Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s) 2017011274, 2017021251, 9789004346710, 9789004346697

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Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s)

Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion Series Editors Carole M. Cusack (University of Sydney) James R. Lewis (University of Tromsø) Editorial Board Olav Hammer (University of Southern Denmark) Charlotte Hardman (University of Durham) Titus Hjelm (University College London) Adam Possamai (Western Sydney University) Inken Prohl (University of Heidelberg)

VOLUME 15

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bhcr

Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s) Edited by

Greg Johnson Siv Ellen Kraft

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Johnson, Greg, 1971- editor. Title: Handbook of indigenous religion(s) / edited by Greg Johnson, Siv Ellen Kraft. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2017. | Series: Brill handbooks on contemporary religion, ISSN 1874–6691 ; VOLUME 15 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017011274 (print) | LCCN 2017021251 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004346710 (E-book) | ISBN 9789004346697 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Indigenous peoples--Religion. | Religions. Classification: LCC BL380 (ebook) | LCC BL380 .H36 2017 (print) | DDC 200.89--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017011274

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1874-6691 isbn 978-90-04-34669-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-34671-0 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Preface IX Introduction 1 Greg Johnson and Siv Ellen Kraft 1 Towards a Typology of Academic Uses of ‘Indigenous Religion(s)’, or Eight (or Nine) Language Games That Scholars Play with This Phrase 25 Bjørn Ola Tafjord 2 Religion as Peoplehood: Native American Religious Traditions and the Discourse of Indigenous Rights 52 Michael D. McNally 3 u.n.-Discourses on Indigenous Religion 80 Siv Ellen Kraft 4 Indigenous Feature Film: A Pathway for Indigenous Religion? 92 Cato Christensen 5 Sounds Indigenous: Negotiating Identity in an Era of World Music 108 Rosalind I.J. Hackett 6 Not Real Christians? On the Relation between Christianity and Indigenous Religions in Amazonia and Beyond 120 Minna Opas 7 Timing Indigenous Culture and Religion: Tales of Conversion and Ecological Salvation from the Amazon 138 John Ødemark 8 Materialising and Performing Hawaiian Religion(s) on Mauna Kea 156 Greg Johnson 9 Becoming Human: ‘Urban Indian’ Decolonisation and Regeneration in the Land of Enchantment 176 Natalie Avalos

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10 Global Indigeneity and Local Christianity: Performing O’odham Identity in the Present 192 Seth Schermerhorn 11 Spiritual, Not Religious; Dene, Not Indigenous: Tłįchǫ Dene Discourses of Religion and Indigeneity 204 David S. Walsh 12

Unsettled Natives in the Newfoundland Imaginary 221 Suzanne Owen

13 The Shamanic Festival Isogaisa (Norway): Religious Meaning-Making in the Present 234 Trude Fonneland 14 Are Adivasis Indigenous? 247 Gregory D. Alles 15

Is Hinduism the World’s Largest Indigenous Religion? 263 Arkotong Longkumer

16 Literacy as Advocacy in the Donyipolo Movement of Northeast India 279 Claire S. Scheid 17 Ethnographies Returned: The Mobilisation of Ethnographies and the Politicisation of Indigeneity in Ifugao, the Philippines 294 Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme 18 The Beginning of a Long Journey: Maintaining and Reviving the Ancestral Religion among the Ainu in Japan 309 Takeshi Kimura 19 Replacing ‘Religion’ with Indigenous Spirit: Grounding Australian Indigenous Identity in Wider Worlds 324 Steve Bevis 20 Of Ruins and Revival: Heritage Formation and Khoisan Indigenous Identity in Post-apartheid South Africa 349 Duane Jethro

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21 Global Intentions and Local Conflicts: The Rise and Fall of Ambuya Juliana in Zimbabwe 366 James L. Cox Afterword: The Study of Religion and the Discourses of Indigeneity 378 Thomas A. Tweed Index 387

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Preface After we sent the manuscript of this volume to the press for review, we headed for Standing Rock. Being there was humbling and inspiring on many levels. The immediacies of indigenous claims and rights stood out in stark relief, as did the power and vitality of global networks being forged in the camps and through the never-sleeping circuits of social media. Most of all, ceremony – sometimes place-specific, sometimes supra-local – was ever-present. Indigenous religions were being translated, performed, and multi-mediated in real time, always with concerns about the environment and sovereignty front and centre. Seeing in action so much of what the contributors to this volume had pointed to in other contexts was rewarding and validating – we were on the right track, after all. But it was also chastening – the stakes of contemporary indigeneity were higher and more immanent than we had previously felt. Given the unprecedented scale and reach of Standing Rock, the limitations of a volume written before the fact are, we hope, understandable. We now see that more might have been said about the historical arc of collective movements – especially occupation events – that have shaped the ways indigeneity is experienced and articulated by many people in the present. Standing Rock echoes both Wounded Knee episodes, of course, but also Alcatraz, and, in an international frame, Mohawk challenges to reified nation-state borders, various Southwestern nations challenges to the same, resistance movements throughout South America and especially the Amazon, and, importantly, the Alta dam controversy in Norway, which forged many aspects of contemporary Sámi identity. Many similar examples can be added to this list. One example along these lines has grabbed our imagination, both for its similarity to many of the struggles we are familiar with, but also for the ways it pushes hard against our working assumptions about the contours and expressions of indigeneity in a global frame. As events came to a head at Standing Rock – with the arrival of winter, increased mass media visibility, statements from the North Dakota governor concerning evacuation of the camps, and the concomitant arrival of an estimated two thousand veterans in support of the Protectors – we headed off on a research team trip to Nagaland, India. In fact, we were in the luggage queue in Kolkata when news came to us via a text message about the Army Corps’ decision to deny the pipeline permit. Buoyed by this amazing news, we were eager to share the story of Standing Rock with people in Nagaland, who themselves have an exceptionally long and proud history of self-determination and protest and one, moreover, that does not map easily onto models we had previously been aware of – Nagas have a maximal form

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of nation-within-a-state sovereignty. Indeed, learning about their history – especially of uncompromising control over their land and resources – utterly reframed our working assumptions about the range of ways sovereign actions are shaping indigenous futures. When it came time to share our analysis of Standing Rock, as Siv Ellen did through the Hutton Lecture, generously sponsored by the Kohima Institute in Nagaland and its affiliates, we were delighted to see the audience’s familiarity with the topic and their strong and sharply articulate views on sovereignty in the North American context. Not only were they quite aware of events at Standing Rock, they were interpreting these according to their own histories of struggle, including historically recent episodes of protracted violence and cultural vitalisation. In fact, the very next day the Morung Express, a local Naga newspaper, carried a story about Standing Rock and its cultural and political implications. Through this stark example, among other profound learning experiences, we left Nagaland ever more attuned to the importance of unfolding discourses of indigenous religion(s) and their quickly circulating local-globallocal iterations. Now tightly focused on histories of indigenous challenges to nation-states and the structures of capital and militarisation that they rely upon and animate, and to large-scale indigenous networks and the solidarities that such moments make possible, we see that this volume has a potential relevance we had not fully anticipated. Put simply, the global now, with all its promise and peril, presents an urgency to document and explore various ways indigenous religions articulate with global movements in support of indigenous peoples and their places, and to chart the ligaments that render possible movements like what has been unfolding in North Dakota. We also see that such a volume risks trivialising these very realities by framing them in academic terms and for an academic audience. The specter of the latter makes us uncomfortable. We sincerely hope readers will take up the challenge we have put to ourselves as events at Standing Rock continue to capture our collective attention and concern.

Introduction Greg Johnson and Siv Ellen Kraft Indigenous peoples all [speak many] different languages but in our meetings, we are speaking one language. Our relationship to Mother Earth is identical. u.n. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon Quoting Tonya Gonnella Frichner1

⸪ Extremely distant and distinct indigenous communities have over recent decades become more like themselves and more like each other. While not equally characteristic of all contemporary indigenous discourses of religion, this paradox is as prevalent on the global scene as it is inadequately accounted for by means of inherited analytical frames, especially with regard to religion. This handbook finds its niche here, seeking to engage indigenous religions from a wide variety of locations and perspectives. Not a typical handbook in the sense of being a reference work, it draws upon the efforts of a diverse group of scholars working at the intersection of indigenous studies and religious studies. Providing numerous case study-based examples, together with provocative theoretical interventions, chapters attend to a wide variety of themes. What they share is a collective focus on discursive and performative modalities that catalyse translations along the spectrum of living indigenous religion(s). These range from highly local forms of indigenous religions (contextually bound) to more general expressions of indigenous religion (in the abstract). The volume’s titular construction – ‘religion(s)’ – is intended to convey the relationship between local and supra-local forms of indigenous religion, about which we say more below. A major theme of this volume is exploring how indigenous peoples appeal to the traditions of their ancestors as a means to open new cultural, economic and political horizons in a rapidly changing and increasingly networked world. The ways they are doing so – becoming indigenous in a global manner – frequently share similar structural features, often happen in collective forums on global stages, and are resulting in shared discourses of ‘indigeneity’ among 1 https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2014-09-22/secretary-generals-remarks -opening-world-conference-indigenous.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_002

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indigenous peoples themselves, general publics, political and legal actors, and scholars. In this manner, indigenous religions (plural) take on partially shared social lives as indigenous religion (singular). These same dynamics are also generating novel ways of being ‘traditional’ back home. Hawaiians, for example, draw upon and enhance their Hawaiian identities when translating their core values and traits for indigenous others in global forums; the common ground they find in doing so is then articulated back into the local spaces from which it emerged, with, for example, a shared reliance on ocean- and agricultural-­based subsistence expressed in an idiom of a genealogical relationship to the earth itself. Nature as sacred, in this example, becomes newly Hawaiian in a way that is simultaneously traditional – building upon ancient images of Papa, the earth mother – and inflected in the global patois of Mother Earth. Religion thus transacts a multiple valence in many of the contexts this volume explores. Sometimes these two senses of indigenous religion(s) map onto one another, other times they remain distinct, still other times they stand in tension (here generative, there combative and territorial). Indeed, much of what animates contemporary indigenous religion(s) is precisely friction within communities over what registers, voices, and venues are most appropriate for announcing sacred claims at varying scales. Polyphony and cacophony often characterise this context, which presents us with an analytical challenge insofar as we must resist the desire to locate the one true voice of tradition, but instead apprehend full spectrums of expression that together constitute tradition in action. This is especially true when Christianities, Buddhisms, Islams, Hinduisms, environmentalisms, New Age-isms, or other non-native traditions receive articulation as or through indigenous religion(s). ‘Religion’ is central to this story, for it is that distinct sphere of human expression that simultaneously stipulates and depends upon hyper-specificity (this rock, this pipe) while insisting upon universal – or at least otherworldly – authority and relevance (even non-proselytising traditions assert their maximal truth status). Translations between local and global forms of indigeneity often rely upon this religion-fostered dynamic, whether by design or not. In other words, ‘religion’ in its formal capacities is discursively exceptional in its ability to translate local-specific needs, experiences, and aspirations into broader (if not universal) frameworks. Thus it stands to reason and is clear empirically that ‘religion’ and its cognates have been prime vehicles for enabling traffic between local and global indigeneities. Little has been written about the formal shaping of indigeneity by discourses of religion from any disciplinary perspective.

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Responding to this gap in the literature, a core goal of this volume is to bring contemporary theorising about religion (both as subject matter and as a disciplinary framework) to bear on the study of indigenous traditions as a means to shed analytical light on this dynamic and, in a complementary manner, to instigate theoretical refinements with regard to categories and frames in the academic study of religion. One means of achieving both of these goals is seen in the way contributors have engaged in comparison (more explicitly in some cases than in others). Indigeneity is a manifestly comparative phenomenon – it has many instances and variations – as invoked on the ground, in global venues, and increasingly in analytical parlance generally.2 The academic study of religion stands to benefit from this kind of real-world comparison, as the people engaging in these acts demonstrate the fact of quotidian comparison, its wide reach, and various uses. We return to the theme of comparison and problems regarding the category ‘religion’ below.

Indigenous Religion(s): A Research Agenda

The broader frame of this endeavour is the research project inrel – Indigenous religion(s): Local Grounds, Global Networks. We (the editors) and some of the contributors to this volume (Alles, Hackett, Longkumer, and Tafjord) are involved in this multi-year, multi-sited fieldwork project.3 In the course of developing a comparative agenda for studying networks of indigenous religion(s) across multiple and variable scales, the inrel group has established several heuristic frames for organising our research. Contributors to this volume have been asked to consider these broader frames, and to do so from the perspective of the distinct local grounds with which they are engaged. We will return to these grounds towards the end of this chapter, but will start out with the broader frames, some of the theoretical and methodological challenges they involve, and some of the overarching questions that inrel and this volume seek to respond to and shed light upon. 2 Recent indigenous studies scholarship that speaks to a global turn includes: Weaver (2014), Allen (2012), L. Smith (1999), Hokowhitu, Kermoal, and Andersen (2010), and Simpson and Smith (2014). Within religious studies, see Olupona (2004). 3 The project was initiated through a Norwegian Research Council grant in 2015 awarded to Siv Ellen Kraft. The five-year international project is anchored by Kraft and Bjørn Ola Tafjord at the University of the Arctic in Tromsø, Norway, and includes a group of five other core members and multiple affiliates.

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Influenced by anthropology and area studies, indigenous religions have often been studied primarily in their specific contexts, as case studies of particular religions, at particular times and places. Alternatively, and especially in the early history of religious studies, they have been described in highly abstract and projected terms based primarily upon non-native exoticism.4 The era of contemporary indigeneity is a game changer (in terms of accelerated flows and increased networks of indigeneity) that requires a new approach, not least for the reason that indigenous communities and their own scholars insist upon research that meets high standards of rigor and accountability (Simpson and Smith 2014). Thus, the overarching vision of inrel is to maintain the contextually rich, bottom-up approach, but to do so within comparative frames, and thereby to attend to global discourses (indigenous religion in the singular) that belong to none of these grounds exclusively or entirely, but affect each (to varying degrees and in various ways).

Indigenous Religion

By ‘indigenous religion’ in the singular, we mean a globalising discourse, consisting of notions of an indigenous we and a flexible, but fairly standardised, vocabulary of assumed similarities: harmony with and care for nature; healing and holism; antiquity and spirituality; shamanism and animism; and autochthonous claims to place announced in the idiom of genealogical connections between the living, ancestors, and the cosmos itself. A growing body of anthropological scholarship is currently trying to make sense of the first part of this concept; of indigeneity in an increasingly interconnected world (Alia 2010; Cadena and Starn 2007; Graham and Penny 2014; Niezen 2009; Niezen 2003). James Clifford notes as significant among recent developments the emergence of “a new public persona and globalising voice […]: a présence indigene,” operating on multiple scales (local, national, and transnational), and including projects such as language renewal, protection of sacred sites, national agendas and symbols, and transnational activism (Clifford 2013:15). Indigènitude, Clifford claims, “is sustained through media-disseminated images, including a shared symbolic repertoire (‘the sacred’, ‘Mother Earth’, ‘shamanism’, ‘sovereignty’, the wisdom of ‘elders’, stewardship of ‘the land’)” (Clifford 2013: 16). A number of other scholars have made similar references

4 For reasons of space, in this introduction we do not dwell upon this history. See, for example, Chidester (1996) and Tafjord’s chapter in this volume.

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to notions of a religious dimension of indigenism and a connected symbolic vocabulary and repertoire. Some concern specific transnational contact zones, such as u.n.-meetings (Karlssen 2003), tourism (Stausberg 2011), the World Music and Indigenous film industries (Hilder 2010; Kraft 2015; Christensen 2013), the environmental movement (Pedersen 1995; Rønnow 2011; Beyer 2003; Beyer 2006; Brosious 1997; Harvey 2003), and indigenous festivals (Fonneland 2012; Longkumer 2016). Others deal with nation building (Chidester 2012; Kraft 2010; Kraft 2009) and legal procedures on national and international levels (Niezen 2003; Niezen 2009; Niezen 2010; Niezen 2012; Johnson 2007). Ronald Niezen, for example, refers to “Indigenous religion” as a new and “global form of religiosity […] associated with those defined in international law as indigenous peoples” (2012:131). Niezen’s main concern is the development of a global indigenous identity. Indigenous religion is connected to these grounds “as a conceptual and performative secondary elaboration of the indigenous people’s concept” (2012: 13). Yet other scholars discuss how academia has played and plays a critical role in the (re)creation and dissemination of these emerging discourses and practices (Cox 2007; Tafjord 2013; Chidester 2014). Together these studies indicate the widespread reach of discourses on indigenous religion(s), particularly on global or transnational levels, as well as hinting towards some of their main locations (u.n. forums, protest events, tourism, festivals, music, academia, and so on). They also, again primarily on the global level, indicate possible rationales and interests behind these developments, including the use of religion as a resource (legal, political, economic, and so on). However, the lack of broader critically engaged comparative studies of these matters is at the same time indicative of the current status of indigenous religions in scholarly literature; global indigenous religion(s) warrant a comparative, religion-focused treatment. It seems clear, to phrase this differently, that a globalising discourse on indigenous religion exists and that indigenous traditions around the world are currently shaped by or actively shaping themselves in regard to it. Yet little is known of the life, vitality and position of this discourse, on various local and global grounds. Stated briefly and empirically, in order to allow for a comparative, bottom up approach to these issues, the following questions serve as guideposts for contributions across this handbook: 1) 2)

How do different indigenous people and the people who interact with them understand, translate, articulate, negotiate and oppose the category ‘indigenous religion’? Who uses it, for what purposes, in which contexts and on which scales (global/local, public/private)?

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What are the media and the trajectories connecting the global and the local? What are the logics and sensibilities involved in the recognition of certain articulations and performances as ‘indigenous’ and ‘religious’?

We are not proposing this as the one enlightening way forward in the study of indigenous religions. We are proposing a new approach, aimed particularly at the contemporary moment, the global now, shifting scales, and comparative perspectives, and one that is firmly empirical. We are not, moreover, suggesting that indigenous people everywhere have entered these paths, or are destined to do so. Reasons why they have not or will not are relevant to an overall understanding of this field, but this particular approach is aiming for those who have or will.

Key Categories

Indigenous religion-making, as we have presented it so far, involves translations and performances; depends on media and technologies, and ‘sovereignty’ – in some sense of the term – is a shared goal. These four categories, we believe, constitute key dynamics that can be fruitfully explored, and compared on and across various indigenous grounds. Translation is the basic intellectual move required when different groups of people encounter one another, and so it is the basic intellectual move that scholars make when they study religions, and that indigenous people – and others as well – also make when they articulate a global indigeneity. Given that translation is never a completely satisfactory endeavour, it is important to reflect critically on the problems and possibilities that translation presents both to scholars and to the construction of a global indigeneity. Performance in a variety of forms – story-telling, music, ritual and drama, dance, and so on – has been widely recognised as a primary manner for engaging in cultural-religious activity and as especially characteristic of indigenous traditions; we are focused on the place of these performative traditions in contemporary indigenous life, and in regard to what they contribute to a global indigeneity. Contemporary media provide both the avenues for enhanced awareness of a global indigeneity as well as new instruments that indigenous people employ in engaging in cultural-religious activity/doing cultural-religious work; instruments that, as elements of modernity, are often assumed to be at odds with indigeneity,­but which indigenous people have themselves embraced. Finally, inasmuch as indigenous people are generally identified in distinction to

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another group of people – colonisers, the mainstream, dominant society – one of the most crucial issues they face is the issue of sovereignty, whether aspiring to full political autonomy or in the form of establishing their own agency and self-determination within broader settler societies.

Translating Indigenous Religion(s)

Translations can be explored as practices on local grounds and in global networks, and as conditions contained in and by both new and long established systems of classification. Translation is crucial to any attempt to communicate about, understand, and analyse indigenous religions and cultures that are not simply local, and it is the definitive move in the construction of a global indigeneity. Translation speaks in particular ways to the connections between our work as scholars and the communicative practices of indigenous people. It also speaks to already established systems of translation, many of them shaped by scholarly studies from the past, and by former generations of missionaries, travellers and colonial administrators. Basic to an understanding of these processes are attempts to detect and identify the comparison involved when items from a particular tradition are judged as similar, identical to, or different from items in other indigenous traditions or pan-indigenous vocabularies. As in all forms of comparison, this implies processes of translation, from one language into another, and from certain categories and taxonomies into others, including categories that originate in scholarly discourses. ‘The shaman’ is an example of the complexities often involved in such translations over time and across space. This concept originated on Siberian grounds, was later translated into academic vocabularies by anthropologists and historians of religions, later returned to Siberia as an – ism (Rydving 2011), and was spread further to indigenous peoples elsewhere. Presently, it is gaining ground as a conventional (in the sense of broadly used and recognisable) term for indigenous religious specialists, seemingly around the world. In the case of ‘the shaman’, as with translation more generally, we are dealing with processes that are “profoundly dialogic […], without closure or guarantee [ … and,] continuously ‘carried across’, transformed and reinvented in practice” (Clifford 2013:48). Specific explorations of translation(s) may include the historical tracing of particular translations, attempts to identify translational traditions and boundaries against translatability, and pursuing an understanding of the mechanisms and logics involved in historical and current examples. On a more basic level, inrel – and this is an approach we have encouraged the contributors

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to this volume to employ – insists upon a focus on language and vocabulary usages (Tafjord 2016), in particular in regard to the terms ‘religion’ (and cognates) and ‘indigenous’ (and cognates): Is the word ‘religion’ used – if so, how and by whom? Are cognates that index religion invoked (for example, sacred, tradition, a local indigenous term(s))? Is religion avoided? Does the terminology of religion shift as it is up-scaled to global audiences? How about the reverse: Are religious discourses embraced on the global stage and brought ‘home’? Are the terms ‘indigenous’ and ‘indigeneity’ invoked, and if so, where and by whom? Are alternative discourses of identity invoked (for example, Native, Aboriginal, First Nation, native term(s), and so on)? Have terms of selfdesignation shifted in recent years, and if so why? Do the people in question have a particular legal status that is in any way different from that of the majority publics of the dominant society in which they are located? Do their religious and identity claims receive articulation accordingly? Tracing the development and reach of a pan-indigenous religious vocabulary is a related concern. How far and to which places have notions of Mother Earth, nature spirituality, animism, and so on, travelled, and to what extent have they entered the religious vocabularies of specific indigenous peoples? Granted that they have been introduced; in which contexts, on which scales, and for which purposes? To what extent are they known and articulated; how did they get there; and what are the translations involved in accepting and integrating them in local vocabularies? If they are contested or rejected, then the question is why? Is there a religious dimension to other established concepts and vehicles of global indigeneity, such as indigenous film, indigenous soundscapes/music, indigenous art and aesthetics? These are established genres, used – and recognised as meaningful by film makers, musicians, museum people, artists and their audiences – again seemingly around the world. What, more generally, are the translational codes and codings involved in these and other processes of synchronisation?

Performing Indigenous Religion(s)

Performance involves acts and utterances – high key and low key – and allows for studies of strategic agency and reflexivity, as well as aesthetic and multisensual appeals and dimensions – on, off and back-stage (Goffman 1956). Performances of indigeneity have been described as crucial in global politics, and for expressing and constituting indigenous identity (Graham and Penny 2014). They can be explored as ‘sites of persuasion’ – arenas in which indigenous people present their values to themselves and others (Morphy 2006); as ‘creative

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encounters’ – ranging from demonstrations to festivals and courtroom proceedings and providing incentives for exploring lost or forgotten traditions, as well as opportunities for living, learning and becoming along the lines of the scripts enacted (Hannerz 1996), and as ‘sites of negotiation and conflict’ (Johnson 2008) – arenas in which competing claims are brought forth, and indigenous people contest one another over the terms of their traditions (old and new). Festivals, museums and tourism are obvious arenas for studies along these lines, along with art, music, dance and film; protests and demonstrations; political meetings and legal settings. Some sites may offer all, or most of these, components, with for instance ‘indigenous festivals’ that attract tourists in addition to locals, and offer music, art and dance, along with sacred claims and performances of indigeneity. Key questions include the issue of whether indigenous identities are played out in such settings, and – if so – to what extent are religious claims articulated?

Mediating Indigenous Religion(s)

Communication technologies are basic to the flow of ideas, people and things referred to so far. Differences in the availability of such technologies (including which ones are available and to which degrees) are similarly crucial conditions for the expected developments. The Norwegian Sámi, for example, inhabit a world that is not only permeated by communication technologies, but one which provides everyday news updates on indigenous peoples, everyday opportunities for hearing and seeing indigenous world music (on the radio, YouTube, and so on), and broad access to the seemingly infinite variety of websites devoted to indigenous issues. In contrast, many Bribris and Kabekirs in Costa Rica live in areas in which roads and electricity have only recently been built and installed. Their connections to global indigenous arenas are therefore much more limited, and more dependent on individual entrepreneurs. Central to the mapping and analysis of local mediascapes is the question of who controls media images and processes of mediation. Stereotypical and degrading images of indigenous peoples (and their religions) are common in large parts of the world, and thus continue to frame discourses. However, indigenous people have increasingly and creatively taken into usage the opportunities offered by new media technologies. The New Media Nation, Valeria Alia argues, “is linked to the explosion of indigenous news media, information technology, film, music, and other artistic and cultural developments” (2010:7). It exists “outside of the control of any particular nation state, and enables its

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creators and users to network and engage in transcultural and transnational lobbying, and access information that might otherwise be inaccessible within state borders” (Alia 2010:7–8). On local and national levels, similarly, ‘indigenous media’ (radio, television, print, film, video, websites and so on) are used to articulate the past and create memories for the future (Ginsburg 1991; Ginsburg 2002), as well as preserve languages and support identity formation.

Sovereignty and Indigenous Religion(s)

Fundamental to any analysis of indigenous religion(s) is the issue of sovereignty, for instance related to processes of nation building within existing nation states, the global discourse of human rights, and premised on specific histories of colonisation. Processes of colonisation have often included missionary activities, sometimes closely connected to state-supported programs for assimilation, and resulting in the suppression of ‘traditional religions’, although in highly different ways and with variable results. Worldwide processes of indigenous revitalisation movements often include the revitalisation of ‘traditional religions’, whether in the form of cultural heritage, attempts to re-animate ancient religious traditions, or through the indigenising of the religions they currently ascribe to. Among the Sámi, for instance, the pre-Christian religion has become increasingly important as a source of national identity symbols and tourism, as well as for the indigenisation of Christianity and of New Age and neo-shamanic milieus (Kraft 2009) At the same time the pre-Christian religion has remained controversial, particularly among conservative Christians. Legislation constitutes an area of particular relevance. Research by Greg Johnson provides examples of repatriation in Hawai‘i as one of the main arenas for exploring, articulating and performing Hawaiian religion (Johnson 2007; Johnson 2014). Legislation also shapes developments through the establishment and solicitation of putatively universal categories. Both national and international legislation have singled out ‘sacred landscapes’ for protection, due to their assumed importance to indigenous people. How are indigenous religions and cultures impacted by these types of legislation, and the taxonomies that come with them? The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (undrip) is crucial in this context, as a site and source of indigenous religion discourse that is generating various feedback loops among indigenous communities, as they seek to harness its possibilities, and a range of nation states, as they try to assess the degree to which undrip interfaces with or goes beyond existing laws and policies. Some of the most provocative aspects of undrip hinge on religious issues, or are issues wherein religious

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claims (to land, resources, ancestors, and so on) may create leverage or be regarded as evidence.

Comparing Again and the ‘Religion’ Problem

Comparative analysis is central to the frames and themes that organise approaches to indigenous religion(s) reflected in this volume. Simply stated, we view the fact of indigenous empirical self-comparison as presenting an opportunity to scholars of religion. Such realities point the way out from a period of disciplinary history defined in large measure by comparison anxiety, an apprehension still found in many corners of the field. In turn, scholars of religion can contribute to theorising discourses of indigeneity by way of our hard-earned lessons regarding failures of the comparative method and ways to nuance rejuvenated approaches to comparative practice. For example, we note that indigeneity is used across numerous discursive fields in variable and seldom precise ways (for example Sarivaara, Maatta, and Uusiautti 2013; Perley 2014). For our purposes, and as a comparative category, indigeneity may be most effective when understood as a circuit that is switched ‘on’ when ‘the indigenous’ is no longer only local or exclusive, but reflexive and reflected, in short – transacted. In this usage, indigeneity is a discursive and performative repertoire that has myriad authors (indigenous and not), stratum upon stratum of multiple-source sediment, unpredictable sympathisers and antagonists, uneven histories, and starkly consequential if wildly diverse legal ramifications. The sediments we refer to include some of the least honourable of academic contributions from the past, often performed under the name of comparativism, and frequently resulting in homogenisation at several levels, and the lumping together of various traditions, whether named as such – Indigenous Religion – or some other label, for example, Primitive Religion, Aboriginal religion, nature religion and so on. Textbooks have been and still tend to continue this tradition of grand theorising – reckoning unity out of difference (see also Masuzawa 2005; Smith 2004). Our distinction between indigenous religions (in the plural) and indigenous religion (in the singular) is intended as a way out of these ruts, yet in ways that acknowledge structuring forces, on the one hand, and the agency of contemporary indigenous people on the other. Contemporary discourses on indigeneity are shaped by inventions from the past, including academic comparativism and theorising, yet are today articulated in new (and old) ways, by indigenous people themselves and others that relate to them.

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Comparison, more generally, is not itself the problem. Comparison is integral to interpretation and encounters, and translations as such (Felski and Friedman 2013). Not to compare is thus hardly an option. Rather, the challenge is to compare in ways that take into account past deficiencies, especially with regard to our discipline’s constitutive category, religion. Here, then, we outline some basic analytic moves the category enables. A primary dynamic of much religion – temporally – is to reframe the past in the present, and this is the fundamental discursive ground of many indigenous claims, especially with regard to place and genealogy. As much as we appreciate current scholarship on becoming indigenous, not enough has been said about the double return found at the intersection of indigeneity and religion. Clifford gestures in this direction and its paradoxical quality, especially with his most recent book, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (2013). Appeals to religion, Clifford shows, are not merely a ‘return to origins’, but also entail feedback loops. Contemporary global religious indigeneity, for example, cirulates back home and is made local once again (often in negotiated, contested, and finally uneven ways). With regard to such dynamics, Clifford and others have sketched the basics roles of religion, but not in a way that drills down to address the formal qualities of religious speech and action. Through a wide range of case studies, we examine the ways indigenous discourses frequently entail ‘religion’. Many of the chapters gathered here show how the movement of indigenous peoples going back to claim a religious identity that is both global and local has the effect of reconsolidating identities through renewed articulation and performance of religious tropes that buffer criticism from outsiders (in other words, religion is immune from critique in effect, if not always by design), builds, restores, and contests authority within and between communities, and promotes allegiances (global and local) between those who speak and self-recognise in a similar register (‘indigenous religion’). The processual and performative turn in indigenous studies has been tremendously revealing, but as noted above, it has tended to ignore crucial aspects­of religious discourse, including its characteristic commitment to deflecting attention away from its contingent qualities (Barthes 1972; Bloch 1989; Lincoln 2012). A primary investment of religious claims is the erasure of terrestrial tracks. This is not a cynical observation; it is a formal one that demands scholarly attention. Ours is a discipline defined by story tracking, especially on hidden pathways, including within our own disciplinary histories (Gill 1998). A comparative and critical engagement with indigenous religion(s) needs to go back, behind, and around, in the sense that our approach – however diversely inflected by individual contributors – is one of critical engagement

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with the category and data of religion. We insist that this should no less be the case when living indigenous traditions are studied. Each of us has connections to and investments in the communities we study, even while these are configured and expressed in a wide variety of ways. At times, some of us have advocated for the peoples and traditions we study (for example, Johnson 2014). However, as a programmatic agendum, we resist the impulse to be wholly deferential in our scholarship. If indigenous religion(s) are constructed and regarded as immune from critique, in an analytical sense, then our work cannot thereby contribute to furthering knowledge about our subject matter. This seemingly straightforward position puts us at odds with the sensibilities of some scholars of religion and indigenous studies. Here a caveat is in order. Not all of the contributors to this volume are equally comfortable with the strong analytical stance we are carving out here. Contributors range across a spectrum on the matter, and even for us individually a great deal depends on context, audience, and so forth, with regard to just how starkly we choose to frame our analytical commitments. Particularly with regard to religion, but also with reference to its relatives ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’, we appreciate the impact of various postcolonial critiques, including those of Asad (1993), Mahmood (2005), and Mandair (2009), among others. However, when embraced in an extreme fashion, such challenges leave little room for the kind of work collected in this volume. Strident positions against comparative work, such as that announced by Ananda Abeyesekara (2011), place severe constraints on our field. Absent categorical frames that enable comparison and conversation, our enterprise – in the specific sense of our scholarship and in the general sense of our ability to understand one another, at least provisionally – grinds to a halt. Quite beyond abstract theoretical considerations, we reiterate the core empirical fact that animates our collective enterprise: indigenous religion(s) is/are a fundamentally comparative emic reality on the ground, in various media, and at the United Nations. To be indigenous is to compare. The same is true of ‘religion’ – just as scholars have grown skeptical of its shelf-life, indigenous peoples are finding its purchase, if in varying degrees. Scholars of contemporary indigeneity are thus compelled to engage the term and all it implies. Even so, contributors to the volume demonstrate considerable anxiety about the ways the disciplinary construction ‘religion’ has undeniable colonial and theological genealogies. How could we not, especially given the fraught places we do our work? But we reject the story that ‘religion’ remains primarily an imperial apparatus that is analytically vacuous (for example, Fitzgerald 2000). Focusing only on this trajectory is to fail to see religion’s potential yield or to take adequate stock of ways it is – increasingly – deployed on the ground by the communities we study. Again, we do not wish to abandon

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our central disciplinary term just at the moment it has renewed empirical relevance in our particular subfield. Conceived rigorously and comparatively, religion enables a double movement that is the condition of possibility for thick description and productive comparison. It does so because it relentlessly directs our attention to local contexts while also prompting structural insights across various traditions and discursive arenas (Tweed 2006). Thus, religion is one register in which we can theorise similarity and difference, fit and not-fit, and which enables, on occasion, the obdurately other to be re-described as having an uncanny family resemblance, and vice versa. The call to compare in this mode is all the more urgent in a world where on-the-ground comparisons and translations are an everyday function of indigeneity. Mounting this project, we have been heartened by the post-Eliadean turn in comparative studies (for example, Smith 2004; Pollock 2011; Calame and Lincoln 2012; Bynum 2014; Robbins, Schieffelin, and Vilaça 2014).

The Chapters

Although obviously not exhaustive, this volume covers examples from all continents and a wide range of indigenous religious traditions. Many chapters are based on in-depth studies of one or several indigenous religions. Others take global arenas as their point of departure and site of exploration, and some focus primarily on theoretical and analytical concepts and challenges. Contributions are grouped into two sections. The first section consists of chapters that are primarily theoretical, focusing on key concepts such as indigenous religion(s), indigeneity and translation (Tafjord), or on global arenas, discourses and genres (McNally, Kraft, Christensen, Hackett). Starting out, Bjørn Ola Tafjord in Chapter 1 presents a typology of academic usages of the term ‘indigenous religion’, in ways that help clarify this highly diverse field, as well as frame the chapters that follow. He suggests eight ‘language games’ or ‘types of uses’, specified as (1) a class of religions, (2) an ethno-political concept, (3) a theological concept, (4) an archaeological and evolutionary concept, (5) an aesthetical concept, (6) a geographically and historically contingent relational concept, (7) a discourse, (8) as material entities and lived religion. The majority of our chapters, the introduction included, largely belong to the seventh of his types, focusing on how the phrase indigenous religion(s) is “articulated, claimed, enacted, assembled, contested, constituted, deconstructed, and reconfigured in specific contexts” (Tafjord, p. 40). James Cox (Chapter 19) has over the past decades been a prominent and leading representative of the first type, indigenous religions as ‘a class of religions’.

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Chapters 2–3 cover u.n. discourses. Michael McNally offers a reading of the formal language of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (undrip), aiming to show “how the religious is absorbed into the cultural but ultimately into the broader bundle of collective rights associated with the recognition of indigenous communities as peoples” (page 53). Siv Ellen Kraft, in Chapter 3, targets what has been referred to as the ‘spiritual tone’ of u.n. discourses on indigenous peoples, in relation to discourses on indigenous religion, using as her point of departure a particular text; State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, issued by the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2009, as part of their awareness-raising and agenda-setting ambitions. With reference to top scale venues like the u.n. and law, both chapters indicate a favouring of indigenous religion in the singular over the plural, with abstract terms like the spiritual, the sacred and Mother Earth used to portray or make claims on behalf of indigenous peoples (in the singular or the plural) (McNally and Kraft). Chapters 4–5 cover film and sound respectively, as media and genres. Both are central to globalising discourses on indigenous religion, and to emergent forms of indigenous aesthetics. Cato Christensen (Chapter 4) asks whether indigenous feature film constitutes a ‘pathway for indigenous religion’, exploring – more specifically – the relationship between globalising discourses on indigenous religion, on the one hand, and indigenous feature films on the other. In Chapter 5, Rosalind Hackett introduces us to the world of indigenous ‘sound’, exploring several case studies from Australia, Africa, and North America in order to theorise the sonic features of indigeneity and the salience of sonic studies of religion more generally. Chapters in the second section take as their point of departure specific local grounds, and are organised geographically; four on North America, two on South America, four on Asia, and one on Hawai‘i, Sapmi, Australia and South Africa respectively. Minna Opas, in Chapter 6, discusses the often ambivalent and tense relationship between Christianity and indigenous religions in Amazonia,­as articulated by missionaries, scholars and indigenous peoples themselves. Of relevance beyond Amazonia, these categories are often seen as contradictory and incompatible, but as Opas shows in her chapter, may at times also overlap and intersect. Based in the same geographical area, Jon Ødemark’s chapter analyses a convergence between certain notions of tribal culture and religion in popular global culture, environmentalism and ethnopolitical rhetoric in the Brazilian Amazon. His point of departure is an alliance between James Cameron, the director of Avatar (2009), and indigenous people against the building of Belo Monte, a hydroelectric dam in the state of Pará, and usage of the film as a model for understanding this struggle.

