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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West by Jennifer Graber Dale Stover The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West. By Jennifer Graber. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 288. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Jennifer Graber writes about the role of religion in telling the nineteenth-century story of the Kiowa nation as it faced westward-expanding European Americans after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. She chose to focus on the Kiowas because they left a documentary record regarding their religious commitments. They were also broadly representative of the western plains, having migrated from the northern plains—where they learned the Sun Dance ritual from the Crow nation— and found their permanent home on the southern plains—where they formed a primary alliance with the Comanche nation and also allied with the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho nations. Graber is to be commended for her unstinting effort to tell the truth on both sides of this contested chapter in American history. On one side, she details how religiously concerned Protestants, calling themselves “Friends of the Indian,” followed political strategies to rescue the Kiowas from what they considered superstition and savagery by persuading them, sometimes coercively, to follow a path of assimilation into Christian religious faith and culture. On the other side, she relates how the Kiowas reacted to these [End Page 91] Protestant American strategies by struggling to retain their Indigenous identity. This identity was rooted in their connection with dwdw, a sun-derived sacred power that assisted them in hunting the respected buffalo, which played a prominent symbolic role in the Kiowa’s annual Sun Dance ceremony and were themselves recipients of dwdw. In 1829, President Andrew Jackson sent a bill to Congress authorizing the removal of five tribal nations from the southeastern states to “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi, creating a physical separation between Indigenous peoples and the citizens of the United States. Friends of the Indian strongly opposed this action because it targeted even Indigenous nations who had independently assimilated. Jackson’s removal plan was carried out with brutal force, and “Indian Country” was soon filled with agricultural tribes in the eastern sector and “wild” buffalo hunters in the west. The next determining moment in this history occurred in January 1848 with the discovery of gold in California, which brought hordes of emigrants west across the plains. This prompted a call for a new kind of separation between Indians and migrating settlers by creating reservations to restrict the nomadic Kiowas and their allies and to establish boundaries for Indian communities. Friends of the Indian were solidly in support of reservations, viewing them as the bedrock for what was regarded as the civilizing process. After years of negotiating, a reservation was established in 1867 in southwestern Oklahoma to include separate parcels of territory for Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches. President Ulysses S. Grant, upon his inauguration in 1869, established a peace policy for the still “uncivilized” tribes of Indian Country and appointed a Quaker agent to oversee the Kiowas. Another Quaker, Thomas Battey, who was hired to teach Kiowa children and witnessed his first Sun Dance in 1873, was shocked by what he saw “in beholding the depth of heathen superstition into which this people have fallen” (9). In 1882, the government enacted the Code of Religious Offenses that criminalized the Sun Dance, and the disappearance of buffalo herds from the plains imperiled the Kiowa’s ability to continue Sun Dances at all. As Graber says, “Kiowas then tried new ritual forms for securing protection and blessing. At the same time, their ritual revisions reflected their long-held posture toward sacred power. As in their Sun Dance days, they came to Jesus, the father peyote, and Feather Dancing to ask for pity, health, and long life” (190). Eventually, the Friends of the Indian “proclaimed that reservations had failed to assimilate Indians”(152), and they advocated allotment of reservation lands and off-reservation boarding schools to negate children’s Indigenous culture by suppressing all that was native: their language, clothes, appearance, and contact with their parents. “On the reservation,” Graber writes, “Kiowas and their allies felt...