Native American Religions

Native American Religions, beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes of the indigenous peoples of North America concerning the spiritual forces of the cosmos. These beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes remained an integral part of indigenous North American cultures until the European settlement of North America was completed at the end of the 19th century. Beginning in the mid-20th century, Native American religions underwent a revival, particularly among the Plains peoples. (For additional information on Native American cultures, see Native Americans.)

II

ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT

From their arrival on the continent at least 15,000 years ago until their encounter with Europeans, the indigenous peoples of North America lived primarily as hunters and gatherers. Until the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago, the peoples of North America shared a common culture with other Arctic peoples. They were, for the most part, nomadic hunters who tracked large mammals of the late Pleistocene Epoch and foraged for wild plant foods. As the ice caps retreated and the ecosystems of North America began to take on their present characteristics, indigenous peoples spread out across the continent and settled in various environmental niches. These groups established culture areas (geographic regions populated by peoples having more or less similar ways of life) adapted to their physical surroundings. Eventually, millions of people were living in kinship communities throughout North America, producing their own food, clothing, and shelter and developing their own religious forms. Even in communities where farming replaced hunting and gathering as a means of producing food, more ancient activities persisted, including traditional religious practices. See also First Americans.

The hundreds of tribal groups of North America maintained individual traditions that were adapted to their regional environments, although elements of these traditions were sometimes passed from one group to another through trade, migration, and intermarriage. The resilience of local tradition is especially apparent in the Native American communities of the Southeast and Southwest, where the cultural influence of Mexico can be seen in such institutions as social stratification, cities, temples, and burial cults. The archaeological evidence also points to substantial continuity within cultures over thousands of years. Each community maintained its characteristic worldview, passed down its own myths, conducted its own rituals, and acted according to its own fundamental values.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, when the first European explorers and missionaries began to document the religious patterns of indigenous North America, they were confronted with cultures that had remained unaffected by developments in the civilizations of Europe and Asia. In particular, certain archaic religious characteristics were prevalent among the peoples of North America—namely, a preoccupation with the cycles of nature; a belief in the animate quality of all beings; the use of various techniques believed to control cosmic powers for personal and communal benefit; an emphasis on kinship as the metaphor for religious relations; a reliance on shamans (religious specialists thought to be capable of ecstatic journeys of the soul taken on behalf of others); and a unified view of physical and spiritual sustenance expressed in an equivalence between economics and religion.

III

CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES

The indigenous peoples of North America perceived themselves as living in a cosmos pervaded by powerful, mysterious spiritual beings and forces that underlay and supported human life. Native Americans believed that in order to survive as individuals and communities, it was necessary to acknowledge these spiritual powers in every aspect of their lives—by addressing the powers in prayer and song, offering them gifts, establishing ritual relationships with them, and passing down knowledge about them to subsequent generations, primarily through myths (see Mythology).

A

The Spirit World

Native Americans lived in a world of spirits who made their presence known primarily through natural phenomena. Most Native Americans believed in a Great Mystery or Great Spirit that underlays the complexity of all existence, as well as in many other spiritual powers that influenced the whole of life. At times of crisis, Native Americans turned to powerful spirits to acknowledge their dependence on these spirits and to seek help. Such crises included drought and disease, the suspicion of witchcraft, and the failure to track and kill game. Each tribal group conceived of the spirit world in its own particular way, and there were variations of belief and ritual practice within each community.

A1

Gods

In no sense did the indigenous peoples of North America profess monotheism, or belief in the existence of one god only. Moreover, even a supreme being could be conceptualized in more than one way. Among the Sioux, Wakan Tanka (Great Mystery) was pictured both as a single entity and as an assemblage of deities—including Sun, Winds, Earth, and Rock. In practice, many Native Americans interacted less with a supreme being than with various subordinate powers believed to be useful in particular circumstances. For example, although the Iroquois worshiped orenda (the unified spiritual power innate in all things), their prayers were addressed to individual spirits with control over weather, war, health, and the growth of plants and creatures. The Ojibwa believed in Kitche Manitou (Great Spirit) but developed personal relations with guardian spirits who appeared to individuals in visions and dreams. The Hopi referred to Masau as their chief god, yet their ritual life focused on scores of kachinas, the spirits of ancestors and the forces of the environment that made fertility possible. The Navajo venerated the Sun and the Changing Woman, a figure who personified creative power, but there were also hundreds of monsters, Holy People (creators and cultural heroes), and other forces to be evoked or exorcised in blessings and curative chants.

