Kuudere-senpai
I was wondering about the totem thing~ Theres a site, that says you can have a birth totem.
I mostly felt more drawn to their information on the medicine wheel which had animals as nautical directions~ North, South, East & West. This I really liked! And it doesn't seem to have to have a specific deity to have a medicine wheel altar. But again this site did have the same information for totems and how to find one and do you have one stuff. So I'll have to come back to this altar thing~ =D
Link Here. -- You'll notice the links for the totems on the other side. There is a page two to the medicine wheel.
Spirit Guide information of all sorts! Bottom of page you'll see a link to a list of a lot of different animals and plenty of information on ones throughout history and etc. This one is an interesting read so far, and seems more reliable than the last link.
Eeeh.
Those are both pretty good (BAD) examples of generic New-Age misappropriation of 'Native American Spirituality'. I'm disinclined to recommend either of them.
The first one, seems based on Plains (Sioux, I think) culture in its' symbolism and lore, but manages to smush in some non-Native stuff about 'Ether' and 'Spirit'. It's pretty generic. I'm inclined to distrust it simply because it isn't a Native website. It's a new-age website.
The second one just...I can't even. It's all over the damn place. A totem spirit isn't a Patronus or personal protector. Karmic debt and other dharmic concepts have no place or connection to Native teachings. Toss in a reference to an Irish goddess, and it's an absolute mess.
The idea of spirit animals or guides does not belong solely to the aboriginal peoples of North America. Lots of different cultures also considered certain animals powerful or helpful in spirit, and highly emblematic within their own symbolism. And since you can work with animal spirits in other, open cultures that haven't been exploited time and again, it's really very wrong for these new-age spiritualities to appropriate Native symbolism and spirituality for their own use. It's also frustrating that they help muddy the water about the differences between the different peoples and their individual traditions, since they tend to homogenize Native cultures down to the same sweetgrass braid-medicine wheel-dance regalia-drum circle pudding.
There won't be a deity of the medicine wheel. Some peoples might have deities who fit a medicine-wheel structure (ie. there's a god for each direction). I'd say most don't, either by dint of not being a people for whom the medicine wheel is an original concept, or that they don't have the concept of deities like you find in Neopaganism. At best you'd be shoehorning one concept into the other, either way you try. However, the medicine wheel does have its' own spirits, rather than deities, placed in each of the quarters. If you try working with the medicine wheel, you will likely come into contact with those spirits.
When I'm looking for resources online that are Native I always try to find websites that are Native-run, particularly those run by schools or other Native educational resources. They are
generally more reliable, without having a lot of new-age things to sift through as well, and come with the bonus of teaching inside the context of the culture, rather than being outside of it.
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