He has written several new agey books based on living close to nature. Mainly influenced by Native American spirituality. As somebody who frequently has needed to feel validation from the outside, and who seeks the satisfaction of having a harmonious worldview, I am somewhat drawn to his work. However, there are certain things about it that are strange. He repeats himself several times within a book and throughout his books. And there is a vocabulary to be learned and a vision to be shared...
Does anyone have experience or thoughts about this stuff?

i am native and do beadwork and got involved with pow wow s for many years. i love them so much excet for the spirituality junk and new age stuff on the side also. my ex is an insecure person who really wanted to feel like he belonged. always outsider not by choice. went to pow wows with me and felt not accepted. he does beautiful beadwork. then he started saying that he thot he was native also. so classic. then he left meand got involved with a guy who is sposed to be teaching him the true ways. oh brother. now he says he is learnikng to be a medicine man. very hush hush about the whole thing. he had said he was a Christian when he was with me, now he says he believed in the native religion. it is so sad that people who are christians dont realikze that yhou can respect the traditions and not get into the false religion. it is really scary to me. and so sad.

I too am native. I can tell you with authority, don't go there! There is a lot of power in these types of ceremonies, etc and it isn't always of a positive nature. It may SEEM harmless enough, but you are messing with powers and principalities that are older than mankind and these plastic shaman types have no clue what they're doing. It's extremely dangerous and not at all what it seems. Also, and please don't take this wrong, but it is fact. No self respecting true medicine man would teach a non-native, period case closed. There are spiritual reasons for this. So all of these that advertise that they were taught by a genuine medicine man are false. They are false teachers of false religions and don't have the background to be doing ceremonies or teaching anything. Most medicine men won't leave the reservation, not to live anyway. If someone is teaching native spirituality off the reservation to non natives, they're a fake and should be avoided like the plague. You have no idea what you're getting yourself into messing with this stuff!

Exactly. That point is covered in several posts on this thread. One of the posts contains a URL for a statement issued by a council of Native American Elders who spoke against the commercialization of shamanism.

[board.culteducation.com]

So much has already been stolen from indigenous peoples. The very least we can do is honor their traditions by respecting their sacred places and keeping our distance so that the tribes can pass on their traditions and practice their medicine in privacy, so that, in the end, all peoples will benefit--those who participate directly in the ceremonies and those who participate by standing at a distance and honoring the boundaries by not crossing them uninvited.

Thanks, very well said! :D

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cozyquiltz
I too am native. I can tell you with authority, don't go there! There is a lot of power in these types of ceremonies, etc and it isn't always of a positive nature. It may SEEM harmless enough, but you are messing with powers and principalities that are older than mankind and these plastic shaman types have no clue what they're doing. It's extremely dangerous and not at all what it seems. Also, and please don't take this wrong, but it is fact. No self respecting true medicine man would teach a non-native, period case closed. There are spiritual reasons for this. So all of these that advertise that they were taught by a genuine medicine man are false. They are false teachers of false religions and don't have the background to be doing ceremonies or teaching anything. Most medicine men won't leave the reservation, not to live anyway. If someone is teaching native spirituality off the reservation to non natives, they're a fake and should be avoided like the plague. You have no idea what you're getting yourself into messing with this stuff!

I like and agree with some things that you said, but not all.

First, I am not native. second, I have taken some of Tom brown's classes and I appreciate them.

Where I agree with you is that the philosophies are not harmless. There is danger in following that path and Tom is very clear about this in his classes. Tom has asked students to leave his school for being too arrogant or not having enough respect.

Where I disagree with you is where you say only natives can walk this path, which seems to be what you are saying. It is the case throughout the history of humankind in numerous cultures that people often developed a seclusionist viewpoint. I disagree with that on principal. It makes no logical sense that a spiritual truth would work for one human and not work for another based on ancestry.

It is also my opinion, having read some history on this, that when the europeans arrived, the natives were open to sharing their religion with them. It's a newer idea that "white men" can't learn this. The natives didn't always feel that way, but, granted, I only know a bit of history, I could be wrong.

