Native American religion

SIGNIFICANCE: American Indian religions are varied, but they generally contain concepts that stress harmony and the interrelatedness of all life and existence; a wide range of activities may be considered religious, because American Indian religions are not based on the division into sacred and secular realms that is characteristic of many modern religions

TRIBES AFFECTED: Pantribal

Until relatively recently, descriptions of American Indian religions have been written from the perspective of Europeans and their American descendants, ranging from the earliest explorers and missionaries to twentieth century anthropologists. Discussions tended to be framed by a number of questions that reflected the European tradition, including whether American Indians had religion at all, what type of religion they had, and what they held sacred. Another problematic aspect to the study of American Indian religions is that there is no way to determine what American Indian religions were truly like before contact with Europeans; there is no way to recover the stories, rituals, norms of behavior, and organizational norms as they existed before they were influenced—sometimes subtly, sometimes radically—by Europeans.

Pre-Contact

The first written details of American Indian religion were recorded by French and Spanish Catholics or English Protestants. For them, “religion” meant the Christian religion, and specifically their own version of it. One either had this religion or did not. The American Indians did not. Thus, they were called pagans and were criticized for their superstitions; sometimes they were feared as agents of the devil. For these European Christians, religion dealt with God, the supernatural, an invisible world, and sacred books, rites, and people. Religion was thought to be able to move beyond ethnic or national borders without losing its validity.

They found little of this type of religion among American Indians. One reason was that there was not one single American Indian religion. There were many American Indian religions. In a sense, each tribe was its own religion; some tribes had no word or idea equivalent to the Western notion of “religion.” The concept as presented by Europeans was foreign to their way of life; the typical religious institutions, stories, and rituals of Christianity did not stand out as religiously distinct from nonreligious ones. Europeans looked for religious stories and activity which resembled their own. An American Indian’s entire life was religious: Constructing a canoe among the Nootka was a religious act, a treaty discussion among the Iroquois was religious, farming among the Hopi was a religious act, the rabbit drive among the Rappahannock was a religious act. These acts were not considered religious from the perspective of Europeans and thus they saw no religion in them. On the other hand, they heard stories which sounded like some of their own religious stories and saw rituals that seemed somewhat like theirs. These they described as the American Indian religion.

The French missionaries were most acute among the Europeans in showing respect for what they considered the religion of American Indians. The Great Spirit became God. The vision quest was viewed as the search for one’s call by God. The French saw in their versions of American Indian religions hints of the ancient Roman and Greek religions to which they wished to bring, as a complement, Catholicism.

The American Indians, however, saw little of religious import in the European way of life. The things that gave American Indians’ lives direction and purpose seemed lacking in the Europeans’ way of life. Europeans did not honor and respect equally the material and immaterial world, and they did not seek to keep a balance between their inner and outer life. They viewed the afterlife as a horrible place for those who disobeyed religious law, and they were unable to speak, chant, sing, dance, and celebrate their life without written words. The Europeans, from the American Indians' perspective, lacked coherence and direction to their life. At the same time, there were many attractive aspects to European life. Surrounded by the European way of life, of which its religion was a part, American Indian religions were overwhelmed and changed but not destroyed.

Post-Contact

From the moment of first contact, American Indian religions changed. All religions change when they encounter powerful new cultural traditions. When these religions have a written history, scholars can trace how they change. Since American Indian religions are not based on a written tradition, there is no clear idea of how much they have subtly changed in accepting European Christian ideas, items of worship, rituals, and images.

It has been suggested that many Christian American Indians kept their tribal religions alive while adopting and practicing Christianity without realizing that they were also maintaining their traditional religions—in other words they adopted the Christian view of what was “religious” and did not consider that the tribal traditions they were maintaining were, in fact, religious ones. Christianity never considered, for example, making a canoe to be religious; therefore, European Christianity had nothing “religious” to say about it. Many aspects of American Indian religions were retained because the nature of American Indian religion itself is dynamic. An oral tradition is able to adapt and change in a way that a literate tradition is not. Because American Indian religions kept their inherent vitality and practical qualities, American Indians were many times able to accept Christianity and keep their own religion.

Animistic Approach

When cultural anthropologists have studied the religions of various cultures, they have frequently employed the views and descriptions of a field of study known as comparative religion. One example is the classification of types of religious systems, one of which is called animism. Another is the concept that religion involves the realm of the sacred, which is contrasted with the secular or profane realm of everyday life.

