Native American religions

A series of federal laws was passed banning traditional Indigenous practices such as feasts, Sun Dance ceremonies and the use of the sweat lodge, among others.

[38] Native American spiritual leaders also note that these academic estimates substantially underestimate the numbers of participants because a century of US Federal government persecution and prosecutions of traditional ceremonies caused believers to practice their religions in secrecy.

[39] The living in the North American Arctic and sub-Arctic Alaska Natives and many Indigenous peoples in Canada mainly practice hunter-gatherer religious cults.

[40][41][14][42] Western North America includes such cultural areas as Northwest Coast,[43] Plateau, Great Basin, and a region of the Indigenous peoples of California.

The Wanapum Indian Smohalla (c. 1815 – 1895) originally built the religion in 1850 in the Columbia River region of modern-day Washington, and over time it has spread across the Pacific Northwest.

[47] The religion combined elements of Christianity with Native beliefs, teaching similar origin stories as Catholicism and holding Sunday as a holy day, while still ultimately pushing away from the so-called civilized man that white people idealized.

(T. B. Odeneal)[46] Smohalla was eventually jailed in an effort to quell a potential uprising of Native peoples, but his religion has continued to survive without him.

The Ghost Dance was created in a time of genocide, to save the lives of the Native Americans by enabling them to survive the current and coming catastrophes, by calling the dead to fight on their behalf, and to help them drive the colonists out of their lands.

[52][27][53] In December 1888, Wovoka, who was thought to be the son of the medicine man Tavibo (Numu-tibo'o), fell sick with a fever during an eclipse of the sun, which occurred on January 1, 1889.

In order to reach this reality, Wovoka stated that all Native Americans should live honestly, and shun the ways of whites (especially the consumption of alcohol).

Tavibo's vision concluded that Native Americans would return to live in a restored environment and that only believers in his revelations would be resurrected.

In fact, some bands of Lakota and Dakota were so desperate for hope during this period of forced relocation and genocide that, after making a pilgrimage to the Nevada Ghost Dance in 1889–1890, they became more militant in their resistance to the white colonists.

Each Nation that adopted the Ghost Dance way provided their own understanding to the ceremony, which included the prediction that the white people would disappear, die, or be driven back across the sea.

A Ghost Dance gathering at Wounded Knee in December 1890 was invaded by the Seventh Cavalry, who massacred unarmed Lakota and Dakota people, primarily women, children and the elderly.

[27][61][49] The native religions of the U.S. region are held in common among the Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands, who mainly practiced the Green Corn Ceremony and other agriculture cults.

[27][63] The Four Mothers Society is a religious in nature traditionalist organisation of Muscogee, Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw peoples that formally founded about 1895 and remains active today.

[67] The movement came to light in the 1950s, led by Mexico City intellectuals, but has grown significantly on a grassroots level only in more recent times, also spreading to the Chicanos of North America.

In the same years, Rodolfo Nieva López founded the Movimiento Confederado Restaurador de la Cultura del Anáhuac,[70] the co-founder of which was Francisco Jimenez Sanchez who in later decades became a spiritual leader of the Mexicayotl movement, endowed with the honorific Tlacaelel.

[71] From the 1970s onwards Mexcayotl has grown developing in a web of local worship and community groups (called calpulli or kalpulli)[68] and spreading to the Mexican Americans or Chicanos in the United States.

[73] Two of the most widely known examples of faith of the Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica are the Aztec and Maya state religions sponsored the monism of the upper classes.

The most outstanding contrast appears between the highly developed Andean faiths with priesthood and empire-ruling cults[22][77] and the religious beliefs of the tribes in the eastern lowlands.

[83][84][85] The Sun Dance is a religious ceremony and reform movement, 1890 the Shoshone tribe in origin,[27] practiced by a number of Native American peoples in the U.S. and Canada, primarily those of the Plains Nations.

In Indiana in 1805, Tenskwatawa (called the Shawnee Prophet by Americans) led a religious revival following a smallpox epidemic and a series of witch-hunts.

His beliefs were based on the earlier teachings of the Lenape prophets, Scattamek and Neolin, who predicted a coming apocalypse that would destroy the European-American settlers.

The American Indian Religious Freedom Act is a United States federal law and a joint resolution of Congress that provides protection for tribal culture and traditional religious rights such as access to sacred sites, freedom to worship through traditional ceremony, and use and possession of sacred objects for Native Americans, Inuit, Aleut, and Native Hawaiians.

It was held unconstitutional as applied to the states in the City of Boerne v. Flores decision in 1997, which ruled that the RFRA is not a proper exercise of Congress's enforcement power.

If in American countries, non-Natives by origin can somehow join authentic ceremonies and, at least, can revitalize same components in their own traditions,[94] then in other parts of the world, such as Russia, neo-pagans are uniting into their own new religious movement.

Its adherents, based on romanticized ideas drawn from classic adventure literature and other sources, strive to follow the worldview and way of life of American Natives.