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Chapter 8 covers a different example of conflicts concerning land issues, and usage of religion as a language of opposition and protest. Anchored in an ongoing struggle regarding telescope development on the sacred mountain Mauna Kea, in Hawai‘i, Greg Johnson presents these battlegrounds as arenas for religion making, and ones that have left lasting marks on materialisations and performances of Hawaiian religion. Also highlighted, is the relationship between indigenous religion (in the singular sense as framed in this handbook) and the local sense, and the potential for up-scaled translations in the present moment of worldwide indigeneity. Often left out in academic studies, urban areas are increasingly the dominant conditions of life for indigenous peoples. Chapter 9 deals with one such ground; La Plazita Institute, a non-profit healing service for urban Indians in Albuquerque, New Mexico (u.s.). Natalie Avalos explores decolonisation as a religious endeavour, and regeneration as based on an emerging pan-­indigenous identity in conversation with religious revitalisation. Chapters 10–11 revolve around the relationship between the local and the global, performances of identity, and the relevance of global indigeneity. Seth Schermerhorn (Chapter 10) explores notions of global indigeneity and local Christianity through performances of Oódham identity, on the us–Mexican border. David Walsh (Chapter 11) takes as his empirical starting point the Tłįchǫ Dene, in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Local religiosity, in the form of Christianity and Dene traditions in these cases, seem to be more or less unaffected by discourses on indigenous religion, but this discourse is articulated during encounters with outsiders or official systems, for instance in connection with tourism and in legal settings. The relevance and usage of indigeneity and indigenous religion is here – and perhaps more generally – a matter of scale and context. Suzanne Owen’s contribution (Chapter 12) concerns an unusual example of disputed claims to indigeneity, but one involving an established and longlasting trope; that of the ‘lost indigenous people’ of a particular site. Titled “Unsettled Natives in the Newfoundland Imaginary,” the study covers the story of the last Beothuk, and his relationship to present day Mi’kmaq, and it explores the relationship between this story and contemporary claims to ‘nativeness’, affected by global discourses on indigeneity, relating to land, culture and heritage. Nordic examples are often overlooked in studies of indigenous religion, due partly perhaps, to their loss of what is today referred to ‘Sámi religion’, the pre-Christian Sámi religion, or their “indigenous religion.” Christianity has since the eighteenth century been the dominant religion in Sámi areas. The shamanic festival Isogaisa, the topic of Trude Fonneland’s contribution

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(Chapter 13), belongs to a more recent revival of ancient traditions. A venue for building local Sámi identity, within the discourse of global indigeneity, Isogaisa is a site in which the global meets the local, macro meets micro, and scales collapse. Chapters 14–16 all deal with issues of indigeneity in India, but in highly different ways and contexts. Greg Alles (Chapter 14) discusses whether the Adivasi ‘are indigenous’, in the light of difficulties and potential of translation, in this case from the South Asian linguistic, cultural and political context to the American and European ones, that dominate international discourses on indigeneity and indigenous religion. Claire Scheid (Chapter 15) provides a further example of claims to indigeneity by scheduled tribes like the Adivasi, or in her case the Adi, in the Eastern Himalayan foothills. Her main focus is on the Donyiopolo movement, in the wake of a very conscious attempt at scriptualisation and formalisation, made possible by increasing literacy and fuelled by a reflexive awareness of identity as an endangered culture. Both the Adivasi and the Adi have connections to the indigenous movement internationally, but weaker and perhaps less potentially useful, than in many of the other cases explored in this handbook, due to the lack of state recognition of them (or any Indian people) as ‘indigenous’ in the u.n. sense of the term. “Is Hinduism the world´s largest indigenous religion,” is the title of Chapter 16, by Arkotong Longkumer. This somewhat unusual and – to many other indigenous peoples provocative, one may assume – question, is discussed in regard to the complexities inherent in the term, and on attempts by the Hinduright to deploy the term ‘indigenous religion’ to shape common practices in the service of a unifying national identity. Moving on to a different part of Asia, Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme (Chapter 17) introduces us to the case of the Ifago of the Philippines. Titled “Ethnographies retuned: The mobilisation of ethnographies and the politisation of indigeneity,” this chapter highlights the role of ethnographies and ethnographers in the becoming and transformation of Ifugao indigenous religion, including both the politicisation of indigenity and its disarticulations. Chapter 18 explores the world of the Ainu, in Japan, and a process of cultural and religious revival, inspired by global indigenous networks and the international movement of indigenous peoples. The museum-sector has been important to this development, Takeshi Kimura argues. It is used here as the ethnographic basis and main site for exploring emerging networks and articulations of global indigeneity. Steve Bevis’ contribution (Chapter 19) presents two case studies from Aboriginal Australian contexts that together indicate the diversity of contemporary indigenous life in this setting. The first case involves attempts to

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formulate local aboriginal theologies in relation to indigenous knowledge perspectives. The second case involves usage of cultural festivals, social media and contemporary art forms as ways of promoting interest in traditional law and ceremony and strengthen the transmission of indigenous worldviews. Chapter 20 is set in post-apartheid South Africa, and explores heritage formation and Khoisan indigenous identity. Reinvented religious rituals have been crucial to the remaking of Khoisan subjectivity, Duane Jethro argues, along with indigenous aesthetic styles, through new civic organisations to make political claims about belonging, and much of it spearheaded by a small group of Khoisan activists. This process, in turn, has been seized upon by the state, and through the translation and upscaling of Khoisan language and images, prepared for national heritage formation and sovereign signification. In Chapter 21, James Cox takes up a recent movement in Zimbabwe in order to provide a striking counterpoint to many of the up-scaling models of localglobal indigenous religion(s) described in earlier chapters of the volume. Cox focuses on the quick spread and demise of the Ambuya Juliana movement to illustrate ways expansionist religious ambitions may be held in check and even stifled by local authorities. His case “demonstrates precisely the power the local can exert on global forces” (page 366). Finally, a theoretically oriented afterword by Thomas Tweed provides a critical discussion of some of the book’s themes and perspectives, and relates these to current scholarship in the study of religion, history, and related disciplines concerning globalisation and the significance of theorising religion in the political present. In his hallmark fashion, Tweed calls attention to movement and niche-making, to crossing and dwelling. He also pushes contributors to the volume and the field in general to attend to our blind spots, especially with regard to core terms of identification and their potential unintended consequences, a conclusion we could not agree with more.

Central Themes and Preliminary Findings

What then, considering our broader vision of a new approach to indigenous religion(s), can be deduced – however provisionally – from the chapters of this volume? First, and this is hardly surprising, the categories ‘indigenous’ and ‘indigenous religions’ are disputed and negotiated, both by scholars, indigenous people, and people in their surroundings, including state governments. Second, the continued strength of the world religion paradigm in relation to indigenous religions is a recurrent theme (Tafjord, Opas, Walsh, Schermerhorn, Longkumer). Christianity may be the overall most commonly ascribed

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to religion among indigenous peoples, but is along with other world religions rarely recognised or categorised as indigenous. Rather, scholars, missionaries and indigenous peoples themselves, usually reserve this concept for native traditions from the past, regardless of the present status of these traditions and the current religious scenario of the people in concern. Missionaries have tended to see indigenous peoples as not Christian enough, and accordingly as not fully Christian; scholars have tended to consider Christianity as a foreign impulse from outside, and have therefore focused on the past, traces from the past or ‘indigenous parts’ of Christian traditions. Nation-building and processes of revitalisation constitute a third theme (Takeshi, Walsh, Fonneland, Scheid, Avalos, Johnson). Indigenous religions have been main targets of colonisation, missionary and forced assimilation, and among many communities disappeared completely or partly, in addition often to being associated with shame. Several of our chapters deal with current attempts to reclaim, revitalise and reconnect with traditions from the past, and again for related but contextually distinct reasons: in order to heal colonial wounds (Avalos), merge political and spiritual aspirations (Fonneland), reclaim ‘lost’ and marginalised identities (Takeshi), or improve their overall position (Scheid). Performance is often key to processes of revival and revitalisation, especially in politicised contexts that involve claims upon rights and places (Johnson). Fourth, several of the chapters contribute to our understanding of agents of globalisation; people or institutions or practices that connect local communities to international networks and global venues, and introduce them to the global discourse on indigeneity and indigenous religion. The contribution of scholars, missionaries and ngos can hardly be overestimated in this regard (Remme and Opas). Other chapters reveal the importance of education (Scheid, Johnson), tourism (Schermerhorn, Fonneland), museums (Takeshi), the music industry and art (Hackett), law and legal systems (McNally, Kraft, Johnson), and film and media (Christensen, Ødemark). Finally, several of our chapters confirm the presence of an indigenous religious vocabulary, and a religious dimension of established indigenous genres. Notions of a close and spiritual relationship to nature, to Mother Earth and to indigenous people as her traditional custodians are recurrent across many of our chapters (Bevis, Fonneland, Christensen, Ødemark, Johnson, Kraft, McNally, Takeshi). The same goes for sacred lands and a genealogical relationship to the land (Johnson, Kraft, Fonneland, Takeshi, Bevis), and the shaman and shamanism. Our chapters from India and the Philippines, however, suggest different patterns (Longkumer, Scheid, Remme). The rephrasing of ‘Mother India’ as Mother Earth by some Hindu nationalists, for instance, establishes a link to globalising discourses on indigeneity, while at the same time – it would

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seem – maintaining established nationalist references to a geographical area (India), and downplaying the global and the environmental dimension.

Future Directions

Of the many paths to pursue going forward in the study of indigenous religion(s), one has struck us in unexpected ways. As this handbook took shape, and as we had the pleasure of learning about new contexts of indigenous religions(s), we were surprised by the multiple political configurations of indigeneity analysed by the volume’s authors. Now we are persuaded that future studies of indigenous religion(s) must work hard to think about atypical modes of indigeneity operationalised as political tactics/strategies, particularly when hinged to religious claims. Forms of indigeneity that deserve more attention include ones that might provisionally be labelled as follows: Dominant (in other words, as asserted by a dominant faction of a society, in contrast to the minority position); reactionary (serve to limit or constrain other possible claims to indigeneity or abridge rights of others in the name of indigeneity); reluctant (by all appearances could claim indigeneity but opt not to); and retroactive (recasting a group – one’s own or others – as historically indigenous and therefore potentially so in the present, even where such claims appear novel or unprecedented). Research that undertakes this agenda will need to have a capacious geographic and conceptual reach, not to mention a willingness to challenge status quo conceptions of indigenous political positionalities and the role of religion in their construction. Finally, we offer a closing conjecture. We have observed that global style pan-indigenous religion is a dominant discourse in Scandinavia and North America, parts of South America and the Pacific, and parts of Australia and New Zealand; it is also well represented in indigenous forums in the u.n., and it is in these regions common in popular and public discourses more generally. However, it may be less relevant in Africa and Asia, including India. Less relevant, less prominent, in a state of competition with other discourses on indigeneity that may be regionally more widespread. Overall, perhaps, one might suggest that discourses on indigeneity are relational, but in regard to different others, related to different scales, and with different directionalities. What we might call ‘pan-indigenous religion’ (Kraft 2016) is self-consciously global, in the sense that it makes global claims. Paralleling this discourse, and perhaps more prevalent in Africa and Asia, perhaps also South America, are pan-orientations in relation to the state-level or a region, or pan-indigenous orientations that aim for the ‘purely political’, while downplaying the religious. Pursuing this line of investigation should also entail socio-economic analyses,

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as some of these discourses may primarily be relevant to the global middle class and others with access to global contact zones, while differently situated actors surely inflect indigenous religion(s) in different tones, not only on different scales. References Abeysekara, A. 2011. “The Un-translatability of Religion, The Un-translatability of Life: Talal Asad’s Thought and Unthought in the Study of Religion.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion. 23, 257–282. Alia, V. 2010. The New Media Nation: Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication. New York: Berghahn Books. Allen, C. 2012. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Barthes, R. 1972. Mythologies. Trans. by Annette Lavers. New York, Hill and Wang. Beyer, P. 2006. Religion in a Global Society. Milton Park: Routledge. Beyer, P. 2003. “Conceptions of Religion: On Distinguishing Scientific, Theological, and ‘Official’ Meanings.” Social Compass 50: 2, 141–160. Bloch, M. 1989. Ritual, History and Power. London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: The Athlone Press. Brosius, J.P. 1997. “Endangered Forest, Endangered People: Environmentalist Representations of Indigenous Knowledge.” Human Ecology 25:1, 47–69. Bynum, C. 2014. “Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology; Or, Why Compare?” History of Religions 53:4, 341–398. Cadena, de la, M. and Starn, O. 2007. Indigenous Experience Today. Bloomsbury Academic. Calame, C. and B. Lincoln. 2012. Comparer en histoire des religions antiques. Controverses et propositions. Liège: Presses universitaires de Liège, coll. Chidester, D. 1996. Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Chidester, D. 2012. Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chidester, D. 2014. Empire of Religion: Imperialism, and Comparative Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Christensen, C. 2013. Religion som sámisk identitetsmarkør. Fire studier av film. PhD Dissertation, Department of History and Religious Studies, University of Tromsø. Clifford, J. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Kraft, S.E. 2010. “The Making of a Sacred Mountain. Meanings of ‘Nature’ and ‘Sacredness’ in Sápmi and Northern Norway.” Religion: An International Journal 40, 53–61. Kraft, S.E. 2015. “Shamanism and Indigenous Soundscapes. The Case of Mari Boine.” In S.E. Kraft, T. Fonneland and J. Lewis, eds. Nordic Neoshamanisms. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Kraft, S.E. 2016. “Indigenous Knowledge in the Making: Pan-Indigenous Religion at Standing Rock.” Hutton Lecture, Kohima Institute Fourth Annual Lecture Symposium. Kohima, India. Lincoln, B. 2012. Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Longkumer, A. 2016. “Visualizing National Life: The Hornbill Festival as Culture and Politics.” In C. Newbold and J. Jordan, eds. Focus on World Festivals: Contemporary Case Studies and Perspectives. London: Goodfellow Publishers. Mahmood, S. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mandair, A. 2009. Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation. New York: Columbia University Press. Masuzawa, T. 2005. The Invention of World Religions. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Morphy, H. 2006. “Sites of Persuasion: Yingapungapu at the National Museum of Australia.” In I.K.C. Kratz, L. Szwaja and T. Ybarra-Frausto, eds. Museum Frictions. Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Durham: Duke University Press, 469–499. Niezen, R. 2003. The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Niezen, R. 2009. The Rediscovered Self. Indigenous Identity and Cultural Justice. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Niezen, R. 2010. “A New Global Phenomenon.” In M.M. Bruchac, S.M. Hart, and H.M. Wobst, eds. Indigenous Archaeologies: A Reader on Decolonialization. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 33–37. Niezen, R. 2012. “Indigenous Religion and Human Rights.” In J. Witte Jr, and M.C. Green, eds. Religion and Human Rights: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 119–134. Olupona, J. 2004. Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity. London and New York: Routledge. Pedersen, P. 1995. “Nature, Religion and Cultural Identity – The Religious Environmentalist Paradigm.” In O. Bruun and A. Kalland, eds. Asian Perceptions of Nature – a Critical Approach. København: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 258–273. Perley, B. 2014. “Living Traditions: A Manifesto for Critical Indigeneity.” In L.R. Graham and H.G. Penny, eds. Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 32–54.

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Pollock, S. 2011. “Comparison without Hegemony.” In H. Joas and B. Klein, eds. The Benefit of Broad Horizons: Intellectual and Institutional Preconditions for a Global Social Science. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Robbins, J., B. Schieffelin and A. Vilaça 2014. “Evangelical Conversion and the Transformation of the Self in Amazonia and Melanesia: Christianity and the Revival of Anthropological Comparison,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56: 3, 559–590. Rydving, H. 2011. “Le chamanisme aujourd’hui: constructions et déconstructions d’une illusion scientifique.” In Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines 42. DOI: 10.4000/emscat.1815. Rønnow, T. 2011. Saving Nature. Munster: LIT Verlag. Sarivaara, E., K. Maatta, and S. Uusiautti. 2013. “Who is Indigenous? Definitions of Indigeneity.” European Scientific Journal. 1, 369–378. Simpson, A. and A. Smith. 2014. Theorizing Native Studies. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Smith, J.Z. 2004. Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, L. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. Stausberg, M. 2011. Religion and Tourism: Crossroads, Destinations and Encounters. New York: Routledge. Tafjord, B.O. 2013. “Indigenous Religion(s) as an Analytical Category.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 25, 221–243. Tafjord, B.O. 2016. “How talking about indigenous religion may change things. An example from Talamanca.” Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 63, 5–6. Leiden : Brill. Tweed, T. 2006. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Weaver, J. 2014. The Red Atlantic and the Making of the Modern World, 100–1927. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

chapter 1

Towards a Typology of Academic Uses of ‘Indigenous Religion(s)’, or Eight (or Nine) Language Games That Scholars Play with This Phrase Bjørn Ola Tafjord Introduction Scholars do not always speak the same language. We may use the same words but mean different things. Phrases that appear identical may do jobs that are not identical at all. This is certainly the case with the phrase ‘indigenous religion’ or ‘indigenous religions’. The many ways in which it is used is a source of both creativity and confusion, among researchers and among those who interact with us. This chapter is an attempt to map different ways in which scholars deploy the English phrase ‘indigenous religion’ or ‘indigenous religions’ in their work. I have searched for different types of uses. Thus I try to move beyond discussions about definitions and instead focus on the theoretical contexts in which defining takes place or, more commonly, in which the phrase is used without a clear definition. What I am aiming at are the more fundamental moves that scholars make. I have tried to abstract or deduce different fields or poles of uses from what is truly a broad, diverse, and dynamic range of articulations, full of ambiguities and overlaps and resonances. I have attempted to identify basic premises and programmes wherein works are positioned; different analytical approaches or strategies that open different horizons of understanding, of translation, and of reflection by employing the phrase ‘indigenous religion’ or ‘indigenous religions’ in particular ways. Hence I am not just interested in how this phrase is made to carry different meanings in different contexts, but more so in how it may serve different purposes and do different work in different academic projects. I have found it helpful to try to follow Ludwig Wittgenstein ([1953] 2009) and think of different types of uses as different ‘language games’. Such ‘games’ are serious. They do dramatic work in the lives of people and things. Language is the primary tool of academics, the basic apparatus of our practice, the main

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instrument of one of the most powerful institutions in the ever more globalising world. With our language games, we make things happen. Rather than define what he means by language games, Wittgenstein gives examples. He encourages us to look for what language in practice does or enables us to do. Like him, I trust that the reader will best understand the perspective I am advocating through my inventory of examples and the comments that I offer along the way. A readiness to look for principles or rules that make specific academic exercises work is required. Thus far, I have come up with at least eight such language games or types of uses (I will use both these terms interchangeably throughout this essay) of ‘indigenous religion’ or ‘indigenous religions’. These are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

as a class of religions as an ethno-political concept as a theological concept as an archaeological and evolutionary concept as an aesthetical concept as a geographically and historically contingent relational concept as a discourse as material entities and lived religion

Some might say that these are hardly the same types of types. The relations between them are not level. This project, however, is not concerned with trying to make a typology with members who all fit neatly alongside each other in a logically balanced arrangement. Rather, I am trying to map an uneven ground with a measure that resists levelling. Language games, as Wittgenstein ([1953] 2009) has shown, do not adhere to one strict logic, and they may feed or prey on each other in different ways. Moreover, in the wide academic world, there might of course be even more types of uses of this particular phrase; language games that I have not yet seen. My survey is far from complete. Besides, these eight (or nine, see footnote 3) types are carved out heuristically. Both the excavating of the terrain and the categorising of the findings could have been done differently. Most of the scholars who I will mention have probably never thought about their own work and the ways in which they use ‘indigenous religion(s)’ in terms of language games. Nonetheless, I do believe my attempt at isolating different types of uses, or different language games, may shed some critical light on a broad but blurry field of powerful academic speech acts. In what follows, I shall comment on each of the eight (or nine) types of uses or language games in a brief and, necessarily, simplified way.

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Type 1: ‘Indigenous Religion(s)’ as a Class of Religions

Here, the phrase is employed as the common name for a particular kind of religions or for a particular kind of religion. It is used to point out one of four basic classes of religions: world religions ǀ antique religions ǀ new religions ǀ indigenous religions. This taxonomy, which is set up to cover and classify all the religions in the world, has become known as ‘the world religions paradigm’. As shown by scholars like David Chidester (1996; 2014), James L. Cox (2007), Tomoko Masuzawa (2005), and Jonathan Z. Smith (1996; 1998), this scheme has a long history. Structurally, ‘indigenous religions’ now occupies the place of earlier concepts like ‘heathendom’ and ‘primitive religions’. In practice, though, ‘indigenous religions’ often serves as a way of referring to ‘the rest’, to all the religions that do not fit in one of the other three main categories (world, antique, and new) of the catalogue. The tremendous diversity of this forth grouping has been a source of scholarly frustration ever since the earliest disciplinary attempts at classification. Nevertheless, it keeps serving as a prime classifier within an academic discipline that is constituted first and foremost by its focus on things that are thought of as examples of a theoretical object: ‘religion’ (unlike other disciplines, like anthropology or history, which are more inclined to take specific methods as their points of departure). While used in similar fashion across a broad range of disciplines, the use of ‘indigenous religions’ as a class of religions is most salient in the academic study of religions or religious studies. Nowadays, this phrase is usually key to how courses are organised, to how textbooks are put together and promoted, to how jobs are posted, to how scholarships are granted, to how libraries organise their collections, to the setup of sessions and foci at conferences, to the channelling of discussions among colleagues, and so on. In short, this phrase is key to how a specialisation in the ‘field’ is largely defined. The longstanding phenomenological tradition, with its emphasis on distinguishing particular types of phenomena in order to analyse instances through comparisons, might have something to do with this. It is among scholars who lean towards phenomenology that we still find the most elaborate and refined proposals for how to define and analyse – carefully and critically – ‘indigenous religions’ as a special sort of religion(s) that purportedly can be found in very different contexts in most parts of the world, and whose characteristics stand in contrast to those of the other three basic sorts of religions. The most sophisticated example of this type of use is James L. Cox’s work. In From Primitive to Indigenous: The Academic Study of Indigenous Religions (2007) he proposes that

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the primary characteristic of Indigenous Religions refers to its being bound to a location; participants in the religion are native to a place, […], they belong to it. The single and overriding belief shared amongst Indigenous Religions derives from a kinship-based world-view in which attention is directed towards ancestor spirits as the central figures in religious life and practice. cox 2007: 69

Building on Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s (1993) theory of religion as a chain of memory, Cox then defines ‘indigenous religions’ like this: [T]hose identifiable communities whose traditions relate to the place to which they belong and whose authority is derived from the chain of memory traceable to ancestors. The beliefs and experiences of these identifiable communities refer to postulated non-falsifiable alternate realities, which are connected to the locality to which the people belong and are related integrally to ancestral traditions. cox 2007: 89

Although Cox writes most extensively about what ‘indigenous’ should mean, his project – like other projects of this type – is driven mainly by an ambition to distinguish between different kinds of ‘religions’.1 In this type of use, the actual weight is always on the noun. To classify ‘religions’, that is what this language game is primarily about.

Type 2: ‘Indigenous Religion(s)’ as an Ethno-political Concept

Here, the emphasis is on the adjective, on ‘indigenous’. This word works as an ethno-political marker. This language game is about distinguishing different kinds of peoples. ‘Indigenous’ is shorthand for ‘indigenous peoples’. ‘Indigenous religions’ then means ‘religions of indigenous peoples’. The anthropologist Ronald Niezen has observed this type of use in the context of rights discourses and law: “Indigenous religion is not just the subject of specific human rights protections but is at the same time a conceptual and 1 It is important to note that ‘pure’ examples of a type of use rarely exist. Cox’s arguments and proposals also contain a strong affiliation with what I have listed as the type 2, the type 6 and the type 8 uses (see below). A warning is therefore due: My typology misrepresents the complexity of the examples and their ability to fit partially into multiple types.

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performative secondary elaboration of the indigenous peoples’ concept” (2012: 130). This now widespread type of use is largely an outcome of efforts that started to gain momentum in the 1960s in and around u.n. institutions and initiatives, efforts that especially since the 1980s have led to the globalisation of an indigenous peoples’ movement (see, for example, Clifford 2013; Niezen 2003). However, in some contexts, uses of ‘indigenous’ as an ethno-political concept are much older. In Latin America, for example, the Spanish word indígena, sometimes translated into English as ‘Indian’ or ‘indigenous’, has been in use for centuries in discourses about local and regional demography, both to tell different kinds of peoples apart and to categorise certain peoples as one of a kind. Anyway, what ‘religion’ or ‘religions’ mean in each case here is secondary, but far from irrelevant. Within the framework of this language game, it is not common that any religion of an indigenous people may count as an ‘indigenous religion’. So-called ‘world religions’ – especially missionising ones like most versions of Christianity or Islam – are in most contexts not considered ‘indigenous’ (when some version is included it is usually because it is considered ‘indigenised’). ‘Religions’ that are thought of as being ‘new religions’ are in most instances not included either. Typically, the adjective ‘indigenous’ is reserved for religions that are considered original to or historically home-grown among one or more ‘indigenous peoples’. Thus, in this type of use, ‘indigenous religions’ is actually a quicker way of saying ‘the indigenous religions of indigenous peoples’. Ashgate’s Vitality of Indigenous Religions book series, now edited by Graham Harvey, Afe Adogame, and Inés Talamantez, may serve as one example of engagement of this language game. The publisher’s presentation of it reads: Ashgate’s Vitality of Indigenous Religions series offers an exciting cluster of research monographs, drawing together volumes from leading international scholars across a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. Indigenous religions are vital and empowering for many thousands of indigenous peoples globally, and dialogue with, and consideration of, these diverse religious life-ways promises to challenge and refine the methodologies of a number of academic disciplines, whilst greatly enhancing understandings of the world. This series explores the development of contemporary indigenous religions from traditional, ancestral precursors, but the characteristic contribution of the series is its focus on their living and current manifestations. Devoted to the contemporary expression, experience and understanding of particular indigenous peoples and their religions, books address key

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issues which include: the sacredness of land, exile from lands, diasporic survival and diversification, the indigenization of Christianity and other missionary religions, sacred language, and re-vitalization movements. Proving of particular value to academics, graduates, postgraduates and higher level undergraduate readers worldwide, this series holds obvious attraction to scholars of Native American studies, Maori studies, African studies and offers invaluable contributions to religious studies, sociology, anthropology, geography and other related subject areas.2 It should be noted that this now quite voluminous book series is characterised by diversity and openness to different perspectives. Together, its many volumes contain examples of all of the eight types of uses of ‘indigenous religion(s)’ listed in this chapter. However, the overall approach seems geared towards my type 2 language game: ‘indigenous religions’ as an ethno-political concept. In general, this type of uses tends to be found most unambiguously in scholarship that has a political agenda, that is, in scholarship that seeks to support somebody or some case, or to discriminate. Disciplines like anthropology, education, political science, law, and – in particular in this context – the emergent discipline of indigenous studies have been at the forefront of producing explicit reflections about, and larger acceptance of, activism as part of scholarship. In the works that take this approach, the phrase ‘indigenous religion’ or ‘indigenous religions’ is deployed to draw attention to, and to draw borders between, certain peoples and their practices. Strategic essentialism is often part of this.3 2 www.ashgate.com/vitalityofindigenousreligions. Accessed 11/09/2015. 3 In informal conversations, exponents of both type/game 1 and type/game 2 have sometimes told me that it is necessary to be pragmatic and to some extent meet essentialist expectations in order to (a) convince administrators and superiors in the institution to make space for this field and (b) to attract enough students. Some have also argued that students should learn first about the most common academic ways of thinking about ‘indigenous religion(s)’; that this is the best way to enable them to challenge established stereotypes later on. In these instances, ‘indigenous religion(s)’ is used also as a pedagogical and educational-political concept. I am not sure whether it would be better to think of this as a ninth type of use or language game on the same level as the eight that I highlight in this chapter, or whether it is better to conceptualise this as a subtype or subgame of both type/game 1 and type/game 2 (and various combinations of them). The doubt is my reason for putting this in a footnote. Anyhow, the point is that ‘indigenous religion(s)’ is used also as a pedagogical and educational-political concept in textbooks (see, for example, Wright 2012), in courses (for example at Syracuse University in the fall of 2014, see http://religion.syr.edu/Courses/Fall2014_pdfs/REL244F14 .pdf), and in study programmes (like the University of Arizona’s undergraduate programme in Religious Studies, see http://religion.arizona.edu/courses), as well as in lobbying (for example, at my own University of Tromsø, a few months ago, the local presence of Sami ‘indigenous

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Type 3: ‘Indigenous Religion(s)’ as a Theological Concept

Essentialisms are certainly also part of the uses of ‘indigenous religion(s)’ as a theological concept, although in significantly different ways. In this language game, the phrase ‘indigenous religion’ or ‘indigenous religions’ is mobilised to point out particular theological subjects and objects. These subjects and objects are then inscribed, and thereby given particular roles with corresponding attributes and values, in the teachings and practices of a particular ideology of religion(s). They are often placed in positions or categories that already carry particular meanings and do particular work to make the foundational ideas of the overarching ideology of religion(s) make sense.4 This happens frequently when now-called ‘indigenous religions’ are interpreted and presented through a lens of another ‘religion’. For example, some Christian theologians talk about ‘indigenous religion(s)’ as a kind of ‘natural religion’, as expressions of a knowledge of God that people have got through their experiences in His creation and as His creation. Socalled ‘natural theology’, nowadays sometimes developed under headings like ‘theology of religions’ (see, for example, Ives 2005: 181–182) and ‘indigenous theologies’ (see, for example, Chavez 2010), allows them to make such arguments. Other Christian theologians may use ‘indigenous religion(s)’ as a synonym for ‘idolatry’ (see, for example, Kraft 1996). So-called ‘demonology’ allows them to make such arguments. Scholars from most if not all Christian camps talk about ‘indigenous religion(s)’ in relation to ‘revelation’ and ‘salvation’. The demonologists are generally dismissive. They target ‘indigenous religion(s)’ in order to extinguish them. At another end of the scale of Christian approaches are those who target ‘indigenous religion(s)’ in order to be embracive of them. The article with the telling title “The contribution of eco-feminism and indigenous religions to a theology of the environment” by Janet Parsons (2011) is one example of the latter kind. She concludes as follows:

religion’ was used as an argument against the closure of the theology programme) and, if such political moves are successful, in institutional policy documents (like the official research strategy of my own department, see https://intranett.uit.no/Content/424070/Vedtatt %20revidert%20strategiplan%20IHR%202012-2016.pdf). Through this game, stereotypes are in various degrees reproduced and disseminated as legitimate didactical and analytical perspectives. 4 Here I follow Talal Asad who observes that “the attribution of implicit meanings to an alien practice regardless of whether they are acknowledged by its agents is a characteristic form of theological exercise, with an ancient history” (Asad 1986: 161, italics in original).

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Eco-feminism, indigenous earth spiritualities and liberation theology naturally stand together in recognising that God suffers and works with his people and all of his loved creation. Those who struggle re-sacralise nature through daily lived experience that becomes the well-spring of a theology that can no longer be written from patriarchy. parsons 2011: 7

Theologians of other religions sometimes make comparable moves (some Hindus, for example, see the chapter by Arkotong Longkumer [2017] in this volume for a contextualised description and a critical analysis). As might be expected, it is in theology that we most often find this type of uses of ‘indigenous religions’, but this language game is not unknown in other disciplines either. In the study of religions and in anthropology, the theories and philosophical presuppositions of scholars like Edward B. Tylor (1871), Émile Durkheim (1912), Mircea Eliade (1951), Piers Vitebsky (1995), Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998), Graham Harvey (2005), and many others, have contributed to the development of something akin to a universal theology of ‘indigenous religions’. Over several generations, a broad and diverse field of celebrated scholars in the humanities and social sciences have created and fortified a prearranged framework of features that are now often assumed to be both general among and special to ‘indigenous religions’. In other words, together, they have contrived a more or less synthetic ‘religiology’ which lends itself to the identification, characterisation, and systematisation of ‘indigenous religions’ anywhere. The results could perhaps be described – along the lines of what Edward W. Said (1978) and Derek Gregory (2004) in other contexts have called ‘imagined geographies’ – as ‘imagined religiographies’ which are also part of ‘imagined ethnographies’ of indigenous peoples in general.5 Anyway, from this, scholars postulate and project most notably shamanism, animism, ecological awareness, holism, and, lately, alternative ontologies as common attributes of and conditions for ‘indigenous religions’. The Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, edited by Bron Taylor, is one of the occasional venues for such work. A special issue on “Indigenous religions and environments: Intersections of animism and nature conservation,” guest edited by Kristina Tiedje and Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, published in 2008, seeks to challenge some of the stereotypes that dominate in discourses about indigenous peoples, but the result of its nuancing strengthens rather

5 For an enlightening discussion of ‘religiography’, see Dressler 2013. On ‘imaginary ethnographies’, from a literary studies perspective, see Schwab 2012.

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than questions what seem to be the basic rules and structures of this larger game. The abstract of the article, of which Snodgrass is lead author, entitled “Of leopards and other lovely frightful things: The environmental ethics of indigenous Rajasthani shamans” is illustrative: In this paper, we argue that shamans as compared to non-shamans demonstrate a deeper connection to wildlife. Shamans display particularly powerful love and reverence for leopards. That shamans more deeply revere, even worship, nature suggests that indigenous Animism does impact the environmental thought and practice of our informants. However, our indigenous informants’ pro-environmental thinking is most strongly linked to only particular classes of people (like shamans) and to particular animals (like leopards). Likewise, shamans do not demonstrate significant differences with non-shamans on all survey items related to wildlife. Finally, the differences between the conservation sentiments of shamans and non-shamans are less striking than other pro-environmental feelings. We thus argue for a complex, and in some instances opposed, relationship between indigenous Rajasthani religion and pro-environmental thought and practice. snodgrass et al. 2008: 30

That animism and shamans are part of ‘indigenous religions’ are among the ideas that seem to be taken for granted here. Yet another, but often related, way of using ‘indigenous religion(s)’ as a theological concept is observable sometimes when researchers get involved, in different ways, in reconstruction attempts, protection or salvage campaigns, or revitalisation movements of particular traditions. Inasmuch as scholars engage in normative reflection, systematisation, and promotion of particular practices and ideologies of religion(s) and, as part of that, in the drawing of boundaries between authentic and inauthentic articulations, they take on theological tasks. One who has done this kind of work, in a very grounded and informed manner, is Robin M. Wright. For many decades he has cooperated closely with the Baniwa ‘shaman’ Manuel da Silva and his followers in the Northwest Amazon, but also with Michael Harner and the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, to revive “shamanic knowledge and power” among the Baniwa (Wright 2013). In some instances, ‘indigenous religion(s)’ is used as a generic name for the type of theological system that the scholar participates in, and thus as a theological term for particular ways of acting and thinking religiously. Some intriguing contributions to this are published in a 2011 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion as the outcome of a roundtable discussion on

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Arvind Sharma’s book A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion (2006). Jacob K. Olupona, who presided over the session at the American Academy of Religion meeting in San Diego in 2007, opens his introduction by stating that he is inclined to retitle Sharma’s book A Prolegomenon to the Study of the Philosophy of Indigenous Religion and by observing that it “provides the possibility of creatively fashioning new scholarship in the respective traditions we study” (Olupona 2011: 789). All these approaches have the potential to break new ground both within and beyond their own immediate contexts, and some contributions indeed do, but at the same time they all build on and reproduce biased, and often seasoned, theological or religiological borders and orders.6

Type 4: ‘Indigenous Religion(s)’ as an Archaeological and Evolutionary Concept

This type of uses also thrives on old academic theories and operates with predefined schemata. The evolution of humankind is the main issue here. This issue is often broken down and rephrased as questions about the developments of different cultures or societies. In this language game, ‘indigenous religions’ are spoken of as practices that are more or less ‘frozen in time’, as kinds of practices that have not changed much through the ages, and hence as practices that one can turn to in order to learn how things were done in some remote past. For example, some archaeologists who study thousands of years old rock carvings look to contemporary ‘indigenous religions’, or to contemporary theories about ‘indigenous religions’ (again about animism, shamanism, and so on), to find clues or even answers to their questions about the ideas and practices of the people who once made the rock carvings (see, for example, Whitley 2011). Anthropologists, psychologists, and others who want to study the development of different human faculties – including the development of ‘religion’ – sometimes use this strategy, too. A presumption is that in the ‘religions’ of living indigenous peoples – especially those who the researchers classify as ‘hunter-gatherer societies’ – one can find traces of how all our ancestors once thought and behaved, much more than in other ‘religions’ or in other kinds of contemporary societies which are assumed to be more advanced (see,

6 For an exposition of how missionaries’ and anthropologists’ approaches may translate things in the same direction, see Tafjord 2016b.

