Native American Religious Traditions Research Articles

Comparison and the Academic Study of Indigenous Religious Traditions

Abstract The recent publication of two excellent volumes—Bruce Lincoln’s Apples and Oranges and Oliver Freiberger’s Considering Comparison—provides an auspicious moment to reflect on and interrogate the nature of comparison within religious studies generally, as well as a variety of subfields, including the academic study of indigenous religious traditions. This article carefully examines both books, analyzes Lincoln’s interpretations of Native American religious traditions within broader comparative frameworks, and discusses several recent developments regarding comparison in the academic study of indigenous religious traditions.

Teaching Native American Religious Traditions: Missing Persons and Silent Scripts

Teaching Native American Religious Traditions:Missing Persons and Silent Scripts Mary C. Churchill (bio) I thank Melanie Harris, Carolyn Medine, and Helen Rhee for inviting me to participate in this roundtable because it mirrors for new and established women of color faculty the daily reality of teaching at US colleges and universities and because it mentors women students of color on the battles they will likely face in a potential career in the professoriate. As a scholar of Cherokee descent who teaches about American Indian religious traditions, I believe that in this mirroring and mentoring we must also consider the experiences of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN)1 women scholars as well as the silent scripts that affect teaching about Native American religious traditions in the classroom. Sadly, American Indian women in academia are a rarity, and relatively few can be found in religious studies. In fall 2013, AI/AN professors in all fields comprised less than 1 percent of all full-time faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions.2 Out of the 791,391 full-time faculty employed that semester, only 1,802 (.23%) identified as AI/AN women.3 If membership in the American Academy of Religion (AAR) is any indication, AI/AN faculty members constitute only .32 percent of the field. According to Aislinn Jones, AAR’s director of membership and communications, the “AAR has had 155 Native American/Native Alaskan members identify themselves over time. AAR has only asked this demographic question in the past 20 years and there have been data gaps during that time. There are 29 American Indian/Native Alaskan current [2015] members.”4 The only AAR study of the professoriate that included race or ethnicity found that in 2002–2003 AI/AN professors [End Page 126] (regardless of gender) comprised .03 percent of faculty in doctorate-granting programs.5 The total number of Native faculty in the study? Four. Native women faculty members are therefore paradoxically invisible and too visible: small numbers translate into limited professional power as well as little anonymity when it comes to reflecting on working conditions. In order to protect the anonymity of the few AI/AN women faculty in the field, I have instead turned to the literature on Native women faculty in general for insights into their experiences. Not surprisingly, the research on AI/AN professors in general remains limited, and little of it focuses on women in particular. Low numbers of American Indians in academia lead to their further obscurity as studies, even those issued by the federal government, fail to report on AI/AN faculty or combine their numbers with those of other small groups. American Indian women faculty are, in effect, “missing persons,” not only in the academy but also in studies that would report on them. We must look to small studies of and individual accounts by Native American women faculty. These sources echo the experiences and concerns of other women of color faculty that Harris, Medine, and Rhee discuss. In a study of ten American Indian women professors, Mary Jo Tippeconnic Fox has reported that “several Native women faculty in this study express feelings of isolation as the only person of color in their department, being treated as ‘tokens,’ feeling their research is undervalued, struggling to find mentors, trying to balance demands, having to go outside their department for intellectual support, and experiencing racial/ethnic and gender bias.”6 These experiences of discrimination and alienation can be found throughout the professional lives of many Native women faculty, beginning in graduate school. Tippeconnic Fox interviewed thirteen American Indian women who earned doctorates between 2003 and 2008 and found that they experienced “instances of overt and covert acts of gender bias, racism, discrimination, stereotypes, hostility, and exclusion in their doctoral programs. In addition, the women felt that their cultural traditions and tribal backgrounds were not respected, and the academy wanted them to change.”7 At the assistant professor level, Jeanne Lacourt, a Menominee Indian scholar, has written publically about her experiences at a large state university. In pressing for change at her institution, she discovered that, in her words, “Indigenous women are not valued (or wanted) [End Page 127] here, especially...

