North American Native Art Articles

Native American art, hand-made and performance, is diverse, because there are so many Native American tribes. But certain generalities can be made about this art, because many of their core spiritual and religious beliefs are similar all across the tribes.

One prevalent trait of all Native American art is the use of animistic themes. These are themes that stem both from lore and from shamanic teachings and experiences. Animism asserts that all beings and all things have a dynamic spiritual essence, so that in a sense all things are in unity, as some modern Western physicists have also come to conclude.

Animism does not negate duality, such as good vs. bad, male vs. female, and so forth; but it does transcend dualities to try to get to what it considers the original Source of all matter, energy, objects, and living beings. Animism is likely the oldest spiritual perspective in the world.

When animism is depicted in art, there can be found abstract shapes such as spirals and zigzag lines carved or painted on it. There will also be depictions of therianthropes. Now therianthropes are half-man, half-beast images. These are very important because they follow the abstract shapes that were made reference to in shamanic vision-journeys; and it's from their shamanistic views and their pragmatic environmentalism that all Native American art essentially springs.

So there will be depicted deer with a man's head, or a man with antlers (this is a very powerful therianthrope and seems to be universal, or that is, globally cross-cultural), or a buffalo with arms and hands like a man who shoots a bow and arrow. These therianthropes are considered to be powerful spirit guides who help the shaman walk the road between the two Worlds and provide him wisdom to impart when he mentally gets back to his tribe.

These same therianthropes make their way into the Native American performance art, and that is why the Christian Europeans, when first encountering their ritual mimes and dances were appalled at such irreverent "paganism" that worshiped animals. But it's not animal worship. Native Americans have traditionally been expert hunters, and one of the ways that they mastered the hunting of an animal was to wear its skin and behave like it, so as to "get into" that animal so that they could more successfully hunt it.

Native American dances are also magical dances, they aren't merely for aesthetics and they aren't ballet-type stories, although many of them do tell stories. Native American dance is meant to channel spiritual energies or reanimate ancient stories that can be caused to re-appear in the world today.

There is also the dream catcher as a repeated and pervasive theme. We have all seen the dream catcher, which originated with the Ojibwa Nation. This is intended to be a magical web that captures bad dreams for the sleeper so that they can be removed, while the good dreams remain in the conscience. The idea of all creation being part of a spider's web is another Native American spiritual concept that is similar to modern physics.

Too many Native Americans, the most sacred animal is the wolf, and the wolf is often depicted in all manner of ways and styles in Native American art. The Wolf Tribe supposedly was the most advanced of all the original tribes and brought spiritual teachings to everyone else. Also widely depicted in Native American art is Kokopelli, the "Trickster" (sometimes also depicted as the Raven), a dancing, flute-playing shapeshifter who loves mankind but is very mischievous.

Inuit Art is Hard Work and Fuelled by Their Philosophy

The art of the Inuit, Native Americans of Canada and Alaska, reflects their deep connection the earth and sea. The Inuit have the traditional Native American deep reverence for the earth and nature and are among the world's oldest line of true "environmentalists". The Inuit are also pragmatists: they generally have not been taking man-made global warming or "Big Oil" alarmism seriously.

The Inuit philosophy is that change is constant in nature, and they feel they have benefited by leasing their land to companies such as Exxon-Mobile. What this all comes down to is that the art of the Inuit is deeply reflective of their traditional environmentalism and their pragmatism, out of which comes their very earthy and shaman-based spirituality.

The Kitikmeot Region in the Central Arctic is one of three regions in Nunavut which is Canada's newest territory and which is where some of the most highly prized Inuit art is made and can be found. There are nearly 5000 people living in the Kitikmeot region, and they are organized in seven hamlets: Bathurst Inlet, Cambridge Bay, Gjoa Haven, Kugaaruk, Kugluktuk, Taloyoak, and Omingmaktok.

In the eastern part of Canada, the Inuit usually use the available material of their liking, which is dark serpentine stone. In keeping with their reverence for the earth, the Inuit love to carve works of art out of stone, for stone is the foundation of the whole world in spiritual terms. It is strong and fixed, lending itself to constancy and security and protection, unlike the fluidity and constant change found in the waters, the seas.

But this is important because in Kitikmeot, the dark serpentine stone is not to be found. Instead, the Inuit artists here use dolomite, a white stone. This art is highly prized for it is exceedingly difficult to find in the open marketplace.

Out of this white stone, the Inuit of the Kitikmeot carve igloos with removable lids and detailed scenes on their inner walls; dioramas, dolls, and birds from musk ox horn; and very realistically carved animals of their world such as polar bears, which are sometimes also deliberately styled to show forth the Inuit belief that the supernatural is embedded in the natural.

It should be kept in mind that the Inuit artists must travel far and wide over cold, difficult terrain much of the time to find a suitable piece of material from which they will carve a work of art. To them, this quest for the right piece of material is all part of the creative process and it's taken as seriously as the carving itself. They try to listen to an inner voice that guides them to just the right area and then helps them to pick just the right piece of stone with which to work.

When the piece of stone is brought back to their home to work on, the story of their journey to find that stone often gets encoded into the art with special markings, or the overall shape and proportion that the work takes on. The Inuit try to draw forth the spiritual from the material at every turn.