WHAT IS THE NATIVE AMERICAN SPIRITUAL TRADITION?
Learning about Native American religions confronts us with a situation similar to that of learning about Hinduism: the label is somewhat abstract and artificial. Just as Hinduism was a name applied to hundreds of diverse religious systems found in India by researchers, the term Native American religion is a blanket term which applies to dozens, if not hundreds, of different ways to thinking about the world and our place in it and about the Absolute. However, again, this course runs into the very real limitations of time and space. Rather than select one particular tradition and attempt to learn about it in depth, I have chosen to be consistent with our approach to other traditions and look for similarities from which we can get a general sense of what the individual traditions are about. In his first chapter, Brown introduces us to one way of classifying the world we are studying: the culture map which distinguishes five broad regions (see p.5). Within these, we are introduced to diffe
