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Copyright 2002 Myths and Symbols on the Quest for Vision The wilderness vision quest has increasingly become a recognized part of the repertoire of both transpersonal psychotherapy and personal growth (Segal, 1998; see generally Foster, 1992; Foster & Little, 1984; Linn, 1997). The complex history of the contemporary vision quest movement has yet to be written; but there is little question that at its center stand Steven Foster and Meredith Little and their profoundly influential School of Lost Borders (Foster & Little, 1984; Foster & Little, 1987; Foster, 1992; Foster & Little, 1997; Foster, 1998). Other first-generation founders of the movement include John P. Milton of The Way of Nature and Joseph Jastrab of Earth Rise Foundation. In addition, there is now what we can call the second generation of vision quest leaders, most of whom have either received training in or been strongly influenced by the School of Lost Borders, including Sparrow Hart of Circles of Air and Stone, Bill Plotkin of the Animas Valley Institute, John Davis of High Desert Passages, and Marilyn Foster Riley of Wilderness Transitions. The movement is also becoming increasingly professionalized. John Davis, for example, is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the Metropolitan State College of Denver and a senior adjunct faculty member in the Transpersonal Counseling Psychology Department at the Naropa Institute. There is also now a professional organization of wilderness vision quest guides and leaders, called the Wilderness Guides Council, which currently has more than 200 members, and which seeks, among other things, to establish standards for the conduct of ecologically sound vision quests. Back to the top The vision quester goes out alone, and returns alone, but is nonetheless a member of a community. There is, in fact, both a smaller and a larger vision quest community. There is, first, the relatively transient group of questers and their guides, who meet together before and after the solo fasts to prepare for and then to reintegrate their wilderness experiences. As psychologist and quest leader Fran Segal puts it, “Vision quest involves preparing to go to the wilderness in search of meaning with the help and support of a group of peers, spending time alone and fasting in the wilderness to seek wisdom or a ‘vision,’ and returning to share it with the group and one’s society” (1998, p. 203). And there is also the larger vision quest community of professional guides and therapists. Both form what first Joseph Campbell (1949/1968, p. 384) and then Jerome Bruner (1960, p. 280; 1962, p. 36) called a “mythologically instructed community.” Such a community, says Bruner, possesses “a corpus of images and identities and models that provides the pattern to which growth may aspire” (1960, p. 280). Myths and images are what inform the wilderness fast experience, make it meaningful, turn it into a vision quest. Back to the top It is not surprising that the contemporary vision quest borrows heavily from the mythology and symbolism of native North America. For example, Steven Foster, one of the seminal figures in the modern vision quest movement, was heavily influenced by the controversial Hyemeyohsts Storm, from whom he borrowed not only one of his central myths, the story of Jumping Mouse (Storm, 1972; Storm, 1983), which forms the core of Foster & Little (1997), but also all the psychological and cosmological symbolism of the Medicine Wheel and the Four Shields, extensively elaborated in Foster (1998).1 Such borrowings and adaptations have become increasingly controversial; even the use of the term “vision quest” has been challenged as a form of cultural appropriation (Bucko, 1998, pp. 244-245).2 Equally important, many Native Americans perceive the use of indigenous forms by non-natives to be intrusive, rude, and disrespectful of spiritual things (Swinomish Tribal Mental Health Project, 1991, p. 129). Such claims of insensitivity and cultural theft have to be taken seriously. Certainly, reasoned responses are possible – for example, Buhner (1997). But, beyond that, I believe, it is possible to construct a core vision quest mythology which is transcultural, which can empower and inform the quest without appearing to misappropriate particular cultural forms. The following sections are an attempt to gather such a core mythology. Back to the top One of the foundational myths of the contemporary vision quest is the myth of the healing power of the earth, which empowers and informs reliance on the “life-sustaining integrity, beauty and intelligence of nature” (Cohen, 1997, p. 20). Under this myth, entering into nature is an experience of “depth and complexity … of exquisite beauty and clear impact” (Greenway, 1995). The Lakota medicine man Pete S. Catches, Sr., expressed the same idea: he lived in a remote cabin where, he said, “[t]he soul might constantly expand in the presence of natural beauty” (Lewis, 1990, p. 50). Under this myth, too, the quester is already set apart by the intention to fast in the wilderness; the quester has “the courage and faith to return to our Earth as a source of emotional healing, as a way to go from being lost to being found” (Chard, 1994, p. 17). This myth is deeply embedded in the American view of the world. In 1862, Henry David Thoreau wrote: Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest.… When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, – a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.… In short, all good things are wild and free (Thoreau, 1862/1992, p. 645, 647, 652). Thoreau states several of the themes in this myth. All value lies in nature; nature is where one goes to “recreate” oneself, to make oneself new; to be able to perceive the strength and marrow of nature in a dismal swamp sets one apart from the community. Now, the myth does not maintain that nature is entirely benign. Rather the myth asserts, with Thoreau, “Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard” (Thoreau, 1862/1992, p. 655). The myth teaches the quester to trust in the earth, to expect healing and growth as a natural consequence of immersion in nature, even in its most fearsome aspect. The myth of the healing earth sets the foundation for the quest. Back to the top Probably the central informing myth of the wilderness vision quest is that it is a rite of passage, as classically defined by Arnold Van Gennep (1908/1960). Indeed, in a culture widely perceived as lacking adequate rites of passage – particularly from childhood into adulthood, and from adulthood into old age – the wilderness vision quest is often put forward as a contemporary model for ritualizing such transitions (Foster, 1996; Henley, 1996, pp. 102-106; Foster & Little, 1987; Sullwold, 1987, pp. 124-125). According to Van Gennep, the function of the rite is to effect the passage from one life stage or social status to another – at birth, puberty, initiation, marriage, old age, and death. Such rituals are performed at special times or places, away from the centers of community life, at night, in the wilderness, naked or in special clothing, in order to remove the participants from normal or profane space and time. They interpose a sacred interval in the flux of profane experience, in order to facilitate the transition from one condition to a totally different one (Kirk, 1974, p. 89). Most influential on the contemporary wilderness vision quest was Van Gennep’s subdivision of all the rites of passage into three stages – separation, transition, and incorporation (1908/1960, p. 11).3 The stage of transition is often called the liminal or threshold stage; this is the stage of “betweenness,” when the participant is at neither one stage nor the other, in neither one condition nor the other. The liminal stage is a sacred state – as anthropologist Victor Turner puts it, “one of ambiguity and paradox, a confusion of all the customary categories” (1987, p. 7) – and thus is filled with power and the potential for power. Among the Plains Indians, for example, “[t]his general pattern of separation, visionary revelation, return, and new (or renewed) responsibility has its locus of acquisition in the liminal period of separation during which the individual encounters the dream-spirits” (Irwin, 1994, p. 84). Thus, the myth of the rite of passage has two functions. First, it provides a structure for the quest process, dividing it into stages, and allowing the apportionment of tasks and rituals appropriate to each phase. Second, it empowers the quester to seek change, to expect a transition, to accept transformation in the wilderness. Back to the top The quest of the hero is claimed to be the central myth of narrative literature; so basic is the quest pattern to narrative that Joseph Campbell labels it with the Joycean term monomyth (1949/1968, p. 30; Joyce, 1939/1999, p. 581).4 Here, in Campbell’s’ words, is the monomyth, the myth of the hero’s quest: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man (1949/1968, p. 30). As Campbell points out, the mythological adventure of the hero is in fact a magnification of the formula represented in the rite of passage, which Campbell gives as separation – initiation – return, and which he calls “the nuclear unit of the monomyth” (1949/1968, p. 30) . Campbell’s seminal idea has been elaborated not only in his own work but in countless derivative works of widely varying merit. The myth of the heroic quest, like the myth of the rite of passage, structures the quest. For example, the quester may deliberately create a gateway, such as a line drawn on the path, which leads into the magical world of wonder where the quest will take place. Moreover, the myth empowers the quester to be courageous in the face of fear, to expect victory, to anticipate meetings with fabulous forces, and to mythologize ordinary encounters into meaningful and wondrous events. Back to the top Another potent myth for the quester is that the vision quest is not simply a rite of passage, or a