ABSTRACT
Today, most Native Americans are Christians and hold corresponding afterlife beliefs. Prior to the spread of Christianity, belief in animism was especially widespread in native North America. The syncretism between Catholic saints and the hundreds of kachina spirits was aided by the fact that kachinas are not worshiped as deities, but are viewed as inter-cessors, functionally analogous to the saints they are commingled with. No North American indigenous culture area is more iconic and generally recognizable than the equestrian Great Plains, and yet the aboriginal afterlife beliefs there are generally difficult to categorize or summarize because of the derived and synthetic character of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century multiethnic confederacies which are the basis for the regional culture pattern. The literature on afterlife beliefs in the Eastern Woodlands is sparse. At the beachhead for transatlantic colonization beginning in the early Modern period, many native groups were displaced, assimilated, or otherwise decimated long before their afterlife beliefs were rigorously documented.
