SOURCE: "Frank Waters and the Native American Consciousness," in Western American Literature, Vol. 9, No. 1, May, 1974, pp. 33-44.

[In this essay, the critics examine Waters's exploration of the rational and intuitive modes of consciousness in his novels and nonfiction, particularly as they relate to cultural conflicts between Native Americans and whites.]

Several years ago during a televised interview series conducted by John R. Milton, the distinguished Southwestern writer Frank Waters was asked why he wrote so much about Indians. He replied simply:

I can answer only that I have lived with Indians all of my life and they interest me. And I probably justify it rationally by saying that, after all, we are all interested in our relationship to our land, to our own earth, and the Indians are indigenous to this continent. The Indian is much different from our European white, so I think that we have a great deal to learn from their expression of it in their own idiom. [John R. Milton, editor, Conversations with Frank Waters, 1971]

While the Native American has indeed fascinated many of our writers from the beginning of Anglo settlement, few have had such a consuming passion as Frank Waters to penetrate the essential difference between the old and new American cultures, to express the native experience in terms approximating its own idiom, and to discover its significance for Anglo Americans. We find that the dominating force behind much of Waters' work, which now stands at nearly two-score books and a greater number of articles and pamphlets, has been his continuing engagement with the elusive quality of Indian consciousness. Above all Waters has sought for a grand philosophic principle by which the native consciousness can be described and related to its Anglo American counterpart. [In a footnote, the critics add: "In the introduction to his penetrating Southwest Writers Series pamphlet, Frank Waters (1969), Martin Bucco observed that Waters' books are all part of 'his imaginative struggle to reconcile through mystic monism such dualities as intuition-reason, unconscious-conscious, eternal-transient, mystical-technological, and red man-white man.'"]

In his attempt to formulate a new theory of consciousness, Waters might appear a co-worker with such currently popular writers as Charles Reich, Theodore Roszak, Marshall McLuhan, Rollo May and Alan Watts, or even a disciple of such notable philosophers as [Martin] Buber, [Martin] Heidegger, and [Paul] Tillich. Waters has read many of these men, but his explorations are uniquely his own, having their roots in his original investigations both of the aboriginal American past and the contemporary American Southwest. Much as did Roger Williams and Henry Thoreau in earlier periods of Anglo American settlement, Waters seems to have become absorbed with Native American culture first as a subject intrinsically worthy of study and then for the light it sheds, often by contrast, upon the continuing struggle by Anglo Americans for adaptation to this formidable land. Both Williams and Thoreau managed a tour de force of inversion by using native culture as a referent against which the successes and deficiencies of Anglo settlement could be measured. In fact, Williams not only found in Narragansett society the basis for his stringent critique of the Massachusetts Bay theocracy, he subsequently incorporated Indian practices such as the tribal form of land ownership and usage when he established the more democratic commonwealth of Rhode Island. [Ralph Waldo] Emerson also recognized that adaptation to the American landscape required a fundamental change in the transplanted European consciousness. Knowing nothing of Native American mysticism, he pondered the possibility of fusing Oriental transcendentalism with Western idealism. And [Walt] Whitman culminated for Anglo American culture in the nineteenth century the quest for a native, transcendent consciousness which would democratize all American peoples, relating them to each other and the land in a fundamentally new and organic way. Surely it is a wonderful irony that Whitman never got far enough west to discover that transcendentalism has been indigenous to the Americas for centuries.

The possibility of a fundamental revolution in consciousness has continued to attract some of our most important Anglo writers, perhaps most notably D. H. Lawrence, who, coincidentally, lived at Taos before Waters. But unlike that irascible genius, who sought salvation from the industrial state through repudiation of the rationalistic component of consciousness and by assertion of the primeval blood instinct, Waters has attempted to reconcile these polar realms into a higher form of consciousness which would both redeem Anglo civilization from its "rational, willful alienation from life," and also insure the survival of Native Americans in this increasingly technocratic world.

