However, even today many Indians, even among their young people, still find strength and meaning in their religious beliefs and ceremonies. The school curriculums omitted the riches of the ceremonies and religious beliefs. Risking to create people who lacked their roots and purpose in life and almost destroyed a unique heritage. During the early contacts between the Europeans and the Native Americans, the Europeans found the Indians either a brutal uncivilized savage or as a naive child. Because the Indians did not have any written language, we found it difficult to understand their depth of wisdom. .
We also found it difficult to understand the nomadic life many Indians lead. We are obsessed with material achievements and we fail to see the human and spiritual values in life. The Indian tribes in the Great Plains have great beauty and dignity in their cultural forms. One of the symbols that expresses most completely the Plains Indian concept of the relationship between human beings and the world of nature surrounding them is a cross inscribed within a circle. At the center of the circle uniting within a point the four directions of the cross and all the other quaternaries of the universe, is a human person. One of the most precise ritual expressions of this centrality is found in one of the rites of the Avapaho Sun Dance. In this dance their sacred wheel is placed against each of the four sides of a man's body. Starting from the feet and moving to the head. Then it is turned sunwise four times, until finally it is turned over the head, with the four attached eagle feathers hanging down over the man's breast. So that he is ritually at the center, a vertical axis to the horizontal wheel. This concept of the vertical axis explains the sacredness of the number seven to the Indians, and it is interesting to note that their interpretation is identical to that found in other major religions.
