AAR Recap

by James Bennett

The fifth and final session of the Religion in the American West seminar of the American Academy of Religion met during the AAR annual meeting last month in Chicago. It was a fitting end in many ways. Meeting in Chicago provided a nice book end to the seminar, which first meet four years ago when the AAR was last in Chicago. That first meeting was in a cramped conference room without enough seats. This year we were in a large meeting room which, at first felt much to vast but, before long, every seat was filled. Nearly fifty people found their way to this year’s seminar meeting! It was great to see several members who have been with us since the start as well as to welcome so many new participants. The presence of both bodes well for the future.

The session featured four pre-circulated essays. One of the advantages of the seminar format, compared with other AAR sessions, is this pre-circulated format. It not only allows for longer papers since they are read in advance, but it also allows most of the seminar meeting to focus on discussion.

Tammy Heise wrote about religion in the Ghost Dance revival at Wounded Knee in 1973, arguing for the important but generally overlooked role of religion in the occupation and AIM, challenging the tendency to sever religion from a event whose interpretation has been interpreted primarily through the lens of the political. Tom Bremer wrote about the role of religion in the founding of Yellowstone National Park, specifically a millennialist evangelical ethic that resolves the seeming contradiction between the nearly simultaneous acts of Congress that established the National Park System and passed the Mining Act. Sarah Koenig focused on the Northwest with a study of trade and material “goods” and they ways that market exchanges among natives and missionaries were also religious exchanges, thereby offering a commercial history of religion in the American West. Finally, Shari Rabin looked at the experience of Judaism in the American West, exploring the differing ways that Jews experienced the West, from the sense of promise and possibility contained in the ease of mobility to a sense of threat or insecurity that resulted from dispersion. The papers provided rich and often innovative analyses that not only moved forward our particular understandings of religion in the American West, but also intersected each other in interesting ways and collectively advanced and opened new thematic and theoretical issues that helped measure the distance the seminar has traveled.

Quincy Newell, my co-chair in the seminar, and I offered some brief comments about the papers. One of the themes of the seminar has been the ways that we draw attention to the presence of religion in the American West. All of the papers advanced this project of uncovering hidden religion, especially as they challenged prevailing understandings of religion by highlighting mobility over stasis, moving beyond Protestantism, and looking beyond institutions to the everyday lives of people as they lived and moved in the West. In this way, the papers advanced the other major theme of the seminar, to consider how attention to the West deepens our understanding of American religion and religion more generally. We then wondered what might remain hidden that we might want to explore more deeply. The categories of gender and race came to mind as ideas that might further complicate our understanding of the West in these and other studies, and as ideas that might be complicated by our study of the West. Alongside the uncovering of hidden religion what most caught our attention was the power of mobility in these papers: of location and dislocation, of claiming and moving into space as a religious act—an act with political, racial and material implications along with religious ones.

What followed was a robust discussion among the nearly fifty attendees in the room, and the space that at first seemed to large impersonal gave way to a conversation and give and take that illumined and challenged all present. Rudy Busto, who had been present at the first session, pointed out the dramatic shift from those first conversations:  no longer were we expressing insecurity about our project  or justifying the need to undertake such discussion. Five years in, the necessity of the conversation was a given and we were starting to complicate our own analysis and categories in ways that spoke to the significance of studying Religion in the American West across a wide range of disciplines and perspectives.

The most encouraging testimony to the success of the seminar at its conclusion was a clear sense that it wasn’t ending, but only getting going. This took the pressure off of us to develop any sense of summing up or closure in our conversation and comments. But more importantly, enthusiasm for the concrete efforts to organize a permanent AAR program unit, as well of the success of this blog over the last year, confirm that these conversations will continue, and that is the best outcome we could have hoped for.

Unearthing the "Spiritual Underpinnings of the American West"

a.k.a. The ASCH Recap, Part I
by Cara Burnidge

For those of you could not attend the American Society of Church History’s winter meeting, your presence was certainly missed as we continued the ongoing conversation about the role of religion in the history of the American West.

In a particularly fascinating examination of “Violence and Religion: Nineteenth-Century Massacres in the American West,” Patricia Nelson Limerick, Jan Shipps, Sarah Barringer Gordon, Jennifer Graber, and Walter Nugent led an important conversation that incorporated many themes discussed at the 2011 AAR meeting. (You can review those themes by reading our AAR recap and further discussion.) The two presentations that composed this panel provided a necessary reminder to all historians that studying the American West is an exercise in unearthing a matrix of ideologies that clash as much as they complement one another.

