The relationship between racial identity and religion is very interesting. Racial identity is a complex psychological construct that defines how individuals within the same race relate with others. Not just physical and biological features define racial identity. Rather, a unique value system that has a general appeal and acceptance across a majority of the members of a given race forms the totality of racial identity.
Religion tends to follow racial patterns, at least initially. This comes from the socialization of religious beliefs within a given race. Religious beliefs that eventually transcended racial lines were not limited within a racial grouping hence; they found expression among different races and eventually among different cultures.
Native Americans lived for a long time before exposure to any alternative belief system. This gave them a peculiar racial identity closely intertwined with their religious identity. To them, all things were part of each other, day-to-day life fed into both religion and culture in one continuous flow. Their society did not have the sophistication of the European worldview that accommodated a religious and a secular view of life.
The major role that racial identity plays in the religion among Native Americans is that it provides them with a position and place among the communities of the world. Originally, European colonialist powers developed a hierarchical system that ranked races according to their socioeconomic development.
In this sense, after themselves, they ranked Native Americans and Indians second, and Africans last. This system was foreign to them because in their belief system, they were children of Mother Nature, and not second-class human beings. Thiers was a strong and long-held system of beliefs with a consistent set of narratives that explained their position in nature.
One of the expressions of this worldview came about when European settlers tried to buy land from Native Americans. This was a very alien concept because in the Native American system of beliefs, land was communal. There was no way an individual could own land because land was a “God-given” resource for the good of man, which in this case was the Native American race.
The role that religion plays vis-à-vis their race is that at a fundamental level, their religion designates their place as a race in nature. Like all religious systems, their beliefs sought to provide a higher purpose for living that was beyond self. It gave them a code of honor that also made them fearsome warriors.
This code dictated how they interacted with the original settlers. It continues to define the traditional world-view of Native Americans towards the other racial groupings. However, just like many other isolated cultures, there was no place for other people. New narratives often came up to explain the emergence of new cultural views brought in by settlers.
A good example of the role of religion in culture shows in the place older people in the community had. Native Americans associated age with supernatural approval. In the Native American religious setting, the older a person became, the more useful he was to the community.
This came from the view that an older person had more wisdom to share with the community. This view still dictates the way Native Americans interact with the rest of the world. The political systems they had ensured that leadership positions went to elders and community decisions came from agreement by a set of elders. It was more important, in a cultural and in a religious sense, to look up to the elders that any other person.