We have a religion which has been handed down to us as children. It teaches us to be thankful, to be united, and to love one another! We never quarrel about religion. Words spoken by Red Jacket, in his superb reply to missionary Cram more than a century ago. I have attempted to paint the religious life of the typical American Indian as it was before we knew the white race. I have long wished to do this, because I can not find that it has ever been seriously, adequately, and sincerely done. Our religion is the last thing about us that the person of another race will ever understand. First, We as Native Americans do not speak of these deep matters so long as We believe in them, and those of us who have ceased to believe speak inaccurately and slightingly. Second, even if We can be induced to speak, the racial and religious prejudice of others stands in the way of any sympathetic comprehension. Third, practically all existing studies on this subject have been made during the transition period, when the original beliefs and philosophy of the Native American were already going through rapid disintegration. There re to be found here and there superficial accounts of customs and ceremonies, of which the symbolism or inner meaning was largely hidden from the observer; and there was a great deal of material collected in recent years which is without value because it is a modern and hybrid philosophy. Find an Indian who is more concerned with profit instead of his heritage, and he will possibly provide you with sacred songs, mythology, and folklore to order! My writings do not pretend to me scientific treatise. They are as true as I can make them to my childhood teaching and ancestral ideals, but from the human, not the ethnological standpoint. I have not cared to pile up more dry bones, but to clothe them with flesh and blood. So much that has been written by strangers of our ancestral faith and worship treat it mainly as a matter of curiosity. I should like to empathize its universal quality, its personal appeal. The first missionaries who came among us were good men, but they were imbued with narrowness of their age. We of the twentieth century know better. We know that all religious aspiration, all sincere worship, can have but one source and goal. We know that the God of the educated, the God of the child, the God of the civilized, and the God of the primitive, is after all the same GOD; and that this God does not measure our differences, but embraces all those who live rightly and humbly on earth. - Ohiyesa (Charles Alexander Eastman)
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 13:13:12 +0000
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