Pretendian: Someone claiming Native heritage falsely in order to either overcome an identity crisis about having mixed ancestry (Native and non-Native) or for personal gain
Am I a Pretendian because I use the word "indigenous?" Um. . .no! First of all, I do have some ancestry from Iroquoian tribes and the Pamunkey tribe of Virginia, but it's not my dominant ancestry, which is Celtic, German and a wee bit Norse. Secondly, the word "indigenous" is not only applicable to Native peoples of North and South America. There was a time when all the peoples of Europe were indigenous, and I happen to belong by ancestry and marriage to two groups.
By blood, in terms of European descent, I'm descended from three indigenous Celtic peoples called the Irish, the Scottish Gaels, and the Welsh. By marriage, I belong to my husband's tribe from Montenegro, the Njegushi. The tribal peoples of the Balkans are some of the few indigenous peoples who survive in Europe.
Why do I separate the terms Eastern Orthodox Christian and "indigenous" in the description of my blog? That's simple. My faith is one single tradition for me, a tapestry of woven of many traditions from both my European ancestors and the ancestors of my husband's people. But I find it important to point out the indigenous thread of this tapestry, because many earth-honouring traditions are present in indigenous practice of the Eastern Orthodox Christian faith, and these traditions have often been misunderstood and vilified by three groups within the Orthodox Church today. Those three groups are: (1) new converts to Orthodoxy who come from evangelical traditions, and think that many indigenous Gaelic traditions, for example, are New Age or Pagan; (2) a pan-Slavic movement in Orthodoxy today largely fueled by the Russian expression of the faith, in which there are many zealous individuals who think that indigenous cultural traditions have no place in the life of an Orthodox Christian; (3) a Greek Athonite movement, made up largely of laypeople attracted to the Greek Mount Athos traditions of Orthodoxy and traditions popularised by Elder Ephraim in America, which also tends to misunderstand and demonise anything that seems different, including Western Rite Orthodox traditions.
So, I draw attention to two things: (1) The indigenous traditions both of the Balkans and of Celtic people are so deeply woven with Orthodox spirituality that you can't extract those traditions from the practice of the Orthodox faith without doing serious spiritual damage to these faithful; (2) the cultural appropriation of Gaelic practices and what survives of Welsh traditions by the New Age has caused so much confusion that people who demonise these ways, from an ex-evangelical perspective, are out of their depth and frankly quite wrong in their opinions. When I was newly Eastern Orthodox, I was influenced by two priests who were ex-evangelical converts to jettison the Gaelic culture which I had rediscovered and adopted in my life, because it "wasn't Orthodox." I was told that replacing it with the prayers in the Jordanville Prayer Book would be enough.
Submitting to what those two priests told me caused me to tear a huge hole in my soul, a terrible rift in my spirit. Becoming the kind of Orthodox Christian those guys expected me to be was NOT enough AT ALL! It did me such great harm, giving up essentially what was part and parcel of daily life in which every moment was hallowed by prayer, even household activities like turning on the oven, that my spirit withered up and I almost left the Church. Since that time, although I have a very good father confessor now in my current Orthodox parish and I've left those other two priests way behind, I still feel fundamentally distrustful of Orthodox spiritual fathership. I went back to my Irish anamcara (soul-friend, spiritual father) who comes from the Gaeltacht, and when it comes to deep spiritual questions about the Gaelic aspects of my practice of the Orthodox faith, I turn to him. As a Gaelic-speaker, he understands these things and why it makes a difference to chant the Our Father, the Angelic Salutation, and the Breastplate of St. Patrick in Irish. A Gaelic-speaker understands the necessity of saying special blessings through the prayers of the Theotokos and St. Brigid when lighting the first candles and incense of each day, or when lighting the stove. He understands the importance of creating my own sacred songs, not only singing the set hymns of the Church. He understands the place of artistry and creativity in home paraliturgical worship. An ex-evangelical or ex-Catholic who is a product of the American educational system, which is essentially founded on WASP notions, just doesn't get it, not in my experience.
