Native American Symbols & Their Meanings
Native American symbolic traditions are among the most frequently misrepresented in the world — reduced to a handful of motifs (the dreamcatcher, the feather, the medicine wheel) that are sold in mass-produced form with little regard for the specific cultures that created them. The reality is far more complex and far more interesting. 'Native American' encompasses hundreds of distinct nations, languages, and cultural traditions, each with its own symbolic vocabulary rooted in its own geography, cosmology, and ceremonial life. The Lakota medicine wheel is not the same object as the Hopi prayer wheel; a Cherokee eagle feather carries different specific meanings than a Crow eagle feather. What these traditions share is not a common symbolic system but a set of common orientations: deep attention to the land and its creatures, a cosmological framework that locates human beings in a web of relationships with other beings and forces rather than above them, and an understanding of symbols as living, active things rather than as merely representative images. This hub introduces the major Native American symbols on SymbolHubs with full awareness that each has specific cultural homes and that approaching them requires respect for those origins.
Overview
Any honest account of Native American symbolism must begin with two acknowledgements: the enormous diversity of Native traditions, and the history of their appropriation and misrepresentation. There is no single 'Native American symbolism,' just as there is no single 'European symbolism.' The Navajo, Lakota, Cherokee, Ojibwe, Pueblo, Haida, and Iroquois nations — to name only a few — each have distinct symbolic traditions rooted in distinct cosmologies, landscapes, and ceremonial practices. What follows focuses on symbols that appear across multiple traditions, while noting where specific cultural contexts matter most.
The most consistent characteristic of Native American symbolic traditions is a cosmological orientation in which humans are participants in a web of relationships rather than rulers over nature. Animals, plants, landforms, weather events, and celestial bodies are not backdrop — they are persons, with their own natures, powers, and relationships to the human world. A symbol drawn from an animal is therefore not a simple metaphor but a reference to a real relationship between that animal's power and the human world. The eagle, in many traditions, is a messenger to the creator or a spirit being of great power — not just a symbol of strength. The bear is a healer and a being of great medicine. The wolf is a teacher of loyalty and endurance. These are relationships, not emblems.
The medicine wheel, used across many Plains nations, encodes this relational worldview geometrically. A circle divided into four quadrants, it maps the four directions (east, south, west, north) onto a set of correspondences that varies by tradition but typically includes the four seasons, four stages of life, four elements, four sacred colours, and four aspects of the self. The wheel is not a static diagram — it is a map of how to live in right relationship with all things, in balance across the four quadrants. The circle itself is everywhere in Native American thought: life is circular, seasons are circular, and the circular form is opposed to the straight line of hierarchy.
The feather, particularly the eagle feather, is one of the most sacred objects in many Native American traditions. Eagle feathers are given to honour achievement, bravery, and service to the community; they are worn and carried with specific protocols and cannot be picked up casually. The feather connects the human holder to the eagle's power — its proximity to the sky and the creator — and to the community's honour that the gift represents. This is why non-Native wearing of eagle feathers can be genuinely offensive: it is not mere decoration but a specific communal honour with specific protocols.
The dreamcatcher is probably the most widely recognised and most widely misrepresented Native symbol. It originated among the Ojibwe people as a protective object for infants — the web filters dreams, allowing good dreams through the hole at the centre and trapping bad ones in the web (where they dissolve at dawn). It was adopted by the Pan-Indian movement of the 1960s and 1970s as a broader symbol of Native American identity, and from there became one of the most mass-produced symbols in the world. Understanding this history — specific Ojibwe origin, Pan-Indian adoption, commercial explosion — is essential context.
The turtle, across many traditions from the Atlantic to the Pacific, carries a specific cosmological role: in many creation stories, the world was created on Turtle's back ('Turtle Island' is a widespread Native name for North America itself). The turtle's shell, with its thirteen sections and twenty-eight smaller scales, was sometimes used as a lunar calendar.
Cultural Context
The history of colonisation is inseparable from any accurate account of Native American symbolism today. The deliberate suppression of Native ceremonial life — including laws in the United States that banned traditional dances and ceremonies from the 1880s until 1978 — meant that entire symbolic and ceremonial traditions were practised in secret or not practised at all for generations. The revival of these traditions since the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978) and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) is ongoing, and many communities are actively reclaiming and revitalising symbolic and ceremonial practices that were suppressed.
The commercial exploitation of Native symbols — the mass production of dreamcatchers, the use of 'war bonnets' as Halloween costumes, the appropriation of sacred geometric patterns for fashion — takes place in this context of suppression and revival. This does not mean that non-Natives cannot appreciate or learn about Native symbols; it means that doing so requires awareness of this history and sensitivity to the specific cultural homes of specific symbols.
The sweat lodge, the vision quest, the Sun Dance, the potlatch — these are ceremonial forms, not merely cultural practices, and the symbols embedded in them belong to living ceremonial traditions with living practitioners who have specific relationships to them. The appropriate response to this complexity is curiosity and respect rather than either wholesale adoption or wholesale avoidance.
Key Symbols to Explore
This culture's symbolic tradition is reflected across several entries on this site, including: dreamcatcher, medicine-wheel, eagle, feather-symbol, turtle, bear.
Navajo Sandpainting: A Symbolic Art Made to Be Destroyed
Among the most distinctive Native symbolic art forms is Navajo (Diné) sandpainting (iikaah, meaning 'the place where the gods come and go'), created as part of specific healing ceremonies conducted by trained medicine men (hataalii) who memorise dozens of precise ceremonial designs, each belonging to a particular healing chant such as the Nightway or the Blessingway. Using pulverised natural materials — coloured sandstone, charcoal, cornmeal, pollen, and crushed flower petals — the medicine man trickles pigment through his fingers directly onto the floor of a ceremonial hogan, building up an intricate symmetrical image that can take many hours and sometimes several assistants to complete.