Limerick opened the panel affirming what fellow blog readers and writers have come to assert: religion has been too long neglected in histories of the American West. Co-presenters Jan Shipps and Sarah Barringer Gordon illustrated this point well with their paper, “The Sins of the Fathers: The Mountain Meadows Massacred as a Religious Event.” In a tripartite analysis Shipps and Gordon described three religious ideologies that converged in Southern Utah in the fall of 1857. Beginning with the perpetrators, Jan Shipps untangled the complicated history of the incident. Despite the LDS Church’s previous claims, Shipps asserted that Mormon men—and not Native Americans—attacked unsuspecting western travelers over 150 years ago. Sarah Barringer Gordon built upon Shipps’ account by explaining the religious significance of the event, for Mormons, lay in the doctrine of Blood Atonement. The Mountain Meadows Massacre, despite previous claims otherwise, involved a blending of religious, political, and military ends evidenced not least of all in the Saints' tithing their plunder to the Church.

Gordon then turned her attention to the Native Americans framed for the massacre as well as the victims of Mormon assault. Even though historians tend to focus on Utah as the site of Mormons' religious worldviews, Gordon pointedly reminded her audience that religious commitments to the landscape existed in the area prior to and distinct from Mormon settlement. Not content to focus exclusively on points of conflict, Gordon concluded her remarks by asserting the ways in which these three groups and their ideologies complemented one another. All three groups understood the landscape to hold spiritual significance within a cosmic history; all three relied on revelation and prophecy to determine individual and communal action; and, finally, all three belong to “meta-critical narratives” that demand attention outside of secular chronologies of the American West.

In her presentation, “’The Indians Have No West Point’: The Meanings of Frontier Violence among Missionaries to the Lakota,” Jennifer Graber offered an equally rich re-consideration of an oft-cited event of the American West. Rather than offer a re-telling of the Ghost Dance movement, Graber compared the experiences of two missionaries to the Lakota: Father Francis Craft and Mary Collins. Graber explained that both Craft and Collins believed themselves to be “friends” of Native Americans yet articulated different views about the role of Christianity for the Lakota, especially following the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. Father Francis Craft, a Jesuit missionary, considered the Ghost Dance movement as an opportunity to bridge the divide between Christianity and Lakota beliefs. Not merely present at the massacre but wounded during battle, Craft became energized by what he believed to be Lakota openness to a Messiah figure and blood sacrifice. Congregationalist Mary Collins, on the other hand, became convinced that the Lakota had misappropriated Christian doctrine for the Ghost Dance. Absent when the massacre occurred, Collins shifted her attention from being a defender and “friend of the Indian” to being open to the use of force in the process of assimilation. Above all else, Graber demonstrated the distinctions among Christian missionaries particularly when it comes to issues of violence. The proximity of armed conflict coupled with contested Christian doctrines related to violence and blood caused these two Christians to intimately re-consider their own convictions...with very different results. Together Craft and Collins contribute to what Graber named the “spiritual underpinnings of the American West.”

This panel was a welcome reminder that scholars of the American West must be good jugglers. The number of balls the field keeps in the air—a multiplicity of religious ideologies as well as the political, economic, and social forces wrapped up within them—proves that the study of the American West poses a unique challenge that continues to unfold.

In this effort to unearth the spiritual underpinnings of the American West, I leave readers with a particularly rich, if more contemporary example: 

Editors' note: Stay tuned for part II of the ASCH recap, which will be posted in a day or two -- that's right, this week you get EXTRA blog posts, because 2012 is just that great!

Book of the Month:

Gregory E. Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity
Review by Quincy D. Newell

Happy New Year!  Do you teach about the Ghost Dance? For many of us who teach about American religion, the Ghost Dance gets a day – and that day focuses on the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, when federal troops clashed with Lakota Sioux Indians, killing scores of men, women, and children. Wounded Knee is a way to weave Indians into the ongoing story of American religion, a way to remind ourselves and our students that Indians did not disappear after rescuing the Pilgrims from starvation, or after the Trail of Tears. Wounded Knee highlights interaction between Native Americans and Anglo-Americans in the West, and it does so in an overtly religious context. It’s tailor-made for American religion classes, especially for those of us that want to focus on the West. Except that it’s so tragic. And except that we so often end up dropping the story into our classes without enough context, so that although we want to present a more complicated story, we end up with something along the lines of “misguided, possibly even malicious, federal troops, controlled by a government back east that really just wants the Indians’ land, massacre well-meaning Native Americans tragically following religious commandments, exercising their religious freedom as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and believing themselves to be invincible because of the idealistic promises made by their authentic, timeless spiritual tradition.” That is, I hope, an exaggeration, but I fear it is sometimes an all-too-accurate summation of what my students leave my classroom thinking.

