Full Answer
What is the traditional belief of Native Americans?
Native Americans believe that the beating of the drum is a uniting force, bringing together people of different tribes, as well as uniting a person’s spirit to their body and mind. The drum is ...
What are the Native American spiritual beliefs?
Native American religions often honor a vast array of deities. Some of these are creator gods, others are tricksters, deities of the hunt, and gods and goddesses of healing. The term “Great Spirit” is applied often in Native American spirituality, to refer to the concept of an all-encompassing power. Some Native tribes refer to this instead ...
What do Native Americans believe in spiritually?
Native Americans believe that dreams are an extension of reality, an opportunity to travel other realms and communicate with ancestors and spirit guides. They teach their children at a very young age to remember their dreams, so they can use them for spiritual guidance and healing. Native American tribes have shamans or medicine men who can ...
What did Native Americans say to the Great Spirit?
The Great Spirit was beleived to rule over the whole universe. All Indians beleived in the great spirit and they beleived all living things had a spirit of its own. The Great Spirit was a spirit that all the Native Americans believed to say it ruled over the universe.
What are Native American spiritual beliefs?
Theology may be monotheistic, polytheistic, henotheistic, animistic, shamanistic, pantheistic or any combination thereof, among others. Traditional beliefs are usually passed down in the forms of oral histories, stories, allegories, and principles.
What religion do Native American believe in?
Native American people themselves often claim that their traditional ways of life do not include “religion.” They find the term difficult, often impossible, to translate into their own languages. This apparent incongruity arises from differences in cosmology and epistemology.
What is Native American spirituality called?
European writers long ago referred to indigenous Americans' ways as “animism,” a term that means “life-ism.” And it is true that most or perhaps all Native Americans see the entire universe as being alive—that is, as having movement and an ability to act.
Do Native Americans believe in spirituality?
Native American religions often honor a vast array of deities. Some of these are creator gods, others are tricksters, deities of the hunt, and gods and goddesses of healing. The term “Great Spirit” is applied often in Native American spirituality, to refer to the concept of an all-encompassing power.
Do Indians believe in God?
Most Indians believe in God and say religion is very important in their lives. Nearly all Indians say they believe in God (97%), and roughly 80% of people in most religious groups say they are absolutely certain that God exists. The main exception is Buddhists, one-third of whom say they do not believe in God.
What are Native American Gods?
List of Native American deities, sortable by name of tribe or name of deity....North American deities.Tribe or groupDeity or spiritNotesInuitPingaGoddess of the hunt, fertility, and medicineSednaSea goddess, ruler of the underworldTorngasoakSky godIroquoisAdekagagwaaSummer73 more rows
What is the story of Tepeu and Gucumatz?
An Iroquois tale tells of Tepeu and Gucumatz, who sat around together and thought up a bunch of different things, like earth, the stars, and the ocean. Eventually, with some help from Coyote, Crow, and a few other creatures, they came up with four two-legged beings, who became the ancestors of the Iroquois people.
What is Native American spirituality?
Native American Spirituality. Native American spirituality is complex and varied. Danita Delimont / Getty Images. Occasionally, modern Pagans, particularly in the United States, include aspects of Native American spirituality in their practice and belief. This is for a variety of reasons–some people are descended from the many tribes ...
Why do pagan people believe in Native American religion?
Others, with no discernible genetic link whatsoever, find themselves drawn to Native American beliefs simply because those practices and stories happen to resonate with them on a spiritual level.
What is cultural appropriation?
Cultural appropriation is a term that refers to, quite simply, the appropriation of one culture’s practice and belief system by another, but without the true cultural context. For example, NeoWiccans who integrate totem animals, vision quests, and sweat lodge sessions as an homage to Native Americans–but who are not Native Americans themselves, and do not understand the usage of those practices on a cultural level because of it – could arguably be accused of cultural appropriation. For more on this, and the way that different people view this issue, be sure to read Cultural Appropriation .
What is vision quest?
