From Alan Taylor’s American Colonies (2001)
“Compared with the Europeans, Indians possessed a more complex understanding of the interdependent relationship between the natural and the supernatural. Where Europeans believed that humanity had a divine duty and an unchecked power to dominate nature, North American Indians believed that they lived within a contentious world of spiritual power that sometimes demanded human restraint and at other moments offered opportunities for exploitation.”
“North American natives subscribed to “animism”: a conviction that the supernatural was a complex and diverse web of power woven into every part of the natural world.”
“Natives believed that humans lived inside, rather than apart from, that web of the natural and supernatural. They conceived of their actions with all other-than-human beings as essentially social”
“Indian animism should not be romantically distorted into a New Age creed of stable harmony. In face, the natives regarded the spiritual world as volatile an full of tension, danger, and uncertainty”
“Natives regarded the nocturnal dreamworld as fundamentally more real and powerful than their waking hours”