LECTURE FOUR:  AUTOCTHONOUS RELIGION:  AN INTRODUCTION TO TRADITIONAL NATIVE AMERICAN RELIGION.

 

 

 

 

Note:  The term “autocthonous” is useful as a way of classifying the wide data set comprised of historically and contemporarily exhibited religiosities (measurable again through a quantifiable “product”) because it is a relatively neutral term which precludes the reductionism that is embedded in terms like “primitive” or “basic.”  The term

“autocthonous” is an adjective which connotes “that which is more indigenous or connected with a specific local and cultural context, as distinct from that which is more global and trans-cultural in scope and influence.”  Traditional Native American religiosities (those religiosities exhibited by individuals and groups/aggregates dwelling in North America, Mesoamerica/Central America, or South America) can be most accurately described as significantly “authocthonous” because even though isomorphic patterns are evidenced (due to the diffusion of ideas in tribes whose languages are derivative from a single linguistic family and due to “syncretism”—literally the amalgamation of ideas that occurs when different intellectual heritages come into contact), the religiosities tend to be more locally developed and connected with the specific attributes of a specific bioregional context (as contrasted with a religion like Islam, which although emergent from the Middle East, and thus in its measurable “product” reflects root metaphors steeped in specific Middle Eastern gestalten, has been grafted into multiple cultural contexts with multiple antecedent or prior religious traditions which ineluctably/unavoidably change the “shape” of the adopted or superceding religiosity).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the invasion and occupation of Alcatraz in 1969 to the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, I felt that the various Indian protests had a much deeper meaning than simply securing additional lands for reservations.  At the bottom of everything, I believed then and continue to believe, is a religious view of the world that seeks to locate our species within the fabric of life that constitutes the natural world, the land and all its various forms of life.  As long as Indians exist there will be conflict between the tribes and any group that carelessly despoils the land and the life that it supports.  At the deepest philosophical level our universe must have as a structure a set of relationships in which all entities participate.  Within the physical world this universal structure can best be understood as recognition of the sacredness of places  (Deloria 1-2).

 

     Deloria, Jr., Vine.  God is Red:  A Native View of Religion. 

                   Golden, CO:  Fulcrum Publishing, 1994. 

 

 

 

A METHODOLOGICAL PRIMER FOR THE STUDY OF TRADITIONAL NATIVE AMERICAN RELIGIOSITY AND AUTHOCTHONOUS RELIGIOUS AS SUCH

 

 

TWO MORE GENERAL METHODS OR APPROACHES TO THE DATA SET OR SUBJECT MATTER

·        Diachronic:  literally looking at data longitudinally or vertically through history (this data can be thought of as the extant—not extinct—empirically quantifiable “product” of Homo religiosus)

·        Synchronic:  literally looking at extant data “horizontally” or latitudinally across different contexts in the contemporary world.  Sometimes anthropologists, and derivatively, religious studies scholars, rely upon a technique called ethnography or ethnographic studies:  this approach involves the examination of extant contemporary societies and cultures (including religious cultures) in order to identify patterns that may reveal something about past societies and cultures which displayed certain longitudinal similarities that render the two societies/cultures comparable  (e.g., anthropologists have used the ethnographic method by examining the attributes of contemporary hunter and gatherer societies/cultures in order to draw conclusions about hunter and gatherer societies/cultures in the past).  With a degree of scrutiny, one realizes that the ethnographic method is rife with reductive or reductionistic pitfalls; however, in the history of ideas that is the discipline of anthropology, many have felt that ethnography has its merits as a tool for drawing conclusions about human societies/cultures now extinct.

 

 

SOURCES (THE EMPIRICALLY MEASURABLE AND QUANTIFIABLE “PRODUCT” OF HOMO RELIGIOSUS—I.E., THOSE WHOSE RELIGIOSITY CAN BE CLASSIFIED UNDER THE RUBRIC “TRADITIONAL NATIVE AMERICAN RELIGIOSITY”—FROM WHICH INFERENCES CAN BE MADE AND ASSERTIONS/HYPOTHESES CAN BE DERIVED)

 

