Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes; Bassett; Avalos

Edited by

Molly Bassett [+–]

Georgia State University

Molly Bassett is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. Her first book The Fate of Earthly Things, a study of Aztec gods and god-bodies, was published by the University of Texas Press in 2015. She is currently at work on a second book tentatively titled The Bundle: Unwrapping Aztec Religion, an examination of the quimilli (bundle) and tlaquimilolli (sacred bundle) as models for theory and method in the study of Aztec religion.

Natalie Avalos [+–]

University of Colorado Boulder

Natalie Avalos is an Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies in the Ethnic Studies department at University of Colorado Boulder, which sits within Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Territories. Her work explores urban Native and Tibetan refugee religious life as decolonial praxis. She takes an endogenous approach to Indigenous life to write about land-based logics, the embodiment of colonialism as historical trauma, and the liberatory and healing possibilities of engaging intersubjective realities. She is a Chicana of Apache descent, born and raised in the Bay Area.

Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes aims to answer many of the questions that come to mind when we think about the religious lives of Native and Indigenous peoples of the world. Scholars from many fields answer dozens of questions about a wide variety of specific Indigenous religious traditions and an array of the ideas, practices, and beliefs many people associate with them. Do Native peoples have “creator Gods?” What is shamanism? Why are there so many spellings of “voodoo?” Is Paganism considered an Indigenous religious tradition? We also interrogate the concept of “Indigenous religious traditions,” by asking what the phrase means in relation to the larger fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies and Religious Studies, whether all religions were at some point “indigenous,” and what the value of studying Indigenous religious traditions is today.

Specialists respond to questions like these and many others in easily accessible language and provide references for further exploration, making this volume useful for personal study or classroom use.

Because each chapter can be read in about five minutes, the books offer ideal supplementary resources in classrooms or an engaging read for those curious about the world around them.

Series: Religion in 5 Minutes

Preface

Preface [+–] xiii-xv

Molly Bassett,Natalie Avalos

Georgia State University

University of Colorado Boulder

Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes aims to answer many of the questions that come to mind when we think about the religious lives of Native and Indigenous peoples of the world. Scholars from many fields answer dozens of questions about a wide variety of specific Indigenous religious traditions and an array of the ideas, practices, and beliefs many people associate with them. Do Native peoples have “creator Gods?” What is shamanism? Why are there so many spellings of “voodoo?” Is Paganism considered an Indigenous religious tradition? We also interrogate the concept of “Indigenous religious traditions,” by asking what the phrase means in relation to the larger fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies and Religious Studies, whether all religions were at some point “indigenous,” and what the value of studying Indigenous religious traditions is today. Specialists respond to questions like these and many others in easily accessible language and provide references for further exploration, making this volume useful for personal study or classroom use.

Indigeneity and Religion

1. Why does the title of this book use the phrase “Indigenous Religious Traditions” rather than “Indigenous Religions?” [+–] 3-5

Tisa Wenger

Yale University

Tisa Wenger, associate professor of American religious history at Yale University, is the author of We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom.

This chapter begins by noting that the concept of religion as a distinct sphere of human belief and practice has a distinctly European and largely Christian history. European colonial authorities referred to Indigenous traditions by derogatory terms such as “heathenism” or “paganism” and did not view them as legitimately religious. Indigenous people have claimed and adapted the concept of religion for themselves, but have often found European ideas about religion to be an uneasy fit. The phrase “religious traditions” is not a perfect solution but offers useful distance from a category (religion) that has too often imposed a Christian-shaped mold.

2. What makes a religion an “Indigenous religion”? [+–] 6-8

Graham Harvey

Open University

Graham Harvey is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the Open University, UK. His research is concerned with the performance and rhetoric of identities among Jews, Pagans and indigenous peoples. He is particularly interested in the ‘new animism’, embracing relational and material approaches to interactions between humans and the larger than human world. His recent publications include The Handbook of Contemporary Animism(2013) and Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life (2013).

Bringing two excitingly rich words together should help us to understand more about religion and more about Indigeneity. More information becomes available for discussion and new light is cast on important debates.

3. Were all religions at one time “Indigenous”? [+–] 9-11

Tyler M Tully

University of Oxford

Tyler M. Tully is a doctoral candidate in Religion and the Arthur Peacocke Graduate Scholar in Theology and Science at the University of Oxford. As a fifth generation Oklahoman of settler and Native (Chickasaw) descent, Tyler’s interdisciplinary research and teaching engages intersecting entanglements between religion, race, gender, science, and colonialism.

This essay looks to the discourse on “Indigenous religious traditions” and “lifeways” in the academic study of religion, asking “Where all religions at one time ‘Indigenous’?” It interrogates assumptions at work in the terms “Indigenous” and “religion,” highlighting questions of power related to identity and place, before situating these within a larger colonial context. Next, it traces its titular query across the work of scholars foundational to the study of religion, such as Tylor, Frazer, Evans-Pritchard, Durkheim, and Eliade. Against the backdrop of this wider history and development, this chapter critically accounts for religion’s longstanding dependence on theories and discourses of the “savage” and “primitive.”

4. What does “Indigenous” mean for the study of religion? [+–] 12-14

Tyler M Tully

University of Oxford

5. Are Indigenous religions only those practiced by Indigenous people? [+–] 15-17

Angela Puca

Leeds Trinity University

Dr. Angela Puca is currently lecturing at Leeds Trinity University and holds a PhD on Indigenous and Transcultural Shamanism in Italy, awarded by the University of Leeds. Her research interests include magic, shamanism and the concept of indigeneity, witchcraft, Paganism, and esotericism. In addition, she hosts a YouTube channel called ‘Angela’s Symposium’ to divulge the academic study of such topics to a wider audience.

This essay will explore the matter of whether a religion, to be deemed indigenous, needs to necessarily be practised by indigenous people. I will argue that this is not necessarily the case as indigenous people is a political category while indigenous religion is a religious studies concept. By disentangling the two, we will acquire a more nuanced understanding of both.

6. How can spiritual traditions create Indigenous traditions in new places? [+–] 18-21

Ras Michael Brown

Georgia State University

Ras Michael Brown is an associate professor in the Department of History at Georgia State University. His research and teaching interests engage the long historical development of religions and cultures in the African Diaspora. He has written numerous articles on early African/American communities and their spiritual cultures, and his book African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry (Cambridge University Press, 2012) was honored as the inaugural recipient of the “Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions” in 2013.

Captive Africans dispersed throughout the Americas understood indigeneity as a process of spiritual transformation that linked displaced people to new places of habitation. Their relationships with native/nature spirits enabled them to create new Indigenous traditions that rooted their communities and allowed them to become spiritually indigenous in the lands of their captivity.