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for example, Winkelman and Baker 2010). There is even an established name for this method: ethnographic and ethnological analogy.7 A panel called “Axial Age Research from the Perspectives of Indigenous Religions,” organised by Armin W. Geertz and Jace Weaver at the xxi World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions in Erfurt in August 2015, addressed yet another branch of this kind of thinking. Their panel abstract contained the following observations: Most scholars in the humanities, including historians of religion, during most of the 20th century explicitly rejected evolutionary theory. The highly speculative, colonial and racist evolutionary schemes in circulation at the end of the 19th century led to this rejection. Robert Bellah’s book Religion in Human Evolution (2011) and the Axial Age debate that it represents was important because it persuaded historians of religions and other historians to opt more or less directly for evolutionary theory. But there are problems with the debate. One of these is that, once again, contemporary indigenous religions are the turning point of major theoretical schemes promoted by thinkers who are not qualified scholars of indigenous religions. This panel consists of friendly but critical responses to Axial Age theory from the perspective of indigenous religions research by scholars who are specialists in indigenous religions. geertz and weaver 2015: 318

Different language games – indeed, fundamentally different academic projects – were set up against each other here. In their papers, Geertz and his fellow panelists James L. Cox, Suzanne Owen, and Jack Tsonis drew on other uses of ‘indigenous religion(s)’ to object to some of the basic premises of the arguments put forth by thinkers who use ‘indigenous religion(s)’ as an archaeological and evolutionary concept. In addition to proving my point about the circulation of different types of uses of ‘indigenous religion(s)’, and demonstrating that some of these are less compatible than others, this panel also suggests that Bellah’s work might be a conspicuous example of this type 4. Bellah (2011: 117–174) extracts examples from ethnographies of peoples who, according to him, practice ‘tribal religion’ (translated as ‘indigenous religions’ in the panel abstract above) – the Kalapalo from South America, the Walbiri from Australia, and the Navajo from North America – in order to theorise about an earlier stage of human evolution. Here is how he makes “a brief aside to defend [his] choice of cases”: 7 For a more detailed exposition and a critique, see Sidky 2010.

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I don’t want to argue that the groups I will describe resemble in any exact way groups of humans from 50,000 or more years ago. Just as chimpanzees have evolved during the same number of years that humans have, so these groups have evolved for as many years as any other surviving human group. Nevertheless, not to look at some groups of hunter-gatherers or horticulturalists with a wholly oral culture as telling us something about earlier stages of human evolution would seem perverse, and though this is exactly what anthropologists who oppose the idea of cultural evolution do, their arguments have not been persuasive to archaeologists or other scholars for whom human evolution is an undeniable fact. bellah 2011: 136–137

Primitivism, of one or more kinds, is usually a principle of these language games. ‘Indigenous religions’ is sometimes just another way of saying ‘primitive religion’ (see also Geertz 2004).

Type 5: ‘Indigenous Religion(s)’ as an Aesthetical Concept

When researchers read and, in their analyses, stage certain common or artistic expressions – acts, sounds, symbols, motifs, patterns, styles, techniques, materials, and/or objects – as both ‘indigenous’ and ‘religious’, they sometimes indicate or imply that particular aesthetical qualities are found in ‘indigenous religion(s)’. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for example, lists 47 of its items – which come from very different places and periods – under the heading “Indigenous Religions” with the subheading “Religious Art, Indigenous”.8 Somehow, the scholar who has classified these pieces has recognised them all as works of ‘art’ that are at once ‘indigenous’ and ‘religious’. Art historian Steven Leuthold is one who has theorised about ‘indigenous aesthetics’ by claiming a special relation to ‘religion’. A strong relationship exists between religious and aesthetic expression in indigenous cultures. In many cases these cultural forms are inseparable and mutually dependent; one could not exist without the other. [−−–] The traditional function of art in native cultures is so closely tied to religion that it is difficult to speak of a social function of art beyond its role in religious expression. In some cases, this close integration of art and religion continues to the present. leuthold 1998: 189

8 See https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hi/hi_reind.htm. Accessed 23/09/2015.

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The way he argues for a general distinction between ‘indigenous aesthetics’ and ‘Western aesthetics’ with reference to ‘religion’, ‘ways of thinking’, ‘continuity’, ‘community’, and ‘nature’ is worth quoting at length: By contrast, there has been a divorce in Western aesthetics between concepts such as beauty and the Good, which had religious connotations for earlier theorists and art. The divorce of spirituality, beauty, and ethics from aesthetics contrasts with the continued interrelationship of these in indigenous aesthetics. Underlying differences in assumptions about aesthetic value reveal larger patterns of difference between indigenous and Western ways of thinking. While Western thought is largely analytic, attempting to separate and reduce experience into its constituent parts for the purpose of mechanistic understanding, native thought is primarily synthetic, involving a search for and appreciation of the connections between categories of experience. Perhaps this high valuation of continuity in thought helps explain the search for historical continuity in native aesthetics. This difference in thinking styles may be the reason for the comparatively small number of indigenous documentaries that focus on art as a separate subject matter and the relative plenitude of films and videos that examine aesthetic expression contextually. Additionally, native directors tend to deemphasize technical explanations of aesthetic processes and to emphasize the larger value or meaning of artistic expression for a community. This attitude of synthesis underlies native desires to live harmoniously in the world rather than alter it. Traditional art is more closely tied to nature than it is to human industry, technology, or ‘genius’. The criteria of aesthetic valuation in native cultures emphasize this connection to the natural world rather than deriving from analytical or critical constructs as in Western aesthetics. Continuity of expression – whether its source is historical, religious, conceptual, generational, tribal, or cosmological – is a central ingredient of indigenous aesthetics. The native films and videos, comments by artists themselves, and the secondary literature about native aesthetic expression all emphasize that the collective function of art originates in religion. leuthold 1998: 1909

Evidently, here, Leuthold himself also demonstrates a certain ‘attitude of synthesis’ and historical continuity in the way he presents indigenous peoples’

9 This quote also illustrates how Leuthold’s thinking taps into or overlaps with my types/games 3 and 4.

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thinking, and acting, and creating, and valuating as substantially different from such activities among contemporary ‘Westerners’. Now and then, scholars of religion also interpret unnamed artistic acts, images, or sounds as expressions of ‘indigenous religion(s)’. For example, Olle Sundström (2013: 120) has noticed how Cato Christensen and Siv Ellen Kraft (2011: 24–25) read what they call “reindeer holism” into scenes in Nils Gaup’s movie The Kautokeino Rebellion and then identify this as an articulation of “indigenous spirituality” (a phrase that is often used more or less synonymously with ‘indigenous religion’). Whereas Leuthold plays this game to allow for wide-ranging comparisons and dichotomic generalisations, Christensen and Kraft use it as an analytical and contextual reading device in a particular case study. Although approaches like these seem most common in art history and in studies of film and literature, similar strategies of identification of ‘indigenous religion(s)’ through notions of particular aesthetics might be found also in some studies of artefacts, experiences, myths, and rituals conducted by anthropologists, archaeologists, folklorists, philologists, psychologists, theologians, or scholars of other disciplines. The prevalence of certain assumptions about aesthetics with regard to ‘indigenous religion(s)’ may be seen for instance in a paragraph of the list that Encyclopedia.com offers, with reference to an academic source, of the “characteristics of indigenous religions”: Indigenous religions rarely have written sacred texts. Rather, their beliefs focus on dances, costumes, masks, ritual traditions, and sacred artifacts (material objects). These practices are part of a people’s cultural identity and help them forge a sense of connection with their world. Indigenous religions transmit wisdom, cultural values, and history, not through formal education but through myths, storytelling, drama, and art.10 Two tracks of academic sensing are fused in this game: one concerning indigenous aesthetics, the other concerning religious aesthetics. Both tracks are part of long academic traditions that have generated, engaged and aggregated impressions from different contexts. In combination, they provide the ground for this language game and prescribe particular academically acquired gazes, ears, smells, touches, and tastes.

10

http://www.encyclopedia.com/article-1G2-3448400023/indigenous-religions.html. Accessed 4/5/2016. The source given is World Religions Reference Library (2007) published by Thomson Gale.

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Type 6: ‘Indigenous Religion(s)’ as a Historically and Geographically Contingent Relational Concept

‘Indigenous religion(s)’ in this type of use means the opposite of ‘foreign religions’ or ‘exogenous religions’. This binary opposition – indigenous versus exogenous or foreign – is what this language game is all about. The settings are encounters between different religions, or between carriers of different religions, in specific places at specific times. America in the late fifteenth century provides an extreme and therefore paradigmatic example. The ‘religions’ that were already there in 1492 may be called ‘indigenous’ in contrast to the foreign Catholicism that was suddenly brought there and imposed by the Spaniards (for an account of these events, see, for example, Todorov 1982). The binary can also be set up as a scale, with indigenous and exogenous, or native and foreign, as opposite poles. Religions can thus be considered more or less indigenous, or in the process of being indigenised. This type of use is not about asserting authenticity or ascribing particular qualities to any of the involved religions. Instead, it is about the positions two or more religions have in relation to each other, and in relation either to a particular place or to a particular social group, in a specific moment. On the one side, one or more religions that are home-grown or have become firmly integrated or grounded in a society. On the other side, one or more religions that are new and seen as belonging somewhere else and/or to somebody else. The temporal issue here is as important as the spatial and/or ethnical issues (see also Tafjord 2013). This type of contextually contingent use of ‘indigenous religion(s)’ has a long history. It typically appears in case studies, in anthropology but also in historical studies. I have found it in numerous works, for example about Shinto practices in studies of Buddhism’s arrival in Japan (Underwood 1934); about Norse practices in studies of the arrival of Christianity in Southern Scandinavia (Wellendorf 2006); about Sami practices in studies of the arrival of Protestant Christianity in Northern Scandinavia (Rydving 1993; 2010); and about contemporary Sufi traditions in studies of the arrival of Salafism in Ethiopia (Østebø 2012). But let me highlight an example from a study of a specific American case, by the historian and philologist Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar Sáenz (2013). She works on the Huarochirí manuscript, a Quechua text from the Andes from the early seventeenth century, that is, a place where and a time when people of local (= Andean) ancestry were under huge pressure from relatively newly arrived, aggressive, colonising, and missionising foreigners (= Europeans). ­“‘Indigenous’ religion,” writes Dedenbach-Salazar Sáenz – using quotation marks only on the first word, on the adjective, of this two-word phrase – “is

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that of the people in the country which is affected by the expansion [of the imperialist Spaniards], ‘common’ peasants as well as Christian-trained ‘intellectuals’” (2013: 106). In other words, she uses the phrase in a historically, spatially and relationally contingent sense: Andeans versus Spaniards as the particular empirical example; the indigenous versus the foreigners as the generalisable relational equation. This type of use is also illustrated nicely by Shun-hing Chan who attributes the difficulties of teaching religious studies in Asia to a predominance of Western theories and case studies and a lack of “material on indigenous religions” (2001: 32). To supply his students with the latter, he started gathering information about the various religions of Hong Kong, the city where he teaches.

Type 7: ‘Indigenous Religion(s)’ as a Discourse

This language game is about studying how people use the phrase ‘indigenous religion(s)’ and how they relate it to other words and phrases, and to different acts and things. The same phrase is thus deployed here as both the name and the topic of a discourse. It may be used to identify either specific instances of speech, or a larger web or cluster of speech, and related enactments and their contexts. It may be mobilised to identify a topos, or a subject of exchange, or a network of references and associations. Scholars use it in order to focus on how ‘indigenous religion(s)’ is articulated, claimed, enacted, assembled, contested, constituted, deconstructed, and reconfigured in specific contexts. Analytical questions that often follow from this type of use are: How did talk about ‘indigenous religion(s)’ emerge? Among whom, where, when, and why? What are the trajectories and the translations of talk about ‘indigenous religion(s)’? Historically, geographically, culturally, linguistically, semantically? How does such talk vary? What does it do in each case? Who does it serve in different circumstances? This type of approach is perhaps most common in critical cultural studies, including critical studies of religion(s). So-called poststructuralism and postcolonial theory are influential currents here. This also stands out as a particularly reflexive language game. By playing it, that is, by casting and exploring ‘indigenous religion’ or ‘indigenous religions’ as a discourse, scholars inevitably contribute to it. Subscribers include the anthropologist Ronald Niezen (2000) and the historian James Clifford (2013). Bruce Lincoln can be seen as an advocate of a version of this type of approach, for example in his article about some historical events in Guatemala (Lincoln 2004). So can David Chidester, for example

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in his book about recent events, enactments, and exchanges in and beyond South A ­ frica (Chidester 2012). Still, in my opinion, the champion of this language game is Paul C. Johnson, who in his seminal article “Migrating bodies, circulating signs: Brazilian Candomblé, the Garifuna of the Caribbean, and the category of indigenous religions” positions his approach as follows: Defining indigenous religions as the religions of those communities that imagine themselves in indigenous style – as organically bound to a land site – brackets the impasse between so-called romantic or essentialist and deconstructivist views of indigenous societies. Whether the Lakota actually emerged onto the surface of the earth from Wind Cave and are in an essential, primordial way the people of and from the Black Hills, versus historians’ claims that they migrated into the region and conquered it after acquiring horses around 1700, is less important for my purposes than that their community makes itself imaginatively as of and related to that place. When the Garifuna say they were the first people to settle much of the coast of Honduras and Belize and forget that within a generation after their arrival in 1797 they drove the Miskito, already there, east to what is now Nicaragua, this historical fact is less important in this article than how the Garifuna understand and discursively present themselves to make community in the present. johnson 2002: 306

This leads Johnson to focus on ‘indigenising’ and to study how such processes take place, and make place, in particular contexts. To supplement delimited case studies, a broader take on now customary comparisons and generalising tendencies is proposed by Greg Johnson and Siv Ellen Kraft in their introduction to this volume: By ‘indigenous religion’ in the singular, we mean a globalising discourse, consisting of notions of an indigenous we and a flexible, but fairly standardised, vocabulary of assumed similarities: harmony with and care for nature; healing and holism; antiquity and spirituality; shamanism and animism; and autochthonous claims to place announced in the idiom of genealogical connections between the living, ancestors, and the cosmos itself. johnson & kraft 2017: 1

Faced with what is going on in Talamanca, Costa Rica, where I do fieldwork, and inspired by perspectives like those of Greg Alles (2013), Markus Dressler

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(2013), Greg Johnson (2008), and Tisa Wenger (2009), I have suggested that we should pay more attention to how practices and things that are considered ‘indigenous’ become associated with ‘religion’ and thereby ‘religionised’ (Tafjord 2016a; 2016b). An ambition of the joint research project “Indigenous Religion(s): Local Grounds, Global Networks”, which this volume is part of, is to study both ‘indigenising’ and ‘religionising’ and how such processes may be combined through discursive and material means in and between local contexts and networks of different ranges and sorts. One might also claim that what I have done throughout this chapter is more or less consistent with this seventh type of use. I acknowledge that. However, I think the ‘looking for language games’ adds a viewpoint that enables us to see discourse analysis not necessarily as all-embracing and above the other types of uses. It reveals that this is only one among many ways of doing academics with the phrase ‘indigenous religion(s)’, even if it means turning other academic uses (and one’s own!) into objects of study and thereby levelling them with other matters that we make ‘empirical’ by subjecting them to analysis.

Type 8: ‘Indigenous Religion(s)’ as Material Entities and Lived Religion

Still, to most researchers, things are more than mere discourses. In many contexts, ‘indigenous religion(s)’ is used to connote or describe material entities, practices, and/or structures that affect people’s embodied and embedded lives. Although this describing is certainly a discursive practice, and even if material entities, practices, and/or structures may also be perceived as both products and producers of particular discourses, there are also other ways of looking at material entities, practices, and/or structures that show other dimensions of the lives of such things and of the lives of the people who relate to them. Many scholars try to account for the materiality – and the material­ reflexivity – of the lived world. Researchers who do fieldwork or otherwise engage with living people in their research, either as members of or as visitors in the relevant communities, are often more concerned about these issues than scholars who confront their sources mostly from desks or armchairs. The scholar’s own embodied condition and embedded presence is one part in this account, but the tangible lives of people and the environments that they (and we) inhabit and interact with are usually the main focus in this language game. It is about reporting physical encounters, events and situations. Anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena is at the forefront of ongoing critical debates about ontologies. She manages to take ontological and ­epistemological questions into equally serious account, while historising thoroughly both her

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own embeddedness and trajectories and those of the objects and subjects whom she studies. Here is a paragraph from Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds: Conjuring earth-beings up into politics – as Mariano did – may indicate that nature is not only such, that what we know as nature can be society. This condition confuses the division that representation requires and, just as important, the subject position from where it is effected. To be able to think ‘earth-beings’, the world that underwrites the distinction between nature and humanity requires a translation in which earth-­beings become cultural belief: a representation of nature that can be tolerated (or not) as the politicization of indigenous religion. This translation moves earthbeings to a realm where they are not (in inherent relation) with runakuna, and ultimately cancels the reality-making capacity of the practices that such connection enables. Yet exceeding the translation, these practices continue to make local worlds, frequently in interaction and complex cohabitation with representational practices. For example, I have said that as personero Mariano was in-ayllu and therefore he spoke from it, not for it; nevertheless, state authorities and modern politicians interacted with him as a representative of runakuna. As such, during the inauguration of the cooperative, a state official gave him a handful of soil that was supposed to represent the former hacienda. In Mariano’s hands the same soil was also santa tira, and this was the earth-being, not its representation. de la cadena 2015: 99–100; italics original

In de la Cadena’s view, what she tries to describe or translate exceeds not only the references of ‘indigenous religion’ but also the very act of referring. Embodiment, practice, and materiality in general have been foregrounded also in recent theories of religion, for example by Manuel Vásquez (2010) who mentions ‘indigenous religions’ in passing. Graham Harvey’s considerable efforts as editor and facilitator of works about ‘indigenous religions’ (see, for example, Harvey 2002) and many of the presentations and publications in which he proves an eager documenter and an unorthodox analyst and theoretician (see, for example, Harvey 2013) are best understood in the framework of this language game too. The search for better ways of gripping (which includes phrasing) things, relations, perspectives, and experiences is clearly an important driver in these and other cutting-edge works. Yet, this game is far from new. Most of the issues that are at stake here – concerning material entities, practices, and/or structures that affect people’s embodied and embedded lives – have been addressed before, although in somewhat different terms, most insistently by so-called postcolonial scholars

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(see, for example, Weaver 1998), but also by Marxists of different kinds (like Taussig 1987, to mention only one), as well as by scholars who have studied the interface between cultural and material conditions and agency from other positions (like Sahlins 1985), and by some phenomenologists (in particular those who build on Husserl while mostly sidestepping Otto and Eliade; a very interesting recent example is Cox 2014). A substantial critical reflection on how researchers cannot avoid getting involved in the realpolitik and acknowledgement of lived ‘indigenous religion’ and its material manifestations, at least on some level, is offered by Greg Johnson (2014). His work also shows how ‘indigenous religion(s)’ materialise through laws and court room practices but also public protesting and civil disobedience which in turn have impact on the lives of people and places – Hawaiian burial sites and mountains in particular. As demonstrated by, for example, David Chidester (2014), scholars have contributed systematically to the constitution and materialisation of ‘indigenous religion(s)’ also through the production and dissemination of tangible academic (including religious) texts. Still, those who today provide the firmest testimonies of the materiality and life of ‘indigenous religion(s)’ are scholars who themselves are members of the community that they talk and write about. Historian of religions Jelena Porsanger, for example, in the English abstract of her Sami monograph Bassejoga čáhci, states that she “examines the sources for the study of the indigenous religion of the Eastern Sami in the period from the 16th to the 20th century” (2007: 3). To her, and to many others, the subject of her study – that which the sources speak about – is a tradition whose life and material existence for long were independent of and unaffected by the English phrase ‘indigenous religion(s)’. Materialisms, pragmatisms, and realisms are also expressed through language games. In this one, ‘indigenous religion(s)’ is used to describe or translate lived situations and structures, embodied practices and institutions, corporeal subjects and objects that scholars have met and interacted with physically. This type of use is central in what most scholars try to do. Many would say that this is what their research is mainly about, that this is the basic move that enables us to say something ‘empirical’ about the world. It is therefore not surprising that this language game, in most cases, is deeply intertwined with one or more of the others.

Clarifications and Challenges

Hopefully, by now, it has become evident that I do not pretend that these eight (or nine) types of uses or language games that I have identified and modelled

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are somehow mutually exclusive. In practice, in and between the examples that I affiliate with each type or game, there are almost always multiple overlaps, combinations, resonances, reverberations, ambiguities – in the articulations as well as in their receptions. A wide variety of positions are taken along the continuums of this academic ‘phrasescape’. Few of them pertain to only one of the types that I have distilled. Several language games may be played or observed simultaneously. The weight and importance of each concurrent language game can be intended or interpreted differently. Besides, within each of my eight major types of uses or language games, there are several secondary types of uses or subgames. Some of these are construed in opposition to each other (for example, dismissive versus embracive theological approaches), but since they work more or less according to the same logic within the framework of the larger type or game, they reify each other in subtle ways. What is more, all the prime games and the subgames are embedded in wider contexts and networks of phrases and projects. Associations and translations are made or made possible in multiple directions. The noun, ‘religion(s)’, may be replaced easily for example by ‘religious traditions’ or ‘spirituality’. In fact, my searches suggest that ‘indigenous religious tradition(s)’ is more common in academic parlance than ‘indigenous religion(s)’, and ‘indigenous spirituality’ seems to be gaining ground. All the above language games can be played with these two phrases too. The adjective is also interchangeable. Sometimes, ­‘indigenous religion(s)’ may be substituted with other generalising phrases like ‘native religion(s)’, ‘ethnic religion(s)’, ‘primal religion(s)’, or ‘tribal religion(s)’ that can do many of the same jobs. Region-based categories like ‘Native ­American religion(s)’, ‘African traditional religion(s)’, or ‘Adivasi religion(s)’ are also applicable in most of these language games, and often switchable with ­‘indigenous religion(s)’, although the scope of cases is then reduced. The naming of ­traditions that belong to a specific ethnic group, for example, ‘Bribri religion’, ‘Hawaiian religion’, or ‘Sami religion’, may work as well, as specifications of ‘indigenous religion(s)’, in most if not all the language games. In many contexts, some of these ways of phrasing ‘it’ are used more than ‘indigenous religion(s)’. And, in addition to such exchanges or translations along different scales that can be articulated in the English language, there are exchanges or translations with multitudes of phrases, concepts, and scales in other languages. The eight (or nine) language games that I have identified are not bounded by the phrase ‘indigenous religion’ or ‘indigenous religions’. They are not even limited to English. They are played in more or less related ways and work in concert with numerous other phrases, in several different languages, both bringing forth nuances and creating complications.

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This diversity of manoeuvres – with the deployment of the same phrase (or with similar or translatable phrases), but often without an explicit account of the principles of how it is put to work in each instance – is a source of many misunderstandings, as authors use and audiences interpret the phrase according to their own preferential language games or horizons. In order to increase clarity in scholarship, I consider it important to try to tell apart these different language games that we play with the phrase ‘indigenous religion’ or ‘indigenous religions’, although I admit straightaway that there will be many imperfections in any attempt at such separations. Of broader concern is the observation that neither in academia nor in the wider world do these different language games, or types of uses, circulate in the same ways. Some are more widespread than others. Users and audiences are not the same. Conduits differ. Impact varies. In continuation of the sorting that I have started with here, it is urgent to try to chart these trajectories, both diachronically and synchronically. This might provide better understandings of how scholars’ uses of this phrase also work outside a university context. We live in a time with unprecedented conditions for reflexivity. Scholarship is often a major source of inspiration and authority way beyond its own domain. Academic ways of talking about an ‘indigenous religion’ or ‘indigenous religions’ now feed back into numerous other contexts where people talk about ‘indigenous religion’ or ‘indigenous religions’ or use similar phrases in their own particular ways.11 But before we can appreciate and analyse adequately 11

For example, in Talamanca, Costa Rica, different actors with different backgrounds and different interests have begun to talk about a religión indígena and religiones indígenas in ways that resemble each of the eight language games in my tentative typology. They use this Spanish phrase in particular ways in order to promote particular calibrations of ‘religion(s)’ and ‘peoples’. Scholars are involved, directly or indirectly, in most if not all of the activities and institutions that in Talamancan contexts now promote these uses: type 1 (a class of religions) is taught in the public schools; type 2 (an ethno-political concept) is used in political activism; type 3 (a theological concept) is insisted upon by academically trained Bahá’í teachers, Christian missionaries, and many tourists; type 4 (an archaeological and evolutionary concept) is on display in museums; type 5 (an aesthetical concept) is articulated and commercialised in art or handicrafts and in tourism; type 6 (a historically and geographically contingent relational concept) is invoked in legal disputes and in the government of the indigenous reserves; type 7 (a discourse) is – if not by other means – provoked by my questions to people about what they mean by ‘indigenous religion(s)’ and why they do or do not use this particular phrase; and type 8 (material entities and lived religion) is encountered for example as books and as performances for tourists but also in communal and private events like funerals or health care practices whenever somebody recognises parts of these events as part of an ‘indigenous religion’. For more about the Talamancan case, which is far more multifaceted than this list suggests, see, for example, Tafjord 2016a; 2016b.

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the complex ways in which others use ‘indigenous religion(s)’ for their own particular purposes, and the ways in which their different uses are entangled with and reflected in multiple other uses of this phrase, including ours, we need a better understanding of how we as scholars are playing these language games in our own particular ways. Acknowledgements Drafts have been read by Hans Geir Aasmundsen, May-Lisbeth Brew, Lindsay Graham, Greg Johnson, Siv Ellen Kraft, Liudmila Nikanorova, Håkan Rydving, and Seth Schermerhorn, who have all offered generous critical input that has made important differences. In a related conversation, Greg Alles made a comment that saved me from making a serious mistake. Big thanks to them. Yet, I alone am accountable for all of the above. I even suspect they still disagree with me on some issues. References Alles, G.D. 2013. “Do Ādivāsīs have religion? Contesting ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ in Eastern Gujarat.” In A. Adogame, M. Echtler and O. Freiberger, eds. Alternative Voices: A ­Plurality Approach for Religious Studies: Essays in Honor of Ulrich Berner (Critical Studies in Religion/Religionswissenschaft). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 21–35. Asad, T. 1986. “The concept of cultural translation in British social anthropology.” In J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 141–164. Bellah, R.N. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cadena, de la M. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds (The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chan, S. 2001. “Western theory, indigenous religion, and local material: Enhancing learning motivation among students of religious studies in the Asian context.” Teaching Theology & Religion 4: 1, 32–39. Chaves Quispe, M., ed. 2010. The Ecumenical Review (special issue on indigenous theologies) 62: 4, 333–422. Chidester, D. 1996. Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Studies in Religion and Culture). Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Chidester, D. 2012. Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Chidester, D. 2014. Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Christensen, C. and S.E. Kraft. 2011. “Religion i Kautokeino-opprøret: En analyse av samisk urfolksspiritualitet.” Nytt norsk tidsskrift 1, 18–27. Clifford, J. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cox, J.L. 2007. From Primitive to Indigenous: The Academic Study of Indigenous Religions (Vitality of Indigenous Religions). Aldershot: Ashgate. Cox, J.L. 2014. The Invention of God in Indigenous Societies. London: Routledge. Dedenbach-Salazar Sáenz, S. 2013. “Don Cristóbal, Llocllayhuancupa and the Virgin: The battle of words in a colonial Quechua conversion narrative.” In J.L. Cox, ed. Critical Reflections on Indigenous Religions (Vitality of Indigenous Religions). Farnham: Ashgate, 105–122. Dressler, M. 2013. Writing Religion: The Making of Turkish Alevi Islam (AAR Reflections and Theory in the Study of Religion). New York: Oxford University Press. Durkheim, É. 1912. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: Le système totémique en Australie. Paris: F. Alcan. Eliade, M. 1951. Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’extase. Paris: Payot. Geertz, A.W. 2004. “Can we move beyond primitivism? On recovering the indigenes of indigenous religions in the academic study of religion.” In J.K. Olupona, ed. Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 37–70. Geertz, A.W. and J. Weaver. 2015. “Axial age research from the perspectives of indigenous religions.” In Abstract Book XXI Quinquennial World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, Erfurt: IAHR, 318–320: https://www.uni-erfurt .de/fileadmin/public-docs/IAHR/Abstract_Book_20150817.pdf. Accessed 12/09/2015. Gregory, D. 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Harvey, G., ed. 2002. Readings in Indigenous Religions. London: Continuum. Harvey, G. 2005. Animism: Respecting the Living World. New York: Columbia University Press. Harvey, G. 2013. Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life. ­Durham: Acumen. Hervieu-Léger, D. 1993. La religion pour mémoire (Sciences humaines et religions). ­Paris: Editions du Cerf. Ives, C. 2005. “Liberating truth: A Buddhist approach to religious pluralism.” In D.R. Griffin, ed. Deep Religious Pluralism. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 178–192. Johnson, G. 2008. “Authenticity, invention, articulation: Theorizing contemporary Hawaiian traditions from the outside.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 20: 3, 243–258.

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Johnson, G. 2014. “Off the stage, on the page: On the relationship between advocacy and scholarship.” Religion (special issue on advocacy in the study of religion) 44: 2, 289–302. Johnson, G. and S.E. Kraft. 2017. “Introduction.” In G. Johnson and S.E. Kraft, eds. Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s). Leiden: Brill, 1–24. Johnson, P.C. 2002. “Migrating bodies, circulating signs: Brazilian Candomblé, the Garifuna of the Caribbean, and the category of indigenous religions.” History of Religions 41: 4, 301–327. Kraft, C.H. 1996. Anthropology for Christian Witness. New York: Orbis Books. Leuthold, S. 1998. Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity. Austin: University of Texas Press. Lincoln, B. 2004. “‘He, not they, best protected the village’: Religious and other conflicts in twentieth-century Guatemala.” In J.K. Olupona, ed. Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 149–163. Longkumer, A. 2017. “Is Hinduism the world’s largest indigenous religion?” In G. ­Johnson and S.E. Kraft, eds. The Brill Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s). Leiden: Brill, 263–278. Masuzawa, T. 2005. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Niezen, R. 2000. Spirit Wars: Native North American Religions in the Age of Nation Building. Berkeley: University of California Press. Niezen, R. 2003. The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Niezen, R. 2012. “Indigenous Religion and Human Rights.” In J. Witte Jr. and M.C. Green, eds. Religion and Human Rights: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 119–134. Olupona, J.K. 2011. “Introduction to the discussion of A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79: 4, 789–794. Parsons, J. 2011. “The contribution of eco-feminism and indigenous religions to a theology of the environment.” Encounters Mission Journal 37, 1–12. Porsanger, J. 2007. Bassejoga čáhci: gáldut nuortasamiid eamioskkoldaga birra álgoálbmotmetodologiijaid olis. Kárášjohka: Davvi Girji. Rydving, H. 1993. The End of Drum-Time: Religious Change among the Lule Saami, 1670s– 1740s. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell. Rydving, H. 2010. Tracing Sami Traditions: In Search of the Indigenous Religion among the Western Sami during the 17th and 18th Centuries. Oslo: Novus. Sahlins, M. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Said, E.W. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge. Schwab, G. 2012. Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Culture, and Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Sharma, A. 2006. A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion. Dordrecht: Springer. Sidky, H. 2010. “On the antiquity of shamanism and its role in human religiosity.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 22: 1, 68–92. Smith, J.Z. 1996. “A matter of class: Taxonomies of religion.” Harvard Theological Review 89: 4, 387–403. Smith, J.Z. 1998. “Religion, religions, religious.” In M.C. Taylor, ed. Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 269–284. Snodgrass, J.G., S.K. Sharma, Y. Singh Jhala, M.G. Lacy, M. Advani, N.K. Bhargava and C. Upadhyay. 2008. “Of leopards and other lovely frightful things: The environmental ethics of indigenous Rajasthani shamans.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (special issue on indigenous religions and environments: intersections of animism and nature conservation) 2: 1, 30–54. Sundström, O. 2013. “Review of Cato Christensen, Religion som samisk identitetsmarkør: fire studier av film.” Journal of Northern Studies 7: 2, 117–121. Tafjord, B.O. 2013. “Indigenous religion(s) as an analytical category.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 25: 3, 221–243. Tafjord, B.O. 2016a. “How talking about indigenous religion may change things: An example from Talamanca.” Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 63: 5–6, 548–575. Tafjord, B.O. 2016b. “Scales, translations, and siding effects: Uses of indígena and religión in Talamanca and beyond.” In C. Hartney and D.J. Tower, eds. Religious Categories and the Construction of the Indigenous (Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 7). Leiden: Brill, 138–177. Taussig, M. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tiedje, K. and J.G. Snodgrass, eds. 2008. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (special issue on indigenous religions and environments: intersections of animism and nature conservation) 2: 1. Todorov, T. 1982. La conquête de l’Amérique: La question de l’autre. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Tylor, E.B. 1871. Primitive Culture. London: John Murray. Underwood, A.C. 1934. Shintoism: The Indigenous Religion of Japan. London: The ­Epworth Press. Vásquez, M.A. 2010. More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vitebsky, P. 1995. The Shaman: Voyages of the Soul, Trance, Ecstasy, and Healing from Siberia to the Amazon. London: Duncan Baird. Viveiros de Castro, E. 1998. “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4: 3, 469–488.

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Weaver, J., ed. 1998. Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Wellendorf, J. 2006. “Homogeneity and heterogeneity in Old Norse cosmology.” In A. Andrén, K. Jennbert and C. Raudvere, eds. Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives: Origins, Changes, and Interactions. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 50–53. Wenger, T. 2009. We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Whitley, D.S. 2011. “Rock art, religion, and ritual.” In T. Insoll, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 307–327. Winkelman, M. and J.R. Baker. 2010. Supernatural as Natural: A Biocultural Approach to Religion. London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. 2009 [1953]. Philosophische Untersuchungen. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Wright, R.M. 2012. “Indigenous religious traditions.” In L.E. Sullivan, ed. Religions of the World: An Introduction to Culture and Meaning. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 31–60. Wright, R.M. 2013. Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans of the Northwest Amazon. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Østebø, T. 2012. Localising Salafism: Religious Change among Oromo Muslims in Bale, Ethiopia. Leiden: Brill.

chapter 2

Religion as Peoplehood: Native American Religious Traditions and the Discourse of Indigenous Rights Michael D. McNally Introduction Indigenous religion(s): the audacity of this pairing of words – each of them contested and contestable as other contributors to this volume ably show – is matched by its urgency in this moment of global history. And, as it happens, in this moment in the history of the academic study of religion. If Jonathan Z. Smith famously argued religion is “solely the creation of the scholar’s study, ….created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalisation, [and having] no independent existence apart from the academy,” his particular way of formulating the point suggests how also true it is that we scholars do not get out that much (Smith 1998: xi). For religion, including perhaps especially indigenous religion, is being conceptualised, and thus created, in a number of public domains beyond the scholar’s study, and in a very pointed way in the legal domain. This chapter is part of a broader project in which I explore the process across a variety of legal fields through which Native American communities in the United States have articulated claims to sacred lands, practices, objects, and ancestral remains. Although implicitly informed by my previous, more community-based research on Anishinaabe religious history (McNally 2000; McNally 2009), this project is concerned less with the language of interpretation of local Anishinaabe religion than with the strategic languages through which Native American communities have articulated claims in various fields of law. Claims that are religious, but not plainly or merely so, have, on the one hand, engaged the powerful American discourse of religious freedom in ways that illuminate the power of that discourse to potentially include and to consistently exclude indigenous religions. But indigenous claims have also gone beyond religious freedom to engage the managerial discourse of cultural resource management under domestic environmental and historic preservation law, and to engage the limited sovereignty discourse of federal Indian law, a body of u.s. law that both recognises and delimits the legal obligations of the u.s. to acknowledged ‘tribes’, and by extension, to individual members of those

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_004

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acknowledged tribes, on a government-to-government basis. The body of federal Indian law is rooted in specific obligations under more than 370 different treaties but also in a legal doctrine known as the ‘federal trust responsibility’, whereby courts have held the u.s. to standards of trusteeship when government actions affect recognised tribes and their resources, including cultural resources like languages and religions. In this chapter, I will push beyond these domestic legal discourses to take stock of increasing interest in articulating ‘religious’ claims in the discourse of indigenous rights and international human rights law, and especially so in light of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (henceforth undrip), adopted nearly unanimously by the General Assembly in 2007. I will not presume here to assess undrip or its implementation: it is at once a non-binding aspirational declaration and a crucial step in the development of norms and practice in customary international law and in the domestic policies of u.n. member states (Charters and Stavenhagen 2009). I also will not offer a comprehensive discussion of the range of international law instruments, monitoring, and reporting processes that are relevant from a legal point of view, such as the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Racial Discrimination, or the Organisation of American States’ Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (much of the language of which has been approved by that body). More modestly, my aim here is to offer a reading of the formal language of undrip and the foundational human rights instruments it clarifies, to show how the religious is absorbed into the cultural but ultimately into the broader bundle of collective rights associated with the recognition of indigenous communities as peoples. To be sure, this elision helps resolve the difficulties of trying to squeeze indigenous traditions into the category of religion and affirms indigenous cultural self-determination by which indigenous communities themselves determine what constitutes religion, the sacred, and culture–in short, what matters to them for protection, and how. But for Native Americans in the u.s., and perhaps for other indigenous communities, this elision of religion into culture, and finally into peoplehood, also risks losing the distinctive rhetorical and legal force of the language of religious freedom. In this regard, this chapter considers the declarations of indigenous rights in international law in contrast to those within u.s. law, to show that at least so far as indigenous communities within the u.s. are concerned, the gains are not as clear, or at least not without an attendant loss of rhetorical and legal purchase. Ironically, the global indigenous movement that has constituted itself in the discursive register of sacred claims has sought protection for those claims in a legal discourse where the ‘religious’ is not particularly salient. If claims to the sacred, Mother Earth, and so on, are rhetorically powerful, the specific

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legal discussion here is emphatically not that of religious protection, but rather of cultural rights that are, in the context of indigenous communities, sacred or set apart from the merely profane senses of economy or polity. And as refracted through undrip, these sacred cultural rights are, in turn, folded into the discourse of the rights of peoplehood and the according rights of selfdetermination that mute the definitional tensions of religion and culture or that traverse the conceptual and legal divide between the religious or the cultural, on the one hand, and the domains of the political and economic, on the other. Native American claim-making, like that of indigenous communities around the globe, is often strategic (Johnson 2007). Seeking protection for ancestral lands and traditional lifeways, not to mention ancestral remains, patrimony, and sacred objects, has engaged Native communities in legal and political discourses that enable legibility and access to power even as they obscure, delimit, and constrain the reach of the power they gain in the doing. This is, after all, how discourses and social power work. If so much of indigeneity is articulated in the register of the sacred – sacred landscapes or waters, sacred objects, sacred ancestors – then the declaration and appeals in the context of the discourse of international law ring strangely hollow. The spiritual, the sacred, or the religious appear as interchangeable adjectival markers to distinguish sacred or spiritual aspects of culture: “religious and spiritual property” (undrip 2007: Article 11); “religious and cultural sites” (Article 12); “spiritual relationship” to lands, territories (Article 25). To be sure, where sacred, spiritual, religious do appear in the declaration as modifiers, they can be crucial modifiers to indigenous cultures. This is seen especially in Article 25’s recognition of indigenous peoples’ right “to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories waters, and coastal seas and other resources,” a relationship that can be the basis of their “responsibilities to future generations in this regard” and that serve to frame, without saying so in so many words, the distinctive contours of indigeneity with respect to land. This framing creates the space for the subsequent recognition, in Article 26, of collective rights to culturally inflected land ownership, occupation, tenure or use, and the implications for development of those lands. In other words, if the religious or the spiritual is a qualifier, it is perhaps the qualifier that asserts distinction of kind, not degree. But religious rights are not distinctively or particularly salient in these instruments, and this is in considerable contrast to domestic u.s. law. The field of religious studies has by now largely agreed that religion cannot be naively regarded as an autonomous or sui generis aspect of human life that is intrinsically set apart from the economic or political or social. But the elision, if not reduction, of the religious into other, more secular, discourses:

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law, politics, property, or, the elision most vexing of all, the view of religious rights as cultural rights, does not, it seems to me, offer the kind of deliverance from the presenting problem of ‘indigenous religion(s)’ that might first seem to be the case. I grant this may be an unfashionable way to think about religion from a religious studies perspective, and that there is a tension between acknowledging there is nothing essential that distinguishes religion from other similarly aligned aspects of culture and the claim that something crucial is lost when religion becomes a conceptual species of culture. But international law, no less than other forms of law, is a discourse that takes place in the dynamic articulation of boundaries of the semantic range of such concepts, pressing by turns to expand and constrain their potential meanings. International law discourse is also distinctly shaped by secularised European public discourses where religion is decidedly not the power word, so to say, that it is in the u.s.

