The People of One Fire: Spiritual traditions of the Cherokee (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798378473595)

In the old days, writes the most notable nineteen-century white observer of the Cherokee religion, "When the Cherokee were the lord of the whole country from the Savannah to the Ohio, well fed and warmly clad, and leading an active life in the open air, he was able to maintain a condition of robust health notwithstanding the incorrectness of his medical ideas and his disregard of sanitary regulations." The same accredited authority spares few words in ridiculing these people as "primitive" and "superstitious". "He had no Great Spirit, no happy hunting ground, no heaven, no hell and consequently death had for him no terrors."

Close-minded in their smug dualistic cocoons, the Christian outsider could not have realized the Cherokee's monistic spiritual outlook whereby the whole universe is one unity and Everything in it is God: animals and even plants were, thus, respected and treated as Brothers and Relatives.

With this in mind, philosophically speaking, the Cherokee shares a common ground with the non-dualism of Advaita Vedanta. The teachings of Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda will affirm these similarities wherever found in this book, suggesting the idea that all religions stem from a single root.