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    Bo’ha

    Northwestern Shoshone term for the spiritual power, energy, and knowledge that flows from the spiritual realm to individuals in this world, most often in the form of dreams and visions.1 These manifestations may come unbidden to the recipient or pursued through rigorous training.2 Bo’ha reflects the worldview in which both humans and nonhumans—including plants, animals, rocks, and land—have spiritual power. Powerful spiritual beings are active participants in the universe who either gift prosperity and health to humans or render misfortune and illness.3 Great Basin Indigenous recipients of bo’ha, or bo’hagunts, describe visitations by spirit guides who have the appearance of Native individuals, sometimes with diminutive stature, to convey instructions and knowledge in the form of songs and dances. These become powerful conduits for spiritual power that can be used for healing purposes as well as guidance for kin groups. Recipients of bo’ha report that their spirit guides enjoin them to follow instructions with exactness and that neglect of their proffered teachings and practices can diminish their access to power.4

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    Bo’ha, Native Saints, accessed May 28, 2026 https://www.churchhistorianspress.org/native-saints/reference-material/glossary/boha

      Footnotes

      1. [1]Jay Miller, “Basin Religion and Theology: A Comparative Study of Power (Puha),” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 5, nos. 1–2 (1983), 69; Gregory E. Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 2006), 49–50.

      2. [2]Don D. Fowler and Catherine S. Fowler, eds., Anthropology of the Numa: John Wesley Powell’s Manuscripts on the Numic Peoples of Western North America, 1868–1880 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971), 245n114; Julian H. Steward, “Cultural Element Distributions: XXIII, Northern and Gosiute Shoshoni,” in Anthropological Records 8, no. 3 (University of California Press, 1943), 286; Miller, “Basin Religion and Theology,” 68–69; Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity, 50–52.

      3. [3]Fowler and Fowler, Anthropology of the Numa, 53, 61, 66, 69, 75–76; Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity, 49–50; see also Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (Columbia University Press, 2006).

      4. [4]See Fowler and Fowler, Anthropology of the Numa, 245–48; Steward, “Northern and Gosiute Shoshoni,” 283, 286; Miller, “Basin Religion and Theology”; and Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity, 50–54.