David Martínez

The Soul of the Indian: Lakota Philosophy and the Vision Quest

Iwant to emphasize at the outset that, as the subtitle indicates, this is a work of philosophy. As such, my treatment of the vision quest, or hanbleceya, will differ substantially from the disciplines that typically define American Indian studies, such as anthropology, history, political science, and literary criticism.1 I especially want to stress that this is not an exercise in ethnography.2 Instead of accumulating data from physical observations or extrapolating conclusions from field interviews, I have analyzed the vision quest for its philosophical content, based on material already published, in which I highlight resources “written by” Lakotas, including works actually composed by Lakota writers and works in which a Lakota played a major collaborative role.3 At the same time, by prioritizing Lakota texts, we cannot assume that the vision quest under examination is in some pure, precolonized form.4 After all, virtually all of the current scholarly resources on Lakota culture and history only extend as far back as the nineteenth century.5 79

From the fourth world to the art world

There are two contexts in which we may interpret Dan Namingha’s Katsina images. First, we could look at them within the Hopi–Tewa tradition from which Namingha claims his heritage. Second, we could look at his work within the broader context of contemporary American Indian art, particularly the modernist movements, beginning with Dorothy Dunn’s Santa Fe School. 1 The first perspective enables us to comprehend the otherwise arcane Hopi–Tewa imagery that recurrently turns up in Namingha’s compositions. The second perspective, however, allows us to appreciate the more painterly qualities of Namingha’s work, such as using colour as a means for narrative or using space as a way of invoking a sacred geography. Ultimately, in order to do justice to Namingha’s work, we must accommodate both perspectives. Namingha not only draws heavily from the Hopi–Tewa tradition for inspiration, but he also depends on a very modern, abstract, and Euro-American vocabulary to express his artistic ideas. ‘Hopi/Tewa is what I grew up with and what I know best’, Namingha claims in The Art of the Hopi . Yet, as Namingha makes clear, he is also ‘influenced by European artists,’ among them, Picasso, Klee, and Gottlieb. 2

The Gods of Time: Husserl, the Maya, and the Pre-Scientific World

Ostensibly this is an essay regarding the “pre-scientific” world, which Husserl sought to examine in “The Origins of Geometry.” What Husserl looked for more specifically was an encounter with the world that was renewed by a return to the things themselves. At the time, “science” (indistinguishable from philosophy) was about deriving ideas from the life-world instead of passively accepting propositions as handed-down by “the tradition,” which is really a canon of works written and promulgated for mass consumption. For what has occurred in the “textualization” of science, not to mention philosophy, is that the abstractions of the text have regretfully supplanted our empirical encounters with the world as the basis for reality. A seminal figure in this transformation was Galileo who, in Husserl’s portrayal of him, made it possible to think of the world, indeed, the universe, in the completely abstract language of mathematics. More specifically, Galileo reenvisioned the universe in the forms of geometry. What we lost in the process was more than a geocentric worldview. We also lost our capacity to view the world as part of a transcendent universe, one composed in the language of myth, which consists of the stories of unseen powers and the belief that all things are interdependent. By turning to the Maya I hope to open a way for appreciating the world as a sacred being, full of spirits and grounded in epics of world creation. But first we must deal with Husserl and the crisis of “western science”.