Greg Johnson. The Brill Dictionary of Religion. Editor: Kocku von Stuckrad, et al., Volume 3, Brill Academic Publishers, 2006.
The Importance of Place
1. Places, Names, Pluralities: Indigenous peoples and scholars increasingly agree that native traditions ‘take place.’ In this usage, place is understood as more than simply location; it is the geophysical anchor of identity. Place in this enriched sense refers to an embodied and storied landscape. As Vine Deloria, Jr. has written with regard to American Indian religions, “[r]ecognizing the sacredness of lands on which previous generations have lived and died is the foundation of all other sentiments.”2 When seeking to understand native religions, one should therefore begin with a consideration of tradition-specific meanings of the land, as these will pertain to myth as well as to history. Because native North America is rich in locale traditions, it is not uncommon to read or hear accounts of a people who emerged from the earth here, a trickster who lived on a mountain over there, a sacred buffalo on that plain, a power cave in this rock. Place—the natural world mapped according to cultural coordinates—is a primary agent in the religious world of these traditions. It acts and is acted upon in ways that are constitutive of the sacred. At the same time, places are marked through ritual and rhetorical processes: they are possessive (e.g., “Mother Earth cares for her children”), possessed (e.g., “the Black Hills is our sacred center”), and dispossessed, the last an all too familiar story. But the story does not end there: places can be regained, re-told, re-inhabited. Place, therefore, is a central category for understanding native traditions, but it is not fixed in its possible meanings.
Mobility and Cross-Fertilizations
Another aspect of place deserves attention here: the category ‘North American Traditional Religions’ is an analytical construct, not a ‘natural’ subset of the world or cultures therein. Indigenous peoples are found around the globe, today as in the past. The Americas are no exception—native peoples inhabit the hemisphere from the northern tip of the Arctic to the southern tip of Chile. Where these people came from is hotly contested, both within academic circles and within native communities. Appreciating and exploring the richness of native religions does not require entering this debate, though one might learn a good deal from observing it; in fact, the debate may be regarded as a generative site of religious claims, as native representatives give voice to origin accounts over and against non-native perspectives and the epistemological implications these entail. In any event, it is important to note that people native to the Americas arrived from multiple origins, geographically, racially, and culturally speaking. These multiple groups have maintained their mobility and cultural fluidity through time. It is therefore a disservice to native peoples and the study of them to be rigid in our understanding of peoples relative to place. To insist on studying traditions by way of imposed geographical encapsulations of them is to preclude taking account of movements and cross-fertilizations.
Arbitrary Boundaries and ‘Culture Areas’
What sense can be made of the tension between a recognition of the arbitrary character of scholarly emphases upon ‘culture areas’ and the considerable attention given to the category of place by native peoples as essential and central to their traditions? One helpful starting point is to acknowledge this tension and to remain conscious of the different voices, claims, and stakes of different maps and the territories they mark out. Approached in this manner, it is clear that the category ‘North American Traditional Religions’ represents a historically produced cartography of indigenous traditions that corresponds in obvious but not always noted ways with the geo-political boundaries of the United States and Canada. This feature has negative implications for the utility of the category because it limits the field of study in dramatic respects. What of the peoples south of the border of the United States? What of those people, including groups of the Apache and Kiowa, who have generational histories of moving across that border? In view of these sorts of limitations, is there a defensible way to argue for the study of North American traditions as a cogent analytical framework? Increasingly, many scholars and native people suggest that there is not; instead a call is made for broader analyses of, say, ‘Indigenous Traditions in the Americas.’ This effort is commendable in its way, but it seems more to displace the question of arbitrary boundaries than to resolve it.
North America as a Paradigmatic Example
As problematic as the category is, a case for its relevance can be made on the basis of how geo-political boundaries have shaped and influenced native traditions. It can be argued that a central and defining feature of native traditions in North America is the fact that they have faced and responded to the reality of being encompassed by alien nation-states. If we engage in the study of these traditions from the perspective of the present, and if we acknowledge that culture-contact history is central to telling the story of various traditions—of their changes, departures, new beginnings, and not simply of their demise—then we see that North America is a revealing analytical frame. It is a context unlike any other wherein the ideals of democracy and liberalism and the realities of modern capitalist economies have come face to face with native communities grounded in their own senses of reality, entitlement, and hoped for futures.
