Renewing the World

"The religious and moral traditions of American Indians of the northwestern Plains during the second half of the nineteenth century represent an elaborate world view marked by ritual complexity and depth--one which envisioned the transcendent in ways that many European settlers found difficult if not impossible to comprehend. Howard Harrod's comparative study of Blackfoot, Crow, Cheyenne, and Arapaho ritual and religious experience offers insight into these symbolic universes. He views Native American religious experience not simply as responses to marginality and oppression but rather as alternative religious visions, and interprets them within the context of their historical development. Harrod's concern is to discover how these people apprehend the sacred and how these fundamental meanings shape their moral and religious experiences. Renewing the World interprets Plains Indian religion and morality in the light of the paradigm of kinship-- a fundamental image which qualifies these people's understanding of their relations to human and non-human life. This provocative study allows contemporary readers to envision the world as another people once saw it and provides the possibility for that world to speak with power and meaning to contemporary experience"--Book jacket.