Endymion's Bower

From Michael D. McNally, “Religion as Peoplehood: Native American Religious Traditions and the Discourse of Indigenous Rights”, in Johnson & Kraft, eds. Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s) (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

 

“Think first of how early modern European authorities determined that New World savages had ‘no religion’ as a legal pretence for conquest and material dispossession by Christian sovereigns …The Doctrine of Christian Discovery was grafted into U.S. law in 1823 (Johnson v. McIntosh 1823) and cited against Indian land claims by the Supreme Court as recently as 2005 (City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation 2005) … The effect was the criminalisation of such Native religious practices as the Sun Dance and the potlatch under administrative law within the U.S. Interior Department’s civilisation regulations. Then consider how the opposite has been true as well. By the 1960s, Native Americans were seen not to ‘lack religion’ but to be ‘all spirituality all the time’. For Indians nothing was profane, everything was sacred, and while this romantic view made Native American spirituality into a national treasure, it served to dull the edges of Native claims to protected religious freedom.” (McNally, 57)

 

“Three of the cases by which the Supreme Court in the 1980s gutted religious freedom protections for religious minorities generally were cases involving Indian claims and in their efforts to narrow the scope of the legal question of religious free exercise, the majority opinions of each embed a habitual misrecognition of the accepted facts of the claims as insufficiently ‘religious’ (Bowen v. Roy 1986; Lyng v. n.w. Indian Cemetery Prot. Association 1988; Employment Division. v. Smith 1990) … There is … a habitual misrecognition of the claims rooted in the … American romance with the notion that Native Americans are naturally spiritual … Consider a 2008 case where an appellate court upheld the government’s approval of a scheme to make artificial snow with treated sewage effluent from a nearby city for skiing on Arizona’s highest mountain, a massif called San Francisco Peaks in English. The Navajo call it ‘Shining on Top’ and consider it a living being who is one of the holy mountains that demarcate the Navajo world, an object of daily prayer and source of medicine and power necessary for all Navajo ceremonies (Navajo Nation v. u.s.f.s. 2008) … While the court recognised all the detailed factual findings about the indigenous claims to the sacred mountain as sincere and in force, it found as a matter of law that religious exercise was not ‘substantially burdened’ by the treated sewage effluent … The court found that the ‘sole effect of the artificial snow’ is on the Native Americans’ ‘subjective spiritual experience’, amounting merely to diminished spiritual fulfillment: … ‘a government action that decreases the spirituality, the fervor, or the satisfaction with which a believer practises his religion is not what Congress has labelled a “substantial burden” … on the free exercise of religion.’ … Here, recognised claims by tribal governments to collective duties and religious obligations were denatured into the claims to subjective spiritual fulfillment that characterise romanticised misconceptions of Native American religiosity.” (Ibid., 58f)

“Reduction of religious claims to those of culture, or cultural ecology, or economy, can dull the edges of certain indigenous concerns that are, for lack of a better term, irreducibly sacred, sacrosanct, urgent, or ultimate, and in the doing lower the barrier to violation of those rights through the logic of the articles [viz., of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] qualifying such indigenous rights as derogable, capable of being suspended under a variety of prevailing concerns of national security or interest defined by states.” (Ibid., 75)

 

This is a prime example of the concrete damage which is done by conceptualizing religious activity as a subjective experience, or as a mere practice, rather than as an objective relationship to certain concrete others, the transcendent existence of which allows Them to be the bearers of properties beyond what can be assigned to the natural object itself. This is the explicit danger posed by popular conceptualizations of this religious activity as non-theistic, exclusively ‘immanent’ rather than ‘transcendent’, and purely ‘orthopractic’.