Do North American Indians believe in a native Heaven and an afterlife?
This is just general knowledge, probably pretty far off base, but I believe most Native American’s are animasts, and animasts don’t believe in heaven or hell or an afterlife in the conventional sense. Native Aborigines are similar in this respect… There are something like 500 Native American tribes or used to be, from the Americas, so these beliefs probably vary widely… I think your question though is whether animism embues a form of “heaven” in the natural world? And I think the answer to that is essentially yes. In fact, animism in its strictest form teaches that the natural/spiritual world is one and is already heaven. In this sense, it has some similarities to Buddhism and the beliefs in reincarnation and karma… Animism http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Animism The term Animism is derived from the Latin anima, meaning “soul”. In its most general sense, animism is simply the belief in souls. In this g
