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 used to believe I was Cherokee because I was told I was by my dad, who said he had a sixteenth of Cherokee blood. However, I found no Cherokee ancestry when I did our family genealogy. I do have some ancestry from Iroquoian tribes and the Pamunkey tribe of Virginia, but I am historically distanced from these ancestors, and my more dominant ancestry 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 (tribal people who were conquered by one colonising group or another who tried to eradicate their cultures), and I happen to belong by ancestry and marriage to four groups.
By blood, in terms of European descent, I'm descended from three indigenous Celtic peoples called the Irish Gaels, 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 and Eastern Europe in general are some of the few indigenous peoples who survive in Europe.
Why do I distinguish the terms Eastern Orthodox Christian and "indigenous" in the description of my blog? That's simple. My Eastern Orthodox Christian faith is one single tradition for me, a tapestry 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.
The indigenous cultural landscape of the Eastern Orthodox Church is much greater than most people know. It includes not only Eastern Orthodox Christians from Celtic-language-speaking groups like Irish and Scottish Gaelic people and Welsh (many of whom have been coming into the Orthodox Church from the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant churches, and many of whose descendants in north America are filling Orthodox churches to the brim now for similar reasons), but also a number of Native people from Alaska, such as the Aleut, Yupik, Tlingit, Koyukon and Athabascan groups. There are also Cherokee Eastern Orthodox Christians in Oklahoma, who adjust church fasting rules during Lent to accommodate their hunting and fishing seasons. In Eastern Europe, there are the various tribes of the Montenegrin people (one of which I belong to, as I've mentioned). There are also the Vlach people in Bosnia. In Eastern Russia, particularly the Volga and Ural region, there are the following peoples who practice Eastern Orthodox Christianity alongside their indigenous traditions: the Komi peoples, the Moksha and Erzya peoples, the Udmurts, and the Mari. There is also an Iranian indigenous people called the Ossetians, from the Caucasus region of Eastern Europe, specifically South Russia. What all of us have in common is the fact that we have forms of traditional dress and ways of life, as well as earth-honouring and other ancestral seasonal celebrations and practices, which we practice in harmony with our Orthodox faith.
So, I draw attention to two things: (1) The indigenous traditions both of the Balkans and of Celtic people, in the practice of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, 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, both ex-evangelical converts, to jettison my ancestral Irish and Scots Gaelic culture which was a major part of 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 have long since gone back to my Irish anamcara (soul-friend, spiritual father) who comes from the Gaeltacht (the name of several Irish Gaelic-speaking areas of Ireland); when it comes to deep spiritual questions about the Gaelic aspects of my practice of the Orthodox faith, I therefore turn to him. As an Irish 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. Technically, the Irish people like to refer to their language not as "Irish Gaelic" but as "the Irish language," so I will make that switch here. An Irish-speaking priest 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, and how sacred it is to worship at an icon shrine outdoors. My Irish anamcara also understands the distinct call I have as a woman to a specific role in the Church other than just a wife or godmother. Hearing that call is largely what called me to SMU Perkins School of Theology, where I could pursue a non-traditional female calling as a lay healthcare chaplain. I already fill a calling in my neighbourhood, in a healing capacity. My studies at Perkins are an expansion of that, both what I do in my neighbourhood and the use of my gifts as a sacred musician.
An ex-evangelical or ex-Catholic who is a product of social conditioning founded on Anglo-European conformist notions, often promoted in the school systems of our childhoods and adolescence, just doesn't get it, not in my experience. However, I must point out in all fairness that my current Orthodox pastor and father-confessor has not "drunk the Kool-Aid" of the American educational experience. He actually has a very fine education, and is an educator himself. He has a grasp on Irish church history as well as an appreciation for Western indigenous heritage. He himself has explored his own heritage, which is a blend of Norse and Sephardic! But aside from people like him who are very well educated, I've run into a lot of ex-evangelicals and ex-Catholics in the Orthodox Church whose understanding of history and ability to research these matters leave quite a bit to be desired.