7. Why do some Indigenous people insist that what they practice is not religion? [+–] 22-24

Chris Jocks

Northern Arizona University

Chris Jocks, Kahnawà:ke Mohawk, is Senior Lecturer in Applied Indigenous Studies at Northern Arizona University. He earned his Ph.D. in religious studies under the direction of Inés Talamantez at University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1994. His work includes publications on conceptual incongruity between Indigenous and settler state societies and nations, as manifest in law, religion, and social practices. He is also engaged with local Indigenous community advocacy in northern Arizona.

This chapter approaches the question by examining various descriptions and conflicting judgments applied to the concept of religion, in relation to Indigenous knowledge and practices. Domains of incongruity range from semantic to ontological, historical, and political.

8. Why is “religion” a problematic category for understanding Indigenous traditions? [+–] 25-27

Philip P. Arnold

Syracuse University

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Philip P. Arnold is Associate Professor and Chair of the Religion Department; core faculty in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Syracuse University; and Founding Director of the Skä·noñh—Great Law of Peace Center. His books are Eating Landscape: Aztec and European Occupation of Tlalocan (1999); The Gift of Sports: Indigenous Ceremonial Dimensions of the Games We Love (2012); Urgency of Indigenous Values and the Future of Religion (Syracuse University Press, 2021). He established the Doctrine of Discovery Study Group (www.doctrineofdiscovery.org), and Indigenous Values Initiative (www.indigenousvalues.org).

Since first contact, “religion” has been used as a weapon against Indigenous Peoples. In the 15th century, Papal Bulls mandated that Christian Discoverers seize non-Christian bodies, lands, and property. The Doctrines of Christian Discovery (DoCD) is the religious foundation upon which Christian supremacy was established to justify the taking of land. Columbus’ voyages ushered forth the “Age of Discovery” and legitimized horrendous acts of violence, as the means to establishing a New World order.

9. Why is it sometimes risky to present Indigenous traditions as religious? [+–] 28-30

Bjørn Ola Tafjord

University of Tromsø

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Bjørn Ola Tafjord is professor of religious studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, co-leader of the research group Indigenous Religion(s): Local Grounds, Global Networks (INREL), and PI of the collaborative research project The Governmateriality of Indigenous Religions (GOVMAT).

This chapter briefly points out some of the risks that may arise if or when certain indigenous traditions are categorized as ‘religious’.

10. Is “tradition” a useful category? [+–] 31-33

Greg Johnson

University of California, Santa Barbara

Greg Johnson teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Director of the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life. His research focuses on the intersection of religion and law in Indigenous contexts, with particular attention to repatriation, burial protection, and sacred land claims.

This entry considers discourses of “tradition” in various contexts, including popular rhetoric, law, and as an academic category, flagging the historical liabilities of the category while also making a case for its ongoing relevance when considered in processual terms.

11. What skillsets do students and scholars use to understand Indigenous religious traditions? [+–] 34-36

Molly Bassett

Georgia State University

This chapter provides a brief overview of some of the skillsets students and scholars may use when studying Indigenous religious traditions.

12. Why study Indigenous religious traditions? [+–] 37-39

Graham Harvey

Open University

Beyond the simple answer, ‘because they exist’ (i.e. we should study the whole of life), the study of Indigenous religions challenges and/or enriches understandings of religion. Indigenous knowledges can improve literacy about all religions.

13. What is the origin of common stereotypes of Native American religious life? [+–] 40-42

Sarah Dees

Iowa State University

Sarah Dees is an assistant professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University. Her first book, a history of Smithsonian research on Native American religions, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press.

This entry will discuss representations of Native traditions that have had a major influence on popular conceptions of Native American religions: museums and popular media. It will cover representations of Native American traditions in museums, literature, and movies, especially Westerns, which popularized the stereotype of Plains warriors. It will also encourage readers to consider how and why representations exist and some ideas for thinking about them critically.

14. How do ideas about race shape understandings of Native American religious life? [+–] 43-45

Sarah Dees

Iowa State University

This entry will look at ideas about comparative religion in the 19th century that created a distinction between “civilized” and “primitive” forms of religion—showing that the categories of religion and race were historically intertwined, and the impact that this has had on mainstream ideas about Native American religions.

15. Why Are Indigenous African and Afro-Diasporic Religions Relevant to You? [+–] 46-48

Ayodeji Ogunnaike,Oludamini Ogunnaike

Bowdoin College

Ayodeji Ogunnaike is an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College whose research is centered on the Yoruba tradition of Ifa divination and orature but also includes Islam and Christianity in African and Afro-diasporic religions, particularly Brazilian Candomblé.

University of Virginia

Oludamini Ogunnaike is an Assistant Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. He holds a PhD in African and African American Studies and Religious Studies from Harvard University. His published works include Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (2020) and Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: A Study of West African Madīḥ Poetry and Its Precedents (2020).

African religious traditions are so practically oriented, they primarily seek to address universal human and cosmological conditions and issues and thus have important wisdom and insight to share with all people across time and space.

16. What makes Vodou an Indigenous tradition? [+–] 49-51

James Padilioni, Jr.

Swarthmore College

James Padilioni, Jr. is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Swarthmore College. His research and teaching foreground African Diasporic ritual cultures, ontology and critical race theory of Blackness, and deep ecology studies, with a particular focus in Afro-Latinx folk Catholicism, herbalism and pharmacopeia, and spirit ecstasy traditions. James also cohosts the Always Already critical theory podcast (alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com).

If indigeneity refers to “that which the earth generates of itself,” then we must reevaluate Vodou traditions as a store bank of indigenous Afro-Amerindian perspectives on sacred ecology, as Vodou’s intergenerational rites of obligation and libation bind communities to the land, and to each other. In these Anthropocenic times of amplifying climate change, the indigenous practice of Vodou offers fresh hope for creating sustainable, planetary futures.

17. What’s the difference between Vodou, Voudou, and Voodoo? [+–] 52-54

Emily Clark

Gonzaga University

Emily Suzanne Clark is associate professor of Religious Studies at Gonzaga University where she teaches undergraduate courses in American Religions. She is the author of A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) and co-editor of Race and New Religious Movements: A Documentary Reader (Bloomsbury, 2019). She has also published on New Orleans Voudou, Jesuit missions in the Pacific Northwest, and the Moorish Science Temple.

This chapter compares and contrasts three different religious traditions with similar sounding names across the Caribbean and New Orleans. By exploring the role of syncretism in each one, the essay draws attention to the importance of cultural context.

18. Is Vodou (Voodoo) a religion? [+–] 55-57

James Padilioni, Jr.

Swarthmore College

Healing and wellness are the core aspects of all Vodou practices. As Vodou holds to a holistic understanding of health, sickness and affliction may manifest in any domains of life — physical, spiritual, social, psychic, political, etc. — and migrate across to the others. The first premise of a Vodou cosmic is material impermanence set against the incessant recycling of soul energy, in a move not unlike Dharmic traditions.