heroic quest, but something more specific – an initiation. Initiation ceremonies are universal among indigenous cultures. It is difficult to draw a bright line between rites of passage and initiations, but perhaps we can best capture the difference by saying that indigenous initiations typically involve some sort of test or ordeal – fasting, darkness, fearful seclusion, endurance of pain, and often scarring or other changes to the body. Initiations are a special case of the rite of passage, typically marking the passage into either sexual maturity or a secret society. Thus, trial and testing are part of the initiatory process; all initiations find a place for ordeal (Sullivan, 1988, p. 346). The function of ordeal is to mark transitions, to prepare the way for new being. “Pain, discomfort, and restriction separate one from one’s prior existence in order to assay the truth (the defining relationship to a unique configuration of sacred powers) of one’s new character” (Sullivan, 1988, p. 353). And again: [A]ll these prohibitions – fasting, silence, darkness,… – also constitute so many ascetic exercises. The novice is forced to concentrate, to meditate. Hence the various physical ordeals also have a spiritual meaning.… The physical ordeals have a spiritual goal – to introduce the youth into tribal culture, to make him ‘open’ to spiritual values” (Eliade, 1958, p. 16). For contemporary wilderness vision questers, the trial and testing consist primarily of solitude, fasting, and exposure to nature (Foster & Little, 1997, p. 37). Many questers go as well without fire or shelter. Some questers also try to spend one night – usually the last night of the quest – in wakefulness; Steven Foster calls this the rite of the “purpose circle” (Foster, & Little, 1997, pp. 120-123). We will briefly discuss the symbolism of three of these initiatory ordeals – solitude, fasting, and the sleepless vigil – which offer potent symbolic resources for the quester.
In all cases, fasting for a vision among Plains peoples involved the voluntary abandonment of the comforts of food, drink, and normal shelter. Further, the seekers placed themselves in a liminal condition devoid of normal social relationships in the hope of establishing more powerful kinship relations with the dream-spirits (Irwin, 1994, p. 11). Fasting is a traditional means of self-empowerment and a means of attaining clarity (Foster & Little, 1987, p. 97). To deliberately abstain from food is to mark the liminal state, the state of paradox and openness, and to negate one’s prior human and social existence. Without meals to organize the day, having only constantly recurring circadian rhythms, time quickly becomes timelessness; linear time – that is, history – becomes circular time, the time of beginnings. Thus fasting is a particularly potent way to mark a new transition, a willingness to change. A series of spatiotemporal myths also may be used to inform and empower the contemporary wilderness vision quest. These are the myths of the center, of the beginning of time, and of the return to paradise. All of these myths empower the quester to seek new beginnings. The location of the vision quest – the quester’s special place or spot – may be mythologized as being at the mythical center of the world. At the center of the world, says Mircea Eliade, stands a mountain or a tree, which is the axis of the earth (Eliade, 1952/1991, p. 42, 44; Eliade, 1954/1991, p. 12). In mythical space, this is the earth’s navel, from which creation began (Eliade, 1952/1991, p. 43), and where heaven and earth meet (Eliade, 1954/1991, p. 12, 15); it is only from the center of the world, for example, that the shaman can travel to the other realms to meet with the spirits (Eliade, 1952/1991, p. 47). Thus, the center is the zone of the sacred, the zone of absolute reality (Eliade, 1954/1991, p. 17); conversely, every sacred place – every place where there is an incursion of the sacred into ordinary space – is at the center of the world (Eliade, 1952/1991, p. 51). For example, among the Plains Indians, the center “is the place of visionary or ritual instruction.” The seeker of visions “is taken into a center or the center becomes a place where visionary experience occurs.… Any place where visionary experience occurs or is invoked becomes a center and a place of power”(Irwin, 1994, p. 59). Similarly, the center lies at the innermost part of a labyrinth, or a mandala, or a temple (Eliade, 1952/1991, pp. 52-53). The circular Blackfoot sweat lodge, for example, is at the center of earth and sky, and thus “deeply reflective of a sacred space” (Harrod, 1987, p. 129). Now, the way to the center is always arduous, requiring danger-ridden voyages, wanderings in labyrinths, because going to the center of the world is a form of initiation. “The road is arduous, fraught with perils, because it is, in fact, a rite of passage from the profane to the sacred, from the ephemeral and illusory to reality and eternity, from death to life … Attaining the center is equivalent to a