Video: The Impact of God is Red on Religious Studies

Full Transcript: 

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: God is Red, 50th anniversary symposium. The Impact of God is Red on Religious Studies. October 7, 2022.

MEGAN MINOKA HILL: Hello, everybody. We're going to go ahead and get started. My name is Megan Minoka Hill. I am Oneida, and I direct a program at the Harvard Kennedy School called the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development.

Growing up, my dad and Vine were really good friends, and they used to conspire to do a number of things, including a traditional knowledge conference, which Dan and I were remembering last night. So it's really just such an honor for me to be here to celebrate God is Red and the relevance his ideas and thoughts have today.

The session is called The Impact of God is Red on Religious Studies. We have a phenomenal panel to share incredible thoughts and insights today and I'm going to introduce them all at once and then turn the podium over.

So I'd like to start with our speaker Michael McNally. Professor McNally is Professor and Chair of the Religion Department at Carleton College and has served as its first Broom Fellow for Public Scholarship. From Carleton he received a BA in History, and from Harvard he received an AM, an MDiv, and a PhD in the study of Religion.

He is the author of Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion, Oxford University Press, 2000; Honoring Elders: Aging, Authority, and Ojibwe Religion, Columbia University Press, 2009; and editor of The Art of Tradition: Sacred Music, Dance, and Myth of Michigan's Anishinaabe, Michigan State University, 2009.

He's also authored book chapters and articles in American Quarterly, American Indian Quarterly, Church History, and in the Journal of Law and Religion. His work has received recognitions through fellowships with the Guggenheim, the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Philosophical Society, and Mellon New Directions Fellowship, which supported a period of targeted legal studies that launched his current project.

Our first respondent is Anca Wilkening. Anca is a PhD candidate in Religions of Americas. Her research interests bring to the surface the voices and stories of marginalized and often disregarded groups in the narration of early American religious history. In making people and communities outside of the dominant Anglo-Protestant traditions the focal point of historical narratives, she is seeking to understand the historical co-constitution and intersections of religious practice, gender, sexuality, and race.

These themes converge in her research on the spaces that dissenting Christianities created for nonnormative constructions of gender, race, and belonging in their religious communities as well as in their missionary approaches and relationships with non-Europeans, specifically Northeastern American Indian communities. Anca studied theology at the University of Hamburg and Heidelberg in Germany before earning a Master's of Arts in Religion with a focus on the History of Christianity from Yale Divinity School in 2019.

And our second respondent is Anthony Trujillo. Anthony is a member of Okhay Owingeh Pueblo, which is one of six Tewa-speaking Pueblos located along the upper Rio Grande Valley. He is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Harvard University with a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School.

His research focuses on Indigenous engagements with and resistance to colonial Christianities in the 18th and 19th centuries, with particular attention to tracing the effects of Christianity on Indigenous connections to their homelands and water spaces, as well as the downstream impacts on territorial, spiritual, and political sovereignties of contemporary Native nations and descendant communities. He is the coordinator of the Native American and Indigenous Studies working group at Harvard.

So join me in welcoming our panel. And may I turn over the podium to Professor McNally?

MICHAEL MCNALLY: Thank you, Megan. Thank you, fellow panelists. Thank you, Anne and Phil and Joe, for putting this amazing thing together. Thank you, Suzan, for your remarks last night, and Robert and Michelle for a really engaging session this morning. I'm honored, to say the least, to be among all of you. And to be honest, I feel a bit out of my league. But it's perhaps a good thing that one of us reflects on this book from the perspective of a white academic, who is a practicing Episcopalian and who has two children, who by virtue of my wife being an Episcopalian priest, are preacher's kids.

The talk that I give is a view from Religious Studies. I've been asked to speak to that. But after Robert's references to "pearls before the swine" this morning, I think a better title for this might be The Pearls Before the Swine: A Swine's Perspective. I was a grad student by the time I gave this book a thorough, if untutored, reading on my specialty general exam bibliography for American Religious History. In this building, before it was this building, my carrel was kind of up there.

I'll confess, and I bet I'm not alone, I read and processed God is Red as a primary source, a period piece among others in my effort to plot the '60s and '70s in a coherent narrative about American religious thought. I got the "God is dead" reference because I had read Altizer and had some Nietzsche and all of that sort of stuff. But I had no clue what I didn't know. The book's provocations were certainly interesting to me, but I had an historian's built in containment strategy, and I didn't let the book change me.

In the years since, the book has proved crucial to my work on law and sacred place protection. And I've looked to those discussions in the book in pretty much every piece I've written. But it was this summer's reading over a week in Minnesota's Northwoods, where I gave the book the time and space to work through the ways it unsettles and to unsettle me some. I admit I have a lot to learn from others who were changed the moment they picked it up.

I've been asked to start our conversation about this book's impact on religious studies, which I'll take up in terms of four provocations. First, Deloria's contention that the American presenting problem is at its core a religious one. Second, Deloria's call to take land seriously in both the practice of religion and also the study of religion. Third, Deloria's provocation to turn serious respectful attention to Native American religious traditions in all their distinctiveness. And fourth, Deloria's attention to the Native struggles to protect Native sacred places as flashpoints of these deeper, more tectonic issues.

But first, a word about the word "religion," because for all the times it appears in this book, the term "religion" in the sense Religious Studies thinks of it comes in and out of focus. In a chapter entitled, "The Origin of Religion," for example, don't expect an overt debate with Freud or Hume or other reigning theories of the origin of religion as such. Sometimes religion as a term, then, enables comparison between Indigenous traditions and Christianity. Often, it is a stand in for Christianity or for the nexus of Christianity and settler colonialism.

At times, though, it's a theological term, as in true religion set off from false religion or set off from the relentlessly secular. Speaking of the relentlessly secular, for Deloria, the crises we faced in 1972 and indeed today boil down to a religious or spiritual one. And redemption, if it is ever to come, must engage not simply the economic or the political, but also the religious. Deloria's is not a callback to old time religion from runaway post-Christian secularism, nor is it a liberal's jeremiad against the noise of solemn assemblies and a Christianity that's in bed with secular culture, though it's both of those.

It's Christianity that's the problem, or perhaps it's the masking of the Christian as the secular that's the problem. It's an important provocation of God is Red that any religious awakening requires liberation from this Western religious ethnocentrism. I'll resist the temptation to go theological here. This morning's discussion did just fine in that regard.

Here, I'd like to underscore the clarity of Deloria's vision about how the American or Western secular masks-- Western secular masks its parochial Christian presuppositions in the effort to appear universal and to reign as such. Religious Studies, not just Theology, has a role to play here, and I think the field has been stepping into this space quite effectively. In the last decade, some of the most exciting Religious Studies work has turned to interrogate the workings of the secular to refine a scholarly sense of how culturally specific our American or other secularisms in the plural.

This inquiry has been energized especially by those concerned about the export of American secularism abroad, and how the language of religious freedom has been weaponized in US engagement with the Muslim world to delegitimize Islamic renewal, and in any case, in a way that is tone deaf to centuries of traditions of engaging religious difference in Muslim idiom. But there is more to be done in terms of sustained inquiry into how American style secularism relates to American style settler colonialism.

Pamela Klassen, with us today, has posed such questions of Canadian history in an innovative volume, Ekklesia, with Winifred Sullivan and Paul Christopher Johnson that undoes the "and" in church and state to explore the capillary workings of what they call churchstateness. Put the two words together. And Tisa Wenger of Yale is at work on a promising book turning on what she calls the settler colonial secular. These efforts chart a good course.

