Native American Religion

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The spiritual practices of Native Americans in the United States are known as Native American Religions. Different nations, tribes, and bands have varying histories and worldviews, which are reflected in their diverse ceremonial practices.

Individual Native American tribes and even small bands are described by early European explorers as having their own religious rituals.

There are many different types of theology, including monotheistic, polytheistic, henotheistic, animistic, shamanistic, pantheistic, and combinations of these. Ordinarily, oral histories, myths, and guiding principles serve as the primary means of transmitting traditional beliefs.

Beginning in the 1600s, Catholic and Protestant European Christians began conversion efforts among Native American tribes.

After America gained its independence in the 1700s, its government continued to suppress racial practices and encourage forcible conversion.. Government officials and religious organizations often cooperated in these conversion efforts. In many cases, violence was used as a means of coercion.

This federal harassment and litigation, which passed federal laws prohibiting traditional native practices such as feasting, sun dance ceremonies, and the use of sweat lodges, officially continued until passage of the Religious Freedom Act of 1978.

Another important policy of religious suppression was the removal of Native American children from their families to government-funded and church-run American Indian schools (also known as boarding schools).

Through violence and bullying, native children in these schools were forced to learn European and Christian beliefs, mainstream white culture and English language values, and were forbidden to speak their language and practice their own cultural beliefs.

Monotheism 

Monotheism is the belief that there is only one deity, an all-supreme being that is universally referred to as God. A distinction may be made between exclusive monotheism, in which the one God is a singular existence, and both inclusive and pluriform monotheism, in which multiple gods or godly forms are recognized, but each are postulated as extensions of the same God.

Polytheism, Henotheism, and kathenotheism

Polytheism is the belief in multiple deities, which are usually assembled into a pantheon of gods and goddesses, along with their own religious sects and rituals. The different gods and goddesses may be representations of forces of nature or ancestral principles which manifest in nature.

Polytheists do not always worship all the gods equally. They can be henotheists, specializing in the worship of one particular deity, or kathenotheists, worshiping different deities at different times.

Animism

Animism is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. Animism perceives all things—animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human handiwork, and in some cases words—as animated and alive.  Animism focuses on the metaphysical universe; specifically, on the concept of the immaterial soul.

Shamanism

Shamanism or samanism is a religious practice that involves a practitioner (shaman or saman) interacting with the spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance. The goal of this is usually to direct spirits or spiritual energies into the physical world for the purpose of healing, divination, or to aid human beings in some other way.

Pantheism

Pantheism is the philosophical religious belief that reality, the universe and the cosmos are identical to divinity and a supreme being or entity. The physical universe is thus understood as an immanent deity, still expanding and creating, which has existed since the beginning of time.

All astronomical objects are thence viewed as parts of a sole deity.

 

Yurok Religious Beliefs and Burial Customs

Yurok myths ascribed creation to Wohpekumew, “widower across the ocean.” Their world was thought to float on water, and, as Kroeber related, “at the head of the river in the sky, where the Deerskin dance is danced nightly, are a gigantic white coyote and his yellow mate.” Yurok dances expressed their beliefs. The motive of such dances was to renew or maintain the world, beginning with the reciting of long formula, after which a dance ensued.Continue to Yurok Religious Beliefs…

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Superstitions of the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians

Superstitions of a ridiculous, and most extravagant nature, were found associated with these Indians, and even now, in almost every town, or hamlet, the child's first education is a belief in their authenticity; and they grow up from infancy familiar with all their fabulous traditions. The effect tends to enervate their physical faculties, and weaken their mental, so that they naturally become a pusillanimous race of people, liable to be deceived, imposed upon, and of course easily influenced by the puplem, and old men, who are their sole instructors.

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Juaneño Band of Mission Indians Puberty Rites

The Instructions the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians Gave to Their Children

One of the difficulties most perplexing to the Indians, was, the rearing and educating their children. They were unacquainted with the arts, excepting those most necessary for their maintenance, and ignorant of all useful knowledge to keep them from idleness; so that their only education consisted in the construction of the bow and arrow, with their peculiar uses, in procuring game and defending themselves from their enemies.

Although, ignorant as they were of the knowledge of the true God, the moral instruction given by parents to their children, was contained in the precepts of Chinigchinich, which were strongly impressed upon their minds, that they might become good, and avoid the fate of the evil.

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Juaneño Band of Mission Indians: Description of the Vanquech or Temple

The temples erected by command of the God Chinigchinich, or the celebrated idolater Ouiamot, were invariably erected in the centre of their towns, and contiguous to the dwelling-place of the, captain, or chief; notwithstanding their houses were scattered about without any particular regard to order, still, they managed to have the location of his house as near the middle as possible.

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Chinigchinich, religious God of the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians

Chinigchinich is an ethnographic account of the culture and notably religious beliefs of the native Californians in the vicinity of the famous mission San Juan Capistrano. This is the mission where the swallows, legendarily, return every year. There is nothing, however, about the returning swallows in this book. Boscana was one of the few Spanish missionaries who, like Bishop Landa in the Yucatan, actually took an interest in the culture they were destroying.

Boscana was, typically, a bigot and a racist (he describes the Indians as being like monkeys). However, he lived among them for decades and obviously had an inquisitive mind and a talent for observation. While he condemns the practices and beliefs of the indigenous people, he describes them in great detail. Barring a time machine, this is the only first-hand account of mission-era Juaneños we will ever have.

The translator of this treatise, Alfred Robinson, was one of the first Yankees to settle in California.

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