For many Native American tribes, both in the past and today, a vision quest is a crucial part of one’s spiritual journey. It is a rite of passage that marks a significant change in one’s life, and often involves communing alone with nature, connecting with the inner self, and typically includes a vision that is both personal and to be shared with the community at large. This may include sun dances or sweat lodges as part of the process. It's important to note that these types of practices can be disastrous if led by someone who has no training, as evidenced by the case of James Arthur Ray, a non-Native self-help guru who was charged with manslaughter following the October 2009 deaths of three people during one of his Spiritual Warriors retreats.
What is the Great Spirit?
Some of these are creator gods, others are tricksters, deities of the hunt, and gods and goddesses of healing. The term “Great Spirit” is applied often in Native American spirituality, to refer to the concept of an all-encompassing power.
What is the medicine man?
The term “shamanism” is an umbrella term used by anthropologists to describe a vast collection of practices and beliefs, many of which have to do with divination, spirit communication, and magic.
What is Native American spirituality?
Even though there are many distinct Native American tribes and cultures, their overarching spirituality boils down to respect for nature. This is where they came from, and this is what continues to sustain them. Many of their practices and beliefs revolve around nature, from how they are healed to how they mature. Studying all tribes and cultures in-depth would be difficult, but we hope to give you some basic information on Native American spirituality below.
What do Native Americans believe in?
The Native Americans revere many deities. There are ones for trickery, hunting, and healing. “The Great Spirit” is a concept many subscribe to and describes an all-encompassing higher power. There are also many other individual spirits in their belief system. Quite a number of them are animals, who they believe guide mankind.
What does the Native American tribe call the medicine man?
Native American tribes don’t really use the term medicine man. They use a specific word in their language that roughly translates to “mystery man.” For example, the term that the people of the Navajo tribe use is “hatáli.” These people are not only healers, but others within their tribe believe them to be bridges to the spirits. Their jobs within their tribe include: educator, historian, healer, and prophet. They can also leave their bodies to communicate with spirits.
What do the Cherokee people believe?
Each tribe has its own take on how the world and human beings came to be. The Cherokee people believe that in the beginning , there was a large floating island held by four ropes over the middle of a vast ocean. The Great Spirit asked all life to stay awake for seven days and seven nights, those who could were rewarded. Afterward, humans appeared. The Navajo tribe believe that we are currently living in the Fourth World. The first people of the first three world were animals, insects, and masked spirits. The first man and woman from the first world were made from the meeting of different clouds.
What do young boys do when they reach puberty?
When young boys reach puberty, they embark on a vision quest. This is a rite of passage for these young boys to receive guidance from higher powers, to reflect on themselves and grow spiritually, and to find a direction for their future. Medicine people can also go through spiritual journeys to communicate with the spirit world. They become the enemy of bad spirits and the protectors of common men.
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Why did European explorers misunderstand the spiritual traditions of Native Americans?
The combination of fluid tenets, a lack of written scriptures, and wide variety of belief caused European explorers to badly misunderstand the spiritual traditions of Native Americans. The assumption of most colonizers was that native religion was shallow, simple, and unimportant. While Native Americans are, by comparison, far more comfortable combining their spiritual beliefs with those of other religions, their traditions are as deeply held and are considered just as meaningful as those of any other culture.
What are the common features of Native American religion?
Most important among these are a lack of distinction between the spiritual world and the natural world, the existence of some type of creative deity, and a general lack of objective, fixed principles.
What is the Great Spirit?
In many cases, this is a single deity, often referred to as the Great Spirit. In some cases, this is a group of gods or a collection of spirits. And, in others, this spirit is more of an impersonal force than an actual, personal being. Because of this broad variation, individual Native American religions can be categorized as theistic, deistic, ...
What is the Native American culture?
Answer. Native Americans is a generic reference to people groups who lived in North and South America prior to the arrival of European explorers. Given the size of those two continents and their diverse landscapes, it is no surprise that Native American cultures varied drastically from group to group and from tribe to tribe.