One well developed conversation of this sort is the interrogation of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, which was made a legal doctrine by the Supreme Court in 1823. In the chapter, "The Aboriginal World in Christian History," God is Red introduces us to the papal bulls granting ownership of the Americas to Spain and Portugal and begins to suggest how Christian discovery has become hardwired into supposedly secular law. That 1823 decision has yet to be reversed, and in this stands in marked contrast to how Brown v. Board of Education reversed the explicit racism of Plessy v. Ferguson.

But it doesn't just lie there. The Doctrine of Discovery got new life in the Supreme Court's 2005 rejection of Oneida land claims in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation. Well, in this case, the Oneida Nation-- you might remember if you know the case-- repurchased lands that it had lost through what Courts generally had seen as clear violations of treaties and US law. But a bordertown said it would not take those lands off of the tax rolls, and the Supreme Court agreed with the town that too much water had gone under the bridge, so to speak, that 200 years of title to all of Upstate New York could not manageably be called into question.

In the first footnote of that decision, Justice Ginsburg, no less, cites the Doctrine of Discovery with a breathtaking effectivity that bespoke just how naturalized it had become. The decision foreclosed other Haudenosaunee land claims. And it's been Onondaga and other Haudenosaunee leaders who have most profoundly put the question, with Phil Arnold and his partner Sandra Bigtree's Indigenous Values Initiative working to ignite Religious Studies scholarship on the history and workings of the Doctrine.

Another major, if largely unfinished, initiative has been the increased awareness about the theological presumptions at the heart of the boarding school era and the actions of the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and other groups. The increased awareness of historical trauma to understand the living legacies and ongoing affliction of past US policies is gathering steam, even as backlash to the same arises.

But as Suzan said last night, the civilization regulations, that other prong of assimilation policy that formerly criminalized ceremonies and gave Indian agents both prosecutorial and judicial powers, have yet to make the cut into this broader awareness. Suzan said it was Vine Deloria who encouraged her to study them and get the word out. But clearly there is need for more historical and Religious Studies scholarship to document just how these regulations were variously enforced in different places and how they became the social facts they were.

Tisa Wenger's We Have a Religion looks at how those regulations played out among the Rio Grande Pueblos. Tiffany Hale and Jen Graber are engaging them in the context of the northern plains in their respective book manuscripts on the Ghost Dance. But more is needed.

So there are injustices of American secularism to be studied, identified, and ultimately to be remedied. But one passage from God is Red stuck with me as a call to consider the destructive cumulative effect of this continuous secularity on the Earth itself. I turn now to the call of God is Red to privilege our consideration of space, not time, in the understanding of religion. As God is Red's closing paragraph has it, which has been cited this morning, this is not just an analytical innovation. It's a planetary necessity.

Thinking about Religious Studies as a field, I don't think there's yet been a full on spatial turn in Religious Studies, certainly nothing rising to the extent of Deloria's summons. But there are stirrings in that direction. In the 1992 revised edition, Deloria notes, quote, "an amazing number of books that deal in one way or another with sacred places," and ponders, quote, "it would be interesting to see how many books preceded this one in articulating some kind of theory about the importance of specific place in our outlook and emotional lives."

If a number of studies of sacred place published in the two decades since the book came out, if there are a number of studies, perhaps those were generated by this book. But perhaps also they were inspired by Deloria's predecessor, Mircea Eliade and his contemporary cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Studies in the spirit of those forebears, such as the important Mesoamerican work of Harvard's David Carrasco, have given way to studies that pay as much attention to the politics as the poetics of sacred place.

In my field, Ned Linenthal and David Chidester have organized this work. So too Tom Tweed, whose book Crossing and Dwelling is the most compelling example of not just attending to sacred place, but making it more theoretically central to the understanding of religion. My students, some of whom are here today, I'm happy to say, drink this stuff up. But they remain parched for the fuller treatments of the sort Deloria called for 50 years ago, where it's less about the abstraction of space, not time, than about taking seriously the moral and spiritual subjectivity of the land itself.

Harvard Divinity School's engagement with Terry Tempest Williams in the previous years sounds to me like a wonderful thing. And I know I have a lot to learn about some of the more recent developments in Religious Studies, but a few are worth noting. Bron Taylor, that sort of paragon of the field of Religion and Ecology, in a book called Dark Green Religion, and Graham Harvey in England, whose work on the new Animism, can inspire us with stories about what could be, while in their zeal to engage Indigenous traditions along the way, can remain, I think, somewhat tone deaf to the differences in starting place from which neopagan or dark green religious postures and those of Indigenous peoples begin.

To acknowledge different starting points is not to resign oneself to the utter incommensurability between Indigenous peoples and other religious traditions. And I appreciate, I think, how God is Red, for all its sharp contrast between Native and Western space and time, natural and hybrid cultures, I appreciate how it doesn't end with a clear punch line of utter incommensurability. Though I think, as Suzan's response to my question last night suggests, I think we could talk about that because there's a tension in this book.

Indeed, God is Red called boldly for more engagement with the distinctive contours of Native religious traditions and began a trajectory of important work in the academic study of Native religions of two kinds, both a substantive trajectory, I'd say, and what we might call a mentorial trajectory.

In terms of a substantive trajectory, God is Red doesn't presume to offer a sustained elaborated study of Native religious traditions in all the diversity and complexity. Deloria provoked and modeled approaches to Indigenous religious traditions of the Americas that went deeper, certainly, than the kind of Iliadin shoebox approach to comparison and those of the Swede, Ake Hultkrantz, whose work was out there at the time God is Red came about.

These works approached Indigenous traditions from sources that were mistaken as data that came from ethnographic and travelogue kind of sources. And these kinds of thinkers before Deloria cared too little about the place of those religious traditions in helping Native peoples survive colonizers' efforts to kill the Indian, which by definition, was the context in which most of those ethnographers and most of those travelogues were written.

But for all God is Red's efforts to unveil the working of religions and colonization and resistance, the book also summons readers to learn more about and from Native traditions in their regard for the land. In 1972, God is Red was, of course, shaped by the milieu and the people that were evoked in the discussion last night by Suzan and the rest of you. But the text cites pretty scant published materials, the ones that were at hand. I can't pronounce the first name, but Hyemeyosts Storm, Ernest Thompson Seton, and the like.

But I'm convinced Deloria was less interested in these imperfect sources, published sources that were at hand, than in the realities they pointed to. To study Native traditions was not to produce coffee table books with sepia photographs of great chiefs and their quotes. To rise to Deloria's challenge, scholars have to be all in to learn languages, to stick with people of a given tradition long enough to appreciate that they have their own theories and their own theories of how their traditions should be taught and learned.

And certainly, scholarly interpretations that mature with time, at least as I understand them, most Native traditions on their own terms require a whole lifetime, if one even comes to deep, broad knowledge of a tradition on their own terms. And as Suzan put it last night, to know enough, to work effectively, to protect what they don't know so Indigenous peoples can continue to practice their traditions as they wish to.

Deloria's last book on Native knowledge and science tried to do this, but even in God is Red, there are zingers of wise insight on Native traditions like the following. I found this in the middle of a paragraph, kind of buried somewhere else like so many of the gems of this book are. They act to complete and renew the entire and complete cycle of life, ultimately including the whole cosmos present in its specific realizations, so that in the last analysis, one might describe ceremonials as the cosmos becoming thankfully aware of itself.

Importantly, of course, Deloria's provocation to engage in the study of Native religions must attend to how the very category of religion needs to be rethunk if it's to encompass their decidedly local experiential nature, their refusal to abstract beliefs from what helps make sense of living well in original places. Don't rely on the tools of Religious Studies as you received it. He rather suggests, look to the Native peoples themselves to set the terms.

In this regard, there's some bright spots here. Cutcha Risling Baldy's book on Yurok women's feasts; the late Ines Talamantez's own manuscript on Mescalero Apache women's ceremonies, which we hope finds posthumous publication. But Deloria set the bar high-- and nervous chuckle here-- too few of the available books on Native religious traditions rise to clear that bar.

