Life to us is a symbol to be lived.– John Fire Lame Deer
Historical Background:
John (Fire) Lame Deer – Tahca Ushte in Lakota – (1900 or 1903 – 1976) was a Minneconjou-Lakota Sioux, born on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, although there is some uncertainty surrounding the exact date of his birth. Lame Deer was a wićaśa wakan or “medicine man.” He was a healer, a spiritual guide, and preserver of the ancient ways of the Lakota people of the American Plains.
Lame Deer’s life was transformed by a vision quest he took at sixteen years old. Alone on a hilltop for four days and nights without food or water, he beheld a vision of his great-grandfather, the original Lame Deer, old man chief of the Minneconjou, dripping with blood from where a white soldier had shot him in the chest. From this vision he knew that his great-grandfather wanted him to take his name, and that he would become a medicine man. After a rather raucous period as a young man, when he worked the rodeo circuit as a clown and became a heavy drinker, gambler, and womanizer, Lame Deer had another somewhat mystical encounter that put him back on track with his destiny. He came upon the house where the original peace pipe, given to the Lakota people by the mystical Buffalo Calf Woman, was kept. The keeper of the pipe told Lame Deer that she had been waiting for him for quite some time. This encounter led him to take his life seriously and become a true wićaśa wakan and to become a leader in the American Indian movement.
The selections below come from Lame Deer’s autobiography, Lame Deer Seeker of Visions: The Life of a Sioux Medicine Man, written with Richard Erdoes. In this reflective account of his life and the harsh circumstances confronting American Natives, Lame Deer beautifully expresses the values and perspective of the Sioux and provides a penetrating critique of modernity.
In Lame Deer’s Words:
Medicine, Good and Bad
I am a medicine man – a wićaśa wakan. “Medicine man” – that’s a white man’s word like squaw, papoose, Sioux, tomahawk – words that don’t exist in the Indian language. I wish there were better words to make clear what “medicine man” stands for, but I can’t find any, and you can’t either, so I guess medicine man will have to do. But it doesn’t convey the many different meanings that come to an Indian’s mind when you say “medicine man”…
The wićaśa wakan wants to be by himself. He want to be away from the crowd, from everyday matters. He likes to meditate, leaning against a tree or rock, feeling the earth move beneath him, feeling the weight of that big flaming sky upon him. That way he can figure things out. Closing his eyes, he sees many things clearly. What you see with your eyes shut is what counts. The wićaśa wakan loves the silence, wrapping it around himself like a blanket – a loud silence with a voice like thunder which tells him of many things. Such a man likes to be in a place where there is no sound but the humming of insects. He sits facing the west, asking for help. He talks to the plants and they answer him. He listens to the voices of the wama kaśkan – all those who move upon the earth, the animals. He is as one with them. From all living beings something flows into him all the time, and something flows from him. I don’t know where or what, but it’s there. I know.
This kind of medicine man is neither good nor bad. He lives – and that’s it, that’s enough. White people pay a preacher to be “good,” to behave himself in public, to wear a collar, to keep away from certain kinds of women. But nobody pays an Indian medicine man to be good, to behave himself and act respectable. The wićaśa wakan just acts like himself. He has been given the freedom – the freedom of a tree or bird. That freedom can be beautiful or ugly; it doesn’t matter much.
Medicine men – the herb healers as well as our holy men – all have their own personal ways of acting according to their visions. The Great Spirit wants people to be different. He makes a person love a particular animal, tree, or herb. He makes people feel drawn to certain favorite spots on this earth where they experience a special sense of well-being, saying to themselves, “That’s a spot which makes me happy, where I belong”…
Even animals of the same kind – two deer, two owls – will behave differently from each other… I have studied many plants. The leaves of one plant, on the same stem – none is exactly alike. On all the earth there is not one leaf that is exactly like another. The Great Spirit likes it that way. He only sketches out the path of life roughly for all the creatures on earth, shows them where to go, where to arrive at, but leaves them to find their own way to get there. He wants them to act independently according to their nature, to the urges in each of them.