consecration, an initiation; yesterday’s profane and illusory existence gives place to a new, to a life that is real, enduring, and effective” (Eliade 1954/1991, p. 18). Thus, the place where the vision quester comes to rest, to seek the vision, is the center of the world. The quester, like the Buddha, sits beneath a tree at the world’s axis. But the center is something else as well – the womb of the earth. In many mythologies, the initiate descends into Mother Earth, Terra Mater (Eliade, 1958, p. 51); the initiate enters a sacred spot identified as the womb of the earth (Eliade, 1963, p. 80). This return to the womb is a precondition to rebirth in a new form; the return to the origin allows access to a new mode of existence; and the return, the regressus, is structurally isomorphic to the reversion of the universe to its primordial state (Eliade, 1963, pp. 80-81). This symbolism of the womb integrates the spatial and temporal dimensions of the myth: to move to the center is to move to the origins of things, to the beginning of time, before the individual – or the cosmos – fell into history. Back to the top At the center of the world is the abolition of profane time, of history, of duration. At the center is found mythic time, where first things occurred, and where the actions of the quester are imitations of the archetypal gestures of the myth (Eliade, 1954/1991, p. 35). The quester abolishes history; during the liminal state, there are only the recurring cycles of the day – the rising and setting sun, the circling stars, the slowly growing or decreasing moon, endlessly repeating. To return to the beginnings of things gives every action of the quester its mythic resonance, for the quester is in the Dream Time, when the world was first laid out. This mythical state of timelessness is symbolized as well by deliberate abstention from food or sleep, which, outside the liminal state, away from the center, mark the passage of time in human society. The quester is in the timeless realm, to be reborn to community, to history. Back to the top The abolition of profane time and the return to the beginnings of things, to the time when the world was first put in order, is mythically the same as returning to a state of paradise. Here the cosmic realms are once more joined together; in the first days, before the fall, humans could pass easily among the cosmic realms, using trees or ropes or tent poles. Most important, in illo tempore, before the fall into history, humans and animals were friends. Animals know the secrets of life and nature; to have contact with them, to speak their language, to become their friend means the possession of an abundant spiritual life (Eliade, 1960, pp. 64-65). This mythological theme is often played out in wilderness encounters with animals. There is a clear sense that animals can serve as the quester’s teachers. “Any time I come into unexpected contact with a large animal in the wilderness,” writes Cass Adams, “I pay close attention, not only because of the joy of being witness in the presence of a magnificent creature, but because through the process of witnessing, some place of mystery is opened up to me” (Adams, 1996, p. 94). Among the Plains Indians, too, “animal powers are seen as allies and friends who wish to assist human beings and give them special powers” (Irwin, 1994, p. 34). But the relationship between the human and the animal spirit involves testing and trial. “Every creature inhabiting the visible world is a potential giver of power, but not every human being can be a recipient of that power” – only those willing to undergo fasting, prayer, trial, and solitude (Irwin, 1994, p. 35). Thus the quester – like the shaman – attains intimacy with the animals, “a blessedness and spontaneity inaccessible to his profane, everyday state” (Eliade, 1960, p. 65). In seeing animals, discerning their purposes, receiving their messages, the quester reenacts the original state of human beings as an integral part of nature, the state from which we have now fallen into linearity, away from the center, and into history. The quester, in the state of liminality, abolishes history and returns to paradise, to speak with animals. Back to the top Finally, the spatiotemporal myth leads us to a final, psychological myth – the myth of achieved balance. As we have noted, the center of the world, the world tree, the axis mundi, is also the center of the self; the dangers on the road to the center are the same as the difficulties of the seeker on the road to the self, to the center of one’s being (Eliade, 1954/1991, p. 18). And what the quester finds at the center of the self, at the center of the world, is a special state of balance. This state of balance is characteristic of the sacred condition. At the beginning of things, the universe itself was balanced, an idea which lies at the heart of the Navajo Blessingway ceremony, which tells about the creation of the world (Beck, Walters, & Francisco, 1996, p. 14, 41-42). Among the Huichol, too, “the sacred … seems to embrace above all the concept of attaining wholeness and harmony.