Native American Religion

" Oral Tradition is the facies of traditional knowledge concerned with the preservation, presentation, and explanation of events in now extinct generations. In preliterate socities it is taken as a testimony of cultural tenure, a transmittal of the essentiality of identity in a people's journey from ancestral to contemporary times. Except when captured in writing, as in journals of exploration or enthnographers' notes, it exists only in living memories and is passed on verbally with or without supporting ceremony or other props...Among many Native Americans, oral tradtion is respected not only as legitimate repository of knowledge about the past, but especially when entwined with sacred or religious beliefs, as is more often than not the case, as the soul, genuine, and irvariant source" - Ronald J. Mason pg. 240 "Archaeology and Native North American Oral Traitions"