Indigenous peoples articulate their indigeneity within the political and legal language of secularism, even as it renders certain claims to indigeneity illegible. In this short essay, I examine the close linkages between secularism, settler colonialism, and Protestant Christianity in three interconnected issues in the United States context: sacred sites, temporality, and divine right.
The Thirty Meter Telescope at Mauna a Wākea
Although claims to indigeneity are often linked with a commitment to the sacrality of land, they need not be. However, the ways in which indigenous peoples articulate their relationships to land tend to differ greatly from the ways in which settlers and their descendants often do. For example, in the context of indigenous peoples subject to US state authority, the articulation of indigeneity vis-à-vis abiding to a belief in the sacrality of land varies greatly and is not necessarily the grounds upon which land claims are asserted.
For example, in the contestation over the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) at Mauna a Wākea on Hawai’i Island there has been a protracted legal battle for years over whether TMT officials can proceed with the $1.4 billion project for an eighteen-story observatory on the summit that Kanaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiians) assert is sacred. Meanwhile astronomers and other TMT proponents continue to uphold westernized scientific knowledge as sacred. As David Maile has theorized, they mobilize the categories of science and time used to describe the TMT in order to justify capitalist-colonialist violence done to Mauna a Wākea.
Plaintiffs in the case insist on the sacrality of the summit, but that is not the basis of their legal challenge. The six appellants formed a group, The Mauna Kea Hui, which challenged a decision by the state Board of Land and Natural Resources (BLNR), which granted a conservation district use permit to the University of Hawaii at Hilo for construction of TMT. The group filed a lawsuit in 2013, alleging that the BLNR violated due process and failed to properly issue a permit for construction of the telescope. Meanwhile, opponents of the project organized to block roads and stop vehicles from getting through to a groundbreaking ceremony. In April 2015, protests grew with crowds of people gathering at the 9,000-foot level of the nearly 14,000-foot high mountain to stop the project, effectively halting construction. The state’s Third Circuit Court affirmed the BLNR decision, so the Mauna Kea Hui appealed to the Intermediate Court of Appeals (ICA). The Hui filed an application to transfer the case to the Hawaii Supreme Court, which took up the case and issued its decision in November 2015, temporarily suspending the TMT permit.1I should note that I offered testimony in the first contested case in 2011, which was later cited in the 2015 Hawaii Supreme Court ruling. See J. Kehaulani Kauanui, “Written Direct Testimony,” Kahea: The Hawaiian-Environmental Alliance; Supreme Court of Hawaii, “Opinion of the court,” December 2, 2015.
In a concurring opinion, Supreme Court Justice Richard Pollack wrote that the BLNR “failed to conduct a contested case hearing before deciding the merits of UH’s application and summarily granted the requested permit without duly accounting for the constitutional rights and values implicated. The board acted in contravention of the protections of Native Hawaii customs and traditions.”
Although the Mauna Kea Hui asserts the sacredness of the mountain, the lawsuit they filed alleged that the state had violated due process and failed to properly issue a permit for construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope. The court agreed, and remanded to state Circuit Court for a new contested case hearing, which proceeded in 2016. Hence in the group’s efforts to protect the mountain as a sacred Native Hawaiian place, they were tactically confined to work within state laws given the structural force of US occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom that eventually led to unilateral annexation in 1898 and “50th statehood” by 1959. Nonetheless, the assertions of the sacred by the protectors were what spoke to people around the world who stood in solidarity, including but not limited to others indigenous individuals.
One of the youth leaders who camped at Mauna a Wākea to stop construction, Joshua Lanakila Mangauil, explained to media time and again that he and the other protesters (self-identified “protectors”) are not against the scientific goals of the telescope, but they believe that construction of another telescope will further desecrate the sacred mountain. As he put it,
This is a new time when we are greatly waking up to the combined responsibility of protecting our sacred places and our natural world . . . . Truth and dedication to standing firm with aloha in our hearts and combining the strengths of every member of our community is what has brought us this victory, and united we will continue.
