Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1985
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 5, No. 3, Summer 1985, pp. 143-76.
Abstract
The earth is a fundamental religious symbol for American Indian peoples. Among horticultural and hunting tribes alike, Mother Earth is the female principle, the expression of fertility and creator of life, begetting vegetation, animals, and humans. In this elemental role she often appears conspicuously in religious rituals. For many American Indian peoples, specific geographical features on the earth also figured prominently in tribal conceptions of the sacral world. The Pawnee Indians, who formerly lived in east central Nebraska, provide an instructive example of a people who had an elaborate and unique set of beliefs about such landmarks and who incorporated these sites into their ritualism as important symbolic entities, constituting a map of the sacred on this earth. By examining these sacred sites, Pawnee beliefs about them, and their role in Pawnee ritual, and by viewing them within the broader context of other Plains Indian beliefs about revered geographical landmarks, it is possible to gain deeper understanding of the relationship between American Indian concepts of the sacred and the environment in which these peoples lived.
Among Plains Indian tribes, the Pawnees, and particularly one division, the Skiris, are recognized for a religious philosophy and ceremonial life that were at once highly developed and distinctive. They were unique' in their belief in a celestial cosmogony and human descent from stars, and they developed an elaborate ritualism, presided over by priests, that commemorated their heavenly origins and association. Their doctors, who healed the sick and manipulated shamanistic powers, were no less distinctive and acquired renown among other Plains tribes as well. Pawnee doctors impressed all spectators by their magical performances, apparently even skeptical whites, who found themselves unable to explain the startling feats they witnessed.1
Early recorders of this culture also noted a distinctive feature of Pawnee beliefs about the origin of shamanistic power: that there were certain underground or underwater geographical locations where animals of all species met and conferred supernatural powers on selected Pawnee individuals.2 In 1922 the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, in a classic paper entitled "The Vision in Plains Culture," drew attention to the Pawnee concept of the animal lodge when she discussed how the normal Plains pattern of a guardian spirit source of shamanistic power was little developed among the Pawnees, who had substituted for it the animal lodge, in which Pawnee doctors learned the mysteries of all the animals instead of acquiring power from an individual guardian.3
Comments
Copyright 1985 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln