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Native American Creation Myths Essay

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In all cultures, areas of the world and religious orientations, one of the initial and essential elements discussed is how the world came to be. These creation stories contain the base of information for the respective belief system, as well as a unified understanding of how those particular groups of individuals were put into existence alongside their surrounding organisms and structures. Many creation myths, created by ancestors of the believers, serve as a guide to the remainder of religious beliefs and practices that follow. As a creation myth guides a belief system, it tells of the fundamentals of the faith organization; telling of monotheistic or polytheistic beliefs, certain laws or rules of life, positive and negative elements of the …show more content…

These stories hold a definitive plot and inform the culture of spiritual and theological values. The Native American culture, widely known for their extensive practice of oral tradition, shares “about 300 versions or myths in all,” (Rooth 497) out of the 562 federally recognized tribes in the United States. As stories are passed from generation to generation, new meaning and symbolism is interpreted, developing the traditions of the Native American culture. Although these traditions develop and grow, they fundamentally remain constant with elaborate descriptions of characters, scenes, and relationships between objects or living things. Although the traditional Christian creation story in the book of Genesis that the modern western world is familiar with is in fact a creation myth, it differs from the Native American versions of myths theologically and in formatting. The biblical story of creation is Christianity’s base of their beliefs much like the Native Americans, but the biblical Christian teaching is presented in a written fashion and has not changed in wording, meaning, or shown any signs of being developed by later generations. Native Americans discuss imagined causations of the ways of the world and spread them orally, allowing room for various interpretations in a creative and poetic

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