Native American spirituality

This paper focuses on the use of censored data in survival analysis. Survival analysis is used most frequently in the case of cancer patients when the study is fi nished and a number of individuals are still alive. The original article cited 2 was declared recently to be the most cited statistical study in the biomedical area. The goal of this paper is to explain the basic principles and methods involved. The way survival analysis processes data and interprets outputs is presented using the clinical data of oncological patients. Methods and Results: Survival analysis is used to estimate survivor function from survival data, to compare survivor functions and to assess the relationship of explanatory variables to survival time. These methods were applied to the data of 176 patients with heamato-oncological diagnoses who had undergone bone marrow blood transplant. Conclusion: It is very important to use appropriate methods when processing statistical data. Standard statistical procedures used for incomplete data could not provide the correct estimation.

This 2003 article presents an overview of the rock art of Illinois and interprets it within the context of Native American religion and spirituality. Please check out the Eastern States Rock Art Research Association web page at ESRARA.org for additional information on eastern North America rock art.

"Native Americans and Canadians are largely romanticised or sidelined figures in modern society. Their spirituality has been appropriated on a relatively large scale by Europeans and non-Native Americans, with little concern for the diversity of Native American opinions. Suzanne Owen offers an insight into appropriation that will bring a new understanding and perspective to these debates.

"This important volume collects together these key debates from the last 25 years and sets them in context, analyses Native American objections to appropriations of their spirituality and examines ‘New Age’ practices based on Native American spirituality.

"The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality includes the findings of fieldwork among the Mi’Kmaq of Newfoundland on the sharing of ceremonies between Native Americans and First Nations, which highlights an aspect of the debate that has been under-researched in both anthropology and religious studies: that Native American discourses about the breaking of ‘protocols’, rules on the participation and performance of ceremonies, is at the heart of objections to the appropriation of Native American spirituality."

The file contains chapter one, the introduction.

My intent is to explore the significance of the ancient spiritual connection of the Coast Salish people to the peninsula of Point Roberts, Washington, utilizing such tools as Salish creation myths, legends, place-names and artifacts, along with Vibration Photography© energy scans and interpretations.

This dissertation, accepted in January of 1993, develops a constructive critique of the Church through a Jungian analysis of Euro-American women raised in Christian denominations but seeking religious meaning through Native American spirituality—specifically by creating medicine shields.

Chapter 2 identifies trends contributing to contemporary interest in Native American spirituality and examine Native American shields from their earliest appearance in anthropological accounts to the present.

Chapter 3 describes shield-making workshops where interviews were obtained. Interview responses are analyzed. Reasons given for leaving the Church are: Christianity’s devaluation of women/ the feminine, physical embodiedness, and the sacredness of creation; the emptiness of Christian symbols; respondents’ desire for participatory experience; hierarchical/ institutional/ patriarchal Church structure; and desire for a religious community that does not define the limits of women’s spiritual experience. The man Jesus is seen as Christianity’s one positive element.

Chapter 4 presents a broad overview of Jungian psychology and examines Marion Woodman’s revisions. A Jungian analysis of shield-making suggests that shields function as mandalas, symbols of psychic wholeness, and reflections of women’s experience of feminine beingness and their journeys toward individuation.

Chapter 5 examines women critiquing the Church from within and incorporating Native American elements in feminist formulations. Rosemary Radford Ruether speaks for feminist theologians. Meinrad Craighead demonstrates an artist’s search for spiritual symbols.

Chapter 6 weaves women’s voices, Native American spirituality, and Jungian psychology into a constructive critique of the Church. Women pursuing Native American spirituality appear to focus on experience of the feminine Being of God/ess and affirmation of themselves as embodied women. The Church does not offer women access to either experience. A Jungian interpretation of Jesus Christ as animus and his participation in the sacred marriage crowning the individuation process offers a model for women’s reconciliation with Christian symbology. The Native American medicine wheel embodies a model of wholeness as it encloses the cross in the fullness of creation.

Chapter 7 concludes that Christological reformulations will not suffice if the Church cannot transform the patriarchal bias at its core and affirm the feminine in its spiritual and embodied reality. Earth-based spiritual traditions may offer necessary correctives.

Appendices follow the text, including interview questions and responses, and illustrations of some of the shields discussed.

