Tradition
Native American religions
Overview
Native American religions, Native American faith or American Indian religions are the Indigenous spiritual practices of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Ceremonial practices involve sacred, spiritual, cultural traditions that can differ slightly among the indigenous groups of the continent. Early European explorers describe some communities, now labelled Native American tribes in the USA and small First Nations or bands in Canada, as each having unique religious practices. Theology may be monotheistic, polytheistic, henotheistic, animistic, shamanistic, pantheistic or any combination thereof, among others. Traditional beliefs are usually passed down in the oral tradition forms of myths, oral histories, stories, allegories, and principles. Nowadays, as scholars note, many American Natives are having a renewed interest in their own traditions.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
This religion of spirits is called _animism_. Now, to explain the universal co-existence of these two sorts of cults, two contradictory theories have been proposed. For some, animism is the primitive religion, of which naturism is only a secondary and derived form. For the others, on the contrary, it is the nature cult which was the point of departure for religious evolution; the cult of spirits is only a peculiar…
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
States what Native American religions is.
Because of the rare occurrence of the phenomenon, however, it has never led to a real mythology. I refer to the belief that in an eclipse of the sun, the sun is swallowed by a dark demon. This belief, obviously, is very readily suggested to the primitive imagination; it occurs in Central Africa, in Australia, and in America, and is found even in Indian mythology. Taken by itself, however, the notion is incapable of…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
States what Native American religions is.
Of this kind were all the religions of early peoples, which we may define as civil or positive divine right or law. There is a third sort of religion of a more singular kind, which gives men two codes of legislation, two rulers, and two countries, renders them subject to contradictory duties, and makes it impossible for them to be faithful both to religion and to citizenship. Such are the religions of the Lamas and…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The social contract & discourses
Close in meaning to Native American religions; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
- Honorific
- Animism
- Henotheism
- Inuit
- Mexico City
- Polytheism
- Monism
- Monotheism
- New religious movement
- Modern paganism
- Pantheism
- Indigenous peoples of the Americas
- Religion
- Protestantism
- Spanish language
- Nahuatl
- State religion
- Universalism
- Vancouver
- United States
- Mexico
- Deity
- Religious syncretism
- Mesoamerica
Place in the tradition
Part of Fundamentalism.
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