Animism is a theory of religious origins which claims that early humans believed that everything that exists has its own spirit or living power which governs its existence. Thus, the first humans heard the wind howl and thought that it must possess a life like the lives of animals that howl. They found themselves surrounded by spirits: rain spirits, tree spirits, pond spirits, sun and moon spirits. As small children talk to trees and flowers—and wait for an answer—so these first, primitive people did the same. The conversation among the spirits, human and otherwise, became the first prayers, rituals, rules, and institutions known as religion.

A theory of origins is nothing unless it also describes what comes afterward. What eventually came after the “primitive,” according to this theory, was the modern Western world of writing, mathematics, and science. In this classification system, since American Indians did not write and had not developed the other “advanced” aspects of European societies, they were primitive peoples. Therefore, it was assumed, they probably had a spirit religion, or animistic religion. It did not take long for a significant body of literature to develop which described the animistic world of American Indian religion. The Lakota wakan and the Algonquian manitou were understood to belong to the world of the spirits. The Pawnees of the Plains were seen to have a hierarchy of star spirits, all subservient to the great spirit in the sky, Tirawa. The Sun Dance, performed by the Plains Indians, was seen as a dance to win support from the Great Spirit. Buffalo Spirit, Caribou Spirit, and Corn Spirit were seen to direct the coming or growth of these animals or plants. There are guardian spirits won in fasting visions by youths of the Plateau and the Northeast Woodlands. The hunting tribes were described as depending on their hunters’ ability to be possessed by one or several of these spirits in order to be able to have the power of that spirit. The tribe itself was seen to have a deep relation with its guardian spirit, or totem, which appeared in the form of an animal. Many books written about American Indian religions have used the theory of animism to describe that religion.

The Sacred

Throughout most of the twentieth century, the sacred and its various manifestations were understood to be central to religious life by most scholars of religion. Although they disagreed about details, they agreed that the sacred was separate from the profane or ordinary, was a manifestation of eternal realities, was known in ways different from those by which ordinary reality was known, and existed before and after those who experienced it. From this perspective, American Indian life was surrounded by the sacred. It was manifested in all nature, in special people such as the shamans and medicine men and women, in rituals in which sacred objects and sacred sounds enabled people to be in contact with the power of the surrounding spirits, and in sacred poles which held up the sky.

Their sacred stories or myths enabled them to reach back to the beginning of time and to re-create time and life itself. They could reach back to the creation of a sacred reality that gave direction and purpose to all life; this reality was the people themselves. A number of scholars exploring American Indian religion from the perspective of religion’s sacred realm have found it an attractive alternative to the way modern Western religion divides the sacred and secular into two realms, thereby helping make possible the repetitive boredom of industrialized societies.

Influence of Lifestyles

American Indian religions have been described in terms of hunting and agricultural lifestyles. The religion of the Paleolithic hunting culture of Eurasia is seen reflected in such common American Indian beliefs and practices as Thunderbird, Mother Earth, the bear ritual, hunting taboos, and certain shamanic rituals. This religion was gradually replaced (7000-5000 B.C.E.) by religions reflective of specialized regional farming cultures in which maize and tobacco became central parts of religious rituals.

The religion of the hunter centers on the hunt: going into the field and tracking, then killing, the animal. This religion sees a symbiosis between the hunter and the hunted. They share the same life energies or spirit. The intricate rearrangement of bones after a kill found among some tribes reflected this sharing. The placing of a small piece of salmon underneath the floor of a snowhouse by the Netsilik Inuit was a sign of respect for the salmon’s “soul.” Chants to a dead bird or animal were common. Another common feature among hunting religions is the belief that animal species have a “master spirit” that, under, certain conditions, allows them into the hunter’s world. The Caribou Man among the Naskapi of Labrador, for example, is said to live in a world of caribou hair as white as snow and deep as mountains. These mountains are the immense house of the Caribou Man. He is surrounded by thousands of larger-than-life spiritual caribou, who pass in and out of his caribou paradise along paths which he controls for his purposes. The animals’ spirits circulate, waiting to be sent back to the hunter’s world in new fleshly bodies. If the bones and the animal are treated properly, the enfleshed animal will return.

