GroshLink

The Red deer Dance at Taos Pueblo was religious (as we white people know it) and cosmical (as we white people do not know) . . . The tribe's soul appeared to wing into the mountain, even to the Source of Things . . . Here was a reaching to the fire-fountain of life through a deliberate social action employing a complexity of many arts . . . These men were at one with their gods (John Collier, 1920, later director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs)

Jenkins argues that the benevolent dreams of the romantized, environmentally sensitive Indians of Dances with Wolves or Pocahontas are shaped by the consumers, the dream catchers. This sympathetic audience grew as American Christianity's self-confidence declined (leading some to doubt Christianity's claims to a monopoly on religious truth), esoteric/New Age believers sought legitimacy for their own beliefs/doctrines, & religion was redefined by proactive academics/advocates (p.9-15).

Note: Jenkins points out that Collier was significantly influenced by William Morris's House of Wolfings. "In Collier's mystical vision of organic communities, Western concepts of democracy were irrelevant, since Native societies already possessed those values through natural inheritance. At Acoma Pueblo, Collier wrote that its

social organization, its magical and animistic worldview, its racial aims are from of old. That earth shall go on, and the inseparable Race, the tradition and spirit and subliminal power of the Race, is the unchanging pre-occupation of Acoma, a democracy of very complex institutions whose pinnacles gleam with a wonder-light and whose foundations rest in a secrecy inviolable" (pp.114-5).