A Category Too Broad for Any Single Prayer

This entry exists specifically to explain why no single prayer text is offered under the broad heading of Native American religion: the term covers hundreds of distinct nations and peoples across North America, each with its own separate languages, cosmologies, ceremonial traditions and specific relationships to prayer, so that treating Native American religion as a single tradition with representative prayers would misrepresent the actual diversity involved as thoroughly as treating all of European religion as a single tradition would. This atlas includes separate, more specific entries for several individual Native American traditions, including Lakota religion, Dine or Navajo religion, and the Native American Church, precisely because meaningful discussion of prayer within these traditions requires attention to their genuinely distinct specifics rather than generalized treatment.

Even at that more specific level, many Native American ceremonial and prayer traditions are understood within their own communities as belonging to specific families, clans, medicine societies or ceremonial roles, with transmission governed by community protocols this atlas's more specific entries also address, rather than as generally published devotional material available to any outside reader.