SRS, it looks like you have been through the indoctrination system of a post-modern institution of higher learning more recently than I have. ;-)

I do share some of beliefs reflected in some of the excellent critical thinking done by some post-modern thinkers. But I also have formed much of my philosophical worldview through my own personal experience far from academia, in the real world. Allow me to situate the context of my personal "real world".

My real world is in an area with a fairly sizable Native American population, a fairly sizable immigrant community of Asian Americans and African Americans, including a recent African immigrant community, a burgeoning Latino immigrant community, and a predominantly Eur Am dominated community of about 89%. I work in an urban K-12 public education institution, and live in a working class/poor neighborhood inhabitated predominantly by the minority communities on the fringes of the considerably wealthier Eur Am neighborhoods surrounding us (because it is the only place I can AFFORD to live, working as an urban educator in an area with incredibly over-inflated housing values and costs). I am Eur Am.

As to the whole Lynn Andrews/New Age phenomenon so despised by many in the Native American community, I am with them all the way. She is a phony, exploiting peoples' ignorance about native peoples' history and culture to make a capitalist killing off the New Age market. She is tremendously successful at it.

I also know that most the Native Americans I know, and I know a lot of them, are just as ignorant of their tribe's history and culture as most other people, they just have substituted their romanticized view of their past for the New Age romanticized view of their past. Neither is accurate, so I find the whole controversy surrounding the appropriation of native religion to be much less controversial than Russ Means or Dennis Banks would have you believe it is.

I am in total solidarity with the repatriation of burial remains and goods from the white man. I fully support the rights of native tribes to be sovereign governing entities fopr their people and their lands, as defined in the treaties made with their ancestral leaders by the US government. Much of that land has been stolen, and must be returned to the tribes, along with their hunting, fishing, water, and mineral rights.

I also support anything that can be done to save the native languages, such as they are, and the authentic cultural traditions of the tribes, so long as the practice of those cultural traditions is in accordance with healthy, beneficial traditional practices. Not all traditional practices rooted in culture are positive. The native traditional practice of abandoning female widows in the wilderness after the death of their male partner, as was practiced among some native tribes in the fairly recent past, would be one that comes most readily to my mind. Granted, it isn't done in the way it once was among the tribes, but any trip to a contemporary reservation will show you that plenty of elderly, widowed native women have been abandoned by their families and left in substandard housing, with little to no attention paid to their most basic needs of adequate food, heat, sanitation, transportation, and medical and mental health care. How is that any different than leaving them in the wilderness?

There is a tremendous amount of misogyny and sexism in traditional cultures. I don't want to see that institutionalized in the name of false sanctity towards cultural traditions, which deserve to be left behind as relics of a superstititious past. The contemporary native religious practices are largely a reinvention, and that movement is wholly dominated by powerful male members of the communities who wish to glamorize a mythic warrior culture which never existed in the ways they claim they did. I don't support that.

I don't support the practice of banishing women who are menstruating from community life while they have their period. I don't support institutionalizing those sorts of practices in native tradition today, because it reflects a backward thinking return to ignorant superstitions of the past. And that particular practice is mighty prevalent among the reinvented native religion advocates today. Go to a pow wow or community feed, and you will run into it.

As to the medical thing, don't know how many of you have had the opportunity to read the fascinating book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, but that book and Mama Might be Better Off Dead: The Failure of Health Care in Urban America are two books that gave me a real "Aha!" moment when I read them.

There are much bigger fish to fry than the New Age movement, even when it comes to medical charlatanism and outright malicious treatment of patients that are considered the dregs of our society, like the disabled, minorities, and elderly women of all cultures.