INDIGENOUS CULTURE AND THE DENIAL OF DEATH

Why don’t we start by talking about your cultural heritage and how you first encountered Ernest Becker?

Lamar: I was born on my reservation in Lame Deer Montana. Sheldon and I are both multicultural—my father is Northern Cheyenne and our mother is white. Our father is one of the few people who still speaks his language. We grew up seeing inequality and marginalization of tribal people and it begged the question why, why is this happening? I went to college and I was always interested in anthropology, so I read The Birth and Death of Meaning, along with Claude Levi-Strauss other anthropologists, and then I went and read The Denial of Death. I’m in education now, and I want to understand the field I’m in, but also why this marginalization continues. For me, Becker answered that question most satisfactorily.

Sheldon: Similar to Lamar, I’m mixed race. I was born in Oklahoma, but I grew up most of my life down in the four corners area near the Navajo and Ute reservation. We grew up in a town that is almost evenly split as to Native people and white people. I think one of the things that led me to Becker is the fact that we were raised sitting on a fence—I could see what was happening in my mom’s culture, white culture, as well as Native culture. I think Becker offers an explanation for the forced assimilation that indigenous people are subjected to all over the world. This is the interaction of terror management—one culture imposing their symbolic and literal ways of avoiding death upon the other. Becker really spoke to me on that. Fortunately for us, because we grew up multiculturally, our parents allowed us to question their sacred cows, so credit to them.

Having grown up with a diversity of influences, what is your relationship to death and your own mortality now?

Sheldon: I am an atheist/agnostic, and it is a beautiful thing to become part of the earth again, part of the ground. I don’t think there’s Saint Peter at the Pearly gates, or any of those things. For me, the idea that I get to be part of the earth again is very fulfilling. Maybe there’s immortality in that, because I’m staying part of this world. There is a death song that I’ve heard at almost every Cheyenne funeral I’ve ever been to—he White Antelope song. The translation of this death song is that nothing lasts forever, only the rocks last forever. In our culture, there is an awareness of mortality and this brief period of time we have here, rather than a tendency to avoid it. There is more death anxiety in Mormonism and in Christianity than there is in Cheyenne culture. The predominant Cheyenne afterlife belief is that there is a happy hunting ground, or moving to the next camp.

Lamar: Atheism is more of a recent belief system, since we were raised Mormon. It has been important for me to understand and reclaim my father’s culture and where I came from because that was something that was taken away from us. I am also someone who believes in science, and those two ideas are easy to reconcile for me. We are going to go back to mother earth, and there is a cultural grace about that in our tribe, about our bodies returning to mother earth and restoring and continuing the cycle that is life. And that’s of course scientifically proven as well. But of we have respect for people’s beliefs, whatever they believe. Many American Indians, and certainly many Cheyenne people, have varied beliefs. In our tribal stories, our genesis stories, we believed that the buffalo was a god and he controlled the world, and so for all intents and purposes that was the first god that’s documented for us. But I think we’ve lost so much that it’s even a question to me about what we really believed when we first came onto the plains and whether we believed in an omnipotent power.

Sheldon: Yeah, our reservation is so mixed, because there are different groups who came and colonized and people were forced-assimilated, so all these influxes of different beliefs happened.

Do you see examples of symbolic immortality projects, as Becker discusses, in your culture?

Sheldon: For sure. We have a cultural hero named Sweet Medicine, and he is similar to Jesus Christ if you will. If you said his name up at Northern Cheyenne, especially for older people, my dad’s generation, this is who they heard about at their dinner table. And he definitely has a hero’s journey of coming from humble beginnings and rising to prominence and becoming both a religious and political leader. We also have sacred objects. There are four sacred arrows; two of those arrows were used for hunting and two were used for war. In the Cheyenne worldview those are definitely the two biggest death anxieties that you have, starving to death or being killed by enemies, so I suppose these symbols represented our denial of death in some ways. The other object is the sacred hat. So yes, there is symbolic immortality.

Lamar: And, Becker points this out in Escape from Evil, there was a fundamental advantage to being a tribal person and developing a hero system in your small tribe, in your small community, because it was more accessible. Now, it’s tough for kids. To be a “hero” in this culture is a pretty tall order when the hero is being Lebron James, or being a YouTube star, or having 5 million subscribers or whatnot, it’s really tough. But in a tribal community there are still eloquent ways you can be a hero, and accessible ways that are not necessarily the standard ways. For example, taking care of your elders, or going out and sharing your food, or attending to responsibilities to mother earth and the land, making sure you have a successful growing season. Any of these things can make you a hero. In modern society, to be successful and to be great is to have a lot of money, to own a lot of properties, and to get more than you need, essentially. In tribal communities, it is considered irresponsible and shameful to take more than you need, while your neighbor or your elder has no food. Modern society hasn’t allowed appropriate ways for hero systems that don’t harm people and that actually support the earth we live on.

Modern society hasn’t allowed appropriate ways for hero systems that don’t harm people and that actually support the earth we live on.

What are the consequences of the loss of these hero systems that were previously so central to indigenous cultures?

Lamar: American Indians had their value systems taken away, and this is why suicide rates are so high among Native people and why there is a gap in achievement that many educators don’t understand. When you take away our epistemology and you take away our ways of knowing, and our language as well, when you don’t allow people to validate and affirm who they are and their culture of being, there is going to be a resistance to what you’re trying to give people. And learning the knowledge that you get in white society—Westernized knowledge—paired with indigenous ways of knowing would be a powerful combination, but quite often it’s not supported.

