Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
44. If Native American religious traditions are place-based, how do "urban Indians" practice their religion?
Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
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.
Description
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.