A2

Guardian Spirits

Because Native Americans believed that supernatural powers were personal beings, they sought to establish relationships with benevolent guardian spirits. Such relationships existed across the North American continent, although they were not prominent in the Southwest. Most of the hunting and gathering peoples of North America hoped to enter intimate relationships with spirits and to win these spirits as their protectors. They also hoped to avoid spirits thought to be dangerous, harmful, or evil. Sometimes, as in the native cultures of the Pacific Northwest, guardians were handed down within families from one generation to the next. More often, as in the cultures of the Northeast, youths sought the guardians' pity and protection by means of lengthy fasts. Guardian spirits became like family members to individual Native Americans, assuring them health, long life, success in economic pursuits, and help in times of crisis. The Native Americans, in turn, were responsible to their guardians, providing them with tobacco and other offerings, singing their praises, and upholding their honor. Thus, whereas supreme beings seemed distant to daily concerns, guardian spirits took an immediate interest in an individual's welfare.

A3

Ghosts

In the worldview of most of the indigenous peoples of North America, there were also spiritual beings to be avoided. Native Americans of the Southwest in particular, such as the Navajo and Apache, dreaded contact with ghosts, who were believed to resent the living. These peoples disposed of the bodies of deceased relatives immediately and attempted to distance themselves from the spirits of the dead, avoiding their burial sites, never mentioning their names, and even abandoning the dwellings in which they had died. If a person were responsible for a death—for example, among the Papago of the Southwest, the death of an enemy warrior—it was necessary to adopt the dead person, keep his scalp, and appease his spirit continually with gifts and kind words.

A4

Medicine

In a world filled with both helpful and harmful forces, Native Americans tried to locate repositories of spiritual power. Uncanny phenomena such as geysers, trees struck by lightning, and deposits of rare minerals, as well as dangerous locales such as waterfalls and whirlpools, became sites of pilgrimage where indigenous peoples hoped to collect spiritual power. They gathered herbs and pollen, oddly shaped stones, and horns, bones, teeth, feathers, and other body parts of animals and placed them in medicine bundles, collections of objects believed to heal disease and to ward off ghosts, witches, foes, and destructive spirits. Most Native Americans kept these medicine bundles for personal, household, and community protection.

A5

Ritual

Native Americans engaged in a great variety of rituals. As a person passed through the stages of the life cycle—obtaining a name after birth, seeking a guardian spirit at puberty, setting off at death for the journey to the afterlife—rituals marked the passages. One of the basic elements of Native American ritual life was the sweat lodge—a purification ritual that originated in the polar regions—in which water was poured over heated stones to create a hot vapor bath. The rites, or ceremonial acts, of the sweat lodge were believed to wash away both moral and physical impurities. Sweat lodges were used for teaching, praying, and singing, often in preparation for other ceremonies.

A6

Prayer

Native Americans used gestures and words to communicate in prayer with the spiritual sources of life. Prayers were offered for a wide range of needs, including health, agricultural bounty, and success in the hunt. Prayers could take a variety of forms: songs and dances, as well as such acts as the sprinkling of corn meal, could function as prayers. Verbal prayers included expressions of thanksgiving, requests or pleas, and coercive formulas. There were cultural variations as well. For example, whereas Iroquois prayers emphasized an attitude of thanksgiving toward all things, Navajo prayers were calculated to exorcise evil and to erect a barrier of blessings against harm.

A7

Offerings

In order to make their prayers effective, Native Americans made offerings to the spirits. The most common offering was of native tobacco, either smoked in pipes, burned in fires, or deposited ceremonially. An Ojibwa, for example, having killed a bear, placed tobacco in the animal's nose to appease its spirit. An Ojibwa might also toss tobacco on the rapids as a prayer to ensure safe passage by canoe. When gathering herbs, indigenous peoples placed tobacco in the earth as an offering of appreciation. Such gifts were thought to seal and renew relations with the sources of life.

A8

Ceremonies

The cycle of the year was punctuated with ceremonial observances of prayer and thanksgiving. Such observances took place at critical points in the agricultural or hunting season—for example, upon the return of the first salmon from the ocean to the rivers; at the times of planting, ripening, and harvest; upon the appearance of sap in the maple trees; or at the summer and winter solstices. In some cases, as in the cultures of the Pacific Northwest, a whole season was devoted to ritual. Spirits were welcomed into the villages with song and dance, and the people shared their food and wealth with one another in elaborate feasts.

