Review of Amerindian Rebirth: Reincarnation Belief Among North American Indians and Inuit edited by Antonia Mills and Richard Slobodin

Authors

Jennifer S. H. Brown, University of Winnipeg

Date of this Version

October 1996

Comments

Published in Great Plains Research 6:2 (Fall 1996). Copyright © 1996 The Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Used by permission. http://www.unl.edu/plains/publications/GPR/gpr.shtml

Abstract

Amerindian Rebirth is both a major collection of essays and probably the best current reference work on Native North American beliefs about reincarnation. Of its sixteen articles, four are previously published; two of them (Slobodin's and Ian Stevenson's), however, include authors' afterthoughts updating their ideas on their research. A substantive foreword by Gananath Obeyesekere, moreover, provides perspectives on reincarnation from the study of Indic religions. The book includes an appendix offering a trait index to North American Indian and Inuit reincarnation sources, compiled in a twenty-one page chart. Since the essays themselves focus mainly on the arctic, western subarctic, and Pacific Northwest, the appendix is a valuable tool for amplifying comparative perspectives.