With tribal rhythms and a sincere lyric that hits on spiritual themes, "The Spirit Of The Hawk" was a change of direction for Rednex, whose previous single, "The Way I Mate," is a very repetitive techno number about fornication. Rednex is a Swedish production team that based their look and sound on their first hit, "Cotton Eye Joe," in 1994. "The Spirit Of The Hawk," though, was written by a German: Axel Breitung, and was produced by the British team F.A.F. (David Cameron-Pryde, Mark Compton and Mark Stagg), who also played all the instruments. It was a wild departure for the band, but it worked; the song charted in many European territories and was a huge hit in Germany.

Rednex typically pokes fun at Americans by portraying themselves as uneducated backwoods hillbillies, but this song is a tribute to Native American culture. As such, Rednex doesn't appear in the video, which was shot in Arizona and directed by Patric Ullaeus. In the video, a native girl leaps from a cliff and transforms into a hawk.

The bridge of this song is a spoken section ("My people, some of them have run away to the hills...") where Geoff Oldham recites part of a famous speech attributed to Chief Joseph, leader of the Nez Perce tribe in the American northwest, when he surrendered to the United States Army after a battle in 1877.