Religion And Healing In Native America

What it means to be healthy or to heal is not universal from culture to culture, from religion to religion. Indeed, in many cultures religion and healing are intimately tied to each other. In Native American communities healing is conceived as the place where ideas about the body and selfhood are brought to light and expressed within healing traditions. Healing is defined as self-making, and illness as whatever compromises one's ability to be oneself. This book explores religion and healing in Native America, emphasizing the lived experience of indigenous religious practices and their role in health and healing. Indigenous traditions of healing in North America emphasize that the healthy self is defined by its relationship with its human, spiritual, and ecological communities. Here, Crawford brings together first-hand accounts, personal experience, and narrative observations of Native American religion and healing to present a richly textured portrait of the intersection of tradition, cultural revival, spirituality, ceremony, and healing. These are not descriptions of traditions isolated from their historical, cultural, and social context, but intimately located within the communities from which they come. These portraits range from discussions of pre-colonial healing traditions to examples where traditional approaches exist along with other cultural traditions-both Native and non-native. At the heart of all the essays is a concern for the ways in which diverse Native communities have understood what it means to be healthy, and the role of spirituality in achieving wellness. Readers will come away with a better understanding not just of religion and healing in Native American communities, but of Native American communities in general, and how they live their lives on an everyday basis.

What it means to be healthy or to heal is not universal from culture to culture, from religion to religion. Indeed, in many cultures religion and healing are intimately tied to each other. In Native American communities healing is conceived as the place where ideas about the body and selfhood are brought to light and expressed within healing traditions. Healing is defined as self-making, and illness as whatever compromises one's ability to be oneself. This book explores religion and healing in Native America, emphasizing the lived experience of indigenous religious practices and their role in health and healing. Indigenous traditions of healing in North America emphasize that the healthy self is defined by its relationship with its human, spiritual, and ecological communities. Here, Crawford brings together first-hand accounts, personal experience, and narrative observations of Native American religion and healing to present a richly textured portrait of the intersection of tradition, cultural revival, spirituality, ceremony, and healing. These are not descriptions of traditions isolated from their historical, cultural, and social context, but intimately located within the communities from which they come. These portraits range from discussions of pre-colonial healing traditions to examples where traditional approaches exist along with other cultural traditions-both Native and non-native. At the heart of all the essays is a concern for the ways in which diverse Native communities have understood what it means to be healthy, and the role of spirituality in achieving wellness. Readers will come away with a better understanding not just of religion and healing in Native American communities, but of Native American communities in general, and how they live their lives on an everyday basis.

In this pioneering work one of the world's leading experts on Native American traditions offers a detailed survey of Native American practices and beliefs regarding health, medicine, and religion. In contrast to the sharp Euro-American division between medicine and religion, Native American medical beliefs and practices can only be assessed, says the author, in their relation to their religious ideas. Spanning the full length and breadth of Native North American cultural areas, from the Northeast to the Southwest, the Southeast to the Northwest, the book offers "thick" descriptions of traditional Native American medical and religious beliefs and practices, demonstrating that for Native Americans medicine and religion are two sides of the same coin: a coherent and holistic system in which supernaturalism acts as a motor in healing.

Tribal peoples believe that the shaman experiences, absorbs, and communicates a special mode of power, sustaining and healing. This book discusses American Indian shamanic traditions, particularly those of the Woodland Ojibway, in terms drawn from the classical shamanism of Siberian peoples. Using a cultural-historical method, John A. Grim describes the spiritual formation of shamans, male and female, and elucidates the special religious experience that they transmit to their tribes. Writing as a historian of religion well acquainted with ethnological materials, Grim identifies four patterns in the shamanic experience: cosmology, tribal sanction, ritual reenactment, and trance experience. Relating those concepts to the Siberian and Ojibway experiences, he draws on mythology, sociology, anthropology, and psychology to paint a picture of shamanism that is both particularized and interpretative. As religious personalities, shamans are important today because of their singular ability to express symbolically the forces that animate the tribal cosmology. Often identifying themselves with primordial earth processes, shamans develop symbol systems drawn from the archetypal earth images that are vital to their psychic healing technique. This particular ability to resonate with the natural world is felt as an important need in our time. Those readers who identify with American Indians as they confront modern technological society will value this introduction to our native shamanic traditions and to the religious experience itself. The author's discussion of Ojibway practices is the most comprehensive short treatment available, written with a fine poetic feeling that reflects the literary expressiveness inherent in American Indian religion and thought.

Religion and Culture in Native America presents an introduction to a diverse array of Indigenous religious and cultural practices in North America, focusing on those issues in which tribal communities themselves are currently invested. These topics include climate change, water rights, the protection of sacred places, the reclaiming of Indigenous foods, health and wellness, social justice, and the safety of Indigenous women and girls. Locating such contemporary challenges within their historical, religious, and cultural contexts illuminates how Native communities' responses to such issues are not simply political, but deeply spiritual, informed by sacred traditions, ethical principles, and profound truths. In collaboration with renowned ethnographer and scholar of Native American religious traditions Inés Talamantez, Suzanne Crawford O'Brien abandons classical categories typically found in religious studies textbooks and challenges essentialist notions of Native American cultures to explore the complexities of Native North American life. Key features of this text include: Consideration of Indigenous religious traditions within their historical, political, and cultural contexts Thematic organization emphasizing the concerns and commitments of contemporary tribal communities Maps and images that help to locate tribal communities and illustrate key themes. Recommendations for further reading and research Written in an engaging narrative style, this book makes an ideal text for undergraduate courses in Native American Religions, Religion and Ecology, Indigenous Religions, and World Religions.

During his 1984 visit to Canada, Pope John Paul II declared, Christ, in the members of his body, is himself Indian. Who is this native Christ? What is his place in the spiritual universe of native people? Achiel Peelman examines these questions in this timely and groundbreaking book, which is the result of research he has carried out since 1982 in native communities across Canada. While Peelman's book is a work of theology and Christology, it is also a work of profound friendship that will help its readers know more deeply the Amerindian experience.

Americans have long been aware of the phenomenon loosely known as faith healing. During the 1990s the American cultural landscape changed and religious healing became a commonplace feature in our society. This is a look at this new reality.

Coming Full Circle is an interdisciplinary exploration of the relationships between spirituality and health in several contemporary Coast Salish and Chinook communities in western Washington from 1805 to 2005. Suzanne Crawford O’Brien examines how these communities define what it means to be healthy, and how recent tribal community–based health programs have applied this understanding to their missions and activities. She also explores how contemporary definitions, goals, and activities relating to health and healing are informed by Coast Salish history and also by indigenous spiritual views of the body, which are based on an understanding of the relationship between self, ecology, and community. Coming Full Circle draws on a historical framework in reflecting on contemporary tribal health-care efforts and the ways in which they engage indigenous healing traditions alongside twenty-first-century biomedicine. The book makes a strong case for the current shift toward tribally controlled care, arguing that local, culturally distinct ways of healing and understanding illness must be a part of contemporary Native healthcare. Combining in-depth archival research, extensive ethnographic participant-based field work, and skillful scholarship on theories of religion and embodiment, Crawford O’Brien offers an original and masterful analysis of contemporary Native Americans and their worldviews.