This essay examines competing scholarly perspectives on Native American worldview, ritual, and the challenges of writing Native history. Drawing on Donald Lee Fixico's The American Indian Mind and Calvin Martin's edited collection The American Indian and the Problem of History, the paper explores whether Native American culture is fundamentally impenetrable to outside interpreters. It contrasts Martin's claim that Native and European worldviews are mutually irreconcilable with Mary Young's argument that meaningful cultural and religious dialogue did occur. Vine Deloria's caution against treating Native thought as a monolith is also considered. The essay ultimately argues that Native American cultures were never static, and that acknowledging their diversity and capacity for change offers a more historically honest framework than essentialist defenses of cultural purity.
Donald Lee Fixico, a Native American author who intends to introduce and defend the Indian worldview to a non-Native audience, argues in The American Indian Mind that Native Americans such as himself — even after being socialized into white society — possess a cultural worldview that is integrally and profoundly different from that of white Americans. This worldview, he contends, is fundamentally at odds with the linearity and scientific rationalism endemic to white society. Viewing Native culture in this way, even in defense of a perspective that has been devalued by white society, risks essentializing Native Americans and reducing their ritual cultures to museum pieces.
According to Calvin Martin, editor of The American Indian and the Problem of History, the ways in which Native American religions and cultures have been conceptualized by white culture often carry a "fixed and rigid quality" that creates an object of study resembling a storefront Indian "hewn out of a rock" (Martin 211). Yet Martin's own analysis in his essay "The Metaphysics of Writing Indian-White History" seems to do exactly that — to create a similarly rock-like, unchanging conception of Native culture and practice. Martin, like Fixico, tends to essentialize "the" Native American and to see the American Indian as a singular, untouchable entity, impenetrable to white historians (Martin 29).
To defend his point of view, Martin sent his initial essay to a variety of scholars and solicited responses, as detailed in his introductory remarks, "An Introduction Aboard the Fidele." Martin believes that Native American culture and European culture are "mutually irreconcilable, mutually antagonistic, and mutually unintelligible," and that no white history ever has or can illuminate Native culture because of its profound difference from white culture (Martin 9).
Viewed through Martin's framework, even the most well-meaning historian or anthropologist commits an act of colonization when engaging with the Native person's mind, writing white history over Native history in what Martin calls "historiographic colonialism" (Martin 11). Along the lines of Fixico, Martin argues that Native Americans perceived an integration between past and present, and held a holistic and cyclical view of the earth and its history. This stands in contrast to white approaches to history, which tend to view humanity and nature as inherently divided — and more often than not, antagonistic. In Martin's framing, Indian history is biological and primordial, while white history is linear; white religions seek to lift the subject above nature, rather than placing the subject within nature through ritual, as is the case with Native American ritual practice.
Martin also argues that even white Native apologists tend to view Native-white relations through a single lens — whether economic or political — and to essentialize one outlook as generalizable to all Native societies. "The ebb and flow of Power can in truth be said to form the warp and woof of the Indian-White experience," and whites, however well-meaning, always wield the power of reductive interpretation (Martin 32).
"Young argues Native and white religions did interact"
"Tribal diversity undermines any single Native worldview"
It seems clear that Native American culture is never static. Ultimately, a genuine engagement with the complex interrelation of cultures — as embodied in Mary Young's essay — is far more fruitful and historically honest than Martin's position allows. Martin's view is, to some degree, paradoxical and even self-defeating: he is a white historian arguing the impossibility of white historians engaging with Native history, writing from a post at a university outside the tribal nations.
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