Regarding the assertions of sacrality, the protectors also highlighted the fact that construction would disturb burial sites on the mountain. However, one of the centerpieces of the legal case regarding the permit was based on the fact that the proposed telescope’s structure was to be built underground and hence contaminate the main water source of the “Big Island” that originates from the mountain peak through snow melt and rain. Protectors also cited the flora and fauna unique to the mountain. Similar negotiations of sacrality and legal strategy played out, and attracted wide public attention, in the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Claiming “Firstness”
Another example of how claims to indigeneity need not be directly linked with a commitment to the sacrality of land is through what Elizabeth Povinelli has theorized as “the governance of the prior”—a claim to firstness. She interrogates the paradox of claiming “firstness” in relation to the form of liberal governance in settler colonial states (forged through British settlement) that also rest on the governance of the prior. She shows how indigenous claims to being prior are easily coopted by the presuppositions underpinning political theory, social theory, and humanist ethics (obligation) which are themselves undergirded by English common law that relegate indigenous priors (practices) to customary traditions. Speaking to the US state, Povinelli explains:
Articulating itself as a “creole state,” a negative projection of the metropolitan state, Americans could claim and experience themselves as the prior occupant of the Americas: projecting itself against the metropole, the settler state constituted itself as prior to it. But in acceding to the logic of the priority of the prior as the legitimate foundation of governance, the settler state projected the previous inhabitants as spatially, socially and temporally before it as the ultimate horizon of its own legitimacy.
In this logic and structure, the governed prior (the indigenous) would be the customary, while the other prior—the governing prior (the settler society)—would be free.
Jean M. O’Brien had theorized this division as a process of “firsting and lasting” in the settler quest to write Indians out of existence in New England. She argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. Hence the Native “prior” (the last) is relegated to the preface of “real” history of the settler society, which claims to be “the first.” In other words, indigenous “primitive” life is relegated to the past deemed primitive, a pre-modern preface against which the settler society can write its own modern freedom. For example, settler regard for indigenous concepts of the sacred have been dismissed as “superstitious” and “heathen” as settlers and their descendants assert their own secular modernity by contrast, often in discourses of “progress.”
Povinelli, like O’Brien, identifies an unresolved temporal paradox that produces the conditions of indigeneity as prior to and a prior of the law at the same time; the law debases indigeneity from having any “prior” at all. She urges scholars of critical indigenous studies to move beyond the claims to “firstness” since the settler state continuously “projects the previous inhabitants as spatially, socially and temporally before it as the ultimate horizon of its own legitimacy.” She suggests, “Indigenous critical theory intervenes in something rather than explains something, not because it is located within the existing aporia of law and justice but because it lies in a particular spacing at once inside and outside of it.” Tending to this temporality question can potentially make for an intervention of what is considered sacred while refusing the colonial binary of insider or outside, secular or sacred.
Separation of church and state?
Western colonization of the “New World” was itself grounded in suppositions of the sacred. The Age of Discovery mandated by the Papacy that enabled the dominance of Europe and its colonies over indigenous peoples is based on the notion of Christian supremacy and divine right, which continues as a form of domination into the present. By the authority of Catholic Monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, the Christian Reconquista preceded support of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage, the expedition that opened the way to genocide, colonization, and the enslavement of indigenous peoples.2See The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking The Domination Code, a film by Sheldon Wolfchild (director), co-produced by Steven Newcomb. Also in 1492, the monarchs issued the Alhambra Decree ordering the expulsion of practicing Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and its territories and possessions.3See The Doctrine of Discovery The 1493 papal bull written to legitimate Columbus’s second voyage to the Americas was subsequently used to justify colonial powers’ claims to lands belonging to sovereign indigenous nations. The doctrine established Christian dominion and subjugated non-Christian peoples by invalidating or ignoring aboriginal possession of land in favor of the government whose subjects explored and occupied a territory whose inhabitants were not subjects of a European Christian monarch.4See Steven Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2008).