B

Mythology

Rituals were meant not only to communicate with spiritual beings but also to pass down tribal traditions. One of the most common rituals among Native Americans was the recounting of myths, which contained a wealth of religious knowledge. Myths provided communities with a cosmogony, a story of how the world came to have its present form; a worldview, a picture of how the various aspects of the world are related to one another; and an ethos, a code of behavior for human beings.

B1

Creation Myths

Through their oral traditions, Native Americans told how the processes of creation occurred, often through the transforming activities of creative deities, cultural heroes, and tricksters. These stories were not meant to be authoritative assertions about the origin of the world: A single people often recounted several different stories to explain the origin of the same phenomenon. Rather, these stories were means by which Native Americans examined the spiritual and physical conditions of their existence—the origins of humanity, the place of human beings in the cosmos, the sources of sustenance, the reasons for death, and social institutions such as marriage.

There were several recurring types of creation myths. In the widespread story of the earth diver, floods covered the primordial landscape, requiring animals to dive into the depths to retrieve a piece of earth from which to form the present earth. Many failed before one finally succeeded. In emergence stories, common throughout the Southwest, humans climbed up from the underworld, beset with problems of their own making, in order to find a place on the surface of the earth. There they received their languages, foods, and clan identities and ultimately migrated to their traditional homelands.

Various cultural regions had their own characteristic creation myths. In the Northeast, the Iroquois told of a woman who fell from the sky world. With the help of birds and other animals, the present land was formed on the back of a great turtle. The woman's grandsons—one good, one evil—created the various opposing forces, such as medicines and poisons, that affect human life. In the Northwest, the cultural heroes Star Child and Diaper Boy were said to have come into existence when two young women married stars and returned to earth. The heroes helped establish the rules of tribal life, including marriage customs. In the Arctic, the Inuit recounted how a young woman married a seabird. When her father tried to bring her back home in his kayak, the bird agitated the ocean. To save himself, the father threw his daughter overboard and cut off the joints of her fingers as she attempted to grasp the boat. From the joints came all the food sources necessary for human life, including seals, walruses, and whales.

B2

Trickster Myths

It was common for creation myths to be intertwined with other mythic themes. For example, emergence stories often included an earth-diver sequence, and young women who married stars in myths in many cases later fell from the sky to give birth to their heroic offspring. Tricksters played a prominent role in this body of lore. These figures were often depicted as solitary coyotes, hares, or ravens, and almost invariably they were male. They represented the chaotic elements within the cosmos, the pleasure-seeking instincts within the moral order.

One famous trickster is the figure of Coyote. In the Navajo story of creation, the Holy Persons methodically placed stars in the sky and plants on the earth. Coyote came along and scattered these elements about, creating the world as it exists today. Coyote also kidnapped the Water Monster's baby and caused a great flood, which brought human beings to the surface world. He seduced a virtuous maiden and taught her witchcraft. He caused disagreements and fights, and for every act he performed, he had a partially plausible justification. Coyote is also widely credited with ensuring the finality of death.

Despite their creative energy, Native American tricksters such as Coyote were regarded as negative examples. They were viewed as antisocial braggarts, bungling imitators, troublemakers, and buffoons. For instance, although the Ojibwa trickster Winabojo functioned partially as a cultural hero—stealing fire for human use, taming the dangerous winds, perfecting the strategies that made successful hunting possible—he also brought about the great flood by killing too many animals and thereby angering the spirits who were their protectors. Frequently, his helpful creativity was seen as an accident, such as when he dashed madly through the brambles but made nutritious berries from his blood.

IV

AFTER EUROPEAN CONTACT

With the coming of Europeans to North America, Native Americans experienced a series of dislocations from which they are still struggling to recover. Foreign invaders overran their territories and claimed sovereignty over their communities, diseases ravaged their populations, and their environments were drastically altered. In many cases, Native Americans were forcibly removed from their aboriginal homelands and livelihoods, with the result that indigenous cultures underwent rapid change. In the midst of these crises, as Native Americans turned to their own religious traditions to understand and ease their plight, missionaries attempted to convert them from their traditional religions to Christianity.

A

Christianity

Tens of thousands of Native Americans now identify Christianity as their traditional religion. Their families have heard Christian stories, sung Christian hymns, seen Christian iconography, and received Christian sacraments for generations. In the mid-1990s, more than two-thirds of Native Americans characterized themselves at least nominally as Christians. Others have combined Christian beliefs and practices with their native religions or have practiced two faiths—Christian and native—side by side but separately. In many cases, Native Americans have reshaped Christianity, assimilating Jesus Christ as a cultural hero and interpreting Holy Communion as a medicine. In other cases, the forms of native religions have been retained while their contents have been thoroughly Christianized.