Addressing this context, a productive analytical stance rests on two related insights: (1) Post-Columbian native traditions are worthy of study and appreciation and should not be viewed as derivative or otherwise impure when compared to pre-colonial traditions; (2) more radically, scholars have no access to language-based data of any North American traditional context that is free from non-native influence. Such influence may be as bald as forced schooling and English-only policies or as subtle as the introduction of a new class of gifts into the potlatch ritual. In this way, the native North American context is an instructive example of a general principle: traditions are historical (this recognition is often difficult because traditions are invested precisely in the erasure of any characteristics that reveal them to be historical products). It is possible and productive to study representations of traditional purity, but analysis falters and indeed becomes untenable if purity is sought at the level of tradition itself. If we grant the relevance of historical and ideological influences to native traditions, then we can appreciate that the category ‘North American Traditional Religions’—while limited and limiting—speaks to ‘real world’ conditions and consequences pertaining to the necessarily political contexts of lived native traditions.
The Politics of Naming
Rivaling the complexity of issues occasioned by the category of place is the category of naming. The dynamic here is similar as well. As a first principle, we should acknowledge that all names are historically produced. We should then also acknowledge that the politics of naming are differential, which should lead us to ask: Who names whom? What names are self-attributions? What names are imposed? What names stick? What names have become sticky? A quick conclusion we reach here is that many European-imposed names have been historically inadequate, if not down right inaccurate, as is the case with the most famous name of all: Indians. Just here, however, we see a lesson emerge. Against the grain of much popular expectation, today many native peoples in North America (at least in the United States) call themselves Indians, not Native Americans. Names, like places, maybe arbitrarily designated, but valuations of them are not—and value is as hard to predict in cultural worlds as in economics ones. In the case of ‘Indians,’ a crass misnomer with a checkered history caught on with native peoples just as it fell out of favor with certain sectors of the non-native public. Broad political utility is behind the former, political correctness the latter. In any case, the lesson is: ask, don’t assume. In general, many of the indigenous peoples of North America prefer their local group name as rendered in their language. But this is often not the case, or one finds political factions within a tribe or nation, such that one prefers one designation (Navajo, for example) and another something else (Dineh, in the case at hand). In Canada the broad designation First Nations is popular.
Plurality
As is readily seen from the preceding considerations, a defining characteristic of North American traditional religions is their stunning plurality. While it is commonplace to refer to World Religions (e.g., Christianity, Buddhism, Islam) in the singular, many scholars have argued that such monolithic characterizations of these traditions are a disservice to them because they erase the variety that exists within these traditions. This position applies even more strongly to the religious traditions of North America. Despite a persistent tendency of people to speak of Indian Religion, Indian Belief, and Indian Culture, no such singular entity has ever existed in the sense usually implied. In the case of so-called World Religions, at least it can be said that each such tradition has a more or less shared idea of sacred history, a more or less shared sense of the tradition’s founders, texts, and the like, however much these might be internally contested. For the native peoples of North America no such common set of referents has ever obtained in the same way. Scholars and students should therefore be wary of any formulations of native religious traditions that posit uniform terms and which imply a similarly uniform reality.
Processes of ‘Singularization’
However, as with places and names, complexity lurks here too. As a caveat to an instance upon recognizing the plurality of native traditions, it should be noted that a relatively recent phenomenon cuts in the other direction. This is the Pan-Indian movement, which has precursors in the first multi-group responses to non-native encroachment and which has been increasingly visible from the twentieth century to the present. This movement emerges from a recognition on the part of Indian peoples that they share many common concerns and ideas, particularly with regard to their position vis-à-vis the dominant society. Cross-tribal affiliations, powwow networks, national and international lobby groups, and native media sources are aspects of contemporary Pan-Indianism. Increasingly, ritual life has moved in this direction, with a particular focus on ritual pipe smoking, the use of sweat lodges, vision quests, and, in some cases, Sun Dancing and the use of peyote. Pan-Indianism is also evident in institutional contexts such as prisons and the military and in urban settings where Indianness rather than specific tribal affiliation is the most visible marker of identity.
