Creation stories all begin as myths, regardless of how they are eventually developed within organized religions. Myths are unverified stories that begin in the prehistoric era and are passed along from generation to generation, broadly accepted by tradition as true accounts of the origins of the universe. Because of their ancient origin, myths are by definition unverifiable, and they are often relegated to the status of fable in the presence of newer explanations based on scientific observation. The Native American concept of Great Spirit is ancient and prehistorical, although in the modern era it was influenced by contact with European Christian ideas about God. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Native Americans began to relate traditions that they had received from their ancestors to Christian conceptions of God as a single entity. As a result, the Great Spirit as perceived by Native American prophets and people took on new dimensions and informed new religious thinking that was a meaningful departure from pre-encounter traditions.
The sacred narratives of indigenous Americans are diverse and include a variety of gods that are thought to influence all parts of the spirit world. The Great Spirit appears across Native American cultures in a multitude of unique ways. Native American understandings of an omnipresent spirit world are rich with gods in various stages of creation with spirits, ghosts, animals, and cultural heroes that move through an Upper World and daily life in this world. However, common to all of them is the idea that the Great Spirit is the omnipotent, omnipresent creator of the universe.
Manitou
According to the various Algonquin peoples of the north-central and northeastern regions of North America, a manitou is one of the spirits that imbue the natural world with motive life force and spiritual energy. Manitous are present in great natural features such as lakes, rivers, hills, and the like, as well as in the powerful forces of nature manifested by sun, wind, rain, and storm; trees, crops, and animals all have manitous, and these sometimes interact with the people in human form. The chief among these spirit-peoples is known as Kitchi-Manitou, or Gitchi-Manitou, the “Great Manitou,” sometimes rendered the “Great Spirit.”
C. Fee
Throughout history, Native Americans demonstrated profound religious sense. Chronicles from their stories reflect logic that allows for the Great Spirit among diverse indigenous populations. In daily life, everything is attributed to spirit. Events are significant not because they happen, but rather, they happen because they are conveying meaningful messages of spiritual significance. For example, prophets didn’t ask whether lightning is produced as a consequence of clashing clouds, but conjectured that clouds clashed purposely in order to produce lightning. Before European contact and in many respects after, the Native American attitude toward the sacred was not codified into theology and doctrine as it was in Western European Christianity. Native American religion has traditionally been polytheistic with major and minor gods. Yet, chronicles from their stories reflect a type of logic that allowed for the Great Spirit to be incorporated more formally into the religious beliefs, once introduced to the singular concept of God in Christian monotheism through Jesuit missionaries in the Great Lakes region, the Indian praying towns of Puritan New England, and various Protestant mission organizations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover, the new religious thinking was promoted by powerful chiefs who believed the Great Spirit could deliver them from the hands of Europeans. This faith provided unity among the tribes and played a crucial role in the Native American resistance to European colonialism.
Early Adaptations
An example of this syncretism can be found in the late eighteenth century in the period of U.S. expansion into the Old Northwest. During the Siege of 1763, Ottawa war chief Pontiac (1720–1769) told his followers about Neolin’s journey to heaven. Neolin was a prophet of the Delaware in Ohio who delivered revelations about the “Master of Life” who created the universe. This Creator appeared in the form of an inferno coming out of the earth. Neolin first saw a woman of great beauty who instructed him to cleanse himself before approaching the Master of Life. The Creator announced himself and told Neolin that he was displeased with his Indian children because of alcoholism, materialism, and polygamy. The Creator told Neolin that he plagued the Native Americans because of their transgressions, brought on by abandoning traditional ways of life in favor of European debauchery. The Creator told Neolin that he led the animals deep into the wilderness, but would return them if the Indians were to do as he asked. Subsequently a Delaware holy man on the Pennsylvania frontier named Seattameck told followers in 1767 that they needed to cleanse themselves of the corrupt ways of European colonists and resist the efforts of Moravian missionaries to convert them. While Pontiac failed to drive the British from the Great Lakes region, his resistance forced major changes in Great Britain’s Native American policy and inspired future generations of resisters.