Raymond DeMallie’s excellent “The Lakota Ghost Dance: An Ethnohistorical Account” (Pacific Historical Review 51, no. 4 [1982]: 385-405) is a great first step toward countering this impression. DeMallie examines the Ghost Dance within a Lakota Sioux context, showing that many of the ways scholars have understood the Ghost Dance fail to take into account “the symbolic content of Indian cultures”(388) – specifically, in this case, of Lakota Sioux culture. It’s a wonderful article, and I won’t try to summarize it here – instead, if you haven’t read it, you should read it. (It’s available on JSTOR, which I’m guessing most of you, dear readers, have access to in one way or another.)

In some ways, Gregory E. Smoak's Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 2006) picks up where DeMallie left off, placing the Ghost Dance in the broader context of the history and culture of Shoshone and Bannock, or Newe, Indians. The Ghost Dance, and prophetic religion more broadly, Smoak writes, were crucial to the lives of Newe peoples throughout the nineteenth century as they dealt with Euro-American expansion and encroachment. The Ghost Dance was part of these peoples’ “long-standing religious response to colonization,” and it built upon elements of Newe culture that preceded it. The Ghost Dance among the Newe was also tied up with the process of ethnogenesis – the emergence of ethnic and racial identities. Ultimately, Smoak argues, “The Ghost Dances were functional, not delusional. On one level they represented a culturally consistent appeal to a supernatural power aimed at restoring the flow of that power toward native people. But on another they were a vehicle for the expression of meaningful social identities. Moreover, the parallels between the Ghost Dances and the prophetic religion of Euro-Americans allowed native peoples to engage the dominant society in a conversation concerning American identities in an age of radical change” (3).

The concept of ethnogenesis is one of Smoak’s keys for explaining the functionality and persistence of the Ghost Dance. In the first part of the book, Smoak illuminates the gradual, confusing emergence of Shoshone and Bannock peoples from the groups that had previously known themselves as the Newe, placing the Ghost Dance within the larger context of Newe interaction with Euro-American colonialism. He then shows the integral role that religion – particularly dynamic shamanistic religious practices – played in Newe cultures, and traces the prophetic tradition among American Indians, especially in the West.

In the second part of the book, Smoak turns to the more directly political aspects of Newe interaction with the United States federal government: treaties, reservations, and the like. Although these details may seem dry to some who are more interested in rituals, stories, and dances, they are crucial for understanding the social and political context of the Ghost Dance. Briefly, treaty-making reified distinctions between groups of Newe, making them more important than they probably were to the people they identified. Simultaneously, the government started trying to lump Shoshone and Bannock peoples into one group for the purposes of reservation-making, erasing the distinctions it magnified during the treaty-making process. Smoak shows that in this context, “the waves of religious excitement that began with the first Ghost Dance prophecies of 1869 were … part of an ongoing process of identity formation that would last for the rest of the century” (113-14). The Ghost Dance, in other words, became a way for Shoshones and Bannocks to negotiate both what it meant to be Shoshone or Bannock, as well as what it meant to be “American Indian.” Smoak traces the spread of the Ghost Dance, showing that it was an ongoing and widespread movement rather than an episodic phenomenon, and uses the theory of relative deprivation to explain why Bannocks were more enthusiastic practitioners of the Ghost Dance than the Shoshones. This interpretation also allows Smoak to show that the Ghost Dance meant different things to different people: to Bannocks, it was “militant resistance”; to the Shoshones, it was “measured accommodation.” Either way, Smoak writes, “Newe people…looked to prophetic religion to make their choice understandable and proclaim their identity as Indians” (118).

As the century wore on, the Ghost Dance also became a way of expressing solidarity with other American Indian peoples. Even as it incorporated Christian doctrines, Smoak argues, “the Ghost Dance taught Indian peoples that they were a distinct group with a distinct origin and way of life and a destiny separate from white America” (154). The Ghost Dance continued to hold different meanings for different peoples, even as it provided a way to unite them as one people.

Brett Hendrickson argued not long ago that one of the things that makes the West different is that there are larger numbers of Native Americans. “In broad brushstrokes,” Hendrickson wrote, “it is fair to say that the study of living Native American religions and worldviews has been vital in the American West as has been the development of Native American religious rights.” Smoak’s story of the Ghost Dance among Newe peoples supports this claim. Although the Ghost Dance did make some inroads in the East, it is largely a western phenomenon. The Ghost Dance itself was multi-layered and malleable, taking on different meanings for different American Indian cultures. Ghost Dances and Identity is well worth reading, whether you’re looking for a complex, subtle argument or just something to make the one day you teach the Ghost Dance a little more satisfying.

Editors’ note: Have you read this book? What do you think about it? Join the conversation and leave your thoughts in the comments! If you have a suggestion for a future book of the month, or if you would like to review a book for the book of the month series, please contact us. Next month, Brandi Denison reviews Matthew Avery Sutton’s Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard University Press, 2007).