Inspiration and Innovation

Religion in the American West

Todd M. Kerstetter

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118848388, 9781118848333
• eBook ISBN: 9781118848326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Covering more than 200 years of history from pre-contact to the present, this textbook places religion at the center of the history of the American West, examining the relationship between religion and the region and their influence on one another.

• A comprehensive examination of the relationship between religion and the American West and their influence on each other over the course of more than 200 years
• Discusses diverse groups of people, places, and events that played an important historical role, from organized religion and easily recognized denominations to unorganized religion and cults
• Provides straightforward explanations of key religious and theological terms and concepts
• Weaves discussion of American Indian religion throughout the text and presents it in dialogue with other groups
• Enriches our understanding of American history by examining key factors outside of traditional political, economic, social, and cultural domains

1
Indigenous Religions in the West

All the earth was covered with water, and everything was dark in the beginning. There was no sun, no moon, no stars. Then one day a raft appeared, floating on the water. In it was Turtle. Down from the sky a rope of feathers came and dangled near the bow of the raft, and then a being, who shone like the sun, descended. He was Earth Initiate. When he reached the end of the rope he tied it to the bow of the raft, and stepped in. His face was covered, so that Turtle was not able to see it. In fact, no one has ever seen his face uncovered. Earth Initiate sat down and for a long time said nothing.

“Where do you come from?” Turtle asked at last.
“I come from above,” Earth Initiate said.
Then Turtle asked: “Brother, can you not make for me some good dry land, so that I may sometimes come up out of the water?”
Earth Initiate did not answer at once, and Turtle asked, “Are there going to be any people in the world?”
After thinking for a while, Earth Initiate said, “Yes.”
“How long before you are going to make people?” Turtle asked.
“I don't know,” Earth Initiate answered. “You want to have some dry land: well, how am I going to get any earth to make it of?”
“If you will tie a stone about my left arm I will dive for some,” Turtle answered.

Turtle was gone for six years, and when he came up he was covered with green slime, he had been down so long. He returned with only a very little earth under his nails. The rest had all washed away.

Earth Initiate scraped the earth out from under Turtle's nails, and put it in the palm of his hand and rolled it about until it was round and about the size of a small pebble. This he laid on the stern of the raft, and went away and left it. Three times he returned to look at it, and the third time found that it had grown very large. The fourth time he looked at it, it was as big as the world, the raft was on ground, and all around were mountains.

When Turtle knew the raft was on ground he said: “I cannot stay in the dark all the time. Can't you make a light so that I can see?”
As they got out of the raft, Earth Initiate said: “Look that way, to the east! I am going to tell my sister to come up.”
Then it began to grow light, and day began to break, and the sun came up.
“Which way is the sun going to travel?” Turtle asked.
“I will tell her to go this way, and go down there,” Earth Initiate answered.
After the sun went down it grew very dark.
“I will tell my brother to come up,” said Earth Initiate.
Then the moon rose.
“How do you like it?” Earth Initiate asked Turtle.
“It is very good,” Turtle answered. “Is that all you are going to do for us?”
“No, I am going to do more yet.”
Then he called the stars each by name and they came out.
Some time after this he said: “I am going to make people.”
So he took dark red earth and mixed it with water, and made two figures, one a man and one a woman.

This account of the origins of the world and human beings comes from the Maidu people of what is now California. It is one example from a countless number of ways the first human inhabitants of North America organized and made sense of their lives through what this chapter calls indigenous religions.

Each tribe that lives in North America has its own rich history explaining its origins and how it came to reside in its particular location. Many tribes continue to maintain those accounts. Europeans have long held tribal accounts in low esteem for reasons that have a lot to do with this book and the history of the American West. For one thing, Europeans considered Indians pagans and, therefore, unreliable. Tribal accounts of creation and migration frequently did not correspond with anything that could be found in Christianity and the Bible. That led Europeans to label Indian creation stories as myths, folk tales, and legends, which demeaned them in comparison to European Christian accounts of human origins. For their part, the Maidu recognized the similarities between their creation story and that in the Bible (the step-by-step creation of heavenly bodies, day and night, and eventually human beings), which they considered evidence of their story's accuracy. Later, many Europeans and Americans rejected tribal accounts as being unscientific. Some Indian intellectuals questioned this science, arguing that it reflected an ethnocentrism not unlike Christian views of tribal “paganism.”

Many tribal creation and migration stories have another important link to this book. Most say the people in question migrated from the “land of the setting sun.” Some tribal accounts reference other compass points, but many indicate the west as the point of origin. On the one hand, that places great importance on “the West,” although it is not “the West” in the sense it is used in US history and in most of this book. On the other hand, such a western origin story followed by a human migration to the east, turns the best-known story of westward expansion (that told from the European or Atlantic perspective) on its head and demonstrates that from the time of first human occupation, the history of the American West is much more complicated and nuanced than is typically thought.

The ancestors of American Indians lived in the Americas for thousands of years before Christopher Columbus arrived and initiated sustained contact with the rest of the world. Accounts of how the first human residents of the Americas arrived vary. Archeologists and anthropologists cite evidence that indicates people migrated into North America from Asia. Many tribal histories such as the Maidu story above say their ancestors were created there and have occupied their homelands since time immemorial.

The area west of the Mississippi River, which is the focus of most of this book, contains a variety of culture areas (see Figure 1.1). Culture areas are zones defined by geography in which climate and resources have influenced the development of distinctive human cultures. The Great Plains, for example, with its vast treeless expanses, massive herds of bison, and relatively sparse precipitation shaped the development of particular human economies and societies. Within each culture area, one can find many tribes and some variation in how people lived. This chapter does not offer an exhaustive list. It samples the religious beliefs of one tribe from each of eight North American culture areas west of the Mississippi to give a sense of the diversity of religious beliefs that existed among American Indians in the region that came to be known as the American West. While similarities exist among American Indian religions, it would be misleading to try to generalize any one tribe's religious system to American Indians as a group.

