The passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of
1978 and the impending passage of the Native American Free
Exercise of Religion Act have made the American People
increasingly aware of the importance of sacred geography in
Native American religions.1 This paper assumes safeguarding
Native American religious practice is that which makes
protection of sacred sites necessary under the First Amendment
of the Constitution and related laws and not necessarily their
archaeological or historical nature. In my earlier paper
(Walker 1991), I have employed the concept of "portals to the
sacred" in an attempt to convey a sense of the ritual
functions of sacred sites in Native North America. Such
"portals" should not be viewed as limited in size or scale.
Some may be miles in their geographical extent while others
are quite limited in size or scale. Likewise, use of the
portals concept must include the understanding that they are
not only positioned in geography but also positioned in time,
such that they become sacred "time/spaces."
Although the concept of the "sacred" is employed widely in
recent discussions of geography, no satisfactory definition of
this fundamental idea has been offered. Until agreement is
reached on a definition of the sacred, effective enforcement
of the foregoing laws will be difficult. Likewise, enforcement
will also be difficult until agreement is reached on the broad
range of different types of sacred geography. This paper
offers a definition of the sacred and a taxonomy of sacred
geography as contribution toward resolution of these problems.
Basic ethnographic research concerning Native American
concepts of sacred geography is sparse. The recent collection
of papers edited by Christopher Vecsey (1991), stemmed from
this absence of research but must be regarded as only a
beginning. Research on this topic is about Asia, Europe, the
Middle East, and Meso-America, e.g., Townsend (1982) and Vogt
(1965, 1969), but with few exception, e.g., Harrington's 1908
The Ethnogeography of the Tewa Indians (Harrington 1908), is a
subject largely undeveloped for most regions in North American
North of Mexico.
In addition to being vital to ritual practice, sacred
geography in Northwestern North American is a source of
religious meaning group identity and group cohesion. Sacred
sites in Northwestern North America are invested through
ritual with complex layers of religious meaning. Tribal
religions in Native America differ from most other world
religions in their conceptions of sacred geography. In the
following, I shall attempt to account for their distinctive
features, focusing especially on the concept of the sacred and
on a tentative taxonomy of types of sacred geography typically
encountered in Native American religions of Northwestern North
America. Field data for this study is drawn from ethnographic
research among Salishan, Shaptian, Ute-Aztecan,, Western
Algonkian, and Lakota groups.
II. Sacred Geography in Northwestern North America: General
Features
Traditional Native American spiritual leaders generally
assert that the timing and geographical location of rituals
are vital to their efficacy. They affirm that unless such
rituals are performed at proper times and in proper locations,
they will have little or no efficacy. It is the rule rather
than the exception that Native American ritual life is
inextricably linked with access to and ritual use of sacred
geography. Although there are significant differences among
Native American religions, they are generally similar in some
respects. For example, they tend to have the following
characteristics in common:
1. A body of mythic accounts explaining cultural origins
and cultural history. These describe a prehuman or
precultural time dominated by animals, heroes, tricksters,
and other mythical figures.
2. A special sense of the sacred that is centered in
natural time and natural geography.
3. A set of critical and calendrical rituals that have
social form and expression to religious belief and permit
the groups and their members to experience the events of
their mythology in various ritual settings.
4. A group of individuals normally described as shamans or
priests who teach and lead the group in the conduct of their
ritual life.
5. A set of ethical guidelines establishing appropriate
behavior associated with ritual and extensions or ritual
into ordinary life.
6. Reliance on dreams and visions as the primary means of
communicating directly with spirits and the sacred. These
and oral tradition are the primary sources of sacred
knowledge.
7. For individuals, the major goal of ritual is gaining
the spiritual power and understanding necessary for a
successful life by engaging the sacred at certain special
times and in certain special places.
8. For groups, a belief that harmony must be maintained
with the sacred through satisfactory performance of rituals
and adherence to sacred prescription and proscriptions.
9. For groups, a belief that while all aspects of nature
and culture are potentially sacred, there are specific times
and places that possess great sacredness which I term
"portals to the sacred" in this paper and elsewhere.
10. In their religious life, Northwestern American groups
are not very hierarchically organized; nor do they favor the
tightly constructed hierarchical mythologies or philosophies
developed by priestly elites of with the Old or New World
agricultural societies; calendrical reckoning of ritual life
is somewhat less important among hunting groups of North
America.
11. The sacred sites of Northwestern North America are
more numerous, more diverse, and less geometrically
patterned than is seen among religion of Meso-America and
the Old World.
12. Mountains and other points of geographical sacredness
are not so often at the center of religious life in
Northwestern North Americas in the Old World or in
Meso-America. Nor are mountains identified as frequently
with the state, with society, or with the group as in
Meso-America and the Old World.
13. Generally, hunting groups in Northwestern North
America seek the intrinsic or embedded sacredness of nature
and do not often force their notions of sacredness onto the
land in the manner of the pyramid builders and earth
sculptors we see in both the Old World and Meso-America.
