Discovery, Settler Colonialism, American Religion: A Conversation with Tisa Wenger and Timothy Bowers Vasko

This panel brings into conversation two new landmark books on religion and colonialism: Tisa Wenger’s Spirits of Empire and Timothy Bowers Vasko’s Making All the World America. Together, these books are concerned with the ways Indigenous religions have been produced by, or shaped in response to, colonial powers. At the same time, both books see Indigenous actors as deeply and actively involved in producing the discourse on religion in the Americas. 

The books have different historical and geographical foci: Vasko writes about Spanish and British colonialisms in the late fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, while Wenger is interested in American colonialism, in the early United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, the shared question in which the authors are interested is at the heart of the study of religion and empire: how are Indigenous and colonial religions intertwined?