19. Is Voudou an American religion or an Indigenous religion? [+–] 58-60

Emily Clark

Gonzaga University

This chapter considers how New Orleans Voudou is both an American religion and an Indigenous one. In the process, it pays particular attention to the politics of both those categories.

20. Is Adivasi religion the same as Hinduism? [+–] 61-63

William Elison

University of California, Santa Barbara

William Elison is associate professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An ethnographer and historian, he specializes in the religions of modern South Asia. He is the author of The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and the Visible at the Margins of Mumbai (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and is currently at work on a short history of Mumbai for Cambridge University Press.

What’s at stake in this equation? This essay introduces India’s Adivasis, or “Scheduled Tribes,” and lays out some key factors to take into account: questions of caste, colonial epistemology, Brahminical tradition, and the politics of Hindu nationalism. For the present-day Hindu Right, the solution to the equation is: “Essentially, yes.”

21. Is Adivasi religion different from Hinduism? [+–] 64-66

William Elison

University of California, Santa Barbara

A response to the previous piece, this essay complicates the historical push-pull dynamic between Adivasi groups and forces of Hinduization, which has gained fresh salience in today’s Hindu nationalist India. As in many other places, in India, religion gives shape to Indigenous communities’ claims to ancestral territories. To identify a local deity as a Hindu god is thus to threaten its worshippers’ claim to cultural particularity—and ultimately, to Indigeneity itself.

22. Is Shinto an Indigenous religion? [+–] 67-69

Emily B. Simpson

Dartmouth College

Dr. Emily B. Simpson received her PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2019 and is a lecturer at Dartmouth College. Her research centers on reinterpretations of the legend of Empress Jingū, a third century empress appearing in early Japanese chronicles, within various Buddhist and Shinto traditions and within women’s cults. Her book project, entitled Crafting a Goddess: Divinization and Womanhood in Late Medieval and Early Modern Narratives of Empress Jingū explores how diverse religious institutions divinized Empress Jingū, focusing on her martial and shamanic deeds, her motherhood and pregnancy, or her connections to maritime communities.

Shinto is often considered an Indigenous tradition. While Shinto is intimately connected to the Japanese archipelago and its various myths, it has also been influenced by other Asian traditions, such as Buddhism, and by “State Shinto,” the version of Shinto adapted and mandated by the nationalist government of Imperial Japan.

23. Do Chicanos practice Indigenous religious traditions? [+–] 70-72

Rudy Busto

University of California, Santa Barbara

Rudy Busto is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Religious Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include: American religion, race and religion, and religions and science fiction. He authored the book King Tiger: The Religious Visions of Reies Lopez Tijerina, The Gospel According to Rice: The Next Asian American Christianity (2005) and has published articles for many journals including the Amerasian Journal and <>The Religious Studies Project.

Chicano identity is bound to the political and cultural activism of the 1960s and early 1970s by Mexican-descent Americans rejecting assimilation in American society. The Chicano Movement, initiated as a coalition of several distinct local movements, coalesced at the end of the 1960s. As Mexicans, Chicanos inherited the legacy of the mestizaje ideal that interpreted Mexico’s history and destiny as the result of the biological and cultural blending of Iberia with indigenous Mexican, primarily Aztec/Nahuatl peoples.

24. Is Neo-Paganism an Indigenous religious tradition? [+–] 73-75

Abel R. Gomez

University of Oklahoma

Abel R. Gomez is a Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Native American Studies Department at University of Oklahoma. He holds a PhD from the Religion Department at Syracuse University. His research focus is on sacred sites, decolonization, and Indigenous survival among the Ohlone peoples of the San Francisco-Monterey region.

While Indigenous and Neo-Pagan religions share important connections such as reverence for the natural world, they also have significant differences. Indigenous religions are often location-specific, tied to particular Indigenous peoples, shaped by colonial contact, and rooted in communal obligations to human and non-human relatives. Neo-Pagan religions, and Wicca specifically, draws from multiple cultural sources and in the Americas is practiced on lands that have been dispossessed from Indigenous peoples. Indigenous and Neo-Pagan religious practitioners sometimes engage in cultural exchanges at local and international levels, but they remain distinct.

25. Are Indigenous people who adapt or alter their rituals and traditions (either by choice or historical necessity) less authentic than their ancestors? [+–] 76-78

Kelsey Dayle John

University of Arizona

Kelsey Dayle John (Diné) is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in Gender and Women’s Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona. Her work is centered on animal relationalities, particularly horse/human relationships as ways of knowing, healing, and decolonizing education. Alongside her work in Indigenous animal studies, Kelsey’s research interests also include: Indigenous feminisms, decolonizing methodologies, and Tribal College and Universities. She finds her theoretical locations within transnational feminism, Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, Diné Studies, and foundations of education.

This chapter describes how the perception of an “authentic” Indian is incomplete, limiting, and bias. Furthermore, the author argues that this notion perpetuates the idea that Indigenous persons fall on linear timelines from authentic to assimilated.

26. Can I convert to or practice an Indigenous religious tradition if I am not an Indigenous person? [+–] 79-81

Donnie Begay

University of Divinity, Australia, PhD candidate

Yá’át’ééh, Donnie Begay lives in Albuquerque, NM and is married to Renee who is from Zuni pueblo. We have three daughters, Natalia, Kaya, and Peri. I am Navajo and grew up on the Navajo reservation. I am born into my mother’s clan, Honágháahnii (One-Who-Walks-Around), and born for my father’s clan, Kinyaa’áanii (Towering House People). I graduated from New Mexico State University with a BA in Business Administration, George Fox University (now Portland Seminary) with a MA in Intercultural Studies, and am working on my Ph.D. from the University of Divinity in Australia.

The idea of ‘conversion’ wouldn’t fit into an Indigenous paradigm mostly due to the fact that Indigenous people believe they were all born into their tribe/people group and gain their being and identity from their families, relatives and place on earth. Non-Indigenous people who seek to practice indigenous religious practices would be viewed with suspicion.

27. Can non-Indigenous religious traditions become Indigenous? [+–] 82-84

Bjørn Ola Tafjord

University of Tromsø

View Website

This chapter briefly discusses some of the ways in which non-Indigenous religious traditions may become Indigenous.

The Study of Indigenous Religious Traditions

28. What moral responsibilities do scholars and students have in studying Indigenous religions? [+–] 87-90

Afe Adogame

Princeton Theological Seminary

Afe Adogame is the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Religion and Society, Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey, USA. His research focuses on interrogating new dynamics of religious experiences and expressions in Africa and the African diaspora. Relevant book publications include: Alternative Voices: A Plurality Approach for Religious Studies (2013); African Traditions in the Study of Religion, Diaspora, and Gendered Societies (2013). He is co-editor of the Routledge series Vitality of Indigenous Religions; Editor in Chief, AASR E-journal of Religion in Africa and Its Diaspora; and Deputy Editor, Journal of Religion in Africa (Brill).

