Native American Religion

There is no Native American religion in the way there is a Lutheranism or a Theravada. There are the religions of the Dine, the Lakota, the Hopi, the Haudenosaunee, the Tlingit, the Yupik, the Anishinaabe, the Muscogee and several hundred more, in unrelated language families, with different creator accounts, different ritual specialists, different calendars and different relationships to their neighbours. A Haudenosaunee Longhouse ceremony and a Hopi kachina cycle are not two versions of one thing.

The category exists anyway, for three reasons worth naming. Outsiders invented it, because colonial administration needed one word for everything it was not. Federal law then made it real: the same statutes that criminalised ceremony in the 1880s and the same statutes that protected it after 1978 applied to all these nations at once, which gave them a genuine shared legal history. And Native people themselves have at times organised across nations, in the Ghost Dance, in the Native American Church, in the American Indian Movement, producing real pan-tribal forms.

The failure mode is pan-Indianism: taking a Lakota pipe, a Dine sand painting and a generalised Great Spirit and presenting the composite as what Indians believe. That composite is not held by anyone. It is also the version most often sold, and its circulation is a live grievance, since the specific traditions it borrows from are frequently closed.

Two further cautions. Many of these communities do not use a word equivalent to religion, because the practices in question are not separable from kinship, hunting, farming and law. And a great many Native people are Christian, or Christian and traditional at once, without regarding that as a compromise.

The suppression of Native religion in the United States was not chiefly a matter of law passed by Congress. In 1883 the Office of Indian Affairs issued rules governing Courts of Indian Offenses, drafted at the urging of the Secretary of the Interior, making the Sun Dance and comparable dances, the giveaway, and the practices of medicine men punishable offences on reservations, enforced through imprisonment and the withholding of rations. Being administrative regulations rather than statute, they were never tested against the First Amendment as a law would have been, and they governed reservation life for half a century. The dance provisions were dropped in 1933.

Running in parallel was the school system. Children were removed to off-reservation boarding schools built on the principle of assimilation, forbidden their languages, and drilled into Christian observance. A federal investigation completed in 2024 identified 417 such schools in 37 states and territories, documented at least 973 child deaths, and located burial sites at 65 of them. Canada operated a comparable residential system through which roughly 150,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children passed; its Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported in 2015 and called the system cultural genocide.

The reversal sits within one lifetime. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 declared a federal policy of protecting the right to believe, express and exercise traditional religions, including access to sites and use of sacred objects. It carried weak enforcement, and the Supreme Court found in 1988 and again in 1990 that it did not by itself stop government action burdening Native practice. Sacred sites on federal land remain the weakest point, and cases about mining, roads and dams on such sites are still being lost.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 addressed a separate injury, the mass collection of Native dead by museums, universities and federal agencies, and requires inventories and return to descendants and tribes. Compliance took decades, and revised regulations in 2024 forced a wave of exhibit closures as institutions found they could not lawfully display what they held.

Some family resemblances are real, provided they are offered as tendencies and not as a creed.

Land is specific. Sacred geography is generally attached to named places: a mountain, a spring, a stretch of river. This is why removal was a religious catastrophe and not only an economic one, and why current litigation over sites such as Oak Flat, Bears Ears and the Black Hills is religious litigation.

Animals and other beings are persons. Hunting and farming traditions across the continent are commonly framed as relationships carrying obligation, in which game gives itself and withdraws if insulted. Read as ecology this is a distortion; read as etiquette between persons it is closer.

Oral transmission is the norm. These are traditions without scripture, carried in language, and the loss of a language is the loss of the ceremony conducted in it. Language revival programmes are therefore religious programmes as much as educational ones.

Specialists are trained and particular. The English word shaman, imported from Siberia, flattens a range of quite different offices: Lakota wicasa wakan, Dine hataalii, Yupik and Inuit angakkuq, Haudenosaunee faithkeepers. Their training, authority and inheritance differ.

Much of it is closed. Restricted knowledge is normal rather than exceptional. A great deal of published ethnography was obtained by pressure, payment or deception, and its accuracy is not the only question about it. Where an account here is thin on ceremonial detail, that is usually deliberate.

And the traditions are alive. Ceremonies suppressed within the last century are being conducted now, sometimes continuously through the suppression, sometimes reconstructed from elders who remembered. Writing about them in the past tense, which older reference works do almost universally, states something false.