Library: Native American Studies by Credo Reference: Religions and Languages

Religions and Ceremonies

Holidays Observed By Indigenous American People
From Religious Holidays and Calendars
Although many groups of American Indians honor different holidays and follow different seasonal cycles, the holidays listed are combined in one chronological list so that common themes may be more easily identified.
Ghost Dance: Topic Page
American Indian religious revivalist movement that spread through the Plains Indians and other ethnic groups in the 1890s.
Mythology: Topic Page
Studies of the myths of North and South American natives, Australian aborigines, the peoples of S Africa, and others have revealed how widespread are many mythological elements and motifs.
Peyotism
From The New Encyclopedia of the American West
Peyotism has since the late nineteenth century become the foundation of a religion that is playing a large role in the modern resurgence of Indian cultural awareness. The peyote religion is a blend of Christian and native spiritual precepts.
Potlatch: Topic Page
Ceremonial feast of the natives of the NW coast of North America, entailing the public distribution of property.

Overview of Native American Languages
From The Columbia Encyclopedia
The classification "Native American languages" is geographical rather than linguistic, since those languages do not belong to a single linguistic family, or stock, as the Indo-European or Afroasiatic languages do.
Algonquian Languages
From Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Houghton Mifflin
The Algonquian linguistic family encompasses those languages spoken aboriginally and currently in regions stretching from the plains to the eastern seaboard, as far south as present-day North Carolina and as far north as the Canadian Subarctic.
Athabaskan: Topic Page
Language, one of the largest families of American Indian languages.
Yuman: Topic Page
Member of an American Indian people living in the lower Colorado River valley by the mid-16th century. They gave their name to the Yuman branch of the Hokan linguistic family, a group of American Indian languages of California and western Mexico also spoken by the Maricopa and Mojave.