Interview with Inés Talamantez

Interview with Inés Talamantez Natalie Avalos (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Inés Talamantez Click for larger view View full resolution Natalie Avalos Inés Talamantez is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and has taught courses there on Native American and Indigenous religious traditions for almost forty years. She was born in Old Mesilla, New Mexico, and is Mescalero/Lipan Apache and Chicana. Her forthcoming book, Becoming: Introducing Apache Girls to the World of Spiritual and Cultural Values, examines present-day Mescalero Apache female rites of passage. Dr. Talamantez developed the concentration in Native American religious traditions in the Department of Religious Studies and was instrumental in creating the Native American and Indigenous Studies minor at UCSB. Dr. Talamantez is often referred to as the mother of the field of Native American religious traditions, as she was instrumental in defining its epistemological boundaries during its inchoate stages and then populating it with her own students. Her exploration of gender as an ongoing process of becoming contributes valuable insights on Native ontology to the fields of Native American [End Page 153] religion and philosophy as well as feminist, gender, and women’s studies. She has served as my graduate adviser and mentor for the last eight years. During that time, she has become more than a mentor—she has become family—a dynamic to which many of her other students can also attest. Like Dr. Talamantez, I am also of Apache and Chicana descent—an experience that has profoundly shaped my own research questions. Dr. Talamantez’s work on sacred power has inspired me to explore the relationship between spiritual empowerment, healing, and movements of decolonization among transnational Native American and Indigenous communities. Some aspects of her forthcoming book Becoming, such as Talamantez’s emphasis on “exemplary womanhood,” may appear to reflect normative (patriarchal) articulations of gender, wherein women are held to asymmetrical standards of behavior and expectations of “purity” not exacted for men. This would be a misreading of the text. For Apaches, women are sacred. Their transition to womanhood not only demarcates a critical time in every young woman’s life but also honors the sacred power with which she becomes endowed at that time and carries with her into her life. And so, I chose to discuss this process explicitly with Dr. Talamantez, among other related topics, as it reflects a Native ontological order that is distinct from what may be assumed in a “Western” worldview and reveals the fundamental role each person plays in the cycle of life of such interconnected communities. Natalie: Did your research interests change after being in the field of religious studies for a few years? Inés: The short answer is no. I was hired in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the 1970s to develop the field of Native American religious traditions. My research interests have been in the continuous effort to expand this new field of study, which by nature is interdisciplinary. Over the decades, I have done extensive research, traveled to a variety of archives, and have done in situ research in the American Southwest and Mexico. I have also done work on three indigenous languages: Apache, Navajo, and classical Nahuatl, in which I have translated and published. During this time, I trained fifteen doctoral students studying the Indigenous religious traditions of the Americas. My pedagogy has always been focused on issues of authenticity: religious, historical, linguistic, and political, both in the past and present. I am open to and excited about the theme of reimagining communication and cooperation. What is it that inspires us in terms of the uniqueness of our cultures? It’s time to recognize each other in a new way that we never thought of before. I’m amazed by what we know and curious about learning more about each other with sincere respect—dropping our fear of each other and learning the true definitions of power. Natalie: How would you describe your current field of study? [End Page 154] Inés: I describe my current field of study as Native American and Indigenous religious...

Native American spirituality: a critical reader

PART ONE: THEORETICAL CONCERNS Mediations of the Spirit: Native American Religious Traditions and the Ethics of Representation Ines Hernandes-Avila Cultural Identity, Authenticity, and Community Survival: The Politics of Recognition in the Study of Native American Religions John A. Grim Spirituality for Sale: Sacred Knowledge in the Consumer Age. Christopher Ronwanien:te Jocks This May Be a Feud, But It's Not a War: An Electronic, Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Teaching Native Religions Ronald L. Grimes PART TWO: DIALOGICAL RELATIONS Voice, Representation and Dialogue: The Poetics of Native American Spiritual Traditions Robin Ridington Pimadaziwin: Contemporary Rituals in Odawa Community Melissa A. Pflug The Church of the Immaculate Conception: Inculturation and Identity among the Anishnaabeg of Manitoulin Island Theresa S. Smith Nahuas and National Culture: A Contest of Appropriations Richard Haly Knowledge, Negotiation and NAGPRA: Reconceptualizing Repatriation Discourses Pia Alteri PART THREE: HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS Repatriating the Past- Recreating Indian History Clara Sue Kidwell Purity and Pollution: Unearthing an Oppositional Paradigm in the Study of Cherokee Religious Traditions Mary C. Churchill Kiowa Religion in Historical Perspective Benjamin R. Kracht The Shaker Church and the Indian Way in Native Northwest California Thomas Buckley Intertribal Traditionalism and the Religious Roots of Red Power James Treat A Brief History of Native American Religious Resistance Lee Irwin

The Practice of Native American Christianity

The fields of Native American religious traditions and American religious history have reached something of a shared critical juncture. Although there has been a long standing scholarly interest on writing about missions to Native Americans from a variety of viewpoints, recent years have seen the publication of a number of fresh considerations of the diversity and texture of Native American Christianity—or better, native Christianities. Native communities have long woven the stories, signs, and practices of the Christian tradition into the fabric of their lifeways, in rich and resourceful ways, even under the direst of colonizing circumstances. But only recently has scholarship begun to take this fuller texture into account: most recently,Native and Christian(1996), edited by James Treat;Native American Religious Identity(1998), edited by Jace Weaver; SergeiKan's Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries; Clara Sue Kidwell's Choctaws and Missionaries; and Christopher Vecsey's multivolume study of the varieties of native Catholicism, of which volume two,The Paths of Kateri's Kin(1998), is of most interest here. This recent scholarship reflects new perspectives of native scholars entering the field and more publications that anthologize a range of native Christian viewpoints into single volumes. It has also to do with more sustained accountability among normative scholars to native communities and the way that consultants in those communities imagine their religious lives.

Mediations of the Spirit: Native American Religious Traditions and the Ethics of Representation

Mediations of the Spirit: Native American Religious Traditions and the Ethics of Representation

Use of Dialogue in the Reinterpretation of American Indian Religious Traditions

Native American religious traditions are rich in aesthetics and symbolism. Each tribal group has its own cultural pattern, language, and way of life, which generate the cosmological core of its unique belief system. The development of these elaborate traditions can only be examined properly within their own social, religious, and historical contexts. Several obstacles interfere with the objective study of American Indian religions, however. The major factor is the persistent lack of understanding between the majority of the American nation and Native Americans. Because of their long history of oppression and forced assimilation, Native Americans are protective of their sacred tradtions and spiritual knowledge. Most non-Indians have as yet failed to comprehend the full impact of conquest on Native Americans, whose lives were forcibly transformed by systematic efforts to replace their cultures and religious beliefs with various forms of Christianity and Euro-American political structures. Today, however, many non-Indians are interested in learning about Native Americans in the hope of better understanding their own history, environment, and spirituality. Since the mid-1960s, in many universities Native American students have demanded courses in Native American studies that would help them comprehend the historical, political, environmental, and religious issues which confront them in the modern world. Students today

Dance and Ritual in the Study of Native American Religious Traditions

Dance and Ritual in the Study of Native American Religious Traditions