Unit 9 · Sikhism, Jainism, and the Traditions of Africa and the Americas

Sikh tradition tells that Nanak was born in 1469 in the village of Talwandi in the Punjab, a region that today lies on both sides of the India–Pakistan border. His family was Hindu, and his neighbors included many Muslims. According to the traditional accounts called the janamsakhis, at about age thirty Nanak went to bathe in a river and disappeared for three days. When he returned, tradition says, his first words were that there is no Hindu and no Muslim. Sikhs understand this to mean that God is not the property of any one group and that the labels people fight over do not matter to God.

After that experience Nanak spent roughly two decades traveling. Sikh sources describe journeys east to Bengal, south toward Sri Lanka, north into the Himalayas and west to Mecca and Baghdad. On these trips, tradition says, he sang his teachings and debated with religious leaders. A Muslim musician named Mardana traveled with him and played a stringed instrument called the rabab while Nanak sang. This pairing of a Hindu-born teacher and a Muslim companion has remained an important image for Sikhs.

Around 1520 Nanak settled at Kartarpur, on the banks of the Ravi River, and founded a community. Followers farmed, worked and worshiped together, and they came to be called Sikhs, a Punjabi word meaning learners or disciples. Nanak is called Guru, which in Sikh usage means the teacher who carries God’s word to people. Sikhs believe that the Guru’s role is not to be worshiped but to point the learner toward the one God.

Scholars note that Nanak lived at a time when devotional movements were flourishing in North India. Poets such as Kabir taught love of God beyond caste and ritual, and Sufi Muslim teachers sang of God in the local languages. Sikhs hold that Nanak’s message was a direct revelation, not a blend of other faiths, and the academic study of religion describes both the setting and the community’s own understanding without choosing between them.

Before his death in 1539, Guru Nanak chose a follower named Lehna as his successor and renamed him Angad, a word Sikhs connect to the idea of a limb of one’s own body. Sikhs believe that the Guruship then passed from person to person, ten Gurus in all, and that each carried the same light. A common Sikh image is one candle lighting the next: the flame is the same even though the candle changes. For this reason Sikhs speak of the Gurus with the same reverence and often refer to them together as a single Guru.

Several Gurus shaped the community’s institutions. The third Guru, Amar Das, made the langar meal a fixed practice and asked visitors to eat in it before meeting him. The fourth, Ram Das, founded the city of Amritsar. The fifth, Arjan, built the Harmandir Sahib, known in English as the Golden Temple, at the center of a pool in Amritsar and compiled the community’s scripture in 1604. In 1606 Guru Arjan died in the custody of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, and Sikhs remember him as the first Sikh martyr.

After Arjan’s death, the sixth Guru, Hargobind, began to wear two swords, which Sikhs interpret as miri and piri, worldly authority and spiritual authority. The ninth Guru, Tegh Bahadur, was executed in Delhi in 1675 on the orders of the emperor Aurangzeb. Sikh tradition holds that he died defending the right of Hindus in Kashmir to practice their religion. Sikhs point to this as an example of standing up for the freedom of others.

The tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, was Tegh Bahadur’s son and became Guru at age nine. In 1699 he founded the Khalsa, a community of initiated Sikhs, which a later lesson describes. Before he died in 1708, Sikh tradition says he declared that there would be no more human Gurus and that the scripture itself would serve as Guru from then on. Historians also note that all four of Gobind Singh’s sons died in the conflicts of his lifetime, a loss Sikhs remember in prayer.

Walk into any gurdwara and you will see the same thing at the front of the main hall: a large book resting on cushions under a canopy, with an attendant waving a whisk over it. That book is the Guru Granth Sahib, and for Sikhs it is not a symbol of the Guru but the Guru itself. Sikhs believe that in 1708 Guru Gobind Singh ended the line of human Gurus and gave that role to the scripture. People bow before it, sit lower than it, and carry it to a bed each night in a ceremony of rest.

The standard printed edition has 1,430 pages, and every copy uses the same page layout so that a hymn is on the same page everywhere in the world. The text is written in Gurmukhi, a script the second Guru is credited with shaping, though the languages inside include Punjabi, Hindi, Persian and others. Almost the whole book is poetry set to music. It is organized by raga, the musical modes of Indian tradition, rather than by topic, because it was meant to be sung.

The Guru Granth Sahib contains the hymns of six of the Sikh Gurus. It also includes the compositions of Hindu and Muslim poets, such as Kabir, Namdev and the Sufi teacher Farid. Sikhs call these poets the bhagats. Sikhs see this as a sign that truth is not confined to one community. The book opens with the Mul Mantar, a short statement of who God is. It names God as one, true, creator, without fear or enmity, beyond time, not born, self-existent, and known by the Guru’s grace.

Because the scripture is the Guru, Sikhs do not have priests in the sense of a separate class with special authority over the text. Any Sikh, man or woman, who can read Gurmukhi may lead a service. A reader called a granthi cares for the book and reads from it, and a continuous reading of the whole text from start to finish, called an Akhand Path, takes about forty-eight hours and marks important occasions. At the end of a service, the book is opened at random and the hymn on that page is read as the day’s guidance.

