Bruce Granville MillerAt one point in his inquiry into the subject he was asked, “Are you
ready to lose someone in your family?” and was informed that this is
the price one must pay for pursuing this topic (Toelken 1996 , 11 ).
Participation in ecstatic experience has costs for indigenous com-
munity members as well. Some Coast Salish communities, for exam-
ple, have difficulty maintaining a Shaker church; the obligations of the
minister and the congregation in general are immense; one must par-
ticipate continually in healings, funerals, and other events. Another
example is the tribal politician I mentioned; he does not wish to en-
gage the spirit power because of the immense obligations of time and
effort that entails, and the consequent difficulty in doing his political
and economic work. The practical difficulties are considerable. One can
envision this as a sort of liminal phase that cannot be maintained.
There are implications for embracing ecstatic experience for aca-
demics out of the field as well as in it. Our university lives require us
to assume a fixed status, not a disrupted one, and to have a “univer-
sity voice,” rather than to be voiceless or wrong-voiced winter-dance
initiates. I recall the experiences of a valued colleague who is an able
learner, who has matured in the sense I mentioned earlier, and whose
embracing of an indigenous epistemology has caused her to both have
a deep cultural understanding and to be misread by university col-
leagues who devalue the effort. The disinclination of the academy to
seriously consider indigenous epistemology has implications for the
university as well as for individual scholars. There is now a broad un-
derstanding that universities and colleges are commonly hostile envi-
ronments for indigenous people, including students and professors.
Many of these people have expressed the view that the university suf-
fers the same malaise that mainstream society in general experiences,
namely, an absence of spiritual understanding of human existence
and a devotion to destructive values and practices. Fabian ( 2001 , 32 )
has suggested that there is utility in employing “passion” (the ecstatic
side of a critical approach to knowledge) in dealing with peoples who
have been subject to brutal domination and oppression. Similarly, in-
digenous scholars have suggested to me that institutions of higher ed-
ucation would likely create an environment more attractive to non-
mainstream people and academics if anthropologists and others on