If Wakan Tanka [The Great Spirit] likes the plants, the animals, even little mice and bugs, to do this, how much more will he abhor people being alike, doing the same thing, getting up at the same time, putting on the same store-bought clothes, riding the same subway, working in the same office at the same job with their eyes on the same clock and, worst of all, thinking alike all the time. All creatures exist for a purpose. Even an ant knows what that purpose is – not with its brain, but somehow it knows. Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist. They don’t use their brains and they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, or their dreams. They don’t use the knowledge the spirit has put into every one of them; they are not even aware of this, and so they stumble along blindly on the road to nowhere – a paved highway which they themselves bulldoze and make smooth so that they can get faster to the big, empty whole which they’ll find at the end, waiting to swallow them up. It’s a quick, comfortable superhighway, but I know where it leads to. I have seen it. I’ve been there in my vision and it makes me shudder to think about…
The Green Frog Skin
The green frog skin – that’s what I call a dollar bill. In our attitude toward it lies the biggest difference between Indians and whites… The green frog skin – that was what the fight [The Battle of Little Bighorn] was all about. The gold of the Black Hills, the gold in every clump of grass. Each day you can see ranch hands riding over this land. They have a bagful of grain hanging from their saddle horns, and whenever they see a prairie-dog hole they toss a handful of oats in it, like a kind little old lady feeding the pigeons in one of your city parks. Only the oats for the prairie dogs are poisoned with strychnine. What happens to the prairie dog after he has eaten this grain is not a pleasant thing to watch. The prairie dogs are poisoned, because they eat grass. A thousand of them eat up as much grass in a year as a cow. So if the rancher can kill that many prairie dogs he can run one more head of cattle, make a little more money. When he looks at a prairie dog he only sees a green frog skin getting away from him.
For the white man each blade of grass or spring of water has a price tag on it. And that is the trouble, because look at what happens. The bobcats and coyotes which used to feed on prairie dogs now have to go after a stray lamb or a crippled calf. The rancher calls the pest-control officer to kill these animals. This man shoots some rabbits and puts them out as bait with a piece of wood stuck in them That stick has an explosive charge which shoots some cyanide into the mouth of the coyote who tugs at it. The officer has been trained to be careful. He puts a printed warning on each stick reading, “Danger, Explosive, Poison!” The trouble is that our dogs can’t read, and some of our children can’t either.
And the prairie becomes a thing without life – no more prairie dogs, no more badgers, foxes, coyotes. The big birds of prey used to feed on prairie dogs, too. So you hardly see an eagle these days. The bald eagle is your symbol. You see him on your money, but your money is killing him. When a people start killing off their own symbols they are in a bad way.
The Sioux have a name for white men. They call them wsicun – fat-takers. It is a good name, because you have taken the fat of the land. But it does not seem to have agreed with you. Right now you don’t look so healthy – overweight, yes, but not healthy. Americans are bred like stuffed geese – to be consumers, not human beings. The moment they stop consuming and buying, this frog-skin world has no more use for them. They have become frogs themselves… Fat-taking is a bad thing even for the taker. It is especially bad for Indians who are forced to live in this frog-skin world which they did not make and for which they have no use…
You put “In God We Trust” on your money. I’m glad you left the Great Spirit out of it. What you want to use your God for is your own business. I tried to show you that the green frog skin is something that keeps whites and Indians apart. But even a medicine man like myself has to have some money, because you force me to live in your make-believe world where I can’t get along without it. Which means that I have to be two persons living in two different worlds. I don’t like it, but I can’t help it…As long I still had some of the horses and cattle left which my father had given me, I had no thought about earning money… Then the day came when I swapped or sold the last of my livestock. I was almost happy. Now I no longer had any property to take care of, to tie me down. Now I could be what I wanted – a real Sioux, an ikce wicasa, a common, wild, natural human being. How such a creature could survive in a frog-skin land was something I would have to find out. I thought I’d do some hunting to keep meat on my table. I found out that I needed a hunting license if I wanted to go after deer or antelope. The idea of an Indian having to pay for a fancy piece of paper in order to be allowed to hunt on his own land to feed his own, genuine, red man’s belly seemed like a bad joke to me. It made me laugh, but it also made me angry. The same people who had killed off the buffalo, who were chopping up the last wild horses into dog food, now were telling me that I was a danger to wildlife preservation if I wanted some red meat on my table, that I had to be regulated. Why couldn’t I be satisfied with the starches they were handing out to us? They told me I should be flattered, that having to buy a license put me up there on the same level with the white gentleman hunter. I answered, through an interpreter, that I was no goddam sportsman, just a hungry, common, natural Indian who did not like fancy stamped papers and knew of only one way he could use them…
No matter how much I hated it I had to face up to the fact that I would have to earn some money. I was like many other full-bloods. I didn’t want a steady job in an office or factory. I thought myself too good for that, not because I was stuck up but simply because any human being is too good for that kind of no-life, even white people. I trained myself to need and want as little as could be so that I wouldn’t have to work except when I felt like it…
The Circle and the Square
What do you see here, my friend? Just an ordinary cooking pot, black with soot and full of dents.
