ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the religions of Native Americans who lived on the Northern Plains of North America. It was these peoples who became the ‘true Indians’ in the modern American and European imagination. It is suggested that indigenous traditions and rituals shaped the responses of Native American peoples to changes introduced by contact with Europeans, and that these responses cannot therefore be fully understood without taking religion into account. In this context ‘modernity’ refers to the processes of colonialization and conquest that took place in both North and South America, and associated social, political and cultural changes. The complex responses of Native American people to modernity are understood to begin with the voyages of Christopher Columbus (1492-1504) and to continue into the present. It will be shown that contemporary responses of native people to the continuing pressures of the majority society in North America are also deeply implicated with religious beliefs and practices. Sometimes these are associated with older indigenous traditions; sometimes they represent a synthesis of elements from Christian, modern Western, and native traditions.
