Native American religion praise

[Kulapavana]

Christine Leigh Heyrman

Department of History, University of Delaware

©National Humanities Center

 

Teaching about Native American religion is a challenging task to tackle with students at any level, if only because the Indian systems of belief and ritual were as legion as the tribes inhabiting North America. So let's begin by trimming down that bewildering variety to manageable proportions with three glittering generalizations (which might, with luck, prove more useful than misleading).

 

1. First, at the time of European contact, all but the simplest indigenous cultures in North America had developed coherent religious systems that included cosmologies--creation myths, transmitted orally from one generation to the next, which purported to explain how those societies had come into being.

2. Second, most native peoples worshiped an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator or "Master Spirit" (a being that assumed a variety of forms and both genders). They also venerated or placated a host of lesser supernatural entities, including an evil god who dealt out disaster, suffering, and death.

3. Third and finally, the members of most tribes believed in the immortality of the human soul and an afterlife, the main feature of which was the abundance of every good thing that made earthly life secure and pleasant.

 

 

 

An Iroquois funeral as observed by

a French Jesuit missionary, early 1700s

At left: the corpse with items to be buried with him

At right: the burial pit being lined with animal skins

 

Detail from Joseph-François Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages amériquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps

(Customs of the American Indians compared with

the customs of primitive times [in Europe]), 1724.

The Library Company of Philadelphia

 

Like all other cultures, the Indian societies of North America hoped to enlist the aid of the supernatural in controlling the natural and social world, and each tribe had its own set of religious observances devoted to that aim. Individuals tried to woo or appease powerful spiritual entities with private prayers or sacrifices of valuable items (e.g., furs, tobacco, food), but when entire communities sought divine assistance to ensure a successful hunt, a good harvest, or victory in warfare, they called upon shamans, priests, and, in fewer tribes, priestesses, whom they believed to have acquired supernatural powers through visions. These uncommon abilities included predicting the future and influencing the weather-- matters of vital interest to whole tribes--but shamans might also assist individuals by interpreting dreams and curing or causing outbreaks of witchcraft.

 

As even this brief account indicates, many key Indian religious beliefs and practices bore broad but striking resemblances to those current among early modern Europeans, both Catholic and Protestant. These cultures, too, credited a creation myth (as set forth in Genesis), venerated a Creator God, dreaded a malicious subordinate deity (Lucifer), and looked forward to the individual soul's immortality in an afterlife superior in every respect to the here and now. They, too, propitiated their deity with prayers and offerings and relied upon a specially trained clergy to sustain their societies during periods of crisis. Finally, the great majority of early modern Europeans feared witches and pondered the meaning of their dreams.

 

Important as it is to appreciate the affinities between the religious cultures of Indians and early modern Europeans (and Euro-Americans), there were real differences that must be kept in mind. The most important is that Indians did not distinguish between the natural and the supernatural. On the contrary, Native Americans perceived the "material" and "spiritual" as a unified realm of being--a kind of extended kinship network. In their view, plants, animals and humans partook of divinity through their close connection with "guardian spirits," a myriad of "supernatural" entities who imbued their "natural" kin with life and power. By contrast, Protestant and Catholic traditions were more inclined to emphasize the gulf that separated the pure, spiritual beings in heaven--God, the angels, and saints--from sinful men and women mired in a profane world filled with temptation and evil.

 

 

Historians Debate

 

The key development in the field of Native American historiography (also referred to as "ethnohistory") within the last twenty years is the growing awareness of the "new world" created for both whites and Indians as a result of their contact. Earlier histories either celebrated the rapid triumph of Euro-American "civilization" over Indian "savagery" or deplored the decimation of native peoples through military defeat and disease. In both versions, native peoples figured primarily as passive victims. More recent histories tell another story entirely, drawing attention to the enduring Indian resistance to white domination and, even more important, to the multiple forms of cultural adaptation and accommodation that took place on both sides of the moving frontier. The landmark study of this new scholarship is Richard White's eloquent and densely detailed The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), which focuses on the Ohio valley and shows how a common cultural terrain gradually emerged as its indigenous peoples interacted with missionaries, soldiers, traders, and other settlers, first the French and later the English. To get the most from this book requires several hours of close reading, but every learned, lucidly written page repays the effort.

 

If you're looking for something that is less daunting in its heft but just as provocative, it's James Axtell's The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York : Oxford University Press, 1985). Few historians understand better than Axtell the importance of religion in shaping early American history, and here he argues that the superiority of French Jesuits as missionaries and the "limber paganism" of the Indians sustained the efforts of both to keep the British from winning the three-way struggle for the North American continent, a contest that culminated in the Seven Years' War (1755-1762). The book sparkles with learning and wit, and its pages are filled with anecdotes that will delight your students. In addition, Axtell has edited a book of primary sources, The Indian Peoples of Eastern America: A Documentary History of the Sexes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), which offers a rich array of selections exploring every facet of life, including religion, among the eastern Woodland tribes, as well as much helpful commentary in the introduction and prefaces to each selection.