In terms of the mentorial trajectory, my fellow panelists, not me, are the ones to elaborate. But God is Red clearly mentored Native students of Native traditions to take religion seriously. Some of you folks had occasion to get to know him personally. Others, the mentorship I think happened through their engagement with the book itself.

There was, it seems, some lag time here. When I first went to the American Academy of Religion in the 20th century, Tink Tinker and Ines Talamantez were basically the sole Native voices in a room, dominated by generally well-meaning non-Native scholars who had too few clear connections, much less a sense of accountability and rigor with respect to the peoples whose traditions they studied and wrote about.

In ensuing years, the leadership of the field of Native American religious traditions has shifted to include some incredible scholars whose work has been shaped by their study of religion. Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, the late Michelene Pesantubbee, Christopher Jocks, Larry Gross, among them. There are others, and there are certainly others who, like David Wilkins, were mentored in other fields and perhaps in ways that engaged the religious differently as a result.

Still, the study of Native religions is, to say the least, not particularly prominent in the burgeoning Native American and Indigenous Studies Association that Robert and others played such a large part in creating. I'd be interested in what my fellows here think about that. But it seems like God is Red calls for sustained attention to Native traditions or attention to what Native practitioners of those traditions choose to share. And the intentionally prominent place of God is Red in Vine Deloria's larger corpus of work on sovereignty and the law might give pause before making too quick work of religion or the study of Native religions as irredeemably colonial.

Susan Hill will speak to these issues too, so I'll be brief. But from a Religious Studies perspective, let me affirm that Deloria's contention that-- let me affirm Deloria's contention that the struggle by Native peoples for their sacred places represents something of a major flashpoint for the tectonic forces his book elsewhere tries to sound out. The first edition of God is Red centers sacred places, of course, and speaks to the San Francisco Peaks, the Black Hills Bear Butte, House Blue Lake, and others.

But especially because of the additional chapter in the 1992 edition, "Sacred Places and Moral Responsibility," which analyzes the Supreme Court's ruling decision, that chapter sketches out for a broad public how to understand the headline-catching sacred place movements we encounter so frequently today. It's this, quote on the board there from the 1972 edition, and not in the go to chapter on sacred places, that has haunted me since my rereading this summer, and maybe serves not only as the-- and maybe serves as the long lost epigram I've been seeking for most of what I've done over the last 15 years.

By now in this symposium, we know just how involved Vine Deloria was in leading, with Suzan, Hank Adams, and others, efforts to protect sacred places. This chapter in the 1992 revised edition offers a crisp, wise, and very teachable reading of the Supreme Court's decision in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, which reversed a Circuit Court ruling that had been the first to acknowledge a religious freedom right to protection of sacred places. So once a Circuit Court of Appeals says, yep, there is a religious freedom right to sacred places, the Supreme Court shuts it down. And the occasion of that, the disappointment of that, is the subject of that essay that becomes a chapter.

Instead, the Supreme Court said the three Northern California Native nations seeking to block a logging road and the implied development through their sacred high country was just like any private citizen with a sincerely held belief wanting to place a servitude-- their words-- on public land. Whatever may be the exact line, Justice O'Connor writes, between unconstitutional prohibitions on the free exercise of religion and the legitimate conduct by government of its own affairs, the location of that line cannot depend on measuring the effects of a governmental action on a religious objector's spiritual development. Whatever rights the Indians may have to use of the area, however, those rights do not divest the government of its right to use what is after all, she writes, its own land.

In Deloria's view, the decision shows a clear need for more sophisticated understanding of Native religions. He writes, "Most troubling about the decision was the insistence on analyzing tribal religions within the same conceptual framework as Western organized religions." End quote. The call is not so much for more monographs on more Native religions, though. Rather it's for those studies to engage the finer grain of how Indigenous peoples imagine lands, waters, peoplehood, and the holy in order to complicate any binary notion of the sacred and the profane. There is an immense particularity in the sacred, he writes in God is Red, and it is not a blanket category to be applied indiscriminately.

There is also a call for critical Religious Studies scholarship that can track how Native claims to the sacred can be misrecognized as the individualized interior piety characteristic of Protestantism that Winnifred Fallers Sullivan argues has become naturalized as the religion that our American law looks to protect, which in the case of Native sacred place controversies, can look a lot to a lot of non-Native people, like the romanticized nature spirituality that so many of them want it desperately to be. Thus, Deloria writes, ceremonies and rituals that had been performed for thousands of years were treated as if they were popular fads or simply matters of personal preference, based upon the erroneous assumption that religion was only a matter of individual aesthetic choice.

Remarkably, the Lyng decision still controls courts in rejecting a religious freedom right to sacred places, even as courts have turned to the right and expanded religious liberty jurisprudence elsewhere. Maybe this is empirical evidence of Deloria's observation that the critique of religious nationalism-- his observation that, unlike Indigenous peoples who stay moored to the land, the hybrid peoples take their connection to land, and they take that in sinister religious nationalist directions.

I'm concluding here. Even when Congress in 1993 tried to reinstate meaningful protections in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that the Supreme Court said in its Hobby Lobby decision in 2014 had shown that Congress intended to expand religious freedom jurisprudence from what the First Amendment had said, according to the Court before 1990, which would include the Lyng decision. So one argument is that the new regime at the Supreme Court would kind of create some space for rethinking Lyng.

But even with that, a case on the San Francisco Peaks, the second major litigation on the San Francisco Peaks, ran aground before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2008, which saw this Lyng decision still as the controlling decision. In that case, the Navajo Nation and five other litigating tribes had challenged federal approval of a snowmaking scheme on San Francisco Peaks that was using treated sewage effluent from the city of Flagstaff to extend recreational skiing beyond the couple of days that had been possible during the Great Drought.

Here, as in Lyng, Native Claims of obligation of Native nations to sacred places on public lands wrenched from them in the first place were flattened to those of diminished spiritual fulfillment. And this case has, thus far, shut down the religious freedom claims made in the second stage of the Standing Rock litigation on Dakota Access and most recently concerning Oak Flat. On this point, the efforts of and around God is Red have yet to move the judicial needle.

But the struggle to protect sacred places continues, no less. In fact, one of my learnings, a late blooming maturation, I'll admit, after writing Defend the Sacred, is that for Native peoples whose claims I was tracking in that book, the story of a sacred place doesn't end with a failed case in court to protect it because the story never began with the court case to begin with. Dana Lloyd has a wonderful book underway from Kansas University Press that interviews many of the Native people involved in the Lyng decision, and follows them as they hardly miss a step after their loss before the Supreme Court to figure out just how to act on behalf of their sacred high country, their waters, and the salmon that swim in their waters.

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, passed by the General Assembly in 2007 and adopted by the US in 2010 with reservations, in a sense can be seen to materialize the hard work of Vine Deloria's generation. And of course, the diplomatic leadership of the Haudenosaunee, who went to Geneva before it was cool, when it was still the League of Nations. The Declaration avowedly creates no binding new rights, but it forcefully clarifies how all existing human rights of binding international law, if they're to meaningfully apply to the world's Indigenous peoples, must apply to them as collective, not just individual rights.

Specifically, religious rights are enumerated in Article 12, but the entire document is shot through with references to the spiritual and to the religious, those various dimensions of Indigenous economy and polity and peoplehood. Article 25 epitomizes this. You might even think of it as the God is Red article, for it introduces a series of land rights as more than secular. It affirms Indigenous peoples' rights to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationships with traditional lands and waters and to pass these relationships on to coming generations.

I wish I had one of those expansive visualizations of all the synaptic transmissions that lead from God is Red to all those conversations and all of those coalition conferences and so forth that led in Vancouver and other places in Latin America to come to a kind of a flourishing in the 2007 culmination of those conversations. Because I think there is a sense in which you can't get to Article 25 realistically without God is Red kind of making the path, making way.

