How the Plains Indians Can Help Defeat Modern Anxiety

And the need for rituals that teach the lesson of death

Self-portrait with fiddling Death. Arnold Böcklin. 1872

“Humans used to foresee their owns deaths. I ended that.”¹ — Aeschylus

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I have a core theory. It goes as follows: a void was left open when the ancestral forms of hardship that molded our minds and bodies were removed from our day to day lives. How we choose to fill this ancestral-hardship-shaped hole is the fateful event of our time. Every essay I have written is a riff on one aspect of this core, including today’s.

My hunch is that a lack of rituals has much to do with the anxiety – a chronic worry about undefined events in the future – that is on the rise. I do not refer to fear, which is fear of some thing, but anxiety, which is fear of no thing.² It is of interest that the major coming-of-age milestones at present – driving at sixteen, voting and smoking at eighteen, drinking alcohol at twenty-one – are as much about gaining a bit of autonomy as they are about self-destruction.

Let us look to the Mandan Indians of the Great Plains and their ritual process, the Okipa, as a basis for comparison.³ It was not gentle.

The Lone Man approaches from the barren prairie bluffs in the West. His skin is painted with white clay, his robe is of white wolf skin, his headdress is of raven skin, and in his left hand he carries his ceremonial pipe. He walks past the waiting Mandan warriors with their faces painted black and enters his medicine lodge. Egg-white buffalo and human skulls are hung from pillars and green willow-boughs and wild sage are spread on the floor.

Fifty young boys with skin painted red, yellow, or white are led inside the lodge and sit along its circular walls. They have not had calories, water, or sleep for four days. They are anxious.

Two warriors stand in the center of the lodge: one holds a scalping knife, the other wooden splints. One youth steps forward. The skin of each shoulder is pinched taut, the blade – serrated to increase the pain – is punched through this flap, and a wooden splint slid through the opening. Ropes are placed around the splints and men waiting on the roof hoist the youth until he is dangling above the earth by the skin of his shoulders. While the victim dangles, the warriors also cut and splint his upper arms, elbows, and thighs. Heavy buffalo skulls are then hung from each of these splints.

The warriors begin spinning the youth. Shimmering beads of bloody red sweat fly off his body as he spins faster and faster. He breaks into screams. Eventually, he loses consciousness. The warriors carefully observe. Is he awake? Is he twitching? Neither a tremor nor a blink must remain. They do not let him down until he is “entirely dead.”

Once “dead,” the youth is then lowered to the herb-scented floor, “until he gets strength to rise and move himself.” He and other youths are then led out of the lodge to the village center, buffalo skulls still dangling off their splints. The entire tribe forms a large circle on the packed dirt. Two warriors stand on either side of each youth and wrap leather thongs around his wrists for the Last Race. The men begin sprinting to drums and chants. At first, adrenaline fuels the blood and water starved body of the youth. When hormones run out and legs finally fail, the warriors drag the youth by the leather thongs around his wrists. His face is in the dirt. The buffalo skulls yank at the wooden splints in his arms and legs. The race does not end until all wooden splints are torn off. As the youth is dragged round and round in a cloud of dirt, blood, cheers, moans, and tears, warriors will jump on the skulls, tearing the flesh and removing one splint at a time.

The last splint is torn away. The youth, once again, is “dead.” The law demands that “there is no person, not a relation or a chief of the tribe, who is allowed, or who would dare, to step forward to offer an aiding hand, even to save a life.” It is not a boy who rises from this mangled mass of red-soaked clay, dirt, and skin, but a man.  

My mind lit up when I first read this and went, “Yes, yes, yes.” But why, given its brutality? Is my hunch correct? Is something essential to human experience lost without these rituals? What does their absence reveal about the State? About anxiety?

What then is the Mandan ritual? My feeling is that the Mandan’s understood the human condition better than the State; they knew that while suffering is inevitable in life, how to handle that suffering requires instruction. So, they built a program. They crammed the greatest amount of suffering possible into four meatless, waterless, and sleepless days of anxiety, clay, sweat, spit, blood, tears, and cortisol, and they did so in order to teach the lesson of death.

Biologically, life and death are separate. Psychologically, life and death are one. The Mandan youths fought until they conquered every protest in their minds; they fought until blackout; the significant point is that they fought until they psychologically died. The Mandan took death in their hands and made of it a counter-weight: What is a fractured femur compared to death? What is a slanderous comment compared to death? What is some unknown, uncontrollable, and unreal future threat compared to death? And this too: what is death but that which they have already accepted with all their being? Death is no longer a cause for dread but an old friend; a giver of perspective; it is at first a rest from a maxed-out ritual, and in the end a rest from a maxed-out life.

Said another way, the ritual itself is not the point. The buffalo skulls, too, are not the point. It is legitimate to assume that life is the ritual and that each trial is merely a buffalo skull. The youth learns what is not under his control. What is pain? A buffalo skull. What is pleasure? A buffalo skull. What is status, desire, aversion, past, future, life, and death? Paltry buffalo skulls. He therefore earns a sense of awe for the only thing that is under his control during his short tenure on this earth: each moment of his existence. What use, then, for anxiety?

The ethnographer wrote that as he watched these youths undergo the splinting, “several of them, seeing me make sketches, beckoned me to look at their faces, which I watched through all this horrid operation, without being able to detect anything but the pleasantest smiles as they looked me in the eye, while I could hear the knife rip through the flesh, and feel enough of it myself, to start involuntary and uncontrollable tears over my cheeks.” I refuse to believe his were tears of revulsion or pity. I believe they were tears of awe at the raw power of the human soul when it no longer gives a damn about the past or the future and has attained a solemn devotion to the current second of life no matter what it will bring; that can smile at its own shredded and bloodied skin in the same way it smiles at the red-fingered sky above the bluffs at dusk. 

The “savages” of yore built rituals so that we may know ourselves and our role in the cosmos. I believe in my bones that the State is automatically to be distrusted on two accounts: it banished ancestral hardship and left open a void, and then it created laws that merely delay the self-destruction that results when a deeply meaningful understanding of death is untaught. It is a paradox that both the noblest deed and blackest sin of the State was to free us from hardship. But it is here that we may turn water into wine. Neither warriors with tomahawks nor lawmakers of the State must dictate our rituals any longer. It is now up to us. It is here that we may realize the modern world is an opportunity to unite the best of ancient Mandan wisdom with the comforts of the State.  

I do not believe we need to replicate this four day rite of death, but I do believe we can learn from it. In the State, we witness a nail-biting anxiety over the way things are that fills the empty void. In the pre-state, we witness awe not about the way things are, but that they are, and thus we find no void.⁴ What then? Is the solution as simple as paying less attention to the way things are, and then deeply and silently contemplating that they are? Is it as simple as stopping what we are doing from time to time and reminding ourselves that this second may be our last?

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1. Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. Line 373.

2. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Dread. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957 

3. Catlin, George (1842). Letters and Notes on the Customs and Manners of the North American Indians. All quotes and information on the Mandan’s and the Okipa are from Catlin, who observed them firsthand. He wanted to paint and study Native American tribes before they were, as he said, obliterated by “the whiskey, the small-pox, and the bayonet.”

4. Yalom, Irvin D. Existential Psychotherapy. Basic Books, 1980. Yalom cites Heidegger Being and Time where I got the inspiration.