User Reviews

I saw this film at the South Dakota Film Festival, where it won Best International Film. The audience, both Native and white, was bowled over by it, cheering the Native activists, laughing at the foolishness of white wannabes, and booing the deception and abuse by pretenders.

The film follows American Indians in South Dakota, New Mexico, and Texas, giving us Lakota, Navajo, Cherokee, and Apache views on the phenomena of pay to pray and whiteshamanism or plastic shamanism, imposters who pose as Native spiritual leaders. We also see a group of European wannabes get taken by a white pretender, doing a fake sweatlodge and getting it comically wrong. (It's just plain dumb luck none of them were killed. Think of those poor people in Sedona who died.) There's some wonderful scenes where clueless New Age people say one foolish thing after another, only to be shown to be wrong time and again by Natives.

The film has some wonderful words of wisdom from Arvol Looking Horse, a spiritual leader of the Lakota, Gayle Ross, a descendant of Cherokee Chief John Ross, Andrew Thomas, a Navajo artist, and Al Carroll, an Apache historian. Looking online it seems some of the same New Age hucksters who worry about their bank accounts getting smaller have conducted a smear campaign against the film and its participants. That is probably the best compliment they could give, because it says just how worried they are abou8t the truth getting out.

There is a lot of naivety in this film. A European lady got an eagle feather as a present from a friend. When she understands that an eagle feather is holy to Indians, she wants to give it back. She does not ask this friend where this feather came from - she takes an airplane to the USA. To me it seems obvious, that making the film was more important than giving the feather back. The Lakota elder to whom the feather is given in the end does not ask (in the film) where this feather came from in the first place. He is glad that a white lady does her best to respect his tradition. All in all, for me as a white European, the film does give an understandable and sympathetic picture of how deep the pain of Indians can be, seeing that the foreigners that came digging for gold now come digging for rituals. I hope and suppose, that the film helps wannabees to understand that digging for rituals is trespassing a sacred boundary.