Crucially, the Declaration also codifies the standard of free prior and informed consent before governments can take action that affect Native peoples within their borders. When it comes to sacred places, this can and should be very significant, raising the standard from consultation, which so often founders, to consent. Federal courts have yet to cite such language and may well not, but tribal courts are inspired in no small part by the forthrightness with which God is Red locates spiritual relationships with lands and waters at the heart of Native peoplehood. Native nations are creatively asserting, insisting on these rights to spiritual relationships without waiting for courts or Congress or states or academics or anyone else to acknowledge them.

Bears Ears National Monument is worth consideration here as a legacy of sorts from God is Red. It has rightly been called the first Native American national monument, as President Obama's 2016 proclamation was largely scripted by a five-tribe coalition who consider its vast expanse to be places of ancestral knowledge and presence, and who are formally integrated in on the federal land management. As you all know, President Trump eviscerated Bears Ears by 85% and gutted the collaborative management structure until President Biden reinstated it. And the tribal coalition has recently issued its own management plan. I encourage you to Google that and check it out.

Another example of these assertions of Indigenous peoplehood and religious/spiritual peoplehood is closer to my home, that of the White Earth Nation, which in late 2018, passed a tribal council resolution declaring that Manoomin, wild rice, is a rights-bearing person under tribal law. In August of 2021, White Earth Nation attorneys filed suit in tribal court on behalf of Manoomin, challenging the state of Minnesota's approval of diversion of billions of gallons of groundwater for construction and testing of Enbridge Energy's Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline.

On a technicality about whether the state agency could be sued in tribal court, the White Earth Tribal Court of Appeals ultimately dismissed the suit, but that tribal court applauded the way the White Earth Nation had put the question. It's been flattened or exploded, as it were, in the media merely as a rights of nature move. But for White Earth Anishinaabe, the spiritual relationship with Manoomin has a different starting place. Some Anishinaabe say what's at stake is their capacity to fulfill their own treaty obligations with Manoomin or with the Manoomin people.

This is in conclusion. If you look to US courts, there may not be so much to celebrate in terms of sacred place protection. There's tar sands oil, lots of it, coursing through Anishinaabe territory in Minnesota in Line 3. But there are some seriously resolute, empowered, creative Native people writing briefs in a court case called Manoomin v. Minnesota, and I have to imagine Vine Deloria is smiling on. Thank you.

MEGAN MINOKA HILL: We'll have Anca Wilkening respond.

ANCA WILKENING: Thank you so much, Dr. McNally, for sharing these thoughtful remarks with us. And thank you to, Phil and Ann, for inviting Anthony and I to respond to them. In our preparation for this response, Anthony and I decided to embrace Dr. McNally's push for engaging this work in a dialogue rather than as a monologue. And we met to discuss Dr. McNally's remarks together before drafting our responses, so they might engage with each other and build on each other.

I will begin by offering a few remarks on the broader implications of God is Red for the Study of Religion past and present and future, and Anthony will follow up with his own Deloria-inspired provocations, rooted in specific Native homelands and colonial histories, as well as his own Tewa context. As always, thank you, Anthony, for being such a generous and thought provoking dialogue partner.

I will follow Dr. McNally's lead and begin with my relationship with this book as a graduate student in the study of religion. I encountered God is Red in a few classes, but more importantly, God is Red also made it onto my general exam list earlier this year. But its placement differed much from when Dr. McNally was a doctoral student here. The book was featured in my Theory and Methods of Religious Studies exam list, where I chose Vine Deloria Jr. as one of my two theorists whom I wanted to engage with more deeply.

For me, in a most basic sense, using someone as a theorist rather than classifying their work otherwise means that their thinking radically changes one's outlook on a specific topic. Hence, it might not come as a surprise that I firmly believe that this book has a lot to offer to the topic of this panel, the study of religion, both Native American and otherwise. For instance, his critique of Western European-centric modes of knowledge production in the concept of history and religion and to suspicion of modern disenchanted secular space and time anticipated later a similar move of postcolonial theorists, such as Talal Azad and Deepa Chakrabarti, as well as the now popularity of the Protestant American secular that we just heard about.

I agree that Deloria's use of the term "religion" is fluid throughout, and I would argue that there is clearly active, not just coincidental, engagement with other theorists of religion, such as Eliade. And we might also consider that he occasionally stumbles into similar pitfalls as others theorizing religion, such as centralizing definitions and stark dichotomies, for instance, in discussion of Christianity and Native religions due to the polemical and pedagogical framing of the work.

More importantly though, God is Red anticipates and proactively pushes back against several theoretical and methodological interventions that have been key to the study of religion. And for that, the book has been underappreciated. What has been appreciated, it has often still been sanitized of its political implications, which we heard about yesterday. The first and most obvious case is the intervention of making spatiality and an agentive natural world and landscape the epistemological crowning of Native American religion.

I agree that the intellectual weight and methodological consequences of the spatial turn have been regrettably neglected in the study of religion with a few exceptions. When the agency of land environment is taken into account, scholars differ greatly in regard to the source of that agency. It seems to make a stark difference whether land has agency based on affordances of materiality and spatiality or based on taking seriously the sacredness of land and claims of land and Earth as animated and personified beings.

Besides the work already mentioned, two studies of Native American religion come to mind that model spatial approaches, Tracy Neal Leavelle's The Catholic Calumet, and very recently, Blackfeet scholar Rosalyn LaPier's Invisible Reality. Leavelle's study of interactions between Jesuits and Native Americans in the Upper Great Lakes and Illinois country heavily relies on spatial metaphors and analysis to acknowledge the mixing of cultural and social streams in between communities. He highlights the deeply rooted spiritual sources and meanings of Native landscapes and how the Jesuits built on and subvert these notions when they established outposts on Native lands.

LaPier's study of late 19th century Blackfeet religion is, in my opinion, a new standard of scholarship rooted in Native cosmologies and spatialities might look like. Drawing from oral histories and her own first-person narrative of life on the reservation and knowledge of Blackfeet geographies and practices allows her to decenter a Christian mission account of early reservation life and draw out Blackfeet reality as three separate but interconnected spheres, each containing visible and invisible elements, the natural and supernatural realms of existence.

The mutually exclusive categories of Christian and Native American advice from God is Red also raised, for some, the uncomfortable reality of Native American Christianities past and present, such as Professor McNally's own work on Ojibwe singers. But in assuming that Native American Christians abandoned their spatial ways of knowing, we might ask how relationships with the land continue in Native American Christian practice and take seriously the agency in epistemological potential of the natural world, even as a Native Christian.

Dr. McNally pointed out that religion does not appear to be a prominent topic at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. What do we make of that? I believe one answer to this question may be found in the Deloria's Native view of religion that opposes religion as an individualized separate sphere and asserts that Native American religion cannot be understood apart from nation, language, kin, culture, everyday life and practice, and political-social activity. Thus, Native American religions simply show up in unexpected places and might actually be all over the Native American Indigenous Studies Association.

I would argue that his expansive approach to religion is generally a rather robust view of the nature of religion, Native American or not. Anthony will say more about that. In recent decades, most studies of religion focus on theories of individualized formations of the religious subject, which seems to be opposed to this communal understanding. God is Red makes clear that the formation of the individual is not the primary focus of Native American religious practice. Instead, highlights community and persistence and flourishing of the nation over individualized notions of religion.

It is not only Eliade's secular versus religious man that gets picked up by Deloria, but he seems to reformulate it as a secular individual versus religious community. We might ask ourselves how to best acknowledge this inherent group sovereignty over individualized notions of agency when studying Native American religion as resistance and reclamation.

