Joseph Epes Brown

Joseph Epes Brown (1920-2000) was a renowned scholar, author, and teacher of Native American Traditions and World Religions. He believed that all great world religions are paths that lead ultimately to the same summit, and dedicated his life to bringing Native American Religions into the canon of World Religions. Through his teaching, writing, and friendships he served as a vital bridge, promoting understanding between Native American and White cultures.

Joseph Brown was born in Ridgefield Connecticut, September 9, 1920. He spent his youth in Aiken, South Carolina and Southwest Harbor, Maine, where he enjoyed sailing, hunting, and horsemanship. It was in Maine that he was first exposed to Native American cultures and as a young boy made friendships with the Wabanaki, who taught him how to fish and hunt. These friendships were the beginning of his lifelong interest in American Indian spirituality.

As a young boy he attended boarding school in Aiken, South Carolina, and Asheville, North Carolina. A rebellious student, he kept his hunting gun hidden under his mattress and his bird dog at a nearby farm. He would spend his weekends hunting and roaming the countryside with his dog. During his early teens, his father developed tuberculosis and was sent to a sanatorium in New Mexico. Brown would spend his summer vacations there, riding and exploring. This was his first exposure to the American West, where he would later return to spend the majority of his life. His father died of tuberculosis when Joseph Brown was seventeen.

His undergraduate college education began at Bowdoin College (B.A. in Literature) and then continued at Haverford College (B.A. in Philosophy and Art History). He then postponed his graduate study and took his first teaching post at Aiken Preparatory School in South Carolina, teaching English.

During World War II, Brown chose to become a conscientious objector. In the early part of the war he washed bottles in a drab malaria research lab/morgue in New York City. Seeking to feed his spirit during this dark time he studied the sacred forms of different religions. To learn more fully about Christianity he took Gregorian chant lessons; and to learn more fully about Islam he befriended Yemeni sailors at the Brooklyn docks. They would dance hadrats (sacred Islamic chants and dances) in the holds of the ships. Later during the war Brown was shipped out to Nevada and California in a sealed railroad car, where he was relieved to perform civilian duty packing mules, clearing trails, and surveying the depth of the snow pack for the Forest Service.

After the war, in the late 1940s, Brown outfitted an old truck into living quarters and traveled west to seek out the Lakota Sioux holy man, Black Elk. He had read about this holy man in Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks and was determined to meet him. He found Black Elk and his family in the fall of 1947, living in tents, picking potatoes in Nebraska. Black Elk, nearly blind, was expecting him, and invited Joseph to return with him to their home in Manderson, South Dakota. He lived with Black Elk and his family on the Pine Ridge Reservation for several years, during which time Black Elk adopted him as a son.  He was given the Sioux name Chanumpa Yuha Mani or “He Who Walks with the Sacred Pipe”. During that time he recorded Black Elk’s account of the seven rites of the Oglala Sioux, later published as the well-known book The Sacred Pipe, an enduring and seminal record of Plains Indian religious expression, still in print today and translated into eight languages.

A recent article by Michael O. Fitzgerald, titledNew Light on Black Elk and the Sacred Pipe,” was published in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. The Journal itself summarizes the article in this way: “This article provides new information that will oblige scholars to reassess the legacy of Black Elk (1863–1950), including excerpts from recently discovered unpublished letters written by Joseph Epes Brown while he was living with the Lakota holy man (1947–49). The author provides insights into Brown’s personal philosophy and a clearer context for the editorial role he played in recording The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux. Brown’s letters also help to illuminate Black Elk’s role in attempting to restore the sacred ‘religion of the Pipe’ among the Sioux and to clarify controversies that include Black Elk’s dual participation in Catholicism.” For readers of Perennialist writings, it is noteworthy that Fitzgerald’s article also includes important new insight into Frithjof Schuon’s role, as a close associate of Brown, in the chain of events leading to the recording of Black Elk’s teachings on the Seven Rites.

