For the annual fall renewal of her shaman spirit, Mee Vang Yang will soon ritually redecorate the tall altar in her living room where she keeps her father’s ring-shaped shaman bells.

She carried them across the Mekong River as the family fled the Communist takeover of her native Laos four decades ago. Today, they facilitate the connection to the spiritual world she needs to help fellow refugees and their American-raised children who seek...

A sacred Native American headdress is set to be returned to its original owners, after being displayed in a UK museum for more than a century.

Exhibited by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter since 1920, the origins of the stunning ceremonial headdress traces back to the Blackfoot Nation of Alberta, Canada.

Known as a ‘bird bundle’, it features eagle feathers, blue indigo bunting feathers, red-tailed hawk feathers, buffalo horns, porcupine quills and brass bells.

The item was identified as a ‘sacred ceremonial item’ in 2013 by...

Sheetal Deo was shocked when she got a letter from her Queens apartment building’s co-op board calling her Diwali decoration “offensive” and demanding she take it down.

“My decoration said ‘Happy Diwali’ and had a swastika on it,” said Deo, a physician, who was celebrating the Hindu festival of lights.

The equilateral cross with its legs bent at right angles is a millennia-old sacred symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism that represents peace and good fortune, and was also used widely by Indigenous people worldwide in a similar vein.

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“No wonder this stuff’s getting so damn popular,” exclaims Shirley to her friend Joan at the start of George Romero’s 1972 film “Hungry Wives.” Joan and Shirley, two neglected middle-age suburban housewives, are on their way to a tarot reading.

What’s getting “so damn popular” is witchcraft.

“The religion offers a retreat” for repressed women, Shirley notes, adding, “Christ, what other kind of women are there?”

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Latinos across Nevada, especially those with Mexican ancestry, gathered at churches this weekend for prayer of the rosary and novena, a nine-day prayer and meditation; multiple mass services; traditional Aztec dance performances; and to sing las mañanitas, a birthday song, at midnight. 

It’s all part of the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a significant spiritual event celebrating the manifestation of the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus Christ, in what is now modern-day Mexico. Her history is rooted in the nation's history of colonization.

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The U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday it has reached a settlement with the Michigan Department of Corrections to change the state's policy limiting worship and religious activities for prisoners, as well as the kosher diet fed to Jewish inmates.

Under the agreement, Michigan corrections officials agreed to eliminate its policy that required a minimum of five people for religious services or activities. It will also remove a prohibition on group religious practices for Hindus, Yorubas, Hebrew Israelites and Thelema practitioners, unless there's...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — When a Tlingit elder dies, leaders from the Alaska Native tribe’s two houses, the Raven and Eagle clans, typically come together along with family and well-wishers for a memorial ceremony featuring displays of traditional tribal regalia.

After elder, tribal leader and college professor David Katzeek died last month, the tribe scrambled to find a way to observe their sacred traditions while keeping everyone safe during the pandemic, with coronavirus cases surging in the state.

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For some years now, cultural appropriation has been installed in our modern society to judge the practices of some individuals who extract elements of a culture or tradition that doesn't belong to them and use it for their own benefit. Sometimes the accusation is confusing, especially considering that no culture is pure — not even our DNA is pure — and especially in a global world. 

However, appropriation can also be seen as an act of violence, especially when its legitimate bearers are made invisible or muzzled and the privilege, which takes...

“It almost seems like it never happened,” Pua Case tells Vox about her time in the encampment at the foot of Maunakea, a dormant volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii and the tallest mountain in the world. While she lives only a 30-minute drive away, she says, “I have to go back and look at videos or pictures to remind myself that we were really up there.”

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Taiwanese people living in the United States face a dilemma when loved ones die. Many families worry that they might not be able to carry out proper rituals in their new homeland.

As a biracial Taiwanese-American archaeologist living in Idaho and studying in Taiwan, I am discovering the many faces of Taiwan’s blended cultural...

Across the country and around the world, people are calling for justice following the death of George Floyd in Minnesota and the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, in Georgia, and Breonna Taylor, in Kentucky. Floyd died after being pinned to the ground by a white police officer for almost nine minutes. Two white men were arrested and charged with Arbery's death. A third man filmed them chasing him through the streets of a South Georgia community. He was later shot. Plainclothes police officers shot Taylor in her apartment while serving a "no-knock" warrant. 

For more than a week,...

Arriving home on one of the last regular flights before pandemic restrictions went into effect in mid-February, Sarah James got to her house to find two caribous worth of meat in her freezer.

Since flights have become intermittent to this indigenous village 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle, said James, a leader of the Gwich’in Athabascan people, the store periodically runs out of basics like meat and sugar. Subsistence hunting, fishing and gathering have been more critical than ever.

To ensure that Arctic Village's population of fewer than 200 have enough to eat...

A ritual in May in a field near Salina changed Abbi Han's life.Han had never been a caretaker for plants. Now, the research resident at the Land Institute is responsible for the survival of a diverse smattering of crops with traditions steeped in American Indian culture.Every day, Han checks on the plants she sowed in May, watering them from a well as needed and pollinating by hand to avoid cross-breeding from an industrial corn operation across the road.Following the advice of Taylor Keen,

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As plans for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border are raising fears that the ancestral lands of Native Americans in the south will be divided, indigenous people in the north are calling attention to their own border problems.The United States and Canada share the largest undefended border in the world, but free passage across it for indigenous tribes is easier in one direction than the other, tribal leaders and immigration lawyers said at the Arctic Encounter Symposium this week.A tribal member born in Canada can come to the United States to work or live without the paperwork...

By now, most political followers are aware that the 116th Congress is the most diverse in history. It includes the first Native American women — Sharice Davids, D-Kan., and Debra

Source: Although Congress is still overwhelmingly Christian, it is changing [faith & values] | Food + Living | lancasteronline.com