Given the many geographical, cultural, and spiritual differences among indigenous peoples in North America, compiling a historical narrative of religious themes in American Indian fiction is a complicated enterprise. Native groups do share common traditions of oral storytelling and episodes of contact with waves of colonizing Europeans. Themes that manifest themselves in this fiction include colonialism and postcolonialism, identity and alienation, the loss of land, relocation, memory, healing, religious freedom, the repatriation of sacred objects and skeletal remains, experience with missionaries and boarding schools, cultural continuity, and community building. Native authors are politically and historically conscious, and, in a very real sense, their characters are struggling to survive in the modern world.

Native spirituality encompasses many traditions of belief, from Laguna creation stories to Ojibwa trickster tales, from the Sun Dance to the Ghost Dance, from puberty ceremonies to vision...