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

Document Type

Article

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.