Indigenous Christian Feminism and Religious Freedom in the American South: Navigating Faith, Identity, and Recognition

Native American tribes in the American South largely exist in a state of invisibility, both administratively and in the public sphere. In South Carolina, only one of 17 Native American communities is federally recognized, the Catawba Nation, while nine are state recognized and seven are regarded as Native American special interest “groups.” Since the 1970s, legislation has increasingly defined the definition of Native American as one who is enrolled in a federally recognized tribe. For example, the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the 1990 Native American Graves Protection Act only apply to federally recognized tribes. Such legislation marks federal recognition as the standard of Native authenticity. As First Nations scholar Glen Coulthard argues, however, recognition is not necessarily a source of freedom for the colonized, but “the field of power through which colonial relations are produced and maintained” (Coulthard 2014, 17-18). Further, in 2020, 144 federally recognized tribes signed a petition condemning the efforts of non-recognized tribes applying for recognition, claiming they lack the proof of being “authentically” Native American and will diminish the sovereignty and rights of currently recognized tribes. 

Yet, for South Carolina’s Edisto Natchez-Kusso, the pursuit of recognition drives much of the cultural revitalization work, as they strive to repatriate ancestral remains from Charles Towne Landing Historical Site, protect traditional territories and the Edisto River from development, and to educate their neighbors not only on their histories and cultural practices, but on their very existence. This paper engages the paradoxes and intersections of cultural revitalization, religious freedom, and political recognition central to the story of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso.

Critical to this story is the role of both Native women and Christianity. As Michelene Pesantubbe wrote in her seminal book, *Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World*, Eurocentric ideals born of Christianity drastically limited the roles available to Native American women in the southeast. As tribal member Lisa Collins said, this colonial shift has carried forward: “Native American women are pretty much invisible.” And yet, it is the Native women of South Carolina that are at the forefront of their communities working to claim legal recognition, remake land-based traditions, and revitalize traditional arts and languages. As Collins said, “we’ve had to learn to speak loudly.” 

Today, the Edisto are re-signifying land, or rather river-based traditions as Christian celebrations of Native identity and resiliency. The Edisto River is a sacred space. It is their homeland: a physical repository of cultural identity, a place in which the Edisto could find solace “among each other” during assimilation efforts, a source of traditional foods like catfish and redbrim, and grasses used in basket making. The river is also the place citizens of the tribe are baptized into the community’s International Pentecostal Holiness Church. Indeed, the Edisto Natchez-Kusso connect being truly Edisto with being members of the Little Rock Holiness Church. The Edisto River, then, serves as a site of confluence for the many tributaries that define Edisto identity. 

The category of religion, and related terms like the “sacred” or “holy,” are fraught western concepts, terms many Native practitioners decry as perpetuating a Eurocentric history and dualistic bias that does not inherently exist in Native America. As Tisa Wenger and Sylvester Johnson argue in *Religion and US Empire*, a Eurocentric formulation of religion serves as a regulatory force in settler colonial societies. Set within this reality, Tribal Board member Sabrina Creel notes, the Edisto “survived through all the things that have tried to take us out: diseases, people, discrimination, education,” but they did so by “adapting to them”—by adapting to dominant white society on their own terms, not by revisiting an essentialized or romantic past. For the Edisto, Christianity and Native identity are deeply linked. Chief John Creel, who serves as the tribal chief, medical doctor, and lead pastor of the tribal church, notes Christianity has become Native, there is not a distinction between the two. Many of the people interviewed see the commitment to Native identity, ancestral land, and Christianity as one. Some, however, surmise that their conservative Christian beliefs challenge outsiders’ perception of their authenticity and therefore their political freedom to self-determine. 

Grounded in long-term community-based research, this paper highlights the ways in which Edisto women appeal to a unique Indigenous Christian feminism to argue for political and religious freedom. This is set within a broader project that explores Edisto efforts to reclaim land, navigate identity politics, and achieve federal recognition. I consider the following questions: What unique challenges do non-federally recognized tribes have in land back movements? How is gender woven into this story and what role do Edisto women play in the political struggle? How do the Edisto leverage their religious identity to create partnerships with southern political actors and institutions? And how does the tribe’s positionality as a Southern Pentecostal people affect their reception by other Native communities, people in the South more broadly, and various levels of governance?

In this paper, I first set the stage by providing a brief history of Native Americans in South Carolina—early colonial experiences, treaty agreements with the British crown, and waves of erasure through the Indian Removal Act and the Termination Era. Next, I expand on how the category of “religion” has been employed as a regulatory device for colonial subjects and how formulations of Native Christianity have served as a tactic for political protection, but as this paper shows, also complicate contemporary recognition efforts. Then, I detail how an Indigenous Christian feminism drives cultural revitalization work for the Edisto Natchez-Kusso. In conclusion, this paper raises questions about the role of Christianity as both a site of empowerment and a locus of restriction for the Edisto Natchez-Kusso, arguing for an expanded study of Native communities in the American South.