- is standing on the fire on top of that old wood stove, and the water bubbles and moves the lid as the white steam rises to the ceiling. Inside the pot is boiling water, chunks of meat with bone and fat, plenty of potatoes.
- doesn’t seem to have a message, that old pot, and I guess you don’t give it a thought. Except the soup smells good and reminds you that you are hungry….But I’m an Indian. I think about ordinary, common things like this pot. The bubbling water comes from the rain cloud. It represents the sky. The fire comes from the sun which warms us all – men, animals, trees. The meat stands for the four-legged creatures, our animal brothers, who gave of themselves so that we should live. The steam is living breath. It was water; now it goes up to the sky, becomes a cloud again. These things are sacred. Looking at the pot full of good soup, I am thinking how, in this simple manner, Wakan Tanka takes care of me. We Sioux spend a lot of time thinking about everyday things, which in our mind are mixed up with the spiritual. We see in the world around us many symbols that teach us the meaning of life. We have a saying that the white man sees so little, he must see with only one eye. We see a lot that you no longer notice. You could notice if you wanted to, but you are usually too busy. We Indians live in a world of symbols and images where the spiritual and the commonplace are one. To you symbols are just words, spoken or written in a book. To us they are part of nature, part of ourselves – the earth, the sun, the wind and the rain, stones, trees, animals, and even little insects like ants and grasshoppers. We try to understand them not with the head but with the heart, and we need no more than a hint to give us meaning.
What to you seems commonplace to us appears wondrous through symbolism. This is funny, because we don’t even have a word for symbolism, yet we are all wrapped up in it. You have the word, but that is all…
You know, it always makes me laugh when I hear young white kids speak of some people as “squares” or “straights” – old people hardened in their ways, in their minds, in their hearts. They don’t even have to be old. You can be an “old square” at eighteen. Anyway, calling these people “squares” – an Indian could have thought it up. To our way of thinking the Indians’ symbol is the circle, the hoop. Nature wants things to be round. The bodies of human beings and animals have no corners. With us the circle stand for the togetherness of people who sit with one another around the campfire, relatives and friends united in peace while the pipe passes from hand to hand. The camp in which every tipi had its place was also a ring. The tipi was a ring in which people sat in a circle and all the families in the village were in turn circles within a larger circle, part of the larger hoop which was the seven campfires of the Sioux, representing one nation. The nation was only a part of the universe, in itself circular and made of the earth, which is round, of the sun, which is round, of the stars which are round. The moon, the horizon, the rainbow – circles within circles, with no beginning and no end.
To us this is beautiful and fitting, symbol of reality at the same time, expressing the harmony of life and nature. Our circle is timeless, flowing; it is new life emerging from death – life winning out over death.
The white man’s symbol is the square. Square is his house, his office buildings with walls that separate people from one another. Square is the door which keeps strangers out, the dollar bill, the jail. Square are the white man’s gadgets – boxes, boxes, boxes and more boxes – TV sets, radios, washing machines, computers, cars. These all have corners and sharp edges – points in time, white man’s time, with appointments, time clocks and rush hours – that’s what the corners mean to me. You become a prisoner inside all these boxes.
More and more young white people want to stop being “straight” and “square” and try to become more round, join our circle. That is good.