The historiography of the academic study of and approach to Indigenous religions has deep imprints in European colonialism and the formation of western modernity and coloniality. This approach, way of knowing and methodology contributes to the (mis)understanding of indigenous religions, in a way that calls for the decolonizing and re-institutionalizing of Indigenous religions as an important academic and cultural field of study

29. Why is repatriation a religious issue for many Native communities? [+–] 91-93

Greg Johnson

University of California, Santa Barbara

This entry considers the politics of repatriation with special attention to human remains (ancestors) and sacred objects.

30. Is an academic approach to Indigenous religions innately colonizing? [+–] 94-97

Afe Adogame

Princeton Theological Seminary

Scholars and students confront ethical challenges and dilemmas in studying Indigenous religions against the backdrop of inherent colonizing legacy. Moral responsibilities therefore include the privileging of indigenous voices, demonstrating empathetic understanding, employing indigenous methodologies, and the scholar/students’ engagement of social, cultural and epistemic reflexivity in reinterpreting indigenous religions in a culturally appropriate way

31. Can we still use the term “shamanism”? [+–] 98-100

Emily B. Simpson

Dartmouth College

Shamanism refers to the belief that certain religious practitioners are able to communicate with supernatural entities, often through a trance state and after undergoing training and initiation. While shamanism is seen as a worldwide phenomenon, its connections to Western-centrism, cultural appropriation, and hierarchical understandings of religion make its usage problematic.

32. Do Native peoples have shamans? [+–] 101-103

Edward Anthony Polanco

Virginia Tech

Dr. Edward Anthony Polanco is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Virginia Tech. He was born in Los Angeles, CA and his family and ancestors are from Kuskatan (Western El Salvador). His academic interests include Native peoples, Latin America, Gender, Religion, and Healing. His main expertise is healing and gender in the Nahua world (Mexico and El Salvador).

Using examples from various Mesoamerican communities this chapter explores the appropriateness of the term “shaman” in Turtle Island and Abya Yala. Using the term Shaman for Native practitioners in what is today Mexico or other parts of the “Americas” can conceal and distort the nuances of local practices. Here we see that it is best to use local Indigenous terms.

33. What is animism? [+–] 104-106

Graham Harvey

Open University

Animism is a term used to label entirely different phenomena and therefore needs care. It can mean “belief in spirits” or “treating the world as a community of multi-species relations”. It can be a colonial insult or an encouragement of respect towards all existences.

34. Why does it matter how we translate religious concepts in Indigenous traditions? [+–] 107-109

Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry

University of Texas at Austin, PhD candidate

Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His focus is on Religions in the Americas with an interest in Late Postclassic and colonial Mesoamerica. His dissertation, They Give the Sun to Drink: the Life and Labor of Aztec Ritual Specialists, is an account of Aztec ritual specialists using material culture and Nahuatl language sources. The project argues that household ritual specialists helped sustain temple religion by crafting ceramic, stonework, regalia, and food staples.

This chapter considers how Indigenous and European grammarians aligned religious terms and concepts when creating bilingual dictionaries. It signals to ritual education, concepts like “religion,” and terms like “minister” and “priest.” The chapter argues that Eurocentric language conceals the semantics of an Indigenous worldview.

35. How do archaeologists study religion in the Indigenous past? [+–] 110-112

Mallory E. Matsumoto

University of Texas at Austin

Mallory E. Matsumoto is assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research addresses the interface between language, material culture, and religion in pre- colonial and colonial Maya communities of Mesoamerica. She has conducted archaeological fieldwork and archival research in Guatemala, Mexico, Hungary, Peru, and the United States.

Archaeology offers an opportunity to understand Indigenous religions in the past because of its focus on material remains of how people practiced their religion—even when those people may have been omitted from texts, images, and other traditional historical sources.

36. Why reconstruct pre-colonial Indigenous religions in the Americas? [+–] 113-116

Yanitsa Buendía de Llaca

University of California, Santa Barbara

Yanitsa Buendía de Llaca is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on Aztec and Toltec revitalization movements, from the Mexicayotl to Macehualiztli, and their intersections with other Indigenous movements and Mexican New Age.

The conquest, colonization, and settlement of the Americas is a process in which European immigrants and their descendants actively take over land and resources from Indigenous and Native peoples. Since colonization is an ongoing process, reconstructions of Native and Indigenous religious practices and identities are also in constant challenge to both historical and present impositions.

37. Are Aztec dancers practicing a religion? [+–] 117-119

Yanitsa Buendía de Llaca

University of California, Santa Barbara

Aztec dance originated from the Conchero Movement, which was a vernacular Catholic practice carried out in small towns in the State of Mexico and neighboring states, including Querétaro and Hidalgo, and Mexico City. Every year on September 13th, Concheros from Mexico and the United States congregate in the Temple of the Saint Cross (Templo de la Santa Cruz) in Querétaro, which has become the cradle of the celebration, to commemorate the commitment of keeping the tradition alive

38. What’s the deal with cultural appropriation? [+–] 120-122

Gregory D. Alles

McDaniel College

Gregory Alles is professor of religious studies at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. He is co-editor of Numen, the journal of the International Association for the History of Religions, and a member of the steering committee of the Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit of the American Academy of Religion. Dr. Alles has served as President of the North American Association for the Study of Religions. His research has focused widely on rhetoric in Greek and Sanskrit epic, the history of the study of religions in Germany, particularly the work of Rudolf Otto, the study of religions in a global context, and most recently on adivasi (tribal) people in Gujarat, India, known as Rathvas. He edited Religious Studies: A Global View and is author of The Iliad, The Ramayana, and the Work of Religion: Failed Persuasion and Religious Mystification as well as a number of articles.

The cultural appropriation of Indigenous identities, practices, and symbols – even bodies – is widespread. The appropriation of Indigenous religious beliefs and practices constitutes a highly contested topic. The contestation has been particularly acute, although not uniquely so, in locations where the New Age and the Indigenous intersect, such as shamanism.

39. Was the Washington R*dskins cultural appropriation? [+–] 123-125

Matt Sheedy

Universität Bonn

Matt Sheedy holds a PhD in the study of religion and is visiting professor of North American Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. His research includes critical theories of secularism and religion, and representations of atheism, Islam, Christianity, and Native American traditions in popular and political culture. His latest book is Owning the Secular: Religious Symbols, Culture Wars, Western Fragility (Routledge 2021).

Following decades of protest, the name R*dskins was changed to the Washington Football team in July 2020. This entry will touch on the R*dskins controversy as an example of cultural appropriation, and how responses to this affair from Indigenous communities reflect an expanding discourse on what constitutes Native American identity.

