Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 151–153 Copyright © 2021, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.2.13 Book Review Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) Natalie Avalos University of Colorado, Boulder, USA For Native peoples on the southern plains, ceremonial life was the place where they formed political alliances based on a shared sacred understanding of the world. Jennifer Graber’s The Gods of Indian Country notes that with the arrival of settlers in what would soon be known as “Indian Territory,” religion remained a connection point—not to consecrate political agreements with Native nations but as a rationale and means to dispossess them. This book narrates the activities of Protestant and Catholic “friends of the Indian” in the nineteenth-centurylong struggle to settle the West through their missionary and reform work with Indians in the southern Plains, specifically the Kiowa. Through careful use of government, denominational, and Kiowa sources, such as calendars and ledger drawings, Graber makes the case that these “friends of the Indian” operationalized a particular kind of white Christian civility to help materialize the structural foundations of US settler colonialism. The book is organized into three sections—open lands, closed lands, and divided lands—in order to convey the distinct shifts in ideology and practice of nineteenth-century US expansion. Beginning with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, chapters one and two outline the debates around Indian removal during the first half of the century in response to settler demands for land. Religious American Religion 2:2 152 actors, initially resistant to policies of removal, sought a moral solution to the “Indian problem,” arguing that Indians could be civilized and eventually assimilated through religious conversion. Graber contrasts these debates with a detailed contextualization of Kiowa life on the open plains as one of the region’s central power brokers—their relationship to nearby tribes as well as to the unseen world. As settlers and reformers trickled into the region, the Kiowa were pathologized as the fiercest of “wild” Indians due to their frequent raids into the Southwestern US and Mexico and their yearly observance of the Sun Dance. After skirmishes with US troops, who carried out a series of Indian massacres in the region, the Kiowa were confined to reservation lands. Here, the historical discourse involving Indian agents, federal representatives, and Kiowas demonstrates the breathtaking level of racist paternalism and deceit that operated together to facilitate land dispossession. Food provisions were promised but always fell short. Farming was encouraged yet poor instruction led to failed crops. While their Quaker reservation agent implored the federal government to act on good faith, noting that deprivations would only demoralize the Kiowas, the federal body’s uneven response communicated their long game—Indian elimination. Chapters three through five, covering the period from 1868–1881, chronicle the consolidation of Indian territory into an open-air prison that experimented with compulsory forms of social engineering aimed at civilizing Indians: changes in dress, food, and complete re-education programs via missionization and boarding schools. Pacifist reservations agents, frustrated by Kiowas who continued dancing, hunting, and raiding, became despots, invited US troops to occupy Kiowa lands, and withheld food as a form of coercion. The Kiowa were incredulous—why would they give up their lifeways on their sovereign lands? As they contemplated revolt, they took refuge in the Sun Dance and religious life, supplicating spiritual power to empower them in their duress. Kiowa assertions of autonomy in the face of this coercion are salient here. As one Kiowa leader noted, it would take the white men many years to kill all Indians, but if all Indians die, “then the world will turn to water or burn up. [The world] can’t live when the Indians are all dead” (108). It is in the aftermath of the Kiowa’s armed resistance in the Red River War—the imprisonment of Kiowa warriors and spike in public support for Indian elimination—that the Kiowa realized they had very little choice but to tolerate this social engineering or starve. In chapters six and seven, Graber links the...