From birth to death we Indians are enfolded in symbols as in a blanket. An infant’s cradle board is covered with designs to ensure a happy, healthy life for the child. The moccasins of the dead have their soles beaded in a certain way to ease the journey to the hereafter…Every day in my life I see symbols in the shape of certain roots or branches. I read messages in the stones. I pay special attention to them, because I am a Yuwipi man [a distinctive type of medicine man who works with stones] and that is my work. But I am not the only one. Many Indians do this…
Words too are symbols and convey great powers, especially names. Not Charles, Dick and George. There’s not much power in those. But Red Cloud, Black Elk, Whirlwind, Two Moons, Lame Deer – these names have a relationship to the Great Spirit. Each Indian name has a story behind it, a vision, a quest for dreams. We receive great gifts from the source of a name; it links us to nature, to the animal nations. It gives power. You can lean on a name, get strength from it. It is a special name for you and you alone – not a Dick, George, Charles kind of thing…
To a white man symbols are just that: pleasant things to speculate about, to toy with in your mind. To us they are much, much more. Life to us is a symbol to be lived.1
Analysis:
Good and Bad
Lame Deer contends that there is no literal way to translate wićaśa wakan into the English language. This is in part because it is a general term that covers a variety of roles within the Sioux culture. It includes the healer, the spiritual guide, the herbalist, the leader of spiritual ceremonies and more. Some suggest that the best translation is “holy man,” but Lame deer opts for the traditional, though greatly inadequate term “medicine man.” One reason why even “holy man” is misleading is due to modern associations with the term. Typically, when we think of a “holy” person, we image a sort of saint who is above sin. Or, in the case of a priest or pastor, one is at least striving to avoid the temptation to sin wherever it arises. But the wićaśa wakan, he tells us, is “neither good nor bad.” Instead of striving to be good, he strives to simply be himself, and that is all that the community expects of him. For example, you may have been surprised to read that Lame Deer was a drinker, a gambler, a womanizer, etc. Lame Deer sees no contradiction between these acts and his role as a medicine man. In fact, he sees these experiences as a valuable tool. He says that a medicine man shouldn’t strive to be a saint. Instead, “he should experience and feel all the ups and downs, the despair and joy, the magic and the reality, the courage and the fear, of his people. He should be able to sink as low as a bug, or soar as high as an eagle. Unless he can experience both, he is no good as a medicine man.” 2
This outlook is both practical and spiritual. It is practical, because in order to help the community, one must be able to relate and connect deeply to the community and its trials and tribulations. It is spiritual, because it reflects a greater metaphysical outlook. Lame Deer contends that neither nature nor the Great Spirit are perfect. To strive for perfection is to be out of touch with the way things are. “The world couldn’t stand that perfection,” he says.3 From this perspective, the saint’s attempt to be without sin is an attempt to rise above nature – to contradict the way in which the Great Spirit wants things to be. The bottom line is that all people including the wićaśa wakan, ought to simply be themselves instead of striving to be something that they are not. None of us are pure, nor were we meant to be.
To be clear, this is not to condone or encourage all the sorts of behavior that Lame Deer engaged in over his life. Alcoholism, for example, is a huge problem among American Indians.4 Lame Deer reflects on the reasons for this:
They drink to forget, I think, to forget the great days when this land was ours and when it was beautiful, without highways, billboards, fences and factories. They try to forget the pitiful shacks and rusting trailers which are their homes. They try to forget that they are treated like children…We drink to forget that there is nothing worthwhile for a man to do, nothing that would bring honor or make him feel good inside. There are only a handful of jobs [in or by the reservation] for a few thousand people. These are all Government jobs, tribal or federal. You have to be a good house Indian, an Uncle Tomahawk, a real apple – red on the outside, white on the inside – to get a job like this. You have to behave yourself, and never talk back, to keep it. If you have such a job, you drink to forget what kind of person it has made of you. If you don’t have it, you drink because there’s nothing to look forward to but a few weeks of spud-picking, if you are lucky. You drink because you don’t live; you just exist. That may be enough for some people; it’s not enough for us.5
The fact that he was a medicine man did not exempt Lame Deer from this sort of life (or “no-life” as he sometimes calls it) and the sense of hopelessness that it tends to leave. And he found it no more shameful for him to go on a drinking binge than it would be for anyone else in the community.
