Shamanism and Christianity: Modern-day Tlingit Elders Look at the Past
Author(s)
Kan, Sergei
Abstract
Shamanism, a key element of the precontact Tlingit culture, was seen by Christian missionaries as one of the worst manifestations of paganism. A relentless campaign waged against the shamans by the missionaries, with the help of military and civil authorities, succeeded: by the final decades of the nineteenth century, the Tlingit had converted to Christianity, and by the 1930s most of the shamans had disappeared. In their effort to reconcile Christianity and the “traditional culture,” modern-day Tlingit elders construct various interpretations of shamanism. The article examines these accounts as indigenous history and as ideological statments that challenge the notion of the inferiority of the aboriginal Tlingit religion to Christianity.