One can discern early indications of Waters' attempt to discover a meeting place for the instinctive and rationalistic modes of consciousness. Both his massive mining trilogy of the thirties [The Wild Earth's Nobility, Below Grass Roots, and The Dust Within the Rock] and the next novel, People of the Valley, demark the tension between these disparate views, but no bridge between cultures is attempted, except for March Cable in the trilogy, though one might be tempted to argue that the mixed Spanish American and Indian, Maria, the heroine of the latter work, herself embodies the fusion. But we see little evidence that this powerful matriarch is ever touched by any but her native Picuris Indian legacy. She remains indomitably aloof from her Spanish American and Anglo neighbors, preferring an encompassing sense of mystic oneness with her valley.

However, in the succeeding novel, The Man Who Killed the Deer, Waters has given us, perhaps unintentionally, a classic account of the difficulties inherent in cultural fusion. Nonetheless this splendid evocation of Pueblo culture and consciousness knows no peer in the tradition of the Indian novel, except possibly N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn. In The Man Who Killed the Deer, the clash between cultures is fully internalized within the protagonist Martiniano, whose Indian personality is initially bifurcated by his part arrogant Apache, part sensitive Pueblo heritage. Then, forced to attend a white school, presumably run by the ethnocentric Bureau of Indian Affairs, Martiniano is deprived of the most significant part of his Native acculturation, religious instruction in a kiva. Instead he is inculcated with the positivistic mentality and technological orientation of the dominant white culture. Upon his return to the pueblo, Martiniano opposes his newly acquired egotism and empiricism to the communal and mystical ways of the elders. He refuses to take part in a tribal rain dance, preferring to spend his time cleaning his irrigation ditches, as any rational man would do. Thus suspended between the two cultures, liberated from Pueblo superstition but thereby alienated from the ceremonial life of his people, Martiniano is forced to work out painfully his personal salvation. Ultimately he completely abandons white psychology and values, achieving mystical accord with his people, with nature outside and his own nature within.

Martiniano's spiritual odyssey not only illustrates Waters' perception that the fundamental disparity between the two cultures resides within their differently premised consciousnesses, but it implies that the Native American can borrow successfully only those cultural elements which do not disrupt his mystical sense of community with his traditions and nature. For example, it takes Martiniano some time to understand that tribal resistance to technological innovation is functional. While to the Anglo mind, digging more irrigation ditches and employing mechanical threshers may seem impeccably reasonable, the tribal elders well appreciated that the use of technology beyond a certain point would be counterproductive to communal unity and, even, to the sensitive balance of nature in this arid region.

Although Martiniano does not bridge the cultural chasm, his closest friend, the outwardly traditional Palemon, offers him an intriguing solution early in the novel, suggesting that the essential differences between the two cultures are matters of form, not substance. According to Palemon, it makes no difference whether one chooses the Anglo, Native, or his individual way, so long as he acquires the faith to live harmoniously with it. Therein alone freedom lies. But this compelling argument neatly side-steps the problem of how one fuses harmoniously elements from disparate cultures and, instead, raises the question if the form and substance of life can be so easily divided.

Through the character of Rodolfo Byers, one of Waters' ubiquitous and mythopoetic traders, the obverse of Martiniano's problem is explored. Byers, who clearly understands the substance of Indian life, contemptuously dismisses the bulk of academic ethnology as either bogus information or pedantry concerned so exclusively with the form of Indian life that its spiritual nature is ignored. As a psychological mestizo, Byers opines that the source of conflict is rooted even deeper than consciousness, extending "down to the tissues, nerves, integuments and bone structure, the chemical composition of the blood-stream, in the very rhythm of life." Of the two cultures, he clearly prefers the Indian because of its mystic awareness and nonexploitative reverence for man and nature. Yet Byers pessimistically predicts the Indian's doom: "There can be no oases in the desert of ever-shifting time, no idyllic glades of primitive culture in the forest of mankind, no ivory towers of thought…. These pueblos, these reservations must sometime pass away." Though the whites will ultimately take over, Byers reflects, their victory will be Pyrrhic unless they "learn from these people … the simple and monstrous truth of mankind's solidarity with all that breathes and does not breathe, all that has lived and shall live again upon the unfathomed breast of the earth we trod so lightly, beneath the stars that glimmer less brightly but more enduringly than our own brief lives." Beneath this fustian, Faulknerian prose the message is starkly clear. Anglo Americans have yet to discover spiritual America, lodged as it is within the mystic consciousness of Native transcendentalism. Nor does Byers' heightened awareness seem adequate to the task of reconciling the Indian's mystic reverence for all life forms with the Anglo's assumption of the right to manipulate all non-human (and possibly all nonwhite human) resources of the planet to its own ends. Thus, philosophically speaking, the novel ends in a bit of an impasse.

