"Two very important books have appeared in 1996: 'Reuben Snake: Your Humble Serpent' and 'One Nation Under God: The Triumph of the Native America Church.' I say they're important because they are designed for the U.S. Government and the American people as an audience. The books are not teaching Indigenous people about peyote; they're documents to voice the concerns of indigenous Nations, to protect those of us who participate in the spirituality of peyote -- as members of the Native American Church or as individuals". (The Native American Press, Ojibwe News)

"One Nation Under God is an essential and informative contribution to Native American studies reading lists". (The Midwest Book Review)

"Reuben Snake's personal testimony on behalf of the sacred peyote is seconded and supported by the chapter 'Voices of the Native American Church, ' which presents a persuasive collection of short, heartfelt testimonials... about the life-affirming teachings of love and respect that are at the heart of the peyote way". (Shaman's Drum)

This book celebrates the endurance of the Native American Church, which now has some 80 chapters throughout the country. Prayer meetings, the sacramental use of peyote, and the significance of various practices and objects are described. Eloquent testimony of Church members from different tribes demonstrates that peyote is not used to obtain "visions" but to heal the body and spirit and to teach righteousness. The authors describe the legal battle to overturn the Supreme Court's Smith decision of 1990, which cited peyote use to deny the Native American Church the First Amendment right to "the free exercise of religion". The American Indian Religious Freedom ActAmendments, passed by Congress in 1994, providing an exemption allowing the use of peyote by the Native American Church, was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1997.

This collection of writings is from authors who are either Indians who have tried to make themselves heard, or whites who have tried to hear Indians. The first part of the book emphasizes the practical and includes Isaac Tens's "Career of the Medicine Man." The second section concentrates on the theoretical and contains Benjamin Lee Whorf's "American Indian Model of the Universe" and chapters on Indian metaphysics, among other things. In addition to an introductory essay on the Indian's stance towards reality, the editors have contributed chapters entitled "The Clown's Way" and "An American Indian View of Death."

'Hultkrantz treads where other angels fear to with this audacious and clear overall survey. He leaves the room for specialists to debate and generalists to quicken curiosity.'--Christian Century

In a study that challenges familiar Western modes of thought, Jacob K. Olupona focuses on one of the most important religious centers in Africa and in the world: the Yoruba city of Ile-Ife in southwest Nigeria. The spread of Yoruba traditions in the African diaspora has come to define the cultural identity of millions of black and white people in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and the United States. Seen through the eyes of a native, this first comprehensive study of the spiritual and cultural center of the Yoruba religion tells how the city went from great prominence to near obliteration and then rose again as a contemporary city of gods. Throughout, Olupona corroborates the indispensable linkages between religion, cosmology, migration, and kinship as espoused in the power of royal lineages, hegemonic state structure, gender, and the Yoruba sense of place, offering the fullest portrait to date of this sacred African city.

This book and accompanying compact disc provide a rare excursion in the innovative ways a community of Haitian migrants to South Florida has maintained religious traditions and familial connections. It demonstrates how religion, ritual, and aesthetic practices affect lives on both sides of the Caribbean, and it debunks myths of exotic and primitive vodou (often spelled ""voodoo""), which have long been used against Haitians. As Karen Richman shows, Haitians at home and in migrant settlements make ingenious use of audio and video tapes to extend the boundaries of their ritual spaces and to reinforce their moral and spiritual anchors to one another. The book and CD were produced in collaboration to give the reader intimate access to this new expressive media. Sacred songs are recorded on tapes and circulated among the communities. Migrants are able to hear not only the performance sounds--drumming, singing, and chatter--but also a description, as narrators tell of offerings, sacrifices, prayers, and the exchange of possessions. Spirits who inhabit the bodies of ritual actors are aware of the recording devices and personally address the absent migrants, sometimes warning them of their financial obligations to family members in Haiti. The migrants' dependence on their home village is dramatically reinforced while their economic independence is restricted. Using standard ethnographic methods, Richman's work illuminates the connections among social organization, power, production, ritual, and aesthetics. With its transnational perspective, it shows how labor migration has become one of Haiti's chief economic exports. A volume in the series New World Diasporas, edited by Kevin A. Yelvington

Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First Nation Know-how for Global Flourishing's contributors describe ways of being in the world that reflect a worldview that guided humanity for 99% of human history: They describe the practical traditional wisdom that stems from Nature-based relational cultures that were or are guided by this worldview. Such cultures did not cause the kinds of anti-Nature and de-humanizing or inequitable policies and practices that now pervade our world. Far from romanticizing Indigenous histories, Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom offers facts about how human beings, with our potential for good and evil behaviors, can live in relative harmony again. Contributions cover views from anthropology, psychology, sociology, leadership, native science, native history, and native art.

Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans of the Northwest Amazon tells the life story of Mandu da Silva, the last living jaguar shaman among the Baniwa people in the Northwest Amazon. In this original and engaging work, Robin M. Wright, who has known and worked with Silva for more than thirty years, weaves the story of Silva's life together with the Baniwas' broader society, history, mythology, cosmology, and jaguar shaman traditions. The jaguar shamans are key players in what Wright calls "a nexus of religious power and knowledge" in which healers, sorcerers, priestly chanters, and dance leaders exercise complementary functions that link living specialists with the deities and great spirits of the cosmos. Exploring in depth the apprenticeship of the shaman, Wright shows how jaguar shamans seek the knowledge and power of the deities through several stages of instruction and practice. This volume, the first study to map the sacred geography ("mythscape") of the northern Arawak-speaking people of the Northwest Amazon, demonstrates the direct connections between petroglyphs and other inscriptions and Baniwa sacred narratives as a whole. In eloquent and inviting analytic prose, Wright links biographic and ethnographic elements in elevating anthropological writing to a new standard of theoretically aware storytelling and analytic power.

This landmark volume compiled by Jacob K. Olupona and Rowland O. Abiodun brings readers into the diverse world of Ifa-its discourse, ways of thinking, and artistic expression as manifested throughout the Afro-Atlantic. Firmly rooting Ifa within African religious traditions, the essays consider Ifa and Ifa divination from the perspectives of philosophy, performance studies, and cultural studies. They also examine the sacred context, verbal art, and the interpretation of Ifa texts and philosophy. With essays from the most respected scholars in the field, the book makes a substantial contribution toward understanding Ifa and its role in contemporary Yoruba and diaspora cultures.

In a spiritual autobiography shaped by years of living with a band of Salish Indian people after the Vietnam War, Tom Harmer shares his hard-won knowledge of their world and the nature spirits that govern it.

Leaving behind college, military service, and years of living off the land as he drifted aimlessly and smuggled draft dodgers and deserters into Canada, Harmer came to the isolated Okanogan region of Washington state in the company of an Indian man hitchhiking home after Wounded Knee. Harmer was desperate to make something of his life. He settled down for nearly ten years close to his Indian neighbors, adopted their view of the world, and participated in their traditional sweatlodge and spirit contact practices.

From his first sight of Chopaka, a mountain sacred to the Okanogan people, Harmer felt at home in this place. He formed close relationships with members of the Okanogan band living on allotments amidst white ranches and orchards, finding work as they did, feeding cattle, irrigating alfalfa, picking apples, and eventually becoming an outreach worker for a rural social services agency. Gradually absorbing the language, traditions, and practical spirit lore as one of the family, he was guided by an elderly uncle through arduous purification rites and fasts to the realization that his life had been influenced and enhanced by a shumix, or spirit partner, acquired in childhood.

Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans of the Northwest Amazon tells the life story of Mandu da Silva, the last living jaguar shaman among the Baniwa people in the Northwest Amazon. In this original and engaging work, Robin M. Wright, who has known and worked with Silva for more than thirty years, weaves the story of Silva's life together with the Baniwas' broader society, history, mythology, cosmology, and jaguar shaman traditions. The jaguar shamans are key players in what Wright calls "a nexus of religious power and knowledge" in which healers, sorcerers, priestly chanters, and dance leaders exercise complementary functions that link living specialists with the deities and great spirits of the cosmos. Exploring in depth the apprenticeship of the shaman, Wright shows how jaguar shamans seek the knowledge and power of the deities through several stages of instruction and practice. This volume, the first study to map the sacred geography ("mythscape") of the northern Arawak-speaking people of the Northwest Amazon, demonstrates the direct connections between petroglyphs and other inscriptions and Baniwa sacred narratives as a whole. In eloquent and inviting analytic prose, Wright links biographic and ethnographic elements in elevating anthropological writing to a new standard of theoretically aware storytelling and analytic power.

The bones of Pierre Toussaint, the first proposed African-American Catholic saint, were disinterred and spread around in the New World. In his introduction, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith suggests the same is true of the religious practices that peoples of African descent and victims of the Atlantic slave trade brought with them. Fragments of Bone examines the evolution of these religions as they have been adapted and re-contextualized in various New World environments. The essays in Fragments of Bone discuss African religions as forms of resistance and survival in the face of Western cultural hegemony and imperialism. The collection is unique in presenting the voices of scholars primarily outside of the Western tradition, speaking on the issues they, as practitioners, regard as important. Bellegarde-Smith, himself a priest in the Haitian Vodou religion, brings together thirteen contributors from different disciplines, genders, and nationalities. The authors address the creolized African religions beginning with their evolution from Nigeria and Benin to New Orleans, Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, Brazil, and Guyana. The more familiar neo-African religions of Vodou and Santeria are also discussed,