14. Ritualists in Northwestern North America are generally
shamanic, unlike the priestly figures encountered in the
more complex religious systems of Meso-America and the Old
World.
15. Sacred sites are numerous and include the following
types (see Walker 1991):
a) Shrines, vision quest sites, altars, and sweat bath
sites that serve as ritual settings.
b) Monumental geographical features that have mythic
significance in a group's origins or history. Included are
mountains, waterfalls, and unusual geographical formations
such as Pilot Knob, Kootenai Falls, Celilo Falls, and
Mount Adams.
c) Rock art sites such as pictograph and petroglyph
panels.
d) Burial sites and cemeteries.
e) Areas where plants, stones, earth, animals, and other
sacred objects are gathered for ritual purposes or where
sacred vegetation such as medicine trees serve as objects
or center of ritual.
f) Sites of major historical events such as battlefields
where group members died.
g) Sites where groups are thought to have originated,
emerged, or been created.
h) Pilgrimage or mythic pathways where groups or
individuals retrace the journeys and reenact events
described in myths and in the lives of mythic and other
figures.
i) Lakes, rivers, springs, and water associated with
life and the vital forces that sustain it.
j) Areas or sites associated with prophets and teachers
such as Smohalla, Handsome Lake, Sweet Medicine, and
others.
Ethnographic investigation of several hundred sacred sites
suggest strongly that they are an essential feature of Native
American ritual practice. Without access to them, practice
would be infringed or prevented altogether in certain cases.
Like wise all known groups possess a body of beliefs
concerning appropriate times and rituals that must be
performed at such sites. The more important a sacred site is
in the ritual like of a group, the more numerous symbolic
representations it will have in art, music, and myth. It has
also become clear in this review that sacred sites also have
very diverse functions in that they serve to objectify key
cultural symbols, illustrate dominant religious metaphors, and
sustain patterns of social, economic, and political
organization. Sacred sites can also serve as indicators of
cultural unity as seen among the various medicine wheels
described by the Arapaho and their neighbors of the
neighboring Northern and Central High Plains. In general
sacred sites lend concreteness to the less visible systems of
linkages within and among different cultural groups. Sacred
symbol systems, when superimposed on geography, give to
geography a significance and intelligibility similar to
relatives such as father, mother, or simply kinsmen. Through
ritual, sacred sites function to create a conceptual and
emotional parallelism between the objective order of the
universe, the realm of the spirits, and the intellectual
constructs of Native American cultures. They are portals
between the world of humans and the world of spirits through
which sacred power can be attained and spirits contacted. Such
sites give order to both geographic and social space, and by
thus ordering natural space and time they give order to all
that exists (Walker 1991).
This review of sacred sites suggests that the conjunction of
geographical, social, seasonal, and other transitions enhance
opportunities to access the sacred. In observing these
conjunctions of multiple transitions, I have been struck by
the parallelism of these ideas with those of Arnold Van Gennep
concerning rites of passage (1960) and others who have
demonstrated that the rites of passage in the human life cycle
are ritually celebrated as times of great sacredness in the
life of the individual. From this perspective, the sacred may
be more easily experienced as individuals go through life
cycle transitions, especially when such transitions are
conjoined with other transitions such as "first game" or
"first fruits" rituals that may coincide with additional
transitions such as equinoxes and solstices. Similar
transitions in the lunar cycle in which the first quarter,
second quarter, third quarter, and full moon are seen as
paralleling the human life cycle in birth, adolescence,
marriage, and death are further transitions in nature that my
coincide with transition in the lives of individuals and
communities. It is a conclusion of this study that
Northwestern North American the conjunction of multiple
transition provides heightened opportunities for accessing the
sacred, especially at points of geographical and environmental
transition such as mountain tops, waterfalls, cliffs, and
other breaks in the landscape.