The first symbol in the Guru Granth Sahib, and the one you will see on Sikh flags and doorways, is Ik Onkar. It combines the numeral one with a letter and is usually translated as There is one God, or One Reality is. For Sikhs it states the heart of the faith: God is one, without form, present everywhere, the same for every people. Sikhs use many names for God, including Waheguru, Wonderful Teacher, but hold that no image can represent God and that no place or people has an exclusive claim.

According to the Gurus, the main obstacle between a person and God is haumai, a Punjabi word for self-centeredness, the habit of putting I and mine at the center of everything. The remedy Sikhs practice is naam simran, remembering God’s name. This can mean repeating a name of God quietly, singing the hymns, or holding God in mind during ordinary work. Sikhs believe that a life shaped by this remembrance slowly loosens the grip of ego and brings a person into harmony with God’s will, called hukam.

Sikhs commonly summarize the Gurus’ teaching in three duties, often given in Punjabi: naam japna, remembering God; kirat karni, earning an honest living; and vand chakna, sharing what you earn with those in need. Notice that two of the three are about ordinary economic life. Sikh tradition praises the householder who works and raises a family over the ascetic who withdraws from the world. A story told about Guru Nanak has him choosing a poor carpenter’s plain bread over a rich man’s feast because the carpenter’s bread was earned honestly.

Sikhs, like Hindus and Buddhists, speak of karma and rebirth, and they believe the human birth is a rare chance to unite with God. But the Sikh account of liberation is centered on grace. Sikhs hold that a person cannot earn union with God by effort alone; the Guru’s grace opens the way. Compare this with the Christian language of grace, or with the Jain emphasis on individual effort in a later lesson. That comparison is one of the useful exercises of this unit.

Return to the kitchen from the opening story. The people cooking, cleaning and serving there are performing seva, selfless service done without expecting reward. Sikhs regard seva as a form of worship, not a chore attached to it. Sweeping the floor of a gurdwara, polishing the shoes of visitors, or washing the enormous pots after the meal are all seva. Many Sikhs describe the experience as a way of wearing down haumai, the ego, by putting oneself at the service of others.

The langar is the free community kitchen and the meal it serves. Sikh tradition credits Guru Nanak with beginning it and the third Guru, Amar Das, with making it a firm rule. He is said to have required that everyone, including the Mughal emperor Akbar when he visited, sit in the rows and eat before meeting him. The rows themselves, called pangat, are the point. In sixteenth-century India, people of different castes did not eat together, and a high-caste person could be considered polluted by sharing food with a low-caste one. The langar deliberately broke that rule.

The Gurus also addressed the position of women. Guru Nanak wrote a hymn asking why anyone should call woman inferior when kings are born of women. Sikh teaching holds that women and men are equally able to read the scripture, lead worship, and receive initiation into the Khalsa. Historians point out that practice in Sikh communities has not always matched this ideal, as in every tradition, and Sikh reformers today often quote these hymns when calling for change.

The scale of the langar can be startling. The Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar serves free meals to tens of thousands of people each day, prepared largely by volunteers. During disasters, Sikh organizations have set up mobile langars for flood victims and, in 2020, for people affected by the pandemic in cities around the world, including Chicago. Studying the langar is a way to see how a teaching about God’s view of people becomes a rule about seating, a menu, and a schedule of volunteers.

Sikh tradition tells that on the spring festival of Vaisakhi in 1699, at Anandpur in the Punjab hills, Guru Gobind Singh stood before a large gathering with a drawn sword and asked who was willing to give his head for the faith. One man stepped forward and was led into a tent. The Guru returned alone with a bloodied sword and asked again. Four more came forward in turn. Then, the story says, all five walked out of the tent alive and dressed in new robes. Sikhs call them the Panj Piare, the Five Beloved Ones. They came from different castes and different parts of India.

The Guru then prepared amrit, sweetened water stirred with a double-edged sword, gave it to the five, and then asked them to give it to him. Sikhs point to this moment as the founding of the Khalsa, a word meaning pure or belonging directly to God. Members took a new name: men became Singh, lion, and women became Kaur, princess. Because these names replaced caste surnames, they made it harder to tell a person’s social rank, which Sikhs understand as part of the point. Today many Sikhs carry these names whether or not they have been initiated.

Initiated Sikhs, called Amritdhari, maintain five articles of faith whose Punjabi names all begin with K: kesh, uncut hair, usually kept under a turban by men and by some women; kangha, a small wooden comb that keeps the hair neat; kara, a steel bracelet worn on the wrist; kachera, cotton undershorts; and kirpan, a small sword. Sikhs explain them in various ways. The kara, for instance, is often described as a reminder of God’s oneness and of the wearer’s duty to act rightly with the hand that wears it. The kirpan represents the duty to defend the weak.

