Suggestions for Selecting a Research Topic for your Family Participatory Paper

Integrated Seminar 101

Key: There are four key considerations in selecting a topic for your participatory paper. 1. that you have a personal and/or academic interest in exploring the sacred journey, 2. that there is ample resources available locally upon which you can base your research, i.e., at the library, 3. that you select a topic that is covered during the seminar, any Australian or North American Indigenous community,  and 4. begin early in your search for a topic (this doesn’t help you now, however).

I put together a web Resource Page specifically for the purpose of helping you select a topic.  Please use it, there are wonderful and critical print as well as web resources for you to access. Its at the Resources pages.

Let me provide a few examples of how I would go about selecting a topic.

1.  Perhaps you have a passion for outdoor activities (camping, fishing, hiking, etc.) or you are a environmental science, natural resources, agricultural science, or wildlife resources major, consider a ceremony that encompasses a pilgrimage to a distant location, traveling over a distinct landscape.

You might consider a pilgrimage, such as that to the Medicine Wheel in the Big Horn Mountains.  Other possible pilgrimage topics could include the Huichol Indian of Northern Mexico who we saw briefly in a video earlier this semester, and who take pilgrimages to gather the sacred peyote plant. A critical source is Barbara Myerhoff’s Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians.

Closer to home would be Coeur d’Alene, Crow, or Lakota Sioux vision question rituals, in which men and women sought to fast to seek a guardian spirit. Our own Landscape Traveled by Coyote and Crane is a great start for your research, if you focus on the vision quest. I would have you also look at Joseph Brown’s The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux, or from my first book, The World of the Crow, for a Crow example of the vision quest.

2.  Perhaps you have a passion for the arts (visual, musical, theatrical, performing) or you are a architecture, music, theater arts, or studio arts major, consider a ceremony that focuses on intricate ritual performance and elaborate art, music and dance.

I would encourage you strongly consider doing something in the Balinese community, and a key resource would be Stephan Lansing’s The Balinese. There excellent discussion on the arts, and on the rituals of the Balinese in this book.  We have a great video on this community, entitled Three Worlds of the Balinese.  You could select to do a specific rite of passage relating to a marriage or even funeral. You could select to present on the Wayang Shadow Puppet performances, or the village temple festivals. You could also consider the world renewal ceremony of Eka Dasa Rudra.  Remember we have the excellent video on this subject, so if you missed it earlier, you can still check it out.

Another local option would be for you to consider the Crow, Lakota Sioux or Coeur d’Alene world renewal ceremony.  For the Jump Dance, consider Landscape Traveled by Coyote and Crane, for the Coeur d’Alene option, and for the Sun Dance, consider Joseph Brown’s The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux, for the Sioux example, or from my, The World of the Crow, for a Crow example, along with a wonder visual presentation of the entire Crow Sun Dance linked from the Resource page for this course.

3.  Another consideration would be if you are interested in literary expressions, such as the oral traditions, such as those involving the American Indian Coyote and other Animal People.

I can see a wonderful story developing around a young girl or boy and her or his interactions with and lessons from a grandparent. You could consider the importance of the oral literature, and explain how they are told or recited, and respected, and develop an interesting story around this setting.

Now this is information discussed in Stores that Make the World and Landscape Traveled by Coyote and Crane, in the instance of the Crow and Coeur d’Alene Indians and other Indigenous communities, and we have an awesome web module developed by the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in which can actually see and listen to tribal elders tell their oral traditions and talk about them and their meaning from their perspective. Some of the stories are hilarious (i.e., the Coyote stories). See the Coeur d'Alene Module web module. 

4. Types of Ceremonies  to Consider - Rites of Passage, World Renewal, and Pilgrimage:

Some general types of ceremonies to consider include all forms of individual rites of passage, from birth-related rituals and naming ceremonies, to girls and boys puberty rituals, to vision quests and initiations into religious orders, to wedding and marriage ceremonies, to healing and health-related ceremonies, to funeral and death rituals.

Also collective ceremonies, such as those in which groups of people journey to sacred place, which can be either spatially or temporally oriented. Spatial journeys are illustrated in pilgrimages involving travel to a "sacred place," such as to the Medicine Wheel in the Bighorn Mountains. Temporal journeys are illustrated in the act of storytelling and in certain communal rituals, often referred to as "world renewal ceremonies," in which time is suspended and participants return to "the perennial time of the creation."