40. What is decolonization and what does it have to do with Indigenous religious traditions? [+–] 126-128

Natalie Avalos

University of Colorado Boulder

For Native and Indigenous peoples, decolonization is both an end goal in the form of “land back”—the reallocation of Indigenous lands to Indigenous peoples—and the radical praxis that supports this end. A critical Indigenous studies approach to understanding Indigenous religious life serves to ‘decolonize’ by centering Indigenous epistemologies and assert them as epistemologies in their own right, as opposed to ‘primitive’ or superstitious belief.

Indigenous Religious Traditions

41. What is a Land-based religious tradition? [+–] 131-133

Dana Lloyd

Villanova University

Dana Lloyd is Assistant Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University. She holds a PhD in Religion from Syracuse University, and LLB and LLM degrees from Tel Aviv Law School. Her book manuscript, Arguing for This Land: Rethinking Indigenous Sacred Sites, is under contract with University Press of Kansas.

What does it mean for land, or a specific site, to be considered sacred? What does it mean to base a whole religious tradition on the sacredness of a place? I explore these questions in this chapter, but instead of turning to the usual suspects of religious studies (e.g., Mircea Eliade), or to my own religious tradition (Judaism), for answers, I turn to Native scholars (e.g., Vine Deloria, Jr.), who explain their religiosity while connecting the sacredness of the land with land dispossession.

42. What’s the relationship between Indigenous religion and land or territory? [+–] 134-136

Chris Jocks

Northern Arizona University

The inquiry behind this question can begin to advance only if the question is drastically reframed, since “religion,” “land,” and “territory”—to some extent even “relationship”—are substantives that drive us further away from any useful appraisal. We need a language of relationships rather than objects.

43. What does it mean for an Indigenous religion to be “place-based?” [+–] 137-139

Abel R. Gomez

University of Oklahoma

Indigenous peoples often speak of being from and of particular places. Indigenous relationships are both ancient and emerging, tied to particular places of revolution or power, burial sites, and actions of sacred figures. Indigenous religions are rooted in place, but not “stuck” in place as evident in urban intertribal gatherings and transnational protest movements.

44. If Native American religious traditions are place-based, how do “urban Indians” practice their religion? [+–] 140-142

Dennis Kelley

University of Missouri, Columbia

Dennis Kelley is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. His research area is the intersection between religious, ethnic, and national identities, specifically in how they are negotiated and maintained through embodied practice in contemporary American Indian communities.

Indigenous traditions seek to maintain ancestral connections to particular places, the natural cycles of those places, and the on-going relationship with those connections. I refer to this process as “embeddedness.” Urbanized Indigenous traditions carry the meaning systems developed within this relationship into all contexts, not only in activities associated with nature. Urban contexts have opportunities for both living in natural spaces and their cycles, and for interacting with the world through the lens of embeddedness.

45. Do Indigenous Peoples believe plants, animals, and waters have personhood? [+–] 143-145

Meaghan Sarah Weatherdon

University of San Diego

Meaghan Weatherdon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Diego. She specializes in the study of Indigenous religions and spiritualities on Turtle Island with a particular focus on intersections between spirituality, youth self-determination, and land-based activism.

What ethical responsibilities and moral imperatives come with designating other-than-human beings as persons? What does it mean for Indigenous Peoples to regard trees, beaver, or moose as their relatives? This article addresses these complex questions by discussing a few key examples in which Indigenous Peoples have drawn on their own spiritual traditions to fight for the legal recognition of other-than-human beings as persons.

46. What does it mean when Indigenous peoples say animals are sacred? [+–] 146-148

Kelsey Dayle John

University of Arizona

This chapter describes the worldview of many Indigenous cultures where non-human beings are considered to be persons. This ontology is a key foundation for all relations within Indigenous worlds.

47. What role does pilgrimage play in Indigenous religious life? [+–] 149-151

Paul L. Gareau,Jeanine LeBlanc

University of Alberta

Paul L. Gareau is Métis and an assistant professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. His research and teaching centers on theory and methodology around religion and relationality, gender, Indigenous epistemologies, land and place, and sovereignty/peoplehood.

University of Alberta, PhD candidate

Jeanine LeBlanc is Mi’kmaw and a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Her research explores Mi’kmaw women’s lived experiences of religion, Indigenous women’s engagement with religion, and Indigenous feminisms.

When discussing what role pilgrimage plays in Indigenous religious life, we focus on how religion is relations and movement is a means of relating to Land and Waters across traditional territories. From this relational perspective, sacred places are storied places where nationhood and peoplehood are affirmed, and where visiting can happen.

48. Are Indigenous peoples inherently environmentalists? [+–] 152-154

Dennis Kelley

University of Missouri, Columbia

The term “indigenous” implies an inherent connection to nature, and that indigenous people uniquely relate to the natural world in some way. However that connection may not specifically conform to “environmentalism,” a term used by non-indigenous cultures that tend to relate to the natural world as separate from the realm of sentient humans. Indigeneity derives social systems from a natural world seen as teeming with other sentient beings–plants, animals, weather phenomena–as well as with the spirituals worlds inexorably connected to those places.

49. What is the Idle No More movement, and what’s a round dance? [+–] 155-157

Matt Sheedy

Universität Bonn

The Idle No More (IMN) movement began with a Tweet in late October 2012 as part of a teach-in by four women in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan against Bill C-45. This bill would have enabled the Canadian government to roll back treaty rights on First Nations reserves, among other proposed legislation.

50. How does resource extraction impact Native American religious practices? [+–] 158-160

Richard J Callahan, Jr.

Gonzaga University

Richard J. Callahan, Jr., teaches at Gonzaga University. He is the author of Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust; editor of New Territories, New Perspectives: The Religious Impact of the Louisiana Purchase; and co-editor of The Bloomsbury Reader in the Study of Religion and Popular Culture. His work is particularly interested in the intersections and co-constitutions of religion, labor, and natural resource extraction.

Natural resource extraction can disrupt relationships between human and other-than-human beings in land-based religions. Indigenous perspectives on natural resource extraction raise ontological and epistemological questions problematizing Eurocentric perspectives on religion.

51. Was the #NoDAPL occupation at Standing Rock “spiritual” or “religious”? [+–] 161-164

Richard J Callahan, Jr.

Gonzaga University

Pipeline opposition focused on relationships between human and other-than-human beings with respect to water being a source of life; the construction was damaging to sacred space; the language of spirituality, sacrality, and prayer was central to the water protector movement; and the occupation drew in religious communities from a variety of traditions. Still, it is important to examine the various meanings of “spiritual” or “religious” to various constituencies in this context.