The images depict specific Holy People (Diyin Dine'e) and events from Navajo origin narratives, and the patient for whom the ceremony is performed sits or lies on the completed painting so that the powers depicted can be physically absorbed and the harmful influences causing illness can be drawn out and neutralised. Crucially, the sandpainting is ritually destroyed before sunset on the day it is made — swept up and the sand carried away, traditionally to the north. This deliberate impermanence is not incidental but central to the symbol's function: the painting's power lies in its precise, temporary manifestation of the sacred for a specific healing purpose, not in its survival as an art object. This stands in notable contrast to the permanent, saleable 'sandpaintings' now produced commercially by some Navajo artists using glue and sand on wood board for the tourist and art market — a distinct, secularised craft tradition that deliberately alters or omits sacred elements out of respect for the difference between ceremonial and commercial use.
Plains Ledger Art: Symbol-Making Under Conquest
One of the most historically poignant Native American symbolic art forms is ledger art, which emerged among Plains nations — particularly the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Kiowa — in the mid-to-late 19th century as traditional pictorial recording surfaces (buffalo hide, used for generations to record winter counts and warrior exploits) became scarce due to the near-extermination of the bison herds by American commercial hunters. Warriors and artists adapted by drawing on whatever paper was available, frequently the actual page ledgers, account books, and other bound paper stock obtained through trade, raid, or, later, distributed by reservation agents and prison authorities — hence the name.
The most historically significant body of ledger art was produced by a group of Cheyenne, Kiowa, and other Plains warriors imprisoned at Fort Marion in Florida between 1875 and 1878 after the conclusion of the Red River War; prisoners including Making Medicine (Cheyenne) and Howling Wolf (Cheyenne) filled notebooks with scenes recording their own war exploits, buffalo hunts, courtship customs, and eventually scenes of their transported, imprisoned life, adapting the flat, profile-based pictorial conventions of traditional hide painting to the new medium while incorporating new subject matter forced on them by displacement itself. The symbolic vocabulary of ledger art — stylised horses shown in profile with all four legs visible, warriors identified by specific painted markings and feather arrangements unique to their individual war record, coup marks indicating specific brave acts in battle — functioned as a precise visual language of personal and communal history, not generic decoration, in which a knowledgeable viewer could read an individual's specific deeds much as a written biography records specific events. Ledger art has undergone a significant contemporary revival since the late 20th century, with artists such as Terrance Guardipee and Dwayne Wilcox extending the tradition's visual conventions into present-day subject matter.
Haida Totem Poles and the Crest System of the Pacific Northwest
On the Pacific Northwest coast, the Haida people (along with neighbouring nations including the Tlingit and Tsimshian) developed a monumental carving tradition centred on the totem pole — tall cedar poles carved with stacked crest figures representing ancestral beings, clan histories, and supernatural encounters specific to a particular family or lineage. Contrary to a common misconception, totem poles are not objects of worship, and the order of figures on a pole does not follow a hierarchy of importance ('low man on the totem pole' is a folk phrase with no basis in actual Haida practice) — figures are read as a sequence of connected stories, and their arrangement follows narrative and artistic logic rather than rank.
Haida visual art is built on a distinctive formal system called formline design, characterised by continuous, flowing black outlines that swell and taper, ovoid shapes representing joints and eyes, and a highly disciplined use of negative space to organise the composition. Common crest figures — Raven (the trickster-creator central to Haida origin stories), Eagle, Bear, Killer Whale, and Thunderbird — belong to specific matrilineal clans and moieties (the Haida nation is divided into Raven and Eagle moieties), and the right to display a particular crest is inherited property, not open to general use. Totem poles serve several distinct social functions: mortuary poles hold the remains of high-status individuals, house-frontal poles mark the entrance to a clan house and narrate its history, and memorial poles commemorate a deceased chief and the succession of their heir. The tradition was severely disrupted by Canadian and American assimilation policy, missionary opposition, and the confiscation or destruction of poles through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but has undergone a strong revival since the mid-20th century, led by master carvers such as Bill Reid, whose work helped re-establish formline carving as a living, evolving practice rather than a museum relic.
Native American Symbols in This Collection
Native American Symbols — FAQ
- Are there symbols shared across all Native American cultures?
- Certain symbols — the circle, the four directions, the eagle, the turtle — appear widely across many nations, but with different specific meanings and protocols in each tradition. There is no single unified Native American symbolic system; it is more accurate to speak of hundreds of distinct traditions with some shared orientations.
- What does the dreamcatcher symbolise?
- The dreamcatcher originated with the Ojibwe people as a protective device for infants. The woven web filters dreams: good dreams pass through the hole at the centre and slide down the feathers to the sleeper; bad dreams are trapped in the web and dissolve at dawn. It was later adopted as a broader Pan-Indian symbol in the 1960s–70s.
- What is the medicine wheel?
- A circle divided into four quadrants representing the four directions (east, south, west, north), used across many Plains traditions. The four quadrants map onto the four seasons, four stages of life, four elements, and four sacred colours. It is a model of living in balance and right relationship with all things.
- Is it disrespectful to wear Native American symbols?
- It depends on the symbol and the context. Eagle feathers are specific communal honours with specific protocols — casual wearing by non-Natives is generally considered offensive. Dreamcatchers are more widely shared. The most important principle is to know which tradition a symbol comes from and to approach it with awareness rather than treating it as generic 'Native' decoration.