Not every Sikh is initiated, and Sikhs disagree among themselves about how strictly the five Ks must be kept. A student in a Chicago classroom might wear a turban and a kara, only a kara, or no visible sign at all, and still identify as Sikh. In the United States the kirpan has raised questions in schools and airports, and courts and school districts have often allowed small, secured kirpans as an exercise of religious freedom. Studying the five Ks is a case of the general question this course asks: how visible signs carry a community’s memory and commitments.

The Sikh house of worship is a gurdwara, a word meaning door of the Guru. Any building where the Guru Granth Sahib is properly installed can be one, from a room in a house to the Harmandir Sahib. Most gurdwaras fly a tall flag called the Nishan Sahib, usually saffron or blue, marked with the khanda, a symbol of a double-edged sword, a circle and two curved swords. The Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar famously has four doors, one on each side, which Sikhs describe as a welcome to people from every direction and every background.

Visitors of any faith may enter a gurdwara. The protocol is the same for everyone: remove your shoes, cover your head, and do not bring tobacco or alcohol. In the main hall, called the diwan hall, worshipers walk to the front, bow to the Guru Granth Sahib, often leave an offering, and sit on the carpeted floor. Men and women usually sit on opposite sides, though this is custom rather than scripture. There are no statues or images of God, in keeping with the Sikh belief that God has no form.

The heart of a Sikh service is kirtan, the singing of hymns from the scripture, usually to harmonium and tabla drums. A speaker may explain a hymn, and the service closes with a standing prayer called the Ardas, which recalls the Gurus and the martyrs and asks for the good of all humanity. Then the book is opened at random and a hymn is read aloud as guidance. Everyone receives karah prasad, a warm sweet made of flour, clarified butter and sugar, handed out from a single bowl so that no one receives anything different from anyone else.

The gurdwara is also a school, a community center and a kitchen. Children learn Punjabi and Gurmukhi there on weekends. Weddings, called Anand Karaj, take place in front of the Guru Granth Sahib, and the couple walks around the scripture four times while a hymn is sung. Sikh calendars mark the birthdays of Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh, Vaisakhi in April, and the martyrdom days of Guru Arjan and Guru Tegh Bahadur, all observed with kirtan and langar.

Sikhism is a global tradition of roughly 25 to 30 million people, according to common estimates, which makes it one of the larger religions in the world though far smaller than Hinduism or Islam. Most Sikhs live in the Indian state of Punjab. Large communities also live in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Malaysia and East Africa. Estimates of the Sikh population in the United States usually fall between 500,000 and 700,000, with the largest concentrations in California, New York and New Jersey.

The first Sikh immigrants came to North America around 1900, many of them former soldiers in the British Indian Army who found work on railroads, in lumber mills and on farms in California and British Columbia. The first gurdwara in the United States opened in Stockton, California, in 1912. Early Sikh immigrants faced laws that barred Asian immigration and land ownership. In 1923, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Supreme Court ruled that a Sikh veteran of the U.S. Army could not become a citizen. Immigration law changed in 1965, and most Sikh Americans today trace their families to the decades since then.

The Chicago area has a substantial Sikh community, with gurdwaras in Palatine, where the Sikh Religious Society built one of the region’s largest, and in other suburbs and neighborhoods. Sikh Americans work in every field, from trucking, in which Sikhs make up a noticeable share of drivers, to medicine, engineering and politics. Turbaned Sikhs have sometimes been mistaken for Muslims and attacked, especially after September 11, 2001. In 2012 a gunman killed six worshipers at a gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, about eighty miles north of Chicago; a seventh victim died of his wounds in 2020.

Sikh organizations respond to such events with education and, characteristically, with langar. After Oak Creek, the Wisconsin community reopened its kitchen and invited neighbors of every faith to eat. Understanding the difference between a Sikh turban and Muslim dress, and knowing why a Sikh might carry a kirpan, is part of the practical purpose of a course like this one. The goal is to read the signs around you accurately, so that fear built on confusion has less room to grow.

In the same century and the same region of northeastern India where tradition places the Buddha, another teacher left home to seek liberation. Jains call him Mahavira, Great Hero. His given name was Vardhamana, and tradition says he was born to a ruling family near the city of Vaishali, in what is now the Indian state of Bihar. Traditional Jain dates place his life at 599 to 527 BCE; many historians put him somewhat later, in the fifth century BCE. Jains do not regard him as the founder of their tradition but as its most recent great teacher.

According to Jain tradition, Mahavira was the twenty-fourth Tirthankara, a word meaning ford-maker, one who builds a crossing over the river of birth and death so others can follow. The twenty-third, Parshvanatha, is placed by tradition about 250 years earlier, and most historians accept that he was a real teacher. Jains hold that the tradition itself is eternal and that Tirthankaras appear in every age to restore it. This is why a Jain would object to the sentence Jainism was founded by Mahavira.

