Before invasion, Turtle Island-or North America-was home to vibrant
cultures that shared long-standing philosophical precepts. The most
important and wide-spread of these was the view of reality as a
collaborative binary known as the Twinned Cosmos of Blood and
Breath. This binary system was built on the belief that neither
half of the cosmos can exist without its twin; both halves are,
therefore, necessary and good. Western anthropologists typically
shorthand the Twinned Cosmos as "Sky and Earth," but this
erroneously saddles it with Christian baggage and, worse, imposes a
hierarchy that puts sky quite literally above earth. None of this
Western ideology legitimately applies to traditional Indigenous
American thought, which is about equal cooperation and the
continual recreation of reality. Spirits of Blood, Spirits of
Breath examines traditional historical concepts of spirituality
among North American Indians both at and, to the extent it can be
determined, before contact. In doing so, Barbara Mann rescues the
authentically indigenous ideas from Western, and especially
missionary, interpretations. In addition to early European source
material, she uses Indian oral traditions, traced as much as
possible to early sources, and Indian records, including
pictographs, petroglyphs, bark books, and wampum. Moreover, Mann
respects each Native culture as a discrete unit, rather than
generalizing them as is often done in Western anthropology. To this
end, she collates material in accordance with actual historical,
linguistic, and traditional linkages among the groups at hand, with
traditions clearly identified by group and, where recorded, by
speaker. In this way she provides specialists and non-specialists
alike a window into the seemingly lost, and often caricatured world
of Indigenous American thought.
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