Tisa Wenger, a scholar of religious studies, has contributed a fascinating account that will interest folklorists for its careful exploration of the social and political context in which expressive culture is performed. The book pursues multiple goals. At its broadest, the work examines how religion and religious freedom are defined in the U.S., and the implications of this on federal Indian policy and Native American life (4). At its most specific, the work recounts a controversy that unfolded in the 1920s around Pueblo Indian dance performances. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Charles Burke, supporting Protestant missionary objections to the reputed “immoral” nature of the ceremonial dances, issued directives in 1921 and 1923 advising federal agents on reservations to severely restrict or even ban the dances. The directives sparked heated responses from a variety of perspectives, both white and native. By gradually reconceptualizing native dance as a form of religious expression, supporters won landmark First Amendment protection for Native American religion. But as Wenger argues, this victory—while an important step in the struggle for religious freedom and cultural autonomy—paradoxically meant an adoption of Euro-American understandings of the category of religion, and led only unevenly to other advances in religious autonomy for Native Americans, an argument supported in the final chapter of the book.
During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (and surely today as well), the Southwest was a rich site for white projections about indigenous Americans and the American landscape itself. Perspectives varied depending on what people wanted to see, and depending on their political, cultural, and religious agendas—and what they felt about the dominant U.S. society. Wenger documents this fascinating context in the early chapters of the book, beginning by tracing the contrasting approaches of Catholic and Protestant missionaries, themselves battling for power and influence in native communities. By the late-nineteenth century, the Southwest had attracted white social critics and reformers in a variety of fields, characterized by Wenger as cultural modernists (and in some cases, romantic primitivists) who saw in the Indians and the landscape of the Southwest the potential for a uniquely American aesthetics and spirituality. The author retells the premises and mission of Boasian anthropology, and the influence of Boas’s students—a topic well covered in other scholarship but nonetheless essential to the Pueblo Indian case. Visual and literary artists were drawn to the region and contributed to its nascent tourism industry.
Through detailed discussions of biography and individual perspectives, the reader becomes familiar with numerous people influential in the 1920s Southwest. Lengthy sections of the book consist of quotations and paraphrases of primary source materials. The author distinguishes a range of positions among whites, including assimilationists who promoted “civilizing” efforts such as missions and boarding schools; scientific racists who believed Indians were incapable of becoming civilized; and cultural modernists (allied with other modernist movements of the day, especially in anthropology and the arts) who saw the adobe towns and colorful dances of the Pueblo Indians as evidence that the natives of the Southwest were unspoiled, authentic primitives. The Pueblo Indians themselves were far from unified in opinion about dancing or other issues of tradition and assimilation. Wenger distinguishes self-identified native progressives, who promoted assimilation and “progress” through education (yet who rarely wanted to extinguish all forms of native culture), from traditionalists or conservatives, who defended native ways of life amidst increasing pressures to assimilate. For both whites and natives, the dance controversy became a training ground for activists supporting Indian freedom. This group included John Collier, later appointed by FDR to revise federal Indian policy, newly empowering native religious leaders.
To the cultural modernists, re-envisioning Pueblo Indian dancing as “religion” was a useful step towards dislodging Christianity from its dominant place in U.S. life. The modernists were by and large secular themselves, or were attracted to the beauty and mystique of what they increasingly called Indian “religion.” Wenger meticulously traces the gradual application of the word “religion” to dancing and other aspects of Native American culture that had previously been referred to as “custom,” if they were distinguished from the entirety of native life at all. What initially appeared to be a small, perhaps accidental, conceptual change eventually allowed white and native activists to win legal protection for Pueblo dances.
Wenger’s exploration of the intellectual and political implications of this application of the term “religion” brings us to how this publication is broadly relevant and of significance far beyond U.S. history or Native American studies. Wenger places her research comfortably in the well-established vein of scholarship that approaches religion as a cultural category, changing through history and politically consequential. Because Pueblo Indian ceremonial dances came to be protected as religion, Native American expression contributed to new ways of thinking about what can be considered “religion” and to new ways of thinking about Native American cultures in general. Wenger argues that, ironically, because the First Amendment relies on an Enlightenment view of religion as compartmentalizable—“a matter of individual conscience and belief” (xiii)—this move situated Pueblo Indian ceremonies as something separate from other community obligations, something which an individual might choose not to participate in. This right was in fact claimed by self-identified Indian progressives who had become Christian and did not want to participate in ceremonial dances, a participation that at one time was similar to an individual’s other community obligations, such as maintaining irrigation ditches and helping to clean public spaces. Wenger posits that this kind of separation is crucial to secularization. Secularization is not a diminishment of religious belief or practices but a privatization—a key goal of Enlightenment thinking (15). The author makes clear that her own stance is that of a neutral documentarian: “My point is not to argue that this was a wholly positive or negative development…but simply to point out that it resulted from a discursive and conceptual shift” (6).
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[Review length: 966 words • Review posted on September 22, 2009]