52. Do Hawaiian religious practices have any political significance? [+–] 165-167

Marie Alohalani Brown

University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa

Marie Alohalani Brown, a Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Hawaiian), is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa, specialist in Hawaiian religion. Her research is primarily carried out in 19th- and 20th-century Hawaiian-language materials. Her works include Facing the Spears of Change: The Life and Legacy of John Papa ʻĪʻī, which won the biennial Palapala Poʻokela Award for the best book on Hawaiian language, culture, and history (2016, 2017); The Penguin Book of Mermaids (2019) for which she is co-editor along with Cristina Bacchilega; and Ka Poʻe Moʻo Akua: Hawaiian Reptilian Deities (forthcoming, 2022).

Hawaiian religious practices have a multi-nuanced political significance when considered through the lens of power. This point is evidenced by the traditional understanding of human-deities power relations, the Hawaiian word for that which in English is termed religion, and past and present Hawaiian religious practices.

53. Why is the public expression of Indigenous Religion political? [+–] 168-170

Stacie Swain

University of Victoria, PhD candidate

Stacie Swain is a Ukrainian-British doctoral student in the Department of Political Science and the Indigenous Nationhood Program at the University of Victoria, in lək̓ʷəŋən territories (Victoria, B.C.). Her research considers the intersection of Indigenous ceremony with the categories of religion and politics, particularly in relation to settler colonialism, Indigenous legal orders, and the governance of public space.

Just as the notion of religion has been shaped by human activity, so has our notion of politics. Public expressions of Indigenous religion may be political as a form of resistance to current political regimes, but also because such expressions are grounded within Indigenous peoples’ own prior and ongoing political systems

54. Why were Native American religious traditions outlawed? [+–] 171-173

Jennifer Graber

University of Texas in Austin

Jennifer Graber is the Shive, Lindsay, and Gray Professor in the History of Christianity and the Associate Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Texas in Austin. Her first book, The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America, explores the intersection of church and state during the founding of the nation’s first prisons. Her latest book, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West, considers religious transformations among Kiowa Indians and Anglo Americans during their conflict over Indian Territory, or what is now known as Oklahoma.

55. Is Indigenous law religious? [+–] 174-176

Dana Lloyd

Villanova University

Indigenous scholars and legal practitioners tell us that for many of their communities there is no distinction between law, creation stories, and ceremony. Does this make Indigenous law religious? If so, should the State recognize Indigenous legal systems as legitimate competitors of the State’s official (secular) legal system? These questions have different answers in different contexts, which I explore in this chapter.

56. Do Indigenous People Have Churches? [+–] 177-180

Pamela E. Klassen,Roxanne L. Korpan

University of Toronto

Pamela E. Klassen is a Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and the co-creator of Kiinawin Kawindomowin Story Nations, found at www.storynations.utoronto.ca. She is a settler scholar whose research focuses on religion, public memory, and Indigenous-settler relations, with specific attention to treaties and questions of land and jurisdiction.

University of Toronto, PhD candidate

Roxanne L. Korpan is a settler scholar and doctoral candidate in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto whose research focuses on intersections of Christianity, colonialism, media, and Indigenous sovereignty in nineteenth-century Canada. Her dissertation analyzes the Anishinaabemowin bible translations of Kahkewaquonaby (Peter Jones), Methodist minister and a chief of the Mississaugas of the Credit. She is the author of the article “Scriptural Relations: Colonial Formations of Anishinaabemowin Bibles in Nineteenth-Century Canada,” Material Religion 17, no. 2 (2021): 147-176.

Indigenous people on Turtle Island are leaders and members in Christian churches across a wide range of denominations; Indigenous Christians have worshipped, preached, and prophesied for more than four centuries. Some of the most powerful Indigenous advocates and public intellectuals have been Christian clergy or theologians. At the same time, many Indigenous people are sharply critical of Christianity as an ideological support for colonialism and white supremacy.

57. What is the Native American Church? [+–] 181-183

Lisa Poirier

DePaul University

Lisa Poirier is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. She lives and works on the traditional lands of the Council of the Three Fires – the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations. At DePaul, she teaches classes about Native American religions, theory and method in the study of religion, new religious movements, and gender and sexuality in religion.

The Native American Church is a religious organization that was first officially incorporated in Oklahoma in 1918. The church’s charter documents were drafted in response to the United States federal government’s opposition to the spread of the medicinal and religious use of the buttons of the peyote cactus. Seeking protection for their ceremonial use of this sacred plant, they formed the Native American Church.

58. Is Peyote a medicine or a drug? [+–] 184-186

Jennifer Graber

University of Texas in Austin

According to some Indigenous peoples, non-human powers offered humans the peyote cactus as a medicine. But most non-Indigenous peoples think peyote’s psychoactive alkaloids demand its regulation as a dangerous drug. Indigenous practitioners of ritual peyote ingestion have struggled against this view since the earliest colonial encounters. They affirm, instead, that communal peyote rites heal both body and spirit.

59. What are Native American foodways, and how are they religious? [+–] 187-189

Andrea McComb Sanchez

University of Arizona

Andrea McComb Sanchez is an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Arizona. Her work addresses Native American religious traditions, religion and the environment, religion and colonialism in North America, and religion in the American southwest.

To answer this question I will set up a framework for conceptualizing Native American religious traditions that emphasizes the importance of and interconnection between Place, Sacred Narratives, Communities, Ceremony, Relationships, and Responsibility. I will then discuss how foodways are an integral part of this framework supporting interconnectivity. I will discuss shared characteristics while emphasizing the diversity of specific traditions and foodways.

60. What is a sweat lodge? [+–] 190-192

Suzanne Owen

Leeds Trinity University

Suzanne Owen obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh and published her
thesis as The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum 2008). She is currently Reader in Religious Studies at Leeds Trinity University in the UK researching indigeneity in Newfoundland and British Druidry

This essay describes common features of a sweat lodge and sweat lodge ceremony, how it often functions in a Native American community, and discusses an example of a misappropriation.

61. What role does healing play in Native American and Indigenous religious traditions? Or, what’s religious about health and healing in Indigenous religious traditions? [+–] 193-195

Suzanne Crawford O’Brien

Pacific Lutheran University

Suzanne Crawford O’Brien is professor of Religion and Culture and chair of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at Pacific Lutheran University. She is the author of Coming Full Circle: Spirituality and Wellness Among Native Communities in the Pacific Northwest (University of Nebraska, 2014), and with Inés Talamantez the author of Religion and Culture in Native America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020).

This chapter explores the central location of healing within Native American Religious traditions. It argues that healing is fundamentally about restoring the whole person within community, and that such work is spiritual in nature. Indigenous traditions play a central role in healing the soul wounds of colonialism, wounds that can lead to mental, emotional, physical, social, and spiritual illness. For many communities, la cultura cura: as individuals reclaim traditional worldviews and practices, they find new pathways forward.

