Native American Traditions

This entry is an umbrella over hundreds of distinct Native nations' spiritual systems, plus the one genuinely pan-Indian religion, the Native American Church, and it must be said plainly that the umbrella exists for orientation rather than commerce: the commercialization of generic Native American spirituality is precisely what Native nations themselves have formally condemned for more than thirty years, and these practices describe communities rather than services anyone may book. The Native American Church carries the syncretic center: traditional Native belief blended with Christianity, peyote as holy sacrament and means of communion, and the all-night meeting led by a roadman with drum and staff, held for births, thanksgivings, and memorials rather than a liturgical year. The Plains nations' systems run on their own terms, the Lakota Wakan Tanka, the sacred mystery, the Sacred Pipe, all my relations, and the annual Sun Dance of prayer and fasting in the summer months, and the medicine people whose healing roles come through calling and community obligation, never payment.

The religion's modern history is American law. The Courts of Indian Offenses established in 1883 prosecuted ceremonial practice including the Sun Dance; the peyote religion spread north from Mexico to the southern Plains in the late nineteenth century and took organizational form in Oklahoma, incorporated under Oklahoma law from 1911 and officially created in 1918; the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 recognized the practice, the Supreme Court's 1990 decision endangered it, and the 1994 amendment to the act specifically protected sacramental peyote use, the statute that governs the church's core rite today. The church counts roughly three hundred thousand adherents across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, the most widespread indigenous religion among Native Americans, its chapters autonomous, with an internal division over enrollment: the original charters have no blood-quantum requirement while the North American offshoot restricts attendance to Native Americans of one-quarter blood quantum. Peyote itself is a live crisis, legally sold only in Texas where the wild cactus population is shrinking and the licensed dealers are few.

The tradition's relation to this library is governed by its own declarations. The 1993 Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality, passed by representatives of forty Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota nations, condemns for-pay spirituality by name, the New Age shamans, the paid sweatlodges and vision quests, the fake sundances, and the plastic medicine men within Native communities too, and the entry's position follows it: access is gated by nation, kinship, and community, the roles are not professions, nothing here is for sale, and the appropriate posture for non-Native readers is respect at the boundary. The library's shamanic-journeying and core-shamanism entries are categorically separate from this tradition and are written as such.