Indigenous religion

“ It is however true that we have a western heritage, but we have to analyze that, on the one hand we have a "Mother Culture", the indigenous or anahuaca; it gave us a way of feeling and interacting with human beings, nature, the universe and the divine and sacred. ”

“ The foreign elements intermingled with the native culture in sections of the Eastern hemisphere produced an abnormal condition of society, where the arts of civilized life were remolded to the aptitudes and wants of savages and barbarians.476 Tribes strictly nomadic have also social peculiarities, growing out of their exceptional mode of life, which are not well understood. Through influences, derived from the higher races, the indigenous culture of many tribes has been arrested, and so far adulterated as to change the natural flow of their progress. ”

“ It is to be desired that some missionary should give an account of the degree and kind of natural religion among the native tribes. Their belief in the efficacy of sassy-wood to discover guilt or innocence, indicates a faith in an invisible Equity. ”

“ The custom, as observed by the most ancient amongst the peoples of the earth, is, and was some thousands of years ago, a religious rite, and differs altogether from the practice of the blacks, who in this merely endeavour to test the powers of endurance of a candidate for admission to a certain rank in the tribe. In considering the effect, however, of this and other practices that are mentioned, one may believe that they are really indigenous, and that they have originated either in consequence of a peculiarity of climate or from the necessity of limiting the population. ”

“ We are just, indeed, beginning to comprehend the true character of the indigenous Indian civilisation of the era of the discovery. These remarks are sufficient to show how feebly the obligations of letters and Christianity have been performed, with respect to the red men, by the colonists of those types of the early European civilisation, who rested themselves on feudal tenures, military renown, and an ecclesiastical system of empty ceremonies. ”

“ The religions of the more advanced tribes, though differing in many of their practical details of application to life, may fairly be treated as one. It should not surprise us to find that there is no known tribe in Africa, or elsewhere in the world, which has not a religion ”

“ But other causes exist; speculation anywhere may take crudely scientific rather than crudely religious lines. Especially the belief in ancestral spirits may check or nullify the belief in a remote All Father. We see this among the Zulus, where spirits entirely dominate religion, and the All Father is, at most, the shadow of a name, Unkulunkulu. We may detect the same influence among the northern tribes of Australia, where ancestral spirits dominate thought and society, though they receive no sacrifice or prayer. ”

“ This fact has led certain travellers, who, it is certain, were not familiar with the native languages, who had not penetrated into the inner secrets of the peoples they professed to have studied, and who, in addition, were often wrongly informed by chance interpreters, into the belief that tribes without a religion exist in Africa. ”

“ Most of these educated men, however, rather shunned the cultivation of their maternal tongues, and preferred, when they wrote at all, to choose that of their white brethren, the Spanish, Portuguese or English. The extensive theological literature which we possess, printed or in manuscript, in American tongues, and in many it is quite ample, is scarcely ever the result of the efforts of the Christian teachers of indigenous affiliations. ”

“ The core values of life, death, nature, the cosmos, the divine and the sacred are harmoniously and intimately shared by all the so-called "indigenous" peoples of the American continent. What bonds and identifies peoples with indigenous roots is the philosophical-cultural matrix that gives us structure us and not the alleged "Latinity" (“Latin ethnicity”) which was invented by Napoleon III to seize the non-Anglo Saxon America in the 19th century or the "Hispanic ethnicity” with which English speakers catalogue us in the 20th century. ”

“ So the indigenous art of a people is their only prophecy and their school of anointed prophets and kings. Our own art is the only light by which this conventionalizing process we call “civilization” may eventually make its institutions harmonious with the fairest conditions of our individual and social life. ”

“ This incorporation of the teaching of the missionaries with the indigenous belief is not without interest, showing a broad spirit of tolerance in the author, who, without abandoning the faith of his forefathers, is ready to admit the truth of Christianity and its suitability to those who profess it, and sees no difficulty in providing in the unknown lands beyond the grave a special country for each race, just as there is in the world he knows of. ”

“ It is among these tribes, inhabiting a wild and forbidding country, undisturbed by the march of progress and civilization, that one may find the indigenous races living under the same conditions and maintaining the traditions and customs that prevailed before the coming of the white man to the western world. ”

“ Since, then, the theories of a diversity of origin of the races, and that the American Indian is indigenous to this continent, are both opposed by the teaching of God's Word, it follows that both are wrong, and can not be sustained.
We stand squarely by the Bible. Men may come and men may go, but God's Word will endure forever. ”

“ Oxford whether Jehovah was a god of Moses's tribe or quite the reverse, 'a Kenite god.' Yet it really makes a good deal of difference! For in a complex of tribes, speaking one language, it is to the last degree unexampled (within my knowledge) that one tribe, or family, possesses, all to itself, a family god who is also the Creator and is later accepted as such by all the other tribes. One may ask for instances of such a thing in any known race, in any stage of culture. Peru will not help us—not the Creator, Pachacamac, but the Sun, is the god of the Inca family. ”

“ There is in the nature of the aboriginal races a religious fervour which apparently forms an integral part of their character. They are also submissive and inoffensive, and it can be understood how any invading and warlike tribe would, without difficulty, conquer and control people having this mild disposition. ”

“ No indigenous civilization exists in America to-day, yet the effects of a former culture are not altogether absent. The descendant of the Aztec, Maya, and Quiché, is still of superior mind and haughtier spirit than his roving brother who boasts of none but a savage ancestry. ”