The Problem of Indigenous Religion(s)

Bjørn Ola Tafjord has detailed a number of problems with “Indigenous Religion(s) as an Analytic Category” in an article by that title that queries both the indeterminacies of ‘indigenous’ and those of ‘religion’ and this handbook promises to extend this important discussion (Tafjord 2013). The promise and the limitations of indigenous religion(s) as an analytical category is relevant, and perhaps most keenly seen, in the efforts by indigenous communities and organisations to articulate ‘religious’ claims in the arena of international human rights law. Something of the valence of ‘religion’ as a power word and ‘religious freedom’ as a powerful discourse in the context of u.s. law, politics, and culture, remains relevant in an international human rights context. Native American traditions are incongruent with the conventional category of religion in any number of ways. For the purposes of this chapter, I can identify several that relate to the local, rather than universal, orientation of Native American religions. In one respect they are the province of discrete communities in particular places rather than portable, universal matters of individual conscience, assent, or belief. They are also local in that they are profoundly oriented to place by religious relationships with lands, waters, plants, and animals that defy many analogies with ‘sacred space’ in other traditions. In this regard, they are profoundly integrated with other, less visibly religious aspects of lifeways where the sacred is not so clearly set apart from presumptively profane matters of social organisation, economic livelihood, political decision-making, fields that in modernity have been defined precisely for their contrast with the religious. In this, Native traditions can concern themselves as meaningfully

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with the material as with the spiritual. Their local rather than universal nature can make Native traditions remarkably able to integrate elements of Christian traditions in all kinds of complex ways, rather than to be mutually exclusive with it. Finally, Native religions have often been interrupted traditions whose resurgence has called into question, at least among opposing interests, Native claims to authentic tradition. The distinctive contours of these religions can be, for the purposes of this chapter, encapsulated into the structural problem of figuring protections of ‘indigenous religion(s)’ within, on the one hand, available categories of rights to religious conscience or religious freedom in international human rights law, and with simply folding the religious, and the notion of religious rights, into the categories of culture and cultural rights on the other. The category of ‘indigenous’ presents a second structural problem for the purposes of religious protections under international law: indigenous peoples are betwixt and between the fundamental units of received international law and its institutions. Indigenous peoples are not merely indigenous people, individuals who are the bearers of enlightenment human rights vis-à-vis the state, or constituents of ethnic ‘minority’ populations alongside other cultural, linguistic, and religious groups. But neither do they readily fit as peoples in the sense of the other principal unit of international human rights law, the member States endowed with what the u.n. Charter lays out as matters of principle: inviolable rights to sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence. We will return to the ways that undrip aspires to address the structural problems and the implications for articulation of Native claims in international law. But the better to assess those implications, we should understand at least in part how, in domestic u.s. law, the discourse of religious freedom has both stunted and enabled effective Native claim-making.

Religion as Religion: Religious Freedom and Native American Claims in u.s. Law

If it is unremarkable to observe that ‘religion’ is a power word in u.s. legal discourse, and that American cultural identity is tied up with notions of religious freedom in ways that both create possibilities for some rights for religious minorities and that authorise exclusions of others, it will prove helpful to consider how religious freedom discourse has both rewarded and disappointed Native American claims (Sullivan et al. 2015; Hurd 2015; Asad 2003).

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‘Religion’ is a highly charged word, and especially so for Native Americans. It is freighted with the history of its use as a weapon against Native peoples. Think first of how early modern European authorities determined that New World savages had ‘no religion’ as a legal pretence for conquest and material dispossession by Christian sovereigns. The Doctrine of Christian Discovery emerged as a term of art in the emergent ‘law of nations’ that became, ironically, the footings for the edifice of the international law regime by means of which indigenous peoples have begun to assert their claims. Domestically, the Doctrine of Christian Discovery was grafted into u.s. law in 1823 (Johnson v. McIntosh 1823) and cited against Indian land claims by the Supreme Court as recently as 2005 (City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation 2005). In the years of formal federal policies of Indian assimilation between the 1870s and 1934, the savagism of Native peoples was seen as cultural, not endemic, but the effect was the criminalisation of such Native religious practices as the Sun Dance and the potlatch under administrative law within the u.s. Interior Department’s civilisation regulations. Then consider how the opposite has been true as well. By the 1960s, Native Americans were seen not to ‘lack religion’ but to be ‘all spirituality all the time’. For Indians nothing was profane, everything was sacred, and while this romantic view made Native American spirituality into a national treasure, it served to dull the edges of Native claims to protected religious freedom. But such power words as ‘religion’, ‘the sacred’, or ‘spirituality’, like the discourses they signal, are charged because they can be appropriated, tweaked from below as well as above. And, Native peoples have strategically engaged the category of ‘religion’ with considerable keenness. Since incorporation of the Peyote Way as the ‘Native American Church’ in Oklahoma and other states from 1914 (Maroukis 2010) to the Pueblo dance controversies of the 1920s (Wenger 2009) to passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (henceforth airfa) in 1978 to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (henceforth nagpra) in 1990, Native communities have engaged the discourse of religious freedom to articulate their claims to protection of ‘sacred’ places, practices, medicines, objects, and ancestral remains. There is not space here to recount in detail how woefully inadequate the First Amendment religious free exercise clause has been as a protection for Native sacred places and practices. Indeed, three of the cases by which the Supreme Court in the 1980s gutted religious freedom protections for religious minorities generally were cases involving Indian claims and in their efforts to narrow the scope of the legal question of religious free exercise, the majority opinions of each embed a habitual misrecognition of the accepted facts of the

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claims as insufficiently ‘religious’ (Bowen v. Roy 1986; Lyng v. n.w. Indian Cemetery Prot. Association 1988; Employment Division. v. Smith 1990). In 1980 for example, a First Amendment challenge by several bands of Cherokee to the proposed Tellico Dam’s obliteration of a network of sacred sites from which they had been forcibly removed in the Trail of Tears but which remained sites of pilgrimage, ceremony, and ancestral burials, failed because a federal appeals court found the claims were more ‘cultural’ than ‘religious’ (Sequoyah v. t.v.a., 1980). But there is also a habitual misrecognition of the claims rooted in the other American romance with the notion that Native Americans are naturally spiritual. To illustrate, consider a 2008 case where an appellate court upheld the government’s approval of a scheme to make artificial snow with treated sewage effluent from a nearby city for skiing on Arizona’s highest mountain, a massif called San Francisco Peaks in English. The Navajo call it ‘Shining on Top’ and consider it a living being who is one of the holy mountains that demarcate the Navajo world, an object of daily prayer and source of medicine and power necessary for all Navajo ceremonies (Navajo Nation v. u.s.f.s. 2008). The Hopi, for whom the massif is the home of ancestor kachinas (spirits) who bring rain and life, and four other nations, joined the Navajo to challenge the snowmaking scheme as a violation of their religious rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993), which was Congress’s effort to restore robust free exercise protection after Employment Division. v. Smith (1990), a decison that had gutted First Amendment free exercise rights. While the court recognised all the detailed factual findings about the indigenous claims to the sacred mountain as sincere and in force, it found as a matter of law that religious exercise was not ‘substantially burdened’ by the treated sewage effluent. Since the ski area comprised one percent of the surface of the mountain, and because there would be no limiting of access or physical destruction of plants or sites on the ski slopes, the court found that the “sole effect of the artificial snow” is on the Native Americans’ “subjective spiritual experience,” amounting merely to diminished spiritual fulfillment: That is, the presence of the artificial snow on the Peaks is offensive to the Plaintiffs’ feelings about their religion and will decrease the spiritual fulfillment Plaintiffs get from practising their religion on the mountain. Nevertheless, a government action that decreases the spirituality, the fervor, or the satisfaction with which a believer practises his religion is not what Congress has labelled a “substantial burden” … on the free exercise of religion. Navajo Nation v u.s.f.s. 2008 1063

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Here, recognised claims by tribal governments to collective duties and religious obligations were denatured into the claims to subjective spiritual fulfillment that characterise romanticised misconceptions of Native American religiosity (McNally 2015). To be sure, Native leaders and advocates have turned to discourses seemingly less disappointing than that of religious freedom to articulate claims to sacred lands, sites, practices, objects, and ancestral remains. Discrete chapters of my longer project take up how Native leaders have engaged the specifically cultural protections: cultural resource protections under domestic environmental law, and cultural property protections under historic preservation law. In the history of the litigation of cases like the San Francisco Peaks or the Tellico Dam, the religious freedom claims have consistently outlived the claims under domestic cultural protection laws, largely because the latter only have legal teeth where procedures of review have been inadequately followed. Before we turn to claims under the discourse of indigenous rights in international law, it is important to remark on how religious freedom discourse enabled successful Native American claims to domestic legislative and administrative protection. For where the legal weight of Native American claims to First Amendment protections has been slight, the discourse of ‘religious freedom’ has powerfully amplified Native claims in the political arena, enabling such legislative victories of concern to fewer than two percent of Americans as airfa and nagpra and the 1994 Peyote Amendment to airfa, among others. In the strategic hands of Native leaders, that discourse has developed a consistent enough administrative posture towards Native religious and cultural claims to extend across Presidents from Bush the elder through Obama to encompass a range of administrative accommodations and directives and mandates for consultation with tribes in the management of government lands and other federal activities. As Greg Johnson shows in the context of nagpra, Native leaders drew deftly on the power of broader American romance with Native American spirituality, together with the power of the discourse of religious freedom as an elementally American commitment, to win important protective frameworks for Native American ‘religions’ (Johnson 2007). Native leaders did not key these legislative and administrative accommodations straightforwardly into the logic of universal religious freedom law but rather to the local commitments of Native communities recognised in treaty-based federal Indian law. A brief look will help distinguish how Native activists gave specific indigenous, and one might even say collective, shape to religion. The structure of the protections for religion in each of these statutes and accommodations turns on the collective rights of the more than 550 federally

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recognised ‘tribes’ of American Indians and Alaska Natives. Rights related to the treaty-based government to government relationship and elaborated in the legal doctrine of a federal ‘trust responsibility’ extended from the 1970s to ‘protect and preserve’ the cultures and religions of federally recognised American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Pacific Islanders within u.s. borders (see, for example, u.s. v Wilgus 2011). The paternalism here is no doubt tangible, but where u.s. courts have not generally recognised robust First Amendment or rfra protections for Native American religions, they have on important occasions upheld legislative and administrative accommodations for Native American religions practised by members of federally recognised tribes, and done so based on the political status of members of tribes possessing collective rights to religious and cultural traditions in addition to whatever individual civil liberties they claim as u.s. citizens. Equal protection, due process, and other civil rights challenges to this approach to federal Indian law and policy have been many. In the late 1970s, even as it was ruling otherwise in the Bakke case, the Supreme Court made clear that it was the political, rather than racial, character of American Indian status that was elaborated in federal Indian law. In 1974, the Supreme Court upheld the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ hiring preference for Indians in Morton v. Mancari (1974), and elaborated in a 1979 case that laws that “might otherwise be constitutionally offensive” might be acceptable if they are enacted pursuant to the United States’ trust relationship (Washington v. Yakima Nation 1979). This view of collective religious rights pertaining to politically recognised tribes and their members can and does contrast with the religious rights of many individuals who are lineal descendants of Native people but not members of federally recognised tribes and who would be readily seen as ‘racially’ Native in American society. After decades of activism concerned for protection of sacred sites, ancestral remains, and other cultural freedoms as part of a broader push for treaty rights and tribal self-determination, Native activists strategically drew on the discourse of religious freedom to win Congressional passage in 1978 of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, a resolution lacking the teeth of a legal cause of action but which nonetheless acknowledged indirect government prohibition of Native religions and that directed the powerful government agencies managing vast tracts of federal land and others to evaluate their policies in terms of the effects on Native religious freedom. airfa directed federal agencies: to protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religions of the American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and Native Hawaiians, including, but

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not limited to, access to sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonials and traditional rites. airfa 1978

The coalition of Native leaders that had helped pass and implement provisions of airfa pressed Congress for human rights legislation reclaiming the humanity of ancestral Native dead who had been deemed archeological resources and the property of museums. The monumental 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra) set in motion a requirement that all federally funded museums and scientific institutions inventory their collections of human remains and cultural items and established a process for the repatriation to culturally-identified Native American governments of the human remains and of items determined to be ‘sacred objects’ or ‘cultural patrimony’ (nagpra 1990). When Peyotist practitioners of the Native American Church had lost almost a century of court-protected accommodations under religious freedom in the Supreme Court’s Employment Division v. Smith decision, and when their particular concerns were left out when a coalition of religious and civil liberties groups convinced Congress to restore by statute specifically what the Supreme Court had withdrawn in Smith (rfra 1993), Native activists won an amendment to airfa legislating an accommodation for peyote that drew on the importance of religious freedom but which crafted the religious protections on the legal basis of the distinctive political status of recognised tribes and their members, defining ‘Indian’ as members of federally recognised tribes: Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the use, possession, or transportation of peyote by an Indian for bona fide traditional ceremonial purposes in connection with the practice of a traditional Indian religion is lawful, and shall not be prohibited by the United States or any State. airfa as amended 1994 3b [1]

If religious freedom had been a largely bankrupt legal category as concerns Native claims in courts, religious freedom has proved extraordinarily useful as a discourse for gaining targeted legislative protections for Native practices, and for shaping Executive Branch policies of accommodation that stopped short of declaring Native American religions to be collective but that nonetheless tailored accommodations to the logic of the distinctive political status and limited sovereignty of recognised tribes. This extended discussion about Native claims in u.s. religious freedom law risks distracting us from consideration of religious claims under indigenous

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rights in international law, but offers crucial context. For the story of halting headway – losses in the courts and modest to considerable gains in terms of Native specific legislative gains and in terms of administrative accommodations – prepares us to understand Native American hunger for redress in the international arena, beyond what Walter Echo-Hawk, citing Chief Justice John Marshall, called the ‘Courts of the Conqueror’ (Echo Hawk 2012). It also prepares us to see what is lost in terms of the distinctive legal and cultural force that can accompany claims to ‘religious freedom’ in u.s. law.

Religion as Peoplehood under Indigenous Rights

This same strategic positioning of Native traditions to take advantage of existing American legal protections characterised the efforts of the Cayuga leader Deskaheh (variously Deskaneh), who brought concerns of traditional government of the Six Nations Haudenosaunee Confederacy to the League of Nations in Switzerland in 1923 (Hauptman 2008). Deskaheh was bringing concerns about Canadian refusal to recognise the traditional Haudenosaunee government, not particularly religious claims, but his appeals to the international community were strategically positioned to capitalise on a romanticised regard for the plight of Native North Americans. Emboldened by the renewal in the 1970s that came with the American Indian Movement, the Haudenosaunee went to the United Nations to gain an international hearing concerning broken treaties and claiming the reintegration of an indigenous spiritual posture towards the economic, political and environmental degradation of the planet. The Haudenosaunee delegation described the integration of the political and religious in their 1977 manifesto, Basic Call to Consciousness: Traditional First Nations Peoples hold the key to the reversal of processes in Western civilisation that hold the promise of unimaginable future suffering and destruction. Spiritualism is the highest form of political consciousness. And we, First Peoples of the Western Hemisphere, are among the world’s surviving proprietors of that kind of consciousness. Akwesasne Notes 1978: 79

Inasmuch as such claims could be aired at the United Nations, their progress was impeded in two important respects. Structurally, indigenous communities making the claims were, and still are, betwixt and between the principal units of the international law bodies like the United Nations, the nation-states

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who are the members of those bodies, and the citizen of those nation-states that is the liberal unit of human rights in the international legal regime. Secondly, indigenous claims themselves straddle the operative conceptual divides of political, cultural, economic, and religious rights. As we have seen, rights to land, to health, to food, to education, to self-determination, are all implicitly religious concerns at the same time. The formative triad of binding human rights law instruments – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966, effective 1976), and the International Covenant of Economic and Social Rights (1966, effective 1976) – articulate religious and cultural rights. But those rights were, for reasons of these structural incongruities, only partly of use for indigenous communities. At best, indigenous communities could register their collective claims to culture, land, and religion as aggregations of rights-bearing individuals, or as ‘populations’ claiming ‘minority rights’. a Religion as Religion in International Human Rights Law Religious freedom is embedded in the key instruments of international human rights law. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (henceforth udhr) provides that: Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. udhr 1948: Article 18

In contrast to the terse language of the U.S Constitution’s First Amendment, the more privatised individual right of religious belief is here joined with language that makes room for public expression, manifestation, and practice, and for the potential communal nature of those rights. Article 18 (1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (henceforth iccpr) similarly elaborates the language of udhr to include public and even collective manifestation, and practice of belief and conscience: Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching. iccpr 1966: Article 18 [1]

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But the legal force for indigenous peoples of such rights, especially in the context of international law, has been qualified considerably. Article 4(2) of iccpr clarifies that rights of religious conscience are along with rights to life, freedom from slavery and torture, among the non-derogable rights that cannot be suspended even in states of national emergency. But iccpr Article 18(3) qualifies that rights to ‘manifest’ religious belief or conscience are not strictly-speaking non-derogable: “Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others” (Article 18:3). u.s. courts have interpreted constitutional or statutory religious freedom to be similarly qualified, but balancing tests have emerged to suggest only “compelling government interests” – which were in Wisconsin v. Yoder clarified to be only state interests of the “highest order” – could outweigh an individual’s right to religious free exercise. In that case, the u.s. Supreme Court found that even Wisconsin’s compulsory education laws did not present a sufficiently compelling government interest to outweigh an Amish parent’s religious freedom rights to educate a child in the Amish way of life outside formal schooling (Wisconsin v. Yoder 1972). b Religion as Culture in International Human Rights Law Prior to undrip, indigenous communities had gradually more traction available to them for religious rights within iccpr’s Article 27, the key instrument for the rights of ethnic minority populations in member nation-states: In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise their own religion, or to use their own language. iccpr 1966: Article 27

Article 27 is emblematic of how religion is conceptualised in international law. As a matter of individual belief or conscience, religion is enumerated among the few rights of the highest, non-derogable order. But as a matter of community identity and collective practice or expression, religion is regarded as a species of culture, and religious rights a species of cultural rights. Perhaps this observation seems both unremarkable and odd; unremarkable because of course religion is a facet of culture, odd because the discursive

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purchase religion has in the u.s. political and legal context as an isolable, arguably sui generis, domain, is specific to u.s. legal, political, and cultural history. The establishment of unesco and other cultural rights instruments in the later twentieth century emerged to protect cultural life as an arena of economic and social activity, or to protect cultural ‘achievements’, exemplary archeological or historical built environments and the heritage of the world’s civilisations for human posterity, under unesco, under a kind of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs approach to their value vis-à-vis other rights. The International ­Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (henceforth icescr) emphatically affirms “the right of everyone: (a) to take part in cultural life; (b) to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications; (c) to benefit from the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific literary or artistic production of which he is the author” (icescr 1966: Article 15). For indigenous communities, as we have seen, cultural rights often have more to do with the right to practise everyday activities of culture than with the rights to benefit from scientific discoveries or fine arts. Because what is properly ‘cultural’ about indigenous concerns is not so easily set apart from what is economic, political, ecological, or religious, it follows that the cultural protections under icescr and iccpr, short of further elaboration, could only partly encompass indigenous cultural claims. But in no small part because of the active lobbying of the indigenous movement at the u.n., these cultural rights, including those under iccpr Article 27 for ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic minority populations, were clarified to include indigenous peoples and their land based traditional cultural and spiritual activities. The u.n. Human Rights Committee (unhrc) formally clarified iccpr in 1994: With regard to the exercise of the cultural rights protected under Article 27, the Committee observes that culture manifests itself in many forms, including a particular way of life associated with the use of land resources, especially in the case of indigenous peoples. That right may include such traditional activities as fishing or hunting and the right to live in reserves protected by law. unhrc 1994: 7

The Human Rights Committee also clarified that states would have special obligations to protect Article 27 rights,

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towards ensuring the survival and continued development of the cultural, religious, and social identity of the minorities concerned… [and that] these rights must be protected as such and should not be ­confused with other personal rights conferred on one and all under the Covenant. unhrc 1994:9

Importantly, such clarifications took pains not to shake up the basic structure of the iccpr, arguably the most far reaching of the human rights instruments. Even as it acknowledged that indigenous groups might have expansive claims under the rubric of cultural rights, the 1994 unhcr clarification also made clear that Article 27 was strictly speaking about individual right to group membership and not to be confused with Article 1’s rights of ‘peoples’ to self-determination. The iccpr draws a distinction between the right to self-determination and the rights protected under Article 27. The former is expressed to be a right belonging to peoples and is dealt with in a separate part of the Covenant. Selfdetermination is not a right cognisable under the Optional Protocol. Article 27, on the other hand, relates to rights conferred on individuals as such and is included, like the articles relating to other personal rights conferred on individuals, in Part iii of the Covenant and is cognisable under the Optional Protocol. In other words, even indigenous communities were aggregations of indigenous people, not peoples, in the technical sense of international law; citizens of nation states with minority population rights, but not nations in an international law system. In 2009, the body charged with implementation and assessment of icescr, the Economic and Social Council, ecosoc, issued a parallel clarification of that convention’s recognition of “the right of everyone to take part in cultural life” in light of indigenous efforts at the u.n. ecosoc held that the ‘everyone’ associated with Article 15’s right to participate in cultural life and to morally and materially benefit from cultural forms he/she has authored “may denote the individual or the collective; in other words, cultural rights may be exercised by a person (a) as an individual, or (b) in association with others, or (c) within a community or group, as such” (ecosoc 2009: 9). This is not simply a nod to a form of collective rights to intellectual or collective property; it is also an affirmation that collectivities can be understood to enjoy rights of cultural freedom. “The right to take part in cultural life can be characterised as a freedom” (ecosoc 2009: 6) and “to take part in cultural life… is a cultural choice and as such should be recognized, respected, and protected on the basis of equality,” an “especially important” point for all indigenous peoples who have the right to the full enjoyment, as a collective or as individuals, of all human rights and fundamental freedoms (ecosoc 2009: 7).

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ecosoc also took pains to clarify that ‘cultural life’, especially for indigenous peoples, should be understood not simply as heritage but as “a living process, historical, dynamic, and evolving, with a past, a present and a future” in the diachronic frame, and in the synchronic, a matter of ­exchange, improvisation, and hybridity: “the concept of culture must be seen not as a series of isolated manifestations or hermetic compartments, but as an interactive process whereby individuals and communities, while preserving their specificities and purposes, give expression to the culture of humanity” ­(ecosoc 2009: 11, 12). Finally ecosco offered some clarity on the expansive reach or what implementing the ‘cultural life’ protections icecsr Article 15 (1) might entail for indigenous peoples, including religion, economic practices, land relationships, and natural environments themselves (ecosoc 2009). Paragraph 35 of the council’s clarification elaborates on this feature specifically in the context of indigenous peoples: the strong communal dimension of indigenous peoples’ cultural life is indispensable to their existence, well-being and full development, and includes the right to the lands, territories, resources which they have ­traditionally owned occupied or otherwise used or acquired. Indigenous peoples’ cultural values and rights associated with their ancestral lands and their relationship with nature should be regarded with respect and protected, in order to prevent the degradation of their particular way of life, including their means of subsistence, the loss of their natural resources, and ultimately, their cultural identity. ecosoc 2009: 35



Peoples, not People

There is an immense difference between the legal force of ‘peoples’ and ‘people’. Both the iccpr and icescr begin with the same first article: All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development. This right to peoples’ collective self-determination together with the collective pursuit of economic, social, and cultural development, is thus the first word in international law, the counterpoint to the enumerated human rights enjoyed by all people, as individuals, within those peoples; but the right to peoples’

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collective self-determination has remained the province of the nation states that drive the institutions and processes of international law. iccpr Article 27 is emblematic of how indigenous communities were ill served by a human rights discourse based on the tension between individuals and nation states. For even the cultural, religious, and linguistic rights of minority communities were interpreted strictly speaking as aggregated rights of the individuals belonging to the communities. Among the more important ways for iccpr to become operationalised has been for grievances under iccpr to come before the u.n. Human Rights Committee under the (First) Optional Protocol, signed by 115 states, but the grievance structure has included only those of individuals, not collectivities. Even the 1989 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention 169 of the u.n.’s International Labour Organisation (ilo), which served to identify the particular cultural, spiritual and other concerns of indigenous peoples involving development, makes clear in its first article that “the use of the term peoples in this Convention shall not be construed as having any implications as regards the rights which may attach to the term under international law” (ilo Convention 169, Article 1 [3]). undrip’s passage in 2007 is in this sense a game changer: it clarifies that existing human rights, if they are to apply to indigenous people, must also be regarded crucially as matters of collective, not just individual, rights. The first article of undrip makes this plain: Indigenous peoples have the right to the full enjoyment, as a collective or as individuals, of all human rights and fundamental freedoms as recognised in the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law. undrip 2007: Article 1

In the section that follows, I will explore what the language of undrip does to help address the two presenting problems I have identified with international legal protections of claims to indigenous religions by weaving those claims into the broader fabric of indigenous rights to peoplehood. First, it is important to register that proponents and critics alike of undrip agree that it was signed without creating any new rights. For those connected critics keen to point out what appears a fait accompli but which undrip has yet to accomplish in terms of indigenous rights, this is a crucial point. The rights of a people’s fuller collective self-determination described in Article 1 of iccpr or icescr, and that comprise the basic principles of the u.n. Charter (1945) – respect for the “sovereign equality,” “territorial integrity” and “political independence” of member

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states – are potentially advanced to the degree that such nation states implement the elements of undrip, but while there are significant nods in this direction, no clearly delineated structural intervention in the basic workings of international law for indigenous peoples. Article 46 of undrip bookends Article 1 with insistent clarity on this point: Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, people, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act contrary to the Charter of the United Nations or construed as authorizing or encouraging any action which would dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States. undrip 2007: 46 [1]

The second part of Article 46 delimits how the rights clarified in undrip remain derogable, or not, in accordance with international human rights obligations. Any such limitations shall be non-discriminatory and strictly necessary solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and for meeting the just and most compelling requirements of a democratic society. undrip 2007: 46 [2]

For realist critics of undrip, that is those who regard its aspirational language as aspirational only, this is where rubber hits the road. For scholars more familiar with the often halting workings of international law, realist critics among them, this aspirational language can represent not simply a modest step, but a profound intervention, because of the clarity of its declaration that indigenous peoples have rights to exist as peoples, and that existing human rights must be also collective as applied to indigenous peoples.

Religion as Culture in undrip

The U.n. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples directly engages the category of religion in its elaboration of collective rights, but unlike the terse words of the First Amendment religion clauses and other human rights instruments, the Declaration elaborates on what protection of ‘religious traditions’ might entail in terms of the collective practices of indigenous communities,

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and particularly on the extension of the religious, as conventionally seen, into other economic, social, and political dimensions of life. In its preambular findings, undrip recognises the urgent need to respect and promote the inherent rights of indigenous peoples which derive from their political, economic and social structures and from their cultures, spiritual traditions, histories and philosophies, especially their rights to their lands, territories and resources. 2007: 12

Article 12 reads: Indigenous peoples have the right to manifest, practice, develop and teach their spiritual and religious traditions, customs and ceremonies; the right to maintain, protect, and have access in privacy to their religious and cultural sites; the right to the use and control of their ceremonial objects; and the right to the repatriation of their human remains. undrip 2007: Article 12

In its effort to address the problem of the protean nature of indigenous religion(s), undrip does not content itself with a single ‘religious freedom’ provision, or a tight focus on ‘religion’ as a power word or a term of art. Instead, rights to religion are framed by, and folded into, more expansive considerations of cultural self-determination, where economic, ecological, juridical, and political matters can also have spiritual or religious facets and/or urgency. The more specifically religious rights provisions of Article 12 follow a broader discussion of cultural rights in Article 11: Indigenous peoples have the right to practise and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs. This includes the right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures, such as archaeological and historical sites, artefacts, designs, ceremonies, technologies and visual and performing arts and literature. undrip 2007: Article 11

Even in Article 12, where undrip expressly discusses rights to ‘religion’, the term appears as an adjective: ‘religious traditions’ or ‘spiritual traditions’. Where the protection, maintenance, and strengthening of indigenous institutions and customs are concerned, the chosen term is not religion but ­spirituality. Indigenous Peoples have their right to promote, develop, and ­maintain their

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institutional structures and their distinctive, customs, spirituality, traditions, procedures, practices, and in the cases where they exist, juridical systems or customs, in accordance with international human rights standards (Article 34). Religious or spiritual considerations are explicitly enumerated in five additional undrip articles protecting various elements of culture (Articles 25, 31, 34, 35, 36) and implicitly present in further considerations of rights to oral traditions, philosophies, and languages (Article 13), culturally inflected medicine (Article 24), and traditional ecological knowledge (Article 31). As we have seen, adjectival enumerations of religious or spiritual considerations of other protections for culture are not inconsequential. Indeed, such ­references can be drivers of what can distinguish a range of indigenous cultural rights as sacred, as urgent, or as tantamount to peoplehood. Notable here is the explicit recognition of rights to “maintain and strengthen” an indigenous people’s “spiritual relationship” with traditional “lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard.” (Article 25) Thus Article 25 introduces a series of other articles regarding rights to traditional land, and frames those rights at least in part in terms of relational ‘spiritual’ responsibilities to the land itself and to future generations. Furthermore, an implementation manual to help ­nation states with undrip underscores the centrality of the religious to c­ ultural rights: the concept of indigenous spirituality is inherently connected to culture. Adopting policies that promote certain religions or prohibit indigenous spiritual practices, or the failure of laws or other governmental institutions, such as the police and courts, to respect indigenous spiritual practices, can undermine the right to culture. Asia Pacific Forum 2013: 13



Religion as Peoplehood

This section has considered how, under the rubric of indigenous rights, the various cultural rights, including religious rights, under instruments of international human rights law must be understood to apply collectively as well as individually if they are to extend meaningfully to indigenous people and peoples. Indeed, it can be said that the debate about people and peoples, and the resultant declaration of the rights of indigenous peoples, underscore that religious rights, cultural rights, and the porous boundaries between them are matters of peoplehood and the self-determination of recognised peoplehood. If the rights of full peoplehood and full self-determination as peoples remains

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aspirational in many respects, it is the insistence of this aspirational norm that can help us appreciate the power of protections of religious or cultural matters under the rubric of indigenous peoples’ self-determination for Native American communities whose efforts to render ‘legible’ what matters to them in the language of the state and u.s. society have been arduous and only partially successful. Here most religious rights are folded not simply into cultural rights as they had to be in international law but more momentously into the rights of (indigenous) peoplehood and the attendant rights to self-determination that equip indigenous peoples themselves to determine their cultural, economic, political, and religious development and commitments. To students of the definitional and analytical problem of indigenous religions, such norms as those affirmed in undrip are refreshing developments that make a lot of sense at the level of discourse. But the aspirational possibilities of the discourse of indigenous peoplehood in the norms of the Declaration are constrained, to put it lightly, by the realities of international economic and political power. For some Native American critics of undrip, this is serious enough to raise questions about what forms of qualified self-determination – the tribes’ ‘quasi-sovereign’ status is a term of art in federal Indian law – it might displace. “Is undrip an instrument of indigenous empowerment or a new and sophisticated form of assimilation?” asks Duane Champagne (2013), whose perspective bespeaks how a global indigenous rights framework in some respects underachieves the elaboration of the government to government relative to self-determination in u.s. law. “By avoiding a definition of indigeneity and not recognising political self-government from indigenous nations, [undrip] has redefined indigenous nations into citizens and ethnic groups” (Champagne 2013: 9). He continues: This reclassification or redefinition of indigenous peoples and nations will not satisfy the claims to territory and self-government that indigenous nations throughout the world generally uphold. In fact, indigenous nations make claims to land and self-government that nation-states are reluctant to acknowledge. Indigenous nations may realise some advantages within the undrip frame, but most likely they will not see full indigenous claims to self-government, territory, and cultural autonomy. The undrip solution and implementation can be only a partial solution at best. champagne 2013: 11

Champagne, to reiterate, is not discounting the step forward that undrip represents, but his position shows how appeals to international law of undrip

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without begging the government to government question, does not present the leap forward that might seem to be the case at first glance, especially for Native American communities that are currently recognised and that exercise considerable treaty rights within domestic federal Indian law. The issue of self-determination can be broken down into a bundle of rights. Among the most important are the right to preserve cultural identity, to have collective authority over decisions related to the land and territory in which they live, and to determine the nature and scope of development activities within the territory. Recasting self-determination as a bundle of rights captures issues of self-government and self-determination within the legal frameworks of nation-states. Some nation-states may take enlightened positions and support indigenous traditions of self-government and territorial autonomy. Other nation-states may be less willing to enhance possibilities of indigenous claims to territory and resources. Negotiations about selfgovernment and self-determination might be more satisfactory for indigenous nations if they were held on a government-to-government basis, as they are currently done in the United States and Canada. champagne 2013: 15



Religion as Peoplehood: The Case of Consultation and Consent

As Champagne himself notes, few things in international law, much less law in general, are all or nothing. The norms newly articulated in undrip, even if they enact no new rights, create pathways for thinking anew in the legal contexts of particular nation states. They bring self and international scrutiny on the part of those states and eventually may give rise to a body of customary law that brings the newly configured norms into law and policy. As Robert Williams put it to sceptics of the process leading to undrip: Moral suasion, shame, and the simple capacity to appeal to an internationally recognised legal standard for human rights have all done much to undermine the legitimacy of state-sanctioned domestic practices that deny human rights. williams 1990: 670

A crucial way that religion as peoplehood can become operationalised for Native American communities is in the process of tribal consultation, and the

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standards of free, prior, and informed consent that appears as a consistent norm across a handful of undrip provisions. In the United States, a matter crucial to the religious freedom as peoplehood of Native American communities is the obligation for the u.s. to consult with recognised tribes on federal actions that will impact them as part of the government-to-government relationship between the u.s. and the tribes as elaborated in treaties and the doctrine of the trust relationship. In the 1970s the trust relationship was clarified in such measures as airfa “to protect and preserve rights” to believe express, and exercise the traditional religions of the communities (airfa 1978). President Clinton strengthened and detailed the parameters of federal consultation in Executive Order 13175 on Tribal Consultation and the consultation process is elaborated in cultural resource law under environmental and historic preservation statutes (Executive Order 13175). Arguably, it is merely a procedural requirement, and what consultation looks like can range greatly. When it is working well, recognised governments of Native communities are informed early in the process of government agency actions that may affect them, and are able to weigh in and shape plans and policies to minimise adverse impacts, but the legal teeth to ensure that Native perspectives are seriously taken into account are few. As this chapter is going to press, litigation over federal consultation with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe on development of the Dakota Access pipeline show the weaknesses of consultation absent more legal teeth (Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 2017). Still, the consultation standard has been sharpened by case law, as with a 1995 appeals court ruling that the u.s. failed to “make a reasonable and good faith effort in its evaluation” under a historic preservation law when its consultation amounted to mailing the Sandia Pueblo a map of a proposed road and asking Pueblo officials to mark up all the sacred sites, which the Pueblo did not do for secrecy and other purposes (Pueblo of Sandia v. u.s. 1995: 863; King 2003). undrip expressly engages language that ramps up such a procedural standard of consultation to a procedural and substantive standard of consent, consent that is “free, prior, and informed” (2007: Article 19). The ‘edges’ of the ­consent standard come into relief in the language of one of the reservations with which the u.s. qualified its approval to undrip: The United States recognizes the significance of the Declaration’s provisions on free, prior and informed consent, which the United States understands to call for a process of meaningful consultation with tribal leaders, but not necessarily the agreement of those leaders, before the actions addressed in those consultations are taken. u.s. State Department 16 December 2010

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Conclusion The developments of international law considered in this chapter seem at first glance to be liberative. ‘Religious’ rights are reintegrated into the complex wholes that are indigenous cultures, where there is no particular need to define the sacred or the religious vis-à-vis other aspects of culture, or to disclose knowledge that shouldn’t be disclosed in the doing. What is more, this would have particular significance in parts of the world where ‘religious freedom’ is anything but an orienting discourse and perhaps even received as a colonising imposition on other ways of navigating religious difference (Hurd 2015; Asad 2003; Su 2016; Sullivan et al. 2015). Indeed, given the profoundly collective nature of indigenous religious traditions, the integration of religious rights into the rights of peoplehood and self-determination are compelling. And yet, the flattening of indigenous religious claims into the broader language of culture or peoplehood entails limitations as well as possibilities. On the one hand, translating religion into secular discourses (culture, education, development, resource, heritage, land rights, collective self-determination, cultural property) or enumerating the spiritual as among the distinct facets of those discourses worthy of enumeration in articles on, say, cultural or resource rights, re-inscribes and maybe even extends the reductive logic of the Enlightenment even as it seems to move beyond the religious/secular divide. This reduction of religious claims to those of culture, or cultural ecology, or economy, can dull the edges of certain indigenous concerns that are, for lack of a better term, irreducibly sacred, sacrosanct, urgent, or ultimate, and in the doing lower the barrier to violation of those rights through the logic of the articles qualifying such indigenous rights as derogable, capable of being suspended under a variety of prevailing concerns of national security or interest defined by states. If a discourse of religious rights as peoplehood is suggestive of wonderful possibilities among peoples whose religions have not counted in rights ­regimes privileging a view of religion as a matter of individual assent, belief, or conscience, for whom religion is a collective matter inseparable from peoplehood itself, there are serious limits to such aspirational language when the nation states that establish international law institutions are themselves the powerwielders who define the reach of self-determination. That Bolivia, for example, enacted undrip into its domestic law suggests the power of a­ spir­ational ­language to leverage indigenous negotiations with powers of nation states; but advocates for indigenous rights in Bolivia can still point to the lack of meaningful consultation, much less consent, on development projects that impact them (Rice 2014). We are left, then, with persisting elements of the problem of indigenous religions, both in terms of the difficulty of identifying the specifically ‘religious’

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in indigenous rights and in terms of the structural incongruity of indigenous communities with either the nation states who are enfranchised as members of international institutions like the u.n. or with the non-governmental organisations which inform but are not enfranchised to shape significantly the work of those international bodies. The problems, though, should not be regarded as intractable. Neither should the possibilities of undrip be seen as aspirational only. At the time of this writing, the Fifteenth Session of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (2016) has called for monitoring mechanisms to more systematically implement the norms of undrip and to explore modalities for weightier participation of indigenous communities in the institutional power centres of the u.n. As the norms, monitoring processes, and structures for fuller indigenous presence in international bodies are elaborated in time, perhaps there are fruitful possibilities in more decidedly reworking the conceptualisation of religious freedom rights in international law, clarifying how rights to religion must be collective and not merely individual if they are to apply meaningfully to the world’s indigenous peoples. As we have seen, there have been considerable efforts to clarify the cultural rights under current human rights instruments, such as iccpr and iescr, to better protect the elements of indigenous cultures that pertain to spiritual relationships to land, traditional practices that are at once cultural and sacred, relationships with ancestors, and the like. I will develop this proposal more fully in forthcoming work that articulates an emergent bundling within u.s. domestic law of the harder legal edge of ‘religious freedom’ protections with the self-determination collective rights recognised under federal Indian law in its better moments, and perhaps models a way of re-inscribing the harder, perhaps even non-derogable, legal edge of religious rights into the effort not only to address the problem, but to promote the flourishing, of indigenous religions. References Akwesasne Notes. 1978. Basic Call to Consciousness. Summertown, Tennessee: Book Publishing. American Indian Religious Freedom Act, (AIRFA). 42 U.S.C. Sec  1996. 1978. Amended 1994. Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, ­California: Stanford University Press. Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions and the Office of the ­United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. 2013. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: A Manual for National Human Rights Institutions.

