Shaman are spiritual beings with the ability to heal, work with energies and ‘see’ visions. The essential characteristics of shaman are mastery of energy and fire as a medium of transformation. Shamanism is a range of traditional beliefs and practices that involve the ability to diagnose, cure, and sometimes cause human suffering by traversing the axis mundi and forming a special...
awnee people (also Paneassa, Pari, Pariki) are a Caddoan-speaking Native American tribe. They are federally recognized as the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. Historically, the Pawnee lived along outlying tributaries of the Missouri River: the Platte, Loup and Republican rivers in present-day Nebraska and in northern Kansas. They lived in permanent earth lodge villages where they farmed. They left the...
Paiute (sometimes written Piute) refers to two related groups of Native Americans – the Northern Paiute of California, Nevada and Oregon, and the Southern Paiute of Arizona, southeastern California and Nevada, and Utah. The Northern and Southern Paiute both spoke languages belonging to the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan family of Native American languages. Usage of the terms Paiute...
In the 1930s, an American anthropologist named Irving Hallowell journeyed north to Canada to live among the Ojibwa and study their culture. When he left he took with him a wealth of knowledge – and something else – a bundle of sacred scrolls, made out of birch bark, and central to the performance of ancient religious ceremonies of the tribe. The scrolls were never forgotten by those...
The Navajo, who call themselves Dine (“The People”), are the largest Native American group in North America. Their tales of emergence and migration are similar to other Southwestern tribes such as the Hopi (with whom they have a long running rivalry). Navajo ceremonies such as the Nightway and the Mountain Chant are renowned for their beautiful liturgy. The Navajo are the largest...
The Mohawk Indian tribe was one of the original members of the Iroquois Confederation, or Kanonsionni in their own language “people of the longhouse.” Related families lived together in longhouses, the symbols of Iroquois society. The other member nations were the Seneca, Oneida, Cayuga, and the Onondaga. Later a sixth tribe, the Tuscarora, joined the confederacy. Today these long...
Medicine wheels, or sacred hoops, were constructed by laying stones in a particular pattern on the ground. Most medicine wheels follow the basic pattern of having a center of stone(s), and surrounding that is an outer ring of stones with “spokes”, or lines of rocks radiating from the center. Some ancient types of sacred architecture were built by laying stones on the surface of the...
Kokopelli is a fertility deity, usually depicted as a humpbacked flute player (often with a huge phallus and antenna-like protrusions on his head), who is worshipped by many Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States. Like most fertility deities, Kokopelli presides over both childbirth and agriculture. He is also a trickster god. Because of his influence over human sexuality...
The Iroquois also known as the Haudenosaunee or the “People of the Longhouse”, are a league of several nations and tribes of indigenous people of North America. After the Iroquoian-speaking peoples of present-day central and upstate New York coalesced as distinct tribes, by the 16th century or earlier, they came together in an association known today as the Iroquois League, or the...
The Hopi are a Native America Nation who primarily live on the 1.5 million acre Hopi Reservation in northeaster Arizona. The reservation is surrounded by the Navajo reservation. Hopis call themselves Hopitu – ‘The Peaceful People’. The name Hopi is the shortened form of the title to what they called themselves, “Hopituh Sinom”, “the people of Hopi”. Hopi...