial matter” reads D&C 131:7). But then, in both traditions, good is also something physical, tangible, real—and hence in Mormonism, God is a literal, physical, exalted human being who demonstrates our own potential—and that speaks to our physical senses as much to our spiritual, for they are one and the same.
That is probably why physical community—Zion, we call it, and it is an article of faith that it will be literally built upon the North American continent—is so central to both traditions, since, again, we are not saved from physical time and space, but in it. For it is important to emphasize that in both Native Americans and Mormonism, salvation isn’t just individual (as in so much of the John Bunyan tradition of Protestantism), but communal. It somehow didn’t surprise me when that Navajo student told me her entire family needed to be present for that cleansing ritual—for we are not saved individually, but with and through our families. “He shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the children to the fathers,” reads the only scripture to appear in all four volumes of the LDS canon, “lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” Native American thought is the only other place I’ve encountered thus far that places such an emphasis on redemption through connection with one’s family and ancestors.
For in Native American thought, our ancestors aren’t just in our genes or some vaguely defined “cultural heritage” or what have you, but literally there. N. Scott Momaday writes about how “memory is in the blood,” and he also means that quite literally. I think of how anytime I’ve displayed a sardonic sense of humor, my Dad has said I sound just like his Dad–a man who passed away while I was still in the womb; or how Victor Villanueva in Bootstraps hears his son who’s never lived in his native Puerto Rico nor learned Spanish, call his toes “fingers of my feet”—dedos de pie, obeying the Spanish syntax of his forebears. Our ancestors may be more literally with us than we realize. But then, is that not why we perform vicarious ordinances in the Temples, which are also physical to a shockingly literal degree?