ABSTRACT
Nestled in between California’s Sierra Nevada and Inyo Mountains lies a small school offering nature-based ceremonies centered on four days and nights of fasting alone in wild desert landscapes. The ceremonies offer an experience of the world as animate and the self as deeply embedded in that animate world. The school’s non-Indigenous U.S. American founders and guides have been mentored by several Native American teachers, which raises important questions about the meeting of conceptual worlds and the appropriation of knowledge and practice in a colonial context. In Chapter 13 of the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity, Carlin considers these questions by examining the influential relationships Native American mentors have had with non-Native school guides. Carlin briefly describes the school and its work. The author then discusses recent scholarly attention to creating dialogue between Native and non-Native worlds and examines the school as a rich non-specialist setting in which this meeting of worlds manifests. After detailing the school’s history, Carlin places that history in the fraught context of the contemporaneous rise of the American counter-cultural environmental movement and the American Indian Movement. Complex ethical issues abound in the work described here. The chapter aims to demonstrate the compelling texture and depth in a history some critics have written off as spiritual tourism. Carlin closes by arguing that lines of ecocultural affinity and solidarity can connect disparate worlds even as the spectre of appropriation looms.