The religion of the farmer focused on earth, seasons, life, and death. While in many parts of the world, farming religions seem to have led to an increase in animal, human, and plant sacrifice, this does not seem to have been the case in North America. Sacrifice did occur, however: White dogs were sacrificed by the natives of Northeast Woodlands; self-mutilation occurred in the Sun Dance of the Lakota and in the Okeepa (Okipa) ceremony of the Mandan; the Pawnee sacrificed a young captive girl to Morning Star. This latter example is expressive of the major life-death-life theme found in farming religions, for the young girl was a personification of the vegetation whose necessary death promotes the growth of plants. Farmers’ cultures are more settled, and their religions reflect the complexity of living all year long in the same place. The intricate religious hierarchy of the Pueblo Indians reflects this complexity.

Religion Today

Passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978 in the United States and the recognition of aboriginal rights in the Canadian constitution have had far-reaching consequences. The search for identity now occurring among American Indians is also a search for religion. This search proceeds in two directions: one which seeks to find an American Indian religion that can be shared among all tribes—a pan-Indian religion—and another which attempts to affirm the religious distinctiveness and variety found in each tribe before the first encounters with the Europeans.

American Indian religion has always been a vital part of their lives, and it continues to be. Since the beginning, missionaries and scholars alike have tried to impose their questions and answers on American Indian ways of life, which always contained more than they saw. Therefore, American Indians have always had to struggle to retain spirituality, sacrality, Christianity, and lifestyles. One form of modern American Indian Christianity is the Native American Church. The Native American Church takes different forms; some groups are more focused on the Bible, while others concentrate on traditional rites. All mix Christianity with traditional practice; another significant component of the Native American Church is peyote, a hallucinogenic plant consumes at rituals.

American Indian religions began as oral traditions. They were sung, danced, spoken, and lived. The written investigations of non-Indians, while valuable in recording a tradition, abstracted that tradition from the people who enlivened it. This orality is still present, contextualizing the everyday religious life of American Indians.

Harmony

Harmony is found in a deep sense of connectedness with the entire universe. Harmony and balance are to be expected and considered normal. One’s life (individual and social) is to sustain this harmony among creatures and within space and time. There is harmony among all creatures, living and dead. Names such as Grandmother Spider, Corn Mother, and Coyote the Trickster help indicate this. The entire universe is like an intricate network of family members, each dependent upon each.

There are stories that connect the past and present in such a way that the listener becomes aware of how alive this present world is to its past. When one hears the Inuit story of Sedna the unwilling bride, one becomes aware of how the game animals of the sea grew from the joints of her fingers. When one hears the Pueblo stories of Corn Woman, one sees them reflected in the four colors of corn. The best-known stories of the various tricksters such as Coyote, Raven, Mink, and Blue Jay help one realize that each of these reorders the universe through its actions and thus returns the surrounding world to the harmony necessary for it to continue. These are not stories that attempt only to connect one to an ancient past; they are stories that enliven the present.

The world is always more than meets the senses. What one experiences is a world which is connected: a harmony of the inner world of one’s dreams and visions and the outer world of one’s senses. The vision quest of the young teen seeks not so much a spirit as a harmony between the inner self and the surrounding world marked by taking a new name which reflects that harmony. When one is sick, harmony has been destroyed, either because some object has entered into the sick person or because one’s inner world has been stolen. The task of the “medicine” man or woman is to bring into balance the inner and outer worlds so that health or wholeness returns.

This same harmony is achieved through prayers, offerings, and ritual actions. Prayers may be short or long but are always seen as creative. In a literate culture the “pen is mightier than the sword”; in an oral culture the spoken word is the creative and ordering word. Offerings are found in many forms, but the pipe ceremony was, and is, one of the most common.

Center of the Circle

Space, time, and inner and outer worlds are all connected in the circle. Circles are sacred for American Indians because they reflect and imitate shapes in nature. To be in harmony means to live as part of the circle. When a person stands and thinks of the six directions at equal points around him or her, the person is at the center of a three-dimensional circle.

It is in this knowledge of one’s place in the circle that one realizes one’s home. The horizon one sees from one’s place in the circle reflects that landscape which is home. Land itself is important and central because it is coextensive with one’s sense of harmony and thus identity. “Here” includes the waters, the earth, the shape of the horizon, the variations in the weather. That is why so many American Indian tribes designate the four points of the compass as important. Directions enable one to know where one lives. In ways of life that focus on the land, on telling the story, and on the harmony between the inner world of dreams and visions and the outer world of hunting or planting, anything can be religious. In the world of today’s—and tomorrow’s—American Indians, awareness of one’s place within the harmony and interdependence of life will lead to new questions and new answers about American Indian religion and life.

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