I will close with some thoughts on the provocations of God is Red and how they pan out in the reality of the academy, especially as a graduate student in Religious Studies who is invested in the study of Native American religion. As Dr. McNally pointed out, it takes time and also resources for scholars to stick with given petitions long enough to thoroughly account for them. I'm asking myself how a thorough God is Red approach is at all possible in those structures as well as funding and time constraints of religious studies PhD programs.

The most obvious solution here is to continue supporting the recruitment and work of Native PhD students and faculty. There have also been some other important changes made here at Harvard recently. When I started out in this PhD program, we were not able to count Indigenous languages towards our required non-English research languages. Thankfully, the Harvard Committee on the Study of Religion has very recently changed its mind, and Indigenous languages now count as research languages.

But what other measures of support and especially mentorship within Religious Studies graduate programs and beyond can we think of to support this type of research in the context of an academy built on highly individualized and capitalist notions of academic knowledge production? And with that, I'll turn it over to Anthony.

MEGAN MINOKA HILL: We'll have our second respondent, Anthony Trujillo.

ANTHONY TRUJILLO: All right. Hello, everyone. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to offer this response to Professor McNally's insights into God is Red, a scholar who has not only tuned into Deloria's insistent land-centered pulse in his remarks, but has learned to move his academic body and mind to that Indigenous beat in many ways. I really appreciate that.

I'm also glad to be joining Anca, my good friend and colleague, in offering this response. It would not be an exaggeration to say that where I find myself often swimming in the kiddie pool of Vine Deloria's writings, Anca I often observed taking these graceful deep dives into his work and really opening up his thought in some really profound ways. So thank you. And I also want to thank you all, and to the organizers, to Phil, to Ann, to Tracy, for bringing this all together. And with that, I'll begin.

So Dr. McNally characterizes God is Red as a series of provocations. In that critical but playful spirit, I'll take this cue and offer some of my own thoughts, a few of which may further provoke. If we take Deloria's Indigenous view of religions seriously, as Dr. McNally and so many have, we need to assert at the outset that religion, despite its often heavenward orientation, must fundamentally have to do with humans' relationship with the Earth.

That is, according to Deloria, without a capacious notion of land, religion is a meaningless and empty category, and pursuing its study amounts to little more than a chasing after the wind. Elaborating a bit, we might also say that there is no form of placemaking that is not essentially a religious practice. This is to make the spatial turn a turn even further to the particularity of Indigenous ways of knowing.

So what might it mean to take the religious meaning of land seriously, as Deloria suggests that we must? For historians, it might mean that we may have left out some of the most influential religious figures, for better or worse. Among the colonizers and colonial institutions, religion as land relation brings into view not only the French Jesuit priest, but the officers and traders who claimed the entire Mississippi watershed and all of its tributaries for France and the Catholic Church, including the homelands of the Oceti Sakowin, where Deloria would one day call home.

Religion as land relation calls attention not only to the American Board of Commissioners for foreign missions, but the geographers and surveyors who plotted mile after prayer-bathed, scared shitless mile through the homelands of agitated Indians, demarcating the Northwest territory. Religion as land relation, inclusive of water relation, identifies as rivertine apostles and lacustrian prophets not only Latter-day Saints, but those two seers and sowers of Indigenous apocalypse, Lewis Pick and William Sloan. Louis Warren has made a tantalizing religious assessment of exactly this undertaking in his book God's Red Sun.

Do we regard these figures and the settler colonial land regimes they preached and propagated as religious? If not, I think we may have missed one of Deloria's central critiques of what Dr. McNally and a number of Religious Studies scholars call the American secular.

But now, let's take the further turn and recognize the host of Indigenous terralogians, historians of place, and movers and shakers of land and sky, who have often been illegible as religious authorities, but who nevertheless have inherited and nurtured powerful relationships with the Earth. Pottery makers, three sisters planters, dwelling makers, ground stompers, corn pounders, hymns singers, bread shapers, bead makers, land defenders, water protectors, language speakers, knowledge keepers. These are Indigenous people who make history and religion.

In the 1920s, Sotero Ortiz from Okhay Owingeh Pueblo anticipated Deloria when he expressed the All Pueblo Council's view on non-Indigenous claims to Pueblo land in this way. Quote, "If the Hispanos are claiming something which is just, we will secure that. We are claiming something which is sacred." This kind of echoes the epigraph that Professor McNally brought up to our attention.

Tisa Wenger, who I should note has been a formative mentor for both Anca and I, picked up on the inseparable connection between two Pueblo assertions in this period-- land is sacred, and we have a religion, a claim which does need to be historicized for that particular moment, and which Tisa Wenger has done in a really incredible way. These are also expressed in a Tewa prayer invoked by the brilliant anthropologist from Okhay Owingeh Pueblo, Alfonso Ortiz. The prayer goes, within and around the Earth, your authority returns to you.

If one critique of God is Red is that Deloria can tend to speak too generally about American Indian religion, the way I particularized that claim in my own Tewa context is to turn our attention to [? Nonquio, ?] our ocher Earth mother. It is within and around her body that my relatives and ancestors live and move and have our being. In fact, it may be that Pueblo potters are some of our terralogians par excellence.

If [? Nonquio's ?] body is our religious center, then this gives a whole new valence to the trip my great-grandmother and a group of Pueblo potters and artisans took to Washington D.C. in 1971, when they met with Richard and Pat Nixon. I'd suggest that this was a performance of land-oriented spiritual sovereignty on par with the advocacy of Pueblo men. And perhaps, in some yet untheorized way, their visit had something to do with the inauguration of the self-determination era.

Turned in another direction, if we regard land as the basis of religion, Indigenous resistance to attempts to rupture our connection to place or to lay waste to our homelands are heavily religiously inflected. The Supreme Court Lyng decision may have focused on one particularly sacred site, but what about the entirety of Earth mother's body? If Deloria considered the title God is Red as provocative, that moves us to interrogate and resist the structures that would make such a claim provocative in the first place, the racist, misogynistic regimes of capitalist land relations that normalize the desecration of Earth Mother.

This leads to a concluding point. Rather than trying to probe and extract safeguarded Indigenous ceremonial knowledge, I'd suggest that scholars of religion begin recognizing American Indigenous religious practice in the more public acts that Indigenous intimacy with land compels us to make for God is Red's sake.

Nick Estes' riveting manifesto, Our History is the Future, which tracks the compounding violences that led to the No DAPL protests, begins with a prologue titled "Prophets." Vine Deloria, Jr., Mike McNally, and the place-based, place-grounded scholars who have followed in his wake urge us to shake things up. If the ground isn't vibrating when we write, if our bodies aren't moving when we read, if settlers aren't rematriating plundered bodies and lands into Native hands, I have to wonder if for all of our scholarly turnings, we have grasped one smidgen of what Vine Deloria was getting at.

When surveying the wasteland of the American religious landscape and channeling the insights of many Indigenous nations, he transgressed the cosmological color line and said, let God be red. And God was red. And in decades since, American Indigenous scholars, including myself, have found ourselves reaching down, placing our hands on the Earth, saying, hello, Mother, I'm here because you are here. And our mother sang back to us, good morning, child, we've been here all the while.

MEGAN MINOKA HILL: Thank you all for such a powerful and thought provoking discussion. We have just over 30 minutes for questions and answers for our audience here in the room and also online. And I wonder, as in the first panel, if you would like to respond, Professor, to Anca and Anthony.

MICHAEL MCNALLY: Well, thank you. I'll be sort of brief. I appreciated all of your comments, and I eagerly anticipate more conversation from what the three of us have done here.

The notion of terralogians, and you sort of enumerated the various kinds of people that we might consider, I'm imagining that they're the real sources of God is Red. And in a side conversation earlier, Phil said that God is Red was presumably-- there's not a lot of knowledge about the production of the book, but that it happened pretty swiftly. And one of my observations is how thin-- how the published sources that Deloria in God is Red works with are kind of thin, right?