62. Is Voudou dangerous? [+–] 196-198

Emily Clark

Gonzaga University

This chapter unpacks why outsiders to the tradition of New Orleans Voudou depicted it as something dangerous. The tradition’s African origins and its ongoing resistance to white supremacy led white citizens to see Voudou as something abnormal, immoral, and uncontrollable.

63. Why is distinguishing a Native American worldview from a EuroChristian one important? [+–] 199-201

George E. Tinker

Iliff School of Theology

George E. “Tink” Tinker, a citizen of the Osage Nation (wazhazhe), is the Clifford Baldridge Emeritus Professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions at Iliff School of Theology. During his 33 year professorate at Iliff, Dr. Tinker brought a distinctly American Indian perspective to a predominantly White, euro-christian school, as he continues to do in lectures across the continent. His publications include: American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty (Orbis, 2008); Spirit and Resistance: American Indian Liberation and Political Theology (Fortress, 2004); and nearly a hundred journal articles and chapters for edited volumes.

Colonialism and its eurochristian worldview stand as the center of that rupture that has and continues to fragment, shatter, and divide the Indigenous communities and their cultures in this hemisphere. Yet, the original foundation of that Indigenous worldview and our cultures are still held firm by enough folk that we need not entirely despair.

64. Do Indigenous peoples have “gods?” [+–] 202-204

Patrisia Gonzales

University of Arizona

Dr. Patrisia Gonzales is the author of Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (University of Arizona Press) and Traditional Indian Medicine (Kendall Hunt). The granddaughter of Kickapoo/Comanche and Macehual peoples, she descends from three generations of bonesetters, herbalists, midwives, and traditional doctors. She teaches courses on Indigenous medicine at the University of Arizona. She is a mother maker, baby catcher, and herbalist and has collaborated with Macehual knowledge keepers in Mexico since 1990.

What exactly do the gods stand in for? Powers? Energies? Sacred agents and spiritual agencies? The “gods”, as a concept, may reflect the non-Indigenous attempt to describe in one word the deep Indigenous analysis of how life functions, which has evolved over millennia. When one hears the idea of the gods, it is a difficult to not contrast their existence with the embedded Judeo-Christian “God” as the oppositional concept of what is true and correct.

65. What do Indigenous religious traditions in the Americas have in common? [+–] 205-207

Inés Hernandez-Avila

University of California, Davis

Inés Hernandez-Avila (Niimiipuu/Nez Perce, enrolled on the Colville Reservation, and Tejana), is Professor of Native American Studies, UC Davis. She is a scholar, poet, visual artist, and cultural worker. Her research/teaching areas include contemporary Native American/Indigenous literature (U.S. and Mexico), and Indigenous religious traditions.

We must remember that there is no one Native American or Indigenous culture, but rather hundreds upon hundreds of Indigenous cultures throughout North, Central, and South America, each with a distinct language and a unique way of interpreting their lives, their worlds, and their beings.

66. What is a nagual/nahual/nawal? [+–] 208-210

Mallory E. Matsumoto

University of Texas at Austin

The highly diverse tradition of nagualism in Mesoamerica—which posits the existence of nonhuman or other-than-human entities that inhabit the liminal space between the human world and the realm of gods and ancestors—provides an entry point for understanding Indigenous concepts of self and soul and challenges the applicability of Western understandings of “religion” to Indigenous Mesoamerica.

67. What are sacred bundles and why are they important in Indigenous cultures in the Americas? [+–] 211-213

Molly Bassett

Georgia State University

This chapter briefly describes sacred bundles and bundling in a variety of North and South American Indigenous cultures.

68. What motivates Nahuas to practice their religion of el costumbre? [+–] 214-216

Abelardo de la Cruz

University at Albany, (SUNY), PhD candidate

Abelardo de la Cruz is from Chicontepec, Veracruz, Mexico. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University at Albany, (SUNY). He collaborates at the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas and this academic year (2020-2021) serves as a Nahuatl instructor at the University of Utah.

El costumbre is a system of beliefs that the inhabitants of the municipality of Chicontepec consider their local religion. The followers of el costumbre share beliefs, practices, and the value of living together in the religion inherited from their grandparents, while also accepting some influence from Catholicism.

69. What are ancestor spirits, and what role do they play in Hawaiian religious life? [+–] 217-219

Marie Alohalani Brown

University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa

Ancestral spirits termed ʻaumākua play a significant role in Hawaiian religious life, and speak to the Hawaiian belief that death can never truly separate the living from the dead. ʻAumākua are a category of akua (deities), some of whom may take the form or flora or fauna, or elemental phenomena.

70. Do all Indigenous Peoples in North America practice the same ceremonies as one another? [+–] 220-222

Meaghan Sarah Weatherdon

University of San Diego

Native American ceremonies are diverse and vary widely across communities. These distinct ceremonies give form and expression to Native American’s historical and ongoing relationships with their lands and empower them to cultivate a sense of place and community. At the same time Native Americans also engage in cultural borrowing, ceremonial exchange, and religious reinvention to gain new insights, build understanding, and foster solidarity, especially in times of uncertainty and political unrest.

71. What is the Ghost Dance? [+–] 223-225

Tiffany Hale

Barnard College, Columbia University

Tiffany Hale is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College of Columbia University. She is a scholar of Indigenous religious traditions whose work focuses on nineteenth-century Native American history and US race relations. Professor Hale teaches courses in global Indigenous religious traditions, Native history, and religion in the Americas. Her current book project, Fugitive Religion: The Ghost Dance and Native American Resistance After the Civil War, is under contract with Yale University Press.

This overview provides a description of the circumstances that produced and ascribed meaning to religious movements known as Ghost Dances among Native American communities. Rather than think of the Ghost Dance as possessing a single doctrine, I show how the term reflects a range of strategies indigenous groups employ in asserting selfhood.

72. How are Indigenous narratives and oral traditions like “texts?” [+–] 226-228

Dennis Kelley

University of Missouri, Columbia

In the analysis of human cultural production, any collection of symbolically meaningful things can be read as a “text.” But if we are confining the discussion to the stories associated with the deepest meanings of a social system, then both written and oral narratives fulfill the role of “religious” or “sacred” texts. In fact, many of the world’s religions began and continue traditions of oral transmission of stories, so in that way, indigenous narratives are very much like the religious texts we study.

73. What do trickster tales tell us about human beings, and why are they important in Indigenous cultures? [+–] 229-231

Davíd Carrasco

Harvard University

Davíd Carrasco, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America, is a Mexican American historian of religions with particular interest in Mesoamerican cities as symbols and the Mexican-American borderlands. Working with Mexican archaeologists, he has carried out research in the excavations and archives associated with the sites of Teotihuacan and Mexico-Tenochtitlan resulting in Religions of Mesoamerica and City of Sacrifice. Carrasco has received the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest honor the Mexican government gives to a foreign national, and was recognized as the University of Chicago Alumnus of the Year in 2014.