Tecumseh (1768–1813) was a Shawnee chief who worked with his brother “The Prophet,” also known as Tenskwatawa (1775–1836) or Lalawethika “the Rattle,” to unite Native American tribes to resist European expansion into tribal lands. Daniel Boone’s (1734–1820) introduction of hunting, land speculation, and European settlement in Shawnee territory during the 1770s led to a revival of Native American religious sentiment. “The Prophet” Tenskwatawa offered an alternate vision of a nonomnipotent Great Spirit. His vision was that “The Good Spirit” or “The Finisher” descended from the sky after a great flood and brought the world out of primordial darkness, and surfaced a great turtle from the watery void and then placed mud on the turtle’s back, creating Turtle Island. However, the Turtle eclipsed the Finisher in the Shawnee consciousness. The unification of Native American tribes was a central part of Tenskwatawa’s religious reformation. After Tenskwatawa’s defeat at the Battle of Tippecanoe (1811), Tecumseh joined forces with the British during the War of 1812. He marshaled two thousand warriors in several military engagements and eventually was killed in battle. With Tecumseh died the last hopes of a Native American confederation in the Great Lakes area, but the idea of the Great Spirit took on new shape and new cultural power.
Calumet or “Peace Pipe”
A vital component of many ceremonies among the Native Americans of the Northeast and the Great Plains, the calumet is often popularly referred to as a “peace pipe.” Adorned to emphasize its ritual function and thereby to distinguish a sacred object from an everyday tobacco pipe, the various parts of the calumet generally were designed to represent different aspects of the natural world. The communal smoking of the calumet signifies intimacy and kinship, which explains the pipe’s abiding popular association with peace treaties and trade agreements. The smoke rising into the air provides a potent visible symbol of the Great Spirit, while breathing that smoke evokes the blessings of that Spirit upon the individuals and interactions involved.
C. Fee
Characteristics of the Great Spirit
Algonquin mythology contains a hierarchy of supernatural beings, of which the Great Spirit remains at the top. Initiates respect divine guidance while searching for identity. The Great Spirit (Wakan Tanka, or Gitchi Manitou of Native American cultures) reflects nontheistic awareness of reality that includes an active, personal, nonanthropomorphic divine power. This power is intertwined with everything within the universe and yet is personally interwoven with the web of living things on an earthly scale. Wakan Tanka, the Sioux name for the Great Spirit or Great Mystery, is perceived as the creator of the world or universe, believed to be the All-Providing One. This Spirit is revered for providing for the needs of everyone. This reverence is displayed when the people honor the four directions, the Sun, Mother Earth, and their fellow humans because these are Wakan Tanka’s creations. When honoring these elements, people honor the spirit of Wakan Tanka that resides within each of them.
Indigenous cultures have evolved diverse creation mythologies and sacred stories. These stories remain relevant and are used as teaching devices to guide individual behavior in ways that support the individual and the community. However, the Great Spirit doesn’t punish people for being bad: it doesn’t inflict eternal torment on people for “not believing in It.” In these cultures, a life out of balance with the Great Spirit, with the earth, and with the community is its own punishment. Life is filled with suffering as well as joy, and this intense mixture is the gift of the Great Spirit.
