Sacred Sites, Native American

Religious Beliefs and Sacred Land

To comprehend religious beliefs and practices associated with sacred landscapes, it is necessary to examine indigenous conceptions of the sacred. Most religions of Native North Americans are cosmo-theistic. Within such a worldview, humans, animals, plants, natural objects, and natural phenomena are animated by spiritual power. These sacred beings are interrelated through kinship and reciprocal obligations. Through reciprocal kin relations, spirit beings interact with each other and with humans. Those interactions involve transferring power and establishing a dialogue that must be maintained by ceremonial and ritual prescriptions that require an intimate interaction with a particular landscape.

For traditional people, there exists a complex web of relationships, if not a unity between the ecology, humanity, and supernatural beings. Those relationships require sustained reciprocity and moral acknowledgment that are fully integrated into all aspects of social, cultural, and environmental activity. A cosmo-theistic view of the universe encompasses the entire landscape, including all the conceptual levels and elements of that ecological system.

Within religious ideologies, a basic frame of reference is sacred power. Traditional religions, as articulated and practiced, conceive of sacred power as a quality that pervades the universe and all the beings that inhabit the world. Sacred power is a force that gives life and movement to the universe and the “beings” inhabiting it. In their creation and placement on the landscape, all “beings” are endowed with a specific sacred power. All animals and animated natural objects possess sacred power. “Humans” also can possess it through ceremony, ritual, prayer, and sacrifice. These religious actions require interaction with the landscape because it is the source of those powers or “medicines.” Sacred power therefore requires a landscape that is intact, alive, and filled with animation. These qualities are as important today as they were in the past.

Each indigenous society embeds “portals” to the sacred within the unique context of its own worldviews—the symbolic and social processes that structure an interpretation about a particular society's identity. A society's worldview organizes the conceptualization and expression of time, space, causation, [Page 1180]and cultural being. For Native Americans, especially among those still practicing aspects of their indigenous religions, there exists a dynamic relationship between their society's worldview and their social construction as a people.

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