American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In pulling together these pithy citations from respected Americanist works, sometimes now called Indienology, this commentary attempts a comprehensive overview of notions relating to the person, in both cosmic and personal senses, of Native North America. It uses the European solution for distinguishing those indigenous to India from those of America by the expedient of a single vowel: a or e. Moreover, to clinch the argument, comparable Inuit data are included. This treatment is intended to be balanced, indicating features that both helped and harmed individuals and communities, using citations from scholars who convey statements in a Native voice upholding the interconnectedness of customs, taboos, demeanors, and their likely outcomes. Though reported as asides or seemingly obscure details for only a single tribe or instance, all these observations can be understood to have continent-wide distribution, providing a coherent worldview that was accepted, rejected, modified, or ignored depending on local conditions of terrain, history, customs, contacts, and inter-group hostilities. Local factors of population densities, social systems, and tending (foraging) or tilling (farming) lifeways are largely ignored here in the interest of tracing more generic patterns. Spatial orientations in worlds and homes are as significant as cultural rules since they provided the basic “staging area” for the active deployment of people and materials for larger tasks and activities.