Is Native American religion a religion?
Attempting to define Native American religion in any detail is futile. As with any other large collection of people groups, there are literally thousands of individual approaches to spirituality in Native American cultures. The concepts of fluidity, a unified spiritual and natural world, and a lack of written scriptures are shared across many of these traditions, but each is a completely independent worldview in and of itself.
Do Native Americans have written texts?
Written texts comparable to works such as the Bible, the Qur'an, or the Vedas do not exist in Native American religious history. Instead, oral tradition and personal teaching are strongly emphasized in Native American religious practice. The motivation for this is extremely practical. From the Native American perspective, the only way to learn traditions is to participate in them; there is little use for written texts.
What do indigenous peoples look for in the cosmos?
Indigenous peoples look on the cosmos as a living womb that nurtures their lives, and so they have less need to destroy or reshape it as more technologically developed cultures do (although they sometimes abuse the land and livestock as developed cultures do). Their goal could be described as achieving harmony in the personal, social, and cosmic realms, rather than gaining personal salvation or liberation as historical religions aim to do.
What is the belief that spirits are all natural?
This belief, known as animism, is common to many preliterate religions which hold that personal, intelligent spirits inhabit almost all natural objects, from stones, plants, and rivers to insects, birds, animals, trees, and mountains.
What is Native American spirituality?
As American Indians emerged during the past century from the controlling influence of Christian missionaries on the reservations, they have fought to reclaim their religious heritage and to guard it from distortion by the dominant white culture of North America. Some Native Americans have expressed the feeling ...
What is the Native American conception?
As in many Goddess religions, the Native American conception divides the universe into heaven, earth, and underworld. Distinctions among spirits, divinities, humans, and animals are often blurred.
Where did the ancient cultures of the North reach?
Archaeologists propose that tens of thousands of years ago a somewhat uniform culture stretched around the northernmost regions of the globe from Greenland and Scandinavia to northern Asia and Siberia. The peoples of this circumpolar culture shared a common history and many religious beliefs and practices including animism, shamanism, and ceremonies centered around hunting and animals. The culture reached down into China, where it influenced the development of Taoism, and Tibet, whose shamanistic Bon culture left its stamp on Tibetan Buddhism. Beginning as long as 60,000 years ago, the peoples of northern Asia migrated across what is now the Bering Sea to Alaska and Canada, and then down through the Great Plains of North America to Central and South America.
Do non-Indians participate in Indian rituals?
Some Native Americans have expressed the feeling that their religion is not appropriate for use by outsiders, and that non-Indians have no business participating in Indian rituals such as the sweat lodge and vision quest.
What is a set religion?
Instead of calling their beliefs and practices a set religion, most refer to it as a system of spirituality that permeates every aspect of their lives. Religion is a set doctrine of supernatural beliefs, the ceremonies, and activities associated with it, and includes things like concepts of deities, spirits or ghosts, what happens to a person after death, and certain special occasions throughout a person's life.
What does the Lakota word "mitakuye oyasin" mean?
The Lakota term “ mitakuye oyasin ” means that all are related or all beings are relatives of each other. This explains the belief that spirit exists in everything or that everything is connected ins some ways. This does not necessarily encompass an objectified spiritual connection because the concept behind the phrase also pushes for respect for the individual.
What is Native American spirituality?
Native American spirituality includes similar ideas, but integrates them more into everyday living rather than reserving them for special occasions. Of course, there are ceremonies for births, deaths, marriages, harvests, and other special times, but daily life was just as filled with beliefs as “holidays” would be.
Why do people have funerals?
Funeral rites and ceremonies existed to facilitate the spirit's progression to its next life . This, again, is not that much different from other religions around the world. For example, ancient Egyptians mummified their pharaohs and buried them with worldly possessions so they could “live” comfortably after death. Things like “Last Rites” and prayers at a funeral provide the same services in Catholicism.
What do people look for when they talk about religion?