Tradition says that at age thirty Mahavira gave up his home, his wealth and eventually his clothing and spent about twelve years wandering, fasting and meditating, often enduring abuse without responding. At the end of that time Jains believe he attained kevala jnana, complete knowledge, becoming a Jina, a conqueror. The word Jain means a follower of the Jina. What Mahavira conquered, in Jain understanding, was not an enemy but his own attachments and passions. He taught for about thirty years and organized a community of monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen, and Jains note that nuns outnumbered monks from the beginning.

Jains believe Mahavira died at Pavapuri, in Bihar, and attained final liberation. The Buddhist scriptures mention him under the name Nigantha Nataputta as a rival teacher, which gives historians an outside witness to his existence. His teaching survives in scriptures called the Agamas, written in an ancient language called Ardhamagadhi, though Jains disagree about which texts are authentic, as a later lesson explains.

A Jain monk in western India walks slowly along a road at dawn, sweeping the ground ahead of him with a soft brush of wool before each step. He wears a cloth over his mouth. He will not eat after sunset, and he will not eat root vegetables at all. Each of these habits follows from one principle: ahimsa, non-harm. The brush moves insects out of his path. The cloth keeps him from swallowing tiny creatures. Cooking after dark might burn insects drawn to the flame. Pulling up a root kills the whole plant and the small lives in the soil around it.

Jains take ahimsa further than any other major tradition because of how they understand life. According to Jain teaching, every living being has a jiva, a soul, and souls dwell not only in animals but in plants, and in the tiniest single-sensed beings of earth, water, fire and air. Harm to any of them attaches karma to the soul, as the next lesson explains. A Jain scripture, the Acharanga Sutra, teaches that no living creature should be killed, treated with violence, abused, tormented or driven away, and calls this the pure and eternal law taught by those who know.

The first of the five Jain vows is ahimsa. The other four are satya, truthfulness; asteya, not taking what is not given; brahmacharya, chastity; and aparigraha, non-possession or non-attachment. Monks and nuns take these as the mahavratas, the great vows, in their full form: they own almost nothing, do not travel by vehicle, and depend on food offered by laypeople. Laypeople take the same five as anuvratas, lesser vows, adapted to family and working life: a strict vegetarian diet, honesty in business, faithfulness in marriage, and limits on what they accumulate.

Jains are divided into two main branches that agree on these vows but differ in practice. Digambara monks, whose name means sky-clad, wear no clothing as the fullest expression of non-possession, and this branch holds that women must be reborn as men before final liberation. Svetambara monks and nuns, white-clad, wear simple white robes, and this branch holds that women can reach liberation and that the nineteenth Tirthankara was a woman. The two branches also disagree about which scriptures are authentic. Both are ancient, and both are active today.

Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs all use the word karma, but Jains mean something unusually specific by it. In Jain teaching, karma is a kind of extremely fine physical matter that fills the universe. Every action driven by passion, especially anger, pride, deceit and greed, draws karmic particles to the soul, where they stick like dust to a wet cloth. The karma clouds the soul’s natural qualities, which Jains describe as infinite knowledge, perception, bliss and energy, and it determines the soul’s next birth.

The Jain path is therefore a two-part program. First, stop new karma from coming in, which Jains call samvara; the five vows do this by removing the passions that attract it. Second, burn off the karma already there, which Jains call nirjara; fasting, meditation and patient endurance of hardship do this. When all karma is gone, Jains believe the soul rises to the top of the universe. There it dwells forever in perfect knowledge and bliss as a siddha, a liberated being. Jains do not believe in a creator God. The universe, in Jain teaching, has always existed. The Tirthankaras and siddhas are revered as examples, not as gods who grant favors.

One consequence of this teaching is a strong emphasis on individual effort. Where Sikhs speak of the Guru’s grace, and Christians of God’s grace, Jains hold that no one else can remove your karma for you. Jain temples are full of images of Tirthankaras seated in meditation, and worshipers offer rice, flowers and lamps before them, but Jain teachers explain that the Tirthankara does not respond; the worship shapes the worshiper. The annual festival of Paryushana, lasting eight or ten days, ends with each Jain asking forgiveness from everyone they may have harmed, with the words micchami dukkadam, may my wrongdoing be forgiven.

Jain philosophy is also known for anekantavada, the doctrine of many-sidedness: reality is complex, and any single statement about it captures only part of the truth. Jain teachers illustrate this with the story of blind men describing an elephant, each touching one part and each partly right. From this follows a habit of saying in some respect before a claim. Modern Jains often present anekantavada as intellectual ahimsa, non-violence toward other viewpoints. It is a useful idea for a course that asks students to compare traditions without ranking them.

Jains number about four to five million people, by common estimates, the great majority in India, especially in the western states of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra. That is less than half of one percent of India’s population. Yet Jains have an outsized presence in Indian business, banking, publishing and philanthropy. The vows steered them away from farming and soldiering and toward trade. Jain communities have long funded hospitals, animal shelters and schools. Jain temples such as those at Mount Abu in Rajasthan and Palitana in Gujarat are among the most intricately carved buildings in India.