In addition to The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian, and The Sacred Pipe, Brown has also authored Animals of the Soul: Sacred Animals of the Oglala Sioux and Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions.

In 1952, Brown married Swiss dancer and artist Elenita Roulet in Switzerland. He returned to the United States with his new bride where they lived on the Maine coast while Brown prepared The Sacred Pipe for publication and Elenita studied pottery. The couple then moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he pursued a Master’s degree in Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, and his wife studied art and Flamenco dance. Disillusioned by the dry and scientific anthropological approach to Native American cultures during that time, Brown eventually left graduate school. The couple then taught at Verde Valley School, a groundbreaking alternative private high school in Sedona, Arizona, where children Alexander and Marina were born. During a sabbatical, Brown lived in Safi, Morocco, where he taught English and studied Arabic, and where daughter Malika was born. After Morocco the couple returned to Verde Valley School where their fourth child, Veronica, was born.

Brown completed his M.A. in Anthropology at Stanford University in 1966. Joseph and Elenita taught at Prescott College in Arizona prior to moving to Sweden in 1969, where he received a Doctorate in Anthropology and History of Religions from the University of Stockholm under the tutelage of renowned scholar Åke Hultkrantz. His close relationship with Hultkrantz was to last for the remainder of his life.

In 1970, Brown created the first Native American Religious Studies program in the United States at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he remodeled a farm in the wooded countryside in order to have his beloved horses close at hand. A natural horseman, he had a lifelong love and knowledge of horses. In the fall of 1972, he joined the Religious Studies faculty at the University of Montana, Missoula, where he taught until his retirement in 1989. On his ranch outside of Missoula at the foot of the Bitterroot Mountains he raised and trained Arabian horses. His love and respect for the American buffalo (bison) resulted in the establishment of a small breeding herd of bison at the ranch. His daughter, Malika B. Coston, continues his horsemanship legacy today at the family ranch.

Brown was well loved and respected by his students. In his quiet, eclectic, and dignified manner he combined humor, storytelling, and the arts into his teaching. The reciprocity and relatedness of all life was a major theme in his classrooms and he emulated what he taught.

During his professional teaching career, he was also contributing editor for many years to numerous publications including Parabola, The Handbook of Living Religions, and The Encyclopedia of Religion. He lectured extensively throughout the world during his career, established and chaired the first “Indigenous Religious Traditions Group” of the American Academy of Religion and was often invited to testify for Native American Tribes in court cases in defense of the Freedom of Religion Act. He was a sought-after book reviewer and consultant, advisor and consultant for film, and advisor to American Indian prisoners.

In 1984 Brown was a founding director of the Foundation for Traditional Studies, a non-profit foundation dedicated to “preserving and strengthening the religious traditions which have been transmitted through the ages and which have so much to teach contemporary society”. The mission statement for the foundation’s journal, Sophia, states that it is “the foremost journal in the field of traditional studies in the English language”. Brown was a director of the foundation and an editorial board member of the journal for the remainder of his life.

Joseph Brown passed away in 2000, at the age of 80, at his home in Stevensville after a long illness. He was surrounded and loved by his wife, four children, four grandchildren, many four-leggeds, and the Bitterroot Mountains.

His close friend, the eminent scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, wrote a tribute to Joseph Brown in Sophia shortly after Brown’s death that concluded with this opinion: “America has not produced another scholar of the Native American traditions who combined in himself, as did Joseph Brown, profound spiritual and intellectual insight and traditional understanding, the deepest empathy for those traditions, nobility of character and generosity towards his students and everyone else who wanted to benefit from his unrivalled knowledge of the spiritual legacy of the first inhabitants of this continent.”

From Joseph Epes Brown, The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian: Commemorative Edition with Letters While Living with Black Elk, edited by Marina Brown Weatherly, Elenita Brown, and Michael Fitzgerald (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2007), pp. 127-130.