Essay about Burial Rituals of Native American Culture

As they are wrapping up Teofilo’s corpse, Leon ties a gray feather in the old man’s hair with a piece of twine. Ken hands him paint and he decorates the old man’s face with stripes of white, blue, yellow and green stripes. Leon tosses pinches of cornmeal and pollen into the air. The narrator does not describe the significance of these actions, but it is obvious that these are ritualistic activities that have to do with funeral rites. The men wrap the corpse in a red blanket and carry it up to their truck. At this point the reader becomes aware that the men must have anticipated that Teofilo was dead when they went out to the sheep encampment. Why else would they have brought the paint, cornmeal, pollen, and red blanket? The men appear to be filling their parts in a predetermined drama. Before placing the blanket-wrapped body in the back of the truck, Leon addresses Teofilo’s corpse: “Bring us rain clouds, Grandfather.” (Silko, p. 358).

Different cultures, countries, religions, and community with various behaviors and rituals that guides their belief and action when a loved one pass away. Religious and spiritual belief, type of life after death, superstitious beliefs after death and beliefs towards the meaning of life are all based on tradition and death ritual.

Death is inevitable part of human experience, which is often associated with fear of unknown, separation, and spiritual connection. Death is an individual experience, which is based on unique perceptions and beliefs. Fear of death and dying seems to be a universal phenomenon, which is closely associated with apprehension and uneasiness. Death is allied with permanent loss, thus personal experiences of grief are similar in many different cultures. There are different mourning ceremonies, traditions, and behaviors to express grief, but the concept of permanent loss remains unchanged in cross cultural setting. With this paper I will identify cross-cultural perspectives on death and dying, and will analyze

Every individual experiences the act of death, and most persons experience the death of someone they know of. Whether family, kin, or someone infamous, the living deal with the process of dying. Anthropology seeks to understand the universal process of death ritual and how different cultures deal with death differently. An anthropologist can extract social values of a given culture, past or present, from how death ceremony is practiced. Such values could be regarding political hierarchy or an individual’s status in a society, and about a culture’s spiritual or religious faith. By exploring death ceremony in ancient Egypt, contemporary Hindu death practice in India, and current North American funerary rites, it can be illustrated that

The text Burial Rites written by Hannah Kent focuses on the true story of the last woman to be executed in Iceland, her punishment for playing part in the murder of two men. She is sent to wait out her days on the farm of a district officer, Jón Jónsson with his two daughters and wife. Naturally, the family are horrified to have a convicted murderer in their midst. Borne from this, the family refuse to talk to her. A young man, Toti is appointed as her spiritual guardian in the last days of her life, throughout the text, he attempts to redeem her soul by asking her to recount her life.

In this paper, we will discuss the different death rituals performed in different cultures. We view death rituals from Native Americans, Africans, those of the Chinese decent, and endocannibalism from the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea. Death is universal to all people in every culture. Responses to how one deals with death and dying differ greatly. Death rituals are usually based on beliefs. This can come from religion, history, language, and art.

Due to the wide range of habitats in North America, different native religions evolved to match the needs and lifestyles of the individual tribe. Religious traditions of aboriginal peoples around the world tend to be heavily influenced by their methods of acquiring food, whether by hunting wild animals or by agriculture. Native American spirituality is no exception. Traditional Lakota spirituality is a form of religious belief that each thing, plant and animal has a spirit. The Native American spirituality has an inseparable connection between the spirituality and the culture. One cannot exist without the other.

The Native Americans have been in North America since about 13,000 B.C.E. and even left traces of art in the state of Ohio. However, those traces have been messed with over the years and an act had to be put in place to protect their burial mounds in particular. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was put in place in 1990 to stop people from removing artifacts out of their graves without meeting certain requirements and have some of them be returned as well. They do not want any more disturbances to the burial ground as it is disrespectful to the tribes and it makes it harder on archeologists to identify the item, where it came from, and how old

The spirit travels to another world where it influences the lives of the Native American people. Although all Native Americans believe that the deceased should be cared for, burial practices differ based on the tribe and the location. A Native American funeral is typically held in a church or a spiritual place. In “The Man to Send Rain Clouds,” by Leslie Marmon Silko of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, also known as Kawaik, states, “Why didn’t you tell me he was dead? I could have brought the Last Rites anyway,” which was said by the priest. He believed in this Roman Catholic way of preparing the dying person’s soul for death. The Last Rites is a sacrament where the priest rubs a dying person with holy oil and prays for that person’s salvation. Leon, who found Teofilo’s body, doesn’t believe in the Last Rites ritual and is the reason why he didn’t tell the priest that Teofilo had already died. Leon believes that the deceased body goes back to nature while the priest believes that it is the necessary Christian act of performing the ritual. Deceased loved ones, along with the food supply, allowed Native Americans to stay in the same location to care for the body and soul of their loved

Judaism: Ritual of death Death is the cycle of life. Each cultural and religion has there own way of comprehending a loss of a loved one. Certain communities believe in reincarnation, while others believe in eternal heaven or hell. With each belief, each community has their own ritual and traditions.

Ceremonies in regards to internment and burial service cremation speak to the convictions, heavenly cosmology and judicious development of individuals and their traditions. Today, the normal individual is liable to carelessness mulling over or investigating about conventions of internments and funerals. The explanation for this is that the present world is more about youthful life and existence with a dug in fear of death covered in one side of the psyche. Demise is an unpreventable piece of living. Archeologists seek and research the historical backdrop of old human advancements by finding internment and memorial service hones that diverse societies have deserted. These discoveries unveil more about the way social orders have lived and from

Mankind’s history of burial practices and funeral customs are as old as civilization itself. There is no specific way to planning a funeral. Every civilization and culture has provided for their dead in different ways. Religion and personal beliefs play an important role in the burial practices and funeral customs of a given culture or civilization. Furthermore, each civilization and cultured ever studied have three things in common: some type of funeral rites, rituals, and ceremonies; A sacred place for the dead; and memorialization of the dead. As far back as the time of Christ, burials have been noted to take place. In time burial and funeral customs have become very distinct, interesting and

Religion and culture teach rituals that families must follow during the burial and funeral service. In some cultures, the wake and time for mourning are quick, in others, they can take several weeks before the burial occurs. Death is the end, some cultures rejoice others mourn, but between all cultures and religions, it is a time to remember the one who died.

Depending on different cultures ritual burial has a certain structure and a change in human behavior. It represents a recognition of life and death, and sometimes a belief in life after death. Religion in its earliest forms, being one of the first forms of etiology, had something to say about life and death. That’s why the act of burial it’s a performance because each single action in the rite originates from something that had a meaning explained by religion. When a human comes to life there’s this informational void that surrounds him. We tend to fill in this void as a community with a projection of ourselves into it, and one of the earliest forms of this is religion. “Religion shows every sign of remaining widespread, almost universal, probably because it helps meet certain social and psychological needs”. This makes the rite of burial not just an ordinary human “performance” but something with a bigger meaning embedded in

Today the society is looking for ways to ease life and to find solutions for problems which oppress our lives and make it hard to live through. Because of many reasons, the traditional burials in this century are becoming a problem. (Prothero,2001). The fact that they cover a lot of land to build cemeteries and other things that are attached to these traditional burials is enough for us to search for a practical solution. About a century ago the term "cremation" was unknown to many people. It is believed that it began to be practiced during the early Stone Age and still exists today. Since that time cremations have been made all