The study of Native American religious traditions remains contested, shaped by colonial frameworks that have misrepresented Indigenous lifeways as static rather than living systems. The concept of Pan-Indianism embodies these tensions: while some criticize it for flattening distinct spiritualities and sovereignties, others celebrate it for fostering intertribal diplomacy and survivance. This panel centers Indigenous agency through four case studies: the Ghost Dance as an enduring resurgent practice (challenging reductive narratives tied to Wounded Knee); peyote ceremonies’ criminalization and resilience as medicine-prayer syntheses; Delaware tribal negotiations of authenticity and Pan-Indianism’s dual role as adaptation/contention; and sweetgrass harvesting’s challenge to Western ecological ethics through sacred reciprocity. Together, these papers reveal how Native religious traditions—distinct yet dynamically intersecting—navigate colonial disruption, reframing Pan-Indianism not as homogenization but as a vital, contested dimension of Indigenous sociality and political-spiritual practice.
The Ghost Dance Movement is historically and culturally complex and open to misrepresentation and misinterpretation. This partly stems from the Ghost Dance’s discursive association with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 as a result of the governmental response to the movement. Misunderstood and mis-framed by the government at the time, the Ghost Dance movement did not end with that massacre, but expanded in subsequent years and has appeared again in the twentieth century (Warren 2017; Wenger 2009; Kehoe 2006). Instead of being understood as an effort on the part of the Ghost Dancers to address their conditions using the ritual actions of their past, the entire popular record of the Ghost Dance emphasizes this violent “end,” while obfuscating the ongoing presence of indigenous people, dance, and cosmovision in the United States continuing to today.
This paper examines the production of the distinction between religion and medicine as it pertains to peyote consumption in colonial New Spain and the United States. I posit that whether peyote consumption was considered to be a religious or a secular activity was deeply influenced by the gender of the practitioner. This paper is an exploration toward a theory of Indigenous medicine and healing, centering Indigenous women working with peyote in two radically different time periods.
This paper examines the question of ‘Being’ as it pertains to the cultural life of the Delaware Tribe of Indians. A cultural life that many in the tribe feel is at the precipice of dissolution as a unique, coherent entity. It seeks to understand the ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ responses to this existential situation and the manner in which Delaware people variously either express their ontological make-up qua Indigenous Delaware and (attempt to) uphold attendant commitments or, conversely obscure their ontological make-up in falling back upon and conforming to popular public settler-colonial representations of “being Indian” or subscribing to a homogenizing pan-Indianism. These issues, while intensely local, mirror broader social trends in Euromerican consumer societies, and, as such, the question of being Delaware provokes the question of what it means, once again, “to be.”
This study utilizes accounts of indigenous sweetgrass practices and myths in anthropological and religious studies fields to evaluate how indigenous approaches serve to expand Western ethical imagination around plants and ecological preservation. Indigenous harvesting practices and uses of sweetgrass are embedded in sacred myths and assumptions about the interconnectivity between humanity and plants. In this interconnection, plants and humans are envisioned to be in a sacred relationship of symbiotic mutuality. This study examines how harvesting practices contrast with dominant Western secular and religious paradigms of ecological ethics in approaches to plant replenishing. Initial studies regarding sweetgrass indicate that traditional indigenous approaches of human-plant relationality through sacred harvesting have proved more effective than predominant ecological approaches of not harvesting in promoting plant replenishment. Indigenous stories and practices challenge common Western paradigms of ecological preservation and potentially promote the rights of plant-life.