In broad terms, North American shamans are individuals with extraordinary access to spiritual power. Here the term is synonymous with some unarticulated notion of 'primitive religious specialist.' A clearer understanding of shamanism can be discerned from those scores of descriptions of Native American religions and cultures where romantic and primitivist biases are less influential, although the statement of what distinguishes shamanism from other phenomena is necessarily complicated because of the diversity of shamanism in North America.

In the general literature on native North Americans, every sort of priest, healer, ritual specialist, and sorcerer is somewhere called a shaman.