Review: Lame Deer Seeker of Visions

Lame Deer Seeker of Visions by John Lame Deer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This works great as a forthcoming autobiography of a wasted youth in alcohol, joy-riding, and skirt-chasing to in adulthood learn the value of lessons adults had tried to impart. However, this is not a coming-of-age tale from one man to another, but a "medicine man" to another culture: Native American spirituality is real, cohesive, and valuable; respect it and at least don't destroy it. Also, don't destroy the Black Hills sacred ground with more mountain-marring statues, even of Crazy Horse. (Lame Deer was an active participant in one of the Mt. Rushmore occupations decrying treaties broken as late as the 1940s.)

Lame Deer tells the story to his friend and admirer (definitely read his epilogue), and this reads like a transcript; very natural and conversational. Some others pop in to attest, including another medicine man from a line of medicine men: Peter Catches. (See http://www.ocetiwakan.org/pages/about...)

One of my favorite lines from a movie is "It's a sad and beautiful word" from Down by Law. How does one existence amid such hopeless contradiction. I like the reaction (and also a movie quote), "Accept the mystery! This seems aligned with what I feel is Lame Deer's key message summed up in this line of the book, "Man cannot live without mystery. He has a great need of it."

Along the way, Lame Deer reveals the details of many ceremonial rites: inside the sweat lodge, pulling an embedded eagle claw from the flesh, the yuwipi binding ceremony, cross-tribal peyote sacrament, and more.

Lame Deer espouses some things I find hard to "swallow" from the succulence of puppy flesh to magic like controlling the weather. But, what do I know? As Lame Deer observes, "The elk is an athlete. In spite of his big antlers he can run through a dense forest no matter how close the trees are standing together. You don’t quite know how he does it. He lives with the trees, is himself formed like a tree; his antlers are like branches."

Once, while walking a trail on Isle Royale with my nose in a Nietzche compendium I stumbled on a large moose an arm's length away. I was afraid of being crushed in the dense forest by its sudden moves, but it ran through the dense forest no matter how close the trees were standing together. I don’t quite know know he did it.

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