Offering Smoke: The Sacred Pipe and Native American Religion

This book offers an excellent compendium of information about the "calumet", sacred pipe, or "peace pipe", however you call it. It covers the history of this sacred object from antiquity until the past century, with excellent maps, drawings and color photographs. It will satisfy the needs of all, from the casual reader to the serious scholar. The only topic not covered is the techniques of making a pipe from the Catlinite or other pipestone.It has an extensive bibliography for further research and a very inclusive index.For what it's worth, I find this book an excellent purchase and it will remain on my reference shelf for some time to come.

The book seems to be assembled from what may have originally been a number of different "papers" on the subject. As a result, there is a lot of repetition, but that and the typos here and there and the mislabeled illustrations are a minor issue. The importance of this book is its validation of what Native America has said all along...the "pipe" has been with us for a long while, and it is almost as universal in Native North America as is the ceremonial/spiritual use of tobacco. The author says he hopes his research on the pipe will make "leaders" in the U.S. and Canada reconsider their positions on the use of the pipe in Native American spirituality, as those positions relate to its use (or repression of its use) in various contexts. As a reader, and pipe carrier, I too hope that it has the effect of allowing the use of the pipe in prisons, schools, etc. to increase. Recently I read that Canada is allowing Native citizens to take an oath in the court room using the pipe. Maybe this book has in some way, had an influence on this change for the better. The author primarily focuses on pipes with detachable stems, that are/have been used in ceremonial contexts. He suggests that archaeological evidence indicates that the use of the pipe may be older than the institutional religion that by and large tried to stamp out its use. His discussion of Native cosmology was also of interest.