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 war that many participants and camp leaders became aware of only when they emerged from the dust and reconnected to social media. As virtual documentation of the Burn and ethnic diversity on the playa increases, such altercations over cultural boundaries seem likely to impact the way the event is perceived.
In the view of many participants, Burning Man exists as an alternate reality, separated from social conventions, where play and provocation performatively intertwine. In 1990, when participants first entered the Black Rock Desert, they “joined hands and stepped over a line drawn in the desert’s surface signifying their collective entry into another zone of experience.”44 That line signified the separation of the playa from conventional social norms and parameters. Today, many Burners seek to maintain that line and challenge critics to leave politics in the default world, retaining the playa as a zone of unrestrained Radical Self-Expression. Many view Burning Man as an artistic space and vigorously defend the right of artists to express themselves without regulation. Ideally, Burning Man Project places regulations on art only when that art is imminently dangerous to participants.45 However, this utopian vision remains only tenuously detached from the disciplining of cultural boundaries that occurs in the default world. As increasing numbers of people of color attend Burning Man, Radical Self-Expression that they find to be racist may be a deterrent to their involvement, thus limiting the potential for the Radical Inclusion of nonwhite participants; both are listed among Burning Man’s 10 Principles.
In 2018 at Burning Man, I participated in a tea ceremony called Tea and Turbans at the Appropriated Dragon camp in the French Quarter Village. I walked up the red stairs of the Chinese-styled pagoda to the top-floor sitting area, where I was greeted by two white women in turbans. They directed me to select a cloth bundle from a table piled high with them in multiple colors and then to find a partner and take a seat at one of the café tables. In time, a Middle Eastern man greeted us, led the small crowd in a lesson on how to wrap our turbans around our heads in Moroccan fashion, and narrated the symbolism of the traditional tea service. We then enjoyed a tea service of three pours each, and I enjoyed an intimate conversation with my new friend Nomad, augmented by the caffeinated accelerations of my sensory perception. It was a magical playa moment of newfound connection and Immediacy (another one of the 10 Principles) as we talked about paranormal events, yoga, travel, Bali, and Maori mythology. I lost track of time as we sat together, and a photographer snapped a picture of me at ease, gazing across the playa in my turban (see figure 6).
6. Author portrait taken during a Tea and Turbans tea ceremony, Burning Man, 2017 (photo by Bootleg).
When the ceremony was over, we took a group picture of all of us in turbans, and then I went back to the Black Rock Bakery to check on operations. When I entered the bakery, I encountered a group of six or seven of our campers, all of whom were Asian American. Immediately, I made a joke of having “gotten turbaned” and stripped my head of the turban. They all laughed but seemed relieved at my having called to the fore the questionable politics of the Tea and Turbans experience. Later, sitting in front of the bakery during a community meal, I spoke with Kevin, one of our Chinese American campers, who mentioned that initially he had been eating his meal on the steps of the Appropriated Dragon before he had become viscerally aware of the fraught optics of such a scene and had moved over to sit in front of the bakery, which has a traditional French Quarter New Orleans façade. We spoke a bit about the politics of cultural appropriation and the Appropriated Dragon. He thought that the Appropriated Dragon was an interesting idea but was “not smart enough” in its confrontation with the debates concerning cultural appropriation to be an effective performance art piece.46
Bacchus, one of the innovators behind the Appropriated Dragon, traces the concept back to his ideal of Burning Man as a city, Black Rock City. He envisioned the great cities of the world as having ethnic neighborhoods and sought to create a kind of Chinatown,