The emphasis on the importance of simply being yourself also figures into Lame Deer’s critique of modernity. In a powerful analogy he states that no two leaves even on the same plant are exactly alike. The Great Spirit must like it that way – each thing in the universe fulfilling its own unique and individual nature. So he finds it appalling that people today are “putting on the same store-bought clothes, riding the same subway, working in the same office at the same job with their eyes on the same clock and, worst of all, thinking alike all the time.” There are many forces that have led to increased conformity in our society. Three of the most significant are advertising, career specialization, and globalization. Two hundred years ago, an American Indian could live their whole life without seeing as single advertisement for anything. Today it is estimated that the typical child sees about 20,000 thirty second television commercials each year. These ads send strong messages (the strongest they can muster) about what we should want, what we should wear, how we should smell, and how we should act. The power of advertising is so strong and so pervasive, it is impossible to imagine what a modern society would be like without it.6 Consider also, that the American Indian had to be a “jack of all trades.” In any given week one might be a hunter, a fisherman, a butcher, a home builder, a trader, a craftsman a cook, and so on. In contrast, contemporary “modern” culture is all about specialization. Most people tend to spend 40+ hours every week at the same kind of task – and in some occupations this task can be incredibly narrow, such as assembling the same part of a product on an assembly line or reviewing the same government form, one after another, for hours on end. And to top it off, we find that even the cultural diversity that developed through being part of a particular tribe, city, or nation has been rubbed out by globalization. While television and the internet are bringing people together with many positive effects, these shared influences, shared products, and shared advertising are also creating more conformity, as people all around the globe increasingly eat alike, dress alike, and think alike.
Green Frog Skins
Lame Deer contends that the biggest difference between Indians and whites pertains to the role of money in their lives. From his perspective, money is at the root of most of the evils in the world. Arguably, the most significant of these evils is the destruction and exploitation of nature. From large scale desecration, such blowing the very tops off of the Appalachian Mountains to get at the coal seams beneath, the slashing and burning of the rainforests to create more pastureland for cattle, to the extermination of the prairie dogs as well as their natural predators, nature has become simply a means to a monetary end. As Lame Deer poignantly puts it, when the cowboy looks at a prairie dog he only sees “a green frog skin getting away from him.”.The destruction of nature is just one aspect of what we might describe as “the monetization of everything.” Today, we see land as money, water as money, animals as money and people as money. The list of things that can be bought and sold seems to be growing on a daily basis. The Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel describes this in terms of a shift from having a “market economy” to being a “market society.” For example, he notes that if you go to jail in Santa Barbara California, you can purchase a “cell upgrade” for $90.00 a night. Or, suppose you want to sit in on an important congressional hearing or Supreme Court case, but don’t want to spend hours in line. There are now companies that hire out “line standers” who can do the waiting for you. In many cities we are even paying children to do well in school. Some schools in Dallas Texas for example, pay kids $2.00 for each book that they read.7 As a college professor, I get paid by the number of courses I teach. But due to the fact that some professors have lower enrollments, or higher student drop-out rates, some administrators would like to move toward a “per student” compensation system. One has to wonder whether this would encourage professors to see students as green frog skins, and their courses as simply additional objects for sale in our market society. The primary relationship becomes an exchange of goods for services, rather than true mentorship, or the shared engagement in a quest for a deeper understanding of the world around us.
The Circle and the Square
Lame Deer’s world is infused with a deeper meaning that lies behind even the most common-place things. “From birth to death,” he tells us, “we Indians are enfolded in symbols as in a blanket.”8
Modern culture is not without its symbols, but it certainly seems to encourage a more literal way of thinking. But perhaps even more important than the scarcity of our symbols is how our symbolic meaning is infused. For example, the cowboy who sees the prairie dogs as a “dollar bills slipping away”, is thinking symbolically. But his symbolism is destroying the local ecosystem and his own spirit in the process. Not only is this kind of symbolism destructive, it is reductive. It reduces the complex (the biological ecosystem of the Great Plains) to something simple (dollar bills). Compare this to the symbolic interpretation that Lame Deer gives to the pot of stew. He sees it as more than a simple cooking pot filled with meat and broth. By seeing it symbolically as the sun, the clouds, breath, his animal brothers, and as Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, caring for him, his symbols expand his universe and makes it richer, more complex, more nourishing, and more spiritual. In his world there is much more than meets the eye – not less. He encourages us to consider that perhaps we do not take our symbols as seriously as we should. There is a sad irony in the fact that American environmental policies nearly led to the extinction of the Bald Eagle, the very symbol of our nation.
