Orientations and Memory

by Brandi Denison

“We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed.” Milan Kundera, Ignorance

Growing up in western Colorado, my life was oriented around a variety of mountains. When I was in town, I only needed to head towards the Grand Mesa, a large, purple flattop mountain, in order to go home. At home, in order to go to school, I headed towards the sandstone rock formations that make up the Colorado National Monument.  In order to visit my grandparents, I headed towards a series of hills that formed the foothills of the Uncompahgre Plateau.  To go to the post office, I  turned towards the Bookcliffs. Growing up in a place with very little entertainment for young people, we found amusement along the river, in ditches, and in the surrounding mountains and desert. Even as I escaped what I felt at the time to be a provincial life through books, I often made my escape outside.

Now, my orientation is in relationship to the Atlantic Ocean, a powerful and massive landmark that is invisible even 50 feet from it. It has taken some time for me to get used to such a powerful, yet invisible landmark. I spend too much time inside: writing; prepping for classes; and escaping the heat. However, in my writing, I am never far from persistent orientation of the American West’s mountains.

What does an orientation towards the American West illuminate? The thing about religion in the American West is that it is not somehow specific or even unique to that place. After all, there are landscapes that are similar to the American West throughout the world. Mongolia has expansive deserts and Nepal even more impressive mountains than the American West. Other places have as much religious diversity and a similar history of colonialization. One thing that an orientation to the West does is disrupt the grade school narrative of American Religious history.  It also calls attention to other issues and frameworks that can prove useful in other settings outside of the American West. It’s not just about Indians, Catholics, and Mormons, but also about city-building, utopian dreams, court battles defining religion, the desire to find freedom, cultural reappropriation, land, both as sacred place and ownership over, difference, diversity, and identity crises.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about the study of religion in the American West as an act of memory. For many of us, novelist Milan Kundera’s words will be eternally true: “we will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past. . . who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other.” We, in this imagined community of scholars, bloggers, and readers, stand united against narratives of American religion that start with the Puritans arriving on the shores of the East Coast, insisting instead that maybe the narrative starts with the arrival of the Spanish, or that it starts with the indigenous peoples who were here long before any European.

The American West was constituted in part by both cultural memories of it (through Buffalo Bill shows, early Westerns, and reenactments of epic battles) and through academic scholarship. For instance, through his Frontier Thesis, Fredrick Turner created the definitional boundaries of what that actually was.  Scholars of religion in the American West have inherited these orientations, both in the constant struggle to assert that religion is important in the West and also that the West continues to be relevant past Turner’s artificial closing. Even as this work is rooted in evidence through academic methodologies, it is engaging memory.

But, how might an orientation toward the American West allow scholars of religion to account for what memory, Kundera’s poor thing, can actually do? Individual memories are fragmented, partial, and incomplete. Cultural memories are even more incomplete and partial, even as those memories are spun to hide holes or lapses. An orientation towards memory in the American West, then, reveals that the components of human identity—region, race, ethnicity, religion—are fundamentally fluid, porous, and uncertain even as acts of cultural memory attempt to make these identity boundaries certain.

Orientation to religion in the American West is a commitment to address impartial memories, through an inherently unstable category, and within an indefinable space. Even as the landmarks of that space overwhelm and frame day-to-day movements, our commitment as scholars of the American West is to recognize that orientations are fundamentally relational. In the words of Jonathan Boyarin, in his The UnconvertedSelf, my hope with orientating my scholarship in the American West is to “keep . . .the past open, or reopen. . . a chink in the past” (118).

“Religion and Empire” as a Theme for Teaching American Religions

by John-Charles Duffy

I’m in the process of reframing my “intro to American religions” course for this coming fall. I teach this course as a historical survey. For the past couple of years, the course’s organizing narrative has had two strands, intertwined like DNA: one story about the consolidation and erosion of Protestant dominance in American society, and another story about the expansion of religious diversity in the U.S. through immigration.

This fall, I’ll be attempting a single organizing narrative, unified by the theme “religion and empire.” By “empire” I have in mind American territorial expansion and the United States’ rise to political and economic superpower status. This experiment grows out of a conversation I had at the AAR this past November with Brandi Denison. By reframing American history as a history of empire—from the Mississippians and the Aztecs to U.S. neocolonialism and globalization—I hope to give the course a stronger transnational orientation, with attention not only to the flow of religions into U.S. borders but also to the flow of American religions and their influence out across the globe.

One side effect of this focus on empire is a shifting of the story’s center of gravity westward, away from the eastern seaboard. I already make a point, as I suspect all of us do by now, of starting the story of European contact with the Spanish and the French rather than the English. The theme of empire reinforces that move, plus now I’ll be including Russian colonization in Alaska and California. Manifest Destiny will loom large in the new course, which will ensure that Native Americans recur in the historical narrative rather than fading into obscurity after the initial European contacts. Manifest Destiny will also bring Hispanic Americans into the course earlier—in the course as I’ve been teaching it up to now, they don’t appear until the unit on post-1960s pluralism. Mormons will figure in the new course as an obstacle to American empire in the trans-Mississippi west; Confucians, Buddhists, and Sikhs help build that empire’s infrastructure and economy. I’ll be adding to the course a focus on Christian civilization-building in the United States’ Pacific possessions. Our readings will likely include McKinley’s account of how God inspired him to take charge of the Philippines.

