What is the Sioux's Indians religion?

Answer 1

The Sioux regard the universe as ultimately incomprehensible; life, growth, and death are mysterious and suggestive of powers difficult to understand. Since time itself is regarded as non-causal, and does not embody notions of change and progress, nothing in the universe can be considered to be inevitable. This incomprehensibility and unpredictability of the universe, anything difficult to understand, is called 'wakan', which also connotes the animating force of the universe, the totality of which is 'Wakan Tanka'. Wakan Tanka is the sum total of the personified powers that brought all things into being; sometimes it is embodied as the Six Grandfathers. Humankind itself formed in and emerged from the womb of Mother Earth, as did the buffalo. Everything has its own spirit but all share the same spiritual essence that is Wakan Tanka; so it is that the most important aspects of personality are shared by everything in the universe. Other beings often shared their knowledge with humans or provided aid in time of crisis, and so came to be thought of as 'people'. The observance of the human-like characteristics of these peoples led to the development of kinship with them. At birth one receives from Takuskanskan a guardian spirit and the life-breath or ghost which comes from the stars; at death these return to the spirit world. Ritual seeks to placate the wakan beings or powers - which may be predisposed to good or evil - but also involves a process of continuing revelation. On returning from his vision quest, the vision seeker commonly integrates his vision into the life of the community by performing it ritually in public. In this way he adds to the fund of collective knowledge necessary to sustain a balanced relationship between the human community and other forms of life, both animate and inanimate. This sense of unity and of the cohesive force of ritual, is conveyed by the recurring song text: "I do this ( take part in the ritual, songs and prayers) so that I may live with my relations". Finally, a few words on the Black Hills, why they are sacred to the Sioux. According to Charlotte Black Elk, Sioux legend says that with the creation of the universe a song was given to it, each part of the universe being imbued with a part of the song; but only in the Black Hills was the song found in its entirety, here at the "heart of everything that is". Legend also says that the hills are "...a reclining female figure from whose breasts flowed life-giving forces, and to them the Lakota [Sioux] went as a child to its mother's arms" (Luther Standing Bear quoted in Matthiessen). It was in the Black Hills that the Sioux people originated, and at Bear Butte on the eastern edge of the Hills, that the Creator first imparted his sacred instructions to them; thus it is that Bear Butte is the most sacred of all places, and both Sioux and Cheyenne come here each year for vision quests. Although explanations of what happens to one at death vary, it has been said that the spirits of the Sioux dead rest in the Black Hills.

Answer 2

The Cherokee Indians