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Bowen v. Roy, 476 U.S. 693 (1986). Champagne, D. 2013. “UNDRIP: Human, Civil, and Indigenous Rights.” Wicaso Sa Review Spring 28, 9–22. Charters, C. and R. Stavenhagen, eds. 2009. Making the Declaration Work: The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Copenhagen: International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs. City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, 544 U.S. 197 (2005). Echo Hawk, W. 2012. The Courts of the Conqueror. New York: Fulcrum. ECOSOC. 2009. “General Comment 21: The Right of Everyone to Take Part in Cultural Life.” C/C.12/GC/21 (20 Nov. 2009). Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872. 1990. Executive Order 13175 on Consultation and Coordination with Tribal Governments. Pres, Clinton. (2000). Hauptman, L. 2008. Seven Generations of Iroquois Leadership: The Six Nations Since 1800. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Hurd, E.S. 2015. Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. International Covenant of Economic and Social Rights (ICESR). 1966. New York: United Nations General Assembly, 16th December 1966, effective from 3rd January 1976. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). 1966. New York: United Nations General Assembly, 16th December 1966, effective from 23rd March 1976. International Labour Organisation (ILO). 1989. Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, C169, 27 June 1989, http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:1 2100:0::NO:12100:P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312314:NO. Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543. 1823. Johnson, G. 2007. Sacred Claims: Repatriation and Living Tradition. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. King, T.F. 2003. Places that Count: Traditional Cultural Properties in Cultural Resource Management. Walnut Creek, California: Alta Mira Press. Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association 485 U.S. 439. 1988. Maroukis, T. 2010. The Peyote Road: Religious Freedom and the Native American Church. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. McNally, M.D. 2000. Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion. New York: Oxford University Press (reprinted Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2000). McNally, M.D. 2009. Honoring Elders: Aging, Authority, and Ojibwe Religion. New York: Columbia University Press.

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McNally, M.D. 2015. “From Substantial Burden on Religion to Diminished Spiritual Fulfillment: The San Francisco Peaks Case and the Misunderstanding of Native ­American Religion.” Journal of Law and Religion 30, 36–64. Morton v. Mancari, 417 U.S. 535 (1974). Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). 1990. 25 U.S.C. 3001 et. seq. 16th November 1990. Navajo Nation v. United States Forest Service, 535 F.3d 1058, 1113 (9th Cir. 2008), cert. denied, 129 S. Ct. 2763 (2009). Organisation of American States (OAS). 2012. “Draft American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” OEA/Ser.K/XVI GT/DADIN/doc.334/08 rev. 7 (2 May 2012). Pueblo of Sandia v. U.S., 50 F. 3d 856 (10th Circuit, 1995). Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). 1993. 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb-2000bb-4. Rice, R. 2014. “UNDRIP and the 2009 Bolivian Constitution: Lessons for Canada.” The Internationalization of Indigenous Rights: UNDRIP in The Canadian Context. Waterloo, Ontario: Centre for International Governance Innovation, 59–62. Seqouyah v. T.V.A. Sequoyah v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 620 F.2d 1159 (6th Cir.), cert. denied, 449 U.S. 953 (1980). Smith, J.Z. 1988. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, No. 16-cv-01534 (D.D.C., 2016). Su, A. 2016. Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Sullivan, W.F., E.S. Hurd, S. Mahmood and P.G. Danchin, eds. 2015. Politics of Religious Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tafjord, B.O. 2013. “Indigenous Religion(s) as an Analytical Category.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 25, 221–243. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 1948. General Assembly Resolution 217A. Paris: United Nations General Assembly, 10th December 1948. U.N. General Assembly. 2007. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2 October 2007, A/RES/61/295; http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/ documents/DRIPS_en.pdf. U.N. Human Rights Committee. 1994. “General Comment 23.” CCPR/C/21/Rev. 1/Add. 5. August 1994. U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. 2016. “Draft Report of 15th Session.” May 16, 2016. U.S. State Department. 2010. “Announcement of U.S. Support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” December 16, 2010. U.S. v. Wilgus, 638 F.3d 1274 (10th Cir., 2011). Washington v. Confederate Bands and Tribes of the Yakima Indian Nation 439 U.S. 463 (1979).

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Wenger, T. 2009. We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Williams, R. 1990. “Encounters on the Frontiers of International Human Rights Law: Redefining the Terms of Indigenous Peoples’ Survival in the World.” Duke Law Journal, 660–704. Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972).

chapter 3

u.n.-Discourses on Indigenous Religion Siv Ellen Kraft It is essential to know and understand the deeply spiritual special relationship between indigenous peoples and their land as basic to their existence as such, and to all their beliefs, customs, traditions and ­culture. […]The entire relationship between the spiritual life of indigenous peoples and Mother Earth, and their land has a great many deep-seated implications. cobo 1986, Ch. xxi, 26

∵ Introduction Several scholars have commented on the ‘spiritual tone’ of u.n. discourses on indigenous peoples, but mostly in passing and never – to my knowledge – as a main focus. An attempt to address this gap and discuss in more detail u.n. discourses on indigenous religion, this chapter is concerned with references to religion and cognates, and with extent, patterns and usage. Anything resembling a complete account is ruled out by the size of the material, but digital availability allows for a survey of targeted concepts in central publications, substantial enough for an analysis of the main (spiritual) concerns: how is the term ‘indigenous religion’ used at this top-level of global governance? Are ‘indigenous people’ spoken of in religious terms, and – if so – to what extent, in which contexts and for which reasons? I will start with a brief discussion of methods and material, followed by a tentative overview of the religious wording in three prominent texts: the Martinez Cobo Study (launched in 1972 and completed in 1986); the ilo Convention 169 (1989); and the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). In the second part of the chapter, I will dig deeper, on more delimited grounds, using as my point of departure State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, a report issued by the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2009, as part of their awareness-raising and agenda-setting programmes. Although not a discourse analysis in the strictest sense of the term, I will draw selectively on © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_005

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tools and perspectives from Norman Fairclough (2003) and others, most explicitly in regard to notions of vocabularies and interpretative repertoires; connected words or word-clusters that constitute both frames and resources for thinking and talking about indigenous peoples.

Method and Material

‘u.n. publications’, in this context, means texts published by the u.n., in print or on their webpages, that focus on indigenous peoples. Such publications date back to the formation of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations (wgip), in 1982, and has since then resulted in a massive quantity of documents, across a broad variety of genres: speeches, legal documents, recommendations, proceedings, reports, abstracts, and news clippings. English is the lingua franca at this level of indigenous discourse, but many publications – particularly the legal ones – have been translated and incorporated into state legislation, around the world. Most of them can be downloaded from u.n. websites and many are represented on indigenous websites. They are thus in principle available to anyone with access to the internet, and bits and pieces are today widely cited and circulated. We are here dealing with the top level of global networks, and the highest level of global governance. u.n. legislation, in particular, offers important resources for indigenous peoples vis-à-vis state governments. Legal documents like the ilo Convention 169 and UNDRIP exist above the messy level of debates and negotiations, as factual and normative (soft law) statements; statements of what is and what shall be. They are for these same reasons obvious candidates for what discourse analysts entitle canonical texts or monuments; texts that stand out, that are frequently cited, and that contribute in important ways to the normalisation and naturalisation of claims and vocabularies. The Martinez Cobo Study is another likely candidate for status as canonical. Initiated upon the request of the Economic and Social Council in the u.n. in 1971, The Cobo Study was finally released in 1986, under the name of the Special Rapporteur appointed to prepare it. It is commonly regarded as a milestone in the work of the international movement of indigenous peoples, was followed by important initiatives, is still widely cited, and has no doubt influenced later developments.1 Of particular importance for my concerns are repeated 1 The volume is available on the internet (in the form of scanned pdfs of each of the chapters, which does not allow for a digital search), and consists of three parts, 21 chapters, over a total of 1393 pages (introductory comments and appendices not included). Part 1 (Chapters 1–3)

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­references to ‘a spiritual relationship to the land’ as crucial to indigenous peoples. This same cluster is repeated in ilo-Convention 169, and the u.n. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: governments shall respect the special importance for the cultures and spiritual values of the peoples concerned of their relationship with the lands or territories, or both as applicable, which they occupy or otherwise use, and in particular the collective aspects of this relationship. ilo Convention 169, Part two, article 13

Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources. u.n. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Precisely what to make of ‘the spiritual’ in these texts is a fairly open question. My point so far is that ‘the spiritual’ is regularly used in documents whose authority, legitimacy and visibility are today unrivalled on the level of international indigenous politics. A second point, to be developed further in the pages to come, is that the more elaborate style of documents like The Cobo Study, and State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples add frames, details and content to these abstract, legal phrases, but in ways that keep options open regarding the religion-secular binary. A third point of interest has to do with the comparativism employed in this first, and so far most extensive and ambitious, u.n. study of indigenous populations, particularly examples of up-scaled comparativism. The Cobo Study consists primarily of brief accounts of particular groups in their state contexts, organised thematically, and together revealing both diversity and similarities. However, in between these highly factual accounts are passages depicting a common core, formulated in ways that imply or indicate ‘ultimate concerns’. Religious language tends, in this study, – as I will argue in regard to State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples – to be used primarily at the highest, more overarching, level of indigeneity and identity-claims. covers various actions taken by the u.n., Special agencies and so on. Part 2 is thematically organised with chapters on how to define indigenous populations, health, housing, language, land, religion and so on. Conclusions and recommendations of the study, in Addendum 4, are available as a United Nations sales publication (u.n. Sales No. E.86.XIV.3).

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State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples was issued by the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples in 2009,2 as part of its four part strategy of awareness raising, information collection, co-ordination of activities, and advisory function.3 It is listed on the (front) website of the Forum, together with the ilo Convention, the UNDRIP, a film, and various official u.n.-reports. The document is 238 pages, and is structured by the main topics of the Forum’s mandate: Economic and Social Development, Culture, Environment, Education, Health and Human Rights. The stated goal – to describe and discuss the state of more than 370 million people in some ninety countries – is approached through a combination of general references and examples from distinct indigenous peoples. There is not, unlike for The Cobo Study, a particular chapter devoted to religion. Chapter ii (Culture) offers what is the overall most extensive and elaborate usage of religious concepts, but there are also substantial clusters in Chapters iii and v, on ‘Environment’ and ‘Health’ respectively, and occasional references in the rest of the chapters.

State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples – Tone, Terms and Vocabulary

Having read through State of the World´s Indigenous Peoples (United Nations 2009), and based on previous references to an indigenous religion ‘tone’ and vocabulary, I started with a digital search. Basically, I (1) counted instances of particular words, (2) categorised them according to the topics they are connected to, and (3) distinguished between instances that refer to indigenous

2 The Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues was established in 2000, and today constitutes a highly important combination of think tank, debate forum and meeting place for indigenous representatives from around the world. More than 1500 indigenous representatives attend the annual sessions in New York, along with representatives from some seventy countries and around thirty-five u.n. agencies and inter-governmental entities. 3 The volume is presented under ‘acknowledgements’ as a collaborative effort in which a number of experts and organisations participated, among them authors of the thematic chapters (which are described), the Secretariat of the Permanent Forum (responsible for writing the introduction), an overall leader of the process, a managing director, an editor, a long list of named commentators, and input from two three-day long expert group meetings organised by the Russian Association of the Indigenous Peoples in the North and the Yamal Nenets Autonomous Okrug.

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people in the singular (what they collectively are, have or need) and the plural (what a particular indigenous people has, is or needs). In addition to words that I expected to be there (spirituality, indigenous spirituality, sacred, religion, holistic, Mother Earth, shaman), I included a selection that are in scholarly settings commonly applied to indigenous religions (animism, more than human, healer, spirits), along with certain classical religious terms (god, goddess, sacrifice, salvation, holy, myth, goddess, priest, evil, ritual, ceremonies). Finally, I included a range of concepts relating to time, origins and history (ancient, immemorial, ancestors, ancestral, future, traditional, nature, environment, environmental). Although too small to qualify as representative or exhaustive, my collation of the words used, does indicate linguistic preferences, and can accordingly serve as a starting point for a mapping and analysis of patterns and regularities. Absences, first, indicate that recent scholarly inventions (or reinventions) have not been incorporated into u.n. discourses, or at least not in this particular study. There are no references to ‘animism’ and ‘more than human’, and few to ‘spirit’ and ‘healer’. Classical religious terms, similarly, are rare and far between. Indigenous peoples are not talked of in terms of salvation, sacrifice, sanctity, myth, holy/holiness, priest, evil, goddess, god, ritual. Nor are there ­references to the vocabularies of the specific religions to which major parts of them ­belong, such as Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. As for the words represented, the most striking tendency is the dominance of ‘spirituality’ and ‘spiritual’ (45 and 97), and the far more limited usage of ‘religion’ (7) and ‘religious’ (12). There are in addition four references to ‘Indigenous spirituality’ (all of them singular), twelve to ‘sacred’, and five to ‘­holistic’. The remaining cognates tend to cluster around time (origins) and space (lands), including concepts such as immemorial (3), ancestral (25), ancestors (8), ancient (4) and – the overall winner – ‘traditional’ (363). ‘Immemorial’ is in all three instances a part of the mythically toned phrase ‘since time immemorial’, used in relation to indigenous practices and traditions. ‘Ancestors’ and ‘ancestral’ refer to either specific places where ancestors are buried and/or to ­ongoing relationships to ancestors at these sites, for instance through “dreams and spiritual paths” (United Nations 2009: 62). ‘Sacred’, similarly, is used primarily in connection to sites, with a few instances including ceremonies, ­traditions or objects. References to ‘space’ top the list of my word-search, with two hundred and forty-five references to environment, one hundred and nine to environmental, and fifty-three to nature. ‘Mother Earth’ is found in one passage only, under the sub-title ‘Violence against indigenous religion’, and in the form of a citation from the International Indigenous Women’s Forum:

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Indigenous traditions and indigenous women themselves identify women with the Earth and therefore perceive degradation of the Earth as a form of violence against women. This conviction is more than a metaphorical allusion to Mother Earth. It is rooted in indigenous cultural and economic practices in which women both embody and protect the health and well-being of the ecosystems in which they live. 2006: 172

The relative lack of references to Mother Earth surprised me, due to the prominence of this concept in u.n. discourses more generally. Mother Earth is used in other publications listed on the website of the Permanent Forum, including The Cobo Study; the General Secretary has used it in speeches addressing indigenous issues, and a ‘Mother Earth-day’ has been established. It is possible that Bolivia’s granting of subject-status and legal rights to Mother Earth have compromised ‘her’ position on this level of global discourse. A 2010-report by the Permanent Forum entitled Study of the need to recognize and respect the rights of Mother Earth (Permanent Forum 2010) refers to “misunderstood prejudice views” that Mother Earth is a religious creed, “the promotion of which would impinge upon freedoms such as the freedom of conscience” (2010: 8). Similar concerns may lie behind another significant absence; that of the shaman. Although well established as an idiom of indigeneity, and widely used in indigenous communities, the ‘shaman’ may be ‘too religious’ on this level of discourse. The shaman is in addition controversial amongst some indigenous people, whether because of the harsh critique of New Age appropriation of the term, of scholarly critique of the concept, or simply because some indigenous people consider themselves secular, belong to a different religion, or do not think of their pre-colonial history in terms of ‘shamanism’.4

Religion and Spirituality

‘Religion’ is consistently excluded from ‘indigeneity’, as articulated in both The Cobo Study and State of the World´s Indigenous Peoples. The latter uses ‘religion’ 4 Among the Norwegian Sàmi, for instance, most of whom identify as either Christians or as secular, ‘shamanism’ is the established term for speaking of the religious past, and is today a central and highly visible part of nation building, but primarily framed as ‘cultural heritage’. A vibrant neo-shamanistic milieu has existed since the mid-1990s side by side with usage of the shaman and shamanism in nation building contexts, but many Sàmi are critical of this form of ‘religious’ shamanism, and would protest strongly to being identified as such.

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exclusively (and as such sparsely) with reference to either particular religions among distinct indigenous peoples, or – more commonly – to hostile intruders from outside. “Indigenous spirituality,” to cite one instance of this usage, “has in many cases been violently repressed or forbidden and are under constant assault from the large, dominant religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.” (United Nations 2009: 60).5 Chapter 2 (on culture) provides a definition of religion and spirituality respectively. “Religion” is defined as “a specific practice and ritual that are the external expression of some people’s spirituality,” and “an institution with a recognised body of communicants who gather together regularly for worship and accept a set of doctrines offering some means of relating the individual to what is taken to be the ultimate nature of reality” (United Nations 2009: 60). “Spirituality” is defined as “an internal connection to the universe, which includes a sense of meaning or purpose in life, a cosmology or way of explaining one’s personal universe and personal moral code” (United Nations 2009: 60). The contrast acknowledges affinities (why else would spirituality and religion be contrasted?), yet insists on the “important difference between them” (United Nations 2009: 60), and in ways that emphasise the dichotomy between ‘external’ (religion) and ‘internal’ (spirituality). The usages of ‘spirituality’ on the same page, the rest of the chapter, and indeed in other parts of the publication, shift between more or less religious and more or less secular versions. ‘Spirituality’ comes in primarily secular versions, as with the reference to values and worldview in the above definition, or – on the opposite end – as ‘religious’ in most established senses of the term, as for instance in this passage: Spirituality is the relationship human beings create with the spirit world in order to manage forces that seem overpowering. Indigenous spirituality is intimately linked to the environment in which the people live. For indigenous peoples, the land is the core of all spirituality and this relationship to the spirit of the earth is central to all the issues that are important to indigenous peoples today. United Nations 2009: 59

We here have links between ‘spirituality’ and ‘the spirit world’, combined with references to ‘the spirit of the earth’, all of which are presented as ultimate concerns and as integral to indigeneity. 5 The Cobo Study takes a slightly different approach, arguing that it is a problem in certain state-contexts that official definitions of religion exclude traditional indigenous practices, and thus deprive them of the legal protection and benefits granted to the category.

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Spirituality is used primarily in connection to the land, traditions and health, and it often emerges as a non-differentiated aspect of indigenous people’s being and identity, but – again – usually in elusive ways, avoiding clear cut boundaries between the religious and the secular. We may, in the language of discourse analysis, speak of a floating signifier, a term whose meaning (signified) is vague and unsettled, and that can accordingly mean different things to different people and in different contexts. We are not, at the same time, dealing with something free floating. This, for instance, differs sharply from the seeker-mentality typical of spirituality discourses in New Age and neo-pagan circles, centred on the self-development of individuals. Indigenous spirituality is a collective concern, centred on indigeneity as such: on ancient traditions, ancestral lands and the inner being of indigenous people – what we are and have, or what we have partly lost and must now reclaim. Contrasting this with ‘western’ culture and religion adds a further level of meaning and resonance. Indigenous spirituality shares ground with New Age spiritualities in regard to a notion of ‘religion’ as formal, dogmatic and churchlike institutions, prone to abuse their power. ‘Religion’, moreover, tends to be categorised as ‘western’. Although usually implicit, both The Cobo Study and State of the World´s Indigenous Peoples occasionally spell out this logic: Indigenous peoples have rich and diverse cultures based on a profound relationship with their land and natural resources. Dichotomies such as nature vs. culture do not exist in indigenous societies. Indigenous peoples do not see themselves as outside the realm of nature, but as part of nature […]. Nor do indigenous peoples emphasize a radical duality between the sacred and the mundane as happens in Western culture. In many indigenous cultures, social and political institutions are part of the cosmic order, and it is on the basis of their worldview, beliefs, values and customs that indigenous peoples define their customary laws and norms. United Nations 2009: 52

The ‘other’ of identity-claims must somehow be connected to scale. For this reason, perhaps, ‘indigeneity’ tends to imply – or, as in this passage – be explicitly opposed to ‘western’ people and traditions. Usage of the West as other, moreover, is likely to trigger older primitivist discourses, in this passage including the relationship to nature (close contra distant), notions of worldviews (holistic contra dualistic), and of religion (undifferentiated contra differentiated). The Cobo Study adds to these a distinction between private (western) and communal (indigenous) notions of ownership over the land (Cobo 1986: Ch. xvii, 30–31), but is otherwise more ambivalent in regard to the relationship

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between ‘religion’ and the western-indigenous divide. In practice, however, its focus is exclusively on the indigenous side of the divide. The chapter on religion notes that “indigenous beliefs, religions and churches would seem to have practically disappeared in some areas,” adding that “this seems to be the case in several countries, for which there is information” (Cobo 1986: Ch. xix, 16). It is nevertheless exclusively these same traditions that are depicted in the study, usually with unclear or missing references to time. There is hardly any mention of the ‘dominant religions’ to which many, if not most, indigenous people according to their own measures belong. Identity claims in local settings may make use of the global scale, wholesale or to some extent, and for any numbers of reasons, but are as likely to adjust, adapt or ignore these identities. The Norwegian Sàmi, for instance, are in their local and national context both Norwegian and Sàmi, and are in their everyday lives unlikely to perceive non-Sàmi Norwegians as ‘western’, or to talk of their relationship in terms of this particular chain of oppositions. Sàmi neoshamanism, however, regularly draws upon this discourse; Sàmi artists and musicians sometimes do; international contact zones are likely to make use of it (festivals, tourisms, u.n.-meetings and so on), and the national media regularly cite and structure their representations on the basis of it. Conclusion A náhppi is a milk bowl, traditionally an important utensil in Sàmi reindeer husbandry, that lately has been taken up and exhibited by Sàmi artists (duodji specialists). The philosopher Nils Oskal, in a study of its potential meanings – in the present and in the past – notes that the object today exists “in a state of tension where it says something to everyone, where it says something to a selected few, and where it no longer says anything to anyone” (Oskal 2014: 89). What I have referred to as an ‘indigenous vocabulary’ lacks concrete objects like the milk bowl. We are here dealing with ‘big’ and highly abstract words, but words, nevertheless, that like the milk bowl can be expected to say different things, depending on the prior knowledge and experiences of any audience, and the scale of usage. Unlike the milk bowl, moreover, this vocabulary consists of words that are native to none of the early traditions of the indigenous people who use them. ‘Indigenous spirituality’ depends upon a fairly recent concept of indigeneity, born in the wake of the international movement of indigenous people. The adoption of ‘the sacred’ (from Christian and scholarly vocabularies) probably dates back to Australia in the 1970s, when the concept of ‘sacred sites’ entered legal discourse, through the combined efforts of a­ nthropologists

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and aboriginies (Tsing 2009:55). ‘Mother Earth’ has linguistic relatives among numerous religions, but is framed by environmentalist concerns and images, including the Gaia-model developed by James Lovelock (Rønnow 2003; Gill 1987). Remaining parts of the ‘vocabulary’ (spiritual, ancestral, immemorial, holistic and so on) all have wide fields of usage, only parts of which are ordinarily understood as religious, but most of which lend themselves to religious or mythical interpretations. It is tempting to describe this vocabulary as a second order abstraction, existing above the level of (native) first order concepts, and used to interpret and organise them in particular ways. Worlds like ‘sacred’ and ‘Mother Earth’ offer translational and bridging devices, calling upon people to search in their native vocabularies for matching words; of what their version of sacred places or Mother Earth may be. Distinct indigenous traditions and religions are thus made comparable in ways that support notions of common ground and shared denominators, thus facilitating the double vision of indigeneity as uniqueness and unity. This vocabulary must – in order to work and survive – be useful both on the intra-discourse level and in regard to the outside world. It needs, more specifically, to come forth as respectful of, and appropriate for, in principle all indigenous peoples, and simultaneously offer signs and sound-bites for external communication. Both levels have to do with the diplomatic dimension of indigenous discourse. Institutions like The Permanent Forum of Indigenous Peoples constitute diplomatic (or para-diplomatic) arenas and activities. They facilitate communication between delegates from different indigenous peoples, and between indigenous peoples and their outside world, whether inside the u.n. system, vis-à-vis nation states, or on variously scaled public fields. For this they, as other diplomatic institutions, need a common set of rules and language (Hauge and Neumann 2011), along with simple messages; ‘sound-bites’ that are clear and striking enough to break through the noise of late modern publics, and that are in addition recognisably ‘indigenous’. ‘Spirituality’ scores high on several of these criteria. It lacks obvious enemies, and carries the intuitive ring of primitivist traditions, thus offering recognisable signs and soundbites without being explicitly or necessarily bound by them or these images. It is in addition elusive enough to pass as secular, but can draw upon the respect, depth and sincerity connected to religion. ­Religion and religion-like language, more generally, offer qualities and potential that are useful, if not indispensible for identity-making at this level of abstraction. Religion, to quote Bruce Lincoln’s famous thesis on method, “is that discourse whose defining characteristic is its desire to speak of things eternal and transcendent with an authority equally transcendent and eternal” (Lincoln 1999:395). Sacred

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claims add depth, sincerity and ultimacy, thus helping to lift words above the level of the ordinary and position them beyond dispute and argument. These particular sacred claims draw extensively on environmentalist discourses, and thus on what is perhaps the most commonly acknowledged field of global urgency. They refer mainly to this-worldly issues and challenges; to the identity of indigenous people (in the singular and the plural), and to matters concerning rights and sovereignty (particularly in regard to land). What I refer to in the introduction as ‘a spiritual tone’ of u.n.-discourses on indigenous people, consist partly of religious- or religion-like concepts connected to these issues (spiritual, sacred); partly of the ultimate concerns to which they are related, and partly to mythical references to origins (‘time immemorial’ and others). This, then, is not ‘religion’ in the sense of faith in supernatural beings, but religion as identity and way of being, a global style version of civil religion and cultural heritage. The degree to which this globalising discourse results in a standardisation of local cultures is likely to differ, depending – among other things – on specific local ground incentives. What I have referred to as second order abstractions may take on a life of their own, by being incorporated among the first order concepts that they in a previous round of events helped organise. It may also be established as an additional layer of discourse, an additional resource for talking and thinking – in certain contexts, on specific scales, and for specific goals. References Fairclough, N. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Gill, S.D. 1987. Mother Earth: An American Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hauge, S. and I.B. Neumann. 2011. Hva er diplomati. Oslo: Universitets forlaget. International Labour Organisation (ILO). 1989. Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, C169, 27 June 1989, http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:1 2100:0::NO:12100:P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312314:NO. Lincoln, B. 1999. “Theses on Method.” In R. McCutcheon, ed. The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion. London: Cassell, 395–398. Oskal, N. 2014. “The Character of the Milk Bowl as a Separate World, and the World as a Multitudinous Totality of References.” In M.A. Hauan, ed. Sàmi Stories – Art and Identity of an Arctic People. Stamsund: Orkana Akademisk forlag, 79–90. Rønnow, T. 2003. “Moder jord. Et moderne nøkkelsymbol.” Din. Tidsskrift for religion og kultur 2, 34–44.

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Tsing, A.L. 2009. “Adat/Indigenous: Indigeneity in Motion.” In C. Gluck and A.L. ­Tsing, eds. Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon. Durham: Duke University Press, 40–66.



U.N. publications

Cobo, J.M. 1986. The Martinez Cobo Study: Study of the Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations. Final Report Submitted by the Special Raporteur, Mr. José Martines Cobo. United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. http:// undesadspd.org/IndigenousPeoples/LibraryDocuments/Mart%C3%ADnez CoboStudy.aspx. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. 2010. “Study of the need to recognize and respect the rights of Mother Earth,” Ninth session, New York, 19–30 April. http://www .un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/E.C.19.2010.4%20EN.pdf. United Nations. 2009. State of the World´s Indigenous Peoples. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Social Policy and Development, Secretariat of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. ST/ESA/328. http://undesadspd.org/ IndigenousPeoples/LibraryDocuments/StateoftheWorldsIndigenousPeoples.aspx. U.N. General Assembly. 2007. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2 October 2007, A/RES/61/295; http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/.

chapter 4

Indigenous Feature Film: A Pathway for Indigenous Religion? Cato Christensen Introduction During the last couple of decades, filmmaking has proven to be an increasingly significant vehicle for indigenous peoples’ self-representation. Ranging among various forms of media taken up by indigenous peoples – such as radio, television, digital media and newspapers – film, as argued by Emiel Martens, “has proven itself particularly well-suited to render Indigenous stories, traditions and knowledges” (2012: 3). From the offset with indigenous peoples’ involvement in documentary filmmaking in the 1960s, the concept of ‘indigenous film’ now covers a range of formats and countless productions, by indigenous filmmakers all over the world. With pioneering filmmakers such as Barry Barclay, Merata Mita and Nils Gaup in the mid-1980s, we also saw the offset of indigenous feature film production. Feature films, in particular, have added to indigenisation of the silver screen and propelled indigenous filmmaking onto an international stage. This is manifest in a massive increase in screening venues and audience outreach. As of 2016, we are talking about around one hundred full-scale dramatic pictures worldwide by indigenous directors (Pearson and Knabe 2015), some of which have distinguished themselves with critical acclaim, box office success and international recognition from festivals such as Cannes, Toronto, Berlin and Sundance. Indigenous film is indeed, as argued by Kristin Knopf, “on the threshold of claiming a firm share of the media industry and becoming a fullscale and internationally acclaimed film tradition” (2008: 61). Filmmaking adds to a global flow of indigeneity. It does so in the communicative force of films, the ‘reaching out’ to people, indigenous and non-­ indigenous, with representations, stories and knowledge. In addition, it does so in the very concrete form of foregrounding global networks of filmmakers, distributors, audiences, festival organisers and the like, to join together under the banner of indigeneity (Dowell 2006). In and of itself, this makes indigenous filmmaking an interesting field of study in the context of indigenous religion(s). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_006

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In this chapter, I take a closer look at the relationship between indigenous film and discourses of indigenous religion. For the purpose of limitation, I restrict myself to focus on indigenous feature films. That said, with a scope of over a hundred indigenous feature films worldwide, I still do not attempt at providing a conclusive analysis. Rather, the aim is to sketch some ways in which ‘indigenous religion’ can function as an analytical lens to explore indigenous feature films, and vice versa. While indigenous film has come to constitute a growing field of academic study, very little attention has been devoted to the religious aspects of such films, or to the interrelatedness of indigenous filmmaking to discourses of indigenous religion more specifically, for that matter. Scholars have, for instance, discussed the role of indigenous films in adding to ‘counter-discourses’ to hegemonic representations of indigenous peoples (see Knopf 2008), in empowering indigenous peoples locally (see Ginsburg 2002; Wood 2008), and in b­ eing a driver towards establishing networks and community among indigenous peoples around the world (see Dowell 2006), but only fragmentarily has the issue of religion been discussed. In my discussion, I build on some perspectives from such previous research. These are perspectives that, while not explicitly focused on religion, are interesting starting points for approaching the relationship between indigenous film and religion. I start my discussion by sketching a tendency in indigenous feature films to emphasise the importance of religiosity to indigenous peoples’ identity and culture. I then discuss the emphasis on religion in films as a way of relating indigenous groups to the global concept of ‘indigeneity’. Finally, I discuss ways in which many indigenous feature films negotiate with the stereotypes and primitivism in mainstream film and media discourses.

Explicit and Implicit Displays of Religion

There is no shortage of religion in indigenous feature films. For instance, in some of the most well-known, landmark, indigenous feature films, such as Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001, Inuit), Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigitt’s Ten Canoes (2006, Australian aboriginal), and Nils Gaup’s Pathfinder (1987, Sámi), religion lays the foundation for the entire plotline. In Atanarjuat, which translates an Inuit legend for cinema, an unknown shaman putting a curse on a small Inuit community sets the story in motion (Knopf 2008: 315). In Ten Canoes, we are faced with a reality of looming sorcery, spirit possession and religious rituals to prevent war and community downfall (Pearson 2015). In Pathfinder, even the title of the film points to its religious

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dimensions: the young hero Aigin (Mikkel Gaup) coming of age as a spiritual pathfinder for the Sámi community around which the plot revolves (DuBois 2000; Christensen 2015). Examples include also a wide range of other films, worldwide, from the Australian aboriginal film, BeDevil (Tracey Moffatt, 1993), which recreates local ghost stories, to the Native American Older Than America (Georgina Lightning, 2008), which explored visions of ancestors and the resilience of ancient native religious traditions over corrupted Catholicism. These are all examples that show how feature film is one of the arenas that testify to the importance of religion in various indigenous peoples’ self-representation. Such tendencies are also evident when looking more broadly to the expanding circuit of national and international indigenous festivals, which often is a prime distribution channel for indigenous feature films. For instance, as John C. Lyden notes as he reports from The Fourth Biennial VisionMaker Film Festival that was held in Omaha, Lincoln and Kearney, Nebraska, usa, in the fall of 2011: The festival offers a unique opportunity to celebrate Native American film and to note the ways in which the religious and cultural beliefs of Native Americans play a part in their self-representation and their representation of their past and their future. lyden 2012: 1

Notwithstanding that Lyden, writing for Journal of Religion & Film, might have been on the lookout for religion as he and his colleagues visited the festival, his observations can still stand to illustrate the fact that religion sits safely as part of a common representational repertoire of indigenous filmmaking. Not just in America, as reported by Lyden, but all over the world. Seeing religion in indigenous feature films is perhaps to be expected. A ­ fter all, indigenous filmmaking does not exist in a vacuum, but rather is intertwined in broader discourses of cultural and identity politics. Many indigenous filmmakers have political agendas, seeing filmmaking as a vehicle for voicing the uniqueness and value of their cultural and ethnic group, often positioned explicitly against the backdrop of past and present encounters with colonialism (Knopf 2008). As such, to a greater and lesser degree, they aim at portraying indigenous difference from that of their non-indigenous counterpart, and to promote cultural traits as signifiers of ethnic distinction and communality. ­Religion fits very well into such representations of cultural difference. It gives a sense of depth to differences, being more than merely a matter of ‘outer’ signifiers, such as clothes, livelihood and language, but also a different way of being in the world, a different worldview.

