ABSTRACT

Today, most Native Americans are Christians and hold corresponding afterlife beliefs (Morrison 2002; Stockel 2004; Vilaça and Wright 2009). In previous centuries, hundreds of distinct ethnic and linguistic groups gave rise to a wide range of different afterlife beliefs, with some common themes. For example, in the Northwest Coast, Arctic, and Subarctic, animistic soul concepts commingled with notions of cross-species reincarnation and multiple souls coexisting in individual bodies. The many “persons” of the animate material universe may be directly engaged with by skilled individuals, reminiscent of Siberian shamans. Migratory Navajo and Apache peoples represent a late prehistoric incursion of this northern cultural pattern into the desert Southwest United States, and indeed these affiliated groups retain an eschatology typical of their Subarctic-dwelling kin. In contrast, the Pueblo desert agricultural-ist populations of the Southwest regard the hydrologic cycle as the basis for their distinctive eschatology; souls of the dead transmigrate back and forth between the life-giving rainclouds and the life-giving springs. Afterlife beliefs in the equestrian societies of the Great Plains are not well-defined, likely an effect of cultural synthesis between disparate hunting and agrarian groups in nineteenth-century confederations. Likewise, determining the status of traditional afterlife beliefs in the Eastern Woodlands is not straightforward. The ethnographic record in the East is piecemeal as many groups were conquered and displaced (and/or assimilated and converted) long before a reliable ethnographic record was established. Some eastern Iroquoian, Siouan, and Algonquian groups apparently maintained beliefs in a paradisiacal afterlife, which may be indigenous, or may owe to the influence of Christian monotheism. That these paradise beliefs are occasionally attested to in sources from the contact-traditional period is not conclusive, as the objectivity of these early modern authors is in doubt. Finally, the influence of Christian apocalyptic eschatology was profound in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prophet-centered native revitalization movements of the Eastern Woodlands, Great Plains, and Intermountain West, 185and similar patterns have arguably contributed to the syncretic character of pan-Indian traditions such as the Powwow movement, where Christian and Indigenous religious ideas are seamlessly commingled.