Indigenous Americans: Spirituality and Ecos
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Each nation and community has its own unique traditions. Still, several characteristics stand out. First, it is common to envision the creative process of the universe as a form of thought or mental process. Second, it is common to have a source of creation that is plural, either because several entities participate in creation or because the process as it unfolds includes many sacred actors stemming from a First Principle (Father/Mother or Grandfather/Grandmother). Third, the agents of creation are seldom pictured as human, but are depicted instead as “wakan” (holy), or animal-like (coyote, raven, great white hare, etc.), or as forces of nature (such as wind/breath). The Lakota medicine man Lame Deer says that the Great Spirit “is not like a human being. . . . He is a power. That power could be in a cup of coffee. The Great Spirit is no old man with a beard.”1 The concept perhaps resembles the elohim of the Jewish Genesis, the plural form of eloi, usually mistranslated as “God,” as though it were singular.
Perhaps the most important aspect of indigenous cosmic visions is the conception of creation as a living process, resulting in a living universe in which a kinship exists between all things. Thus the Creators are our family, our Grandparents or Parents, and all of their creations are children who, of necessity, are also our relations.
An ancient Ashiwi (Zuñi) prayer-song states:
That our earth mother may wrap herself In a four-fold robe of white meal [snow]; . . . When our earth mother is replete with living waters, When spring comes, The source of our flesh, All the different kinds of corn We shall lay to rest in the ground with the earth mother’s living waters, They will be made into new beings, Coming out standing into the daylight of their Sun father, to all sides They will stretch out their hands. . . .thus the Mother Earth is a living being, as are the waters and the Sun.
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It's important to know that for many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning and protest since it commemorates the arrival of settlers in North America and the centuries of oppression and genocide that followed.Nov 6, 2023
