# Indigenous Religious Traditions The umbrella entry for the world's many indigenous, traditional, and folk religious traditions — religions that emerged within specific communities, ancestral lands, and cultural lineages over prehistoric time, transmitted predominantly through oral tradition rather than codified scripture, and centered (in widely varying ways) on relationships with ancestors, particular places, animal and plant kin, spirit beings, and cosmologies that integrate human life with the broader natural and supernatural order. There is no single "indigenous religion" — the category covers African Traditional Religions, the many distinct religious traditions of Native American and Indigenous Canadian peoples, the religious traditions of Indigenous Australians, Pacific Islander religious traditions, the religious traditions of Indigenous Latin American peoples (often syncretized with Catholic Christianity), the indigenous traditions of the Sámi, the Ainu, Siberian shamanic traditions, and many more. Treating these as one umbrella entry is a reference-shelf compromise; each tradition merits independent treatment that this folder will not provide. Estimates of global adherents are highly contested — anywhere from ~100 million (counting only primary religious identification) to ~600 million (counting cultural participation alongside other religious identification). In US right-wing discourse, indigenous religious traditions appear primarily in colonial / "civilizational" framings, around questions of land use and religious-liberty law, and (less frequently) in syncretist tech-right and dissident-right invocations of "deep" pre-modern spiritualities. ## Founding and core beliefs The umbrella covers traditions of dramatically different shape, age, and structure. Common (though not universal) features: - **Animism** — the view that natural features (rivers, mountains, trees, animals) have spirits or are themselves alive and morally engaged with humans - **Ancestor veneration** — ongoing ritual relationships with deceased forebears - **Sacred geography** — particular places (often ancestral lands) carry religious significance and require specific ritual relationships - **Oral tradition** — sacred narratives, ceremonial words, songs, and teachings transmitted across generations through trained holders rather than through codified scripture - **Ritual specialists** — shamans, medicine people, priests, elders, ceremonial leaders trained through long apprenticeship - **Integration of religion with community life** — religious practice is not separable from family, governance, agriculture, hunting, healing, and other community life Specific traditions differ enormously in cosmology, ritual structure, gender roles, the place of altered consciousness, the boundary between "religious" and "secular," and the relationships with colonizing religious traditions. **Major regional traditions, in barest sketch:** - **African Traditional Religions** — the umbrella for hundreds of religious traditions across sub-Saharan Africa. Major examples include the Yoruba religion (with significant diasporic afterlife in Santería, Candomblé, Vodou — the Afro-Atlantic religions of the Americas), Akan religion, Igbo religion, Zulu religion, Maasai religion. ~100+ million adherents. - **Native American religious traditions** — distinct to each indigenous nation; major examples include the Navajo / Diné, Lakota, Hopi, Anishinaabe / Ojibwe, Pueblo, Tlingit, Iroquois / Haudenosaunee. ~5–10 million people of Native American descent in the US and Canada; religious participation varies. - **Indigenous Latin American traditions** — Maya, Quechua, Aymara, Mapuche, and many others; extensively syncretized with Catholic Christianity in many communities while maintaining distinct religious practice - **Indigenous Australian / Aboriginal traditions** — the Dreaming (*Tjukurpa* in Pitjantjatjara, with many local terms); ~60,000+ years of continuous tradition; profound integration of religion with land, kinship, and law - **Pacific Islander traditions** — Polynesian, Melanesian, and Micronesian religious traditions - **Sámi traditions** — indigenous to northern Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula - **Ainu traditions** — indigenous to Hokkaido and the Russian Far East - **Siberian shamanic traditions** — across the indigenous peoples of Siberia - **Indigenous European pre-Christian religions** — extinct as primary tradition for centuries, with substantial modern reconstruction movements (Heathenry, Druidry, Slavic Native Faith, Hellenism, etc.) that occupy a different category but are sometimes engaged in this umbrella ## Major divisions The umbrella is not meaningfully divisible into "branches" the way Christianity or Buddhism is. Each tradition has its own internal structure, lineages, and ritual specialists. ## Demographic footprint Estimates range from ~100 million to ~600 million globally depending on definitional criteria. The number is genuinely difficult to determine because: (a) many adherents practice indigenous traditions alongside a major world religion (Catholic + indigenous in Latin America; Christian + indigenous in much of sub-Saharan Africa); (b) census categories often do not distinguish indigenous traditions; (c) the boundary between "religious participation" and "cultural participation" is itself a Western category that maps awkwardly onto many indigenous traditions. The largest concentrations: sub-Saharan Africa (especially West and Southern Africa), Latin America (especially the Andean nations, Mesoamerica), Indigenous communities in North America (US, Canada, Greenland), Indigenous Australia, the Pacific Islands, and parts of Southeast Asia and Siberia. ## Right-wing politics tributaries Indigenous religious traditions appear in US right-wing political discourse through several distinct channels: **Land-use and religious-liberty conflicts.** Major political conflicts over access to sacred sites (Bear Ears, Mauna Kea, the Black Hills, Standing Rock), peyote use in the Native American Church (legally protected by the 1994 amendments to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act), funerary repatriation under NAGPRA, and Indigenous religious accommodation in federal and state contexts. US right-wing engagement with these conflicts varies: religious-liberty legal infrastructure has supported some Indigenous claims, while right-wing land-use politics has often opposed Indigenous land-protection claims. The dynamic is internally inconsistent in ways that surface tensions within the broader religious-liberty coalition. **As object of colonial / civilizational framing.** Some US right-wing intellectual traditions — particularly the older paleoconservative and "Western civilization" framings — treat indigenous religious traditions as primitive or pre-civilizational, contrasted with the "Judeo-Christian" or "Western" inheritance held to constitute civilization proper. The framing has shaped historical US policy toward Native American religious practice (the suppression of the Ghost Dance, Sun Dance, peyote ceremonies through much of the 19th and early 20th centuries) and continues to shape some contemporary right-wing engagement with Indigenous claims. **As object of dissident-right and neo-pagan engagement.** Conversely, segments of the dissident right and neo-pagan revival movements engage indigenous religious traditions (especially European pre-Christian traditions like Heathenry and Druidry) as resources for "deep" pre-modern identity and "blood and soil" framings. This engagement is heavily contested — most indigenous religious communities reject white-supremacist appropriation, but some reconstruction movements (notably in Heathenry / Asatru) include both inclusive and explicitly racialist factions. **Tech-right syncretism.** Plant-medicine spirituality, ayahuasca tourism, "shamanic" framings in Silicon Valley personal-development cultures, and the integration of indigenous-derived concepts (mostly without engagement with indigenous communities) into tech-right "civilizational" rhetoric. **Christian missionary politics.** US right-wing engagement with Christian missionary activity in indigenous communities — both historical and contemporary — engages indigenous religious traditions as objects of evangelization. The political-religious dynamics around historical residential schools, contemporary missionary law (the John Allen Chau / Sentinelese case), and indigenous religious-rights conflicts overlap with broader right-wing religious-political organizing. ## See also - [[Christianity]] — the religious tradition that has most extensively engaged indigenous traditions through missionary activity, syncretism, and colonial-religious politics - [[Religious Liberty]] — the legal frame that mediates many US conflicts involving indigenous religious practice - [[Theocracy]] — Foundations regime-type entry; some indigenous political-religious traditions integrated political authority and religious authority in ways that intersect this category