As Steven Newcomb documents in Pagans in the Promised Land, contemporary US laws that undercut indigenous claims to sovereignty can be traced back to Christian medieval law.5Independent states throughout the world continue to impose this notion of the “pre-modern” savage as a mechanism of control in their negotiations with indigenous peoples’ legal status and land rights. One result is that there is no global consensus that indigenous peoples have the right to full self-determination under international law. As Newcomb details, the Puritans drew a parallel between themselves and the Children of Israel, escaping religious persecution in Europe just as the ancient Hebrews were led out of Egypt. America was their “Promised Land,” making way for the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.6See also Steven Paul McSloy, “‘Because the Bible tells me so’: Manifest Destiny and American Indians,” Indian Country Today Media Network, 2004. The concept of Manifest Destiny thus stems from Puritan claims of destiny under God’s mandate to settle North America as articulated by John Winthrop in his 1630 sermon for “City upon a Hill”—the belief that they were divinely elected to settle the North American continent.
Consider as an example the enduring Discovery Doctrine, which undergirds all US federal Indian policy. United States justification of dominance vis-à-vis indigenous peoples is premised on Old Testament narratives of the “chosen people” and the “Promised land,” as exemplified in the 1823 Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. McIntosh. This landmark decision that held that private citizens could not purchase lands from Indian tribes, and the foundations of the court’s opinion lay in the “discovery doctrine.”
Based on this ruling still today, the United States government considers Native Nations as mere occupants of their traditional homelands, with “use rights” based on the court’s invention of the concept of “aboriginal title.” As Newcomb highlights so vividly, the United States’s claim of separation between church and state is a farce. Settler colonial rationales for the taking over of indigenous peoples’ homelands are grounded in Judeo-Christian concepts of the sacred, even as they purport to be guided by secular law.
Kauanui and Swain both view the ‘secular’ language used in political discourse of the modern democratic West (whereas Swain contextualizes her research in Canada, Kauanui does so in the United States) as being grounded in a hegemonic Christian tradition stemming from colonization, thereby undermining the ‘neutrality’ agenda it is meant to create and promote.
As Swain notes (2017, 3), secularity and the subsequent language of secularism is often used to denote a sense of religious neutrality in legislation, meaning that one religious belief is not be favoured over another in an official state capacity. However, rather than truly being neutral, the perceived notion of what counts, or is understood as religion has formed a vehicle where certain traditions receive preference, namely that of Protestant Christianity. In an indigenous context, this outlook is harmful because indigenous religion has been interpreted within the “problematically colonial category of religion,” meaning that if Christianity is used as a defining point for ‘religion,’ then indigenous beliefs, existing in such a contrast, cannot fit within this cultural category (ibid). This is further problematized where, as Kauanui (2017) notes, the “superstitious” and “heathen” conceptions of indigenous belief on behalf of colonial settlers, perhaps both past and present, have been used as a springboard by which “secular modernity” is both forwarded and justified by the pursuit of “progress” of the state’s relationship towards religion. This is complicated further by the fact that our understanding of religion in the colonial context (Smith 1998: 269) may not have changed significantly.
Kauanui’s mention of ‘progress’ can be linked to the understanding of progress by Lynn White, who was the first (or perhaps the most controversial) to identify Christianity, and more specifically Protestant Christianity, as a religion obsessed with perpetual progress (White 1967). If we understand Christianity as being characterized by the pursuit of progress, then we can locate an underlying colonial conflict in what Swain (2017, 4) identifies as the oppositional relationship between “religion” and “spirituality.” I think Kauanui’s mention of the Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT) is an excellent example of this interconnection. Using the “discourses of progress” to appear secular in a once explicitly Christian society, the issue at hand may really be the contestation between Christian colonial drives towards progress (“religion”) in the construction of the telescope, and the indigenous desire to “protect sacred places and the natural world” (the “spiritual”), rather than one of an innately secular conflict. Therefore, although political discourse and public conflicts are designated by the state as secular, there may be a Christian understanding of ‘progress’ underlying the state’s standpoint, revealing the ‘secular’ to be ‘Christian.’