… It is a dynamic condition of balance in which opposites exist without neutralizing each other …“ (Myerhoff, 1974, p. 74). This balance is maintained most dramatically by the shaman in the flight between the layers of the cosmos (Myerhoff, 1974, p. 75). Like the shaman, the vision quester seeks to return to illud tempus on behalf of the people, to make an ecstatic journey through the assistance of animal tutelary spirits and bring back information of the other realms. As mediator, the quester, like the shaman, travels back and forth and, with exquisite balance, becomes attached to neither realm (Myerhoff, 1974, p. 253). The anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff tells this story about the Huichol shaman or mara’akame Ramòn Medina Silva: One afternoon Ramòn led us to a steep barrance, cut by a rapid waterfall cascading perhaps a thousand feet over jagged, slippery rocks. At the edge of the fall Ramòn removed his sandals and told us that this was a special place for shamans. We watched in astonishment as he proceeded to leap across the waterfall, from rock to rock, pausing frequently, his body bent forward, his arms spread out, his head thrown back, entirely birdlike, poised motionlessly on one foot (Myerhoff, 1974, p. 45). This was, Myerhoff writes, “a virtuosic display of balance” (1974, p. 46).5 The myth of balance tells the quester that such balance, both inner and outer, is attainable, and provides a model for the new being into which the quester has been initiated. Back to the top We have looked at vision quest participants and vision quest leaders as constituting a “mythologically instructed community.” We have reviewed several myths that might contribute “a corpus of images and identities and models that provides the pattern to which growth may aspire” within that community (Bruner, 1960, p. 280). The intent has been to discern a set of transcultural myths that might inform and empower the contemporary wilderness vision quest while avoiding any imputation of cultural appropriation. The mythology that we have examined includes the myth of the inherent healing power of the earth; the myths of the rite of passage, heroic quest, and initiation; the spatiotemporal myths of the center, the beginning of time, and the return to a harmonious relationship with the natural world; and, finally, the myth of finding the center of oneself, returning to one’s own beginning, and achieving a kind of inner and outer balance in the world. These myths are transcultural and empowering – a resource for the re-visioning of the vision quest. Back to the top 1 For indigenist critiques of Storm, see, for example, Kehoe, 1990, p. 200; Deloria, 1994, p. 37; Churchill, 1996, p. 317. 2 There is thus some question about just what the process should be called. Tinker (1998, p. 135) uses the term “Rite of Vigil” to refer to the ritual as practiced by Native North Americans. Lakota practitioners use the Lakota term hąblécheya, or speak of fasting, or “going up the hill” (Bucko, 1998, p. 245). The highly respected Lakota medicine man Pete S. Catches, Sr., insists that the proper term for the ritual is “Pipefast” (Catches, 1999, p. 147). Some non-native practitioners speak of “vision fasts,” “wilderness fasts,” “wilderness rites of passage,” or even just “solos.” I will use the term “vision quest” in this paper, but with some misgivings, since the term has, over the last several years, acquired an uncontrolled mass of connotation. 3 There is some variation both in the number of terms and in the terms themselves among vision quest guides and leaders. For example, Steven Foster of the School of Lost Borders speaks of severance, threshold, and incorporation; Joseph Jastrab of Earth Rise Foundation speaks of separation, initiation, and reincorporation; and Bill Plotkin of the Animas Valley Institute speaks of the five phases of preparation, severance, sacred world, reincorporation, and implementation. 4 It is not at all clear, of course, whether Joyce meant by the term what Campbell means. This is how Joyce uses the word: “At the carryfour with awlus plawshus, their happy-ass cloudious! And then and too the trivials! And their bivouac! And his monomyth! Ah ho! Say no more about it! I’m sorry!” (Joyce, 1939/1999, p. 581). 5 Interestingly, Myerhoff’s account of Ramòn’s display of balance is probably the source for the almost identical feat alleged by Carlos Castaneda to have been performed in his presence by the Mazatec sorcerer don Genaro (Churchill, 1998, pp. 37-38; see Furst, 1996, p. 182). Adams, C. (Ed.). (1996). The soul unearthed: celebrating wilderness and personal renewal through nature. New York, NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Beck, P., Walters, A., & Francisco, N. (1996). The sacred: ways of knowledge, sources of life. Tsaile, AZ: Navajo Community College Press. Bruner, J. (1960). Myth and identity. In Murray, H. (Ed.), Myth and mythmaking (pp. 277-287). New York, NY: George Braziller. Bruner, J. (1962). On knowing: essays for the left hand. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bucko, R. (1998). The Lakota ritual of the sweat lodge: History and contemporary practice. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Buhner, S. (1997). One spirit, many peoples: a manifesto for earth spirituality. Niwot, CO: Roberts Rinehart Publishers. Campbell, J. (1968). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1949) Catches, P. (1999). Sacred fireplace (oceti wakan). Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers. Chard, P. (1994). The healing earth: nature's medicine for the troubled soul. Minnetonka, MN: NorthWord Press. Churchill, W. (1996). A little matter of genocide: colonialism and the expropriation of indigenous spiritual tradition in academia. In Churchill, W. (Ed.), From a native son: Selected essays on indigenism, 1985-1995 (pp. 315-336). Boston, MA: South End Press. (Reprinted from Churchill, W. (1988). A little matter of genocide. Bloomsbury Review, 8(5), 99-117) Churchill, W. (1998). Carlos Castaneda: the greatest hoax since Piltdown Man. In Churchill, W. (Ed.), Fantasies of the master race (pp. 27-65). San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. Cohen, M. (1997). Reconnecting with nature: finding your wellness through restoring your bond with the Earth. Corvallis, OR: Ecopress. Deloria, V. (1994). God is red: A native view of religion. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing. Eliade, M. (1958). Rites and symbols of initiation: The mysteries of birth and rebirth (Trask, W., Trans.). New York, NY: Harper & Row. 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(Eds.), Ecopsychology: Restoring the earth, healing the mind (pp. 122-135). San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books. Harrod, H. (1987). Renewing the world: Plains Indian religion and morality. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. Henley, T. (1996). Rediscovery: Ancient pathways, new directions (Rev. ed.). Edmonton, Alberta: Lone Pine Publishing. Irwin, L. (1994). The dream seekers: Native American visionary traditions of the Great Plains. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Joyce, J. (1999). Finnegans Wake. New York, NY: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1939) Kehoe, A. (1990). Primal Gaia: Primitivists and plastic medicine men. In Clifton, J. (Ed.), The invented Indian: Cultural fictions and government policies (pp. 193-209). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Kirk, G. (1974). The nature of the Greek myths. Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books. Lewis, T. (1990). The medicine men: Oglala Sioux ceremony and healing. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Linn, D. (1997). Quest: A guide for creating your own vision quest. New York, NY: Ballantine Wellspring. Mahdi, L. (1996). A note on the vision quest. In Mahdi, L., Christopher, N., & Meade, M. (Eds.), Crossroads: The quest for contemporary rites of passage (pp. 355-357). Chicago, IL: Open Court. Myerhoff, B. G. (1974). Peyote hunt: The sacred journey of the Huichol Indians. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Segal, F. (1998). Ecopsychology and holistic health. In Bassman, L. (Ed.), The whole mind (pp. 198-212). Novato, CA: New World Library. Storm, H. (1972). Seven arrows. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Storm, H. (1983). Jumping Mouse. In Van Matre, S. (Ed.), The earth speaks (pp. 170-180). Greenville, WV: The Institute for Earth Education. Stone, K. (1998). Burning brightly: New light on old tales told today. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Sullivan, L. (1988). Icanchu's drum: An orientation to meaning in South American religions. New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company. Sullwold, E. (1987). The ritual-maker within at adolescence. In Mahdi, L., Foster, S., & Little, M. (Eds.), Betwixt and between: Patterns of masculine and feminine initiation (pp. 111-131). LaSalle, IL: Open Court. Swinomish Tribal Mental Health Project. (1991). A gathering of wisdoms. Tribal mental health: A cultural perspective. LaConner, WA: Swinomish Tribal Community. Thoreau, H. D. (1992). Walking. In Atkinson, B. (Ed.), Henry David Thoreau: Walden and other writings (pp. 627-663). New York, NY: Random House. (Original work published 1862) Tinker, G. (1998). Jesus, Corn Mother, and conquest: Christology and colonialism. In Weaver, J. (Ed.), Native American religious identity: Unforgotten gods (pp. 134-154). Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Turner, V. (1987). Betwixt and between: the liminal period in rites of passage. In Mahdi, L., Foster, S., & Little, M. (Eds.), Betwixt and between: Patterns of masculine and feminine initiation (pp. 3-19). LaSalle, IL: Open Court. Van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage (Vizedom, M., & Caffee, G., Trans.). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1908) | ||
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