“ Now the initiatory development of this aboriginal instinct was very humble, and if we wish to know what our direct ancestors once were, we need only consult the record of anthropological research among such savages as the Fijians or Tonga Islanders. The shape assumed by religion amongst such people was most probably ancestor or ghost worship. The dead father or chieftain is still seen in the dreams of his children or people, and the mysteriousness of the new shape and presence he assumes excites the awe and reverence which is at the root of the religious habit. ”

“ Their zeal and liberality in supporting the institutions of the Gospel among themselves, and in efforts to Christianize the Indians, were marked traits in their character. They considered it one of the great objects of their mission to this continent, to [Pg 94] become the means of the salvation of its aboriginal inhabitants, and thus to extend Christ's kingdom in the world. In a most commendable degree, they carried their religion into the various every-day concerns of life, and consulted, especially on every occasion of interest and importance, the particular guidance and blessing of God. ”

“ It is this shifting of the care of the pagan cult from chief to peasant, from court to hovel, and, perhaps, to some extent from higher to lower race, that serves to explain how the more primitive and uncouth gods have tended so largely to supplant those of higher, more graceful mien. Aboriginal deities, thrust into obscurity by the invasion of higher foreign types, came back to their own again. ”

“ The Medicine Lodge, in many tribes, was the centre of these observances. It was customary to announce the holding of a Medicine Lodge weeks and months in advance to awaken a general interest in its ceremonies. The religious system of the aborigines is another of the subjects which has been but partially investigated. It is rich in materials for the future student. The experience of these tribes in developing their religious beliefs and mode of worship is a part of the experience of mankind; and the facts will hold an important place in the science of comparative religion. ”

“ Out of the primitive conditions of nomadic and pastoral life, under the leadership of tribal elders who were both priests and warriors, they gradually passed, after many vicissitudes of peace and war, into more settled forms of agricultural life and developed into distinct and separate polities of varying vitality, but still united by the bond of common religious and social institutions in the face of the indigenous populations whom they drove before them, or reduced into subjection and slowly assimilated as they moved down towards and into the Gangetic plain. ”

“ Except in a very few places, near the passes through the snowy mountains, the aboriginal inhabitants are alleged to have been obliged entirely to conform to the rules of Hindu purity, and to reject their ancient forms of worship; for I hope that the colonists from the south are not so bad as they pretend, and that religious zeal has not had such a victory over humanity as they allege; for the fear of being thought in any degree contaminated by the infidel Khas, would make them carefully conceal whatever indulgence humanity may have wrung from intolerance. ”

“ The vast empire of the Jesuits, in Paraguay, has all passed away, and, we are told, the descendants of their convert Indians are no way distinguished from the other savages. It strikes me that Christianity is the religion of civilized man, that the savages must first be civilized, and that as there is little hope that the present generation of Indians can be civilized, there is but little more that they will be Christianized. ”

“ But, progressive as they are, they have not, like the more pristine tribes of the south-east, developed 'the germs of religion,' the belief in a benevolent or ruling 'All Father.' Unlike the tribes of the south-east, they have co-operative totemic magic. Each totem community does magic for its totem, as part of the food supply of the united tribe. But the tribe, though so SOLIDAIRE, and with its eight classes and hereditary magistracies so advanced, has developed no germs of religion at all. Arunta progress has thus been singularly unequal. ”

“ Conscious as they were of the existence of some Supreme Being, but worshipping no God, true or false, the white man's religion which makes such a worship obligatory through a mediator found easy access among so susceptible a people; and with equal ease they likewise adopted the civilization of the white man. But the Natives received not only the white man's civilization and his religion, but have even gullibly imbibed his superstitions. ”

“ The second is that, for the first time in these five centuries of colonial invasion, indigenous peoples have sought to extend their uprising to other indigenous peoples and are linked with to non-indigenous civil society, as well as giving an international character to their struggle. ”

“ Also, with a view to producing ready-made alphabets in order to begin with their evangelisation work, SIL missionaries set aside important dialectal differences that later on became a matter of contention among indigenous peoples, particularly once they became politically and culturally empowered in the last decades of the twentieth century (Stoll 2002) . ”

“ The mountains and the borders of the Desert are still possessed by tribes speaking a language totally distinct from all others known—nominally professing the Mahometan religion, but regardless of its precepts—dwelling in tents, and wandering from pasture to pasture with their flocks and herds—displaying the same fierce and indomitable character which distinguished the aboriginals, from whom they are in all probability descended. ”

“ Many of the people who live along the foot of the mountain ranges, although Christianized sufficiently to contribute to the Roman Catholic churches, still retain many of their aboriginal customs, especially those pertaining to marriage, birth and death. ”

“ There is little or no felt opposition between processes implying control and processes of a propitiatory character in the religion of the Pueblo Indians, which American ethnologists have been so successful in expounding, or, to mount to a still higher level, in the Vedic, Assyrian or Egyptian cults. ”

“ Fears are sometimes entertained lest the great numbers of Catholic and other immigrants should exercise an inimical influence upon our resident population. But we should remember that the institutions indigenous to the United States are the most vigorous protest against both religious and political superstition, and by their own uncoerced influence will most effectively transform into their own likeness all comers thereunto. ”