     Much of the data examined in the service of facilitating a longitudinal or diachronic study of traditional Native American religiosity is derived from field notebooks, journals, or official documents from what is called the “Contact” and “Post Contact” periods—literally at the time of contact between Native Americans and Europeans and after this contact.  These archived documents were generated by European explorers, fur trappers, Judeo-Christian missionaries and clerics (e.g., Reverend John Heckwelder and David Zeisberger, the Moravian Missionary, in the Middle Atlantic and New England states, and Father Pierre Jean de Smet in the Inland Pacific Northwest), military figures, naturalists, and anthropologists.  More latitudinal or synchronic studies (as in the cases where the ethnographic method has been implemented) and the hypotheses derivative from the data sets examined through these studies are functions of observations and analyses of demonstrated behaviors and customs of those Native Americans practicing varieties of religiosity as part of a literal renaissance of the more traditional Native American religious forms in the contemporary world.  Some more autochthonous, distinctly non European, traditional Native American elements in Native American religiosity, exhibited in the contemporary world (even those who now practice some variation of Judeo-Christianity), can be deduced from the residues embedded in the more syncretistic forms of religious consciousness and orientation that are ostensibly classified under the rubric of the superceding religiosity (in a way, the prior or antecedent traditional concepts have not been completely “overwritten” or entirely superceded but synthesized into the new “template” that is the contemporary religious orientation—e.g., my wife’s late paternal grandfather, a full-blood Seminole originally from the Applachiacola reservation in Florida, saw himself and was seen by others as a pious, practicing Methodist; however, he still believed that when the alligators were bellowing near his southern Georgia farmstead, the ancestors were expressing aggravation about something and needed to be appeased—a residual trapping from a more antecedent traditional Seminole religiosity not fully overwritten by the Judeo-Christian/Methodist orientatio.  In one anecdotal case example that my wife relayed to me, my wife’s grandfather apparently stopped his consumption of a peach at the sound of the gators bellowing and threw his peach into the high grass as a form of sacrificial appeasement of the ancestors!).

          The Varieties of Sources Implemented in the Study of Traditional Native American Religiosity:

·        Archaeological:  material culture (the “product” of specific social groups/aggregates in specific places in space and time)

·        Oral/Written Records (extant mythic/mythopoetic/mythopoeic encodings…”biographical maps,” e.g., the “Winter Counts” of the Plains Indians)

·        Anthropological/missionary/military accounts from the “Contact” and “Post Contact” periods

·        Ethnographic studies

·        Anecdotal accounts and explanations of those whose religio-cultural consciousness is defined as a function of Traditional Native American religiosity (e.g., Vine Deloria, Jr. whose assertions are cited above)

 

 

 

 

 

SPECIFIC PROBLEMS WITH AND CAVEATS FOR EXAMINING TRADITIONAL NATIVE AMERICAN RELIGIOSITY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOME GENERAL ISOMORPHIC PATTERNS EVIDENT IN THE DATA SET THAT IS THE “PRODUCT” AND ANTECDENT INTERIOR PSYCHOLOGICAL AND COGNITIVE ORIENTATION CLASSIFIABLE AS “TRADITIONAL NATIVE AMERICAN RELIGIOSITY

 

 

 

 

 

Contemporary Native American Studies scholars, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars tend to focus now on the distinct, more sui generis (idiosyncratic or connected with a particular socio-cultural-regional context) elements constitutive of specific varieties of Traditional Native American religiosities (e.g., Navajo religiosity as distinct from Ojibway religiosity, as distinct from Inuit religiosity…).  The conclusions drawn from these more sui generis examinations of specific varieties of Traditional Native American religiosity may bear up some of the earlier, more “global” assertions concerning isomorphic patterns evidenced interculturally (e.g., between the quantifiable “products” marking Traditional Lakota Siouxian religiosity and that of Traditional Algonquian religiosity…and that of Traditional Salishan religiosity…).  The conclusions drawn from the close scrutiny of the more sui generis elements constitutive of the more specialized varieties of Traditional Native American religiosity may also help to reshape standard assertions concerning the isomorphic patterns evidenced in Traditional Native American religiosity as such, yielding more robust, less reductive, truly scientifically phenomenological representations of the data set:  the sui generis, specialized attributes as well as the more “global” isomorphic patterns evidenced throughout the historical and contemporary data set classifiable under the rubric “Traditional Native American religiosity.”