PATIENT
Native American religious traditions
NATIONS
500+ federally recognized in the US alone
DEPTH
Five traditions, by design
SOURCES
Mostly indigenous scholars
CHIEF COMPLAINT
What does it mean to be in relationship with a place, and what is not ours to take?
HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS
This guide is different from the others in one way: some of what it could cover, it deliberately does not. Many aspects of Native American sacred traditions are not public knowledge. They are held within specific communities and transmitted through specific ceremonial relationships, with considered reasons for privacy, including a history of that knowledge being taken, commercialized and misrepresented. The guide covers what has been publicly shared by indigenous scholars, community members and cultural ambassadors, and it names what it leaves out. There is no single 'Native American mythology', any more than there is a 'Eurasian religion'. The five traditions it covers in depth are the Lakota, Haudenosaunee, Diné, Anishinaabe and Pacific Northwest peoples, plus the trickster tradition across many nations.
REVIEW OF SYSTEMS
LAND
Not the setting for religion but the religion. Sacred geography is place-specific and cannot be relocated: Bear Butte for the Lakota, the four sacred mountains for the Diné.
KINSHIP
Mitákuye Oyás'iŋ, 'all my relations': the relationship to animals, plants, water and land is genuine kinship, not a metaphor.
HÓZHÓ
The Diné goal of life: beauty, balance, harmony and right relationship.
RECIPROCITY
Wealth as what you give away, in the Pacific Northwest potlatch. A language in which a bay is a 'who', not an 'it'.
THE TRICKSTER
Coyote, Raven and others: the world needs disorder to stay open. The humor is the content.
PHYSICAL EXAM — STYLE & STRUCTURE
- —Colonial suppression: the Indian Religious Crimes Code (1883) made traditional ceremonies illegal, and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act did not pass until 1978.
- —Canada banned the potlatch from 1885 to 1951. Many ceremonial objects were seized and ended up in museums.
- —The guide does not reproduce information that indigenous communities have asked to be kept within their communities.
- —Vision quests, sweat lodges and 'shamanic' experiences have been extensively commercialized by non-Native practitioners, which is what the guide declines to describe in detail.
- —Several quotations here are composites or paraphrases of publicly shared teachings; the reference line on each says which.
ASSESSMENT & PLAN
Read this one slowly, and take it as an introduction, not as a how-to. The guide's own advice is to learn from indigenous people and communities directly for deeper engagement. It recommends Vine Deloria Jr. and Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass) as the way in. It is a non-denominational reference guide.