Ernest Thompson Seton's Gospel of the Red Man. Ernest Thompson Seton, as some of you know, was one of the founders of the Boy Scouts, and there's like a whole story there. But I'm gathering it's all those terralogians that he was raised with that he met in the context of Lummi Nation. And all the places that Suzan was pointing us to last night are the ones that really are the sources of this.

As I'm putting together a rereading of this book with all of you, I appreciated what Suzan said last night about how this book sort of performs knowing enough to know what you don't know about each of the Indigenous traditions, and saying enough to do the work of protecting the rights of those people, to just continue to do in their own quiet ways what they wish to do without calling it into court. Yeah, I'll stop there, but I really appreciated both of your remarks and look forward to our conversation.

MEGAN MINOKA HILL: Do we have any questions? We have one in the back, I think from Zoom. Kelly?

SPEAKER 3: Yes, we do. So we do have a question from Zoom participant, Marie Velour. She writes, yesterday Suzan Harjo explained to us that American Indians were, quote, "forced into the religion box." I understood that there was a Native spirituality in Native ways, but nothing like a formal Native American religion. How do you feel that Vine Deloria would react to having this symposium on the impact of his writings precisely on Theology and Religious Studies?

MEGAN MINOKA HILL: Who would like to start?

ANTHONY TRUJILLO: I guess it doesn't seem to me that Vine Deloria shakes that, as we heard in our conversation earlier this morning, ever gets away from the theological discourse, from using some of these categories. I mean, one, they kind of energize like whole populations of people, so there's a populace that Deloria seems to have in mind.

And I mean, part of the work that Anca and I have talked a lot about and Professor McNally has written a lot about is opening up and expanding what this category is. Can it be broken open? And we might even say, can any academic discourse-- can a university be a site for Indigenous life, thought, creativity? Is it already too constraining? Well, we're here, right? We're having this conversation. We're studying religion, history, and a variety of different things.

How can we open up this idea, this category, and say-- and that's kind of where I was kind of getting at a little bit with my remarks. Let's not just put it in a ritual ceremonial setting, but let's look at all these people who are interacting with land, with water, with Earth in a transformative way, in an intense way. And let's think about how does that just reframe what we might think about what the practice and the study of religion might be. So that's kind of a little bit where I end up going with that.

MICHAEL MCNALLY: Do you want to add, Anca?

ANCA WILKENING: Go ahead.

MICHAEL MCNALLY: I'll be brief. I mean, the title of the book is God is Red. It's a provocation. Robert, in that earlier discussion, I think did a good job of describing how Vine Deloria was engaged with Harvey Cox and with James Cone and with other people at the time. And this is where I guess I'm hoping more of our conversation goes.

Wants to offer maybe even a corrective that science or technology or economy or polity or law or some of these other categories, each of which has its own department and space on this campus, that this is a place to have these conversations, not this is a place to contain these conversations. But as good as any place to locate their heart.

ANCA WILKENING: I will very briefly say-- Tisa Wenger has done a lot of work on this-- but not including Native people in the category of Religion has had devastating consequences in the past about the legitimacy and what they were able to do. So I think we need to keep that in mind when we are saying that they should not be included or debating whether or not they should be included in Religious Studies.

I stumbled into Native American Studies solely by the fact that, six years ago, they just showed up, like Native people showed up all over my archives. And then it was the choice of whether to perpetuate colonial erasure and not make them part of my work or actually follow up on what I was seeing in the archives and including them and reading up on the theories that we've just discussed. And so I would be very careful to not perpetuate that erasure in Religious Studies, if that makes sense. And just what Anthony was saying about breaking open categories and pushing back against what we've done and how we've been selling things.

MEGAN MINOKA HILL: In the back.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, that was beautiful. Thank you all so much. My question is for thinking about this moment in Religious Studies for both students and faculty. What are some of the things that you're looking for or advice that you would give for how we can specifically push the boundaries in these moments to reform the field and to be careful not to reinscribe these different narratives that we've been pushing back on for the last 50 years? So yeah, what would you say are some important things for both students, faculty, administration if you want to get into it, as next steps?

MICHAEL MCNALLY: I was so pleased to hear that Indigenous languages are-- it's a little bit late to be recognizing Indigenous languages as research languages that might enrich an understanding of not just that particular tradition whose language relates to it, but mapping back onto religion. And I think that, to me, is what is at its best when folks are engaging in the study of Native religions. It's how did the Indigenous categories and idioms sort of map back on.

The example that I would use was my last slide about Anishinaabe people in their effort to fight against the tar sands pipeline, speaking about legal obligations that they have to Manoomin. And that's not sort of just made up. In work on something else, I sort of followed the thread of that discussion, and it goes back to elders in northern Wisconsin, long, long ago speaking in those terms.

ANCA WILKENING: I would argue for more classes. I mean, Harvard Divinity School is doing a little bit. Ann Braude's Issues in Studies of Native American Religion, I think, is taught like every three years right now or something like that. So just like adding classes, adding faculty, adding an actual Native Studies concentration, those kind of things. So actually utilize things. Keep bringing in people. I mean Ann is bringing in people in the class.

So I've been taking two Munsee Lenape language classes with a language keeper from Munsee-Delaware Nation. And I met her through a thing that happened at Princeton, but they were bringing her in to learn Munsee within a Princeton context. So those kind of things, I think, are just like institutionalizing those kind of actions. More funding, more workshops, those things. It's very pragmatic, but I think that will help. Yeah.

ANTHONY TRUJILLO: On that point, I mean, I think what Anca has raised and Professor McNally about languages and funding, I mean, when we think that the whole university here has funded itself on Indigenous life and lands for a few hundred years, like, OK, step up, and make this central. Make this a priority, for one.

I do think that something along the lines of the Report on Human Remains can be a galvanizing point for marginalized people, Indigenous peoples here in North America and around the world for saying-- coming together. And this is how our life and cultures have been treated by this kind of institution. Now, let's recenter. Let's refocus. Let's shift the gravity of this.

And I think in a really practical way, that is funding. Its multidisciplinary connections, which is one of the challenges that I think can face any scholar. It's like, how do I-- OK, if I'm going to really pay attention to land, what methodologies do I need? Is History going to give me that? Is Archaeology going to give me that? What connections to Native communities do we need to really nurture?

I mean, or not even nurture, sometimes just even open up because these have been such a-- a university can be a site of continued exploitation. So these are some of the things that I end up thinking about.

MEGAN MINOKA HILL: I just wanted to add on to that really quickly because at Harvard there is a growing presence of land acknowledgments. We had one at the opening of this session, and I think the pressure is on to make sure it's not just in word, and it's in action. Joe.

AUDIENCE: I think this is the right panel to raise this question because it's something I've been grappling with my own scholarship. And I think it does have to do with Religious Studies. Studies involves the distancing and the analysis of experience in some kind of abstract way. In two of my family lines, I've had individuals who made it a point to have sacred traditions written down.

One was my great-great-grandfather, The Boy, so-called Last Chief of the Gros Ventre at Fort Belknap, who called in an anthropologist, who also was a Catholic priest, Father John Cooper, to really try to write down the knowledge he had about certain sacred ceremonial ways that he knew were passing away. And so all of that's recorded in ethnographic style with kind of minimal interpretation. And I think it's been very useful to our tribal community, including having all that republished at our own expense in the 1970s, for example.

Another line is Fred Gone, a progenitor of that family line, who in 1941-42 was hired by the Montana Writers' Project to write down folklore. And so he consulted with a lot of elders. Probably the pinnacle of his contribution is a biography of our most famous 19th century medicine man named Bull Lodge, and it's really a sacred account of this man's life and of the kind of work that he did.

