Shifting Paradigms in American Religious Histories
by Tiffany Hale
“Indians, Contact, and Colonialism in the Deep South,” Joel Martin’s chapter in Retelling U.S. Religious History, begins by describing two movements that have “underscored the importance of [Indigenous] peoples across the land and throughout the history of North America” (149).
The first is the New Indian history rooted in the political movements of the early to mid-twentieth century. This includes not only Red Power and its precedents, but broader imperatives within the academy to examine the experiences of groups whose lives historians have traditionally viewed as marginal: in other words, the push to write history from the ground up rather than from the top down. The New Indian history involves seeing Native people as agents of their own histories, challenging narratives about their inevitable disappearance, and highlighting the resilience, adaptation, and dynamism in these societies. This work continues at an impressive pace, with recent works in the last two years by Native historians including Ned Blackhawk, Michael Witgen, and Elizabeth Ellis. Martin stated that he would like to see broader synoptic studies of religion in America take up this same kind of energy. Recent works in that field that do this quite effectively include Kathryn Gin Lum’s most recent book Heathen, Pamela Klassen’s work and others.
The other movement Martin says religion scholars should pay attention to is the “unprecedented increase in visibility in American public life [of Indigenous peoples] as artists, entrepreneurs, journalists, political leaders, and intellectuals” (149). This may be less familiar terrain for some scholars, yet it is important because it involves paying attention to how Native people narrate their own stories on their own terms, or perhaps how those stories are part of broader trends in popular culture that coincide with movements like Black Lives Matter, the push to defend treaty rights and/or protect sacred sites. Martin mentions Vine Deloria Jr.’s work as among the most influential in this regard. I agree that we cannot fully understand the recent effort led in part by the first Native Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to address the massive issue of boarding schools without situating these efforts in a longer history alongside the ongoing work of Native filmmakers, artists, activists, and public intellectuals, including the Osage playwright and filmmaker Ryan Red Corn along with many others whose names are too numerous to list here.
Martin’s main argument is that the appearance of these two major developments calls for a fundamental paradigm shift within American religious history. “The change I envisage,” he writes, “would be much more than a matter of simply tacking Indians on or splicing them into our narratives” (149). This work would instead involve addressing old yet still-powerful stereotypes of Native people as static and lacking agency, but moving beyond narratives of early contact to include the study of colonialism and how it changes over time. “Colonialism,” Martin writes, “is one of the most painful, difficult, and contested aspects of American history, and we historians of American religion are not accustomed to thinking or writing about it” (154). Since the publication of Retelling US Religious History, this statement is, thankfully, less true. In addition to Martin’s clear articulation of the problem, this shift is also due to the influence of Inés Talamantez, whose pathbreaking work over several decades helped to initiate a new generation of religion scholars into the ethical considerations that are so central to doing intellectual work in the field.
Yet in revisiting Martin’s essay one of the main things that I am left with is the sense that an enormous amount of work remains to be done. This is especially the case when we consider that Native students are still among the least represented on college campuses and the immense pressure that Native scholars sometimes feel to speak for their communities in ways that white scholars would never be asked to do. This leads me to a theme that Professor Talamantez often repeated, which involves the importance of reciprocity. If Native ideas and voices serve to enrich broader narratives of American religious history, what do historians of American religion offer Native thinkers in exchange? How might we re-cast the intellectual labor we do as co-constitutive instead of flowing in only the direction of a broader vision of the American story? Put differently, what can scholars of religion offer not only Native studies, but Native peoples?
Answering this question would require moving beyond symbolic gestures of solidarity and tokenizing representational politics to initiate the paradigm shift that Martin outlined. It would require scholars learning about and respecting the boundaries that Native intellectuals and their communities set around questions of religion and acknowledging the harm that academic researchers have historically done with regard to these concerns.
One key skill that religious studies brings to the table is the rigorous work of thinking with but also beyond materialist frames to engage with the philosophical and theological underpinnings of the world we inhabit. To add depth and perspective to basic questions, such as: what does it mean to be a person in relationship to other species? How do societies determine belonging, and how has colonialism shaped and re-shaped these determinations? These are issues that religion scholars are well equipped to offer perspective on issues that are of importance to Indigenous communities. Here I am thinking of scholars such as Larry Gross, Tisa Wenger and Andrea McComb Sanchez, just to name a few. Such work brings questions of ethics to the fore not only in discussing colonialism but by generating the deeper conceptual understanding necessary to find solutions to some of the most pressing issues we face today. That work for our present generation, as I see it, has in many ways only just begun.
Tiffany Hale is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College. She is a scholar of Indigenous religious traditions focusing on nineteenth century Native American history and United States race relations. Her book manuscript, titled Fugitive Religion: The Ghost Dance and Native American Resistance After the US Civil War is under contract with Yale University Press.