Family and spirit

For many Indian peoples, kinship was essential to the stability, integrity and survival of the community. For example, being a nephew or daughter means playing a specific role with clearly defined rights and obligations in relation to others. Foreigners arriving in the villages, including white prisoners, were often regarded as "cousins" or "brothers", which guaranteed their stable social position and the integrity of the group.

The elders played a very significant role. By tradition, grandparents were responsible for almost all of their children's upbringing because parents were believed to be too busy with daily tasks and had not yet attained the wisdom to pass it on to their children. The elders were and remain the source of food and moral formation, as well as the recipient of the mythological and spiritual heritage of each people, as narrators. First of all, they are responsible forining the sacred customs of the community.

Indians often see the community as an extension of the natural world, with abundant spirits. Clans (or families) and sacred communities were believed to be descendants of an animal or totem, a term that anthropologists have adopted from the ojibwa odem language, which translates as "village". For example, the Iroquois are organized into clans called "turtle clan", "bear clan" and "wolf clan," with a mother clan leading each.

The totemic animal may have helped an ancestor hunt or find the way home. In other situations, a member of the clan is looking for an animal to turn it into the totem of his group.

According to members of the Osage spider clan, on one occasion, a child participated in an expedition to the forest in search of a totemic animal. He found the fabric of a large spider as he followed the footprints of a deer. She questioned the reason for her clash with the spider. The young man replied that he was following the footsteps of a deer because he was looking for a strong animal to turn it into a symbol of his clan. The spider claimed that, although it looked like a tiny and weak creature, it had the exceptional virtue of patience.

Moreover, sooner or later they were all captured by them, as happened to man. The boy was impressed by that explanation and returned to his clan, where he adopted the spider as a totem animal.

Individuals who were not part of a totem-based society or clan were able to develop a personal relationship with a Totem animal, which became their spiritual guide. It was often believed that clans and people adopted the characteristics of the spiritual totem. It was said, for example, that the members of the bear clan were extremely strong and fierce. The mice are very short-sighted, and the mice-clan cheyenes adopted a short world view: they paid much attention to the near and present things and little or nothing to the long or future things.