Indigenous and First Nation Spiritualities
Praying for the Water: Uniting Together in a Southern Watershed
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Victoria Machado
"Praying for the Water: Uniting together in a Southern Watershed" looks at present-day environmental beliefs and understandings surrounding one of Florida’s most valuable natural resources and the leaders involved with its protection. Drawing from interviews conducted with Florida environmental activists, this paper explores the religious and spiritual implications of water-based activism and what it means to unite for clean water. My research looks at water prayer ceremonies, such as the 2019 Lake Okeechobee "Healing Waters" Prayer Walk, led by indigenous leader Betty Osceola, in addition to regional interfaith organizing work driven largely by Unitarian Universalists. By focusing on water protection, I argue that when engaged on a larger statewide level, religion and spirituality can play an increasingly important role in Florida’s environmental efforts as they help bridge gaps by expanding this work beyond race, class, ethnic, and socioeconomic boundaries.
The Quest of Vision: Visual Culture, Sacred Space, Ritual, and The Documentation of Lived Experience Through Rock Imagery
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Aaron Atencio
This paper will breach an amalgam of subjects within the Eastern Shoshone culture that focuses on the interplay between religious experiences, dreams, altered states, visual culture, and environments. This study considers the Eastern Shoshone world view as a navigatory structure comprised of how actors perceive their environment--and how such perceptions and beliefs buttress themselves upon visual processes perfected through interactions within physical environments, entangling cosmological and phenomenological belief structures with material environments. Through such processes, a carbon footprint regarding experience, values, and belief becomes documented as visual culture, guiding and revivifying the Eastern Shoshone worldview and actions. I wish to explore these cultural specifics by putting forth a conversation that revolves around religion and neuroscience, while also providing a glimpse into the Eastern Shoshone's vision quest ritual. I trust that doing so will illuminate why the Eastern Shoshone worldview tethers itself to lived experience derived through vision, observation, ritual action, and phenomenological dynamics.
Loss of Indigenous Eden
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Blair Stonechild
Elder Ernest Tootoosis told the author that First Nations lived in the Garden of Eden and did not abuse the gifts of the Creator. This paper explores Indigenous Eden, the concept that humans lived in harmonious existence with creation since the advent of humanity 200,000 years ago. Elders teach that humans desired to experience physical life in order to learn. In return, they were to show gratitude for the gifts of creation and act as stewards by respecting all created beings. Indigenous peoples view all created beings as interrelated and as being their spiritual relatives. The beginning of civilization is defined as the human initiative to rise up against and conquer nature. This development amounted to a rejection of Indigenous values which were the Creator’s original instructions and resulted in exile from the Garden of Eden. As a byproduct of civilization, religion has abetted human dominance of nature. Non-Indigenous peoples became the majority of world population only in the 1820s, and the past two centuries have seen unprecedented exploitation of resources, struggles for military power, and destruction of the natural environment.
