Over at Religion in American History, Paul Harvey interviews Tisa Wenger about her new highly-anticipated book We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom:
One of my interventions in this book is to point out the rather obvious fact that although “religion” may originally have been a Western construct, many groups of people around the world have made it their own. Religion may not have been an indigenous category centuries ago, but Native Americans in the United States today certainly do understand and describe their indigenous traditions as religion. They began to do so for obvious reasons, in part to claim constitutional protection from government suppression under the First Amendment, and more broadly because identification as religion provides a certain legitimacy and status in America’s cultural and legal systems. This happened at different times for different tribes across the United States, and WE HAVE A RELIGION looks specifically at how this process occurred among the Pueblo Indians of the early twentieth century. I tried to convey the full complexity and ambivalence of the process: on the one hand the Pueblos successfully defended their dance ceremonies; on the other hand the conceptual apparatus of religion and religious freedom only exacerbated a variety of “modernizing” pressures on tribal life. More specifically, government officials increased their demands that the Pueblos treat ceremonial participation as a matter of individual conscience and choice rather than as community obligation, and that they generally separate ceremonial life from tribal governance. Their story provides a glimpse into the process of cultural change in colonial conditions. But it is important to see that Native Americans have also made the concept of “religion” their own and in many ways have used it to their own advantage. Such conceptual categories are always shifting and multivalent, and I think it’s a mistake on many levels to suggest that “religion” is inherently or universally a tool of colonial control or of western domination.
Read the entire interview here.
Daniel Vaca is the Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Humanities at Brown University, where he teaches in the Department of Religious Studies. A historian of religion and culture in North America, he specializes in the relationship between religious and economic activity in the United States. His first book, Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Harvard, 2019) examines how evangelical ideas, identities, and alliances have developed through commercial strategy and corporate initiative. The co-chair of the American Academy of Religion's program unit on Religion and Economy, Daniel serves on the editorial board of The Immanent Frame.