No Generalizations
2. Conceptualizing Native Traditions: A number of excellent sources will orient the interested reader with reference to native histories, historiography, and religious thought. An indispensable background and bibliographical resource is the Handbook of North American Indians. Rather than attempt to offer summary accounts of the vast terrain covered in these and other volumes, the remainder of the present entry will be limited to exploring several conceptual issues pertaining to North American traditional religions. The central principle that should be adhered to by all scholars and students of native traditions is one that we cannot help but run afoul of here: do not generalize. Native traditions in North America are as diverse as the people who practice them. Many hundreds of distinct groups exist in the present as in the past. The peoples who compose these groups speak many different languages, practice an incredible range of life-ways, engage non-native worlds in varying degrees, and are otherwise diverse. Even participants in Pan-Indian movements are not single-minded in ways that exclude traces of local cultures; quite the opposite, Pan-Indian elements are often construed according to local ideas, ideals, habits, and accents. Thus, the best scholarly tradition is ethnographically based, seeking out detail and difference.
Specifying Features That Are Not Found
While necessarily engaging in generalization for efficiency sake, the path charted here is to proceed by specifying features not found, for the most part, in the traditional religions of North America. Describing traditional religions by peeling away layers of what they are not is illuminating because the study of religion as a discipline and the colonial disciplining of native peoples share a common historical reliance on the explanatory and motivating power of various interpretations of Christianity. The desire to understand and act upon other peoples by way of one’s own conception of salvation history has shaped popular and academic representations of native traditions in ways that have proven remarkably durable. The study of native traditions in the Americas needs to move as far as possible from this tendential hermeneutic in an effort to conceive of these traditions in ways that respect the integrity, complexity, and multiplicity of the life-ways considered. That said, it is appropriate to give a word of caution: analysis of native traditions should not overcorrect in the effort to strip away Christian or other Western influences. Overcorrection of this sort leads to its own distortions. Much in the way many North American traditional peoples have embraced names not of their own creation, so too they have incorporated and embraced aspects of the non-native world, Christianity included. In fact, a majority of Indians today identify themselves as Christian. What they mean by Christian often proves to notably dynamic and eclectic, but to discount this religious reality is to preclude the possibility of a full consideration of traditions in the present.
If we take a very broad view of religion as speech, action, and social structures that rest upon claims to knowledge and authority derived from sources that are transcendent (other than human) and not empirically falsifiable, then we have a definition encompassing enough to include many Western and non-Western forms of religious life. The task, then, is to separate out characteristics that are frequently taken to be representative of native religious traditions but which are more characteristic of Western ones. Doing so enables us to see the outlines of the religious traditions of North America as they emerge by way of contrast. When this analytic method is coupled with our earlier observations pertaining to the flexible and present-focused quality of tradition, the following features of these traditions stand out.
Orality
The native religious traditions of North America are not textual. The fact that ‘New World’ cultures were not literate is well known; the consequences of this for their religious traditions are not always fully appreciated. Orality removes the possibility that a text will be fetishized or otherwise reified in dogmatic terms. Correspondingly, orality opens up tremendous room for variants and change. Most importantly, orality necessitates storytelling, which requires powers of memory and presentation. As all accomplished storytellers know, a sure way to keep audiences’ attention is to bring them into the story. This feat is just what oral traditions do: they contribute to the narrated life. Each person’s life is cast and interpreted as part and parcel of a larger communal and cosmic story that reaches backward and forward in time and up and down into the elements. From many traditional points of view, the act of speaking and hearing oral tradition is constitutive of the world itself. Similarly, many practitioners consider oral traditions to be the chief means of communication between humans and other entities: animals, ancestors, spirits all compose and are composed by story. Narrative is the mode that brings these native North American traditions to life, whether by way of songs, chants, folktales, genealogies or even legal testimony. The latter reveals that oral tradition has not been erased by modernity and literacy, though it has taken new forms as speakers have found novel vehicles and avenues for its expression. In many respects, oral tradition in the present has taken on a heightened oppositional status vis-à-vis the textual habitus of the dominant society.
