ritual or spiritual life. For example, when White people have joined in activities protesting the building of the hydrodam on Innu land, they participated with Innu people in ceremonies and prayers which were part of the struggle. White people have also become a part of Indian community through marriages and friendship.

This is not the same as White people adopting Indian spiritual practices; rather it reflects the power of the community to adopt, to make relationship with a person. Paula Gunn Allen, Laguna Pueblo author and teacher, sums it up by saying, "You cannot do Indian spirituality without an Indian community,… it's physical and social and spiritual and they're fused together." [Jane Caputi, "Interview with Paula Gunn Allen, "Trivia 16/17, Fall 1990, p. 50.] It is our link with Native people as allies and friends which creates a spiritual relationship, rather than a spiritual rip-off.

Summary and Further Questions

If there are two things I could impress upon your hearts, I hope you will take these with you: the choice to become allies and the choice to do your own spiritual work. I hope that you might honor the desire in your hearts, the interest in things Indian, and use it to really learn about Native lives and struggles. Use it to cut through the stereotypes, find out the deeper realities, and then to use the power you have to act in solidarity with Native people. I also hope that you might trust in our ability to do our own spiritual work, trust that we can find a way to do it with each other. I ask you to believe with me that the spirit is here in our midst.

For those who have begun this journey, I would also like to offer some further questions and reflections which have emerged on this path of creating anti-racist woman-valuing earth-centered spiritualities. For this paper, I can merely give voice to some of the issues which are raised, in the hope of sparking further discussion.

THE EARTH

What does it mean for an earth-centered spirituality, that the particular land on which we live is stolen land? What about the grief of the land for her original people? Are there ways to be welcomed here? This is the land of our birth, perhaps for many generations. I believe we do belong on the earth, she is the mother of us all. But how do we live her with honor? Is it the responsibility of all of us who love this land to restore her original people?

It seems tome that the land in all her specificity – this stream, that mountain, that group of trees – not only have been stolen. She has also been kidnapped from a people who regarded land as unownable and possessed a consciousness which demanded respect, and enslaved into the hands of a people who has reduced her from "person" to "property." How can the earth be our goddess when we have made her our property? The very idea of ownership of land goes against the ethic of an earth-based spirituality. It seems to me that there are parallels her with