Finally, if you believe the story of Stalking Wolf (Tom Brown's teacher), Stalking wolf believed that white men couldn't learn his spiritual philosophy, but his visions and the spirits who came to him told him to teach white men.


I know that you will probably disagree with me, and many many people are critical of Tom Brown Jr. What I wrote above is just my opinion and my observation. It's possible that you are right and I am wrong.

What is true, about Tom Brown Jr is that he has had numerous successful tracking cases. That's documented and indisputible. He follows tracks as well as a native.

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hubert
He has written several new agey books based on living close to nature. Mainly influenced by Native American spirituality. As somebody who frequently has needed to feel validation from the outside, and who seeks the satisfaction of having a harmonious worldview, I am somewhat drawn to his work. However, there are certain things about it that are strange. He repeats himself several times within a book and throughout his books. And there is a vocabulary to be learned and a vision to be shared...
Does anyone have experience or thoughts about this stuff?

You're probably no longer surfing this site, but if you have any questions, I'd be happy to do my best to answer them. I've read most of his books and taken a handful of classes.

Not teaching the unprepared is one thing. Not teaching non-natives is rascism.

jah:

Be careful.

Accusing people of "racism" because they don't want to include outsiders in their religion is rather insulting.

Native Americans have endured enough from the "white man" without that kind of rhetoric.

It's their choice to teach who they wish to teach.

I agree, and I regreted that I didn't recognize that in my earlier post.



If you think that white men "can't / are unable to" teach native american philosophy, then I'd disagree.

But if you think that Natives should not teach whites or that most whites who claim to be able to teach the traditional philosophy have not put in the time, then that's understandable and perhaps correct. It's entirely possible that all the good native american teachers have kept their wisdom on the reservation.

I believe that Tom Brown is a good teacher and that he has tremendous respect for native american culture and tradition, but I'm hardly an expert.

If one was to take a loosly comparable example, one could look at the story of Bruce Lee and Kung Fu. As the story goes, Bruce would teach anybody, but many Chinese traditionalists felt that Kung Fu should only be taught to the Chinese. Which side was right is a matter of perspective.


One story that Tom told once at a class I attended, he was kind of talking about why Stalking Wolf picked him, and he said that even before he'd met Stalking Wolf, that he's, at the age of 7, already spent all the time he could outside, exploring what was basically undeveloped pine barrons in Southern New Jersey, and at that age he was fascinated by Native Americans and he'd rented several books from the library about them. I can imagine Tom's fascination when he met grandfather, in the middle of the pine barrons, when he knew that there were no native americans living off the land in New Jersey.

Ofcourse, some people believe that most everything that comes out of Tom Brown's mouth is a lie, so, draw your own conclusions.


As for me personally, I never had the fascination with Native Americans exactly the way Tom described his, but I related to what he was talking about. I remember, 11 years of age in the 7th grade, I was introduced to the Bushman in a 7th grade textbook and I was instantly taken with them and I'm not sure how or why I formulated this opinion, but I was instantly convinced that their way of life was better than ours. From that age of 11, into well into my 30s, I believed that native American and all (so called) primitive societies lived better lives than us modern Americans., and as a result of that, I became a social misfit. It wasn't until My 40s that I began to normalize and make a mostly normal and reasonably social impression on city dwellers.

A friend gave me the book "the tracker" by Tom Brown about 15 years ago and I was instantly taken by it, not for the native American philosophy exactly, but for the adventures Tom had in the natural world, and also, for grandfather's amazing skills, that Tom describes in detail. At the time, I had no money so taking is class was out of the question.

Some 5 years later I had a seriously bad personal crisis, and in trying to deal with it, I went to Amazon dot com and looked to see if Tom Brown had any other books and I found that he did. I bought a few more of his books, starting with "the search", and I honestly believe that those books may have saved my life - that's how deep my personal crisis was at the time.

Does this mean that Tom is not a fraud, or that his school isn't a cult? No. These things are possible, all I can say with certainty is that I was personally moved by his books and later by his classes.