Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions - Softcover

Brown, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199739005 ISBN 13: 9780199739004

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Teaching Spirits offers a thematic approach to Native American religious traditions. Within the great multiplicity of Native American cultures, Joseph Epes Brown has perceived certain common themes that resonate within many Native traditions. He demonstrates how themes within native traditions connect with each other, at the same time upholding the integrity of individual traditions. Brown illustrates each of these themes with in-depth explorations of specific native cultures including Lakota, Navajo, Apache, Koyukon, and Ojibwe. Brown demonstrates how Native American values provide an alternative metaphysics that stand opposed to modern materialism. He shows how these spiritual values provide material for a serious rethinking of modern attitudes - especially toward the environment - as well as how they may help non-native peoples develop a more sensitive response to native concerns. Throughout, he draws on his extensive personal experience with Black Elk, who came to symbolize for many the greatness of the imperiled native cultures.

About this title

About the Author

Former Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Montana

Review

"A wonderful, clear synthesis-perhaps the best we have-of American Indian spiritual traditions, so precious and so illuminating, because they are not separate from land and life."--Peter Matthiessen, author of Tigers in the Snow

In this medicine bag of empathetic and insightful essay-lectures, the legacy of a preeminent scholar of American Indian religious traditions is opened for new generations of teachers and students. The late Joseph Brown was a legendary mentor, whose gentility and grace in person and on the page lent dignity and depth to the indigenous ways of knowledge and ceremony he passed on to others. Here we have Brown's thoughts on themes that preoccupied his scholarly and lecturing life: Indian concepts of time and space, language and song, animals and hunting and nature, and varieties of ritual practice. But Brown is always probing beneath these topics to a deeper, almost wordless realm, where he provokes us to ask how these American Indian ways of knowledge might, in turn, teach us to become more fully human. A long-awaited, marvelous inheritance. --Peter Nabokov, Department of World Arts and Cultures, UCLA

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0199739005
• ISBN 13: 9780199739004
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 168