Well, it's fallen out of fashion to get into that kind of detail in writing in particular. And you've made mention, Professor McNally, about there's enough said about Native religions, just enough to let you know there's stuff going on but not a lot of detail. And I find that the danger I confront is the generality is turning into like New age pat language, and it sounds-- there's no generic-y Native tribal religious system. And so, to me, the antidote is to get very specific.

And so I harness this for an audience in Psychology, thinking broadly about "mental health," quote unquote, and try to articulate aspects of an Ani mind, for example, and mentality in these traditional ways, which have sacred cosmological underpinnings. But I find resistance among other Native people who feel like these things shouldn't be talked about publicly. And yet, they were published and made public by some of my own ancestors that I draw on in this way. So what is the future of Native Religious Studies when you're not allowed to talk about actual religious practices in any detail?

ANTHONY TRUJILLO: Well, you know, I'll just chime in. I brought Alfonso Ortiz into this. And as you may know, Alfonso Ortiz was not appreciated and in terms of his anthropological work by my Pueblo. And I think there is a growing appreciation for the kind of scholarship that he was doing in the 1970s, the kind of ways Ortiz was moving the needle and writing. I mean, he's kind of a Vine Deloria figure for at least the Pueblos in terms of writing just in so many venues and so many genre.

And his anthropological work was just one of those. It's a tension that I really, really struggle with as well. I mean, even just in preparing these remarks. Earth Mother can be just a generalizing kind of New Age-ish sounding term. To kind of bring in the actual Tewa name, [? Nonquio, ?] and to bring in Alfonso Ortiz is controversial at least, especially in my Pueblo.

And so I don't have a good answer for that, but I feel like as somebody who's working, trying to be aware of the critiques and the problems of what can be regarded as extractive dives into Indigenous ceremonialism, noticing Indigenous religion, as Anca has pointed out, in a lot of different places, I mean, I would kind of cite your work, Professor Gone, within, in some ways, as like, you want to see where is Native American Religious Studies happening. Well, look at some of your writings. Look at some of Professor Warrior's writings perhaps. I'm not sure if you would categorize it in those terms, if that's the right term.

But to think beyond like a conference or a department. But then how do we bring that kind of particularity that is enough to kind of be substantive? And I think a lot about [? Nonquio ?] in particular, as kind of coming from a family of potters. And what is that kind of opening up to me as somebody who's just also interpreting my own community, family experience, and along these lines? That's my perspective.

MICHAEL MCNALLY: You put the question so well. I see it as a tension in God is Red, and I see it as a tension in the efforts of the coalition that Suzan was talking about and that Vine was involved with in the legal world. Because it's not sort of just a concept. It's a power word in US law. And once religion becomes the carrier of a Native tradition to seek to protect it, that opens potentially the door to others thinking about religion as this sort of, well, if it's religion, how are you going to shut the door on me.

You know, I'm a practitioner of Native American religious traditions, and I want my eagle feather too. And your policy that restricts my access as a religious practitioner of Native American religions. And this stuff gets litigated, right, in the eagle feather stuff. It's really dicey.

And I see a bit of a tension in this book. I posed the question last night that was kind of moving in this direction. But if you have this copy with you, on page 155 in the new chapter of "Natural and Hybrid Peoples," he says, although several generations of scholars have sought to devise a comprehensive theory of religions that would explain how these diametrically opposed religions, natural and hybrid peoples, are similar to each other, I can find no satisfactory explanation of what elements they have in common.

I mean, that's nothing like the lead sentence of that chapter. But in the subsequent versions, he does talk about the New Agers and the other people that are kind of taking the oxygen, whatever oxygen is left. I think it's also the other pole of the tension is, write this book for an audience that's mostly non-Native and that's also looking at-- yeah, invite them to ponder this because the planet is at stake.

ANCA WILKENING: I'd really prefer that. If you are taking seriously this idea of community involved research, where Native people guide questions, then we should just trust then that if we shouldn't talk about the ceremonies, that they're not going to be relevant to what we have to say about Native religion to the broader public. So that's one thing. And then that can be very individualized depending on the nation that you're talking about. I mean, Tisa Wenger, again, has written a great book about Native American religion without actually going to dances, so that's a good example for that.

And outside of Native American Studies, people have talked-- have written books about just religion in general without ever going into details about ceremony. I actually barely know any books that talk really deeply about the Eucharist. I mean, there are some. I would say that this need for the describing ceremony, getting access to ceremony, is about colonialism and trying to get access to something that just seems secret and therefore threatening, rather than actually having this substantial impact on the study of Native American religion that we might ascribe to it.

MEGAN MINOKA HILL: We have a question in front.

AUDIENCE: Oh, thank you.

MEGAN MINOKA HILL: Oh there's a microphone that's coming your way.

AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. My name is Pamela Klassen, and I'm from the University of Toronto visiting here for the year. Thank you very much for the conversations and the questions. I very much agree with you, Anthony, about we need to sort of much broaden the idea of what counts as a text in the study of religion and reading surveyors' memoirs. I've been doing a lot of that for a project I'm working on in gold right now, and they are definitely religious texts. And they are claiming land in very specific ways.

So obviously when you're thinking about the connection between relationships with land, as we know, in the settler colonial context, those can be incredibly destructive. But those are also something that we need to think about in the study of religion. And I think in a way, Vine Deloria, Jr. pointed us to that in books also like Red Earth, White Lies. Like geologists, we need to be reading what do they think about the Earth. Like, they're coming up with these theories, especially in the 19th century and even today, that are cosmological. And we need to sort of attend to that.

So in relation to that, I'm also wondering about-- or I'll just say one quick thing, then I'll turn to my big question. I think we also need to see how questions-- not just words like "religion," but words like "ceremonial," words like "spirituality" have also been deployed by settler colonial forces in incredibly devastating and legalistic ways, as those civilization regulations were pointing to. Now, that was just some comments on what some of the things you were saying, Anthony.

But I had a question for the panel more generally. What would it mean to take more of a sort of Turtle Island approach to some of the questions that you're asking? Because even that last quote that you gave from Jana-Rae Yerxa, she's from Couchiching First Nation on the Canadian side of Rainy Lake. And she's talking about Manoomin, as I understand it, not necessarily in relation to the US jurisprudence. And I was thinking yesterday about the comments that were-- I can't remember if it was Suzan or someone else who made the comment about questions of distraction. Like when you start focusing only on the US tribal cases, is that distracting you?

I mean, obviously it's super important work. I'm not denying that. But what happens if you take a different kind of at once a broader view-- I mean, Turtle Island is not particular land places-- but also a broader view that is also very specific at the same time? I don't want borders between Canada and the US sort of distracting us in other kinds of ways, but it does strike me that when you give examples like Jana-Rae Yerxa and questions around Manoomin, that those are speaking to kinds of spiritual jurisdiction that are multijurisdictional, in sort of John Burroughs sense of the word, and not only--

What would actually mean if we started by thinking about overlapping jurisdictions that are here and now and that we have to contend with? All those pipelines are crossing all kinds of borders as well. I don't know if that's a clear enough question for you, but thank you very much for the provocations.

MICHAEL MCNALLY: That's a fantastic point to make, Pamela, and I'm grateful for it. And there's a couple of, even in God is Red, I think even in the earliest version of it, references to supranational corporations as part of this too. Yeah. I cobbled my remarks together from what I feel like I know best, and I wish I knew more about the other jurisdictions. But the point is such an important one because that person at Couchiching First Nation is talking just as much about rice beds in northern Wisconsin, much less northern Minnesota.

MEGAN MINOKA HILL: We have a question in the back.