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Such perspectives are, for instance, central to Maori filmmaker and writer Barry Barclay’s concept of ‘Fourth Cinema’ (2003) – perhaps the closest thing we will come to a common ideological foundation for indigenous filmmaking (Ginsburg 2012; Murray 2008). In Barclay’s vision, Fourth Cinema, an addition to the well-known First- (American), Second- (Art House) and Third Cinema (‘Third world’) framework, should pave the way for an entirely new cinematic aesthetic – an indigenous aesthetic. Central to Barclay’s thought was the employment of film as a vehicle to rework “ancient core values” of indigenous cultures (Murray 2008: 17). While Barclay stressed indigenous peoples’ spirituality as key to the development of a worldwide Fourth Cinema (Murray 2008), his own feature film Ngati (1987), which together with Mereta Mita’s Mauri (1988) are regarded as pioneering works of Maori Cinema, shows that references to religion are not always explicit. In fact, he warns against seeing indigenous films merely in terms of “surface features,” such as “the rituals, the language, the posturing, the décor, the use of elders, the presence of children, attitudes to land, the rituals of a spirit world” (Barclay 2003: 7, in Murray 2008: 17). Rather, in his ideological and classificatory approach to Fourth Cinema, he implies the influence of religious traditions at a deeper, conceptual level in indigenous filmmaking (Barclay 2003). Following up on the perspectives of Barclay, there is a tendency among some scholars to see religion in indigenous filmmaking as a backdrop to many of the stories being told. This line of thought is, for instance, detectable in the work of Michelle H. Raheja on indigenous filmmaking in North America (2010). Raheja argues that a distinct ‘indigenous aesthetics’ is present in indigenous peoples’ filmmaking, where spiritual traditions are a central aspect. For instance, in juxtaposing indigenous filmmaking to so-called Third Cinema – a term used for postcolonial filmmaking of Africa, Latin America and Asia – she writes the following: While Third Cinema is a postcolonial movement that grew out of cultural and political changes in Africa, Latin America and Asia in the 1960s to denounce Hollywood-style entertainment in favour of a national, popular, and activist vernacular, Indigenous cinema has its roots in specific Indigenous aesthetics with their attendant focus on a particular geographical space, discrete cultural practices, notions of temporality that do not delink the past from the present or future, and spiritual traditions. raheja 2010: 17–18

Besides Barclay, Raheja refers to Steven Leuthold’s much quoted 1998 book ­Indigenous Aesthetics, which stresses that a “strong relationship exists between

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religious and aesthetic expression in indigenous cultures” (Leuthold 1998:189). Following this line of thought, one might argue that the stories told in indigenous films are in themselves often structured in accordance with spiritual norms and traditions. As such, even stories that are not explicitly about religion or spirituality, might – especially for an indigenous audience – serve ­certain spiritual functions. They tell stories of a spiritual nature, and seek to effect audiences in a spiritual way. Similar perspectives are also present in Wendy Gay Pearson’s (2015) analysis of the three films Atanarjuat, Pathfinder and Ten Canoes. While all these three films deal explicitly with religion as part of their narrative, Pearson also finds spirituality inherent in other aspects of them, in the way they convey their narrative and in the aesthetic choices of the filmmakers. For instance, in her analysis of Ten Canoes, she points to the employment of different timeframes and of structuring the narrative through diegetic layers of oral storytelling. This, combined with the usage of slow pacing camera movement, long takes and long shots that situate the spectator within a specific landscape, serve, as she puts it, “to nudge the spectator into an alternative sense of time, one that is radically different from that of the west” (Pearson 2015: 150). The film thus serves as a bridge to a different epistemological and ethical system, and in that way – in itself, and even without considering its more explicit references to religion – functions as an invocation to lives inside a spiritual cosmology. The three films analysed by Pearson are all presented as conveying indigenous storytelling traditions, and to be – in themselves – continuations of the very same, ancient storytelling traditions that they depict. The narratives are set in the past, and the films are structured as to be mythic narratives, where the time of the stories offers guidance to the present. In that sense, it is straightforward to see them as inviting metaphorical interpretations and carrying links to religious traditions, even beyond explicit representations of religious ritual and worldview. However, throughout the landscape of indigenous feature films, it is not just the films dealing with the past that are presented as reciting indigenous storytelling traditions. Rather, reading from presentations of films, for instance in festival programmes, by filmmakers themselves, on the internet and in much research, the notion that indigenous filmmaking represents a continuation of indigenous storytelling traditions, albeit in a new guise, seems to be a rather standard conception. As Huston Wood put it: “To greater and lesser degrees, every Indigenous film reflects the specific storytelling traditions of the native peoples being represented” (Wood 2008: 1). Arguably, the discursive practice of promoting feature films as vehicles for indigenous storytelling traditions is much more than a simple statement of the nature of indigenous films: that films are a way for indigenous peoples

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to tell their own stories, represent themselves, rather than being represented by non-indigenous people. It is also a way of contextualising filmmaking in a larger complex of indigenous culture, values and beliefs, and an investment in the notion that indigenous peoples are carriers of fundamentally different worldviews from that of Western, dominant society. This way of adding to an ­“indigenous politics of difference” (Niezen 2012: 120) is not insignificant in terms of linking indigenous feature films to discourses of indigenous religion. Rather, it might be seen as both adding to and drawing on the very same discursive repertoire, and hence functioning as a cognate that indexes notions of indigenous peoples’ spiritual affiliations. This brings to the fore that films do not only convey meaning on an intramedial level, through what they entail of explicit representations, but also on an inter-medial level, through the way they interplay with and draw on broader societal, cultural, historical and political discourses (see Erll 2008). The research on indigenous films is also at stake here. That is, while explicit discussion on ‘religion’, as mentioned, is lacking in most scholars’ work on indigenous filmmaking, the framing of films as displays of ‘storytelling traditions’ are widespread, encompassing both culturalisation and, arguably, spiritualisation into their meaning.

Religion as Indigenisation

As this anthology truly shows, religion is an increasingly integral part of the common representational repertoire of indigeneity, at a transnational and global level, but also at national and local levels. Indigenous religions are increasingly perceived as a singular entity, related to notions of a collective ­indigenous identity, rather than being perceived in the plural, related to the plurality of different indigenous identities around the world. While it is ultimately hard to estimate the influence of indigenous filmmaking on such broader discourses on indigenous religion (in the singular), its role in shaping views on indigenous peoples for public opinion should not be underestimated. After all, as an increased interest in film and popular culture in social sciences during the last decades tells us, media representations, be it by film, radio, tv or any other mass distributing apparatus, contribute significantly to give meaning to social reality. Media provide, as Douglas Kellner so adequately puts it, “the materials out of which people forge their very identities” (1995: 1). When discussing the influence of indigenous filmmaking on discourses of indigeneity (and indigenous religion), it is also important to look beyond distributive patterns, commercial appeal and audience numbers, which o­ bviously

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are (still) quite low compared to Western cinema. As Huston Wood (2008) points out, simply because most people’s level of knowledge of indigenous communities and cultures are quite low, indigenous films of all kind, even feature films, might potentially carry power to influence views on indigenous groups significantly. This is the case with all representations of indigenousness, even those of Hollywood and other non-indigenous sources, but films carrying the authenticated mark of being an ‘insider’ indigenous perspective are all the more likely to be conceived as “windows into reality” (Wood 2008: 65). Another issue that is interesting when discussing the interaction of filmmaking and discourses of indigenous religion is the dynamics between the local and the global. All indigenous feature films are, in a sense, local. They originate from different artistic minds and skills, and respond to different ‘local’ cultural, political and historical trajectories. However, filmmaking is never merely a local endeavor. It is inevitably shaped by the globalisation of film as a medium, by discourses of film that transcend national boundaries and by a growing international indigenous cinema network (Goulet and Swanson 2013; Pearson and Knabe 2015; Columpar 2010). Moreover, indigenous filmmaking is a field that has developed in parallel to the internationalisation of indigeneity. As such, its representations are arguably, at least to some extent, shaped by global discourses on what it means to be ‘indigenous’. In some cases, filmmaking is indeed even part of (and adds to) the refashioning of identity that many indigenous peoples around the world go through, as they increasingly bond to global discourses of indigeneity. They are what Laura R. Graham and H. Glenn Penny call a ‘performance of indigeneity’ (2014). Emphasising religiosity in the display of specific ethnic and cultural groups in such films might be part of this process of indigenisation. As such, even though the (explicit or implicit) religiosity of indigenous feature films are often anchored in local or national contexts of traditions and local histories of religion, both the mere fact that religion is given weight in the first place and the way it is displayed, might cater to a vocabulary of indigeneity. Privileging religion as a cultural trait, hence, might add to fit distinct indigenous groups into a shared symbolic repertoire of ‘the indigenous slot’ (see Li 2000). While obviously not all indigenous feature films invite scrutiny from such perspectives, at least some do. One example can be drawn from my own research on the aforementioned Sámi feature film Pathfinder (Nils Gaup, 1987; see Christensen 2010; Christensen 2012; Christensen 2013; Christensen 2015). Pathfinder was the first ever feature film to be written and directed by a Sámi. Nils Gaup, Pathfinder’s writer-director, whom himself was a Sámi, was influenced by stories he had grown up with; stories that, according to the film’s

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opening text, had been “passed down from generation to generation for nearly 1000 years.” The narrative of the film was set in an ancient, pre-colonial past. It followed the intense struggles of a group of Sámi nomads as they were faced with a band of murderous, invading marauders – the Tchudes. Pathfinder connected explicitly to an ongoing struggle for Sámi cultural and political rights in Norway during the 1980s. Aside from having tremendous symbolic value to many Sámi, its focus on Sámi culture, tradition and resilience in the face of threat, offered a comment on Norwegian assimilation and missionary politics towards the Sámi that had been going on for centuries. Although the film followed a rather formulaic and effective action plot, it still took the time to dwell on characterisations of Sámi cultural inventory and traditions. In this way, it took part in a broader discourse concerning what it meant to be Sámi and what the characteristics of Sámi culture were and should be. Religion was prominent in this. The film painted a picture of the ancient Sámi society as defined by spirituality. In the film, it is their worldview, a sort of nature oriented cosmological holism, that makes the Sámi whom they are, what distinguishes them as a people, and what separates them from their counterparts. For instance, a prominent subplot of the film deals with the strive to ensure continuation of their religious tradition, in the face of war and genocide. At one level, Pathfinder’s emphasis on religion was anchored in local traditions and a local history of religion. In particular, it functioned to traditionalise Sámi culture towards a backdrop of Christian mission and assimilation politics that had oppressed and devalued Sámi pre-Christian traditions for centuries – a way of reclaiming the past, so to speak (Christensen 2010; Christensen 2015). Simultaneously, its representation of religion functioned at another level as cues to the process of indigenisation that was going on among the Sámi at the time (Christensen 2010; Christensen 2015). The Norwegian Sámi officially ­‘became’ an indigenous people in 1990, when the Norwegian state ratified International Labour Organisation Convention 169, but this was preceded by more than a decade of intense ‘indigenisation’, comprising changes of both a political and cultural nature (Eidheim 1998; Minde 2003). In this process, an entirely new context for the formulation of self-images and the identification of a Sámi cultural domain was created. As several scholars have argued, this process also had a distinct religious dimension. For instance, Siv Ellen Kraft (2009) shows how increased actualisation of religion as a symbolic resource in Sámi nation-building over the last four decades, can be seen as a refashioning of the Sámi as part of a global indigenous identity. Pathfinder’s construction of the Sámi as a people defined

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by their spiritual anchoring, traditions and heritage was part of this process ­(Christensen 2010; Christensen 2015). While anchored in local traditions and a local history of religion, Pathfinder’s representation of religion, at the same time, connected with an emerging global discourse of indigenous religion.

Emancipation from Primitivism

While I so far have talked about a broad tendency in indigenous feature films of emphasising the essentiality of religiosity to indigenous peoples’ identity and culture, this should not be taken as a generalisation about the entire corpus of indigenous feature films out there. Just as the mere number of films, their diverse themes, plots, characterisations and cultural anchorings would make it far-fetched to call indigenous feature film a genre, so it would to generalise about the representation of religiosity in them. After all, in a great many indigenous feature films, there is no trace of religion at all, at least not explicitly, while in others, the religion represented does at least not invite interpretation in terms of discourses of indigenous religion. One reason might be a strong drive among many indigenous filmmakers towards distancing themselves from ‘misrepresentations’ of indigenous peoples by mainstream discourse and media. This, what anthropologist Kristin Dowell calls “visual sovereignty” (2013:1; see also Raheja 2010), does not only simply entail emancipation from dehumanising and derogatory clichés of primitive savages, bloodthirsty devils and dumb, childlike people in need of civilising. For many indigenous filmmakers, it also means emancipation from romantic media ‘myths’ of indigenous peoples, including those of indigenous peoples’ spiritual affiliations. One might thus assume that some indigenous filmmakers simply avoid religious themes all together, in fear of adding to such representations’ reproduction. This might be especially pertinent to filmmakers over, for example, indigenous activists and artists working with other formats, simply because film has been – and still is – a prime vehicle for stereotyping, primitivising and generally misrepresenting indigenous peoples, even in romanticised versions (see Kilpatrick 1999). Just think of, as Pearson and Knabe remind us, “the steamroller that is Hollywood’s influence on representation” (2015: 4), with the exotic visions of Native Americans in productions such as A Man Called Horse (Elliot Silverstein 1970), Little Big Man (Arthur Penn 1970) and, perhaps most noticeably, Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner 1990). While there are good reasons to promote a more nuanced notion of indigenous peoples than merely as victims of Hollywood’s and other outsiders’ representations, as argued by for instance Michelle Raheja (2010) and Faye Ginsburg (2002),

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many indigenous filmmakers are still directing their efforts at countering the ­“influential stereotype-driven and stereotype-creating effects of the mainstream film industry” (Pearson and Knabe 2015: 4). One particularly good example is the Native American film Smoke Signals (1998), directed by Chris Eyre. Smoke Signals is a road-movie. It tells the story of Coeur d’Alene adolescent boys Victor and Thomas, who leave their lives at the reservation, and set out for Phoenix, Arizona, to claim the ashes of Victor’s father. Smoke Signals uses irony and satire to counter, dismantle and ridicule Western, and particularly Hollywood, clichés of Native Americans. Chiefly among these are what Knopf calls “the Western construct of the mythological and spiritual Indian” (2008: 249). Part of the twist in Smoke Signals, as such, is that it plays with audiences’ preconception in recontextualising some of the most prevalent Indian stereotypes. For instance, throughout the film, there are several inter-medial references to Hollywood and other pop cultural clichés about Indians, and indeed other indigenous peoples. Most predominantly, these references function as an indirect critique of the influence of “the Hollywood Indian” on young Native Americans struggling to find their identity (Wood 2008: 20; Knopf 2008: 255). In the film, one of the main characters, Victor, mocks his companion, Thomas, for having learned how to act Indian from watching Dances with wolves (Kevin Costner 1990) “two hundred times” (Wood 2008: 20). More obvious references to spirituality follow in the same manner; for instance as a take-off of the shaman character (Old Lodge Skin, played by Dan George) in the movie Little Big Man (Arthur Penn 1970), who says the famous line, “It’s a good day to die.” In Smoke Signals (1998), this intensely melodramatic quote reappears in modified guises, jokingly juxtaposed to the most mundane situations, such as the morning radio broadcast (“It’s a good day to be indigenous”), during breakfast (“Sometimes it’s a good day to die. Sometimes it’s a good day to have breakfast”) and playing basketball (“Yeah, sometimes it’s a good day to die. Sometimes it’s a good day to play basketball”). Smoke Signals is not, Knopf argues, “a counter-discourse which refurbishes or blatantly attacks old clichés but an answering discourse that presents Indigenous culture in its own right, offering a critique of colonisation and misrepresentation of Indigenous cultures in a largely ironic way. It recontextualises the Indian image of mainstream thought and responds with a freshly different representation” (2008: 238). Reading from interviews with the director, Chris Eyre, the ironic way of dealing with religion is an outcome both of respect for Native Americans’ ‘actual’ religiosity and a counter reaction to spiritual iconification of Native Americans in Hollywood films and the media in general. As Eyre puts it in one interview:

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I wouldn’t do ceremony in my films because I don’t know how to capture it. It’s subjective. Those who exploit it do a disservice to it. A Man Called Horse bastardized the Sun Dance, and vision quest sounds so cliché if it’s not done in the right way. There’s nothing that can capture it. Indian religion isn’t considered a real thing. People regard it as non-religion, not a real religion. I think we’ve fallen short of portraying Indians in the media. Indians have never been portrayed in a respectful way, someone always over romanticizes or over glorifies them on an iconic level. eyre, in Fielding 2003

Here, it seems obvious that the romantic portrayal of indigenous religiosity by Hollywood was part of the stereotypical repertoire that the filmmakers sought to debunk. By a combination of avoiding and offering inter-medial meta-­ commentaries on religion, it opposes a tradition of representation that already has iconised and romanticised Native American religious traditions too much. It is interesting to compare the approach taken by Smoke Signals to that of, for instance, the aforementioned Pathfinder – a film that went in the opposite direction, highlighting spiritual aspects of that specific indigenous culture. While both Smoke Signals and Pathfinder obviously share a certain desire for debunking outsiders’ representations of Native Americans and the Sámi respectively, their take on religion responds to very different histories of colonialism and colonial representations. As opposed to the romantic ‘media myths’ of Native American spirituality that are the backdrop to Smoke ­Signals, Pathfinder’s emphasis on religion had arguably no such representational counterpart. Instead, it was positioned (at least partly) against a backdrop of ­century-long oppression and devaluation of Sámi non-Christian traditions (Christensen 2015; Dubois 2000). For the Sámi cultural and political revitalisation movement of the 1980s, of which Pathfinder was a part, highlighting religious traditions was arguably more accessible as a counterhegemonic strategy. While Pathfinder responded to a history of religion that needed to be redeemed and reclaimed, Smoke Signals responded to a history of religion that needed to be downplayed, left alone, respected, not commercialised. This goes to show that while many indigenous filmmakers seek to respond to historical trauma, religion plays different roles in the equation. For some, representations of their religious traditions are considered to be in need of redemption, while for others, representations are considered to be in need of redemption from religion. It also reminds us that, to quote Pearson and Knabe, “Indigenous filmmaking comprises a wide spectrum of political positions, anti- and post-colonial ideologies, and, indeed, attitudes towards embracing or rejecting particular forms of identity” (2015: 13). In terms of the latter, obviously

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not all indigenous filmmakers share an equally conscious attitude towards refraining from the (re)production of romantic, primitivist myths of indigenous religion(s). Indeed, throughout the landscape of indigenous feature films we find the entire spectrum, from, on the one hand, representations that come very close simply to catering to stereotypes of the spiritual ‘noble savages’ to, on the other, obvious attempts to deflect or counter those very same discursive tropes. For instance, in Older Than America (2008), by Maskwacis Cree filmmaker Georgina Lightning, the approach to religion is very different from that of Eyre’s Smoke Signals. Here, much like in Pathfinder, the very notion of holding an indigenous identity is intrinsically associated with spirituality. In fact, in some of Chris Eyre’s later productions as well, such as the tv-movies Skinwalkers (2002) and A Thief of Time (2004), Native Americans’ spiritual affiliations are at the core of the plot, with seemingly no ironical or satirical twist (Wood 2008: 35–38). While I take it to be beyond the scope of this chapter to pass judgement on indigenous feature films’ positioning on a continuum between primitivism and anti-primitivism, it is at least safe to say that for indigenous filmmakers, representations of religion are complicated. Images of indigenous religiosity both belong to a repertoire of non-indigenous stereotypes, and – as this anthology discusses – a repertoire of indigenous representational resources. Sometimes the balancing between the two is difficult, simply because many indigenous peoples around the world have been forced to see themselves through the eyes of others for a very long time. As such, when talking back to the categories that have been created to contain indigenous peoples – through various media, and in this case feature film – it is often, at the same time, a talking back through the very same categories (Ginsburg 2002: 51). Kristin Knopf’s (2008) perspectives on indigenous filmmaking as a ‘hybrid’ form of self-definition and cultural expression is arguably useful in this respect. Through the concept of hybridity, she criticises the emphasis on indigenous films as merely ‘counter-discourses’ to hegemonic power and representations, stating that their post-colonial nature need not only be anti-colonialist, but also carry a certain dialogue and interaction with colonialist discourses (Knopf 2008: 29). As she puts it: On the one hand, postcolonial filmmaking is driven by the need to deviate and differentiate itself from mainstream filmmaking; on the other, […] the concept of hybrid filmic practice [needs to be] introduced. ­Hybrid film practice in regard to Indigenous filmmaking needs to be understood in the Bhabhian sense of creating a third space, where Western film technology, conventions, and genres mingle with Indigenous usage and negotiation of these, infused with content that derives from various

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Indigenous constructions of cultural meaning as well as structures, styles, and techniques that are informed by traditional and modern Indigenous cultural practice and expression. knopf 2008: 53

As most indigenous feature films carry with them underlying colonialist notions in relation to the portrayal and weight given to religion, this might also vary with the aspirations of filmmakers in terms of outreach and commercial success. Indigenous feature films vary in terms of targeting audiences. Some filmmakers seek primarily to ‘give back’ to local communities, whereas some aim at targeting the widest possible audience, indigenous and non-indigenous alike. More often than not, as Pearson and Knabe suggest, filmmakers try to “mediate between disparate audiences and spectatorial expectations” (2015: 26). In the latter case, indigenous filmmakers providing an accessible aesthetic experience that also allows non-indigenous spectators to translate the film into familiar categories, will perhaps inevitably harbour a risk of repeating clichés and romantic notions about their own cultures. Conclusion In the heading for this chapter, I ask whether indigenous feature film is a pathway for indigenous religion. I think it is safe to say that it is. However, it is not a straightforward pathway. While the corpus of indigenous feature films from around the globe does anything but contradict images of indigenous peoples as spiritual, it does not univocally invoke the notion of indigenous peoples around the world as one collective spiritual unity. Rather, as a discursive field in the articulation of indigeneity at the intersection of the local and global, the national and the transnational, indigenous feature film pulls in various directions. It is a discursive field that stresses both commonalities and difference between indigenous groups and individuals. The same goes for their religiosity. Indigenous film is a field that both promotes indigenous religions (in the plural) and indigenous religion (in the singular), sometimes both and sometimes neither. It is a field that sometimes reproduces primitivism and stereotypes about indigenous peoples, and sometimes debunks or at least nuances primitivism and stereotypes about indigenous peoples. It is a field that sometimes moves along trajectories outside, in opposition to, or as an alternative to Western cinema and media, and sometimes alongside, in collaboration with and interwoven into Western cinema and media. Throughout this chapter, I have discussed some aspects that are worth considering when looking at indigenous feature films through the analytical lens

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of indigenous religion. While I have touched upon several of the issues above, against the backdrop of a relative scarcity of scholarly attention towards religious aspects of indigenous feature films, there still is a lot to explore. In so doing, we should remind ourselves that the landscape of indigenous feature film is as diverse as the films are numerous. It is equally important to remind ourselves that indigenous feature film is not a static field, and that what can be seen as thematic tendencies so far, do not need to be so in the future. One, perhaps main ‘move’ to note within the field, has to do with generational shifts among indigenous filmmakers. This is currently going on. A ‘second generation’ of indigenous filmmakers is taking over from the ‘first generation’. With this, the political and ideological drive behind filmmaking might shift. For instance, Faye Ginsburg talks about a ‘new wave’ of indigenous filmmakers in Australia that “no longer feel the need to shoulder the initial burden of representation borne by those before them who literally had to invent Indigenous cinema when virtually nothing existed” (2012: 19). It remains to be seen how changes like this turn out in respect to religion. References Barclay, B. 2003. “Celebrating Fourth Cinema.” Illusions 19, 7–11. Christensen, C. 2010. “Religion i Veiviseren: en analyse av Sámisk religiøs revitalisering.” DIN: Tidsskrift for religion og kultur. 1–2, 6–33. Christensen, C. 2012. “‘Overtroen er stor blant Viddenes folk’: om religion og koloniale relasjoner i Sámisk filmhistorie.” Tidsskrift for kulturforskning. 11: 2, 5–25. Christensen, C. 2013. Religion som Sámisk identitetsmarkør: Fire studier av film. PhD. The University of Tromsø, Norway. At http://munin.uit.no/handle/10037/5173 Accessed 09/06/2016. Christensen, C. 2015. “Sámi Shamanism and Indigenous Film: The Case of Pathfinder.” In S.E. Kraft, T.A. Fonneland and J.R. Lewis, eds, Nordic Neoshamanisms. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 175–190. Columpar, C. 2010. Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dowell, K.L. 2006. “Indigenous Media Gone Global: Strengthening Indigenous Identity On and Offscreen at the First Nations/First Features Film Showcase.” American Anthropologist. 108: 2, 376-384. Dowell, K.L. 2013. Sovereign Screens: Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast. ­Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. DuBois, T.A. 2000. “Folklore, boundaries and audience in The Pathfinder.” In J. ­Pentikäinen, ed. Sámi Folkloristics. Turku: NIF, 255–274.

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Eidheim, H. 1998. “Ethno-Political Development among the Sámi after World War II. The Invention of Selfhood.” In H. Gaski, ed. Sámi Culture in a New Era: the Norwegian Sámi Experience. Karasjok: Davvi Girji, 29–61. Erll, A. 2008. “Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory.” In A. Erll and A. Nünning, eds. Cultural Memory Studies: An Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 389–398. Fielding, J.R. 2003. “Native American religion and film: interviews with Chris Eyre and Sherman Alexie.” Journal of Religion and Film. 7:1. At http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol7/iss1/5/ Ginsburg, F.D. 2002. “Screen memories: resignifying the traditional in indigenous media.” In F.D. Ginsburg, L. Abu-Lughod and B. Larkin, eds. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Ewing, CA: University of California Press, 39–57. Ginsburg, F.D. 2012. “Australia’s Indigenous New Wave: Future Imaginaries in Recent Aboriginal Feature Films.” Revised version of Adriaan Gerbrands Lecture, May 29, 2012. At http://www.fel-leiden.nl/en/gerbrandslecture/ Goulet D. and Swanson K. 2013. “Indigenous Feature Film Production in Canada: A National and International Perspective.” Report commissioned by the imagine NATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival. At: http://www.omdc.on.ca/Assets/Research/ Research+Reports/Indigenous+Feature+Film/Indigenous+Feature+Film+Producti on+in+Canada.pdf. Accessed 10/06/2016. Graham, L.R. and Penny, H.G. 2014. “Performing Indigeneity: Emergent Identity, SelfDetermination, and Sovereignty.” In L.R. Graham and H.G. Penny, eds. Performing Indigeneity. Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1–31. Kellner, D. 1995. Media Culture. Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern. London, New York: Routledge. Kilpatrick, J. 1999. Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Knopf, K. 2008. Decolonizing the Lens of Power: Indigenous Films in North America. ­Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi Kraft, S.E. 2009. “Sámi Indigenous Spirituality: Religion and Nation-building in Norwegian Sàpmi.” Temenos. 45:2, 179–206. Leuthold, S. 1998. Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media and Identity. Austin: University of Texas Press. Li, T.M. 2000. “Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia: Resource Politics and the Tribal Slot.” Comparative Studies in Society and History. 42:1, 149–179. Lyden, J.C. 2012. “Fourth Biennial VisionMaker Film Festival Report.” Journal of Religion & Film: 15:2. At http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol15/iss2/9. Accessed 09/06/2016.

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Martens E. 2012. “Maori on the Silver Screen: The Evolution of Indigenous Feature Filmmaking in Aotearoa/New Zealand.” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies. 5:1, 1–30. Minde, H. 2003. “The challenge of indigenism: The struggle for Sámi land rights and self-government in Norway 1960–1990.” In S. Jentoft, H. Minde, and R. Nilsen, eds. Indigenous Peoples: Resource Management and Global Rights. Delft: Eburon Academic Publishers, 75–106. Murray, S. 2008. Images of Dignity: Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema. Wellington: ­University of Hawaii Press. Niezen, R. 2012. “Indigenous Religion and Human Rights.” In J. Witte Jr and M.C. Green, eds. Religion and Human Rights: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 119–134. Pearson, W.G. 2015. “‘Once upon a Time in a Land Far, Far Away’: Representations of the Pre-Colonial World in Atanarjuat, Ofelas, and 10 Canoes.” In W.G. Pearson and S. Knabe, eds. Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 143–171. Pearson, W.G. and S. Knabe. 2015. “Globalizing Indigenous Film and Media.” In W.G. Pearson and S. Knabe, eds. Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 3–40. Raheja. M. 2010. Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press. Wood, H. 2008. Native Features: Indigenous Films from Around the World. New York, London: Continuum.



Films

A Man Called Horse. 1970. Directed by Elliot Silverstein. Paramount Pictures, DVD. A Thief of Time. 2004. Directed by Chris Eyre. TV Movie. PBS Pictures. DVD. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. 2001. Directed by Zacharias Kunuk. Sony Pictures. BeDevil. 1993. Directed by Tracey Moffatt. Ronin Films. Dances with Wolves. 1990. Directed by Kevin Costner. Orion Pictures. Little Big Man. 1970. Directed by Arthur Penn. Paramount Home Media. DVD. Mauri. 1988. Directed by Mereta Mita. Hauraki Film Enterprises. Ngati. 1987. Directed by Barry Barclay. New Zealand Film Commission. Older Than America. 2008. Directed by Georginia Lightning. Tribal Alliance Productions. Pathfinder. 1987. Directed by Nils Gaup. Norsk Film AS. Skinwalkers. 2002. Directed by Chris Eyre. TV Movie. PBS Pictures. Smoke Signals. 1998. Directed by Chris Eyre. Miramax. Ten Canoes. 2006. Directed by Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigitt. Palace Films.

chapter 5

Sounds Indigenous: Negotiating Identity in an Era of World Music Rosalind I.J. Hackett Introduction As a contribution to the growing scholarship on global indigenous religion(s) this chapter explores the role of sound, including musical sounds, in the politics of indigeneity. Markers of indigenous identity are diverse and grounded locally for the most part, whether in terms of language, land, mythology, ­cosmology, symbolism, taboos, ritual practice, bloodlines, social structure, artefacts, historical events, or the visual and performing arts. Discourses on sound and recourses to sonic expression – whether vocalised or instrumental – as distinctive or distinguishing features of indigenous identity remain relatively underresearched. Yet the emergence of a global indigenous movement from the 1980s, together with the growing influence of new sound and music-related technologies, analogue and digital, in many domains of life (Théberge 1997; Jones 1992), has had a noticeable impact on the recording, transmitting, sharing, and marketing of the sounds of indigenous peoples in our interconnected world. This impact can be positive in that the creative expression of indigenous peoples can benefit from transcultural recognition and collaboration. But it may also be negatively impacted by commercialisation and m ­ isappropriation (see, for example Wilson and Stewart 2008: 11). To pursue a more sonically focused line of inquiry is pertinent to understanding the changing local–global dynamic of indigenous religious and cultural actors as they upscale to the global stage and engage in new forms of interaction, articulation, translation, and transaction. For, as noted by Bob W. White, “[i]f world music has indeed become the soundtrack for globalisation, then music is not merely a manifestation of global processes and dynamics but is the very terrain on which globalisation is articulated” (White 2011: 1). A more sonically aware study of the globalisation of indigenous religions is also timely because of the burgeoning of the interdisciplinary field of sound studies in recent decades (Sterne 2012). A rich range of multidisciplinary resources on the production and transmission of sound, the culture and materiality of aurality, and new forms of hearing and listening, is now available © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_007

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(Erlmann 2004; Szendy 2007). As noted by the editors of Keywords in Sound, sound is “a substance of the world as well as a basic part of how people frame their knowledge about the world” (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015: 2). It is not just about sounds made and sounds heard, but also about sounds imagined, by both individuals and communities (Kahn 1999: 3). There is also the question of which subsets of sounds are classified as ‘musical’, widely recognised as “a set of performative acts and objects of inscription that invite particular modes of listening” (Sakakeeny 2015: 113). Matt Sakakeeny reminds us that music is an idea and not just a form, which is germane to the present study on global religious indigenism. Operating with the broader categorisation of sound takes us beyond more formal ritual or performance settings into private and public soundscapes (Samuels et al. 2010; Schafer 1994).1 This type of approach emphasises the ‘sensory domain’ over more formal musical inscription and social mediation over music’s exceptionalism (Sakakeeny 2015: 116–118). Furthermore, it allows for an expanded understanding of the human voice and vocalisation, beyond singing alone (Weidman 2014). If we want to explore the cultural and religious work sound does or is believed to do in indigenous settings, then we are obliged to turn to a variety of ethnomusicological, ethnographic, and historical sources. Discourses on sound in relation to indigeneity are more frequently embedded in popular or scholarly accounts of performance and expressive practices. They may similarly arise in relation to questions of language, orality, and media ­communications. But to consider sound as aspectual is no different from considering gender as a category of analysis and as integral to all areas of social and cultural life. So in approaching the various case studies and examples selected for this chapter, what might be the guiding questions? First and foremost, we need to ask if specific indigenous peoples or translocal alliances claim a particular sound or sounds (vocal and/or instrumental) as constitutive and/or distinctive of their identity or heritage, and how that sound or set of sounds might bear religious meaning. Second, it would be important to know how (religious) discourses and practices of sound might ‘expand’ regionally and/or globally in response to encounters with other indigenous peoples and/or with Western or Middle Eastern musical sounds, for instance. Do new (or revived) claims emerge for a shared global ‘indigenous’ sound (or primordial sonic essence) in conjunction with global indigenous activism and/or as a consequence of New Age and world music appropriations and categorisations? 1 But, see Novak and Sakakeeny (2015) for critiques on the limitations of sound and soundscape theory and the need for more integration of ‘sound studies’ and ‘music studies’.

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Third, how have new digital technologies transformed the production and reception of indigenous (musical) sounds? What bearing do the new technological possibilities have on discourses of authenticity (see also Jones 1992: 207)? Do recorded and/or performed indigenous sounds endorse primitivist notions of indigenous spirituality or do they challenge such notions as part of the ongoing politics of recognition? What effects do such trends have on enhancing or diminishing the religious or spiritual framing of the sound(s)? In the global marketplace, are there any noticeable trends in discourse from religious to spiritual to secular or vice versa? The examples explored below were chosen in part for their ethnic, geographic, and gender diversity but primarily because the question of sound – its o­ wnership, its authenticity, its effects, its translation, its transaction, its ­mediation – featured more prominently in the associated popular and scholarly literature. In other words, musical instruments, percussive, and vocal ­practices are discussed in terms of their purported (sacred) sonic power and quality. Furthermore, they provide historical perspectives on the evolution of these sonic practices from localised settings to more global stages, along with evaluation of their commodification and expanded outreach. In sum, they can challenge us to consider what a focus on sound, and its perceived spiritual roots or religious framing, provides in the quest for greater understanding of the l­ocal–global dynamic of contemporary indigeneity. They invite us to be more attentive to the role of the sonic and aurality in the new indigenous presence referred to by James Clifford as ‘indigènitude’ (Clifford 2013) or ‘global indigenism’ by Ronald Niezen (Niezen 2003). We might ask how uses of sound provide new audibility and not just visibility for indigenous peoples. Similarly, it would behoove us to know to what extent ideas about sound are part of, if not integral to, the negotiation of indigenous cultural identity and representation in our globalising world. For example, based on her study of nineteenth-century Colombian primary sources (hearing, writing, speech, and song), ethnomusicologist Ana María Ochoa Gautier finds that “ideas about sound, especially the voice, were central to the very definition of life,” and that the question of how to distinguish between human and nonhuman sounds took on greater importance in a colonial context (Gautier 2014: 5). In the present piece, I focus on the contemporary, global context not just because of space constraints but also because this period of modern technological mediation and heightened encounter between indigenous peoples and between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples (through activism and tourism, for example) has occasioned noticeably more discourse on sound (Greene and Porcello 2005; Manuel 1993). The advances in sound mixing and recording,

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and the democratisation of such technology, feature prominently in some of the debates about identity and authenticity (on indigenous media, see, Wilson and Stewart 2008: Ginsburg 1991). In the 1980s, at the height of the era of postmodernism, thanks to scholars like James Clifford we were urged to be more self-critical and reflexive about how we went about ‘writing culture’ (Clifford 1988). With rapidly developing technologies of mediation (Sakakeeny 2015: 121; Lysloff and Gay 2003) and new forms of sound reproduction (Sterne 2003), we have arguably entered into another critical phase, that of ‘recording culture’ (see also Lacasse 2000). This is the focus of Christopher Scales’s important study of the Aboriginal music industry of the Northern Plains and the powwow social world that supports it (Scales 2012). His work underscores the potential of this historical moment for more sonically aware studies of indigenous culture and religion. Scales argues that, until recently, the aesthetic practices of contemporary powwow singers when recording have been virtually ignored in the study of Native American expressive cultures. For more than a decade, he conducted field research at powwows, while also serving for some of that time as a sound engineer for Arbor Records, a large Aboriginal music label based in Winnipeg, Canada. He argues that the rise of ‘competition powwows’, popular weekendlong singing and dancing contests, has been highly influential in shaping the repertoire and aesthetics of drum groups both in and out of the recording studio. This is particularly the case for younger drum groups that can emulate the award-winning groups at these gatherings. The salience of this rich ethnography for our present purposes is the fact that while in the recording studio, by virtue of serving as the sound engineer of a particular group, Scales kept on asking the musicians “how should it sound?” (Scales 2012: 212, 263, 265). In exploring the aesthetic universe of powwow recording, he writes about their preference for “liveness” (live recording and single take) and distrust of studio mediation that is typical of almost all these recordings (Scales 2012: 222). It concerns the ‘energy’ and traditional Native values that singers are able to invoke on the powwow grounds, along with, as one recording engineer and producer explained, their investment in “the ideology of liveness as an index of authenticity” (Scales 2012: 216). Multitracking and other forms of studio manipulation are considered ‘cheating’ and a breaking of the rules agreed on by both performers and producers that recording is a conduit and a means of capturing a live performance (Scales 2012: 223). Interestingly, post-recording sound effects are not considered so inauthentic because they did not interfere with the single-take performance. For example, the addition of digital reverb is intended to offset the sterility of the recording studio and mimic the “natural” ambience of powwow performances (Scales

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2012: 232).2 Significantly, because the drum is regarded as sacred, no digital effects were applied to it as opposed to the voice (Scales 2012: 224). In contrast to rock music, it is the drum and not the voice that “must remain as unmediated (or as documentary) as possible” (Scales 2012: 224–225). In his final chapter, Scales returns to the central question of his overall study, namely “Why record?” (Scales 2012: 243). He claims that “[u]nderstanding the symbolic status of recordings as unique cultural texts is crucial for tracing the links between powwow recordings, competition performances, and indigenous modernity” (Scales 2012: 243). He further nuances his question to incorporate more emphasis on how a (commercial) recording is produced and evaluated. He contends that the ‘aesthetics of liveness’ provides the bridge between technology and tradition, between the demands of the recording industry for polished, original performances and singers with responsibilities to dancers and community and concerns for authenticity (Scales 2012: 255). Scales suggests that “mediated forms of powwow music become powerful signs of modern indigenous identity, and mediate between the discourses of modernity and tradition” (Scales 2012: 255–256). These recordings are also predicated on an imagined audience that is intertribal or ‘supratribal’ and may include non-Natives (Scales 2012: 258–259). In conclusion, he reminds us that the discourses of tradition and modernity have been adopted by Native Americans from the twentieth century onwards as a tool of “social and political mobilisation and cultural consolidation” (Scales 2012: 259). He cautions us as scholars to not conflate emic and analytical uses of these terms, especially given the limitations of deploying tradition as a defining marker of identity in a mass-mediated, globalising world. Being more attentive to the nature and representational implications of recording culture enabled Scales to treat recording as “both a process and a text that produces knowledge, theory, and argument” (Scales 2012: 267). Ethnomusicologist Beverly Diamond also worked with sound producers and musicians in Native American audio recordings in Canada (Diamond 2005). She explores how contemporary Native American recording artists negotiate their ambiguous position between traditional, world, and popular music genres (Diamond 2005: 119). To avoid stereotyping, some “choose not to present sonic markers of Aboriginality” and be included in the genre of popular music (Diamond 2005: 120–121). She notes that this strategy differs from Sámi and Australian Aboriginal artists at the time. She explores the ideologies of sound production and manipulation in four cds by Native American artists, 2 See also Doyle 2005: 5 on the “affective outcomes” of the use of echo and reverb in classic rock and roll and pop recordings, cited in Scales 2012: 232.

