Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, Twelve Cultures from the Arctic to the Andes

The Inuit of the Arctic, from Greenland across northern Canada to Alaska, are the northern anchor of the path. Their older religious world rests on rules of respect between hunters and the animals they take, watched over by the sea woman Sedna, with an angakkuq, a shaman, sent to put right what has been broken.

The Ojibwe of the Great Lakes country, part of the larger Anishinaabe family, honor the manidoog under the Great Spirit Gichi-Manidoo through tobacco offerings, dream fasting and the Midewiwin medicine society, whose birchbark scrolls served as memory records of songs and cosmology.

The Lakota are the western division of the Seven Council Fires on the northern plains. Their religious life is ordered by Wakan Tanka, the great mystery, and by seven rites brought by White Buffalo Calf Woman. Lakota organizations have formally objected to outsiders performing their ceremonies, which is why the atlas describes the tradition without reproducing it.

Pueblo is a family name rather than one people: the Hopi, Zuni, Acoma, Taos and the Tewa and Keres speaking communities share kiva based ceremonial societies and a calendar of dances while speaking unrelated languages. Each pueblo governs its own ceremonies, and many restrict or forbid outside attendance and recording.

The Hopi live on and below three mesas in northeastern Arizona, in villages among the oldest continuously inhabited in North America. Their year turns on a ceremonial calendar in which the katsinam are present in the villages for part of the year and return to the San Francisco Peaks for the rest, and the villages themselves have closed much of it to outsiders.

The Navajo, Dine in their own language, are the largest federally recognized Native nation in the United States, at home in the Four Corners country bounded by four sacred mountains. Their religion is ordered around hozho, harmony and right relation, restored through chantway ceremonials led by trained singers.

Apache is the common name for a group of Southern Athabaskan peoples, among them the Chiricahua, Mescalero, Jicarilla and Western Apache, each with its own government. Their traditions speak of Usen, the Giver of Life, and of Changing Woman, and the girls' puberty ceremony, the sunrise dance, is the best known public rite.

The Aztec, more properly the Mexica, built Tenochtitlan and led the Triple Alliance empire until the Spanish conquest of 1519 to 1521. Their religion centered on Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Tlaloc and Coatlicue and on the Five Suns, the successive world ages, recorded partly in colonial era Nahua scholarship such as the Florentine Codex.

The Maya are millions of living people speaking around thirty related Mayan languages, not a vanished civilization. They are descendants of the builders of Palenque and heirs to the Popol Vuh, the Tzolkin and Haab calendars and the Long Count, with a deciphered hieroglyphic script among the most complete of any pre-Columbian writing.

The K'iche' are the largest Maya group in the western highlands of Guatemala. The Popol Vuh, the fullest surviving Maya account of creation and the Hero Twins, was written down in K'iche' in the sixteenth century, and K'iche' daykeepers still count the 260 day calendar.

The Nazca of the southern Peruvian coast, about 100 BCE to 800 CE, left no writing, so their religion is read from what remains: geoglyphs best understood as ritual paths walked rather than viewed, many running toward water in a desert where water governs religious concern.

The Inca, the Quechua speaking people of Cusco, ruled the Andes from Ecuador to Chile through Tawantinsuyu until the Spanish invasion of the 1530s. Their state cult set the sun, Inti, at its head, served from the Coricancha in Cusco, above an older Andean worship of Viracocha, Pachamama and the huacas of each community.