III. Definitions of the Sacred
Without an alternative definition and understanding of the
sacred, we might be forced to rely on such conventional
definitions in our study of Native American sacred geography
as that advanced by Durkheim. In his Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life, Durkheim defines the sacred as follows: "A
religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative
to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and
forbidden-beliefs and practices which unite into one single
moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them"
(Durkheim 1947:47) Fundamental to this definition is the
distinction Durkheim draws between the sacred and the profane:
"The opposition of these two classes {the sacred and the
profane} manifests itself outwardly with a visible sign by
which we can easily recognize this very special
classification, wherever it exists. Since the idea of the
sacred is always and everywhere separated from the idea of the
profane in the thought of men, and since we picture a sort of
logical chasm between the two, the mind irresistibly refuses
to allow the two corresponding things to be a promiscuity, or
even to direct a contiguity, would contradict too violently
the dissociation of these ideas in the mind. The sacred thing
is par excellence that which the profane should not tough, and
cannot touch with impunity. To be sure, this interdiction
cannot go so far as to make all communication between the two
worlds impossible; for if the profane could in no way enter
into relations with the sacred, this latter could be good for
nothing. But, in addition to the fact that this establishment
of relations is always a delicate operation in itself,
demanding great precautions and a more or less complicated
initiation, it is quite impossible, unless the profane is to
lose its specific characteristics and become sacred after a
fashion and to a certain degree itself. The two classes cannot
even approach each other and keep their own nature at the same
time". (Durkheim 1947:40)
This classic distinction does not fit Native American
conceptions of the sacred in Northwestern North American,
because the sacred is not viewed as a domain set aside,
distinct, and forbidden as Durkheim suggests. Instead, the
sacred is an embedded, intrinsic attribute lying behind the
external, empirical aspect of all things, but not a domain set
aside or forbidden. The situation is both more complex and
more subtle. Fox example, among the Lakota this embedded,
intrinsic attribute is wakan: among the Algonkians it is
manitou; among Ute-Aztecans it is puha; among the Sahptians it
is weyekin; and among the Salishans sumesh. In this large
region, accessing the sacred is a primary goal of ritual and
entails actually entering into sacredness rather than merely
propitiating it. Whereas certain cultures tend to create their
own sacred space and sacred time somewhat arbitrarily by
special rituals of sacralization, Native Americans of
Northwestern North America more often attempt through ritual,
visions, and dreams to discover embedded sacredness in nature
and to locate geographical points that permit direct access to
it in order to experience it on a personal level. Unlike
Durkheim, Eliade's view of hierophanies is somewhat more
compatible with Native American views of sacred geography.
Citing Eliade, Carrasco says,
"In Elaide's view, all religion are based on hierophanies or
dramatic encounters which human beings have with what they
consider to be supernatural forces manifesting themselves in
natural objects. These supernatural forces manifesting
themselves in natural objects. These manifestations transform
those objects into power spots, power objects, wonderful
trees, terrifying bends in the river, sacred animals. The
stones, tree, animals, or humans through which a hierophany
takes place are considered valuable, full of mana, things to
be respected and revered. Human beings who feel these
transformation in their landscape believe that a power from
another plane of reality has interrupted in their lives.
Usually, they respond with a combinations of great attractions
and great fear. Their lives are deeply changed as a result of
this encounter with numinous places ( Carrasco 1979:203).
IV. Conclusion
From this view, therefore, sacred sites and sacred geography
among cultures of Northwestern North American functions as
fundamental ingredients of ritual. Points of geographical
transition are joined with multiple transition in the seasons,
the sun, the moon, the life cycle of the individual, and the
rhythm of community life to form conjunctions of multiple
transitions that become especially powerful access points to
the sacred or hierophanies. This view of sacredness and sacred
geography stresses the embeddedness of the sacred in all
phenomena, distinguishes between the general sacredness of all
things and the specific sacredness of access points or portals
to the sacred, notes the importance of conjunctions of
multiple transition in the individual life cycle, in nature,
in community, and in tribal life, and how such multiple
transitions help establish the times of greatest sacredness
and ritual efficancy of sacred sites. It rejects the
Durkheimian view that the sacred is a domain set aside or
forbidden,, and adopts the view of Eliade (1964, 1968, 1972)
that the sacred can be accessed and experienced directly
through ritual practice at appropriate times and geographical
locations. It is clear that Eliade's paradigm is the one to be
employed in future research on this topic and that a proper
understanding of this topic must be from the point of view of
religious practice. Likewise, the American Indian Religious
Freedom Act, the Native American Freedom of Religion Act, and
related legislation are designed to protect First Amendment
guarantees of practice rather than associated archaeological
or ethnographic values.
Bibliography:
Carrasco, David
1979 "A Perspective for a Study of Religious Dimension in
Chicano Experience: Bless Me, Ultima as a Religious Text."
Paper presented to the Chicano Studies Colloquium at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, April 12, 1979
Durkheim, Emile
1947 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Glencoe,
Ill., The Free Press.
Eliade, Mircea
1964 Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. New York,
Bollingen Foundation.
1969 The Quest. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
1972 Patterns in Comparative Religion. New York, Meridian
Books.
Harrington, John Peabody
1908 "The Ethnogeography of the Tewa Indian>"
Twenty-ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnology, 1907-1908. Washington, DC., US. Government
Printing Office.
Townsend, Richard F.
1982 "Pyramid and Sacred Mountain." in Ethnoastronomy and
Archaeoastronomy in the American Tropics, edited by Anthony
F. Aveni and Gary Urton. New York, New York, Academy of
Sciences.
VanGennep, Arnold,
1960 The Rites of Passage, London, Routledge and Kega Paul.
Vogt, Evon Z.
1965 "Structural and Conceptual Replication in Zinacantan
Culture," American Anthropologist, LXVII:342-353.
1969 Zinacantan: A Maya Community in the Highlands of
Chiapas. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press
Walker, Deward E., Jr.
1991 "Protection of American Indian Sacred Geography." In
Handbook of American Indian Religious Freedom. Edited by
Christopher Vecsey. New York, The Crossroads Publishing Co.
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