When anyone speaks of religion specifically, they usually look for the ceremonies and beliefs that surround some of the most pivotal points in a person's life. These include birth, marriage, and death. Spiritual beliefs also pertain to things going on in the natural world around the people.
What is the difference between religion and spirituality?
Religion describes a division between the supernatural, which is ruled by one or multiple deities. Native American spirituality does not separate the two concepts in any real way. The spiritual or supernatural world is the same thing as the real world.
How did tribal communities interact?
Throughout history, many tribal communities interacted with each other, traded, shared cultural practices and even intermarried. This leads to assimilation or acculturation where both groups exchange ideas or beliefs in various ways. This happens in most cultures around the world that come into contact with another.
What is Navajo ceremonial work?
Most traditional Navajo ceremonies are enacted on behalf of individuals in response to specific needs. Most Pueblo ceremonial work is communal, both in participation and in perceived benefit, and is scheduled according to natural cycles.
What are the differences between Native American and Western cultures?
Western tradition distinguishes religious thought and action as that whose ultimate authority is supernatural —which is to say, beyond, above, or outside both phenomenal nature and human reason. In most indigenous worldviews there is no such antithesis. Plants and animals, clouds and mountains carry and embody revelation. Even where native tradition conceives of a realm or world apart from the terrestrial one and not normally visible from it, as in the case of the Iroquois Sky World or the several underworlds of Pueblo cosmologies, the boundaries between these worlds are permeable. The ontological distance between land and sky or between land and underworld is short and is traversed in both directions.
What is the significance of generosity in Native American culture?
Generosity, in the Native American tradition, is a religious act as well as a social one. The value of generosity is perhaps most dramatically figured in the northern practice known in English as giveaway or in the potlatch of the Northwest Coast peoples, in which property and gifts are ceremonially distributed. Human beings are taught to give eagerly because in so doing they imitate the generosity of the many other-than-human entities that provide for human sustenance.
What are the visible entities that are not animate?
These may include departed as well as yet-to-be-born human beings, beings in the so-called “natural world” of flora and fauna, and visible entities that are not animate by Western standards, such as mountains, springs, lakes, and clouds.
What is oral narrative?
A community’s oral narratives contain a record of human interaction with other-than-human beings, powers, and entities in a place. In addition to the more solemn genres, such as creation stories and migration narratives, there are moralistic stories, family histories, instruction meant to teach traditional skills, and many kinds of jokes. Moreover, joking, clowning, and other forms of entertainment are integral parts of many ceremonial events and settings, either formally or informally. Sometimes such performances are a means of shaming individuals into correcting troublesome behaviour, but they are also employed simply to spread happiness and to lighten moods.
What is the most important life passage?
One of the more important life passages is death, which is understood as a transition and not an ending. Beliefs about death, and ritual responses to it, however, are among the more heterogeneous aspects of Native American religious life.
What is significant achievement?
Significant achievements and life passages are meant to be shared by relatives and the community. Various forms of coming-of-age and initiation ceremonies make up a large portion of the ritual repertoire of many Native American traditions.
You Are Not An Isolated Individual
At the core of native American spirituality is the concept that everything is connected with everything else. This is at odds with the mainstream teaching of the West that sees individuals as separate entities.
Discovery And Healing Through Spiritual Practices
Native American spirituality emphasizes balance and how of all things are intimately entwined. When there is an imbalance within yourself, it is seen as a result of a disharmony between you and the spirit world. This can be rectified through the purification and transformative power of native American spiritual practices.
The Sweat Lodge
The Sweat Lodge is one way of reinstating harmony, as the practice of the Sweat Lodge is seen to be transformative and cleansing. It is seen as offering participants an opportunity to create a new life and new beginnings through rebirth. It’s a powerful way of reinventing oneself and embracing the individual you are meant to be. Learn More.