If one takes into account actual spiritual practice, the personal view of the Great Spirit as a thing that is ubiquitous in the material world, a sort of a “life force” of the world itself, then perhaps the Native American concept of the Great Spirit becomes clearer. Once again, there was a religious intuition about the divine power that was pervasive in North America, and clearly visible in indigenous myths and sacred stories. Many of these myths held that all things were one with the Great Spirit, even as the spirit manifested in different forms, such as Spider Woman, Buffalo Woman, or Old Man, or perhaps as a trickster with a wry sense of humor who laid out the hills and covered them with trees and game and enemies to fight. All things had their own particular spirits, including the rocks, the hills, the trees, the animals, and, of course, the people. In the spiritual life of Native Americans, material objects present the strongest tangible link between the mundane world and the transcendent. Objects were generally constructed for daily tasks essential to economic stability, diplomacy, and ecological harmony. Understanding the spirit imbued in the creation of material objects, from selection of materials from spiritual beings (be it plant or animal) to their eventual contents, holds keys to understanding the diversity in interpreting the Great Mystery.
Material Objects and Practices
Native Americans could be described as regional ethno-botanists whose rigorous study of cause and effect relationships resulted in sophisticated cultivation techniques. They maintained a relationship with the spiritual universe where nature was considered a “being,” and humans were part of nature through the changing seasons. Native people were reliant on a healthy, balanced environment for dietary nutrition. Indigenous people engineered vessels (pottery and basketry), employing sophisticated techniques to produce baskets able to endure stress, weight, and wear. Native people did not produce generic objects: they engineered baskets to gather, prepare, store, and serve food; and their dialects assigned names to specific baskets to delineate function. These tasks were conceived of in religious and spiritual terms.
Many native-produced objects speak of the gifts they bring to their makers and possessors—presenting a blessing whispering into our ears of a wilderness abundant with life. Some native people practiced ghost religions. In these traditions, humans were perceived as transparent in the landscape, just another natural element within a pristine ecosphere, unobtrusively residing in the surrounding and encompassing landscape.
The Great Serpent Mound
Located in Adams County, Ohio, the Great Serpent Mound is the most spectacular effigy mound in North America. Effigy mounds, which are relatively common throughout the Ohio and upper Mississippi River valleys, are ancient earthen structures that depict animal and bird forms. Associated with the Adena (ca. 500 BCE–100 CE) and Hopewell (ca. 200 BCE–500 CE) Native American cultures, such mounds often, although not always, contain burials, and also seem to have been ritual sites; indeed, Spanish Conquistadors reported some such ceremonial sites in what is now the southeastern United States. The Great Serpent Mound itself portrays a wriggling snake more than four football fields in length; the serpent figure is more than four feet high and more than twenty feet wide. The snake appears to be swallowing a great egg, although recently some have argued that the oval shape represents the eye of the serpent. No burials seem to be a part of the Great Serpent Mound, and while it has intrigued residents of southern Ohio since European settlers first entered the region, the function of the giant snake remains shrouded in mystery.
C. Fee
Indian baskets fabricated in the California region offer glimpses into a spiritual world of indigenous people. The process of their creation, for the basket maker, is a way of life. More than any other objects, baskets present the spirit of plants, their creators, and the function for which they have been produced. Baskets display the Native American consciousness of nature’s abundance and embody prescient media ecology with a primordial message that extends the human hand into a spiritual universe and in some way, involves the Great Spirit with the daily lives of human beings. The primordial knowledge of native people found in baskets made in the present day reflects the collective consciousness of the people and their environment, embracing the human experience within a broader spiritual continuum.
Meredith Eliassen
See also Creation Stories of the Native Americans; Great Hare; Myths; Spider Woman
Further Reading
Cave, Alfred A. 2006. Prophets of the Great Spirit: Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern North America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Drake, Benjamin. 1969. Life of Tecumseh and of His Brother the Prophet, with a Historical Sketch of the Shawnee Indians. New York: Arno Press.
Edmunds, R. David. 1983. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Thomas, Robert Murray. 2007. Manitou and God: North American Indian Religions and Christian Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group.
