Indigenous spiritualities — Pacific

The spiritual traditions of the Pacific — Māori, Hawaiian, Samoan, Aboriginal Australian, Torres Strait Islander, and the hundreds of traditions across Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia — are among the world's oldest and most geographically diverse, shaped by the extraordinary human journeys that carried peoples across the largest ocean on earth. Common threads appear across the diversity: the centrality of ancestors in the life of the living, the sacredness of genealogical knowledge, the deep relationship between land and sea and spiritual identity, and the understanding that the visible world is always interpenetrated by invisible forces. Aboriginal Australian spiritual traditions, among the oldest continuously practiced in the world, offer a vision of the cosmos — the Dreaming — that challenges every assumption about time, place, and the nature of the sacred.