Manitou and Other Myths

Question: I've seen a few Native American pantheons, but they are all just that - cross-cultural conglomerates of cultures that really have nothing to do with each other, besides a shared geographic location, which in my opinion is a bit like making a European pantheon - it makes about as much sense, and you get no real feel for each pantheon's myths and ideas. How do you plan to tackle this question?

Oof. Native American gods. One of the bogeys of Scion.

Ideally, each Native American religion needs its own pantheon; while some of them do have overlap, lumping all the Native American gods together in one set doesn't make any sense at all. Why would you make distinctions between Irish and Gaul and Welsh and Basque over in Europe, but then try to smash all the gods of a much larger geographic area together and call them the same? The answer is usually that the writer doesn't know a great deal about Native American religions and just has a handful of scattered gods from various different nations they want to have playable, and the end result is that Coyote is rubbing elbows with Sedna and other such nonsenses. (I suspect there's also a bit of Eurocentricness at work, too - most players of Scion are in Europe and the US and have European ethnicities and backgrounds, so it's natural that they'd be more drawn to the gods of their own misty heritages than someone else's.)

We personally have not tackled it yet, mostly because it hasn't been needed for our games in quite a while and we haven't seen much player interest in having Native American deities available as playable parent gods. As you can see from the map on our download page, there are a ton of discrete pantheons to choose from down there, and it would be complete craziness to try to declare that the Hopi and the Algonquin are the same people, so we're for the moment assuming that there are just as many different, unique pantheons at work in the Americas as there are in Europe. The one we're most likely to try to firm up for play first is the Inuit religion, since a few PCs have ties there and it's also one of the easiest to try to convert to Scion's format, but there are a lot of different options available. Someday I should do a poll. (Can you tell I love polls?)

I have seen a lot of explanations and justifications for running all of the Native Americans together; writeups often run with the idea that the European pantheons and/or Titans destroyed them so thoroughly on invasion that they are now a conglomerate of the last survivors banding together. Considering how thoroughly European and Asian religions have destroyed one another throughout history, however, I have trouble seeing why it should be different in the case of the Americas, particularly since the Aztlanti just south seem to have held it together even without things like government recognition or reservation land. I've also seen some advance the idea that the Native American religions really are all being run by the same group of gods who just happen to be master shapeshifters and appear differently in different areas, but that solution strikes me as lazy at best - you can believe that there are ten thousand nitty gritty little pantheons in Europe, but there's only one in all of North America?

I'm not a Native North American expert, sad to say; most of my research lies south of the border, which hampers me some in making too many judgment calls until I have some more reading and discussion under my belt. But, just as I wouldn't claim that the gods of the Slavs and the the Finns and the Albanians are all from the same religion, so I wouldn't decide that the Zuni and the Cherokee and the Huron are worshiping the same gods. It'd be an exercise in futility and oversimplification.

As far as I can tell, the best solution is to give them their own specific pantheons, depending on what you need in your game (want to play with kachinas and Kokopelli? A Hopi pantheon is just what you need. More interested in Changing Woman and Talking God? Start work on a Navajo pantheon, and so forth). No other solutions I've seen have held water for me, but if anyone has fresh ideas in the comments, I'd love to hear them.