Jainism’s best-known influence on world history runs through Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi was born in 1869 in Gujarat, in a Hindu family. Jains were numerous in his region, his mother kept frequent religious fasts, and before he sailed to London in 1888 a Jain monk administered the vows she asked him to take. As a young lawyer, Gandhi corresponded with a Jain poet and jeweler named Shrimad Rajchandra. He later named Rajchandra as one of the three people who most influenced his thinking. Gandhi’s insistence on ahimsa as an active force, his fasts, and his refusal to call his opponents wholly wrong all show the marks of this exposure. Gandhi drew on many sources, though, and remained a Hindu.

Jainism came to Chicago’s attention in 1893. That year a young Jain lawyer named Virchand Gandhi, no relation to Mohandas, spoke at the World’s Parliament of Religions, the first major interfaith gathering in the United States. Today the Jain Society of Metropolitan Chicago maintains a temple in Bartlett, a western suburb, with white marble carving in the traditional style. Jain communities exist in most large American cities. Estimates of Jains in the United States range from about 100,000 to 200,000.

Modern Jain practice includes questions that outsiders often find striking. Some Jains, usually elderly or terminally ill, choose sallekhana, a fast to the death undertaken with a teacher’s permission as the final act of non-attachment; Indian courts have debated whether it should be protected as religious practice. Jain communities also run animal shelters called panjrapoles, some of them centuries old, and bird hospitals, and have been early voices in vegetarian and environmental movements. Each of these follows from the same conviction the monk with the brush was living out: that every life counts, down to the smallest.

Most of this course has studied traditions through their texts: the Torah, the Gospels, the Qur’an, the Vedas, the Guru Granth Sahib. That method works well when a community has a written canon. It fits less well for many Indigenous traditions, the religious ways of peoples who lived in a place before colonizers arrived and who maintain a distinct relationship with that land. For most of their history, the Yoruba of West Africa and the Native nations of North America kept sacred knowledge without a single book.

In an oral tradition, teaching is passed from person to person by speaking, singing and doing. A creation story is told by an elder. A song is learned by singing it beside someone who knows it. A ceremony is learned by attending it for years, first watching and then helping. Oral does not mean vague or careless. Yoruba diviners memorize hundreds of long verses, and Native singers learn song cycles that must be performed exactly. Scholars who study oral cultures note that communities often build in checks, such as correction by other elders, that keep the core stable.

Because the knowledge lives in practice, scholars often use the word ceremony where they might use scripture elsewhere. A ceremony is a formal religious action, with set words, objects, times and roles, that renews a relationship with the sacred. For many Native nations, the land itself also carries meaning. A mountain, a river or a lake can be the place where a story happened, where ancestors are buried, or where a ceremony must be held. Moving the people away from that land breaks more than a home.

Two cautions guide this chapter. First, there is no single Indigenous religion. There are more than 570 federally recognized tribes in the United States alone, and many hundreds of African peoples, each with its own language and ways. Second, many members of these communities are also Christian or Muslim, or combine practices. The chapter describes selected traditions carefully and attributes each belief to the people who hold it.

The elder in the opening story was following protocol, the rules a community keeps about how sacred things are shared. Protocol can govern when a story is told, as with Anishinaabe winter stories. It can govern who may tell it, such as a member of a certain clan or someone who has been taught and given permission. It can govern who may see a ceremony, whether photographs may be taken, and which objects may be touched. Visitors to a gurdwara cover their heads; visitors to a Native ceremony may be asked to leave their phones outside.

Some knowledge is restricted, meant only for those who have been initiated or who hold a particular role. This is not unique to Indigenous traditions. Many religions have teachings or rites that only the initiated take part in. But restricted Indigenous knowledge has often been taken without permission. Researchers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries recorded ceremonies, published sacred songs and collected sacred objects for museums, sometimes by purchase and sometimes by theft or from graves.

The United States addressed part of this history in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, known as NAGPRA. The law requires museums and federal agencies that receive federal money to inventory Native human remains, burial objects and sacred objects, and to return them to the tribes they came from when a claim is established. Museums in Illinois, like museums across the country, have been working through these returns for decades, and the process continues.

For a student, the lesson is practical. When you study a tradition that has not chosen to publish its sacred knowledge, rely on what members of that community have themselves chosen to share, in books, museum exhibits, websites and talks. Name the specific nation or people. Do not treat a ceremony you have seen in a film as something you may imitate. Respect in the academic study of religion includes accepting that some things are not yours to know.

The Yoruba are a people of southwestern Nigeria and neighboring Benin and Togo, numbering in the tens of millions today. Many Yoruba are Muslims or Christians, and many families include members of all three paths. The traditional Yoruba religion, sometimes called Isese, meaning tradition or the old ways, has influenced religious life far beyond West Africa, as the next section shows. Its sacred knowledge has been kept mainly in oral verse, song, drumming, sculpture and ritual.