"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 all depends on what we mean by the word "one." It's one faith in terms of all Orthodoxy holding the same dogma and doctrine. In both the East and the West, there is a lot of oneness in liturgical seasons and traditions in the Divine Services, though the flavours slightly vary. But Orthodoxy is not completely "one" when it comes to daily practice of the faith by ordinary people, or to variety in liturgies, if by "one" you mean a homogenous approach defined by only one ethnicity in the Church. Ironically, the oneness of Orthodoxy is threatened when certain cultural and social traditions being used in Orthodox life--be they Serbian, Russian, Greek, or (insert prejudiced Eastern European ethnicity here)--are hailed as "truly Orthodox" while traditions from the Western Orthodox side are looked down upon and discouraged. Nor is true "oneness" of our faith expressed, when Celtic-descended indigenous people in the Balkans, like the Vlachs, are condemned by certain Orthodox jurisdictions as being practitioners of witchcraft. It's not "one faith" either when American new 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. However, the times they did accuse me of that really hurt and sometimes, after hearing such things, I wouldn't attend church for a while.
The aforementioned two priests, in my first three years of being in the Church, 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. To be fair, I am the one who allowed them to do that, so hearken to me now when I advise caution when you are navigating your spiritual journey as a new Orthodox Christian. Don't accept everything people tell you at church without question, not even everything the priest tells you. Pay attention to your gut feeling if something doesn't feel right. Be watchful about whether or not the things you are being taught or told produce the fruits of the Spirit. It's not that you can't generally rely on teachings in Orthodox churches; it's that there are quite a few people out there who spread incorrect ideas because they have zeal without knowledge.
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 a lot of Catholic and Protestant influences that anyone with discernment and education knows how to 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 and I grew up completely misinformed about my Native heritage. I can, however, connect more easily 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. I was amazed when I found a distant cousin in Bosnia who belongs to the Celtic-descended Vlach people!
These, then, are my indigenous ways. Indigenous does not just refer to Native peoples in the Americas, Africa, Australia or other areas of the world that have become well known in popular American culture for their tribal groups. 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; these people tend to have a culture and spirituality that is very rooted in the veneration of creation and honouring ancestors, and often a rich oral tradition passed down from generation to generation. The people of pre-schism Britain were indigenous before being conquered by Germanic invaders, who then assimilated some of the ideas of the Britons. Then, those people, the descendants of the Saxon invaders, were indigenous before being conquered by the Normans, but not before some of their cultural and linguistic ways had been appropriated by the Vikings first! The pattern for invaders and colonising groups is conquer the native people of a land, eradicate them and their culture or force intermarriage with them, appropriate the parts of their culture which serve the conquerors, and then write a history claiming that the invading group was in the right the whole time. History is written by the victors.
Both Celtic and Saxon cultures blended beautifully with pre-Schism Christian teaching, teaching before the Great Schism between the Christian East and West. These teachings and ways, prior to 1054 C,E., is was what we in the Eastern Church 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, earth-honouring practices were discouraged or eliminated, 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 a new misogyny took root in the Western churches. (Misogyny has actually been a problem all over the world, in one way or another, throughout much of human history).
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.
One more thing: the core teaching about life in general, in many indigenous cultures, is that there is no separation between sacred and secular life. The sacred permeates every moment, every breath, and even seemingly mundane tasks throughout the day. We are to invite the Creator into all moments, even our sleep. So, in Celtic indigenous practice, just generally, God's presence is invited into the simplest daily tasks like cooking, milking a cow, raking a garden, planting herbs or crops, and even making clothes. Not only is God invited, but the whole heavenly court of angels and saints, beginning with the most Holy Theotokos, the Mother of God. This presence is invited mostly through sacred song in the Celtic languages, such as Gaelic or Welsh, that have been passed down through the ages.
Every second is sacred, every moment in time. Every blade of grass or leaf of the tree hum with Divine energies, which are not to be confused with Divine Essence. The tree is not God, but God's Divine touch and energies and the breath of the Holy Spirit are upon the tree and all nature, including humankind. Does that make sense? This understanding and view of creation, and the inclusion of all creation in daily prayers, is at the heart of Orthodox Christian indigenous approaches to prayer. All life is sacred from its beginning to its end. All creation is connected to the Holy Trinity. The eternal salvific actions of the Trinity have eternally affected all creation. This sacredness of all life and living out that connection between creation and Creator is also what I mean when I say "indigenous."
Celtic Cross from my back garden shrine
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