Charles Upton (b. 1948), poet, author, activist, and veteran of the counter-culture has voyaged and experienced firsthand the many facets of the New Age cul-de-sac, including its pitfalls which are all too often ignored. Since the 1960s, psychedelics 2 or hallucinogens, now termed entheogens, 3 have played a pivotal role in the modern and postmodern seeker's quest to circumvent the trappings of the empirical ego and attain self-realization. After a hiatus of nearly thirty years, psychedelic research has now made a revival, which should provoke much inquiry as to what underlies this phenomenon. It is interesting to note that the New Age Movement, the Human Potential Movement, Humanistic Psychology, and Transpersonal Psychology all emerged in a common setting; they do not only share many similarities but have also assisted in each other's development. For example, the English writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) could be said to be a single figure connecting all of the above movements via his popularizing of the perennial philosophy and his writings on psychedelics, both of which are acknowledged by the above movements and or disciplines. Huxley not only helped shape each of the above but provided an integrative theory in which they could take root. That said, while he popularized the perennial philosophy he is not considered to be a traditionalist or perennialist. Where Charles Upton parts ways with his New Age and counter-culture comrades is that since his introduction to the works of the traditionalist or perennialist school-most significantly René Guénon (1886-1951), Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998), and Ananda Coomaraswamy (1887-1947)-he has affiliated himself with this orientation. Upton has written numerous books and articles on traditional metaphysics and the perennial philosophy, the most noteworthy of which are The System of Antichrist: Truth and Falsehood in Postmodernism and the New Age (2001), including its sequel, Vectors of the Counter-Initiation: The Shape and Destiny of Inverted Spirituality (2012). Although he has abandoned the practices of his early search in the New Age and counter-culture movements, he acquired an abundant knowledge and understanding of these pseudo-spiritualities and is in a position to inform and also caution contemporary seekers. The following interview offers a unique look at psychedelics in the light of the perennial philosophy by way of perennialist theory and also personal accounts of the author. 1 Editor's Note: This interview was conducted electronically with Charles Upton between March and May of 2011. The footnotes were compiled by the editor. 2 British psychiatrist Humphry Fortescue Osmond (1917-2004) coined the term "psychedelic" or "mind-manifesting" via his correspondence with Aldous Huxley. In responding to a letter that Dr. Osmond received from Huxley written on 30 March, 1956 he wrote in poetic reflection: "To fathom Hell or soar angelic, / Just take a pinch of psychedelic," thus giving birth to the term "psychedelic"; yet it was not known to the public at large or the scientific community until 1957 (Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer (eds.), Moksha: Aldous Huxley's Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience [Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1999], p. 107). It is also relevant to point out that it was Dr. Osmond who in May of 1953 first introduced Huxley to a synthesized form of mescaline, the psychoactive compound in peyote (among other psychedelic cacti) that in turn produced his work The Doors of Perception in 1954, which according to some launched the psychedelic revolution. 3 "'Entheogen' means simply 'God generated within you!'" (Robert Forte, "A Conversation with R. Gordon Wasson," in Entheogens and the Future of Religion, ed. Robert Forte [San Francisco, CA: Council on Spiritual Practices, 1997], p. 69).

While the contemporary world has been heralded as being “post-racial”, we can look all-around to see evidence that this assertion is not only flawed but false. Religion is generally blamed as the key culprit for the escalating conflicts igniting the world over which threatens peace. Yet, rarely is secularism and the void created in its midst carefully analyzed in this context. The historical roots of this problem are more remote than postmodernism and modernism. However, secularism has fractured the way that human identity has been understood throughout time which eclipses the integral relationship between human diversity and religious pluralism.

The April 21, 1971 New York Times article by George Gent covering the opening of the Grolier Club exhibition, "Ancient Mayan Calligraphy" with interview quotes by Yale anthropologist Michael D. Coe. The article focuses on the significant importance of the Grolier Codex and features the first published photographs of four of the Codex pages by a NYT photographer.

This article has been posted on Academia.edu as part of the Grolier Codex Project of the Center for Archaeoastronomy under the directorship of John B. Carlson, Ph.D.  The Grolier Codex Project seeks to further advance the study of the Grolier Codex.

This paper explores the nature of the supernatural in a Native American context, using explicit examples to illustrate the development of various abilities. In the Native context these abilities are seen as integral to specific training and developmental engagement with sacred powers. Published in Jeffrey J. Kripal, ed. Religion: Super Religion. Part of the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Religion series. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2017: 169-183.

Plains Indians deserves a more honored and more fully understood place among the world's great religious traditions; second, Black Elk's account of his early life, his Great Vision, and the principal rituals of the Lakota comprise an eloquent expression of the heritage and one of the most radiant spiritual testimonies of our time; third, the Lakota visionary and his tradition offer the contemporary world profound lessons of the most urgent importance.

We describe the lightning whelk (Busycon sinistrum) and show how its shells were used among coastal peoples along the Gulf of Mexico and lower Atlantic coast. During the Middle and Late Archaic periods, lightning whelk shells were transported hundreds of km from the coasts to the Midsouth where they were made into a variety of artifacts that were interred in graves. We explore the symbolic significance of sinistral (''left-handed") snails in post-Archaic times, focusing on the lightning whelk as a metaphor of spiral/circle, fire/sun, and purification/continuity among Native Americans of the eastern United States. This particular marine mollusk shell had special spiritual significance-and hence economic and political value-for several millennia, particularly in the southeastern United States, but its ritual importance as cultural icon resonates with cultures around the globe. The importance of the sinistral whelk as both medium and message has been inadequately appreciated by American archaeologists.

As I write this about 20 veterans commit suicide each day. Could this be because we do not have a proper "step down" process in going from soldier to citizen?  I prove how the very concept of a "Veteran's Administration" is native American in origin, and how America's soldiers are trained in this warrior tradition. However, what was overlooked was the spiritual tradition.  Could the original spiritual practices, indigenous to the Americas hold the key to healing our veterans?