Working closely with Inés Talamantez (a mentor and friend), Suzanne Crawford O’Brien avoids the standard themes found in American Indian religion texts, opting instead for a framework encompassing themes such as reciprocity; the earth; climate and conservation; water; food; medicine; and gender and sexuality. Walking past well-worn categories (such as mythology, ceremony, and rites of passage) that pervade the halls, classrooms, and syllabi of religions departments throughout the academy, Talamantez and Crawford O’Brien privilege the “concerns and commitments of contemporary tribal communities” (14) and, in the process, expand the notion of American Indian religion to include varied sites and contexts within which spiritualty manifests holistically as an integral facet of lived experience.
After establishing a foundation for the rest of the book in chapter 1 (“Practical Reverence, Radical Reciprocity”), chapter 2 (“Earth”) centers place within the formation and continuing cultivation of Indigenous religious traditions, focusing in particular on the ongoing desecration and conquest of sacred sites, including Heart Mountain (Wyoming), Sweet Grass Hills (Montana), Mauna Kea (Hawaii), Dzil Nchaa Si An (Mt. Graham), and the Black Hills (South Dakota). In this and subsequent chapters, the use of firsthand case studies effectively brings into sharp contrast fundamental differences in religious worldviews held by the first peoples and the settler societies that displaced them. With a continued emphasis on place, chapter 3 (“Climate and Conservation”) explores the destabilizing effect of climate change on earth-centered spiritual traditions and Indigenous communities in general, which have suffered disproportionately as the lands and seas to which they are inextricably linked undergo dramatic changes. As Crawford O’Brien illustrates, Indigenous communities have been anything but idle, resisting extractive industries that prioritize profits over people, putting the earth and all its human and non-human relatives in peril. With a focus on Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), Crawford O’Brien provides multiple examples of Indigenous climate change initiatives and “collaborative conservation,” whereby Indigenous communities employ long-held traditional knowledge systems to work with non-Indigenous partners to confront the deleterious effects of industry and the consumptive societies they feed. Crawford O’Brien convincingly makes the case that from an Indigenous perspective, spiritual worldviews are not compartmentalized, and any change to traditional earth-centered lifeways will be accompanied by religious change. Chapter 4 (“Water”) illuminates the sacred qualities of water, beginning with numerous origin stories that lead, quite naturally, to the role of water in sacred ceremonies as a form of physical and spiritual sustenance. Like chapter 3, chapter 4 includes examples of activism throughout Indian Country, emphasizing once again that environmental justice -- in this case water rights -- and religious freedom are inseparable.
Chapter 5 turns to the sacred facets of food, highlighting the gathering of traditional foods as a sacred act, their use in ceremonies, the colonial disruption of hunting, fishing, and gathering practices, and the delicate interdependency and reciprocal balance between human communities and their life-giving foods. After outlining the thoroughly devastating impacts of post-contact European diseases and the subsequent and long-term neglect of the health and wellbeing of Native American communities, chapter 6 (“Medicine”), while outlining innovative health initiatives in Indigenous communities to address the epidemics of diabetes and suicide, demonstrates that traditional medicines, sacred foods, and spiritual practices are part of an overall healing process with the power to untangle the tentacles of colonization that prevent positive health outcomes. Chapter 7 (“Gender and Sexuality”) focuses primarily on Indigenous women and girls, who, after European contact, experienced an erosion of access to economic, political, spiritual, and artistic power that mirrored the male-dominated Judeo-Christian “values” of invasive settlers. Native American women experience the highest rates of domestic and sexual violence in North America, a direct result of the colonial legacy that has demeaned and preyed upon them from the start. By weaving in a cross-section of traditional ceremonies centered on women and girls that persist to the present, Crawford O’Brien illustrates that all is not lost, and that the foundation for a resurgence of the feminine and re-balancing of gender roles in Native communities is in place. Chapter 8 tackles the fraught and complex history of Christianity in Indigenous communities, unflinchingly airing the pervasive violence that accompanied the missionization era while emphasizing the role of Indigenous agency in infusing Christianity with Indigenous worldviews, values, songs and sensibilities.
Religion and Culture in Native America is an indispensable addition to the literature, liberating varied Native American spiritual traditions from the tyranny of overtrodden themes found in standard religious studies texts written from a Western perspective. As a “starting place,” each chapter ends with a list of references and recommendations for further reading, a springboard for teachers and students to explore rich (and neglected) insights from Indigenous researchers, writers, culture bearers, and those who work with them. From the outset, Talamantez and Crawford-O’Brien are clear that Religion and Culture in Native America is not designed to be authoritative. Rather, it is an “introduction to the important work being done by Native communities, scholars, and their allies” to “protect [Indigenous] people, their lands, and their cultures.” In that sense, it is a critically urgent introduction, demonstrating that without the ongoing protection and stewardship of Indigenous spiritual traditions, we risk losing our collective connection to our Mother Earth while inching ever closer to the end of the Anthropocene.
--------
[Review length: 871 words • Review posted on April 1, 2021]