New Agers should help Indians

New Agers Need to Put Money Where Their Mouths Are to Free Leonard Peltier

By Corine FairbanksThe American Indian Movement has been fighting the New Age movement for over 30 years now. This business supports a billion dollar industry. For all of the rhetoric that these New Age predators use, such as: "love and light," and "be the change you want the world to be," they execute strategic marketing plans to profits from selling and desecrating our ceremonies, sacred objects, and medicines.

These New Agers are white collar pimps that prostitute our spirituality and culture to whoever has a buck. In doing so, they export it all over the world, yet never once take a moment to identify American Indians as real people with real needs and real life and death issues.

Then there are costume companies and clothing companies that capitalize on cheap imitations of American Indian regalia. You know the kind I am talking about, the "Native Poca-Hottie" Halloween costumes that non-Natives seemed determined to where. Even famous actresses wearing cheap mock war bonnets think it is chic and sexy.

Here again, how much of the profits go back to Native people?

All of the billions of dollars generated by both of the above business ventures and nothing comes back to our Native communities. None of their profits comes back to our food and Social Service programs, veteran programs, let alone to Leonard Peltier and his defense committee or legal fund. Our communities are in need of funding; whether they be in an urban setting struggling with poverty, or with our relatives still back in our homelands, some of them freezing to death because they cannot afford to heat their homes.

We need to pin these "pimps" to the wall! We need to make them accountable to the appropriation and exploitation of our culture and spirituality--and make them hurt where it can only hurt with these predators--through their wallet. At the end of the day, how many of them laugh at us while counting change from all the sales they have made?Comment:  Corine is a friend of mine.

For more on New Agers, see James Ray's Sacsayhuaman Video and Shaman in A Gifted Man.