Indigenous religions

This article challenges the conclusion that Indigenous religions are largely insignificant globally, based on statistics that indicate a very small percentage of adherents in comparison to the numbers of followers of major world faiths, or to those who profess to hold no religion. The article begins by defining precisely what is meant by an Indigenous religion. This leads to an examination of how Indigenous religions interact with other seemingly dominant religions, and concludes that in many cases practitioners of Indigenous religions can also be affiliated with major world religions like Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, as well as with so-called secular forms of religion. This is illustrated by examples drawn from the author’s field studies in Zimbabwe, which imply that an Indigenous minority does not refer exclusively to a numerical indicator, but can also be understood in particular contexts as a relationship best expressed as ‘both-and’ rather than ‘either-or’. Indigenous agency is then discussed by presenting the case of a select group of Indigenous leaders in Australia, the Rainbow Spirit Elders, who intentionally transformed the central Christian doctrine of the Incarnation into an ancient and ubiquitous Indigenous symbol, the rainbow-serpent. A detailed case study drawn from Alaska follows, which describes how Indigenous communities in Alaska responded to the 1971 capitalist land claims settlement imposed by the United States Government by deliberately integrating the seemingly all-consuming ‘religious’ force of the market economy into customary patterns of life. The cases drawn from Zimbabwe, Australia, and Alaska show that classifying Indigenous religions as minorities needs to be qualified, contextualized, and nuanced.