No Codified Dogma
Related to their orality and corresponding absence of codified dogma, native North American traditions tend to be non-propositional. That is, they usually have no creed or systematized set of truth claims that must be adhered to for one to be judged a believer. Indeed, it can be said that these traditions are not belief based. They are far more concerned with religious activity and ritual life, with what some call ‘practice.’ Native religious traditions of North America, like indigenous traditions around the globe, are principally focused on maintaining personal, communal, and cosmic balance through ritual actions. The range of ritual activity in such traditions is vast: some rituals mark life and status transitions, others are designed to bless, heal, or attract rain, still others are for purposes of witching and unwitching, but the general theme of all is to manage the ‘power’ of the world—to attract positive energy to where it is needed and to drive away dangerous power. Some rituals are cycle-based, like the Winter Ceremonial of the Kwakuitl or various first fruit ceremonies, others are performed on an as needed and as available basis, such as Navajo Sandpainting or the rituals of the Native American Church.
The fact that these traditions are oral and tend to be non-doctrinal does not mean that they are without mechanisms for constructing and exercising authority. Sentimental views of ‘noble savage religion’ are of no use in the project of understanding these traditions. An honest if sobering approach to religion includes regarding it as a heightened form of social and ideological capital that may confer tremendous rewards to those who wield it persuasively, or, conversely, may present serious problems to those who fail to do so. These dynamics are true of native traditions as much as of any other. This factor means that some groups of people are able to establish their power and position over and against others by way of their use of religion. Of native traditions the same questions should be posed as of any tradition: What groups and individuals do they serve? What groups and individuals do they disserve? Who may or may not participate in a ritual? How do various ritual experts attempt to extend their authority through ritual innovations and other action? Such questions continue to be relevant today, particularly as issues of identity and group membership have taken on centrality in recent years.
In-Group Based Traditions
A related feature of native traditions of North America is that they are non-proselytizing. This aspect can come as a shock to well-intentioned non-Indians who are on spiritual paths that they believe lead to native religions. Unlike conversion-based religions such as Christianity, these traditions are ethnicity based. Either a person is part of the group—as reckoned culturally, which may or may not include genealogy and, by extension, race—or a person is not. If a person is part of the group, then the religion pertains to that person, for his or her place in the community and the cosmos depends upon it. If that person is not part of the group, he or she may well be regarded in religious terms (as having some sort of power), but it is highly unlikely that he or she will be regarded as part of the religious community.
A Multitude of Spirits and Deities
Another feature of these traditions that seems alien to many non-native people is they are not focused, for the most part, on singular deities. Some traditions include references to maximal deities, though these seldom figure into practical religious life. Moreover, when maximal deities are invoked, the specter of missionary influence must be suspected. This is not to say that these religious traditions are without their gods or entities equivalent to gods—almost all traditions include reference to high order entities. These are often spoken of as ‘master’ spirits: e.g., that which controls the winds, that which controls the rains, or that which is the spiritual leader of a species of animals. In any event, such deities or spirits are not worshipped in an abstract sense for their own sake; they are ritually invoked and engaged as inhabitants and agents of the world itself. A similar situation obtains with regard to pivotal religious figures. Native traditions recognize their full share of prophets and visionaries, and these, like Sweet Medicine of the Cheyenne, are regarded in the highest terms. There are few examples, however, of anything approaching the status of Jesus in Christianity, Mohammad in Islam, or Moses in Judaism. This points us again to the ways native traditions are less about figures and beliefs than they are about relationships. Relationships may be mediated by prominent figures and deities, but they are ultimately about the peoples’ connection to one another and the group to the larger world. More must be said about the world in this context.
