Orenda and a Definition of Religion

J. N. B. Hewitt's Orenda and a Definition of Religion, published in American Anthropologist in 1902, is the paper that introduced the Haudenosaunee concept of orenda into English language comparative religion scholarship. Hewitt, who was of Tuscarora and European descent and worked for the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology, wrote from a genuinely informed position within Iroquoian language and culture, and the paper is the primary route by which orenda entered the wider study of religion. Its limit is the vocabulary of its own moment, the paper is itself an argument against applying the category religion to Iroquoian belief in the way scholars of that era used the word, a dated theoretical framing scholars now read critically. Cite it for its documented role introducing the concept and for Hewitt's own firsthand linguistic material, reading its theoretical argument as a period piece rather than current theory.