Native America

We think about religions in a very particular way, and we think that Europeans have a religion-- Catholicism, Judaism, Islam. We think about other peoples in the world as having religions as well. When we think about Native American religions, however, it should raise a question in our minds. So much of the knowledge that's inscribed within Native religions deals with empirical realities. It engages the ecological realities of place, how to work with the land, how to work with rainfall, how to think about agriculture. Why aren't we calling this Native science? Indeed, the same thing that could be called a spiritual statement could be regarded as a profound ecological statement as well. Commentaries on water, commentaries on land, commentaries on clouds, commentaries on agriculture. All of this could be called religious, but it could also be called a profound scientific knowledge, a Native form of science. And so we might recast or rethink our notion of Native religion as, more properly, a kind of Native science that's empirical, that's grounded, that's about acting in the world, rather than just engaging in a set of beliefs.