Waters' next volume on Native Americans, Masked Gods, makes a frontal assault upon some of the perplexities raised by the preceding novel. As a study of Pueblo and Navaho ceremonialism, Masked Gods adds to the Waters canon the philosophic underpinnings of the Anglo-Native American confrontation. Waters first attempts an appraisal of the objective quality of the two cultures, observing that "the Indians were communal, obdurate to change, nonindividualistic, and hence not competitive enough to meet the challenge of the Whites. Although they have originated five-sevenths of the agricultural wealth of the entire world today, they were not adaptative enough to keep abreast of industrial developments as did their white neighbors." On the other hand, Waters believes "nor could anything have held back the progress of the Anglos with their lusty individualism, Yankee wit and mechanical genius." More to the point, however, is the subjective record of the two cultures. To evaluate this, Waters advances the hypothesis that both individuals and societies follow a parallel evolutionary pattern through successively more advanced levels of development. However, since each level is characterized by some profound conflict, it must be resolved before progress to the next stage of development is possible. For example, the typical conflict on the individual level in Anglo-European society has long been between instinct and ego. Likewise, on the level of culture and race, the equivalent conflict occurs but it is now expressed as the economic and political struggle between Anglo-European culture and those such as the Indian, which it seeks to dominate. Put simply, imperialism is egotism raised from the individual to the cultural level. The corollary to this theory of inevitable conflict is Waters' assertion that if one polar force wins on either level, the result is equally disastrous. "If the instincts win, the individual disintegrates morally and psychologically. If the conscious ego wins, his life is impoverished to sterility." Likewise, for civilizations, successful domination by either component of consciousness holds the same perils. Conceived in these terms, individual and cultural conflict are the norm, and comprise the precondition for obeying the evolutionary imperative to rise to a higher level of consciousness. Obviously, then, survival for individuals and civilizations depends upon successful integration of oppositional psychic forces.

Masked Gods supplies abundant evidence that some Native Americans intuitively grasp these truths. Specifically, Indian ceremonialism is shown to be fundamentally dedicated to creating an emergent consciousness capable of reconciling the cosmic dualities of man-nature, the macrocosmic unknown and microcosmic known, and the inner and outer worlds. Waters surmises that the mental faculty able to unite the disparate qualities of instinct and rationality is intuition. In Pueblo Indian society, he observes, kiva training is directed to awakening this aspect of mind which intuitively "grasps cognizance of the ordered universes of within and without, their relationship to one another, and its own enduring place in the whole." This description of Indian consciousness in formation considerably qualifies Waters' earlier and rather reductionistic picture of Native Americans as dominantly instinctual. In fact, if the Native Americans indeed synthesize ceremonially the dualities of instinct and rationality, one wonders if it is not the Anglos who are behind on the evolutionary spiral towards the higher consciousness.

The strength of Masked Gods lies first in its highly specific characterization of the differences between the two divergent aspects of consciousness, particularly in the realm of religion and philosophy; and secondly in its imaginative attempt to synthesize them by borrowing from [Albert] Einstein's famous unified field theory, which successfully demonstrated that the two opposite, but complementary, forces of repulsion and attraction within the atom create a unified field. Thus matter comes into being, with its dynamic potential for release of immense energy. To Waters, Einstein's equation representing the atomic unified field, E = MC², is a generative idea, suggesting that there exists for human consciousness a latent psychic force which can combine mystic and rationalistic awareness within a unified, harmonious field.

While this splendid extension represents a quantum leap in understanding, the precise nature and origin of the unifying psychic factor are left for future works, though Waters here suggests that it will be born by enduring the conflict between the "deep-rooted, opposite and irreconcilable dualities of man's nature … without seeking to escape it by repressing either the instincts or the conscious ego." According to him, modern psychiatry affirms that when psychic pain becomes too great, "a solution will develop spontaneously in the depths of the unconscious."

