Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native SpiritualityReview by: Philip JenkinsNova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol. 10, No. 2 (November2006), pp. 131-133Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/nr.2006.10.2.131 .

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Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality. ByPhilip Jenkins. Oxford University Press, 2004. xii + 306 pages. $28.00cloth; $16.95 paper.

Philip Jenkins opens this excellent work with a quote from D. H.Lawrence: “The American Indian will never again control the Americancontinent, but he will forever haunt it” (p. 1). Dream Catchers is the vali-dation of that assertion, and the history of that haunting. As Jenkinsmakes clear, his exploration is not a study of Native American religionin itself, but rather of Anglo-America’s often confused understanding ofit, and often selective appropriation thereof, usually with an eye moreto needs in the white soul than the red. Highlighted aspects of Nativereligion have therefore shifted dramatically as American spiritual cul-ture in general has changed.

For the Puritans, Indians were heathen crying out to be converted toChrist, the subject of the colonial ‘errand to the wilderness.’ On theother hand, for nineteenth-century spiritualists, Indian religion was ashining example of commerce between the worlds, and its greatprophets among the noblest of spirit guides. For transcendentalists andUnitarians, the first Americans exemplified pure, nature-tinged wor-ship of the Great Spirit. For others they were the lost tribes of Israel, orfugitives from Atlantis. More recently, these people of the land haveexemplified an ecologically sensitive faith worthy of the children ofMother Earth or, with their peyote and mescaline, an edifying opennessto the spiritual value of mind-altering substances.

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All these themes and more are amply investigated in these pages witha wealth of pertinent quotes and references. This is, of course, not thefirst book on Anglo understanding, or misunderstanding, of the indige-nous people. One thinks, for example, of Robert F. Berkhofer’s TheWhite Man’s Indian (1978). But Jenkins brings the story up to date,including an extensive review of current Indian spirituality books, “expe-riences,” and merchandise, and of recent over-idealizations of Nativeculture. There is a run-down of recent debates over the borrowing ofNative spiritual practices, often with a New Age packaging, by non-Indians. Above all, this is, to my knowledge, the first major study in thegenre to focus primarily on white relations with Native religion. To thistask Jenkins brings a religious studies understanding of the dialogue,with admirable results.

Philip Jenkins has written a remarkable series of books on variousreligious and social issues, including his controversial The New Anti-Catholicism (2004), the splendid The Next Christendom (2002), essentialfor understanding the radical shift in Christian world demographics ofrecent decades, and Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions inAmerican History (2000). The last is really the story not of the “cults” andreligions themselves, but of public response to them, and of the cul-tural contexts within which they have risen and fallen. In my review ofthat book in these pages (Nova Religio 6, no. 1 [2002]: 191–92), paired witha fine review of the same book by Thomas Robbins, I felt it necessaryto point out that, despite much useful material on outside perceptions,citations from the “mystics and messiahs” themselves (or their groups)were not seldom so selective, out-of-context, or trimmed to the pointof distortion as to foreclose our hearing the “cultists” and new reli-gionists in their own normative voices, leaving them to be defined bytheir critics.

Dream Catchers is likewise a book not about a spiritual tradition, butabout its perception amongst a public given to sensationalizing, ideal-izing, and demonizing. Citations of authoritative Native Americanspokespersons are even skimpier here than those by alternative reli-gionists in the other work. Yet the same caution does not apply here. Notbecause most of us fully understand Native American religion, butbecause the white response to it has been so diverse, so multipolar andoften self-contradictory, as to leave a clear impression that no outsiderfully has a handle on it, and so does not define it. One senses in thisbook a basic respect on the author’s part for the American Indian thatone did not feel he held for his American mystics and messiahs. Here,it is the white dreamers/exploiters of Indianism to whom Jenkins’ gentlebut unmistakable digs are directed.

Dream Catchers deserves a very wide readership. We non-nativeAmericans still have an ‘errand’ to the Indian, not of conversion but ofcatching-up in our understanding. This book will directly and indirectly

Nova Religio

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do much to facilitate that journey. Reasonably priced, it should be in alllibraries and many private collections.

Robert Ellwood, University of Southern California

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