Spirituality vs Covenant

In Defend the Sacred, Michael D. McNally does a lot to clarify for readers what Native religions are and how they work. Part of this discussion involves the long story of how Native religions have been folded into or coopted into the contemporary category of Native American Spirituality.

The Holy Mountain, San Francisco Peaks

Spirituality, as it has come to be understood since the late 20th century, is an approach to meaning and identity that is individual - not tied to a community or a specific place; subjective - internal and emotional, based around experiencing feelings of awe or ecstasy for instance, and eclectic - it involves seeking a sense of fulfillment from a wide range of experiences. He writes that spirituality is a type of "piety whose authenticity relies on the self's ability to range freely across religious and cultural boundaries to find its fulfillment" --a spiritual marketplace coupled with the therapeutic turn in American religion "from communal norms of self-disciplines to individual possibilities of self-fulfillment" (106).

McNally argues that defining Native American religion as spirituality distorts and misrepresents it in ways that are detrimental to Native American religious freedom. He is quite disparaging of this approach, at one point calling it an "alchemy" (97) that denatures and mangles the factual claims of Native people about their beliefs and practice. He quotes a law case about the San Francisco Peaks that reduces the Peoples' relationship (Hopi, Navajo, and others) to the mountain as "the profound integration of man and mountain into one." McNally caustically responds, "Where does such a construction come from if not straight out of some bookstore's New Age Spirituality shelf" (111). 

I wonder how often in World Religion classes around the US, Native American religion has come across in this ambiguous and universalized way, as a glowing and sentimental feeling of emotional bliss that all nature is sacred? McNally helpfully emphasizes that the point "is not to be in a mystical union of man and mountain, but rather to discipline one's thought and behavior to conform ritually and ethically and doctrinally to the narratives, ethical teachings, and ritual duties of discrete religious traditions" (111-12).

There may indeed be significant differences in how people come to be attached to or in relationship with a locality, a particular land - this is Jonathan Z Smith's locative religion. There is a significantly different historical arc for how the Cherokee, for instance, and the small farmers of Kentucky's Knobs region and the Cumberland Plateau of Appalachia came to have a relationship with the land. And significant differences in how they would understand it and speak about it and live it out. 

But as Wendell Berry and others have shown--in communities where families have farmed the same place for generations, a profound relationship can emerge. 

Wendell Berry raking hay with horses

Like Native American religion, the relationship to place described by Berry is based on knowledge, duty, obligation, and discipline. While "spiritual experiences" of awe or transcendence might emerge at times - the relationship with the land is not primarily subjective (internal and emotional). Rather it is covenantal - a word that McNally himself uses several times. Covenant describes a relationship of commitment built upon knowledge and lived out through discipline and obligation. As Berry would say, to respect and to love a place is to know it and understand it as only deep generational knowledge can do, and then to live in and with it's ecology in a careful and disciplined way. Before using a plow, one ought to know when and where to use it, what it will do, and how the land will respond lest you end up making a mess that cannot easily be remedied. And again as Berry repeatedly points out, at its best this is not an individual pursuit but a collective lifeway in which a community embodies, protects, and passes along its accumulated discipline and knowledge of its environment and how to live well in it.

It is in this way that the world described by Berry is similar to that of the Navajo and Hopi. McNally writes that "the religious significance of the San Francisco Peaks is not primarily an individual matter of internal states but a collective matter of duties, ceremonies, peoplehood" (114).  Native American religions have embodied this covenantal relationship. "Traditional Native American religions are profoundly local, tied to particular places not simply through deep feeling and aesthetic appreciation, or through religious practices that take place on them, but also through a whole range of narratives, ritual disciplines, and sophisticated moral codes relating to specific places" (108). 

This statement so closely tracks with the relationship with land described by Berry in the small agrarian communities of Kentucky in the early half of the 20th century. Of course, all that is gone now. As Berry points out, the predominantly evangelical Protestant religion of the small farmers of Kentucky since the 2nd Great Awakening struggled and failed to include a covenantal relationship to the land in its tenets and practices. Thus, what was tenuous was easily lost.  

An interesting note might be to compare the relationship with land and the family farm exemplified by Joe Brown in Crystal Wilkinson's novel The Birds of Opulence. There is a connection of ancestral animism that binds Brown to the land through memory, ritual, and power.