Here, for the first time in paperback, is a fascinating daily record of Ferdinand Hayden's historic 1871 scientific expedition through Utah, Idaho, and Montana Territories to the Yellowstone Basin. The expedition's findings quickly led Congress to establish Yellowstone as the world's first national park. In addition to its scientific discoveries, the expedition is famous for producing the earliest on-site images of Yellowstone, by its photographer, William Henry Jackson, and its guest artist, Thomas Moran. Marlene Deahl Merrill has woven together a compelling daily narrative from the field writings of three expedition members: unpublished journals kept by mineralogist Albert Peale and geologist George Allen, periodic reports by Peale to his hometown newspaper, and letters from Hayden to his friend and mentor Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian Institution. Enriching this narrative are Jackson's photographs of camp scenes and landscapes; rare panoramic drawings by the party's topographical artist, Henry Elliott; maps; an introduction; and extensive annotations.

To what extent did colonialism affect the terms by which the colonised understood the material and spiritual landscapes in which they lived? What history, memories, and meanings survive from the colonial encounter and before? In this text, Sandra E. Greene explores the material and spiritual meanings that the Anlo-Ewe people of Ghana once associated with particular bodies of water, burial sites, sacred towns, and the human body itself and brings these meanings and memories into contemporary context for the Anlo. As a key to understanding the Anlo world view, Greene reconstructs a vivid and convincing portrait of the human and physical environment of 19th century Anlo. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork, early European accounts, and the archives and publications of the Bremen Missionary Society, Greene charts how these ideas changed following contact with British colonisers and German Pietist missionaries who discouraged spiritual interpretation of these sites in favour of more scientific and regulatory views.; Anlo responses to these colonialist challenges to their ways of organising physical space involved considerable resistance and, over time, selective acceptance of aspects of n

"Hassig's position is daring and potentially controversial and will be mandatory reading for those who deal with calendrical systems." -- Dr. Barbara J. Price, Columbia University

Based on their enormously complex calendars that recorded cycles of many kinds, the Aztecs and other ancient Mesoamerican civilizations are generally believed to have had a cyclical, rather than linear, conception of time and history. This boldly revisionist book challenges that understanding. Ross Hassig offers convincing evidence that for the Aztecs time was predominantly linear, that it was manipulated by the state as a means of controlling a dispersed tribute empire, and that the Conquest cut off state control and severed the unity of the calendar, leaving only the lesser cycles. From these, he asserts, we have inadequately reconstructed the pre-Columbian calendar and so misunderstood the Aztec conception of time and history.

Hassig first presents the traditional explanation of the Aztec calendrical system and its ideological functions and then marshals contrary evidence to argue that the Aztec elite deliberately used calendars and timekeeping to achieve practical political ends. He further traces how the Conquest played out in the temporal realm as Spanish conceptions of time partially displaced the Aztec ones. His findings promise to revolutionize our understanding of how the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican societies conceived of time and history.

Magesa argues that, just as Islam or Christi anity, African religion defines how people should live, with standards, values, and principles that have much to teach t he rest of the world. '

"A marvelous example of African Diaspora Studies . . . challenges our usual scholarly and everyday articulations of religion, even as it clearly articulates the possibilities and limits of Caribbean African retentions in Vodou, Santeria, and Obeah." --Barbara Christian, University of California, Berkeley Sacred Possessions is an unprecedented collection of thirteen comparative and interdisciplinary essays exploring the cross-cultural dynamics of African-based religious systems in the Caribbean. The contributors analyze the nature and liturgies of Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, Quimbois, and Gaga as they form one central cultural matrix in the region. They ask how these belief systems were affected by differing colonial histories and landscapes, how they affected other cultural expressions (from the oral tradition to popular art and literature), and how they have been perceived and (mis)represented by the West. The book is a unique contribution to the study of the Caribbean as a site of mutliculturalism, demonstrating the linkages between anthropology, religion, literature, and popular culture. Also included are a stunning photoessay on Cuban Santeria, a glossary of terms, and an insightful introduction by the editors. Margarite Fernandez Olmos is a professor of Spanish at Brooklyn College. She is coeditor and translator with Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert of Pleasure in the Word: Erotic Writing by Latin American Women and Remaking a Lost Harmony: Stories from the Hispanic Caribbean. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is a professor of Caribbean and Latin American literature in the department of Hispanic studies at Vassar College. She is the coeditor of Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam: Short Stories by Caribbean Women and author of Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life.

