Indigenous people and their religious traditions have countless attributes. Their religious beliefs have a lot to do with different spirits, myths, rituals, gods, ancestors, etc and play an every day role in their lives. The significant positions are played by a group of people called shamans. Shamans are people who can go beyond their human weaknesses and have relationships with spiritual beings. Shamans are essentially regular human beings who follow the religious and sacred path in a much more profound and more focused way. Shamans can be a hereditary characteristic but a typical human being can be one also. Shaman's visions have been altered from training, disciplines, and rituals. Through this training the Shaman can gain intelligence and power and then can use it to do many things. Shamans can heal sicknesses, lead the souls of the dead, and provide direction for hunting or planting, and much more. All of these are very beneficial to indigenous societies. Also they have to have a close to death ill experience and be reborn again before they can become a Shaman. .
There is an example of a Siberian shaman who once said that he was very ill for a long time and then one day, in a dream, was brought to an ancestral spirit. He said that in this dream he was cut to pieces on a black table. Then he was thrown into a kettle to be boiled. They found a hole in a bone located around his ribs. It was called an excess bone. He said that if you look across the hole in this bone and see all and know all. And that was how he supposedly became a shaman.
Indigenous peoples base a lot of their relationships with nature from their myths and rituals. They mostly believe in many gods and each god is the god of something. For instance, a tribe may have a god of rain. If you worship and pray to this god you are mostly hoping that it will keep the rain in line by helping provide moisture to their crops so they can have food.