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noting the significance of artist collaboration (including with the ancestors) and the influence of a complex mix of factors on the rationale for production decisions (Diamond 2005: 129). The importance of the clarity and accuracy of voice and drum sounds for identifying a region, nation, and individual musician emerged from her case studies and interviews. The use of reverberation proved to be more contentious. Some artists liked the spaciousness afforded by reverb. Another was comfortable with the “New Age targeting” implicit in the heavy reverb, especially in combination with flute or slow song tempos (Diamond 2005: 132). She also refers to other New Age conventions such as bells, open-fifth harmonies on a synthesizer, occasional flute entries and birds, both cries and wing flapping (Diamond 2005: 131). Even though it has been demonstrated that many listeners outside of First Nations contexts hear extensive reverberation as “part of the casting of Aboriginal music as ‘spiritual’,” Diamond notes that none of the musicians she interviewed made mention of such an association (Diamond 2005:132). For them it is about filling the spaces in music. They are more worried about reverberant arrangements (or inaccurate drum and voice sounds) destroying the specificity of timbral information about place and nation. They remained open to a variety of musical arrangements as long as there was trust between collaborators. Moving from the Native American to the South African recording scene, Louise Meintjes’s influential study of music-making in a South African recording studio in the turbulent early 1990s reveals the technical, as well as personal, artistic, racial and ethnic ways, in which artists, producers, and sound engineers collaborate to shape Zulu popular music (Meintjes 2003). Production of this music is also shaped by the global traffic in music styles and technologies. While her focus is more on ethnic traditions and national identity, rather than on religion per se, we learn about the struggles over sound, its mixing, its quality, and its meaning in the recording process and studio social practice (Meintjes 2003: 142–143). Drawing on the work of Simon Frith on early rock music (Frith 1986), she explores the ideology of “liveness” as a “trope of authenticity in a number of technologically mediated musics” (Meintjes 2003: 130) and the tensions between the ‘authenticity’ of performance and the ‘falsity’ of mediated sound. She notes that World Music also seeks to sound as if captured in the moment of performance (Meintjes 2003: 129). This may involve the minimisation of the visual markers of sonic mediation such as the placement of microphones, attention to technical details, and sound effects (Meintjes 2003: 130). This recalls the work of Birgit Meyer and Patrick Eisenlohr on the dialectics of concealing and revealing of techniques of mediation in the production of the immediate and real (Eisenlohr 2011; Meyer 2011; see also van der Port 2011).

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In the context of South Africa, Meintjes claims that the discourse about liveness in the Johannesburg studio she studied “shapes and expresses a particular Africanness” (Meintjes 2003: 142). She argues that the aesthetic desire for livesounding production is “refracted through different nostalgias about blackness and nativism” (Meintjes 2003: 142). Furthermore, the technology and institution of the music industry serve to exponentially intensify “the production and distribution of ideas and values of African musicality and African Otherness” (Meintjes 2003: 142). She emphasises that the local aesthetic of Africanness is shaped by apartheid history and global cultural production, as well as local social relationships and ideas of personhood (Meintjes 2003: 143). In sum, the South African musicians she studies are “caught between the desire for the break and affirmation that following the markets’ nativizing thrust promises, and the desire to represent themselves in a way that resonates with their everyday sensibility, modes of living, and musical biographies” (Meintjes 2003: 169). The contradictory effects generated by the commodification of ethnicity in this neoliberal era are addressed in the South African context more broadly, and further afield, by Jean and John Comaroff in their aptly titled book, E­ thnicity, Inc. (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; see also Clifford 2013: 18). Some of the same questions regarding what is lost and gained in the recording and production of indigenous musical sounds arise in the Australian Aboriginal context. The work of Karl Neuenfeldt is particularly instructive in this connection, as he has written extensively on the didjeridu and its traditional background as well as its use in contemporary music (Neuenfeldt 1997). He traces the origins of this wind instrument in northern Australia over one thousand years ago to its popularity on the world music stage, and its relation to how “aural ‘images’ of aboriginality are technologised and transposed across cultures” (Neuenfeldt 1993: 60). Neuenfeldt takes sound seriously, stating that the perception of indigenous peoples by dominant cultures, and vice versa, is profoundly influenced by sounds – the most evocative sounds are often musical – and communities themselves can be defined and described sonically (Neuenfeldt 1993: 61, emphasis added; see also Feld 1997; Schafer 1994). He emphasises the interplays of the processes of sound and technology, arguing that for indigenous peoples to gain access to a space within the dominant culture’s soundscape they need to consider the relationship between sound and technology (1993: 60–61). Put simply, “technology is power; in the context of popular music, power is the control of sounds” (Neuenfeldt 1993: 61). Citing Steve Jones, “the ability to record sound is power over sound” (Jones 1990: 19), he notes the evolution of recording technology in that regard, as well as the constraints of the institutions, structures, and power relations of political economies (Neuenfeldt 1993: 61).

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In a later piece, Neuenfeldt discusses the sonic strategy of a successful producer of Australian Indigenous recordings, Nigel Pegrum (Neuenfeldt 2005). He notes the centrality of the didjeridu in Pegrum’s recordings, as this constitutes the “sonic element of greatest importance to consumers” (2005: 89). Thus the particular ‘sound’ or ‘intentional sonic construction’ is connected to an ancient instrument rather than a producer or place (such as Nashville or Berlin). Neuenfeldt emphasises how a producer of ‘world music’ recordings such as ­Pegrum must have the skills of a culture broker as well as a sound specialist. The recording studio, as noted in the cases discussed above, is not just an industrial, musical, and aesthetic space but also a cultural space for negotiating the cultural baggage musicians bring into the sessions. Referring to tourists from the us and Japan who want to take back the “great sound of the didjeridu,” Pegrum explains the challenge of producing ‘didj music’ for diverse markets: Those kind of people wouldn’t want to [buy something too traditional] although we did do something very traditionally sounding albums … which would be bought by the slightly more serious eco-tourist who only wanted, as far as we could tell, the purer form of the didj. But that in itself is a totally other argument because who knows what the didj sounded like five hundred years ago. They didn’t have digital recorders in the Northern Territory five hundred years ago so it’s [unknown], like all traditional music where nobody knows what it was like one hundred years ago really. neuenfeldt 2005: 90, emphasis added

Neuenfeldt elaborates further on the aesthetic and sound-based considerations faced by Pegrum in these large-scale productions. In order to create an “‘authentic’ sonic ambience,” the producer has to blend the “‘reality’ of the didjeridu (and its essentialistic, earth-connected connotations) [with] ­‘unreal’ synthesized sounds (and their connotations of authenticity) [without a] ­jarring juxtaposition” of sounds (Neuenfeldt 2005: 90). He aims for a ‘sonically transparent’ studio practice with minimal technological mediation (as opposed to the typical ‘in-your-face’ and ‘thumping you in the stomach’ mixing of rock bands), even though, as Neuenfeldt notes, multitrack recording requires a range of electronic effects and interventions. So just as the skilled didjeridu player can take the “technological simplicity of the unadorned hollow tube” beyond “its clichéd dronelike signature sound or animal calls,” the producer works to integrate the sound of the didjeridu and create a balanced audio spectrum in relation to the other vocal and instrumental sounds (Neuenfeldt

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2005: 91–92). Pegrum’s goal is to create a “mesmerising relaxing overall effect” (Neuenfeldt 2005: 92). When seeking a more exotic sound for certain target audiences attuned to world music, Pegrum invokes a musical device that he terms “Mists of Time” (Neuenfeldt 2005: 95). Neuenfeldt describes this as a “particular sound combination and musical ambience based on didjeridu that is especially useful for ­invoking the vast expanses of desert Australia so common in tourist advertising, despite the fact the didj was historically not common in the desert” (­Neuenfeldt 2005: 95). Neuenfeldt concludes his case study of the industrial, aesthetic, and cultural production of “indigenous” music styles in Australia by arguing that in the context of music there is no simple answer to what constitutes ‘indigenous’ given the complex interplay of indigenous and ­non-­indigenous ­performers, sounds, and markets. Conclusion In the course of this chapter I have argued that working with the concept of sound opens up, following Clifford and others, the sterile opposition of local and global (Clifford 2013: 195) or the dichotomy of the cultural and the political (Clifford 2013: 224). Moreover, it offers a productive example of the processes of articulation and interpellation (constrained freedom, turning and returning) that are integral to indigenous heritage work (Clifford 2013: 210). In fact, music, according to ethnomusicologist Veit Erlman, is critical to the new global reality that engages Westerners and non-Westerners in complex, multiply mirrored ways (Erlman 1999: 3). He goes so far as to say that unlike any other aspect of mass culture, music functions as an interactive social context, a conduit for other forms of social interaction (Erlman 1999: 6). Even though ethnomusicologists reject the notion that there exists a type of core music for a specific group of people (Kierkegaard 2002a: 9–10) it is noteworthy how discourses on sound, identity, and authenticity are generated or revived in the context of the recording studio. While many musicians embrace the creative opportunities afforded by modern digital technologies for transforming their sounds into less stereotyped versions of their traditions and heritage (Kierkegaard 2002a: 13) – or what Kierkegaard terms “global imaginative sound” (Kierkegaard 2002b: 57), she also notes the reductive tendency within world musics to privilege the purer and the simpler (older and more original) invocation of universalism, often represented in the form of the drone effect (Kierkegaard 2002b: 49–50).

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These tensions resonate with John and Jean Comaroff’s aforementioned anthropological work on the changing relationship of culture and the market (2009). They write about the limitations and possibilities of neoliberalism, notably in the form of the commodification of human identity and specifically the future of ethnicity. The book is appositely titled, Ethnicity, Inc., but there is also reference to ‘Nationality, Inc.’, ‘Divinity, Inc.’, and ‘Locality, Inc.’. This begs the question as to why we should not also factor in ‘Sound, Inc.’, as part of the processes of ethnicity going corporate (and, by extension, national and global). Similarly, Clifford proposes that we not just focus on global indigenous “presence” in this new dispensation, but also on indigenous “futures,” as well as the deep roots of indigeneity (2013: 22). The examples adumbrated above propose that being attentive to sounding and hearing practices in relation to religious and cultural identity opens up new ways of thinking about what Clifford terms the “roots and the routes” (2013: 38) of indigenous thriving and transformation (2013: 43). References Clifford, J. 1988. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Comaroff, J., and J.L. Comaroff, eds. 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Diamond, B. 2005. “Media as Social Action: Native American Musicians in the Recording Studio.” In P.D. Greene and T. Porcello, eds. Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technology in Sonic Cultures. Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press and the University Press of New England, 118–137. Doyle, P. 2005. Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording ­1900–1960. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Eisenlohr, P. 2011. “Introduction: What is a Medium? Theologies, Technologies and ­Aspirations.” Social Anthropology 19: 1, 1–5. Erlmann, V. 1999. Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West. New York: Oxford University Press. Erlmann, V., ed. 2004. Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, Wenner-Gren International Symposium. New York: Berg. Feld, S. 1997. “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea.” In S. Feld and K.H. Basso, eds. Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 90–135.

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Frith, S. 1986. “Art versus Technology: the Strange Case of Popular Music.” Media, ­Culture & Society 8, 263–279. Gautier, A.M.O. 2014. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century C ­ olombia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ginsburg, F. 1991. “Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village?” Cultural Anthropology 6:(1): 92–112. Greene, P.D., and T. Porcello, eds. 2005. Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures. Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press and the University Press of New England. Jones, S. 1990. “Technology and the Future of Popular Music.” Popular Music and Society 14:1, 19–23. Jones, S. 1992. Rock Formation: Music, Technology, and Mass Communication. Vol. 3, Foundations of Popular Culture. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Kahn, D. 1999. Noise, Water, Meat: a History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kierkegaard, A. 2002a. “Introduction.” In M. Palmberg and A. Kierkegaard, eds. Playing with Identities in Contemporary Music in Africa. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 7–18. Kierkegaard, A. 2002b. “‘Tranzania’ – a Cross-over from Norwegian Techno to Tanzanian Taarab.” In M. Palmberg and A. Kierkegaard, eds. Playing with Identities in Contemporary Music in Africa. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 46–59. Lacasse, S. 2000. “Voice and Sound Processing: Examples of Mise en Scene of Voice in Recorded Rock Music.” Popular Musicology Online http://www.popular-musicology -online.com/issues/05/lacasse.html. Lysloff, R.T.A and L.C. Gay, eds. Music and Technoculture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press 2003. Manuel, P. 1993. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India. ­Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meintjes, L. 2003. Sound of Africa!: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. ­Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Meyer, B. 2011. “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational forms, Semiotic Ideologies and the Question of the Medium.” Social Anthropology 19:1, 23–39. Neuenfeldt, K. 1993. “The Didjeridu and the Overdub: Technologising and Transposing Aural Images of Aboriginality.” Perfect Beat 1: 2, 60–77. Neuenfeldt, K, ed. 1997. The Didjeridu: From Arnhem Land to Internet. Sydney: John ­Libbey & Perfect Beat. Neuenfeldt, K. 2005. “Nigel Pegrum, ‘Didjeridu-Friendly Sections’, and What ­Constitutes an ‘Indigenous’ CD: An Australian Case Study of Producing ‘World ­Music’ ­Recordings.” In P.D. Greene and T. Porcello, eds. Wired for Sound: Engineering

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and Technology in Sonic Cultures. Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press and the ­University Press of New England, 84–102. Niezen, R. 2003. The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Novak, D., and M. Sakakeeny, eds. 2015. Keywords in Sound. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sakakeeny, M. 2015. “Music.” In D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny, eds. Keywords in Sound. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Samuels, D.W., L. Meintjes, A.M.O. Gautier, and T. Porcello. 2010. “Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 329–345. Scales, C.A. 2012. Recording Culture: Powwow Music and the Aboriginal Recording Industry on the Northern Plains. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press. Schafer, R.M. 1994. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. Sterne, J. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sterne, J., ed. 2012. The Sound Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. Szendy, P. 2007. Listen: A History of Our Ears. Trans. by C. Mandell. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press. Théberge, P. 1997. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. van der Port, M. 2011. “(Not) Made by the Human Hand: Media Consciousness and Immediacy in the Cultural Production of the Real.” Social Anthropology 19: 1, 74–89. Weidman, A. 2014. “Anthropology and Voice.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43, 37–51. White, B.W., ed. 2011. Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters. Tracking Globalization. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Wilson, P., and M. Stewart, eds. 2008. Global Indigenous Media: Culture, Poetics, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

chapter 6

Not Real Christians? On the Relation between Christianity and Indigenous Religions in Amazonia and Beyond Minna Opas Introduction The Christianisation of indigenous Amazonia began over five centuries ago by  European Catholic missionaries arriving to the New World. As a result, today a significant number of indigenous peoples in this vast lowland area ­practise  different forms of Christianity. Nevertheless, their Christianity is often neglected or not taken seriously. In Western news media indigenous Amazonians are still portrayed, implicitly more often than explicitly, as animists, people who are tied to their territories, ancestral lands and nature, people who are spiritual rather than religious. Very rarely, if ever, do we get to read, hear, or watch news about indigenous Christians. As has often been noted, it is this same picture of indigenous peoples with a spiritual relationship to their land that is evoked in international indigenous peoples’ rights discourse and in indigenous peoples’ own identity presentations in political contexts. Interestingly, however, despite also struggling with their traditional cosmology or some particular aspects of it, this picture is also used by Amazonian indigenous Christians themselves for different purposes. Furthermore, scholars have ­wrestled with the question of Christianity. A great change can today be detected in comparison to two decades ago when Christianity was not something researchers would find i­ nteresting, let alone necessary, to study. Nevertheless, in spite of the growing interest in indigenous Christianities, the concept of indigenous Christianities itself has not yet received much scholarly attention. This chapter explores the often ambivalent and tense relationship between Christianity and indigenous religions mainly in Amazonia but also more generally by looking at the ways in which these two categories have been seen as contradictory and incompatible, although at times also as overlapping, in different domains: missionary discourses; indigenous peoples’ own identity ­presentations; international agreements and declarations on indigenous peoples’ rights; indigenous theological discourse; as well as in academic and

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media representations. Although perhaps an act of essentialisation itself (or essentialisation of essentialisations), the terms ‘indigenous religions’ and ‘indigenous spiritualities’ are here, for pragmatic reasons, treated mostly as coterminous referring to the traditional socio-cosmological understandings of indigenous peoples. At times, however, the distinction is made for analytical purposes. While both the terms ‘indigenous religions’ and ‘indigenous spiritualities’ are in use in the academic field, the former is more closely tied to the world religions paradigm, whereas the latter is more frequently used in discussions on religious change and New Age type of religiosity, as well as in political and legal contexts. However, irrespective of the choice and the context, they tend to form the counterpart for conceptualisations of indigenous Christianities or Christianity in indigenous contexts. This chapter argues that the central ‘generative problem(s)’ (Bialecki 2015) in regard to the relationship between indigenous religions and Christianity in Amazonia are related to tensions between continuity and change and stability and instability (including representations and naturalisations of these tensions). Indigenous religions are frequently considered – both by scholars and other agents – to easily accept, adopt and domesticate foreign influences. This makes them simultaneously extremely stable and unstable, continuous with the past and prone to change. (Western) Christianity, on the other hand, and reflecting its hegemonic status in dominant discourses, is reckoned to resist change and represent stability; although there are also situations, fields and relationships in which opposite understandings play a significant role. The tensions generated by these binarisms, or, rather, continuums, translate into questions over authenticity, originality, orthodoxy, and even that of right kind of humanity, as will be discussed below. In this chapter I ask, in what ways, to what extent, and for what purposes is Christianity as a category and phenomenon considered as parallel, overlapping, or discontinuous with that of indigenous spiritualities and how these conceptualisations affect indigenous peoples’ daily lives in Amazonia. In particular, attention is paid to the question of how the eclipsing of indigenous Christianities in favour of ­spirituality – the essentialisation of indigenous peoples as advocates of indigenous ­religions – enhance or debilitate their possibilities as agents in relation to different non-indigenous actors. What does it mean in daily life that they are not considered ‘real Christians’? Finally, I pose the following question: how should we conceptualise the relation between the categories of indigenous religions and (indigenous) Christianities? Examples for discussion are drawn from Internet sources and from my fieldwork conducted in several ­periods from 2000 to 2015 among the Arawak-speaking indigenous Yine people living in the Peruvian lowland area.

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Missionary Discourses in Amazonia

Owing largely to processes of globalised market economies, culture has become a commodity even in many of the remotest indigenous areas. Appropriation of peoples’ material culture, symbols and cosmologies for consumption has at times been led from the outside, at other times been brought about by the deliberate actions of indigenous peoples themselves in relation to their processes of auto-representation and identity construction. In these projects, indigenous spirituality becomes abstracted and objectified as a separate category, which can then be commercialised and through which people can take part in a variety of discourses on a local and global scale (in the Amazonian context see, for example, Hutchins 2010; Kapfhammer 2009; Wright 2009). In addition to anthropologists, and government and ngo workers, amongst others, Christian missionaries in particular have played a central role in forcing indigenous peoples to articulate their traditions, customs, and spiritual lives. Although in indigenous languages there usually do not exist words corresponding to the notions of religion or spirituality, missionary activities of describing languages, of translation and education have demarcated a sphere of religion, which among indigenous groups has oftentimes become glossed as ‘our way’ or ‘our tradition’. The category of religion thus has come to be framed as a loose and vaguely bounded entity, yet one that can be contrasted and compared with others’ ‘ways’, such as Christianity, for instance. Also the Yine people of south-eastern Peru denote their views of the workings of the social-cosmos as ‘our custom’ (Spanish: ‘Es nuestro costumbre’; Yine ‘Wasruglu’). ‘Religiones’ (the Spanish word used predominantly in the plural) for them are Catholicism, Adventism, Evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, and so on. Although many Yine self-identify as Christians, they still understand their traditional social cosmos and ways of interacting within it as something not necessarily existing in the worlds or Christianities of others. Based on their socio-cosmological understandings that could be characterised as resting on a particular perspectival logic (Lima 1999; Opas 2014; Vilaça 2005; Viveiros de Castro 1998), they say that ‘it is like this for us’, meaning that different people live in different worlds, which are not necessarily in hierarchical relationship to one another, and that this is their world. Other people have their own worlds. The missionary discourses circulating among the Yine, and to some extent or in some occasions adopted by them, differ from these vernacular Yine views in that in the former indigenous cosmovision and Christianity do get placed in a hierarchical relationship, thereby causing tension within the indigenous group, as will be further discussed in the following section. In regard to missionary work previous scholarship has noted, there is often a great difference in the way Catholics and Protestants conceptualise the

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­relationship between traditional cosmologies and Christianity. In the Amazonian context, various ethnographic examples show how the Catholics have been more positive than the Evangelicals in their approach to traditional (shamanistic) cosmologies and how Catholicism and shamanism are to be understood not as competing but as two complementary sides of people’s lived worlds (Capiberibe 2004: 85–87; Pereira 1999: 432–434; Hugh-Jones 1994; Wright 1999a: 201). While in general terms this holds true also in the Yine context, there does exist a great variation in Yine approaches depending on the level of locality of the missionary activities and discourses in question. The Evangelical Protestant Yine churches are members of faienap ­(Fraternidad de Asociaciones de Iglesias Evangélicas Nativas de la Amazonía Peruana), the Brotherhood of Associations of Evangelical Native Churches of the Peruvian Amazon, which was established as a result of the missionary activities of the Summer Institute of Linguistics/Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Swiss Mission in Peru in 1988. ­faienap organises two-month courses on transcultural missionary work, which are popular among indigenous Protestants. Through these and other courses, the association distributes its view of the relation between indigenous cosmologies and Christianity. According to this view, indigenous cosmologies are based on superstition and should be left behind (faienap 2011). However, as these cosmologies cannot be totally eliminated from indigenous Amazonians’ practice in daily life, the Evangelical Protestants demonise the different non-human beings of the indigenous social cosmos and wage an active battle against them instead. In the African context, Birgit Meyer (1999) has illuminatingly shown how the same paradox was inherent in Protestant missions among the Ewe in Ghana. On the one hand, the Protestants wished to abolish the traditional religion, on the other they needed it in order to demonstrate the meaning of Christianity. The two cosmologies are therefore in many Protestant views in a productive, although tense, relationship to one another: indigenous cosmology is simultaneously included in, and attempted to be excluded from, the Protestant one. In the indigenous Protestants’ daily lives, living out this paradox can be a complicated task. In south-eastern Peru, for instance, a local Evangelical Yine pastor saw the beings of the traditional Yine social cosmos as belonging to Satan’s realm (and thus being included in the Christian cosmology) and the spirits of psychoactive plants, in particular, as exemplifying Satan’s work. Nevertheless, the pastor still wavered in demonising the spirits of p ­ sychoactive plants, because with only sporadic access to national health-care, they played an important role in local medical practices. His solution to the dilemma was to demonise the weaker plant, kamalampi (Spanish: ayahuasca; Latin: Banisteriopsis caapi), but continue to use and interact with the spirit of the plant considered more powerful, namely gayapa (Spanish: toé; Latin: Brugmansia sp.).

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Dominican Catholic understandings of the relationship between indigenous religions and Christianity, on the other hand, stem largely from the idea of inculturation, a term that became emblematic of the ­evangelising processes of the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council held in 1962–1965. It refers to the relationship between the Gospel and the culture to which it is brought, which the ­Catholics understand as being in a putatively ahierarchical and ongoing process of interdependence and mutual influence: “Beliefs, values, customs, symbols and ­institutions of a particular culture give rise to a new version of the Gospel,” which then affects, in turn, all these by “healing them” (Espeja 1993: 12; see Opas 2017; my translation). Such politics has meant that Catholicism has not, at least in principle, viewed indigenous religions or cosmologies as a threat, and consequently, has not tried to abolish them nor wage an active battle against them. In this sense, inculturation, unlike the Protestant approaches discussed above, has been a project(ion) of continuity and stability by design. However, the implementation of the politics of inculturation at the local level has also lead to much uneasiness both among clergy, because it has been considered to generate and embrace syncretistic practices, and indigenous people, because it has not succeeded in seceding from hierarchical structures. In the case of the indigenous Yine people, the decades of co-living and missionising have not, in the Catholic missionary view, resulted in successful inculturation and, accordingly, have caused frustration. The Catholic father responsible for the Church’s work in the Yine area has come to view the indigenous adults as having ‘hearts of stone’ as in his view they have not shown many signs of ‘true ­Christian faith’. During my fieldwork he complained that people still used crucifix n ­ ecklaces as amulets and held on to their traditional cosmovision rather than seeking aid from the Gospel in their daily concerns. In the language of inculturation, the Yine version of the Gospel had failed to ‘heal’ the local customs. In practice then, there were limits to the continuity and stability of Catholicism, as the practices of inculturation rather allowed more space for questions of orthodoxy and for hierarchical power play to emerge. In both the Evangelical and Catholic cases, the local level struggles over the question of real Christianity reveal the persistence of the hierarchy between missionaries and indigenous Christians. Indigenous Yine people, although self-identifying as Christians, remained subject to evangelisation.

Indigenous Negotiations of Legitimate Christianity

In research on Amazonian indigenous Christianities, the question of continuity and change has been shown to be central in a variety of ways also to ­indigenous

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lay Christians’ own local level processes of identity construction. In some cases, ­emphasis has been put on continuity or overlap between Christianity and ­indigenous social cosmoses (Gow 2006; Vilaça 1997), while in other cases the ­relation has been characterised by rupture (Bonilla 2009; Grotti 2009). Despite these tendencies towards continuity and discontinuity, none of the cases involve exclusively just one or the other, rather in all cases there are elements from both processes. As many have noted (for example Wagner 1981), transformation and change are embedded in and necessary for cultural continuation. It then d­ epends on the local interpretations whether the coming of Christianity is considered to have brought about cultural and religious change or not (see Robbins 2009; Vilaça 2009). James Cox (2014), for instance, has shown how among indigenous people in different geographical contexts ruptures have ­often been conceptualised as continuations when the Christian God has been ‘invented’ in and for indigenous cultures replacing or continuing the work of a deity or deities even in contexts where there previously was no high god. In the local level inter-denominational interaction in my long-term field site in south-eastern Peruvian Amazonia, the question of continuity/rupture and that of stability/instability tend to take the form of the problem of orthodoxy. Yine Catholics and Evangelicals not only disagree on the role of tradition and customary ways in many issues having to do with religious dogma and praxis but also frame much of their social disagreements in terms of correct interpretations of Christianity. These interpretations are fundamentally tied to ­questions of corporeality and humanity (Opas 2008; Opas 2014). Indigenous Amazonians have classically been considered to form ‘communities of substance’ (Seeger et al. 1987), which refers to the idea of both people and social groups being formed through joint material practices such as preparing and consuming food together, working together, and living close to one another. In this way, through the correct use of the right kinds of substances (bodily fluids and certain kinds of food and beverages, for instance) people are constantly reproducing their legitimate human conditions. These processes entail a certain openness of the body to outside and foreign influences. It is through such openness that transformations take place and that indigenous Amazonians renew their socio-cultural worlds. This holds true for Yine Christianities too. Among both Yine Evangelicals and Catholics, being a Christian is conceptualised as a highly unstable bodily condition. However, these groups’ views differ in regard to the nature of the right kind of Christian body. For the Evangelicals, becoming true Christian requires a transformation, that is, leaving behind not the old social cosmos as such, as discussed above, but the old bodily habits and practices such as drinking alcohol. For the Catholics, however, such customary practices as parties involving the drinking of home brewed manioc beer are considered inherently related to the production of sociality and the right kind

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of humanness, and carrying on with them is thus considered vital for achieving and maintaining a legitimate Christian bodily condition. For the Yine Christians, then, the question of the relationship between traditional indigenous cosmology and Christianity takes the form of the problem of orthodoxy, or rather, as I am calling it, that of orthomorphia – of correct bodily form. Nevertheless, the setting still resonates strongly with the c­ ommon ­tendency of Protestants to wage a battle against some aspects of indigenous cosmology while the Catholic Christianity and indigenous social cosmos are more complementary to, and thus continuous with, one another. This ­difference affects in many ways the daily community life among the Yine. In addition to complicating the organisation of communal parties, wakes, and other gatherings where drinking of manioc beer has customarily been given a central role, the differences in understanding of legitimate Christianity intermingle with other social controversies between Evangelical and Catholic families. This has generated such issues as accusations of witchcraft and inhibits the Yine attempts to achieve the main goal of their social life, that is, ‘living well’, which means living tranquilly among one’s kind.

Transnational Discourses on Indigenous Spirituality and Christianity

As has been noted many times, international agreements concerning indigenous peoples’ rights have had a profound influence on the general understandings of indigenousness and indigenous peoples as a category. The central ­documents in this sense have been the International Labour Organisation (ilo) Convention 169 for Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (1989) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). Although the number of countries that have ratified the ilo convention is low, the significance of the agreement extends far beyond these signatories. In relation to the processes of drafting and implementing these agreements, indigenous peoples have, to a great extent, adopted a common language in order to unite and to fight for their rights on a wider front. This has contributed significantly to the transnationalisation of the indigenous movement, and has enabled indigenous peoples to articulate their localised socio-political struggles at international level (Stammler-Gossmann 2009). At the same time, however, the processes of drafting and i­mplementing agreements have contributed to the essentialisation of these peoples as ­certain  kinds. The international agreements tie ­indigenousness, in the first place,  to land and to ancestry. This connection is, interestingly, considered

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­emblematically, although not exclusively, as a ­spiritual relationship. The ilo Convention 169 is in this sense still somewhat allusive, as its Preambles calls attention “to the distinctive contributions of indigenous and tribal peoples to the cultural diversity and social and ecological harmony of humankind…” (ilo 1989; my ­italics). The u.n. declaration, however, in its Article 25 states more d­ irectly that: “Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their ­distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or o­ therwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard” (u.n. 2007: Article 25; my italics). Indigenous peoples’ relationship to land is thus by definition of a putatively spiritual character. The formulation of the Article 25 also evokes the common contemporary discourse on indigenous people as the saviours of our planet for future generations. Previously, Trude Fonneland and Siv Ellen Kraft (2013; see also Johnson and Kraft, Introduction to this volume) have noted that a close and spiritual relationship to nature is crucial to the indigenous spirituality discourse. They identify also other e­ lements fundamental to this discourse. These include sacred landscapes, healing and holism, practices such as animism and shamanism, and links to a pre-Christian past. The last of these elements is of the greatest interest here. Even though the indigenous spirituality discourse does build on pre-Christian indigenous pasts, it seems not, however, to be totally distinct from Christianity either. Also the transnational indigenous Christian discourse stresses similar continuity and embraces the rhetoric used in the general indigenous spirituality discourse. Despite (Western) Christianity often being contrasted with indigenous spirituality as an advocate of colonialism, present day indigenous theology embraces both. Indigenous theology is part of the current of contextual and Third and Fourth World theologies, which question the occidental cultural character of Christian theology (Bonino 2004; Chavez Quispe 2010; Cleary and Steigenga 2004; Fabella and Sugirtharajah 2000; Judd 2004). It emerged from liberation theology from the 1950s and 1960s onwards and has since matured and become institutionalised so that, for instance, in Central and South America eight ­continent-wide meetings of indigenous theologians, including Amazonian representatives, have been organised between the years 1990–2016. Indigenous theology aims at decolonising and transforming Christianity from within and through indigenous spirituality. The themes indigenous theology has brought to general theological discussions include “respect for cultural diversity, love of mother earth, and the quest for human, social and cosmic harmony” (López Hernández 2010). Especially the role of Mother Earth is intriguing here. As Fonneland and Kraft (2013) note, Mother Earth has been an emblematic f­ igure of New Age type discourse on indigenous spiritualities. It would therefore seem

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that the figure does not sit well in indigenous Christian theology. ­However, Mother Earth is emblematic in indigenous theology as well. This becomes ­visible not only within the discussions of Central and South American indigenous theologians in the context of the above-mentioned continental meetings (see Opas forthcoming), but also at a more general level in relation to the work of the World Council of Churches (wcc), which – although not uncontested as a voice of indigenous theologies – among other things has hosted the indigenous preparatory caucuses prior to the u.n. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2007 and 2009 (see for example Dahl 2012). At the wcc meeting in Geneva in 2009, the relationship of indigenous theology to Mother Earth or Pacha Mama was described as follows: “From her [Mother Earth] we learn that we are all brothers and sisters, because we belong to her, come from her, the co-creator of life with God, and return to her – which demonstrates the greatness and the humbleness of humankind” (Ludeña Cebrián 2010: 366). In a similar manner, representatives of Indigenous Churches, in their Joint Declaration with the wcc at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2009, stressed indigenous peoples’ relationship to land and to Mother Earth. They stated that: “We recognise that the right to life is comprised not only of human beings, but also of all forms of life as well as Mother Earth who, for us, is alive” (wcc 2009). From the indigenous theologies point of view, then, there is no inherent controversy between indigenous spirituality and Christianity. Indigenous theologians (within the wcc context) see the current pan-indigenous spirituality as a continuation of the pre-Christian indigenous cosmovision, while Christianity is understood as an extension of this same spirituality. What indigenous theologians do object to in Christianity is the way the Gospel has been brought to them: captured by Western culture and disrespecting indigenous ways of “encountering the good news” (wcc 1998; wcc 2003). In indigenous theology discourses Christian theology becomes de-colonised and legitimised, domesticated, and indigenised through the – at times rather vaguely ­established –­ connections first between the salvational and liberational objectives of Christianity and indigenous theology respectively, and second between the ­Creation leading to human stewardship in the world and the conceptualisation of indigenous people as protectors of all life. In spite of this r­ esonance, however, many practices, structures and interpretations inherent to (western) Christianity remain foreign and problematic to indigenous theologians. In regard to the focus of this chapter, indigenous theology discourses demonstrate that the homogenising picture of indigenous people as holding a special spiritual relationship to the land is distributed and affirmed not only through the global indigenous movement but also through and within the structures of global Christianity. The Catholic politics of inculturation has spread throughout

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Latin America and has affected the religious landscape in a variety of ways. On the other hand, in many Amazonian local contexts i­ ndigenous theological approaches are still waiting to take hold. One reason for this, surely among many other reasons, is the spread of the more ­fundamentalist ­Protestant and Pentecostal churches, which, as discussed above, work counter to the ecumenical objectives of the indigenous theology movement (Judd 2004: 226–227). In all these cases, however, Christianity and indigenous spirituality get defined in relation to one another.

