Legend of Rainbow Warriors
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Since the early 1970s, a legend of Rainbow Warriors inspired some environmentalists in the United States with a belief that their movement is the fulfillment of a Native American prophecy. Whether the prophecy originated from a Native American person may only be known by the author who first published the account, but the modern source of the legend is a 1962 book titled Warriors of the Rainbow by William Willoya and Vinson Brown from Naturegraph Publishers. Brown, who is attributed with research supporting chapters on Hopi prophecies, is the founder and owner of Naturegraph Publishers. [1][2][3]
A Prentice Hall book, The Greenpeace Story, traces the popular spread of a legend of a Hopi prophecy told among environmentally minded nomads through Greenpeace plankholder Bob Hunter, who got a copy of the Warriors of the Rainbow in 1969. Hunter, who died May 5, 2005 was the author of many of the myths told among Greenpeace supporters, and the first president of Greenpeace. The Economist, in Hunter's obituary, has him reportedly receiving from a wandering dulcimer maker in 1969 a copy of the book in which the legend of a Hopi prophecy was first published. By Hunter's account, he first read the book in 1971 during a voyage on rough seas of the North Pacific where the name Greenpeace was also conceived. Hunter was reportedly 1/32 Kwakiutl Indian, but intensely proud of that part of his heritage. Hunter is attributed with giving Greenpeace its bent toward mischievous protest.[4][5][6]
Lelanie Fuller Stone attributes a very similar prophecy to a Cree woman. [7][8] Stone, who says she is a non-enrolled person of Cherokee descent, reports a Cree woman told her
There will come a time when the Earth grows sick and when it does a tribe will gather from all the cultures of the World who believe in deed and not words. They will work to heal it...they will be known as the "Warriors of the Rainbow."
In numerous retellings of Stone's account, the Cree woman was her grandmother, but Stone does not make such an assertion.[9] Folklore shared among attendees at Rainbow gatherings has held since the earliest years of those gatherings that they are fulfillments of a Native American prophecy, similar in verse to that told both by the Naturegraph book and by Stone. The legend also inspired the name two of Greenpeace's ships, named Rainbow Warrior and used in environmental-protection protests by Greenpeace.
In 1987, the legend of the Warriors of the Rainbow inspired an achievement-based award system within the New Zealand-based Spirit of the Sword Youth Initiative.
References
Willoya, William, and Vinson Brown. Warriors of the Rainbow: Strange and Prophetic Indian Dreams. Healdsburg, California: Naturegraph, 1962.
Dahl, Arthur. "Brown, Vinson." In Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, edited by Bron Taylor, 227. London & New York: Continuum International, 2005.
Other Resources:
Legend of the Rainbow Warriors - by Steven McFadden - 2005 edition A journalist's account of many different versions of the legend, with a focus on how the legends may apply to the present moment.
