Essay On Native American Religions

The Native American religions are highly connected to the land from which the tribe originates. They acknowledge some geographical sites as “sacred”. The term sacred sites qualifies places with religious significance for the tribes. Therefore, these sites will be used for ceremonies, or for collecting plants. These sites cannot be displaced somewhere else. Of course, the colonisation of the United states has led to the deprivation of most of their lands, and which have now become private or public property. Most of it has remained federal land and some of them have become national parks or monuments. As for any of the beliefs of Native American, the policies used by the US have had different consequences. While at some time, trying to protect

Therefore, sacred sites won't necessarily be considered as religious under the first amendment. The non-Indian concept of religion separates it from the land, and basis itself on a group of beliefs and behaviours different from the traditional and cultural practices of the natives, which weakened the court’s responsiveness to the religious and cultural impairment from which the tribe asked protection against. With the unspoken monotheistic vision of religion as a faith to which one adheres rather than an entire way of being, a lot of courts were less incline to notice the harm caused to the Native American religion by land modification. Therefore the major problems faced by the Indians is the ethnocentricity of the courts and notably their conception of religion and its practices. As we know, the Judeo-Christian concept of religion involve a worshiped god and may refer itself to one or two sacred sites maximum (e.g Jerusalem, the Vatican). For that reason, the conception of a specific place where ceremonies may occur, isn’t integrated in most of the judges belief. This leads to a specific vulnerability for Indians that the Western religions may not