"But it's all one faith!" exclaims my current pastor. "The idea that the faith is all divided up along ethnic traditions is a fallacy." That's both true and untrue. It's true in terms of all Orthodoxy holding the same dogma and doctrine. But it's not completely true when it comes to daily practice of the faith by ordinary people, or to variety in liturgies. It's not true, not when certain cultural and social traditions being used--be they Serbian, Russian, Greek, or (insert Eastern European ethnicity here)--are being hailed as "truly Orthodox" while traditions from the Western Orthodox side are being looked down upon and discouraged. It is not true, when Celtic-descended indigenous people in the Balkans, like the Vlachs, are being condemned by certain Orthodox jurisdictions as being practitioners of witchcraft. It's not true when American converts look at my celebrations of seasonal festivals from my ancestral traditions, or look at the colourful stones and Trinity knots on my Irish-style icon shrine to St. Brigid of Kildare, and accuse me of being "pagan." Nobody has accused me of that for a long time, because they found out quickly that I am a fierce defender of my ancestral heritage in Orthodoxy, but the times they did accuse me of that really smarted. The two priests who tried to rip all of my heritage out of me in the name of making me "purely Orthodox" did damage that has taken years to heal.
Eastern Orthodoxy is rich, nuanced, and varied in the cultural expressions of its practice. People who try to say that this variety doesn't exist are simply adopting Russian or Greek expressions of Orthodoxy and declaring those to be a standard that must be adhered to, rather than allowing for a rich tapestry of dress, language and hymnody in the various expressions of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Western Rite expressions are actually part of that richness, including Celtic traditions from Gaelic and Welsh people and Old English traditions from seventh, eighth and ninth-century Saxons. To be sure, surviving Gaelic traditions have Catholic and Protestant influences that anyone with discernment and education knows how to spot and adjust for Eastern Orthodox practice, but for the most part, pure Gaelic Christian tradition is founded in the golden age of the saints in Ireland and Scotland, before the Great Schism of 1054. In general, the Celtic traditions in Ireland, Scotland and Wales are also more influenced by Eastern Christian spirituality than other Western traditions before the Schism. So, dismissing them as "Papist" and therefore "not Orthodox," as one Greek diaconissa (deacon's wife) did once, is the true fallacy.
So, to return to my answer of the titular question in this article, I'm not a Pretendian. I honour my Native American ancestors, but I don't pretend to belong to their particular cultural traditions since I've not been raised with those or with Iroquoian or Algonquin people. I can, however, connect with the indigenous Saxon, Gaelic, Welsh and Norse traditions of my northern European ancestors. I also inadvertently end up doing many things that are Balkan, things that would be recognised by my husband's people, like censing the house and gardens every day at home, because of some similarities between Balkan and Celtic traditions.
These, then, are my indigenous ways. Indigenous does not just refer to Native peoples in the Americas or Africa. It refers to any people with their own deeply embedded culture, language, religion and societal/familial traditions before being conquered by an invading or colonising group which tried to eradicate them. The Christians of pre-schism Britain were indigenous before being conquered by Germanic invaders. Then, those people, the descendants of the Saxon invaders, were indigenous before being conquered by the Normans.
Both Celtic and Saxon cultures blended beautifully with pre-Schism Christian teaching, which was what we call Orthodox. The Saxons, Gaels, and Britons blended their languages, artwork and many other earth-honouring traditions with the New Faith. This is what I have found in my own research over several years. It was only after the Norman conquest and its support of the Roman See in the Great Schism that wisewomen started being doubted and demonised, priests were forced to celibacy, churches were taken away from married priests and their families, monasteries were more segregated between men and women and from farming communities, and misogyny took root in the Western churches.
Separate women and motherhood from the Church, and Her heart grows cold. So do the hearts of people belonging to tribal and clan-based societies where women are honoured and viewed as equal to men. That is my observation and my experience.
Celtic Cross from my back garden shrine
