ABSTRACT
Indigenous peoples are often defined as the colonized, or formerly colonized, first inhabitants who are marginalized within a dominant culture. Definitions of 'indigenous religion' are often primitivist, implying that they refer to pristine, pre-colonial, self-contained and unchanging oral traditions based on kinship. Promoted in the 1970s by and Andrew Walls in Aberdeen, primal religions' were viewed as the basis of all other religions. The Indigenous Religious Traditions Group at the American Academy of Religion was established in 1992 following a series of workshops under the rubric primal spirituality, but the work that came out of them went by the name indigenous religious traditions. The invocation of the spirits of ancestors and place in contemporary Druidry could be accused of being merely rhetoric in order to claim an authority in matters to do with British heritage or the environment, although these do not appear to be the aims of members of Druid groups who responded to the questionnaires.