- tells us that a key symbol for the Sioux is the circle, while for the white man it is the square. Each symbol both reflects and enforces a way of seeing and living within the world. For the Lakota, the circle represents nature. To live within the framework of a circle is natural for humans, since they are a part of nature. Lakota homes (teepees) were round, and set up within the larger circle of their encampment. The focal point of the community, the campfire, is also round, as people sit in a circle to tell stories, to remember their ancestors, to sing, and to pray. It is easy to see how a circle fosters community. Everyone can be seen and heard regardless of their location within the circle. There is no privileged place – no “front” to which all eyes constantly point. Compare this to our classrooms, in which every student faces the front, toward the teacher, the one with authority. Or consider our living rooms, where most, if not all seats point in a singular direction – toward the television set.
- in regards to architecture and social spaces, the circle represents togetherness and equality, the “white man’s symbol,” “the square,” embodies efficiency. Squares make maximal use of space. If a piece of land is carved up into square parcels, every inch can be bought and sold with nothing wasted. School classrooms can be side by side with no space lost between them. Desks can be lined up in rows to fit more students and to make efficient pathways — again maximizing the use of space.
The Indian way comes at a cost when viewed in terms of efficiency, but our love of the square seems to carry a loss in terms of community relationships. I’ve seen this first-hand in the classroom. I used to teach in rooms with individual desks that could be moved into a circle whenever I wanted. And, I quite often found that the circular format tended to increase student discussion. Lately I’ve been teaching in rooms with rectangular tables, all facing forward, that are quite difficult to move. The impact from this was immediately apparent. The fact that all eyes are constantly positioned to the front, (to me, the authority figure, standing in the privileged position) often harms the learning process and impacts the sense of a classroom “community” and a shared engagement in learning.
The circle and the square can also be applied to our conceptions of time. Indians tend to visualize time as cyclical. It is a circle (or spiral) of returning seasons, of phases of the moon, and of rituals that follow these seasons and phases; of life moving toward death, and back to life again (as the tree that falls in the forest that becomes the fertilizing nutrients for future trees.) In contrast, modern cultures tend to see time as linear – constantly marching ahead to the drum of progress. We envision “blocks” of time, to be filled in order to maximize efficiency and profit. We put great importance on being “on time” – which Indians tend to regard as a beguiling notion, with no correspondence to reality.9 Again both have costs and benefits. Linear time enhances productivity. It enables us to set up conference calls, to book flights months in advance, and so on. But the cost again seems to hit our personal relationships. We never seem to have enough time to talk with friends, to spend with family, or to walk in nature.
In closing we should note that seeing the world symbolically in the manner that Lame Deer does, ultimately creates a sense of connectedness, not only with other people, but with the natural world. In his epilogue to Lame Deer Seeker of Visions, Richard Erodes puts the point nicely:
“Some of my Indian friends tend to look upon life as a long series of symbolic images forming definite, harmonic patterns. They see man not as a separate entity viewed against a background, but as part of the earth upon which he walks. They see him as a kind of plant, almost, which extends roots and fibers in a number of directions, taking nourishment from different sources, exchanging juices with other plants, being perhaps eaten by some other creature and thereby becoming something else in the process, a living organism gaining strength from his surroundings as well as from certain powers inherent in nature. They see man as a small but essential particle of the universe, linked to all other living things by a number of what – for lack of a better word – I would describe as unseen but strongly perceived umbilical cords. It is difficult to look in this way upon a white man living in a city apartment.”10
Notes:
- All of the passages above are taken from Lame Deer Seeker of Visions:The Life of a Sioux Medicine Man by John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erodes, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1972.
- Ibid., pg. 79.
- Ibid.
- The use of the term “Indian” to refer to the indigenous peoples of North America is considered “politically incorrect” by some, because, of course, they are not from India. Some have pushed for the use of “Native American” as a replacement. I’ve chosen to use “Indian” nevertheless, because many (perhaps the majority) of the present day Lakota seem to prefer it.
- Ibid., pg. 77.
- New York Times columnist Louise Story notes: “Supermarket eggs have been stamped with the names of CBS television shows. Subway turnstiles bear messages from Geico auto insurance. Chinese food cartons promote Continental Airways.US Airways is selling ads on motion sickness bags. And the trays used in airport security lines have been hawking Rolodexes.”http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/business/media/15everywhere.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
- These examples are all described in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of the Market by Michael Sandel, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2012.
- Lame Deer 1972, pg. 113.
- For more on these contrasting conceptions of time, see The Primal Mind, the classic documentary by Jamake Highwater, Wellspring Media 1984.
- Lame Deer 1972, pg. 274