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Native Wisdom: Perceptions of the Natural Way by Ed McGaa

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I bought this soon after leaving South Dakota where I had spent a year as a part time reservation doctor (the rest of my residency was elsewhere) and left with a deep respect for the Lakota people. This seemed like a natural book to read and I picked it up for the popsugar challenge this year after it sat on my bookshelf for nearly 30 years. I found where I gave up 60 pages in and remembered why.

There are some very good things about this book. There are other very dubious points. McGaa himself says he's only one man and this is how he sees things and in that context fine. What bothered me were some things that aren't exactly true or a bit overreaching because I believe you can celebrate your people/cause/culture without doing that, such as the suggestion that they were entirely peaceful until white colonization which is definitely not true (which he admits much later in the book after floating the idea about where I DNFed it all those years ago) or weird claims that Europeans didn't learn democracy from the Greeks and Romans but rather (unacknowledged) from the Natives. Uh yeah, not so much. Were they influenced by Native governance sure I'll buy that but not with that claim. Some of this annoyed me more because this isn't coming from a place of ignorance of history. He's very well read on that as you see through the text.

He also oddly conflates human sacrifice such as practiced by the Central and South American indigenous people (and also good inclusion of the Spanish in the bad side of colonization instead or just leaving it with the English, French and Dutch) with the witch trials claiming that was human sacrifice. Yeah, not so much if you ask me. Sacrifice means you're giving the sacrifice to god(s) to get something in return. The witch trials were all about power (getting more and not having yours challenged), land grabs, misogyny and intolerance. It was more capital punishment than sacrifice.

The first six chapters were more about the spiritual side of indigenous people, mostly the Lakota, his opinions on drug use in ceremony, sweat lodges etc. I will say I very much liked his beliefs that all people, all races, all genders need to work together (which naturally fits into my own beliefs). THe last four chapters was talking more about the Natural Way and how it slams up against governments, Christianity/Islam, misogyny and homophobia (I was glad he mentioned the Winkte, the Lakota term for homosexual men because 30 years ago that was still a very dicey subject and publishers didn't want to touch it though in this case it's just a page).

THere are some very dated metaphors in this but also some rather prophetic warnings that predicted where we are right now in America, warning about far right Christian nationalism and how dangerous some ideas are for the environment and all of us in general (as I look at the rise in AI and know how much energy, how much the land has to be damaged, in order to run AI).

I'm glad I finally finished it but it's also a book that can now leave my shelves. I won't be going back to it, though for the curious there is also a small Lakota to English glossary and some prayer chants in the appendices.



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