AUDIENCE: What a wonderful panel. I'm Kimberly Patton. I'm a Historian of Religion here at the Divinity School. Can you hold that for me? Thank you, Brad. You know, it was just heartening to hear especially Anthony's comments, but Anca picked up on it, the notion of what Jonathan Smith urged us to do, which is to let new evidence, new participants, rectify categories. And Tisa Wenger's, of course, beautiful book on the 1920s assertion by the Pueblo that dancing ceremonialism was religion matters so deeply in this conversation.

Autumn Fourkiller wrote this year that Indigenous cultural knowledge is safeguarded for a reason, but that is part of the appropriate study of Native American religions. Often this fact, this reality, this deep characteristic, an ethical imperative, as Professor Gone emphasized, is used as a way of patrolling the exclusion and in reinforcing the exclusion in a very tacit sort of subtly but deeply colonialist way of excluding the study of Native American religions because it's difficult to do right.

That is true of every religion in the history of religions. All of them, each of them, especially in their hybridity, their interaction, their histories, require care, requires, Professor Gone said, specificity. And the protection of Indigenous cultural knowledge matters deeply. But the fact that it matters deeply and the reasons why are part of its study, which is why we need to address the deeply problematic, deeply unethical failure to represent Native American Studies, faculty, and so forth in the academy at large, less than 1%. Certainly here at Harvard.

It is beyond time for representation to occur where it matters. It matters at every level, but it matters deeply at the faculty level. Deeply. And how wonderful to be talking about these things, but wouldn't it be wonderful if this conference didn't just come and go? But that these conversations, these epistemologies, the research that both of you are doing, and those of you who are chairing the panel and responding to it didn't just disappear today October 7. Going forward, how can this become a central part of our conversations of this in the study of religion? Thank you so much for the panel. It was wonderful.

MEGAN MINOKA HILL: Thank you. Any responses to her comment?

ANTHONY TRUJILLO: Yeah. It's interesting to me to think about just this, I guess, tension about the study of Native American religions or Indigenous religions more broadly. And what I would call a-- which absolutely needs to be central to a conversation. In part I think, because I think about William Apess, the 1830s Methodist minister, like turning the lens and showing a mirror, which I kind of see Deloria doing, kind of picking up on this tradition back to colonial society.

And it's not so much of like, let's get a better angle or a better view into Native life. It's like, Native Indigenous people have something to say about the way-- we have a vantage point on settler colonial society that categorizes itself in particular ways. Maybe this is part of what Vine Deloria is doing. He's saying, these categories need to be-- this is all kind of part of a similar thing that's going on. I think Anca had mentioned this as well.

Rather than bringing a better analytic to Indigenous religions, let's bring an Indigenous analytic to settler society. And let's turn that around to offer a critique and also maybe see some possibilities that haven't been seen, either in-- like, the study of texts. I think the question earlier about can we read Nietzsche and think about the places in which that was happening. Like, so crucial.

I had the thing a little while ago like, OK, reading the Sermon on the Mount, well, the mountain might have something to do with actually what Jesus is saying at that particular moment, rather than just being a stage. How does that mountain inform the thing that's happening in that place? And we can ask those types of questions in many, many different spheres so that we're not just maybe mining Indigenous religion for a better way to live our lives, but actually turning to Indigenous thinkers and intellectuals who are grappling with these and have been grappling with these questions for hundreds of years.

To say, we have some stuff to say about this stuff that can, maybe, at least thinking about our own tribal nations and the specificity. I think this goes to Pamela's question. How do we think about the heterogeneity of Indigenous places, the Tewa world in conversation with a Turtle Island? Are those things commensurable in some ways? Are they intentioned with some-- what can we do together? So these are some things that I think about.

MICHAEL MCNALLY: Can I just add to that really briefly? My comment about the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association not necessarily being fertile ground for people who are drawn to apply to a PhD program in Religion from one of the Religion programs. I'd be interested what you think about this and what others involved with NAISA think. But the territory of Religious Studies doesn't necessarily-- it can be claimed and reworked with the comments, the way that you were speaking about that, Professor Patton.

At least anecdotally, the folks that are doing most of the thinking in that world are not trying to be in rooms like this. I don't know if I'm right about that. I don't know if you agreed with that, Robert or Phil or others of you who have been part of those conversations. But religion is-- it's not a very capacious category.

AUDIENCE: I would say that back to those early days when NAISA was being thought of and the first-- thank you. So in those early days when NAISA was just happening in rooms of six of us who were looking at proposals, we weren't saying, hey, let's not put anything on religion on this program. And you've got to remember three of the people, me, Jace Weaver, and Ines Talamantez-- not Talamantez-- Hernandez Avila, people who have a really strong connection to Religious Studies and questions of religion.

So I think that our social networks, which is part of what we relied on to bring people together, would have naturally tended to bring those things out. And so I think it is a really interesting question why this would not be an environment that people would go to. I don't know how many people there are who are doing that sort of-- in the generation that I was in of knowing Chris Jocks and Richard Grounds and people who are doing this sort of work of really Avila and Talamantez with students at UC Santa Barbara.

I wonder if part of that work now is done in people call it, I'm doing Indigenous knowledge. And I'm troubled by some of that, that it's done as if there's a given good to studying Indigenous knowledge. And I think there is, but I don't know how to do it academically in really meaningful ways. And I don't know that the places where people are doing a lot of that work are able to actually then articulate the questions that arise when you say, I'm going to bring Indigenous knowledge into this work.

I say, that sounds great. How much training do you have in the Indigenous knowledge that you're bringing into the work? Because that's really hard knowledge to gain. I mean, who are you working with to mentor you through the things you would need to know to say that-- has somebody told you have enough of that knowledge to bring it into the discussion?

And then to Joe's point, I think one of the things on that point is the need to embrace and advocate for dissent in a moment to say, just because we don't do this now, just because people have a tendency to not do this thing that you're talking about your relatives doing, talking to people and having things recorded, you've got to go figure out what your relationship to those materials is. Well, that was a mistake for that person to say those things, but I'm going to go read it anyway because I want to read their mistake. I don't want to replicate it.

That doesn't seem-- it doesn't seem to actually respect how thoughtful those people were in turning-- in making that choice. Alfonso's another great example of that. And I think that I can respect the fact that people at Okhay Owingeh would reject the idea that he should have done it and still read the books, read the Tewa world, especially to gain wha-- I don't feel like I'm violating. I don't feel like I'm violating something by actually opening the book and reading it, even though I know for somebody there, it could be that.

And I think that that's part of what the reaction there was about. On some of the things, he was trying to correct the record in so much of the Tewa World. But people there said, people were almost done talking about this. Nobody was bringing these things up anymore. We finally waited out people thinking that this was us. And now, you bring it up again. You know? And that really shows you the epistemological way, two different ways of thinking about it.

But I don't think it means that Alfonso was wrong. You know what I'm saying? He was very brave, and he paid a price because of that bravery. And it's not as though he said, please, send all your copies of Tewa World in. I mean, last time I saw him, he signed a copy of it for me. He didn't say, oh, please burn this. Please throw it away. Don't read it.

And so they're really tough questions. But if we're not engaging in really tough questions that help us to understand what Joe is getting at and what other people are getting at, and to also counsel younger people, people who are coming along, to say, , what you're saying is really great in theory. Or even to imagine what it would be to reimagine the university on these terms where you can have a category other than religion, you know.

But if we wait around to re-theorize everything, we'll never get there. Part of how we get to there is by doing that work, you know. And I think Vine Deloria is a good example of all of that.

MEGAN MINOKA HILL: Well, with that, I'm going to have to end the session. I think we've planted lots of seeds for some good lunchtime conversation, and I hope you'll join me in thanking our panel for a really incredible discussion.

SPEAKER 2: Sponsors, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University Native American Program, Center for the Study of World Religions, The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2020, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.