Lack of Salvation History
Contrary to many Christian theologies, native peoples tend not to assume that this world is fallen or otherwise imperfect; rather, the question for them is how to integrate with the world and manage metaphysical ‘power’ within it. We can generalize here: the native peoples of North America seem to be unanimous in describing the world as having a subject quality, as a whole and in each part. Thus, each element of nature is understood to have personhood, which implies in many cases that all things in the world are related, can communicate and are engaged in reciprocal relationships, humans included. An important consequence of this idea is that these traditions are not, therefore, focused on ‘salvation’ or other such means of escaping or transcending this world. Likewise, these traditions tend not to be future-oriented in sense of conceiving of life as unfolding according to a master teleology. Rather, the privileged temporal referent is the past: the past is regarded as wellspring for modeling behavior in present and as an ideal pattern for the future. In fact, it may be argued that it is this desire to emulate and recapitulate the idealized past that causes insiders and outsiders alike to view these religions as ‘traditional.’ In any event, in these religions human history is not understood to be separate from that of natural world, but rather is viewed as a component of it. As human history is not divorced from natural history, neither is the body from the soul. While many native North American traditions distinguish bodies from souls in a variety of ways, the soul does not usually receive disproportionate religious attention, nor is it necessarily ranked as a higher entity than the body. In fact, much religious attention is focused upon keeping body and soul united, and these connected to the family, clan, community, and cosmos. Many Native American mortuary practices and other ritual means for structuring relationships with the dead reflect this concern.
The Vitality of Traditional Religious Life
3. The Living Present: It should be clear that North American religious traditions are not dead. Eulogies for native traditions have been announced over and again by politicians, missionaries, and even scholars. This trend of sentimentally burying the ‘Red Man’ has been a defining feature of North American ideology over the past two hundred years. If one considers the nadir of native traditions in the late nineteenth century, when the Sun Dance and other traditions had been outlawed and the Ghost Dance provoked tremendous violence against the Lakota at Wounded Knee, it becomes conceivable why many observers announced the death of native traditions. Suffice it to say, these pronouncements were premature. Not only have native cultures persisted, they are now thriving. Demographically, native peoples’ numbers have risen dramatically in the past century. This increase is partly due to improved health conditions, but it is principally due to the fact that identifying oneself as native has shifted from being a clear social liability to being a point of pride and a possible avenue to a variety of entitlements specific to native peoples by way of their relationships to the federal governments of the United States and Canada. Correspondingly, native religious traditions have experienced a tremendous eefflorescence over the past century, and particularly since the 1960s. Whereas many native ceremonies were banned in the nineteenth century, now various laws protect a number of native practices and sacred places. Native peoples have fought hard for these protections and continue to do so. These battles include but are not limited to protection of peyote consumption, the use of various animal parts such as eagle feathers in rituals, burial protections, repatriation rights, fishing rights, and the securing of religious rights for incarcerated members of their groups.
‘Survivance’
From this recognition of the contemporary vitality of traditional religious life in North America follow several related observations. Native traditions were not destroyed by colonialism, but neither were they unaffected by them. North American native religious traditions have persisted because, as Gerald Vizenor has argued, Indians are warriors of ‘survivance.’ They have situated their identities, practices, and bodies in a variety of ways with regard to non-native agendas and the mechanism of representation through which these have been pursued. Fiction has been a primary genre through which Native Americans have explored this theme, well-known examples of which include N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. At times, native traditions have been articulated as fierce and oppositional rejections of non-native presence; at other times native strategies of survivance have depended upon the technologies and assumptions of the non-native world. Further, a spectrum of possible modes of engagement rests between these polar responses. Native religious traditions are found across this spectrum. In this way, these traditions are not separable from realities of colonialism and modernity; these forces are constitutive of Native American traditionalism. An instructive exercise is to study various native traditions with an eye for how they might be located on this spectrum, though one should be forewarned that analysis here is far from simple. Analysis of contemporary religions of native North America suggests that the most stridently oppositional movements may make profound use of non-native elements, whereas some apparently accommodationist movements, like various forms of native Christianity, have maintained rather than abandoned a good deal of ancestral content.