Some topics that are typical fare in “intro to American religions” courses will probably drop out of my new course because they don’t tie in well to the theme of empire. The First Great Awakening will definitely go. The Second Great Awakening might survive the cut because of its connection to American expansion west across the Appalachians, but at that point in the historical narrative I’ll be more interested in Native American revitalization movements. The fundamentalist-modernist controversy is out, though we’ll discuss the conservative-liberal split within Protestantism in connection with colonialism, missions, and interreligious dialogue. The day I currently spend on JFK’s speech in Houston will need to go—the speech is an important turning point in a story about eroding Protestant dominance, but it isn’t pertinent to a story about imperialism. (If JFK gets mentioned in the new narrative, it will be for his contributions to the Cold War.) The black civil rights movement will still appear in the new syllabus, to follow up on the legal and social status of America’s former slaves. I currently do a day on American Muslims negotiating life in the U.S.; in the new course, I need to do more on Islamism as a reaction to American neocolonialism.

Again, in choosing “religion and empire” as the course’s guiding theme, my pedagogical aims are broader than highlighting religion in the American west—but I’m pleased that the theme facilitates that focus as well. 

Environmentalism, Sacred Native Land, and the Failure of the First Amendment

by Kenny Richards

American Indians have had serious trouble winning religious freedom cases in the high courts of this country.  Felix Cohen, a legal scholar who set much of the groundwork for practicing federal Indian law, once remarked that we should watch closely what happens in the federal courts when American Indians are involved, as these cases often act as canaries in the coal mine.  If what Cohen warns is true, then these canaries fell to the bottom of their cages a long time ago.  The persistent failure of the American government to protect the right to the free exercise of religion for American Indians suggests that this government is enforcing a particular and biased conception of religion.  In landmark cases such as Employment Division v. Smith, Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, and Navajo Nation v. United States Forest Service, the United States court system has repeatedly shown its aversion to protecting the religious rights of American Indians. 

          

In response to this pattern in high court decisions, different tribal entities have begun arguing for environmental conservation as a way to protect their sacred places from destructive forms of development.  Across the United States, various forms of destructive development, from open-pit mining to energy production are currently threatening the existence and perpetuity of many American Indian sacred places. The shift in legal argumentation from religious freedom into environmental arguments for the protection of American Indian sacred places offers an important opportunity for many to see how, exactly, the court’s interpretation of the First Amendment is failing to protect American Indian religious traditions.  

This past winter, the Snowbowl Ski Resort in Arizona began making snow from recycled human wastewater to spray on their ski runs in the San Francisco Peaks.  This forested and ecologically rich mountain range is a sacred place for many of the Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest.  Klee Benally is a member of the Navajo Nation and an Indigenous and environmental rights activist.  Benally has been working for the protection of the San Francisco Peaks for many years now. As reported by media outlets such as Indian Country Today and The Navajo-Hopi Observer, this past December, Benally participated in a public protest in Flagstaff Arizona where, with a group of other Indian peoples, he argued that snow production violated their human rights, namely their right to the freedom of religion. Benally told Indian Country Today, “what needs to happen is the government needs to afford the same rights to Native Americans that everybody else in this country enjoys.” Not long afterwards, Benally marched with more than a dozen people down to the local U.S. Forest Service headquarters in Cococino National Forest and hand delivered letters of protest addressing the recent promise by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help protect American sacred places.  With the flair of an activist, Benally poured a 5-gallon bucket of treated sewage effluent, the same water to be used on the mountain for snow-production, in the center of the main entrance to the park headquarters.  The Forest Service promptly called in a Hazardous Materials Response Team, or “HAZMAT” to clean and neutralize this hazardous spill.  Benally was then arrested and now faces a maximum possible sentence of $20,000 in fines and 2 years imprisonment.  In a written statement responding to his arrest, as published in the Navajo-Hopi Observer, Benally wrote, “The irony is that the USFS has authorized to spill more than 1.5 million gallons of treated sewage effluent per day onto a rare and pristine alpine habitat, yet they feel it’s appropriate to call hazmat when a pail of this same wastewater is allegedly poured onto their polished tile floors?  I hold the USFS liable for the environmental poisoning that is set to occur on the peaks right now.”

Step back four years: in 2008, after years of litigation, appeals, district, and federal court decisions the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the production of artificial snow on the San Francisco Peaks did not violate the right to the free exercise of religion for several thousand Indian people. The Indian plaintiffs in this argued that the use of treated sewage effluent for snow production at a skiing resort on Mt. Humphrey’s would desecrate one of their sacred mountains, thus destroying their ability to practice their traditional religions. 

After the 9^th Circuit decided the case, Indian peoples continued to protest snow production, alleging human rights infringements in terms of both Indigenous rights and U.S. constitutional rights.  All the while, the Snowbowl Ski Resort continued to put pipes in the ground and make preparations for snow production from recycled sewage effluent.  Since their First Amendment case failed, several groups, including the Hopi Tribe and the Save the Peaks Coalition (an environmentally focused group), have brought lawsuits arguing that the production of snow from treated wastewater will violate certain environmental laws. 

This turn to environmental law for the protection of American Indian sacred places in Arizona is not a singular phenomenon.  Disputes over uranium mining on Mount Taylor in New Mexico, Copper mining from the Pebble Mine in Alaska, and the proper management of the Ka’u Forest Reserve in Hawai’i are all examples of sacred places that are being fought over in environmental terms. Tisa Wenger, a historian of American religions, argues that many American Indians adopted the Euro-American concept of religion as a means of responding to and resisting colonial force.  Not surprisingly, in light of the almost complete failure of American Indian religious freedom cases brought before the U.S. government there is emerging a new adaptation as a way to protect Indigenous ways of life and landscapes. 

Congress and the judiciary must come to terms with their own coercive history and to the limited and unjust definitions of religion that they enforce. The American Indian turn to environmental law in religious freedom cases speaks loudly to the failure of the U.S. government and the First Amendment as protectors of equal rights.   It is high time for the courts, and perhaps Congress, to reassess their definition of religion to include the Indigenous peoples who have not historically fallen under the protection of the First Amendment.