While the use of these power dynamics by legislators may be implicit when compared to the forced assimilation of the residential school systems (see Neeganagwedgin 2014: 32-33), for instance, they no less seek to undermine the legitimacy of indigenous concerns towards the sacred. Further, they may expect some form of subordination in the face of Christianity as a cultural and religious tradition positioned to stand in opposition to their beliefs. As a result, indigenous peoples are framed as ‘aggressors’ against secularity rather than ‘protectors’ of what they deem sacred.
Smith, J.Z. 1998. “Religion, Religions, Religious.” In Mark Taylor (Ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Studies, pp. 269-284. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Swain, Stacey. 2017. “Between Recognition and Regulation.” Unpublished Paper. Accessed Februrary 13, 2018.
Neeganagwedgin, Erica. “‘They Can’t Take our Ancestors out of Us”: A Brief Historical Account of Canada’s Residential School System, Incarceration, Institutionalized Policies, and Legislation Against Indigenous Peoples. Canadian Issues (2014): 31-36.
White, Lynn. “The historical roots of our ecologic crisis.” Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203- 1207.
The way in which science – particularly the role of science in an impetus for progress – is discussed here seems reminiscent of Dr. Sacco’s lecture on skepticism regarding the privileging of various discursive fields over others in both legislation and public discourse. When considered in light of this, the presentation of “science-as-progress” in debate on this issue highlights the influence of discourse that seems frequently ignored in fields outside of the humanities; namely, that language is still a form of ideological currency within these fields, particularly in the determination of public perspectives on the topic at hand. In both academic and public conversation, self-reflexive and discursive critique is frequently levelled at those involved with study or discussion of the “religious” or the “spiritual” (to briefly adopt some problematic categories for the sake of the argument). In contrast to this, as Dr. Sacco notes, there seems to be an ironic “sacredness” at play in the unquestioned legitimacy of science in contemporary society (Sacco 2018, 5).
It seems that this may be an even more insidious form of discourse – as Casey very aptly observed, much of this “secular language” of science and progress so often perceived as “neutral” is in fact value-laden with various ideological assumptions and agendas.
Perhaps in the same way that the categories of “religion” and “spirituality” are unpacked in their utilization in various discourses, so too could the idea of “science-as-progress”, which I believe – in both this article and in general – be unpacked, perhaps especially in its frequent positioning in opposition to “science-as-preservation”. Furthering this, both of these given examples highlight in way in which presentation of terms positioned as binaries serves to develop understandings of both concepts inextricably dependant on, and frequently in opposition to, one another. Taves and Bender allude to this form of co-dependent definition in their “understanding of the secular and religious as co-constituted historical formations” (Taves and Bender 2012, 3).
Moreover, the frequent and implicit association of “science” with the “secular” in public discourse should be given due consideration, particularly in light of Casey’s aforementioned comment regarding the underlying Christian ideologies of “secular” discourse. As secularization is seen as stemming from the “consequences of intellectual developments such as the experimental scientific method and modern reason (the Enlightenment)” (Taves and Bender 2012, 3), these two concepts seen inextricably tied together. If anything, this serves to reinforce the conflicted positioning of science as “secular (and thus neutral, objective, and most reasonable course of action) progress” against a form of spiritual preservation.
In light of this I would like to consider exactly how the interactions between these different discursive fields (and their respective ideological agendas) occur, and subsequent privileging of certain fields over others is determined. It is evident that in contemporary society, the discourse of the scientific-secular, of the empirically provable (hypothetically of course, since we aren’t actually aware of how to prove it ourselves – but someone else has done it!) can be understood as evolving with and thus as inextricably tied to understandings of the religious-spiritual, however it is given a notably more weighted, and automatic, form of legitimacy in public opinion.
Perhaps it could be productive to consider – how does this occur? Can this be changed? Does the offering of “science-as-preservation” and the understanding of nature as a sacred place – perhaps harkening back to Bramadat’s “reverential naturalism” – suggest the privileging of a new form of spiritual, even ecological discourse? What is the role of increased participation by marginalized groups (in this case, indigenous) in potentially directing discourse in this direction?