According to Yoruba tradition, the supreme God is Olodumare, also called Olorun, owner of the sky. Olodumare is the source of all things and of ase, the power that makes things happen. In most accounts, Olodumare is distant and is not the focus of shrines or daily offerings. Instead, people turn to the orisha, divine beings who carry out Olodumare’s will and who each govern certain forces of nature and parts of human life. Yoruba sources speak of hundreds of orisha, and different towns honor different ones.

A few orisha are widely known. Obatala, associated with white cloth and coolness, is said to have shaped human bodies. Ogun is the orisha of iron, tools and the road, honored today by blacksmiths, drivers and mechanics. Shango is linked to thunder and lightning and, in tradition, to an early king of the city of Oyo. Oshun is honored at rivers and is linked to fresh water, beauty and fertility; her sacred grove at Osogbo in Nigeria was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005 and draws thousands to an annual festival.

Eshu, also called Elegba, is the messenger who carries offerings between people and the orisha and who guards crossroads. He receives offerings first so that communication can flow. Early Christian translators into Yoruba used Eshu’s name for the devil, a choice many scholars and practitioners regard as a serious misreading, since in Yoruba tradition Eshu is a trickster and go-between, not a figure of pure evil. The case shows how translation can reshape a tradition in the eyes of outsiders.

In many African religious traditions, the family includes people who have died. Ancestors are those who lived good lives, died well and were given proper funeral rites. Adherents believe they continue to care for their descendants and can be approached with prayers and offerings. A family might pour a little water or drink on the ground and speak the names of grandparents before an important event. This practice of pouring an offering, called a libation, is found across much of West and Central Africa.

Scholars usually describe this as ancestor veneration, honoring and seeking help from the dead, and many adherents stress that it is not the same as worshiping God. The ancestors are elders of the family who have moved to another state of life. They are expected to reward respect with protection and to show displeasure when they are forgotten. Many African Christians and Muslims also keep some customs of remembering the ancestors, and churches and scholars have debated how these fit with their faiths.

Among the Yoruba, a vivid form of this relationship is the Egungun festival. Costumed dancers, their bodies completely covered in layers of bright cloth, move through the town. Adherents understand the masked figures to embody the ancestors who have returned to visit, bless and sometimes warn the living. Because the ancestors are thought to be present, the costumes are treated with great care, and there are rules about approaching and touching the dancers.

Comparison helps show what is distinctive here without ranking. Chinese families burn incense before ancestral tablets. Catholic families visit graves on All Souls’ Day. Mexican families build altars for Day of the Dead. Each tradition has its own theology of the dead. What many African traditions add is the sense that the ancestors remain active members of the living community, with duties toward it and a place in its decisions.

A woman in Nigeria is deciding whether to move her family to another city. She visits a babalawo, a word meaning father of secrets, a priest trained in Ifa, the Yoruba system of divination. Divination is a practice of seeking knowledge or guidance from sacred sources through signs. Ifa is associated with the orisha Orunmila, whom Yoruba tradition honors as the witness of destiny, present when each person’s destiny was chosen before birth.

The babalawo casts a divining chain called an opele, strung with eight half-seed shells, or manipulates sixteen sacred palm nuts. Each cast produces a pattern that he marks in powder on a wooden tray. The patterns combine into one of 256 signs, called odu. Each odu is linked to a large body of poetic verses, stories of people and orisha who faced problems long ago and what they did. The babalawo recites the verses of the sign that has appeared, and the client recognizes which story fits her situation.

The system is a remarkable feat of memory. Training to become a babalawo traditionally takes many years, and a skilled priest can recite thousands of verses. Because of this, scholars describe the Ifa verses as a kind of unwritten library of Yoruba history, ethics, medicine and religious teaching. In 2005 UNESCO recognized the Ifa divination system as a masterpiece of the world’s oral and intangible heritage.

Adherents understand Ifa not as fortune-telling for entertainment but as a way to align a person with their destiny and with the orisha. A reading often ends with a recommended sacrifice or offering, from food to prayer, meant to restore balance. Many elements of Ifa traveled to the Americas, where babalawos practice in Cuba, Brazil, the United States and elsewhere. Some Christians and Muslims in Nigeria also consult diviners, while others reject the practice.

Between the 1500s and the 1860s, the transatlantic slave trade carried roughly 12.5 million Africans onto ships bound for the Americas, and about 10.7 million survived the crossing, according to the major historical database of slave voyages. Most went to Brazil and the Caribbean, far fewer to North America. Among them were many Yoruba, especially in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when wars in the Yoruba region sent large numbers of captives to Cuba and to the Brazilian state of Bahia.

Enslaved people could not bring shrines or books, but they carried songs, drum rhythms, stories, herbal knowledge and the names of the orisha in memory. A diaspora is a people scattered from its homeland, and the African diaspora in the Americas rebuilt religious life under slavery. Colonial authorities and churches usually required baptism and banned or punished African practices. Communities met in secret, in mutual-aid societies called cabildos in Cuba and in the brotherhoods and houses of Brazil.

