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Our assumption is that nowadays these Native American peoples are likely to receive a sympathetic hearing. As little as two generations ago, that would not have been the case. Apart from a few anthropologists and ethnographers, most scholars would have considered native religious ways "primitive." Only with the advent of the more sophisticated understandings of myths, rituals, symbols, and social organizations that social scientists have developed since World War II has it become clear that Native Americans, like native Africans and Australians, have had a genius equal to that of native Europeans or Asians. Nowadays the majority of serious scholars are attentive to this genius, coming to the native peoples they study with an inclination to appreciate rather than dismiss.

The 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the new world has only reinforced this change of attitude. In reviewing the effects of European influence in the Americas, virtually all dispassionate observers have found much to blame in Europeans' treatments of natives. The cultures that European dominance altered or tried to replace were usually damaged seriously, if not destroyed outright. While some rabid Christians might argue that destruction was proper and good, because such cultures were the works of Satan, they are not the majority of commentators or the most representative. Inasmuch as theologians have developed a consensus that God works through native cultures, inspiring them with grace, the cultural imperialism that Europeans often visited on natives now strikes most Christian theologians as ill-advised, if not seriously sinful. Saying this does not imply that Christians should abrogate their conviction that explicit faith in Jesus the Christ is the greatest of cultural gifts. It does imply Christians' being considerably more humble about the offices of Christ's church than has been the norm throughout most of Christian history.

In most Native American cultures leadership in such matters of higher culture has fallen to tribal elders and shamans. The elderly have been assumed to have gained the experience necessary for wisdom. The entire tribe has needed such wisdom in order to live well to prosper in spirit, as well as body. Shamans have been ecstatic, people who knew how to move out of ordinary consciousness and encounter the spiritual forces really running the world. From such travel shamans typically have gained the ability to cure the sick, guide the dead to their place of rest, discern the sources of hard times, and help those troubled in spirit find their way back to peace.

There is no Native American group that has not traditionally been religious. Certainly, many groups long had no special word for religion. Certainly, the ordinary rule among native Americans has been that culture has been holistic, making no rigid separation between secular affairs and sacred. Nonetheless, traditionally sickness, education, hunting, gathering, procreating, celebrating harvests, mourning the dead, and all other significant aspects of culture have entailed interactions with the gods or spirits whom the people credited with the major say in their prosperity or suffering. One could not come of age without the help of such spirits, and one could not pass out of this mortal phase of existence without facing their primacy. All significant infusions of power, from the rage that warriors needed to fight well to the fertility that visited women each month, involved one in an economy of sacred forces. Inasmuch as such involvements are much of what we mean by "religion," we can say that traditional Native Americans were virtually to a person religious. . .

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