Often seen as ethnically monolithic, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in fact successfully pursued evangelism among diverse communities of indigenous peoples and Black Indians. Christina Dickerson-Cousin tells the little-known story of the AME Church's work in Indian Territory, where African Methodists engaged with people from the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles) and Black Indians from various ethnic backgrounds. These converts proved receptive to the historically Black church due to its traditions of self-government and resistance to white hegemony, and its strong support of their interests. The ministers, guided by the vision of a racially and ethnically inclusive Methodist institution, believed their denomination the best option for the marginalized people. Dickerson-Cousin also argues that the religious opportunities opened up by the AME Church throughout the West provided another impetus for Black migration. Insightful and richly detailed, Black Indians and Freedmen illuminates how faith and empathy encouraged the unique interactions between two peoples.

The rich religious beliefs and ceremonials of the Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico were first synthesized and compared by ethnologist Elsie Clews Parsons. Prodigious research and a quarter-century of fieldwork went into her 1939 encyclopedic two-volume work, Pueblo Indian Religion.

The author gives an integrated picture of the complex religious and social life in the pueblos, including Zuni, Acoma, Laguna, Taos, Isleta, Sandia, Jemez, Cochiti, Santa Clara, San Felipe, Santa Domingo, San Juan, and the Hopi villages. In volume I she discusses shelter, social structure, land tenure, customs, and popular beliefs. Parsons also describes spirits, cosmic notions, and a wide range of rituals.

The cohesion of spiritual and material aspects of Pueblo culture is also apparent in volume II, which presents an extensive body of solstice, installation, initiation, war, weather, curing, kachina, and planting and harvesting ceremonies, as well as games, animal dances, and offerings to the dead. A review of Pueblo ceremonies from town to town considers variations and borrowings. Today, a half century after its original publication, Pueblo Indian Religion remains central to studies of Pueblo religious life.

During his last years ethnohistorian Frank G. Speck turned to the study of Iroquois ceremonialism. This 1950 book investigates the religious rites of the Cayuga tribe, one of six in the Iroquois confederation that occupied upstate New York until the American Revolution. In the 1930s and the 1940s Frank Speck observed the Midwinter Ceremony, the Cayuga thanksgiving for the blessings of life and health, performed in long houses on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario. Collaborating with Alexander General (Deskaheh), the noted Cayuga chief, Speck describes vividly the rites and dances giving thanks to all spiritual entities. Of special interest are the medicine societies that not only prescribed herbs but used powerfully evocative masks in treating the underlying causes of sickness. In a new introduction, William N. Fenton discusses Speck's distinguished career.

Black Elk was one of the greatest religious thinkers produced by native North America, and the Sun Dance the central religious ritual of his Lakota tradition. Beginning with a review of the recent critical work on Black Elk by Paul B. Steinmetz, Julian Rice and Michael K. Steltenkamp, Holler reconstructs the history and development of the Lakota Sun Dance, essential background for understanding Black Elk's thought. His analysis is a comprehsnive study of the dance, which was banned by the government in 1883. Holler shows how Black Elk adapted the dance to the conditions and circumstances of reservation life, reinterpreting it in terms commensurate with Christianity. His firsthand account of the dance associated with Frank Fools Crow at Three Mile Camp near Kyle, South Dakota, shows how the contemporary Sun Dance reflects Black Elk's vision. Holler's book offers a philosophical engagement with native North American religion, carried out in close dialogue with anthropology. Readers who were captivated by John G. Neihardt's gripping portrait of Black Elk in ""Black Elk Speaks"" may be surprised to learn that he was a vital and creative leader until his death in 1950, not the broken, despairing old man made famous by Neihardt. Holler establishes that Black Elk was both a sincere traditionalist and a sincere Christian, seeing the two religious traditions as expressions of the sacred. Students of religion should be stimulated by Holler's interpretation of Black Elk as a creative thinker, rather than a passive informant on his people's past. Those interested in Native Americans, especially the Lakota, should appreciate his authoritative reconstruction of the Sun Dance, which proposes new understandings of this central Lakota religious ritual. The book also includes a glossary of terms.

For centuries, a persistent and important component of Lakota religious life has been the Inipi, the ritual of the sweat lodge. The sweat lodge has changed little in appearance since its first recorded description in the late seventeenth century. The ritual itself consists of songs, prayers, and other actions conducted in a tightly enclosed, dark, and extremely hot environment. Participants who “sweat� together experience moral strengthening, physical healing, and the renewal of social and cultural bonds. Today, the sweat lodge ritual continues to be a vital part of Lakota religion. It has also been open to use, often controversial, by non-Indians. The ritual has recently become popular among Lakotas recovering from alcohol and drug addiction. This study is the first in-depth look at the history and significance of the Lakota sweat lodge. Bringing together data culled from historical sources and fieldwork on Pine Ridge Reservation, Raymond A. Bucko provides a detailed discussion of continuity and changes in the “sweat� ritual over time. He offers convincing explanations for the longevity of the ceremony and its continuing popularity.