You’re probably aware of the boarding school system that came at the turn of the century, where native children were taken away, and I think this is a good example of what Becker talks about, and also Berger and Luckmann.1 When we encounter people from a different culture, we tend to have four responses: we derogate, assimilate, appropriate, or annihilate them. When learning about American Indian history in this country that we call the United States, you can see all four of those starkly. And they are still going on. Some of them are hidden better than others and institutionalized to the point where you don’t think they’re still going on, but they still exist and they’re still going on. For me, the education system is one of the foremost institutions that brought all four of those responses to Indian reservations. And systemized religion could be thrown in there as well—assimilating people to Christianity and actually slaughtering people for practicing their indigenous religions. So that was at the turn of the century, but now people willingly and willfully do it on their own, with no gun needed. That’s a powerful force right there.

Felix Cohen, who wrote the Handbook of Federal Indian Law, said “It is a pity that so many Americans today think of the Indian as a romantic or comic figure in American history without contemporary significance. In fact, the Indian plays much the same role in our society that the Jews played in Germany. Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith.”

Sheldon: In Western society, including science, the whole idea of science is for us to come to the “one truth.” Whereas in Cheyenne philosophy, it’s ok to have two different perspectives on the truth, and both can be right. To be clear, I’m not anti-science, I’m pro-science, but I think this influences Western society to really create a mentality of “I’m right, you’re wrong, I’m sophisticated you’re unsophisticated, I’m civilized you’re uncivilized”—these clear markers that make it easier to discriminate.

Lamar: There is a native philosopher, Vine Deloria, who has written a lot about American Indians’ religions and culture, and he points out that a major difference between Native and Western culture relates to evangelizing. Mormons, for example, are well-known for knocking on people’s doors all around the world and converting them to Mormon thinking. And then on the other hand you have my dad’s religion, and we’re very guarded with it. In fact, outsiders are prohibited from going to ceremonies, and we definitely don’t knock on people’s doors and share our religion; we keep it hidden and protected.

And I think, again, this relates to the oppression. They banned the Sundance ceremony and so people had to go underground to practice their religion and rituals. And also, and some of this goes into the ego-centrism that we all have – all tribes believe that they are the chosen ones, and that the objects that came to their possession distinguish them from other people, including their cousin tribe down the river. So that’s part of it, too. We don’t try to assimilate others because our religion is for us. Also, it can be evil to try to force our beliefs onto others, as Becker discusses. But this is very normalized in modern society; there are bibles in nightstands at all hotels, and books of Mormon as well—we want people to believe what we believe, politically, religiously, and otherwise.

Sheldon: When we talk about native cultures or native approaches in 2020, we cannot discount—and I can’t emphasize this enough—the historical trauma of forced assimilation through Indian boarding schools, being survivors of massacres, and how terrible the ripple effects of that are. So our ceremonies are much the same way; those rituals are protected, and we keep the doors closed, because we don’t trust outsiders anymore.

…it’s so necessary to be aware of our sacred cows, and how sometimes we put those sacred cows over another human being. We will oppress another human being, or kill another human being, and especially our earth, for our sacred cows.

Do you think it’s possible to change the dominant culture’s relationship with death?

Sheldon: Lamar and I have spoken about this recently. It seems that there is an itch in our society, and a feeling of loneliness as well, not only because of COVID-19, but also because we feel detached and disconnected. I think there is a big need for us to come together and develop tribes in the small-T sense. I tend to be a bit more pessimistic these days though, because the tribes that are developing are doing so based on fear of death and fear of the other. That’s why it’s so necessary to be aware of our sacred cows, and how sometimes we put those sacred cows over another human being. We will oppress another human being, or kill another human being, and especially our earth, for our sacred cows. Capitalism is too much of a carrot for people just to exploit the earth. And we turn these guys into heroes—Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, we know all these guys’ names. They’re on TV, in the news, and it just reinforces the system. So I think it comes down to being aware of our belief systems, prejudices, biases, and seeing how they relate to our denial of death. That would be a very healthy place to start.

Lamar: The most popular poem in our society is Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken.2 People get it wrong, and it’s googled wrong constantly as “The Road Less Traveled,” which just goes to show what we all want it to be about. But it’s actually not about the road less traveled, or individualism. It’s about an old man looking back on his life and saying oh, you’re going to inflate the fact that you took the road less traveled, thinking that this made all the difference. It’s about being self-deprecating and being aware of our propensity to lie to ourselves and embellish who we are and puff out our chests. And we don’t even pull that out of that poem, and it’s the most popular well-known poem. And so that’s why it’s so important to learn, be vulnerable, and understand ourselves and our impermanent place on this earth.

Everything starts with self-awareness. Becker peeled the onion all the way back to tell us what we’re motivated by, and that this motivation can cause us to do evil and harm to other human beings. When we become aware of that, I think we become responsible to each other, and to ourselves. There is a very inherent pull to be individuals, to be selfish, that we all have to wrestle with. And I think in the fields that Sheldon and I represent, education and law, you can see that these anti-collectivist views start within those systems. But on our best days and in our best selves, we know that collectivism—being responsible for our neighbor, for people who don’t look like us—is really what makes this world go around.

1. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966), by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann.
2. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/89511/robert-frost-the-road-not-taken