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Section 10 of 14
Indigenous & Folk Traditions
Shamanism, Aboriginal belief, African diasporic religion, heathenry and village practice.
This section covers traditions belonging to peoples who are, in most cases, still here — and who
have in most cases had those traditions criminalised, suppressed, misrepresented and sold.
That fact governs how it is written, and the constraints are worth stating before anything else.
Nothing here is instruction. No ceremonies are described in operative detail, no songs are
reproduced, no restricted material appears. Where a tradition distinguishes public knowledge from
knowledge held by particular people — by initiation, by gender, by age, by country — this site
stays on the public side of that line. Not out of squeamishness: because the distinction is the
tradition's to make and not ours to ignore.
The categories are ours, not theirs. "Shamanism" is a word from one Siberian language applied
by Europeans to hundreds of unrelated practices. "Indigenous religion" groups peoples with nothing
in common except having been colonised. "Folk tradition" implies a residue of something more
serious. These articles use the terms because readers need a way in, and say what is wrong with
them.
There is no single tradition in any of these articles. There are hundreds of Aboriginal
Australian nations, several hundred federally recognised tribes in the United States alone, and
Amazonian peoples whose practices differ from their neighbours'. Every generalisation here is a
convenience that someone would rightly object to.
Suppression is part of the description. Ceremonies were banned by law within living memory —
in the United States until 1978, in Canada until 1951, in the Soviet Union with executions. What
survives has survived that, and the reconstruction and revival visible today has to be understood
against it rather than judged for not being pristine.
And the sources should be theirs. Where possible these articles point to material authored or
approved by people within the traditions, and to the institutions those communities have built.
Where the best available scholarship is by outsiders, that is noted.