Figure 1.1 This map shows the geographical location of the major cultural groups who inhabited the West in pre-Columbian North America.

Timing and transmission also complicate the discussion of indigenous religions here. The chapter aims to give a sense of what indigenous religions were like before non-Indians showed up. This is extremely difficult to accomplish. For one thing, dynamic indigenous religions changed over time both before non-Indians showed up and after. For another, much of what we know about indigenous religions as they existed hundreds of years ago comes to us in words recorded by European Christians. Whatever their intentions might have been (much more on this later), those European Christians left a written record from an outsider's perspective clouded by their own religiously influenced perspectives. Furthermore, much of this discussion uses the past tense as it refers to events or people in the past. It should be noted that Indian people are still very much with us as are some of the religions and beliefs discussed here. So, this chapter provides both a limited sample of the variety of American Indian religions of the West and a particularly vivid lesson in the messiness of writing history across vast distances of time and culture. It shows some areas of overlap, but it also shows how widely American Indian religions could differ. Spirits roamed everywhere and people lived religiously to maintain harmony with them.

Arctic

The Inuit, culturally similar peoples who inhabit the Arctic coastal regions of what is now the United States (Alaska), Canada, Russia, and Greenland, lived in a world populated by an indeterminate number of spirits that lived in animals, objects, and places, and that the Inuit sought to manipulate through rituals and the aid of shamans. The Inuit identified three different kinds of human souls. The immortal spirit left the body at death to dwell in a spiritual world. Another, a person's breath and bodily warmth, died with the body. A third, the name soul, lived in a spirit world before inhabiting a human form. Typically this soul entered a baby, but an ill adult might change names with the hope that a new name soul might bring restored health. The Inuit believed most disease resulted from breaking a taboo, which offended spirits, or from the loss of part of their soul. They enlisted shamans to help them rectify the taboo violation or to recover the lost part of their soul. In a variation on shamanic belief, the Inuit believed a soul or spirit would enter a shaman's body and take control of it. The Inuit also believed in “soul flight,” that a shaman could send his soul to the spirit world where it could recover another person's lost soul or consult other spirits regarding an issue that had arisen on earth.

In addition to rank and file spirits, the Inuit believed in several more powerful spirit figures known to all. Sedna, a goddess who lived in the sea and controlled marine mammals, ranked as the most important. The Inuit believed Sedna had run away from her husband to live with another man. This angered her father, who captured her and set out to return her to her husband, which involved a boat trip. While at sea, a storm arose and threatened their boat. Sedna's father figured the storm resulted from spirits angered by his daughter abandoning her husband. He threw Sedna overboard to calm the spirits, but she clutched the side of the boat. He chopped at her fingers joint by joint until Sedna lost her grip and drowned. Sedna's finger joints transformed into sea mammals, which is why the Inuit seek to appease her before hunting sea mammals. The story of Sedna demonstrates the interconnectedness of the natural and the supernatural worlds that exists in many American Indian religions and how spirits play important roles in everyday tasks and events. The story, which depends on the sea and reflects the importance of hunting marine mammals, also shows the critical importance of place to the religion of the Inuit.

Sub-Arctic

A more detailed example of how American Indians view religion comes from the Koyukon Indians. The Koyukon people, Athapascan-speakers who live in the interior part of what is now known as Alaska, can stand in for many other American Indian peoples in the broad outlines of their spirituality and how it permeates every facet of life. The particulars vary from tribe to tribe because American Indian spirituality depends heavily upon the land, plants, animals, and spirits of a tribe's homeland.

For the Koyukon people, in Distant Time it is said animals were human. They had human form, lived in human society, and spoke with humans. Raven created this ancient world and controlled it. When Raven first created the earth, rivers flowed both ways – upstream along one bank and downstream along the other. Raven decided this made things too easy for humans, though, as their boats could drift in either direction without paddling. So, Raven changed rivers so they flowed in only one direction and that is how they are today. Distant Time ended when a catastrophic flood covered the earth. Raven arranged for a pair of each species to board a raft. These plants and animals survived, but after the flood they could no longer behave as humans. All the humans from Distant Time died, so Raven recreated people in their present form.

This much-abbreviated story gives a sense of how one group of American Indians considered the origins of the world and the interconnectedness of people with plants, animals, and spirits. The Koyukon people knew well the biblical parallels (once they learned of the Bible). They did not consider this story a reinterpretation of Christianity. In fact, they saw it as evidence supporting the accuracy of their traditions.

The Koyukon people have hundreds of Distant Time stories, which collectively explain the behavior and appearance of living things, the cosmos, even the weather, and they suggest proper relationships in the world. Some stories are short and can be told by children. Others are long and might take weeks of evening-time tellings to complete. Usually older people who have memorized the epics and have expertise in interpreting their meanings tell them.

Distant Tim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Editors
• The Western History Series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Indigenous Religions in the West
• 2 Missions to New Worlds
• 3 Migrations, Manifest Destiny, and Mormons, 1803–1860
• 4 The West and Religion in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1860–1890
• 5 Religion in the Modern West, 1890–1945
• 6 Religion in the Cold War West, 1945–1965
• 7 Creativity and Controversy after 1965
• Conclusion: The Frontier that Wouldn’t Close
• Index
• End User License Agreement