Bender, Courtney and Taves, Ann. 2012. “Introduction: Things of Value” in What Matters? Ethnographies of Value in a Not So Secular Age, 1-33. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hynes, Mary, and Paul Bramadat. 2018. “Beautiful British Columbia vs. Friendly Manitoba: Where you live may influence your spirituality.” Audio blog. Tapestry. CBC Radio. January 7. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/popup/audio/listen.html?autoPlay=true&clipIds=&mediaIds=1130263107893.
Sacco, Vincent. 2018. “A Skeptic on Skeptics”. Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology. For use in RELS 347/807: Spirituality, Secularity, Non-Religion, School of Religious Studies, Queen’s University.
As noted by Kauanui, Casey, and Lena, the manner by which ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ are positioned in a binary relationship that presupposes a distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’ speaks to the problematic notions of a ‘disenchanted modernity’. Such a dichotomization of immanent versus transcendent realms pose problematic in consideration of many Indigenous Lifeways that connect the living to the teaching and presence of ancestors, spirit-guides, and beyond-human forces. As such, the possibilities provided by a secular ‘disenchanted’ society must be maintained as options among many, both in lived-experience, as well as in theoretical form. Reflection on the continuation of enchantment in the world reminds the scholar of the colonial nature of the dichotomization of reality into discursive, and power-laden, hermeneutical binaries.
As discussed by Casey, the colonial Christian Euro-centric rhetoric surrounding the term ‘religion’ demonstrates the artifice of such distinctions. This reinforces the constructed nature of categories of understanding that are intended to benefit specific sources of power. As Lena argues, when various social constructions of reality are understood as discursive in nature, binaries and hierarchies emerge in order to serve the purposes of those in the position of ‘architect of ideas’, as opposed to the envisioned ‘other’. David Morgan asserts that “Vision reveals authority and weakness, charisma and stigma, compassion and aggression” (2012, 3), suggesting that the manner by which the other is viewed speaks to an internalized understanding of the way the world should be, a projection of the necessitated values for membership to the community to which an individual belongs. When the socially constructed versions of reality become so deeply entrenched in the social and political environments in which they function, these ideological positions have the potential of moving from perception to prescriptions by means of law and policy.
Kauanui’s example of the contestation over the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) demonstrates the manner by which ideologies can be prioritized, and subsequently enshrined not only in legal or social frameworks, but into the physical environment itself. Kauanui cites David Maile’s theorization of a system of justification of “capitalist-colonial prioritization of science and time” to facilitate the TMT. This speaks to Max Weber and Charles Taylor’s description of the ‘Disenchantment Thesis’ as the ‘progress’-charged transformation through which society proceeded from a state of enchantment to a modern condition of human mind-centered ‘disenchantment’. Terming this phenomenon as ‘progress’-charged, I propose that both Weber and Taylor highlight the Euro-centric Christian oriented scientific turn of society as a notable feature of the process of ‘disenchantment’, corresponding to Casey’s commentary on Lynn White’s identification of Protestant Christianity as a ‘progress-obsessed’ religion. This societal trend could be argued to result in a ceaseless search to attain increasing control and mastery of the human-centered world.
According to Weber, progress-oriented capitalistic endeavours further entrench the ‘disenchantment of the world’ by means of rationalization and intellectualization, resulting in the relocation of value-laden claims and pursuits, such as religious affiliation, to the private sphere (Weber 2004 [1918], 16). Subsequently, Taylor defines the ‘enchanted world’ as that which engages with a transcendent realm apart but entangled through its affects upon humanity, as “the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces” (Taylor 2007, 26), with the ‘disenchanted world’ as a re-evaluation and re-configuration of ‘fullness’ of person, achieved through human flourishing and autonomy of mind and self (Taylor 2007, 26-29). As such a divide is created between not only the immanent and transcendent realms, but a hierarchical divide emerges between that which is accommodated and celebrated in the public politicized sphere.