One well-known result is the pairing of orisha with Catholic saints. In Cuba, Shango was linked with Saint Barbara, Babalu Aye with Saint Lazarus, and Oshun with Our Lady of Charity, Cuba’s patron. Scholars have long called this syncretism, the blending of elements from different religions. Some scholars and many practitioners question the term. They argue that the saints often served as a cover or a parallel, and that devotees knew the orisha and the saint were distinct. Others hold that real blending took place. The debate itself is part of the history.

Today these diaspora traditions are practiced across the Americas and have spread to cities such as Miami, New York and Chicago. They are not simply African religion preserved unchanged, nor simply Catholicism with African decoration. They are living traditions shaped by the Middle Passage, by the Americas, and by generations who kept faith under conditions designed to erase it.

In Cuba, descendants of enslaved Yoruba were called Lucumi, and their tradition is known by several names. Outsiders most often say Santeria, the way of the saints. Many practitioners prefer Regla de Ocha, the rule of the orisha, or Lucumi. The tradition has no central authority or single text. Knowledge passes through houses, family-like communities led by a priest, and each house traces its lineage back through the priests who initiated its leaders.

A person who is fully initiated as a priest or priestess is called a santero or santera. Initiation, often called making the saint, joins the person to a particular orisha who is understood to rule their head. It follows years of preparation and involves a period of seclusion and a year of wearing white. Ceremonies called bembes feature drumming, singing in Lucumi, a ritual language descended from Yoruba, and dance. Sacred batá drums, a set of three double-headed drums, are played in many ceremonies. Some rituals include the sacrifice of animals, which are usually cooked and eaten afterward.

After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, many Cubans moved to Florida, and the tradition grew in the United States. In 1987 the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye announced plans to open in Hialeah, Florida. The city council then passed ordinances banning ritual animal sacrifice while allowing the killing of animals for many other purposes. The church sued. In Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah (1993), the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck the ordinances down.

The Court held that the laws were not neutral. They had been written to target one religion’s practice while leaving similar nonreligious killing alone. The case is now taught as a key decision on the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. It shows how a tradition once practiced in secret under slavery came to defend itself openly in American courts. Practitioners and supporters in Chicago and other cities often cite it when their practices are questioned.

On February 2 each year, crowds in white gather on the beach at Salvador, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, carrying flowers, perfume and small gifts. They place them in boats that sail out to sea as offerings to Iemanja, the orixa of the sea and of motherhood. The orixas are the Brazilian form of the Yoruba orisha. The festival is one public face of Candomble, an Afro-Brazilian religion that took shape in Bahia in the nineteenth century.

Candomble is organized into communities called terreiros, meaning grounds or yards, each a house of worship and a kind of extended family. Many terreiros are led by a woman, a mae de santo, mother of the saint. Several of the oldest and most famous houses in Salvador have been led by priestesses for generations. Terreiros belong to different nations, which trace their rites to different African peoples. The Ketu nation follows Yoruba traditions, while others draw on the Fon of Benin or on the peoples of Angola and the Congo.

Worship centers on the orixas, who are honored with songs, drumming, dance and offerings of food prepared according to each one’s preferences. In ceremonies, some initiates enter trance, a state that adherents understand as the orixa arriving to dance among the community in the initiate’s body. Initiates wear the colors and carry the tools of their orixa. Like Santeria, Candomble has linked orixas with Catholic saints, and many practitioners also attend Mass, while others have moved away from these links.

Candomble was long persecuted. Police raided terreiros in the early twentieth century, and practitioners needed permits to hold ceremonies in Bahia until the 1970s. In the 1980s, Brazil’s heritage agency began to list historic terreiros as protected national sites. Terreiros still face attacks and harassment today, which Brazilian courts and activists address as religious intolerance. Brazil marks January 21 as a national day against religious intolerance, in memory of a Candomble priestess.

There is no single Native American religion. Each nation has its own language, stories, ceremonies and sacred places. Still, scholars and Native writers point to some common threads. Many Native traditions describe the world as a web of relationships among people, animals, plants, waters and spirit beings, all of whom are kin. The Lakota phrase mitakuye oyasin, all my relatives, spoken at the end of prayers, expresses this sense that a person is never alone and always owes respect to others.

Creation stories differ widely, and many have been published by members of the nations themselves. The Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, of New York tell of Sky Woman, who fell from a world above and was set down on a turtle’s back, where the earth grew. For this reason many Native people call North America Turtle Island. The Dine, or Navajo, tell of an emergence through a series of worlds into this one. The Anishinaabe tell of a great flood after which a small animal brought up a bit of earth from which the land was remade.

In many traditions the sacred is tied to particular sacred places. Bear Butte in South Dakota is a place of prayer for the Lakota and Cheyenne. The San Francisco Peaks in Arizona are holy to the Dine and Hopi. The Black Hills, which Lakota call Paha Sapa, hold deep religious meaning for them. Because of these ties, disputes over mining, roads, ski resorts and pipelines on such lands are often religious disputes as well as legal and economic ones.

