But the importance of Indigenous religions extends beyond public recognition of the Indigenous lands upon which these festivals are conducted through ceremony. My 2014 survey of attendees at a wide variety of yoga festivals asked, “Which traditions have some of the deepest resources for spiritual growth on our planet?” The top five traditions respondents cited were: yoga (86 percent), nature (83 percent), Buddhism (72 percent), Native American traditions (56 percent), and Hinduism (53 percent).31 In fact, American yoga practitioners valued Native American traditions as containing deeper “resources for spiritual growth” than Hinduism! Certainly, the Hindu American Foundation’s Take Back Yoga campaign proffered a subjective (and motivated) interpretation of yoga by claiming it as a Hindu practice,32 but the practice certainly developed in India, influenced by Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religions.33 Hindus in India created modern forms of postural yoga from a foundation in Sāṃkhya-Yoga philosophical ideals, body building, esoteric dance, gymnastics, and Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious texts. In the early twentieth century, the founders of modern postural yoga—Shivananda, T. M. Krishnamacharya, and Krishnamacharya’s students B. K. S. Iyengar, K. Patthabi Jois, and T. K. V. Desikachar—universalized a system of physical practices and readied them for international export.34 These modern innovators lived within a religious worldview wherein the term yoga referred to a religious path, or more specifically, yoking or binding oneself to Absolute Truth, as in the various yogas (karma yoga [the path of action], bhakti yoga [the path of devotion], and jñāna yoga [the path of knowledge]) in Hindu scriptures, such as the Bhagavad Gītā. They also centralized the Yoga Sūtras, a Sanskrit text that integrates Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious ideas.35 While these first-generation proselytizing yogis universalized yoga as a new scientific method for health and wellness, they also rooted the tradition with Hindu and Indic texts and India’s religious systems.36 So then why would today’s American yogis claiming alliance with these lineages rank Native American traditions as a deeper “resource for spiritual growth” than Hinduism?
In response to this surprising data, I began to look for evidence of Native American traditions in the field. I found yoga teachers invoking the ritual systems of Native American ceremony, calling for a return to ancient Indigenous lifeways, demanding a return to respect for Mother Earth, encouraging their students to find and follow their spirit, and developing alternative epistemologies and ways of inhabiting the body through the philosophical lessons and practical methodologies by combining Indigenous and yogic knowledge. The broader context of these transformational festivals provided attendees with Indigenous-derived experiences, like singing with South American crystal skulls,37 lectures on Indigenous methods for attaining mystical experiences (including peyote, ayahuasca, and DMT), fire ceremonies, ecological messages, Chakra Village healing sanctuaries (established in teepees), teepees erected in communal spaces, Native American Church sacred singing workshops, and workshop and lecture themes focused on learning from Indigenous knowledge systems.
Several prominent yoga teachers hybridized Indigenous and Indic worldviews in their teaching. For example, Ana Forrest, a revered global yoga teacher who often teaches at Wanderlust festivals,38 extracts practical spiritual tools from both Indic and Indigenous sources. In her autobiographical book, Fierce Medicine, she writes:
I have no loyalty to concepts that aren’t true for me. Although I studied Yoga with B. K. S. Iyengar himself, the most important lesson I learned from him was to disobey the dictator if you don’t find a man’s character congruent with his teachings. . . . I discarded what didn’t work from both ancient and modern wisdom traditions and braided in the wisdom from my years as a horse whisperer to create the unique approach I call Forrest Yoga . . . . This book lays out a system of practices founded in Yoga and Native American Medicine. . . . I created Forrest Yoga to do my part in Mending the Hoop of the People. This is my life’s calling, my Spirit Pledge.39
Throughout the text, Forrest posits Indigenous knowledge as a panacea for the errors of Western modernity. In her view, Native cultures have retained that which has been lost or corrupted in the West. She writes,
One of the things I prized about my years on the reservation was seeing the initiation ceremonies the people used to hone intuition and the skillfulness in wielding it. Children who grow up with Native American traditions see the importance of developing these skills, of becoming aware of the sensitive, magical part of ourselves that don’t yet have outlets. Western culture squashes and invalidates our nature so we don’t develop intuition, nor do we know how to use the information from our intuition as a tool for improving the quality of our daily life. I am working to correct that.40
Forrest envisions her integration of Native American ceremony and yoga as a means to mend the “Hoop of the People,” to teach people how to get back into alignment with their bodies and nature, and then to activate that change into more eco-conscious patterns of action and consumption. In addition to working with Native traditions and yoga, she also studied as an energetic healer. During healing sessions, she summoned the energy of the Hindu goddess Kali to serve as her “healing partner.” In Forrest’s view, Kali, whom she describes as “one murderous bitch of a goddess,” was “exactly what I needed in my healing work.”41
Eli Gordon, one of the central yoga instructors at Bhakti and Shakti Fests, seamlessly blends environmentalism drawn from Native traditions, rituals of sage and sweat, and Native dances and songs infused with yoga, bhakti, and kīrtan. Many of his classes began with Native American invocations, and his rhetoric integrated Indigenous ideals of sacrality with bhakti. As quoted in the ethnographic vignette at the beginning of the introduction, his message calls for restoration of ancestral wisdom and veneration of the divinity of nature. These incorporations of Native American religious forms into the contemporary yogic landscape reveal the importance of place in the formulation of transnational religion. American yogis have reached across the oceans to adopt Indic rituals and yogic practices, but they are still ensconced in the contextual history of the United States. This history reveals that when white Americans embody religious exoticism, the alternative sacred forms that they imagine to exist outside of Western modernity are geographically localized. Because of the context of settler colonialism, even if white Americans are pursuing yogic and Indic religions, Native American traditions serve as the most proximate others—supplying pragmatic spiritual tools to revision the self and society.
Festival yogis, organizers, and participants focused on Indigenous rituals and ontologies as a means to open a conversation about alternative modes of sociality, economy, and relation to nature. Indigenous ideas and practices provided a bridge to engage with yoga and Indic religions as alternative pathways of being and knowing in the modern world. The presumed ancient essence of Indigenous and Indic knowledge becomes a generative platform from which to create visions of alternative utopias—new futures that do not attempt to fully revert to the ancient past but rather to use its resources as practical tools in order to evolve into a more conscious future. In the racialized global context of white supremacy, whites easily displace Indigenous peoples and Asians as representatives of that knowledge. As Shelby Michaels told her yoga class at Wanderlust in Great Lake Taupo, “All people are Indigenous and can find the landmarks that lead straight back to original spirit.”42
CULTURAL APPROPRIATION AND ITS IMPACT
The Burning Man community has had a tense relationship with issues of cultural appropriation for many years. In 2009, a “Go Native!” Burner party in Oakland devolved into the organizers’ tears and apologies when Hopi and Kiowa tribal members shut down the party and spent more than four hours lecturing white Burners about cultural sensitivity.43 Most recently, in 2016, members of the Burning Man theme camp Red Lightning became embroiled in an Internet-fueled culture