Review of Amerindian Rebirth: Reincarnation Belief Among North American Indians and Inuit edited by Antonia Mills and Richard Slobodin

• Main Author: Brown, Jennifer S. H.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln 1996
• Subjects: Other International and Area Studies; Arctic; Pacific; Indian; inuit; Subarctic
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsresearch/305; https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/greatplainsresearch/article/1308/viewcontent/11__Amerindian_Rebirth__Reincarnation_Belief_Among_North_American_Indians_and_Inuit.pdf

Amerindian Rebirth is both a major collection of essays and probably the best current reference work on Native North American beliefs about reincarnation. Of its sixteen articles, four are previously published; two of them (Slobodin's and Ian Stevenson's), however, include authors' afterthoughts updating their ideas on their research. A substantive foreword by Gananath Obeyesekere, moreover, provides perspectives on reincarnation from the study of Indic religions. The book includes an appendix offering a trait index to North American Indian and Inuit reincarnation sources, compiled in a twenty-one page chart. Since the essays themselves focus mainly on the arctic, western subarctic, and Pacific Northwest, the appendix is a valuable tool for amplifying comparative perspectives.