Teaching with Native American Religions for Social Justice

This roundtable asks two primary questions: how can we nurture greater respect, more nuanced understanding, more care-full critical thought, and deeper community engagement in teaching on Native American and Indigenous religious traditions? Secondly, how can theories and methods from Native American and Indigenous studies offer critical interventions to responsible pedagogy, making any course in religious studies more responsive to questions of social justice?
To teach Native American and Indigenous religious traditions is to enter precarious pedagogical terrain. Often, what students expect from a course on Native American and Indigenous religions is a survey of Native American ceremonial practices, religious beliefs, and sacred sites. This expectation is too often and too uncritically met by what many courses and textbooks offer. However, because of the deep histories (and ongoing practices) of suppression, dispossession, and genocide associated with Native peoples and Native American and Indigenous religions, this manner of teaching can perpetuate, rather than challenge, settler colonial mindsets that objectify, romanticize, appropriate, and dis-member Indigenous knowledges from their communities. Furthermore, this mode of teaching often diminishes the political nature of Indigenous religions and the centrality of spiritual power in Indigenous uprising and resistance to colonialism.
With these concerns in mind, in this panel we seek to shift the focus from probing Indigenous religious traditions themselves, to critically understanding the relationship between Indigenous religions, power, and justice. This involves reassessing misguided colonial attempts to categorize Indigenous peoples (especially their religious practices), interrogating the study of religion as an academic field, and considering Indigenous contestations and engagements with these approaches. In other words, how might teaching with Native American religious traditions, rather than just about them, be an occasion for better understanding the history and formation of settler colonial societies, and for imagining and enacting more responsible and respectful relationships with Indigenous peoples, places, and knowledges?

In February 2024, a group of early-career scholars of Native American and Indigenous religious traditions gathered to workshop syllabi, craft guiding interdisciplinary questions, and articulate challenges about religious studies pedagogy more broadly. The questions we crafted arose thematically and offer a way of getting specific about the big picture questions of this roundtable discussion:

Theme 1: Balance
How can we balance the need to provide students with background knowledge in both Native American and Indigenous studies and religious studies that they do not have, with the need to move beyond basic or factual knowledge into more complicated theoretical questions?
How do we balance between settler colonial theory and Indigenous power, resistance, and survival, ensuring that our courses do not center on damage or harm?
How do we create a balance between the theories and methods of NAIS and Religious
Studies?

Theme 2: Relationship-building:
How do we incorporate and center the insights and perspectives of Indigenous communities in our classes?
How do we promote deeper engagement between institutions—and individual students—and local Indigenous communities through teaching?
How do we establish caring and collaborative relationships within our classrooms?

Theme 3: Challenges
Often, if a student takes our class on Native American and Indigenous religious traditions, it is the only class they will ever take about both religion and Indigeneity. This presents a huge challenge for scholars of Native American/Indigenous religions.
Other challenges stem from our typical role as being the only scholar at our respective institutions who teach and write about Indigenous religious traditions. As a solo voice, it can be difficult to push our institutions to commit the resources required to build long lasting relationships with local Indigenous communities.
The challenge of reading and developing syllabi. Students are often averse to long texts; many do not read carefully or critically on their own. What kinds of assignments, projects, and activities can we offer to make students more engaged?

While the majority of our roundtable conversation will revolve around the questions above, we will also share some of our initial plans for addressing these in a way that will provide an open source resource for anyone who teaches Native American religious traditions, from the high school through the graduate level.
We are developing a website with different modules that will be available to others teaching classes on Native American and Indigenous religious traditions. Each module will include recommended sources on a given topic, including primary sources, academic scholarship, documentary films, and podcasts. Each module will also include recommended assignments and in-class activities.
We are working on a collective publication on pedagogy, aimed for a journal such as JAAR. This article asks what happens when we approach foundational religious studies concepts (such as place, ceremony, and creation story) with Native American and Indigenous studies theoretical and methodological frameworks in mind.

At the American Academy of Religion Conference, we would like to open this conversation up to include the audiences of the Native Tradition in the Americas unit and the Indigenous Religious Traditions unit. We also learned about the Center for Religion and Cities’ “Indigenize the Syllabus” initiative and would be thrilled to collaborate with the Center to make our work available to high school teachers as well.