Beliefs Essay
The beliefs of each group varies and suffered tremendously when a greedy violent group (aka Russian trappers) took over with nothing else on their minds except profit. With the research I have found there are only three things that all six groups had in common. They all believed in some sort of being they looked up to, all had a respect for their resources especially the ones they relied on, had some sort of spiritual recycling/reincarnation and all had a set of rules more specifically socially accepted and socially rejected norms.
All the groups had interesting facts and variations of beliefs. Certain features of their beliefs were common, but not all had them. All of the groups except the Yupiit believed in spiritual forces such as good and bad spirits or guardian spirits. The Inupiat, Athabaskans, Tlingit and Haida which are only half of the groups I studied had shamans. The shamans worked as magicians, fortune teller, and healers. In the Tlingit and Haida commonly buried the shamans off the somewhere separate from the village out of respect and fear instead of cremating them like everyone else that died. The only groups with physical illustrations of their deity are Unangan/Aleut. The good and evil spirits I mentioned before are what they believed to affect the everyday life of the Unangan/Aleut and Sugpiaq/Alutiiq. Unangan/Aleut and Sugpiaq/Alutiiq also believed in an upper plane of existence and a lower one. The third and last similarity between the Unangan/Aleut and Sugpiaq/Alutiiq was that both believed in some sort of sun man that had some sort of correlation with the sun. The Unangan also believed in wearing special “magical” charms to increase the chances of hunting success. They believed there was a purest being was called “llam sue” and that he dwells in the sky. As for the Yupiit, they believed in a cosmic wide presence that established a working way of life and controls existence itself. Powerful beings are in charge of the reincarnation of animals and humans. They would teach the children that inappropriate behavior would affect the whole group negatively especially the ones they cared most about. The Inupiat were based around