Vision Quests
A vision quest will take you beyond your egoic self to get in touch with your spiritual self. Vision quests allow you to reconnect with the spirit world and through this find guidance and wisdom regarding life. Through the visions received, you gain an understanding of what your life purpose is.
Smudging Ceremony
There are various ways native Americans use smudging as a cleansing ritual or ceremony. Purification from negativity tends the be the main goal of the Smudging ceremony. One can inadvertently be exposed to what is deemed “Bad Medicine” by innocently passing through someone’s smoke (which could be at work or in some other social setting).
Embracing Yourself
Psychological and emotional issues arise when an individual loses sight of who they are and feeling that they have nothing of value to contribute to society.
Ceremonies ,Practices and Beliefs of Native American People
- As a hunter gatherer or as a agriculture based people, native Americans performed various activities that tell us what is native American spirituality. Similar practices followed in the journey of life such as birth, death, marriage also provide us same answers. We can observe that the pra…
Legends of Native American People
- Native Americans have legends in their oral history that sometimes resemble European and Hindu tales. The legend about the deluge or great flood in which the earth is submerged is similar to a Hindu mythological story. Native Americans did not create a definite concept of God. But they emphasized on spirits – major and minor, supernatural powers, human links with nature, the con…
Present Scenario of Native American Spirituality
- Spiritual practices of native Americans have survived despite many challenges. The inherent strength of native American spirituality is evident from this fact alone. European invasion could not lead to its extinction. It is no longer written off as “heathenish” though there are multiple practices being termed as native American spirituality. There was a time ( 1883) when many spir…
Creation Stories
Deities and Spirits
- Native American religions often honor a vast array of deities. Some of these are creator gods, others are tricksters, deities of the hunt, and gods and goddesses of healing. The term “Great Spirit” is applied often in Native American spirituality, to refer to the concept of an all-encompassing power. Some Native tribes refer to this instead as the ...
Vision Quests and Spiritual Journeys
- For many Native American tribes, both in the past and today, a vision quest is a crucial part of one’s spiritual journey. It is a rite of passage that marks a significant change in one’s life, and often involves communing alone with nature, connecting with the inner self, and typically includes a vision that is both personal and to be shared with the community at large. This may include su…
The Medicine Man and Shamanism
- The term “shamanism” is an umbrella term used by anthropologists to describe a vast collection of practices and beliefs, many of which have to do with divination, spirit communication, and magic. However, in the Native American community, the word is rarely used, because it is typically associated on academic level with Indo-European tribal peoples. Instead, most Native tribes us…
Reverence For The Ancestors
- It is not uncommon to see a strong sense of reverence for the ancestors in Native American practice and belief. As in many other cultures, ancestor venerationis a way of showing honor and respect not only to the members of one’s own family, but to the tribe and community as a whole.
The Dangers of Cultural Appropriation
- Cultural appropriation is a term that refers to, quite simply, the appropriation of one culture’s practice and belief system by another, but without the true cultural context. For example, NeoWiccans who integrate totem animals, vision quests, and sweat lodge sessions as an homage to Native Americans–but who are not Native Americans themselves, and do not understand the …
Creation Stories
Spirits and Gods
- The Native Americans revere many deities. There are ones for trickery, hunting, and healing. “The Great Spirit” is a concept many subscribe to and describes an all-encompassing higher power. There are also many other individual spirits in their belief system. Quite a number of them are animals, who they believe guide mankind.
Medicine People
- Native American tribes don’t really use the term medicine man. They use a specific word in their language that roughly translates to “mystery man.” For example, the term that the people of the Navajotribe use is “hatáli.” These people are not only healers, but others within their tribe believe them to be bridges to the spirits. Their jobs within their tribe include: educator, historian, healer, …
Spiritual Journeys
- When young boys reach puberty, they embark on a vision quest. This is a rite of passage for these young boys to receive guidance from higher powers, to reflect on themselves and grow spiritually, and to find a direction for their future. Medicine people can also go through spiritual journeys to communicate with the spirit world. They become the enemy of bad spirits and the protectors of …