In a photo essay at Tikkun Daily Blog, photographer Julia Dean and writer Jay Adler portray the American Indian Church in San Carlos, Arizona. Katharine Sontag introduces the photo essay and the wider project of which it is a part:
Even in the San Carlos Apache Reservation’s small community of roughly 10,000, there are many different religious sects that clash with each other. “Traditionals,” those who practice Native American spirituality, view Christianity as the “oppressor’s religion.” Within the various Christian sects there are also rifts. As Dean says: “It causes divides and fights within the community. It causes divisions amongst the group—a group you want to be unified for their own benefit but things like this are dividing them.”
San Carlos began literally as a concentration camp in 1872, with the U.S. government forcibly relocating tribes, causing them to give up their conventional way of life in exchange for dependence on inadequate government resources. This recent history of oppression brings questions of identity: what does it mean to live within the country that has colonized and oppressed your ancestors for hundreds of years? It’s no surprise, then, that choices about religious identity take on a great weight. As seen from these fourteen photos, the American Indian Church is one of the places where these families congregate, share community, sing songs, and find redemption. It is an Evangelical church led by David Miles, also an American Indian. Both the passion and the peace found on these faces indicate the power of religion and spirituality to move these people, and the central role it plays in their lives.
Read the full introduction here and view the photo essay here.