B

Native Movements

Contact with Christians proved traumatic for Native American religions, as both civil and religious authorities attempted to repress native spirituality and force conversion. Over the past three centuries, this attempt has provoked the rise of various native religious movements.

B1

Prophets and Messiahs

Movements of nativism (the assertion of traditional values in the face of foreign encroachment) and revitalization (the revival of traditional culture, often involving explicit rejection of European civilization) have arisen, led by Native American prophets who claimed to have received revelation from the aboriginal deities, often in dreams and visions. These prophets have frequently shown evidence of Christian influence in their moral codes, their missionary zeal, and their concern for personal redemption and social improvement. Sometimes their teachings have led to military advances against European invaders. For example, in the early 1760s the Delaware prophet Neolin helped inspire the rebellion of Ottawa warrior Pontiac against the British. Similarly, the preaching of Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa bolstered the military efforts of his brother Tecumseh against the United States Army between 1808 and 1813. The revivals of preachers such as the Iroquois Handsome Lake in 1799 and the Salish John Slocum in 1882 spawned new religions—part native, part Christian—that have endured in their respective communities to the present day.

One of the most prolonged Native American uprisings took place in the Southwest under the leadership of a Tewa medicine man named Pop, who in 1680 led the various indigenous peoples of present-day New Mexico in a rebellion against Spanish missionaries and conquistadors. The Native Americans drove the Spanish out and kept them at bay for more than a decade. During the Spanish reconquest, the Hopi burned one of their own villages and killed its converted inhabitants rather than allow the reestablishment of Christianity as the official religion. To this day the Hopi pueblos, or villages, resist the influence of Christian religions, although some Hopi have been attracted to the Mormon faith. In hundreds of other cases, indigenous peoples of North America have defied Christian control or endured its presence with only apparent compliance.

B2

Ghost Dance

New religious movements among Native Americans have at times taken on the character of crisis cults, which respond to cultural threat with emotional rituals. In 1889 a Paiute prophet named Wovoka foretold the imminent end of the current world order. Casting himself in a messianic role that seemed to be influenced by Christian imagery, Wovoka promised that if Native Americans would conduct a ceremony known as the Ghost Dance, depleted animal populations and deceased relatives would be restored. For several years, many indigenous peoples in the western part of North America performed the ceremony, even after United States Army troops massacred Sioux ghost dancers at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1890.

B3

Pan-Native American Movements

Pan-Native American initiatives have helped spread many of the new religions of indigenous peoples, as parochial tribal identities have broadened in the face of common oppression. For example, the Ghost Dance of the 1880s spread among a number of tribes that were all undergoing similar upheavals, and indigenous peoples of the Great Plains shared in each other's Sun Dances. The preeminent pan-Native American religious development, however, has been Peyotism, a religious movement centering on the sacramental ingestion of a mildly hallucinogenic cactus. Peyotism spread from Mexico to the southern Plains peoples in the 19th century. By the early 20th century, despite vigorous opposition by the United States government, the use of peyote was widely established throughout North America. In 1918, Peyotism was formally incorporated as the Native American Church. The group's status as a religious organization enabled members to seek legal protection for the ritual use of peyote. In the mid-1990s, membership in the Native American Church was estimated to be 250,000.

V

CONTEMPORARY TRENDS

Between the 1880s and 1930s, the U.S. authorities attempted to ban Native American religious rituals, including the Ghost Dance, Sun Dance, and peyote cult. In Canada the same restrictive tendencies prevailed. In more recent years, however, governmental authorities have adopted a more supportive attitude toward the practice of native spirituality. In 1978 the Congress of the United States passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, an official expression of good will toward Native American spirituality. In the wake of this legislation, many religious practices once considered on the verge of disappearing were revived. These include pipe ceremonials, sweat lodges, vision quests, and Sun Dances. In an unforeseen consequence of the Native American religious revival, some non-Native American followers of the New Age Movement have adopted Native American beliefs and rituals. New Age enthusiasts have adopted such practices as sweat lodges, pipe ceremonies, and the use of crystals and other natural objects traditionally believed to be charged with spiritual power. While some Native Americans have resented such borrowing of indigenous rituals, others have been pleased to see non-Native Americans taking an interest in native spiritual traditions.