Williams, Mentor L. 1969. Schoolcraft’s Indian Legends. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Great Spirit—Primary Document
Tecumseh’s Speech to the Osages (1811)
The following speech is attributed to the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, who organized and led a confederation of Native American people against the United States during the period of U.S. expansion into the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region in the early 1800s. Tecumseh’s War in 1811 was partly inspired by a Native American religious revival that began with revelations about the Great Spirit from Tecumseh’s brother Tenskwatawa. The references to Great Spirit in this speech illustrate particular Native American perceptions of the divine and the spirit world during a period of organized Indian resistance to American and European conquest.
Brothers,—We all belong to one family; we are all children of the Great Spirit; we walk in the same path; slake our thirst at the same spring; and now affairs of the greatest concern lead us to smoke the pipe around the same council fire!
Brothers,—We are friends; we must assist each other to bear our burdens. The blood of many of our fathers and brothers has run like water on the ground, to satisfy the avarice of the white men. We, ourselves, are threatened with a great evil; nothing will pacify them but the destruction of all the red men.
Brothers,—When the white men first set foot on our grounds, they were hungry; they had no place on which to spread their blankets, or to kindle their fires. They were feeble; they could do nothing for themselves. Our father commiserated [with] their distress, and shared freely with them whatever the Great Spirit had given his red children. They gave them food when hungry, medicine when sick, spread skins for them to sleep on, and gave them grounds, that they might hunt and raise corn.
Brothers,—The white people are like poisonous serpents: when chilled, they are feeble and harmless; but invigorate them with warmth, and they sting their benefactors to death. The white people came among us feeble; and now we have made them strong, they wish to kill us, or drive us back, as they would wolves and panthers.
Brothers,—The white men are not friends to the Indians: at first, they only asked for land sufficient for a wigwam; now, nothing will satisfy them but the whole of our hunting grounds, from the rising to the setting sun.
Brothers,—The white men want more than our hunting grounds; they wish to kill our warriors; they would even kill our old men, women, and little ones.
Brothers,—Many winters ago, there was no land; the sun did not rise and set: all was darkness. The Great Spirit made all things. He gave the white people a home beyond the great waters. He supplied these grounds with game, and gave them to his red children; and he gave them strength and courage to defend them.
Brothers,—My people wish for peace; the red men all wish for peace; but where the white people are, there is no peace for them, except it be on the bosom of our mother.
Brothers,—The white men despise and cheat the Indians; they abuse and insult them; they do not think the red men sufficiently good to live. The red men have borne many and great injuries; they ought to suffer them no longer. My people will not; they are determined on vengeance; they have taken up the tomahawk; they will make it fat with blood; they will drink the blood of the white people.
Brothers,—My people are brave and numerous; but the white people are too strong for them alone. I wish you to take up the tomahawk with them. If we all unite, we will cause the rivers to stain the great waters with their blood.
Brothers,—If you do not unite with us, they will first destroy us, and then you will fall an easy prey to them. They have destroyed many nations of red men because they were not united, because they were not friends to each other.
Brothers,—The white people send runners amongst us; they wish to make us enemies that they may sweep over and desolate our hunting grounds, like devastating winds, or rushing waters.
Brothers,—Our Great Father, over the great waters, is angry with the white people, our enemies. He will send his brave warriors against them; he will send us rifles, and whatever else we want—he is our friend, and we are his children.
Brothers,—Who are the white people that we should fear them? They cannot run fast, and are good marks to shoot at: they are only men; our fathers have killed many of them; we are not squaws, and we will stain the earth red with blood.
Brothers,—The Great Spirit is angry with our enemies; he speaks in thunder, and the earth swallows up villages, and drinks up the Mississippi. The great waters will cover their lowlands; their corn cannot grow, and the Great Spirit will sweep those who escape to the hills from the earth with his terrible breach.
Brothers,—We must be united; we must smoke the same pipe; we must fight each other’s battles; and more than all, we must love the Great Spirit; he is for us; he will destroy our enemies, and make all his red children happy.
Source: Hunter, John Dunn. Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America. London: Longman, Hurst, Orme, Brown, and Green. London, 1824, pp. 45–48.