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This book seeks to explore historical changes in the lifeworld of the Mi'kmaq Indians of Eastern Canada. The Mi'kmaq culture hero Kluskap serves as a key persona in discussing issues such as traditions, changing conceptions of land, and human-environmental relations. In order not to depict Mi'kmaq culture as timeless, two important periods in its history are examined. Within the first period, between 1850 and 1930, Hornborg explores historical evidence of the ontology, epistemology, and ethics - jointly labelled animism - that stem from a premodern Mi'kmaq hunting subsistence. New ways of discussing animism and shamanism are here richly exemplified. The second study situates the culture hero in the modern world of the 1990s, when allusions to Mi'kmaq tradition and to Kluskap played an important role in the struggle against a planned superquarry on Cape Breton. This study discusses the eco-cosmology that has been formulated by modern reserve inhabitants which could be labelled a 'sacred ecology'. Focusing on how the Mi'kmaq are rebuilding their traditions and environmental relations in interaction with modern society, Hornborg illustrates how environmental groups, pan-Indianism, and education play an important role, but so does reserve life. By anchoring their engagement in reserve life the Mi'kmaq traditionalists have, to a large extent, been able to confront both external and internal doubts about their authenticity.

Detraditionalization in late modernity in Western society has affected the domains of both traditional religion and clinical psychotherapy. Sweden, which is said to be one of the most secularized societies in the world, instead, has allowed the public domain to be colonized by new, spiritualized practices. Sold as therapy, the services of new spiritual leaders offer anti-stress techniques to prevent burnout, or leaders are trained to develop their leadership in coaching activities. New varieties of spiritualized therapy are rapidly increasing in contemporary Sweden, typical of which is to have added healing rhetoric to their agenda, such as \"find your inner self' or \"develop your inner potential.\" Four common denominators seem to guide these practices: self-appointed leaders, individualcentered rites, realization of one's Self, and intense emotions. We might also add a fifth aspect: profit. Rites have become a commodity and are sold as liberating practices for burnt-out souls or for people in pursuit of self-realization.

Mi'kmaq Indians' descriptions of journeys between worlds, as we find them in tales collected from the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth, are far too complex to fit into Mircea Eliade's model of shamanism or romantic images of Indians as being \"at one with nature.\" The tales reveal six parallel worlds in which all types of beings belong to families, have wigwams, and search for food. The parallelism between worlds has no significance for beings living their ordinary lives, but it is of the utmost importance for understanding how differing types of beings in the stories (people, animals, supernaturals) achieve interworld journeys. The notions of cosmological deixis and perspectivism are used to explore the narratives and shed light on Mi'kmaq cosmology.

The changing conceptions of place and environment among the Mi'kmaq Indians of Eastern Canada are discussed, focusing on the developments of St Anne's festival, celebrated by the Mi'kmaq each year for centuries. This is a case study of a \"space\" where Indian traditions and Christianity brought by Catholic missionaries meet, clash and merge.

AbstractIt seems that the revitalization of traditional rituals has been an effective way of developing a new embodiment and identity. The ability of the Canadian Mi'kmaq Indians to rework the cultural body, historically imposed on them by the dominant society, opens the way to weeding out destructive patterns unconsciously or consciously embedded historically in their bodies. The ritual opens up opportunities to explore new habitus and to employ the body in a domain shared with like-minded peers so as to facilitate new ways of approaching the world. The rituals thus provide redemptive opportunities for bodies that have been disempowered by hegemonic contexts, and simultaneously offer social affirmation of the new way of being in the world.

This article examines ritual creativity and invention by a pipe carrier in his staging of a kekunit, a godparent ritual, performed in one of Mi'kmaq First Nations (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada). The use of interrituality - borrowing minor ritual acts or elements including objects found in other rituals - becomes in this new performance important building blocks to create a sense of ritual and color this invented rite with tradition and familiarity. Interrituality thus authorizes the new performance and contribute to give the participants feelings of being Mi'kmaq and following the traditional path.

This chapter discusses the various neospiritual and science-like practices which are currently being mobilised in late modern Swedish pursuits of identity, meaning-making, and health. The Swedish Journey therapist claims: To find one's inner potential in an easy way, in just a few hours, and clear out all blockages in a much faster, deeper and more effective way than any other existing method, was a fantastic experience. The expansion of layman therapy and coaching could partly be explained by the fact that it clearly responds to the focus on the individual and self-realisation. The diffuse borderline between coaching and therapy is discussed by Diane Coutu and Carol Kauffman with collected data from 140 leading coaches, data which the authors invited some experts to comment on. The Journey layman therapy is Brandon Bays's specific and personally constructed hybrid between a popular interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis, cellular healing, neospirituality, and Asian philosophy.

IN THE 1960s, many Canadians could watch a television series produced in Halifax, Nova Scotia:The Adventures of Glooscap. The main character, Kluskap,² was a mighty culture hero,³ depicted in old myths among the Mi’kmaq and their neighbor tribes on the east coast of Canada. In the old stories he transformed the landscape by hunting a beaver,⁴ and many Mi’kmaqs knew of his mighty power. But in the 1960s the oral storytelling tradition was looked upon by the dominant white society as emanating from the past, when the Mi’kmaq were hunters and education had not distanced them from premodern beliefs

Mi’kmaq Indians’ descriptions of journeys between worlds, as we find them in tales collected from the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth, are far too complex to fit into Mircea Eliade’s model of shamanism or romantic images of Indians as being \"at one with nature.\" The tales reveal six parallel worlds in which all types of beings belong to families, have wigwams, and search for food. The parallelism between worlds has no significance for beings living their ordinary lives, but it is of the utmost importance for understanding how differing types of beings in the stories (people, animals, supernaturals) achieve interworld journeys. The notions of cosmological deixis and perspectivism are used to explore the narratives and shed light on Mi’kmaq cosmology.