Turning to Eastern mysticism, as he so often does, Waters predicts that the evolutionary Road of Life will be found to follow the pattern prescribed therein. Conceived in these terms, contemporary Western man is presently in the third stage of consciousness, with the stage of perceiving the fourth-dimensional time-space continuum lying ahead. There time will be mastered—time past and time future are all contained within time present, as T. S. Eliot observed in the Four Quartets. After encompassing total awareness of his individual existence, man will then be able to move to the next stage, which is recalling the entire collective consciousness of his species—the latter concept an adumbration of [Carl] Jung's famous postulate. The last stage leads to the merging with the undifferentiated cosmic life force the perfected consciousness of mankind.

Thus, for Waters, the ultimate contribution of Native American culture resides within the medium of its elaborately conceived, but fundamentally simple, ceremonialism which testifies that the universal yin and yang of instinct and reason are ultimately harmonious. However, like Byers' own attempted fusion of the two cultures, that of the Native Americans is also incomplete. They, conversely to Anglo Europeans, have explored the reaches of instinctive wisdom, but not the possibilities of rationalism. Masked Gods therefore points out the direction of the answer to Martiniano's attempted synthesis and advances an hypothetical solution based upon Einstein's unified field theory. But the verification of the theory has again been left for later work.

In the interval between novels, Waters also completed another monumental ethnographic enterprise, the collection (in collaboration with Oswald White Bear Fredericks) of Hopi creation myths and other religious beliefs published as Book of the Hopi. This Hopi Bible records the evolution of the tribe from its original settlement of the continent to its present dire relationships with the white world and the neighboring Navaho. In his transcription of these ancient Hopi legends of their psycho-social development, Waters uncovers myriad testimonies to support his contention that a common evolutionary road binds all mankind together in an ascending spiral of emerging consciousness. From this elevated perspective, he is moved to comment upon the necessity for both cultures to obey the imperative for continuing psychic growth. While Native Americans have in the past achieved substantial spiritual well-being, they now need to develop more respect for the value and necessity of material well-being. And predictably the Anglo world, already more than successful in the latter realm, must replenish the source of its spiritual life. At the very least, the Book of the Hopi is, itself, as Martin Bucco put it, "a consciousness-expanding resource." And it represents, for Frank Waters, a prelude to a further emergence of cross-cultural insight.

While the collaboration of Book of the Hopi was underway, Waters recorded some of his experiences and later reflections upon their meaning. These essays and others were finally collected in Pumpkin Seed Point though the important "Two Views of Nature: White and Indian" was published separately in 1964. The burden of this piece, as the title indicates, is another comparative analysis of the two cultures, this time through the lens of their contrasting views of nature. In the Hopi myth of their tribal emergence, which symbolizes "the emergence of consciousness from the great pool of the unconscious," Waters finds a fructifying metaphor for the limits upon man after achieving rational consciousness. For the obligation to the unconscious, with its primordial past, remains and must be continually celebrated to acknowledge man's common origin in the life force. Appreciation of this truth is what distinguishes the Hopi from his Anglo neighbor who regards himself apart from, and superior to, the other life forms, which he falsely divides into animate and inanimate. And of course, this sense of alienation provides Waters with the essential explanation for the contrastingly rapacious conquest by the Christian-European who regarded the new world as a treasure-house ripe for immediate and total exploitation. Likewise, Waters considers Western technology as an extension of the same mentality and believes that it carries its own seeds of disaster, for its end effects likely are psychic and ecological depletion.

Nonetheless, from this contrasting portraiture, Waters takes the middle ground that neither the extrovert view held by Anglos nor the introvert one of Native Americans can be exclusively correct. Furthermore, he asserts that both cultures stand at crossroads. The Hopis cannot remain in the primitive past nor move into the sterility of Western technocracy. On the other hand, Western civilization cannot abandon its hard-won consciousness and retreat into unconsciousness. Drawing from the Hopi myth of emergence to a fifth world, Waters counsels the white world to investigate inner space wherein the kachina spirits envisioned by the Hopi await to catalyze the release of psychic energy. Both cultures, he affirms, are bound together by "the same unfounded belief in the mysterious continuity of life that will raise us to a level on which we will see reconciled in fuller perspective the opposite and complimentary [sic] sides of our common coin."

While this essay provides the clearest explanation thus far of the differing sources of these two modes of consciousness, its originality lies in the assertion that these apparently polar perspectives are complementary. And in his next and latest novel, The Woman at Otowi Crossing, we encounter a most stimulating fictive attempt to explore the nature of that complementary relationship.

Unlike Martiniano in The Man Who Killed the Deer, however, the protagonist assaying cultural bridging is both Anglo and feminine—all the better to represent the other side of the coin, we suppose. Helen Chalmers, as did her real life model, keeps a tearoom at the geographical and cultural crossroads near Los Alamos where atomic scientists are juxtaposed with stolid natives, such as the ancient Pueblo, Facundo, who becomes Helen's spiritual advisor. Though the novel brings together a multiplicity of now familiar dualities in an unusual display of technical artifice, it is the psychic evolution of Helen Chalmers, cast in the form hypothesized in Masked Gods, which provides the primary integrative pattern.

Helen's awakening to the possibility of a higher form of consciousness was initially spurred by her dissatisfaction with an empty marriage back East. Thus her rejection of the American East and subsequent travel to the West, the land of the Native American, parallels her psychic journey. Though Helen responds with joy to her first explosion of expanded consciousness, in which she glimpses the complete pattern of the universe, her progress towards complete satori-like enlightenment is not easy. But sustained by the unspoken support of the mystic cacique, Facundo, she achieves the perspective of timelessness, proof that she has emerged into the fourth phase of psychic evolution wherein, according to Masked Gods, "through imagination and dreams [one] enters this unconscious realm of the fourth dimensional past and future." In her Secret Journal Helen writes: "There is no such thing as time as we know it. The entire contents of all space and time co-exist in every infinite and eternal moment. It is an illusion that we experience them in a chronological sequence of 'time.'" Thus Helen has found within herself a field of consciousness which heals the split between her conscious and unconscious mind.

Before she can fully emerge to the next level, however, she has to overcome her most central fear, the loss of all sense of individual reality. This perhaps is the core fear of the Western psyche and, in Waters' terms, the main hindrance to attaining race and cosmic consciousness, the last two levels of mystic awareness. But once Helen is freed from her egocentricity, she is rewarded with a dazzling entry into the highest consciousness:

"That one great unity of all creation, imbued with one consciousness and enfused with one power, of which everything in the universe was an embodied part. Before its irreducible reality her illusions of temporal time, or individual separateness, vanished. There was no 'dead' matter. Everything was alive, differentiated not in kind but only in the degree of sentiency with which it reflected this all-pervading consciousness in the ascent from mineral to man. Each cell, each atom and solar system repeated in its constant movement the same great in-breathing and out-breathing rhythm of the whole, the pulse of life itself."

Thus Helen joins Martiniano and Maria in the joy of oneness with the cosmic life force.

Some readers might object to the overtones of didacticism in The Woman at Otowi Crossing; nonetheless its philosophic burden gives the Waters canon a satisfying completeness. Also, this work not only renders the mystic experience intelligible to the Anglo American perspective, it gathers into the frame of one novel most of those cosmic and earthly dualities which have fascinated the author for decades. If Helen's experiences do not verify the existence of that unified field of psychic energy posited in earlier works, there likely is little more Waters can or would care to do, having nearly exhausted the media of the novel and ethnography.

Without doubt, Frank Waters is our most profound chronicler, both in fiction and nonfiction, of the American Southwest. As a philosopher of mysticism, he naturally will have his admirers and detractors; however, even the most rationalistic of the latter would not want to fault the extraordinary reach of his ambition to bridge the psychic gap between two vastly disparate cultures. And it is quite possible that Frank Waters has discovered from his study of the Native American mind that component of consciousness long missing from the Anglo American tradition. Conversely, he has made it equally clear what the penalty might be should we continue to neglect the spiritual resources of our indigenous cultures. Finally, the universality of his concerns is underscored when we compare his conclusions with those of the eminent European philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who has warned that unless Western civilization learns to integrate meditative with rationalistic thinking, it is surely doomed. In the light of Waters' deeply original investigations into both the old and new American ways of thinking, Heidegger's prophecy has a familiar and true ring. Yet, mystic and optimist that he is, Frank Waters himself has shown that it is not too late to learn from our first Americans.