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Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality. By Philip Jenkins. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 306, preface, notes, index. $28.00 cloth); Feathering Custer. By W. S. Penn. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Pp. x + 240, acknowledgments, notes. $35.00 cloth, $19.95 paper); Kokopelli: The Making of an Icon. By Ekkehart Malotki. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Pp. xvi + 161, preface, introduction, map, illustrations, photographs, appendix, bibliography, index. $35.00 cloth, $19.95 paper)
Much of what has been written about the adoption and adaptation of Native American religious beliefs and practices by non-Indian adherents of alternative spirituality, a staple of the "New Age" during the last quarter century, has been more polemical than analytical. The tendency has been (on the one hand) to dismiss New-Age interest in Indian religions as superficial and silly and (on the other) to decry it as another instance of Euroamerican appropriation of things Indian. A strength of historian Philip Jenkins' Dream Catchers is that it neither dismisses nor decries but concerns itself with the sources of that New-Age interest, which Jenkins sees as representing a departure from the conventional notion that Indian religious practices were more worthy of eradication than emulation. Jenkins introduces the strains of contemporary American life and thought that have produced a more hospitable milieu for Native American religions and for New Age adaptations: recognition of religious pluralism, growing legal toleration for that pluralism, the impact of relativistic perspectives, new ways of conceptualizing what constitutes religion, increased respect for women's spirituality, and an appreciation for "the primal and the primitive" (x). Whether these strains are present on the American religious scene in 2005 may be debatable, but Jenkins correctly sees them as emergent in at least some religious quarters through most of the twentieth century.
Their relevance to an increasingly positive view of American...