IV. After European Contact

With the coming of Europeans to North America, Native Americans experienced a series of dislocations from which they are still struggling to recover. Foreign invaders overran their territories and claimed sovereignty over their communities, diseases ravaged their populations, and their environments were drastically altered. In many cases, Native Americans were forcibly removed from their aboriginal homelands and livelihoods, with the result that indigenous cultures underwent rapid change. In the midst of these crises, as Native Americans turned to their own religious traditions to understand and ease their plight, missionaries attempted to convert them from their traditional religions to Christianity.

A. Christianity

Tens of thousands of Native Americans now identify Christianity as their traditional religion. Their families have heard Christian stories, sung Christian hymns, seen Christian iconography, and received Christian sacraments for generations. In the mid-1990s, more than two-thirds of Native Americans characterized themselves at least nominally as Christians. Others have combined Christian beliefs and practices with their native religions or have practiced two faiths—Christian and native—side by side but separately. In many cases, Native Americans have reshaped Christianity, assimilating Jesus Christ as a cultural hero and interpreting Holy Communion as a medicine. In other cases, the forms of native religions have been retained while their contents have been thoroughly Christianized.

B. Native Movements

Contact with Christians proved traumatic for Native American religions, as both civil and religious authorities attempted to repress native spirituality and force conversion. Over the past three centuries, this attempt has provoked the rise of various native religious movements.

1. Prophets and Messiahs

Movements of nativism (the assertion of traditional values in the face of foreign encroachment) and revitalization (the revival of traditional culture, often involving explicit rejection of European civilization) have arisen, led by Native American prophets who claimed to have received revelation from the aboriginal deities, often in dreams and visions. These prophets have frequently shown evidence of Christian influence in their moral codes, their missionary zeal, and their concern for personal redemption and social improvement. Sometimes their teachings have led to military advances against European invaders. For example, in the early 1760s the Delaware prophet Neolin helped inspire the rebellion of Ottawa warrior Pontiac against the British. Similarly, the preaching of Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa bolstered the military efforts of his brother Tecumseh against the United States Army between 1808 and 1813. The revivals of preachers such as the Iroquois Handsome Lake in 1799 and the Salish John Slocum in 1882 spawned new religions—part native, part Christian—that have endured in their respective communities to the present day.

One of the most prolonged Native American uprisings took place in the Southwest under the leadership of a Tewa medicine man named Pop, who in 1680 led the various indigenous peoples of present-day New Mexico in a rebellion against Spanish missionaries and conquistadors. The Native Americans drove the Spanish out and kept them at bay for more than a decade. During the Spanish reconquest, the Hopi burned one of their own villages and killed its converted inhabitants rather than allow the reestablishment of Christianity as the official religion. To this day the Hopi pueblos, or villages, resist the influence of Christian religions, although some Hopi have been attracted to the Mormon faith. In hundreds of other cases, indigenous peoples of North America have defied Christian control or endured its presence with only apparent compliance.

2. Ghost Dance

New religious movements among Native Americans have at times taken on the character of crisis cults, which respond to cultural threat with emotional rituals. In 1889 a Paiute prophet named Wovoka foretold the imminent end of the current world order. Casting himself in a messianic role that seemed to be influenced by Christian imagery, Wovoka promised that if Native Americans would conduct a ceremony known as the Ghost Dance, depleted animal populations and deceased relatives would be restored. For several years, many indigenous peoples in the western part of North America performed the ceremony, even after United States Army troops massacred Sioux ghost dancers at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1890.

3. Pan-Native American Movements

Pan-Native American initiatives have helped spread many of the new religions of indigenous peoples, as parochial tribal identities have broadened in the face of common oppression. For example, the Ghost Dance of the 1880s spread among a number of tribes that were all undergoing similar upheavals, and indigenous peoples of the Great Plains shared in each other's Sun Dances. The preeminent pan-Native American religious development, however, has been Peyotism, a religious movement centering on the sacramental ingestion of a mildly hallucinogenic cactus. Peyotism spread from Mexico to the southern Plains peoples in the 19th century. By the early 20th century, despite vigorous opposition by the United States government, the use of peyote was widely established throughout North America. In 1918, Peyotism was formally incorporated as the Native American Church. The group's status as a religious organization enabled members to seek legal protection for the ritual use of peyote. In the mid-1990s, membership in the Native American Church was estimated to be 250,000.

V. Contemporary Trends

Between the 1880s and 1930s, the U.S. authorities attempted to ban Native American religious rituals, including the Ghost Dance, Sun Dance, and peyote cult. In Canada the same restrictive tendencies prevailed. In more recent years, however, governmental authorities have adopted a more supportive attitude toward the practice of native spirituality. In 1978 the Congress of the United States passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, an official expression of good will toward Native American spirituality. In the wake of this legislation, many religious practices once considered on the verge of disappearing were revived. These include pipe ceremonials, sweat lodges, vision quests, and Sun Dances. In an unforeseen consequence of the Native American religious revival, some non-Native American followers of the New Age Movement have adopted Native American beliefs and rituals. New Age enthusiasts have adopted such practices as sweat lodges, pipe ceremonies, and the use of crystals and other natural objects traditionally believed to be charged with spiritual power. While some Native Americans have resented such borrowing of indigenous rituals, others have been pleased to see non-Native Americans taking an interest in native spiritual traditions.

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