Publication: Great Plains Quarterly
Author: Waldo Wedel & Douglas Parks
Date of Publication: Summer 1985
PDF File: Wedel-and-Parks-Pawnee-Geography-Historical-And-Sacred.pdf
URL: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1853
Description
The earth is a fundamental religious symbol for American Indian peoples. Among horticultural and hunting tribes alike, Mother Earth is the female principle, the expression of fertility and creator of life, begetting vegetation, animals, and humans. In this elemental role she often appears conspicuously in religious rituals. For many American Indian peoples, specific geographical features on the earth also figured prominently in tribal conceptions of the sacral world. The Pawnee Indians, who formerly lived in east central Nebraska, provide an instructive example of a people who had an elaborate and unique set of beliefs about such landmarks and who incorporated these sites into their ritualism as important symbolic entities, constituting a map of the sacred on this earth. By examining these sacred sites, Pawnee beliefs about them, and their role in Pawnee ritual, and by viewing them within the broader context of other Plains Indian beliefs about revered geographical landmarks, it is possible to gain deeper understanding of the relationship between American Indian concepts of the sacred and the environment in which these peoples lived.