ABSTRACT
The Tainos were a tribal community, a society organized with respect to family relationships. The Tainos were but one language group among hundreds in North America, and one small fraction of the continent's fifteen million inhabitants. North America at the time of Columbus was a quilt of tribes with a diversity of languages and religions and ways of life. The religious life of Native Americans is rich with symbol, with the experience of the sacred, and with visions of kinship with people, animals, the land, and all of nature. In ritual performances, persons listen to and repeat myth, shape it in new ways, adapt it, and confirm their belief in it. In ritual, a community identifies itself and rededicates itself to the tribal way of life. The Reformation of the sixteenth century, in all of its various manifestations, marked a decisive turn in the religious history of Europe and shaped the European migration to the New World of the Americas.