Time matters as well as place. Many ceremonies follow the seasons: stories told only in winter, ceremonies for first foods such as salmon, wild rice or corn, and summer gatherings. Reading a creation story as if it were a paragraph in a science textbook misses how communities use it. For adherents, such a story teaches how to live in a place, what one owes to the animals and the land, and who one’s relatives are.

The land where Chicago stands has a long Native history. The city’s name comes from a word in the Miami-Illinois language, shikaakwa, for a wild onion or leek that grew along the river. By the eighteenth century, the Potawatomi were the main nation living around the southern end of Lake Michigan. They belong to the Anishinaabe, a family of related peoples who also include the Ojibwe and the Odawa. The three are often called the Council of Three Fires.

Anishinaabe tradition tells of a great migration long ago from the Atlantic coast westward along the Great Lakes, guided by a sacred shell that appeared at each stopping place. The migration ended in lands where food grows on the water. That food is manoomin, wild rice, which remains a sacred food, harvested by canoe in late summer with ceremonies of thanks. Many Anishinaabe teachers also pass on the Seven Grandfather Teachings: wisdom, love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility and truth.

Some Anishinaabe spiritual knowledge was kept by the Midewiwin, often translated as the Grand Medicine Society. Members pass through degrees of initiation and learn healing, songs and teachings. The Midewiwin also recorded some teachings as pictures on birchbark scrolls, which were read by trained members as memory aids. This shows that the line between oral and written is not always sharp. Much Midewiwin knowledge is restricted, and outsiders learn of it only in general terms.

In the Treaty of Chicago of 1833, the Potawatomi, Ojibwe and Odawa gave up their remaining lands around Chicago, and most were forced west within a few years. Potawatomi nations today live in Kansas, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Michigan and Canada. Chicago’s Native story did not end, though. In the 1950s the federal relocation program brought Native people of many nations to the city, and today Chicago has one of the largest urban Native communities in the country. The American Indian Center, founded in 1953, hosts gatherings, classes and a powwow.

Many Native nations practice purification in a sweat lodge, a low, domed structure covered with blankets or hides. Stones heated in a fire are carried in, water is poured over them, and participants pray and sing in the steam and darkness. Leaders explain the lodge as a return to the womb of the earth and a way to cleanse body and spirit before important events. The details differ from nation to nation, and the ceremony is led by people who have been trained and given the right to lead it.

The Sun Dance is a summer ceremony of many Plains nations, including the Lakota, Cheyenne and Blackfoot. Dancers fast, pray and dance for several days around a sacred tree, offering their endurance for the good of their families and people. In some forms dancers make a flesh offering, which adherents understand as giving the only thing that truly belongs to them. Many Sun Dances are closed to outsiders and to cameras, and Lakota leaders have publicly asked non-Native people not to imitate the ceremony.

A powwow is different. It is a public gathering, often intertribal, with drumming, singing, dancing in regalia, food, trading and honoring of veterans and families. It opens with a grand entry, in which dancers enter the circle behind flags and eagle staffs. Powwows include prayer and have sacred elements, but many are open to visitors, who are welcome to watch and sometimes to join intertribal dances when the announcer invites everyone.

Visitors are asked to follow protocol. Regalia is not a costume and should not be touched without permission. Some songs and moments are not to be photographed, and the announcer will say so. If an eagle feather falls to the ground, the dancing stops while veterans or designated people perform a short ceremony to recover it, because eagle feathers are sacred to many nations. Learning the difference between an open powwow and a closed ceremony is part of respecting both.

For much of American history, federal policy aimed to replace Native religions. In 1883 the Department of the Interior issued rules, later called the Code of Indian Offenses, that made the Sun Dance and other ceremonies punishable on reservations. At government and church boarding schools, beginning with the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1879, Native children were separated from their families, given new names, and punished for speaking their languages or practicing their traditions. The founder of Carlisle, Richard Henry Pratt, summed up his aim as ending the Indian in order to save the person.

In 1890, fear of the Ghost Dance, a new movement that promised renewal to Native peoples, contributed to the army’s massacre of Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. Ceremonies went underground, were held in secret, or were kept alive by a few families. In 1934 the federal commissioner of Indian affairs, John Collier, issued a policy supporting Native religious freedom, but pressure and restrictions continued in many places.

In 1978 Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, or AIRFA. It declared that the United States would protect and preserve the right of Native Americans to believe, express and practice their traditional religions, including access to sacred sites, use of sacred objects and freedom to worship through ceremonies. But the law set out a policy without strong ways to enforce it. In 1988 the Supreme Court allowed a logging road through sacred lands in California, and in Employment Division v. Smith (1990) it ruled that Oregon could deny unemployment benefits to two members of the Native American Church fired for using peyote in a ceremony.

Congress responded with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 and with 1994 amendments to AIRFA that protect the ceremonial use of peyote by members of Native nations. Meanwhile, Native communities have led a revival: language classes, restored ceremonies, returned sacred objects under NAGPRA, and new generations learning songs from elders. The winter story in this chapter’s opening is part of that revival, told in a city far from the woods where it began.