But Red Lightning Tribe’s actions at Burning Man 2017 incited a storm of vitriolic criticism, mostly levied via the Internet. Fundamentally, critics rejected the idea of hosting Native American sacred ceremonies in an environment like Burning Man; others faulted Red Lightning Tribe for allowing drugs and alcohol to infiltrate the ceremonies, though they were disallowed within the camp. Others criticized the camp for being “plug and play” (wealthy, based on a capitalist model) and predominantly white. One critic wrote, “Cultural appropriation in every sense of that word! This camp completely disrespected our ways. You can’t just steal someone else’s [culture] and bend it and rewrite it to fit into your liking. It was ridiculous. Ceremony’s [sic] are sacred, you had drunk acid trippin hippies banging on drums signing the wrong words to my peoples songs, wasicu people there in full head dresses and ‘war paint’ phony ‘[Medicine] men’ This whole thing is screaming cultural appropriation.”66
Although Native elders led many of the prayers and ceremonies at Red Lightning’s camp, and some camp leaders worked closely with members of the Paiute Nation, some critics claimed that these elders did not have a clear sense of what Burning Man was when they accepted Red Lightning Tribe’s invitation to lead the ceremonies. Others accused the Native elders who led the prayers and ceremonies of being “fakes” who were performing ceremonies incorrectly or selling out by performing as entertainment for whites. Others questioned Red Lightning Tribe’s intentions and accused them of mocking Native religious traditions.67 Underlying much of this debate was the central question of cultural property, which encompassed Native ceremonies, prayers, and material culture.68 The venom of critics was profuse, and the Red Lightning Tribe leadership was largely defensive and uncomprehending of the critiques. In their view, many of them had stood with Native peoples in solidarity at Standing Rock, invited elders to lead sacred ceremonies in their own camp, and acted in admiration and appreciation of Native religious traditions.69
Just after the close of Burning Man in 2017, Chase Iron Eyes—a Lakota leader and Standing Rock’s attorney who attended Red Lightning’s Power of Prayer Global Sunset Drumming Circle—posted an Internet video wherein he cited the negative effects of “appropriation.” He explained, “These types of things, they result in Indian mascotry. They result in cultivating kind of a dehumanized, primitive, spiritual ethos that the American Indian is then made to occupy that space in the imagination of the West.” But he justified his presence at Burning Man as an attempt to “build bridges” and get signatures to support Standing Rock water protectors. He also defended his statement that “we are all indigenous,” a claim that infuriated many Native critics (and notably echoes the yoga teacher Shelby Michaels, referenced earlier):
By no means are we trying to mitigate or minimize or do anything by way of lessening and taking the focus off of the genocide, the fifty to eighty million Indigenous people, the original Nations of this hemisphere, . . . [but] all human beings, if you go back far enough, descend from the land or the sacred sites. . . . Race is a purely human construct; arguably, so is religion. . . . The Indigenous people have a role to play in guiding those people who now call themselves Americans or Canadians, . . . who were subjected to those same forces of colonization, those same forces of abstraction and separation. When I say that I am talking about a separation—spirit from mind, heart from intellect, and your being from the sacred connection to the cosmos. If you read any religion, any worldview, people are searching for that. They are searching for how to unite, to transcend, to make themselves one with Divine consciousness, and so forth. This is what ceremony does. . . . Colonization is real, and it happened to every human being. The entire globe was secularized. . . . And so some people are searching for those ways on how to connect with the sacred.70
The Red Lightning Tribe took a year off from Burning Man in 2018. Red Bear (John St. Dennis), one of the Red Lightning camp leaders, told me during our interview, “It would be very politically incorrect to bring Red Lightning back.”71 But in 2019, it did come back, albeit under a new name—Red Lightning: Blue Thunder.
Despite its external critics, many Burners love the opportunities for communal ritual, education, movement, and spiritual exploration that are offered in Burning Man camps like Red Lightning and Anahasana Village (focused on Tantra and yoga). Chapters 3 and 4 discuss, and even celebrate, the transformational spiritual experiences that explorations with alterity can catalyze. Engagement with ceremony, ritual, yoga, and meditation are all means by which SBNR communities attempt to heal themselves and to alleviate their feelings of disconnection and isolation. There is significant and measurable positive personal transformation that can emerge from spiritual explorations in transformational festivals. However, the story of these SBNR communities is fraught, and while there are many who are serious, religious exoticism easily devolves into cavalier forms of play when it is disseminated and commodified by the masses. The hubris of whiteness, with its presumption of entitlement and possession, enables this smooth transition from serious study to playful (mis)representation.
For example, material culture has been at the center of the visually centric debates on cultural appropriation involving box braids, bindis, and Native headdresses. In recent years, wearing Native American headdresses to festivals has become a popular fashion statement for some whites. This is part of a larger fashion trend that celebrates “tribal” cultures through dress, face paint, and body art. This co-option of tribal material culture is a form of exploitation and costuming that cheapens and undermines Indigenous identities. Transformational festivals abound with superficial adoptions of the material cultures of racialized others. At Burning Man and LIB, I encountered each day at least one Native war bonnet used as a fashion accessory, despite the fact that both festivals have issued public statements condemning the practice (see figure 8). Native headdresses have become a touchstone signifying cultural appropriation as violence against already disenfranchised Native populations. Whites wearing headdresses is often singled out because it is one of the most obviously offensive practices in a much more ambiguous and philosophically complex field.
For example, in 2015, on the very same booklet page that LIB highlighted “The Village”—an assemblage of teepees and a yurt wherein village life (and the following year, Indigenous knowledge) would be celebrated (see figure 9)—it included the following statement:
Cultural Appropriation: Appreciation or Disrespect?
Sporting a headdress, or other imitation accessories, that were not received through cultural rights with permission and the understanding that comes with it, means being a walking representative of 500+ years of colonialism and racism. LIB embraces raw, creative, and authentic self-expression. But by embracing the current tribal trends you aren’t asserting yourself as an individual, you are situating yourself comfortably amongst a culture of power that continues to oppress Native peoples.72
Though their condemnatory statement against the headdress is unambiguous, paradoxically, their celebration of the teepee in The Village also seems to embrace “the current tribal trends.” Their philosophical argument seems to draw a distinction between disrespectful costuming and the appreciation of Native lifeways. In this view, intent matters. The turn to Indigenous cultural and religious forms symbolizes a turn toward alternative relations between self and sociality. In so doing, organizers and participants form a spiritual subculture that envisions itself as a tribe. Part of the reason that transformational festival cultures attract these particular forms of self-expression through tribal attire stems from participants’ attempts to set themselves apart with social distinction, to situate themselves as a part of a community, as members of a tribe. The Indigenous symbolism of The Village creates the affective feeling of community and tribe, but extended fully, it also ambivalently supports white possession and performance of Native identities.
8. Woman in Native headdress, Burning Man Temple, 2016 (photo by author; photo edits by Aimée-Linh McCartney).
The cultivation and communal reiteration of this shared notion of “tribe” is founded on an agreed-upon mythic past, a critique of the present, and a projected vision of