Review: Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom Beyond the First Amendment, by Michael D. McNally
This important book engages the ongoing struggle of Native Americans to protect the sacred, their land, and treaty rights. Michael McNally recognizes how the term religion as a western category has failed Native Americans through law by not fully interpreting the complexities of Indigenous religions...
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| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
2023
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| In: |
Nova religio
Year: 2023, Volume: 26, Issue: 4, Pages: 130-132 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This important book engages the ongoing struggle of Native Americans to protect the sacred, their land, and treaty rights. Michael McNally recognizes how the term religion as a western category has failed Native Americans through law by not fully interpreting the complexities of Indigenous religions. Nevertheless, he argues that even though religion is a problematic term, it remains useful, especially if "imagined capaciously as an Indigenous collective right keyed to the collective nation-to-nation relationship [that] can carry the legal teeth of religious freedom" (xv).What McNally proposes in his latest book on American Indigenous religions is an integrative approach wherein Native American religious claims connect with elements of federal Indian law, while Indigenous rights operate within international human rights law. He argues that not only does the language of religion still have value for Native American religious claims in law, but that sovereignty, religion, and peoplehood should be seen as collective rights. This inclusion of religion in notions of peoplehood and sovereignty is what he calls "religious sovereignty," or a "special legal status and nation-to-nation relationship between Native nations and the United States and also to the prerogative of Indigenous peoples themselves to determine what matters are sacred to them" (21). In practice McNally argues that "folding claims to what is arguably religious into broader claims of tribal sovereignty under federal Indian law and Indigenous rights under international law [is] religion as peoplehood" (31) and holds many possibilities. |
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| ISSN: | 1541-8480 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Nova religio
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1525/nr.2023.26.4.130 |