We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom

by Tisa Wenger

For Native Americans, religious freedom has been an elusive goal. From nineteenth-century bans on indigenous ceremonial practices to twenty-first-century legal battles over sacred lands, peyote use, and hunting practices, the U.S. government has often acted as if Indian traditions were somehow not truly religious and therefore not eligible for the constitutional protections of the First Amendment. In this book, Tisa Wenger shows that cultural notions about what constitutes "religion" are crucial to public debates over religious freedom.

In the 1920s, Pueblo Indian leaders in New Mexico and a sympathetic coalition of non-Indian reformers successfully challenged government and missionary attempts to suppress Indian dances by convincing a skeptical public that these ceremonies counted as religion. This struggle for religious freedom forced the Pueblos to employ Euro-American notions of religion, a conceptual shift with complex consequences within Pueblo life. Long after the dance controversy, Wenger demonstrates, dominant concepts of religion and religious freedom have continued to marginalize indigenous traditions within the United States.

Genres: History, Religion, Academic, American History, Nonfiction

356 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2009

Reviews

[Thomas Ray]

E99 P6 W45 2009 College Library room 1193, and Memorial Library

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an eye-opening look at how religion functions in American history, showing how "religious freedom" depends strongly on who gets to be called religious. If your religion looks too different from Protestant Christianity, as the religion of the Pueblo people did, then the nation's commitment to religious freedom does not apply. Wenger describes how this worked, but also how the Pueblo fought for their practices to be recognized as religious.

For a people who did not have a separate notion of religion separate from other spheres of public and private life, this decision to describe their customs as religious carried not just the promise of legal protection and the hope of ending Protestant interference with their sacred rites, but also the end of a kind of social cohesion. If their customs, previously mandatory for all members of the community, were "religious" in some way recognizable to the American government, then participation could not be mandated; the Pueblo too must allow religious freedom, even if that meant fraying the fabric of their community.

Wenger unpacks all of this with skill. The book is well written, easy to follow, and enlightening. Well worth reading for anyone interested in American history and the questions surrounding religious freedom.

[Ingrid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once you settle into the scholarly cadence, you'll find that this book is actually a real page turner. Wenger presents an incredibly nuanced and thorough examination of how the Western concept of "religion" was imposed upon and interacted with traditional Pueblo spiritual customs, and how various factions of Anglo and Pueblo peoples attempted to use (and continue to use) the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses of the First Amendment to serve both assimilationist and cultural preservationist ends.

[Phil]

theoretically, conceptually, archivally crucial for the study of Native American religion, and one of the finest studies of the ill consequences of the narrow definition of “religion” in US history and law/of the way in which the category of religion was formed and has evolved more broadly

[Jenna]

Read for my Historical Research and Writing course.

[Samira]

I have something of a policy against reviewing books in American religious history, unless they are formal reviews. I will be formally reviewing this one, though, and so I will say here that this book is nuanced and extremely well done.

[Yveva]

http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2009/0...