Climbing the World Tree: Native American Spirituality and the Natural World
In the autobiography of John Fire Lame Deer, holy man of the Lakota Sioux, he says, "A good way to start thinking about nature, talk about it. Rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives" (108). To the European mind, his advice might seem a little strange and hard to follow, for the word ?nature' often refers to that which is separate from what constitutes man and civilization. But to Lame Deer and his people, as well as the majority of the indigenous societies of North America, ?nature' included not only humankind but all of creation; the natural world is the sacred whole which everything that exists is born from. Historically, there were nine basic culture areas of indigenous North Americans, mostly separated by region, as would follow from climate and adaptation. These were all very different from each other, but they shared the same belief that the incarnations of nature were inherently divine, that the forces responsible for the creation of all life were present throughout the whole (Berman 20). This sacredness of the natural world manifests itself in each of Ninian Smart's eight characteristics of religion, evidence of its status as a core foundation of Native American spirituality.
One of the most common core beliefs of many of the native peoples of North America includes the three levels of the cosmos¾the middle plane consisting of the spiritual realm and its material manifestation as the world of living beings, the upper plane as home to deities and spirits, and the lower plane of darkness and evil spirits. (Glazier 437) In Black Elk Speaks, narrator Black Elk makes reference to ...