Through many poetic devices, Freneau contrasts the Indian religion view of life after death and his own.
The Indian religion, mentioned in the poem The Indian Burying Ground, and the Christian religion are very different in the belief of an afterlife. The following is from the perspective of Freneau. The lines in the first stanza "The posture that we give the dead, points out the soul's eternal sleep." tells that the lying down posture that Christians are buried in suggests that they will be in an eternal sleep.
The Indian religion in the poem says that your soul lives on forever after you die. The second stanza talks about when a person dies he is once again seated with his friends and joins them in a feast. The following quotes from the third stanza "nature of the soul" and "knows no rest" suggests that when a person dies the soul of that person doesn't die with him, but just moves on to another form. In the fourth stanza the quotes "life is spent" and "not the old ideas gone" suggests that after you have died your ideas and you as a person are not forgotten but remembered forever.
There is a place where all the souls gather and sit. In the fifth stanza there is talk of a stranger observing the place where all the souls have come to sit. This person is obviously influenced by the Christian view of life after death. The person is shown that the souls are not all lying down like he has though but all are in the