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The remarkable story of the innovative legal strategies Native Americans have used to protect their religious rightsFrom North Dakota's Standing Rock encampments to Arizona's San Francisco Peaks, Native Americans have repeatedly asserted legal rights to religious freedom to protect their sacred places, practices, objects, knowledge, and ancestr
About the author
Michael D. McNally is the John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religious Studies at Carleton College. He is the author of Honoring Elders: Aging, Authority, and Ojibwe Religion and Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion. Twitter @mcnallymichaeld
Summary
The remarkable story of the innovative legal strategies Native Americans have used to protect their religious rights
From North Dakota's Standing Rock encampments to Arizona's San Francisco Peaks, Native Americans have repeatedly asserted legal rights to religious freedom to protect their sacred places, practices, objects, knowledge, and ancestral remains. But these claims have met with little success in court because Native American communal traditions don't fit easily into modern Western definitions of religion. In Defend the Sacred, Michael McNally explores how, in response to this situation, Native peoples have creatively turned to other legal means to safeguard what matters to them.
To articulate their claims, Native peoples have resourcefully used the languages of cultural resources under environmental and historic preservation law; of sovereignty under treaty-based federal Indian law; and, increasingly, of Indigenous rights under international human rights law. Along the way, Native nations still draw on the rhetorical power of religious freedom to gain legislative and regulatory successes beyond the First Amendment.
The story of Native American advocates and their struggle to protect their liberties, Defend the Sacred casts new light on discussions of religious freedom, cultural resource management, and the vitality of Indigenous religions today.
Foreword
This is a book about religious freedom from the perspective of Native Americans, exploring what happens when Native Americans make use of the legal system to make claims to sacred places, practices, objects, and ancestral remains.
Additional text
"[McNally’s] work is likely the most comprehensive on Native American religions and law to date."---James. W. Waters, Reading Religion
