Indigenous Foodways: it's all about the Bannock! (not really)

Vine Deloria Jr. is well known for his many titles, including: Custer Died for Your Sins, Metaphysics of Modern Existence, God is Red: a Native View of Religion, and The World We Used to Live in: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men.

In remembering the powers of the medicine men, Deloria covers much ground, including dreams and their interpretation, future telling, finding lost objects, healings, (spirit) animal relationships, influencing the weather, invisibility, and the protection from enemies.

In one instance of resisting arrows, Deloria writes the following:

“The arrows, instead of penetrating the flesh, bound back, some of them flying fifteen or twenty feet in the air.  They appeared to be shot with the full force of the bow, and when picked up and handed to the onlookers, the sheet-iron points were found to be doubled back as if they had been shot against a plate of iron, and the shafts of some of them were split” (p. 176).

Deloria describes this event as something to “boggle the imagination” (p. 176).

As reviewers have observed, the imagination is sure to be boggled by the sheer numbers of the variety of stories that Deloria offers up.  Indeed, the stories making it into the book are only a selected representation of medicine men exploits.

One reviewer noted in an email to me that: “His (Deloria) point is that the weight of the evidence is such that they simply cannot be dismissed out of hand.” – Professor Tink Tinker (Professor Emeritus, Iliff School of Theology)

However, what happens to the entire structure when one of those arrows penetrates the heart of the American Indian medicine man?

Enter Arthur C. Parker’s (Gawaso Wanneh) alternative explanation for the resistance to arrows.  Parker wrote the following in The Indian How Book, published in 1935:

In this book, he offers another explanation for the feat of resistance to arrows, combining it with the healing powers of medicine men.  He writes, “How was this done? Very simply. The arrow shaft was hollow and the arrow-point was fastened to a slender rod that pushed into the hollow reed.  This pressed against the berry juice inside and caused it to gush forth and squirt over the victim.  The red juice looked like blood, and everybody thought that it was.  When wiped away only the bruise of the arrowhead showed, and that dangerous arrowhead had been made of a piece of soft root whittled out and colored.  Medicine men had collapsible daggers that worked the same way…” (pp. 234-235).

What happens to the entire structure… apparently, at least one of Deloria’s backers goes silent.