Death of the Spirit: How did the Eastern Woodland Indians Lose their Traditional Religion?

[caption id="attachment_1367" align="aligncenter" width="403"] Oral historians, storytellers and other leaders (including African griots) in oral cultures transmited the knowledge that most of us now get from films, books, and websites. Photo credit[/caption]

Yesterday's post was about how Native Americans reacted to the disasters of colonialism - in terms of their spirituality and/or religion. It brought up a fair amount of discussion on Facebook and I'll get to that later in this post.


From time to time I like to remind readers that in the 1700's religion wasn't separate from everything else. I suppose there was some separation for Christians who had a Sabbath Day that was different from the other six "ordinary" days, but for Indians prior to white contact, religion - or "spirituality," if that is the term you prefer - was simply part of the fabric of their lives.

When game was still plentiful, Indians would say a prayer for the spirit of an animal after they killed it. So religion and the hunting economy were intertwined.

But - as we know - things changed. They changed for the worse. With the coming of the fur trade, Indians exchanged furs for the things they needed - and sometimes they exchanged the furs for firewater instead of for what they needed. Either way, the demand for furs that came from whites resulted in forests with less game. Hunting became more difficult and the practice of praying for the spirit of an animal after you killed it became extinct. Economics started to become separate from religion/spirituality.

That is one partial explanation for the erosion of traditional Native religion. But what follows is another, more comprehensive explanation.

After reading my post yesterday, a Native Facebook friend of mine made another point. (By the way, what he wrote on Facebook is also an agreed-upon reality amongst scholarly historians.) Anyway, my friend Shawn Stevens pointed out that diseases that came from Europe, like smallpox and measles, killed so many Indians from the Algonquian language family, and killed them off so fast, that it - indirectly - pretty much destroyed traditional Native religion. Not having a paper trail, traditional beliefs and rituals only survived when they were passed along orally from one generation to the next. The epidemics made that impossible.
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