Biography
(1920 - 2000)
The foremost authority among traditional authors on the traditions of
the Native Americans, Joseph Brown, died from Alzheimer's disease on
September 19 at his home in Stevensville, Montana after a protracted
illness. Cared for by his wife of 48 years and his four children, he
remained in his beautiful home amidst the majesty of the mountain ranges
nearby as the disease gradually wore out his brain and sturdy body.
Born in Connecticut, Brown studied at Bowden and Haverford Colleges and
later at Stanford University where he received his master's degree in
anthropology. After many years of teaching, he returned to formal studies
and received his doctorate in the history of religions and anthropology
from the University of Stockholm, concentrating on the culture of the
Natives of North America.
It was during the Second World War that Brown became familiar with the
works of Coomaraswamy and later Guenon and Schuon. This discovery led to
his adoption of the traditional perspective and his meeting later with
Schuon to whom he became closely devoted resulting in his embracing the
Sufi tradition while deepening his study of other traditions particularly
the Native American. Brown was to teach and travel in many places in
addition to the reservations of the Souix and other tribes of the Western
regions of America. for some years he taught in Sedona, Arizona, spent a
year in research and study in Morocco,k and later became a professor at
Indiana university where he established the first Native American
religious studies program. In 1972, he accepted an appointment in the
department of religious studies at the University of Montana where he was
to remain until his retirement in 1989. He was a founding member of the
board of directors of the foundation for Traditional Studies which was
established in 1984. Joseph Brown was an excellent teacher wherever he
went and was deeply admired by his sutdents. His presentation of the
Native American traditions was so authentic that tribal elders would often
send their most qualified students to study their own traditoin with him.
A seminal event in the life of Brown was his meeting with the Lakota
Sioux holy man, Black Elk, who realized the exceptional spiritual
qualities of the young white man who had come to seek and understand the
traditional wisdom of the Sioux. Black Elk adopted him as his son and
Brown was given the name "Chanumpa Yuha mani" (meaning he who
walks with the Sacred Pipe). Such a close relationship developed between
the two tht Black Elk decided to reveal the inner meaning of the seven
sacred rites of the tribe to Brown. The oral wisdom transmitted to the
young seeker in the cold winters of the Dakotas was dutifully recoreded
and published later by him as The Sacred Pipe, a Work that gained
international renown for Brown. The book has since appeared in many
editions and been translated into several languages including French, for
which Schuon wrote a long and majesterial introduction. In fact, Brown was
the link between Black Elk and Schuon who was himself so deeply attracted
to the Native American traditions. For years it was Brown who through
letters and journeys to Lausanne would speak of the Native Americans to
Schuon and would create possibilities of exchange between Schuon and that
world, exchanges that were to play an important role in the last period of
the latters' life.
From the early 1950's when he met Black Elk until he became debilitated
by Alzheimer's disease, Brown wrote continuously on traditional themes and
especially on the Native American traditions. His later books include The
Spiritual Legacy of the American Indians and Animals of the Soul. A work
entitled Teaching Spiritus: Understanding Native American Religious
Traditions is now in press and should appear soon. These works represent
profound studies on many aspects of the North American native traditions,
studies based on the one hand on universal traditional principles and on
the other on first hand knowledge of these traditions as they still
survive in the American West.
Joseph Brown was a person of gentle character blessed with a keen sense
of the sacred wherever it might be found, first of all of course in
orthodox religions themselves and secondly in the world fo virgin nature
and sacred art. he loved the outdorrs, the prairies, deserts, mountains,
and forests, as well as animals both wild and domesticated. he was
especially fond of horses and bred Arabians on his Montana ranch while
teaching at the University of Montana nearby. There was something in his
character of a Sioux warrier and Arab Bedouin combined with a gentlemanly
Anglo-Saxon disposition. As his faculties became gradually atrophied, he
could no longer read and so his wife and children would read traditional
and sacred texts and especially poetry to him. Later, even this was not
possible for him to hear but he still enjoyed music and his last outward
contact with the world areound him was through traditional Arabic, Indian,
and Western music which would be played for him regularly. And so his soul
entered the ocean of silence after bathing in the melodies and harmonies
of traditional music. It seems that he had become ready to listen to what
Plato called silent music heard only by the sages.
After his death after nearly a decade of illness was surely a release
for him and it was a consolation for those near him to see that his
suffering finally came to an end. But for the world of traditional
thought, his death is in any case a great loss. 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
traditaional 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 knowledg of the spiritual
legacy of the first inhabitants of this continent.
-Seyyed Hossein Nasr