While Taylor’s assertion that this is a central distinction of Western Euro-centric culture is accurate when considering historical Christian hegemony, to continue with this division of immanent and transcendent realms as oppositional, does not seem agreeable to counter-narratives and post-colonial discourse. Certain spheres of existence are within the control of human creation and control; the ‘disenchanted’ world allows for secular humanistic autonomy, until that autonomy returns to its hegemonic capitalist tendencies. It is important to recognize that the freedom experienced in the form of possibilities of belief or disbelief extends only as far as that freedom is respected in others.
Morgan, David. 2012 “Chapter 1: Vision and Embodiment” in The Embodied Eye Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling. University of California Press: 3-28.
Swain, Stacie. 2017. “Between Recognition and Regulation: Relating Indigenous Sovereignty to
Canadian Secularism and State Violence”, Doctoral Student, under revision, University of Victoria: 1-18.
Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press: 1-41.
Weber, Max. 2004 [1918]. “Science as a Vocation.” In The Vocation Lectures.
Indianapolis: Hackett Publications: 1-16.
I agree with Casey’s opinion that although secularism provides the agenda of ‘neutrality’ to define multicultural liberalism, there is a preference for certain traditions, such as Protestant Christianity. As Kauanui (2017) noted, indigenous life and culture are relegated to the primitive history; the settler society pursues the progress with modernity. This theory corresponds with Greg Johnson’s definition of secular liberalism which “is not neutral with regard to religion, but, rather banishing some, taming other, and celebrating a select few” (Swain 2017, 3). In other words, secularism is not the term essentially offered to the neutrality, but rather privatizes religion in politic ways to tame or namely civilized other cultures and traditions.
Kauanui (2017) has posed a critical question at the end of the article: is there a complete separation of church and state? From my perspective, there is no constitutional political distance in the relationship between the Nation-State and religion that holds independent authority in two spheres. In the colonial context, the colonization of indigenous people by Europeans is founded on the notion of Protestant Christianity who has the supreme right to dominate indigenous people from the past to present. Although it seems like that Protestant Christianity unilaterally occupied the sacred land of indigenous people, the Nation-State actually “opened the way to genocide, colonization, and the enslavement of indigenous people” in the name of religion (Kauanui, 2017). Moreover, as Josephson-Storm (2018, 15-20) noted, political secularism as the Nation-State promotes the theory of governmentality that demarcate multi-cultures into different spaces to classify and control them. The culture or religion such as Protestant Christianity which is under control is classified to the legitimate “good religion”; The tradition such as indigenous culture which is barbaric and out of control is regarded as illegitimate “bad religion” (Josephson-Storm 2018, 3). Indigenous tradition is also labeled as “superstitious” and “heathen” that is contrary to settler’s political secularism as being characterized by the pursuit of progress (Kauanui, 2017).
Secular nation-state ideology attempts to completely exclude or eliminate superstition by elevating the religion by controlling it and banishing the culture by labelling them as delusion, fantasy, and superstition. In the article, the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) represents the ally between secularism and science to against the “superstition” of Indigenous cultures. However, indigenous Hawaiians did not oppose the scientific goal of the telescope, but they have considered that the construction of telescope would desecrate the burial sites on the mountain and contaminate the main water source (Kauanui, 2017). Therefore, “superstition” is just the name which is compulsively given by the Nation-State who aims to banish and exclude the illegitimate religion.
All in all, secularism does not represent complete neutrality to characterize multicultural liberalism. In the colonial context, political secularism’s goal is not the elimination of religion, but privatizes the religion which they can control and banish and tame others which are characterized as “superstitious” and “uncivilized.” Religion in secular states is not the pure religion anymore but is developed into a way to achieve legal privileges. Indigenous people are regarded as the provocateur of secularism that should be excluded.
Josephson-Storm, Jason Ānanada. 2018. “The Superstition, Secularism, and Religion Trinary: Or Re-Theorizing Secularism”, Williams College, Williamstown, MA: 1-20.
Swain, Stacie. 2017. “Between Recognition and Regulation: Relating Indigenous Sovereignty to
Canadian Secularism and State Violence”, Doctoral Student, under revision, University of Victoria: 1-18.