Native American Religions: An Introduction

by Sam D. Gill

NATIVE AMERICAN AN INTRODUCTION provides an overview of the latest research and thought in this area. Gill presents an academically and humanistically useful way of appreciating and understanding the complexity and diversity of Native American religions and establishes them as a significant field within religious studies. In addition, aspects of European-American history are examined in a search for sources of widespread misunderstandings about the character of Native American religions.

Genres: Religion, Native American, Nonfiction, Spirituality

160 pages, Paperback

First published July 21, 1981

About the author

Sam Gill is Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Native American religions were the focus of his work for twenty-five years. He regularly hung out in cultures in the American Southwest—Navajo, Hopi, Yaqui, and Zuni—to observe ritual and dancing. Since the early 1990s Sam has been an enthusiastic student of dancing in cultures around the world including travel to observe and study dancing to Bali and Java, Thailand and Nepal, Ghana and Mali, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Sam has taught courses on many topics related to dancing notably a yearlong course “Religion and Dance” that covered over thirty dance traditions and included weekly dance studios taught by artists from the relevant cultures. In the late 1990s Sam founded, with his daughter Jenny, a dance and music school, Bantaba World Dance & Music. For many years he has taught salsa dance in high schools, in his classes at CU, and in the community including a performance group. He has developed an extensive catalog of salsa dance instructional videos. Sam’s insatiable interest in various fields of study—movement, dancing, play, masking, perception and the senses, cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, gender issues, fitness, gesture, aging—interweave and shape his current work. Since retiring from teaching in 2017 he has published at least a book a year including an Award Winning book "The Proper Study of Religion: Building on Jonathan Z. Smith" and most recently "Religion: A Contemporary Perspective."

Reviews

[Bilbo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorcery. Occultic. Pantheism. Those are the words that seem best to describe Native American Religion. The Worship of the Creation instead of the Creator (Romans 1)

Interesting comments on some sections about how different tribes merely Christianized their pagan concepts, that is they merely took the Christian terms of Christian missionaries and covered their pagan ideas and practices with them and so changed nothing in their own belief system but merely syncretized both.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This impressionistic work of anthropology evokes with its fluid prose the mixture of transcendent and imminent spiritual ideas that characterize Native American religions. However, for understanding the evolution of religions in the major Native American linguistic and cultural groups, this book is inadequate. It only gives one chapter to a proper historical treatment, and the narrative jumps around. Gill is correct to say that the word "religion" is a Western European invention that may not adequately describe other spiritual traditions, but a passage where he says the name "Indian" may be technically accurate, from a European point of view, comes off as tone-deaf.