Tricksters are often animals like wily coyote, sly fox, clever spider, and cunning raven who challenge gods, insult shamans, undermine chiefs, and may become a culture hero even when caught in the act. In some traditions, tricksters can change shapes and gender.

74. Why do so many Indigenous religions include trickster figures or ceremonial clowns? [+–] 232-234

Chris Jocks

Northern Arizona University

Indigenous tricksters and clowns provide entertainment and cautionary lessons; no surprise there. But they perform a more profound service as well by enacting life-giving spontaneity and laughter, a necessary leavening kneaded into the structure of ceremony.

75. What is the Popol Vuh (and why is it not a Maya Bible)? [+–] 235-237

Mallory E. Matsumoto

University of Texas at Austin

As the best-known colonial-period document from the Indigenous Americas, the Popol Vuh has been fundamental to our understandings of Indigenous Maya cosmology, religion, and history. But attempts to compare it with the Christian Bible or other Abrahamic scriptures deny its origins, intended purpose, and cultural significance—and ultimately say much more about those making the comparisons than about the Popol Vuh itself.

76. Did colonial missions destroy Indigenous religions? [+–] 238-241

Brandon Bayne

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Brandon Bayne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. His first book, Missions Begin with Blood: Suffering and Salvation in the Borderlands of New Spain (Fordham University Press, 2021) argues that Catholic priests invoked the rhetoric of redemptive sacrifice to justify epidemic disease, colonial dislocation, and the territorial dispossession of Indigenous communities. His current research focuses on race, religion, and erasure in the modern memorialization of colonial missionaries in the U. S. – Mexican borderlands.

European colonization in the Americas dramatically impacted pre-contact Indigenous lifeways. In their work of territorial dispossession, monarchs employed missionaries to either extirpate or convert Indigenous spaces, bodies, and customs. Extirpation campaigns set out to discover and destroy powerful objects as well as challenge the authority of Indigenous ritual leaders.

77. Why would Indigenous people venerate Roman Catholic saints? [+–] 242-245

Daniel E. Nourry Burgos

University of Texas at Austin, PhD candidate

Daniel E. Nourry Burgos is PhD candidate in Iberian and Latin American Literatures and Cultures at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He is also a Graduate Portfolio Candidate in both the Native American and Indigenous Studies and The Study of Religion Graduate Portfolio Programs. His research draws methodologically on the disciplines of Religious Studies, Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies, Ethnohistory and Critical Indigenous Studies in order to analyze the processes that bring into existence the notion of an Indigenous Catholic Martyr-Saint

It is well known that the Catholic faith arrived upon the shores of the Americas hand in hand with colonization, and so the question is: why would Indigenous people venerate Roman Catholic saints? A deceptively simple answer might be because within the history of saints we find quite a few Indigenous people.

78. How might we talk about Indigeneity and Catholicism in the Andes? [+–] 246-249

Sierra Lynn Lawson

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sierra L. Lawson is a doctoral student in the Religion and Culture track in the department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sierra’s current work examines competing transatlantic discourses on maternal health within visual and textual archives. She is specifically interested in the devotional labor of “Morisca” women in the Ebro region and women in early Andean colonies as mutually influenced by and influencing imperial grammars for classifying ‘religion.’ In studying rhetorics of devotion she has previously focused on communities who describe themselves as Marian—and, specifically, Guadalupan—devotees.

This chapter reflects on the history of Catholicism and Indigenous practices in the Andes. Looking to modern day festivals like Corpus Christi as well as early colonial figures such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, this chapter gives an account of the complexities of thinking about religion in the pan-Andean region and highlights the interaction between Spanish Catholicism and elements of pre-contact Inca culture in Tawantinsuyu (the Inca empire) such as conceptions of time and division of space.

79. Did Indigenous children lose their religion in US residential boarding schools? [+–] 250-252

Zara Surratt

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, PhD candidate

Zara Surratt is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include the religious history of the American West, the intersections of race, disability and religion, ideas of embodied difference, and religion and children.

Residential boarding schools were a central component of Federal Indian policy after the Civil War. This essay examines how institutions tried and failed to annihilate their pupils’ religion and replace it with an industrial Christian ethic, and demonstrates that students creatively interacted with this instruction in dynamic and unexpected ways.

80. How do Indigenous religions approach disability? [+–] 253-255

Zara Surratt

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, PhD candidate

Experts in Western medicine identify wellness as a matter of individual bodies, but Indigenous models see it in relationship to land, kin, ceremony and tradition. This essay argues that connection and disconnection, rather than ability and disability, are more apt categories for understanding Indigenous approaches to bodily and cognitive difference.

81. Are Indigenous religious traditions patriarchal? [+–] 256-258

Donnie Begay

University of Divinity, Australia, PhD candidate

It is certainly possible to argue that Indigenous religious traditions are patriarchal due to the fact that the most sacred teachings of tribes are generally reserved to be learned and taught by men only. But, when feast, ceremonies and social gatherings occur the women (along with children and non-binary people) contribute and are vital in carrying out Indigenous religious traditions.

82. Did Indigenous people really honor LGBT/Two-Spirit people? [+–] 259-261

Lisa Poirier

DePaul University

The term “Two-Spirit” is relatively new. Dr. Myra Laramee (Fisher River Cree Nation) first shared the term with others at a conference for LGBT First Nations people that was held in Winnipeg in 1990. The term “two-spirit” was subsequently adopted and used by growing numbers of Indigenous people from many different Native nations across North America.

83. What is the relationship between Indigenous religion and sovereignty? [+–] 262-265

Stacie Swain

University of Victoria, PhD candidate

While the concept of sovereignty is foundational to imperialist legal doctrines, Indigenous peoples often claim to hold inherent sovereignty over their territories. Sovereignty relates to Indigenous religion because it raises questions of origins, such as where authority comes from and how peoples relate to land

Indigenous Futurity

84. Indigenous futurism … is that like science fiction? [+–] 269-271

Matt Sheedy

Universität Bonn

Indigenous Futurism (IF) is a growing concept that builds upon a long-standing interest within Indigenous communities to re-imagine the past, present, and future through creative acts of story-telling in various types of media. This entry will focus on how IF is used to creatively re-engage Indigenous ways of knowing for both Native and settler audiences.

End Matter

Index 273-278

Molly Bassett,Natalie Avalos

Georgia State University

University of Colorado Boulder

Reviews

It is an important contribution and will prove useful in many contexts both within and outside of academia.
Critical Research on Religion

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Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes

Molly Bassett [+–]

Georgia State University

Natalie Avalos [+–]

University of Colorado Boulder

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