Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
64. Do Indigenous peoples have “gods?”
Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
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.
Description
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.