2 CHAPTER XIV. 
RELIGION. 
The most surprising fact relating to the North American Indians, 
which until lately had not been realized, is that they habitually lived 
in and by religion to a degree comparable with the old Israelites under 
the theocracy. This was sometimes ignored, and sometimes denied in 
terms, by many of the early missionaries and explorers. The aborig- 
inal religion was not their religion, and therefore was not recognized 
to have an existence or was pronounced to be satanic. Many pictorial 
representations are given in this chapter of concepts of the supernat- 
ural, as operative in this world, which is popularly styled religion when 
it is not condemned as superstition. The pictographic examples pre- 
sented from the Siouan stock are generally explained as they appear. 
Those from the Ojibwa and other tribes are not so fully discussed. It 
is therefore proper to mention explicitly that, in the several localities 
where the tribes are now found which have been the least affected by 
civilization, they in a marked degree live a life of religious practices, 
and their shamans have a profound influence over their sociai char- 
acter. <A careful study of these people has already given indication of 
facts corresponding in interest with those which have recently surprised 
the world as reported by Mr. Cushing from among the Zuni and Dr. 
Matthews from among the Navajo. 
The most extensive and important publications on the subject have 
been made by Maj. J. W. Powell (a), Director of the Bureau of Ethnol- 
ogy. These have been made at many times and in various shapes, 
from the Outlines of the Philosophy of the North American Indians, 
read in 1876, to the present year. 
A considerable amount of detail respecting religion appears in Chap. 
IX, Sections 4 and 5, in the present work. 
The discussion of the religions and religious practices of the tribes 
of America is not germane to the present work, except so far as it eluci- 
dates their pictographs. In that connection it may be mentioned that 
the tribes of Indians in the territory of the United States, which have 
been converted to Christianity, seem not to have spontaneously turned 
their pictographic skill to the representation of objects connected with 
the religion to which they have been converted. This might be ex- 
plained by the statement, often true, that the converts have been taught 
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