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Indians 101: Paiute spirituality [1]
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Date: 2025-09-09
The Paiute homelands were in a high desert area known as the Great Basin. The designation Paiute does not define a single politically unified tribe, but numerous small bands which share common cultural features, including language and spiritual ceremonies. The various bands were often tied together through kinship brought about by intermarriage between the bands.
The Paiutes are generally divided into three distinct groups: (1) the Northern Paiute whose traditional territory included much of Nevada and Oregon; (2) the Owens Valley Paiute, who lived just east of what is now Yosemite National Park; and (3) the Southern Paiute whose territory included parts of California, southern Nevada, and southern Utah.
Like hunting and gathering people throughout the world, Paiute religion is based on animism: a religious view that sees souls in all things. These souls provide animism—life—in all things. For animists, all things are alive and have souls. It is not just animate beings such as plants and animals which have souls, but also inanimate features--including specific geological features, such as hills, mountains, rock formations, springs, rivers, and lakes, as well as weather phenomena such as clouds and lightning, and astronomical elements including the stars, moon, and sun. This means that humans can communicate with them. More importantly, it also means that these other living things can talk to humans.
The Paiute worldview perceives all physical features and elements of the world as being spiritually alive. These spiritual beings have a power—puhá—which controls the world and thus impacts the fate of human beings. Paiute spirituality was traditionally based on the acquisition of power through visions and dreams in which these spiritual beings would appear.
Ceremonies
As with other tribes, ceremonies were an important part of Paiute spirituality. In his chapter in North American Indians in Historical Perspective, anthropologist Marvin Opler writes:
“Supernaturalism centered in curing rituals to maintain life, vigor, and mobility, and also in ceremonies at birth, puberty, and death, the events of natural biological significance.”
Among the Paiutes, for a person to become a healer—often called a doctor—they would have to have received a special spiritual blessing. In her book The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization, anthropologist Alice Beck Kehoe writes:
“Doctors gifted to heal the sick had bouts of illness before realizing that they were being called by a spirit to master the disease. These doctors safeguarded their hard-won mastery over an illness by obeying the spirit’s warning to follow certain practices or precautions, such as bathing at dawn or avoiding salt, and prayed and made small offerings to express their gratitude for the spirit’s aid.”
Just as healing doctors acquired spiritual aid to master illness, there were also Paiute weather doctors who acquired spiritual aid to control the weather. These weather doctors controlled storms and winds; they could make rain, snow, or drought.
Among the Paiutes, dancing in a circle is a way of opening the dancers to spiritual influence. By dancing along the path of the sun—clockwise to the left—the dancers symbolize the fact that the community lives through the circle of days.
The Round Dance is both a ceremonial and social dance. The dance is often associated with prayers for health, for the welfare of the people, fish, and animals, and for the return of fish and other foods. In their book The Encyclopedia of Native American Religions, Arlene Hirschfelder and Paulette Molin report:
“One form consisted of alternating male and female participants who formed a circle around a center tree or post. Facing inward, they locked arms or fingers and danced in a clockwise movement. The dance was sometimes held for several nights in succession.”
Among the Northern Paiute the Round Dance was traditionally performed prior to the fishing season in May, the jackrabbit communal drives in November, and the pine nut harvests in the fall. In his book Corbett Mack: The Life of a Northern Paiute, Michael Hittman (1996a: 279) writes that the Round Dance is performed by:
“Northern Paiute men and women who gathered from far and wide, painting their faces and dancing till morning around a center pole to the instrumentless singing of ritual officiants.”
In his entry on the Northern Paiute in the Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Michael Hittman reports:
“Round Dance ceremonies affirmed social unity after months of separation, and concentrated participants’ energies toward the subsistence tasks ahead.”
According to oral tradition, the Round Dance existed in the mythic past when Coyote ruled the world. It continues to be performed.
One Paiute round dance that spread to other tribes in the Great Basin and California was the short-lived 1869-1870 Ghost Dance. This ceremony originated from a vision which empowered the Paiute healer Wodziwob (Gray Hair; also known to non-Indians as Fish Lake Joe) to lead the souls of those who had died in previous months back to their mourning families.
Note: Wodziwob’s Ghost Dance should not be confused with Wovoka’s Ghost Dance which started 20 years later.
In the Ghost Dance Ceremony, people painted themselves and danced the traditional round dance. In this dance men, women, and children joined in alternating circles of males and female dancing to the left with fingers interlocked with the dancers on each side. As the dancers stopped to rest, Wodziwob would fall into a trance. When he returned, he would report that he had journeyed to the land of the dead, he had seen the souls of the dead happy in their new land, and that he had extracted promises from them to return to their loved ones in perhaps three or four years. He would also bring back messages from departed relatives.
The dance was performed for at least five nights in succession. The dancers decorated themselves with red, black, and white paint. During the dance, some of the dancers would receive visions giving them new songs and ultimately would restore Indian resources. The new dance quickly spread to the northern California tribes.
Sweat Lodge
Most, but not all, American Indian cultures use the sweat lodge, sweat house, or sweat bath. Inside a simple dome-shaped structure, water is poured over heated rocks to produce steam. Sitting in total darkness, the participants are purified.
The sweat lodge was, and still is, an important part of Paiute spiritual life. Writing about the Owens Valley Paiute, Julian Steward, in his 1938 Smithsonian Institution paper Pantubiji’ an Owens Valley Paiute, reports:
“Band unity was somewhat expressed in and heightened by use of a communal sweat house.”
Death
Among the Southern Paiutes, the deceased were quickly buried under rocks or cremated. Mentioning the name of a dead person was avoided.
At funerals and memorials, the Southern Paiutes sing Salt Songs to help the deceased with their journey. According to Philip Klasky and Melissa Nelson, in an article in News from Native California, the Salt Songs
“…describe the sacred journey of the Salt Song Trail, a path from the vermillion cliffs of the Colorado Plateau through the high desert to the spectacular California coast and then through the mountains, sand deserts, palm oases, and the Colorado River back to the high plateau.”
The primary Paiute funeral or death ceremony was the Mourning Ceremony or Cry. This ceremony was held from three months to a year after the death of a relative. During this ceremony a number of items would be destroyed: buckskins, eagle feathers, rabbit skin blankets, nets, baskets, and weapons. In their chapter in the Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 11: Great Basin, Isabel Kelly and Catherine Fowler report:
“The outlay for food and goods was enormous, hence such ceremonies were infrequent.”
Relatives gave the ceremony so that they could sleep and eat well.
Among the Owens Valley Paiutes, the Mourning Ceremony was usually held in the fall. During the ceremony, mourners’ grief was symbolically washed away. All of the dead from the previous year were commemorated by burning their personal articles
Among the Southern Paiutes, the Mourning Ceremony would be held at the conclusion of the three or four dayslong Fall Festival which would bring together several villages.
More about American Indian religions
Indians 101: A very short overview of Mandan religion
Indians 101: A very short overview of Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) religion
Indians 301: A Yavapai messiah
Indians 101: Tribal medicine bundles among Northern Plains tribes
Indians 101: Traditional Shawnee religion
Indians 201: Peyote and the Native American Church
Indians 201: Eschiti, Comanche medicineman
Indians 201: The Omaha Venerable Man
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