Academic and Media Representations

Even though indigenous peoples have in many parts of the globe gained access to information technology and thus to different channels for producing content and affecting the image of themselves, the news media is still largely outside the reach of indigenous peoples, especially in terms of influencing its contents. In news media coverage, Amazonian indigenous Christians hardly exist. This has profound influences on the images delivered and circulating about these peoples. As I have discussed elsewhere (Opas 2013), for instance in bbc online news on indigenous Amazonians in a sample covering the year 2012 (see references for a list of bbc news items), religion and spirituality hardly ever appear as topics in their own right. Rather, indigenous people are discussed usually in relation to two main themes. Either the news tells about indigenous Amazonians in voluntary isolation and initial contact, that is, the people who are not in regular contact with the outside world, or about indigenous peoples protecting their rights to their lands and territories. Although these themes differ in that in the former the image raised is that of primitive human beings and in the latter that of civilised people knowledgeable of their rights, what is common to these images is the essentialisation of indigenous Amazonians as being one with nature. Similar findings have been made for instance in relation to Columbian news media (Jackson 2010: 77). Therefore, although the news do not explicitly discuss indigenous religions or spiritualities, the topics discussed define indigenous peoples through one attribute and thus implicitly draw a picture of them as fundamentally tied to land and other forms of life and by analogy, as animists. Such an image is further strengthened by that which is left unsaid. By ignoring the fact that a great number of indigenous Amazonians are today Christians and many live in cities, the international news media contribute to homogenising and petrifying indigenous Amazonians as people living in, through, and for the rainforest. One core reason for indigenous Christianity being such a difficult topic for the news media has, undoubtedly, to do

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with the importance of exoticism for media work. Christianity is understood to be so familiar to western audiences that depicting indigenous peoples as Christians would make them less exotic, and thus less interesting and marketable. Although there is certainly more to the issue to explain the absence of the topic of Christianity from indigenous people’s media representations than is possible to discuss here, by its practices the news media contribute to the continuation of the colonial processes of othering, hierarchisation and marginalisation in relation to indigenous Amazonians. Such exoticising viewpoints are not limited to the (news) media. For a long time in social sciences Christianity was seen as the ‘repugnant other’ (Harding 1991) or alternatively as something too familiar to be worth research. Perhaps the most influential single factor bringing about a change to this scholarly atmosphere was the development of the field of Anthropology of Christianity (Robbins 2003). It is only during the past two decades with the spread of scholarly interest in Christianity that researchers have been able to take indigenous peoples’ Christianities seriously. Similar developments have, during the past ten years, been recognisable for the study of Amazonian indigenous cultures and religions. Many of the publications on Christianity in this field, which still form a relatively small body of work, have approached Christianity as a foreign element influencing indigenous cosmologies and being adopted or rejected by indigenous peoples in specific ways. The emphasis in these works has been on indigenous people’s views of Christianity and in the relationships between ­indigenous cosmologies and missionary Christianities rather than on indigenous people as Christians, although the boundary between such approaches is by no means a clear one (for example Almeida 2003; Clastres 1975; Fausto 2005; Gow 2006; Miller 1975; Montero 2006; Pollock 1993; Pompa 2003; Schaden 1982; Shapiro 1987; Vilaça 1997; Vilaça 2010; Viveiros de Castro 2002; Wright 1999b). More recent research has begun to concentrate on indigenous Amazonians relations to one another as Christians (for example Grotti 2009; Opas 2014; Vilaça 2016; Vilaça 2009; Wright 2004; 2009). Although the topic of indigenous cosmovision does enter into the latter kinds of studies as well, the main emphasis has started to move away from the interplay between the local (indigenous) and the foreign (Christianity). Conclusion In this chapter I have examined the relationship between indigenous religions or spirituality and Christianity in Amazonia and beyond from the point of view of the conceptual pairs continuity/change and stability/instability. These

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forms of ­religiosity have been shown to be in dynamic relationship, the nature of which varies according to context. In certain contexts they are considered overlapping and even the same, while in others strict boundaries are drawn between them. Nevertheless, in all cases discussed, the Christianity of indigenous Amazonians appears to some actors, in one way or another, difficult to accept as legitimate. Indigenous people cannot be ‘real Christians’ because it seems impossible to view them separate from their indigenous spirituality characterised by ancestry and relationship to land and usually involving a host of different non-human beings. Drawing on Bjørn Ola Tafjord’s (2013) provocative observation that the only thing common to indigenous religions is how they are looked at and acted upon, we can propose that common to indigenous Christianities is the manner in which it is always other people, be they EuroAmericans or other indigenous peoples, who know better what real Christianity is. This underestimating of indigenous Christianities is then also to be viewed as one instance of colonisation – it is a way to keep indigenous peoples as indigenous without allowing them to cross, dissolve and modify boundaries. Thinking in terms of conversion, indigenous religions are pictured as religions that cannot be converted to or converted from. Indigenous people’s religion and spirituality is too unanimous with their culture for them to be able to depart from it. Indigenous people cannot be just Christians but their Christianity seems inevitably to be of an indigenous kind, regardless of what that is taken to mean in each particular case. The problem of ‘real’ Christianity reveals something important concerning the role of indigenousness in defining religious phenomena. It shows how the term indigenous can – as an attribute – work very differently in different contexts. In the case of indigenous Christianities the attribute ‘indigenous’ clearly unsettles the boundaries of the category of Christianity and raises the question of authenticity. How indigenous can Christianity be and still remain Christian? In the case of indigenous religions, however, the attribute does not seem to question the category of religion, at least not in a similar manner. Rather, as has been discussed above, spirituality being in many instances considered ­inherent to indigenousness as an un-institutionalised, vernacular form of ­religiosity, the attribute seems easily to attach to the category of religion. This does  not, however, mean that the relationship would be unambiguous in this case either. The attribute does raise a question of categorisation. What is it that is shared in indigenous religions and how does the category indigenous religion relate to other members of the category of religion? (see Cox 2013; Tafjord 2013). In both cases, then, although in distinct ways, striving for clear and ­unambiguous categories is met with unsettling plurality that refuses to be easily tamed.

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Tafjord (2013), in his analysis of the notion of indigenous religions, notes that indigenous religion(s) works best as a relational concept used heuristically when comparison is made between local and foreign religions. In this sense, indigenous Christianities is an oxymoron combining the local and the foreign. As such, it then seems, the term does not carry much analytical weight for ­examining the movement between local and global religious currents even if it can, of course, highlight certain differences when compared with other kinds of Christianities and with indigenous religions. However, I think the investigative power of the term lies exactly in its ability to encompass the tensions brought about by the ambiguity and inconclusiveness inherent in the practice of and discourses on Christianity among indigenous peoples. In fact, the forces of continuity/change and stability/instability pulling in different directions and engendering ambiguity can be considered as ‘generative problems’ (Bialecki 2015) in indigenous Christianities. They are not something to be superseded but something internal to indigenous Christianities, a motivating force. The cases discussed in this chapter work well to demonstrate this. Regardless of which aspect of the conceptual pairs was dominant, the negotiations always involved the other aspect as well. Continuity and stability were emphasised – although to varying degrees – in relation to the Catholic idea of inculturation, where change is pursued but on such a long-term basis that in practice the impression is that of continuity; in past academic and media representations of indigenous peoples; and in local Yine Catholic views and indigenous theology’s conceptualisations, which establish great continuation between indigenous cosmovision and Christianity. On the other hand, rupture and instability were stressed over continuity and stability in faienap Evangelical missionary work and local Yine Evangelical conceptualisations. However, in all cases the forces pulling to opposite directions were present too, thus creating a tension, a problem, requiring on-going attempts to solve it. Understood in this way, indigenous Christianities do not have to be defined only as being in opposition to indigenous religions but can rather be considered as coming about through their linkage to indigenous religions – the latter thus becomes inherently constitutive of the former. Naturally, of course, also reverse processes where indigenous religions get constituted and defined through their connection to (indigenous) Christianities take place. This can be seen not only in relation to indigenous projects of self-identification but also in discussions on indigenous religions within the world religions paradigm. To conclude, the relationship between indigenous religions and Christianity can be understood as being elementarily about boundary-work with simultaneous movement towards opposing directions (see Johnson 2008). It is largely due to these opposing aspirations that the boundaries remain unsettled allowing for the on-going negotiation of what it is to be indigenous and Christian.

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Chavez Quispe, M. 2010. “Guest Editorial.” The Ecumenical Review 62: 4, 333–339. Clastres, H. 1975. La terre sans mal: Le prophétisme Tupi-Guarani. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Cleary, E.L. and Steigenga T.J., eds. 2004. Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Cox, J. 2013. “Reflecting Critically on Indigenous Religions.” In J. Cox, ed. Critical Reflections on Indigenous Religions. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 3–18. Cox, J. 2014. Invention of God in Indigenous Societies. London: Acumen. Dahl, J. 2012. The Indigenous Space and Marginalized Peoples in the United Nations. ­London: Palgrave Macmillan. Espeja, J. 1993. “Introducción.” In J. Espeja, ed. Inculturación y teología indígena. Salamanca: Editorial San Esteban, 9–24. Fabella, V. and R.S. Sugirtharajah. 2000. Dictionary of Third World Theologies. New York: Orbis. FAIENAP 2011. Catecismo de las Iglesias Evangélicas Nativas de la Amazonía Peruana, 1ª Edición. Pucallpa: FAIENAP. Fausto, C. 2005. “Se Deus fosse jaguar: canibalismo e cristianismo entre os Guarani (Séculos XVI–XX).” Mana 11: 2, 385–418. Fonneland T. and Kraft, S.E. 2013. “New Age, Nordic Shamanism and Indigenous Spirituality.” In S. J Sutcliffe and I.S. Gilhus, eds. New Age Spirituality: Rethinking Religion. Durham and Bristol: Acumen. Gow, P. 2006. “Forgetting Conversion. The Summer Institute of Linguistics Mission in the Piro Lived World.” In F. Cannell, ed. The Anthropology of Christianity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 211–239. Grotti, V.E. 2009. “Protestant Evangelism and the Transformability of Amerindian Bodies in Northeastern Amazonia.” In A. Vilaça and R. Wright, eds. Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. ­Farnham: Ashgate, 109–126. Harding, S. 1991. “Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant ­Cultural Other.” Social Research 58: 2, 373–394. Hugh-Jones, S. 1994. “Shamans, Prophets, Priests and Pastors.” – N. Thomas and C. Humphery, eds. Shamanism, History and the State. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 32–75. Hutchins, F. 2010. “Indigenous Capitalisms: Ecotourism, Cultural Reproduction, and the Logic of Capital in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon.” In F. Hutchins and P.C. Wilson, eds. Editing Eden: A Reconsideration of Identity, Politics, and Place in Amazonia. ­Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 3–37. International Labour Organisation (ILO). 1989. Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, C169, 27 June 1989, http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPU B:12100:0::NO:12100:P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312314:NO. Accessed 17/3/2017.

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Jackson, J.E. 2010. “The Portrayal of Colombian Indigenous Amazonian Peoples by the National Press, 1988–2006.” In F. Hutchins and P.C. Wilson, eds. Editing Eden: A ­Reconsideration of Identity, Politics, and Place in Amazonia. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 70–105. Johnson, G.B. 2008. “Authenticity, Invention, Articulation: Theorizing Contemporary Hawaiian Traditions from the Outside.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 20: 3, 243–258. Johnson, G. and S.E. Kraft. 2017. “Introduction.” In G. Johnson and S.E. Kraft, eds. ­Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s). Leiden: Brill. Judd, S.P. 2004. “The Indigenous Theology Movement in Latin America. Encounters of Memory, Resistance, and Hope at the Crossroads.” In E.L. Cleary and T.J. Steigenga, eds. Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 210–230. Kapfhammer, W. 2009. “Divine Child and Trademark: Economy, Morality and Cultural Sustainability of a Guaraná Project among the Sateré-Mawé, Brazil.” In A. Vilaça and R. Wright, eds. Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Ashgate: Farnham, 211–228. Lima, T. 1999. “The Two and Its Many: Reflection on Perspectivism in a Tupi Cosmology.” Ethnos 64:1, 107–131. López Hernández, E. 2010. “Indigenous Theology in its Latin American Setting.” The Ecumenical Review 62: 4, 352–360. Ludeña Cebrián, D. 2010. “The Sources and Resources of Our Indigenous Theology.” The Ecumenical Review 62: 4, 361–370. Meyer, B. 1999. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Miller, E.S. 1975. “Shamans, Power Symbols and Change in Argentine Toba Culture.” American Ethnologist 2:3, 477–496. Montero, P., ed. 2006. Deus na Aldeia: missionários, índios e mediação cultural. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Globo. Opas, M. 2008. Different But the Same. Negotiation of Personhoods and Christianities in Western Amazonia. PhD. University of Turku, Finland. Opas, M. 2013. “Kristittyjä, mutta kenen mielestä? Kristinusko, ortodoksia ja määrittelyvalta Amazoniassa.” In P.K. Virtanen, L. Kantola and I. Seurujärvi-Kari, eds. Alkupe­ räiskansat tämän päivän maailmassa. Helsinki: SKS, 136–162. Opas, M. 2014. “Ambigüedad epistemológica y moral en el cosmos social de los yine.” Anthropologica 31: 31, 167–189. Opas, M. Forthcoming 2017. “Constituting De-Colonializing Horizons: Indigenous Theology, ­Indigenous Spirituality, and Christianity.” Religious Studies and Theology 36: 1, 79–104. Pereira, M.D.F. 1999. “Catolicismo, protestantismo e conversão: O campo de ação missionária entre os Tiriyó.” In R.M. Wright, ed. Transformando os deuses. Os múltiplos

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sentidos da conversão entre os povos indígenas no Brasil. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 425–446. Pollock, D. 1993. In “Conversion and ‘Community’ in Amazonia.” R.W. Hefner, ed. Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 165–198. Pompa, C. 2003. Religião como tradução: Missionários, Tupi e Tapuia no Brasil colonial. Bauru-SP: EDUSC. Robbins, J. 2003. “What is a Christian: Notes Toward an Anthropology of Christianity.” Religion 33: 3, 191–199. Robbins, J. 2009. “Afterword.” In A. Vilaça and R. Wright, eds. Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Ashgate: ­Farnham, 229–238. Seeger, A. and R. da Matta, and E. Viveiros de Castro. 1987 [1979]. “A construção da pessoa nas sociedades indígenas brasileiras.” In J. Pacheco de Oliveira Filho, ed. Sociedades indígenas & indigenismo no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ/Marco Zero, 11–29. Schaden, E. 1982. “A religião guaraní e o cristianismo: Contribuição ao estudo de um processo histórico de comunicação intercultural.” Revista de Antropologia 25, 1–24. Shapiro, J. 1987. “From Tupã to the Land without Evil: The Christianisation of TupiGuarani Cosmology.” American Ethnologist 14: 1, 126–139. Stammler-Gossmann, A. 2009. “Who is Indigenous? Construction of ‘Indigenousness’ in Russian Legislation.” International Community Law Review 11, 69–102. Tafjord, B.O. 2013. “Indigenous Religion(s) as an Analytical Category.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 25:3, 221–243. U.N. General Assembly. 2007. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of ­Indigenous Peoples: Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly, 2 October 2007, A/RES/ 61/295; http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf. Accessed 17/3/2017. Vilaça, A. 1997. “Christians without Faith: Some Aspects of the Conversion of the Wari’ (Pakaa Nova).” Ethnos 62, 91–115. Vilaça, A. 2005. “Chronically Unstable Bodies: Reflection on Amazonian Corporalities.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11: 3, 445–464. Vilaça, A. 2009. “Conversion, Predation, Perspective.” In A. Vilaça and R. Wright, eds. Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Ashgate: Farnham, 147–166. Vilaça, A. 2010. Strange Enemies: Indigenous Agency and Scenes of Encounters in Amazonia. Durham: Duke University Press. Vilaça, A. 2016. Praying and Preying: Christianity in Indigenous Amazonia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Viveiros de Castro, E. 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4: 3, 469–488.

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Viveiros de Castro, E. 2002. “O mármore e a murta: Sobre a inconstância da alma selvagem.” In E. Viveiros de Castro ed., A inconstância da alma selvagem. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 181–264. Wagner, R. 1981 [1975]. The Invention of Culture. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. World Council of Churches (WCC). 1998. 8th Assembly and 50th Anniversary Preparatory Materials: Hearing on Unit III: Justice, Peace and Creation. At http://www .wcc-coe.org/wcc/assembly/hu3wb-e.html. Accessed 17/11/2016. World Council of Churches (WCC). 2003. Walking Together towards Tomorrow, 1 January 2003. At https://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/wcc -programmes/unity-mission-evangelism-and-spirituality/just-and-inclusive -communities/indigenous-people/walking-together-towards-tomorrow. Accessed 17/11/2016. World Council of Churches (WCC). 2009. Joint Declaration of Indigenous Churches at UN Forum, 21 May 2009. At https://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/ wcc-programmes/unity-mission-evangelism-and-spirituality/just-and-inclusive -communities/indigenous-people/joint-declaration-of-indigenous-churches-at -un-forum. Accessed 17/11/2016. Wright, R. 1999a. “O tempo de Sophie: História e cosmologia da conversão Baniwa.” – R.M. Wright, ed. Transformando os deuses. Os múltiplos sentidos da conversão entre os povos indígenas no Brasil. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 155–216. Wright, R., ed. 1999b. Transformando os deuses. Os múltiplos sentidos da conversão entre os povos indígenas no Brasil, Vol I. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp. Wright, R., ed. 2004. Transformando os deuses. Igrejas evangélicas, pentecostais e neopentecostais entre os povos indígenas no Brasil, Vol II. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp. Wright, R. 2009. “Baniwa Art: The Baniwa Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Sustainable Development.” In A. Vilaça & R. Wright eds, Native Christians. Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Farnham: Ashgate, 187–210.

chapter 7

Timing Indigenous Culture and Religion: Tales of Conversion and Ecological Salvation from the Amazon John Ødemark Introduction The aim of this chapter is to analyse a convergence between certain notions of tribal culture and religion in popular global culture, environmentalism and ethno-political rhetoric in the Brazilian Amazon. Indigenous Amazonians have been very successful in forming intercultural alliances for ethnopolitical purposes. As B. Conklin and L. Graham have put it, a “shifting middle ground [has been] founded on the assertion that native peoples’ views of nature and ways of using natural resources are consistent with Western conservationist principles” (1995: 696). My focus is on one such alliance, and the narrative form it takes. In April 2010, the New York Times reported that ‘[t]ribes of Amazon Find an Ally Out of “Avatar”’ (New York Times 2010).1 The alliance in question was formed between James Cameron, the director of Avatar, and indigenous people against the building of Belo Monte, a hydroelectric dam in the Xingu River, a tributary to the Amazon in the state of Pará. Opponents of the dam identify its damaging consequences. Deforestation and flooding threatens local biodiversity, as well as the global climate due to the emission of methane. Furthermore, the dam will destroy the local means of production of the riverine people, while the forced displacement of about twenty thousand people, many of them indigenous, will have severe cultural consequences (Hall and Branford 2012). Cameron made a documentary about his journey to the Xingu to fight the dam, A Message from Pandora (2010). Here he asserts that Avatar (2009) becomes real in the struggle against Belo Monte. The film shows how the director and leading actors join the indigenous leaders and ‘live Avatar’. For instance, we see how Sheyla Juruna, a leader of the Juruna people, paints Cameron’s face and greets him as ‘our new warrior’ – a sign of cross-cultural collaboration 1 New York Times 10/4/2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/world/americas/11brazil.html? _r=1&. Accessed 15/12/2014.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_009

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eminently readable in global public culture, not least due to the familiar, filmic connotations of the war paint. I will examine the use of Avatar and a set of filmic intertexts as a model for understanding the Belo Monte struggle. Avatar quotes John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest (1985), which was filmed in the Xingu and deals with the conflict between ecologically rooted cultures and techno-industrial modernisation. The heroes of these films ‘go-native’; and that particular cultural ­conversion marks the end of the narrative, but before turning into the other, the (white, male) hero saves the indigenous culture. The films stage tensions between nostalgia for a lost, cultural past and the fear of destruction wrought by modern hands. Through this analysis I aim to show the broader cultural context of the shifting middle ground, its relation to popular culture and its deeper cultural and religious history. In a paradoxical way the symbolic power of the eco-cultural alliance here appears to be dependent upon a non-relation, and a re-establishment of clear-cut cultural boundaries where ‘the tribal’ is also associated with the human past. First I will present the theoretical framework around my analysis before turning to the insertion of Avatar in the Belo Monte struggle. Finally I will examine the cultural and narrative assumptions and implications of this ­insertion.

The Culture of the Shifting Middle Ground

Tsing has warned that scholarly fear of “simplistic representations of wild nature and tribal culture” may lead to the dismissal of “some of the most promising social moments of our times” (2008: 409, 392), namely alliances between ‘tribal’ peoples and (mainly) ‘Western’ environmentalist ngos. However, she also recognises that empowering “green development fantasies” (Tsing 2008: 393) are articulated in Western language and based upon stereotypical conceptions: “[O]ne must have a distinctive culture worth studying and saving” to enter international eco-cultural alliances (Tsing 2008: 409). Thus, particular notions of cultural distinctness and authenticity serve as both a model of the real (there are authentic tribal cultures), and as a model for the formation of the eco-cultural bond between indigenous peoples and ngos (alliances should be formed with ‘pure cultures’ living close to nature and hence worthy of ­‘salvation’). Having a ‘distinct culture’, however, implies living up to standards imported from abroad; translating oneself into the conceptual schemes of the ‘West’ (Tsing 2008). Or, as Carneiro da Cunha asserts, with a Marxian twist, it implies passing from being ‘culture in itself’ (in the text of ­anthropology,

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for instance) to having ‘culture for themselves’, in that turning ‘culture’ into a category of self-identification (2009: 3, see also Oakdale 2004). Regularly, such a re-description also implies erasing long histories of contact and establishing purified versions of tribal and traditional cultures (Bauman and Briggs 2003). Indigenous people in the Amazon, then, have successfully mobilised notions of ecology to form intercultural bonds with ngos and artists like Cameron. As Conklin and Graham observe, conservation has served as a cross-cultural common ground constructed upon the assumption that respect for nature is an intrinsic part of the culture of ‘the Ecologically Noble Savage’ – a new version of an older primitivistic ideal of “people dwelling in nature according to nature, existing free of history’s burden and the social complexity felt by Europeans” (Berkhofer quoted in Conklin and Graham 1995: 696). The struggle over Belo Monte testifies to the continued relevance of Conklin and Grahams’ conceptualisation. Tracy D. Guzmán has observed that “opposition [to Belo Monte] is articulated more frequently in relation to economics and the environment than it is in relation to indigenous human rights” (2013: 172). Nevertheless, notions about ecological insight in ‘tribal’ zones ultimately hinge upon Western notions of indigenous culture and religion reemployed in eco- and ethno-political discourses. One case in point is the occupation of Belo Monte in July 2012 when more than three hundred people from twenty one indigenous villages and nine d­ ifferent ethnicities occupied the construction site.2 On the demonstrators’ website, Ocupao Belo Monte (Occupy Belo Monte), we find a moving, poetic request for political support along with a self-presentation which marks cultural contrasts: We are people who live in the rivers where dams are being built. We are Munduruku, Juruna, Kayapo, Xipaya, Kuruaya, Asurini, Parakanã, Arara, fishermen and riverine. The river is our supermarket. Our ancestors are older than Jesus Christ. Amazon Watch 2013 3

The slogan Ocupao Belo Monte inscribes the protestors in a global struggle against neo-liberalism. At the same time, indigenous activists are claiming a differential cultural identity within a ‘global series’ of protests (Occupy Wall Street and others.). The cultural contrast is made by referring to forms 2 Amazon Watch (6/12/2012): Occupy Belo Monte, http://amazonwatch.org/news/2012/0706 -occupy-belo-monte. Accessed 21/9/2013. 3 Amazon Watch. 2013. Letter-from-indigenous-peoples-of-the-xingu-and-tapajos, http:// amazonwatch.org/assets/files/2013-letter-from-indigenous-peoples-of-the-xingu-and -tapajos.pdf. Accessed 1/9/2013.

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of ­subsistence and religion: indigenous religion is deeply rooted in the land; it outdates the Portuguese and Christian colonisation. Furthermore, the river about to be dammed is an equivalent of ‘your supermarkets’. These contrasts underscore the closeness – and dependency – of a ‘provincial’ way of life upon a particular habitat. Moreover, the contrasts also indicate that claims for cultural difference through ancestry and indigeneity, a deep history in a particular habitat, are premises for claims about conservation. Even if the shifting middle ground is, precisely, ‘shifting’, many of the cultural assumptions it is based on belong to a stable cultural topology. In the words of Stephen Nugent, the “iconic forest Indians […] embody the anti-history of the ancient tribal isolate yet also exemplify the survivor of a crushing set of historical transformations” (2007: 16, my emphasis). Thus, this iconic figure is placed outside history, in a cultural ‘isolate’, while he/she simultaneously is a ‘survivor’ of history (see also Ramos 1998).

Devolution – Timing the Middle Ground

Reminiscing about his Brazilian fieldwork Lévi-Strauss despaired over the ­‘cannibalistic’ nature of the historical process, and how indigenous peoples have been trapped in “our mechanistic civilisation […] like game birds” (quoted in Silver 2011: 117). The anthropologist’s sense of loss is brutal in his comparison of present informants with the past. Living Amazonians were “enfeebled in body and mutilated in form,” and seen as not more than “a handful of wretched people who will soon, in any case, be extinct” (quoted in Rabben 2004: 37). Thus, the remains of the ‘ancient tribal isolate’ surviving in the ethnographic present are only ‘fallen’ fragments of the former culture, and doomed to disappear. This notion of unavoidable loss binds Lévi-Strauss’ scientific anthropology to a Rousseauian sentiment significantly older than structuralism (Derrida 1976: 107–144; Williams 1973). To conceptualise this temporal sensibility, we can turn to Allan Dundes. Commenting upon the tacit, romantic assumptions behind early folklore ­studies – the disciplinary matrix of many disciplines of cultural and religious investigation – he identified what he called a devolutionary premise. Thus he referred to the notion that the present state of cultural items and in some cases whole cultures is but a mere fragment of the authentic artefact and past glory.4 As in the quote from Lévi-Strauss, loss is an inevitable effect of the historical process, “[a] change of any kind automatically moved the item from perfection 4 The most salient case in point is perhaps the Brothers Grimm who regarded folktales as fragments of ancient Germanic myths.

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towards imperfection” (Dundes 1969: 8). This idea of devolution thus assumes that certain cultural items and types of culture are doomed to “decay through time” (Dundes 1969: 6). Figures such as “[t]he noble savage and the equally noble peasant (…) were destined to lose” their authentic culture “as they marched ineluctably toward civilisation” (Dundes 1969: 12). Devolution, then, is actually a side-effect of modernisation and evolution and the inevitable effects that these have upon the ‘tradition’ of peasants and primitives. Accordingly, devolution is only in play when a cherished cultural item (a folktale) or cultural whole (indigenous cultures) comes into contact with the ‘cannibalistic’ historical process. This assumption lies behind a preference for cultural ‘isolates’ assumed to be ancient, and strategies of purification similar to the ones described by Bauman and Briggs (2003). In searching for “‘pure’ precontact cultural data, [s]tudents of the American Indian,” Dundes states, “would often write up their field data as if the Indians had never been exposed to or affected by acculturative European influences” (Dundes 1969: 8). The mutual dependency of evolution/devolution and modernity/tradition actually furnishes an explanatory context for Nugent’s paradoxical topology where the ‘iconic forest Indian’ simultaneously “embodies the anti-history of the ancient tribal isolate yet also exemplifies the survivor of a crushing set of historical transformations” (Nugent 2007: 16). We shall see further examples of such temporal purification in the narrative constructions of an eco-cultural alliance below. But first we have to relate this kind of cultural timing to some paradoxes concerning indigenous agency.

Devolution as Salvation

In strands of environmentalism, the indigenous people of the Amazon play a vital role in planetary survival. The collocation of temporal depth and ecological wisdom is crucial in the construction of this global role: The Amazon is home to hundreds of indigenous communities with traditions of stewardship dating back thousands of years. And yet the Amazon serves an even greater purpose for all life on Earth: it is the living heart of our planet and the heat pump of our global weather system. Without it, our chances of stopping global climate chaos are zero. For no reason less than the survival of our species, we need your support to protect the Amazon today.5 5 Amazon Watch (2014) http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=9a44dab15339533e574167469&i d=502fca5127&e=6e4269f7ba. Accessed 12/12/2014.

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The intervention of the rock musician Sting in rainforest politics in the 1980s was crucial in the articulation and popularisation of such ideas about a struggle taking place in an almost mythical ‘now’ stretching back to a common human origin and (possibly) foreshadowing an apocalyptic end. On the webpage of the Rainforest Foundation – in a text that could be read as its charter myth – it is underscored that Sting’s intuitive understanding of the link between man and forest has been corroborated by climate science: Twenty years ago, Sting went into the Xingu region of Brazil for the first time. He observed the deforestation of the Amazon first-hand, seeing vast stretches of barren land that had once been forest. He had the intuition then that the forest was important, and that those who lived there would best protect it. Today, scientists are recognizing that intuition as true, especially in the context of global warming.6 A bond between people living ‘there’ and global humanity is thus formed. The survival of local cultures, in a particular environment, safeguards against global warming, while indigenous peoples, ‘those who lived there’, serve as mediators between life and death by preserving the forest, a life-sustaining force. The presence of indigenous peoples is of vital importance not only for the local eco-system, but for all men, the whole planet. Applying the terminology of narratology, we could say that ‘those who lived there’ are turned into an actant of ‘helpers’ in a global narrative (Rimmon-Keenan 1989: 34ff). The role as stewards of the rainforest is linked to notions of Amazonians living close to nature, but even if the planetary and panhuman future depends upon indigenous people living ‘there’, their space is also associated with the past. The sign associated with human origins, the lost past that Lévi-Strauss mourned, is converted into a hope for the future. Sting makes the temporal translation thus: We are paying homage to our primeval history. We have stepped back to the Stone Age […]. In some ways Western man is in reverse evolution, we’ve forgotten our real potential. The Xingu can remind us of what we really are. quoted in oakedale 2005: 25

This notion of cultural time could be construed as a (non-disciplinary) example of what Johannes Fabian called the ‘denial of coevalness’, a “tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the 6 Rainforest Foundation. “Sting reunites with Raoni.” http://www.rainforestfoundation.org/ article/sting-reunites-raoni-twenty-years-later. Accessed 17/11/2012.

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producer of anthropological discourse” (Fabian 1983: 31). Thus Fabian refers to how the informant with whom the travelling anthropologist/­environmentalist necessarily shares biographical time, is delegated to the cultural past in the text that accounts for the encounter (travel in space is converted into travel in time). In the eco-cultural middle ground, however, there is symbolic capital associated with the appropriation of what Fabian mainly sees as an asymmetrical form of ‘othering’. Moreover, it is precisely the ‘survival’ of a link to a forgotten wisdom that furnishes many ethno-political moments with a recognisable place to speak from: “Our ancestors are older than Jesus Christ.”7 Moreover, as Sting states, Xingu is a place where ‘we’ are ‘reminded’ of a human essence that we have forgotten. This nicely illustrates another facet of the premise of devolution: Devolution and evolution must (like modernity and tradition) be considered as co-dependent – and coeval – historical temporalities. Evidently, this is so on the historical level ‘proper’, where the modernising forces cannibalistically disrupt ‘tradition’. But indeed, this struggle is also repeated inside ‘us’, the ‘moderns’, when ‘we’ lose contact with ‘our’ fundamental humanity: “the Xingu can remind us of what we really are” (Sting cited in Oakdale 2005: 25).

Avatar as an Eco-cultural Metaphor

I shall now turn to how such conceptions of culture, time and ecological salvation are calibrated in popular culture. The point of departure for this is ­Cameron’s documentary about the struggle in the Xingu, A Message from Pandora (2010). The message comes from a mythical place: Pandora. In Avatar (2009), Pandora is the name of a planet colonised by humans in need of natural resources, as in Greek myth, the name connotes both destruction and hope. On the one hand, Avatar serves as a model for understanding the Belo ­Monte conflict. But on the other, Belo Monte is inscribed in the cosmological plot of Avatar. In contrast to the tight plot of Avatar, A Message from Pandora has a soft narrative structure. It begins with a sequence of images of global, ­environmental degradation. These introductory images – related through a common theme, global destruction – are accompanied by Cameron’s voiceover, providing an autobiographical account of his ecological awakening. Next, we see footage from the journey to the Xingu and the protests against Belo Monte. 7 Amazon Watch, (2013): Letter-from-indigenous-peoples-of-the-xingu-and-tapajos, http:// amazonwatch.org/assets/files/2013-letter-from-indigenous-peoples-of-the-xingu-and -tapajos.pdf. Accessed 1/9/2013.

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The documentary ends with Cameron asserting that ‘we’ cannot live as the indigenous people of the Amazon, and that they, at any rate, do not want us there. What we have to do to live sustainably is to merge the tribal with the technological, and thus create a global techno-culture saturated by indigenous insights. Avatar could actually be seen as an example of this, for here a tribal and ecological message is produced with the aid of particularly advanced visual technology (see also Duncan and Fitzpatrick 2009). As we shall see, the story of Avatar actually takes us in the opposite direction.8 Let us turn to some of the plot features in Avatar that might lie behind the assumed equivalence between the film and the Belo Monte protests. Applying the language of metaphor studies, we could call the domain to be illustrated the target domain (Belo Monte) and the domain used to illustrate it the source domain (Avatar) (Kövecses 2002: 15). A synopsis of the plot, that is the source domain, could go as follows: In 2154, Pandora is colonised by humans backed by military might and corporate power where the aim is to extract a mineral (ironically) called unobtainium. This threatens the indigenous people of the planet, the Na’vi, who live in harmony with nature. Avatars, external technobodies modelled upon Pandoran bodies, are developed to study the natureculture of Pandora. Jake Sully, a former marine confined to a wheelchair, is recruited as a fieldworker. By controlling the avatar with his mind, Jake can move among the natives. In the process of the investigation, however, Jake ‘goes native’. Starting with its title, Avatar stages a mind/body split routinely associated with alienated modernity. This split is reconciled at the end when Jake becomes a Na’vi and is able to walk again. After a healing ritual invoking the maternal goddess of the planet, Jake leaves his earthly body behind. Becoming indigenous, then, also heals Jake’s damaged body. A Message from Pandora ends with hope: that ‘we’ can develop a ‘technotribal’ culture ‘at home’ and stop the intrusion in the Amazon. The closing of Avatar appears to be an inversion of this. The film employs advanced technology to restitute a ‘pure’ tribal culture at the end of the film. Thus, the role 8 A marvellous contrast to this withdrawal of modern technology from the zone of the ‘traditional’ is found in Terence Turner’s work on how the Kayapó use film and audio-visual technology to document, produce and present ‘traditional’ culture. Kayapó notions of representation are non-mimetic in the sense that “representation (…) contributes to the material social reality of the thing represented rather than merely reflecting a preexisting objective reality separate from the act of representation” (Turner 2002: 246–247). It is the very use of filmic technology; the movement of the camera and the cutting of the audio-visual text that ‘conserves’ and constitutes Kayapó cultural schemes and models both for internal and external audiences (Turner 2002: 242–243). Hence, technology here is the traditional.

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of advanced cinematic technology is to save and re-purify an authentic tribal zone threatened by eco-cultural destruction. To be a source of values and an eco-cultural example ‘to us’, the ‘tribal’ apparently has to be situated in an isolated ‘elsewhere’. If Avatar is lived out as reality in the Xingu, this implies that the fictive chronology is synchronised with the real time of Belo Monte. The complexity of this narrative and temporal conjuncture is underscored by the way the concrete threat of Belo Monte for people in the region is associated with the mythical generality of Avatar. The plot of Avatar is developed in the tension between the animistic life force of natural cultures and a death-producing ­culture of extraction. On Pandora, it is a planetary nature-culture, not a ‘mere’ local, ­cultural adaptation to a particular environment that is threatened. The use of Avatar as a narrative model thus appears to underscore the role of the Amazon as a scene where a struggle of global importance is played out. This turns what could be construed as a ‘mere’ local struggle into a struggle of cosmological proportions: making a narrative inference that blends the timescales of fact and fiction, we could say that stopping Belo Monte would be stopping the actant that eventually will colonise Pandora (in the future of the sci-fi). Thus, the narrative merger of Avatar and Belo Monte inscribes local indigenous cultures in a cosmological drama similar to the one the Rain Forest Foundation and Amazon Watch outlined to spell out the consequences of deforestation; it is not only about the people living in the forest, it is also about ‘us’ and the future of Gaia. The notion of ‘Avatar happening here’ evidently hinges upon the assimilation of the Na’vi with the indigenous people of the Xingu. The Na’vi have a number of traits routinely associated with indigenous cultures: they live close to nature and treat it with animistic respect. On the negative side, the Na’vi become victims of modernisation and development schemes that destroy the complex eco-cultural whole in which their indigenous form of life is embedded. Thus, they also share an identity with other ‘victims’ of the cannibalistic historical process. Critics have noted that the image of the Na’vi is a stereotype, a symbolic inversion of ‘modern culture’; that they are depicted as ‘irrational’ and ­‘retarded’, as ‘plain Indians in sci-fi drag’, and based upon ‘exotic tropes and colonial paternalism’ (Benjaminsen and Svarstad 2010: 11; Starn 2012: 179; Clifford 2012: 218). Surely, the point about the inversion is formally true. Nonetheless, this misses the content of the romantic counter-concept of noble savages and ecological Indians, and thus also the very cultural conditions for the ecological middle ground. The Na’vi are indeed ‘consistent’ with Western notions of conservation, and they are never construed as childish animists with i­rrational beliefs

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about nature. On the contrary, real communication takes place between man and nature on Pandora.9 This positive stereotype is certainly also constructed through inversion, but the Na’vi do not (only) represent the basic human building blocks that ‘we’ have evolved from, they also evoke the culture and species-nature that ‘we’ have lost. The cultural traits in play in both Avatar and A Message from Pandora are, moreover, similar to the ones mobilised as contrastive markers of identity in the Occupy Belo Monte blog. When it comes to the equivalence between A ­ vatar and the Belo Monte, an indigenous leader in the Xingu, Arara, is reported to have confirmed it, using the movie as a narrative middle ground: “What happens in the film is what is happening here”10 while the Achuar leader Luis Vargas also saw it as a good narrative example of relations between the state, corporate power and the indigenous people in Ecuador11 (Adamson 2012).12 Hence, we should not simply accuse Cameron of representing others in a stereotypical way; he might actually be quoting indigenous people who have made the same cultural distinction long before the arrival of Avatar in the Amazon.

Narrating Cultural Conversion and Salvation

If our films thus could be seen as co-authored in the eco-cultural middle ground, Cameron has also related Avatar to a cinematic intertext. He states that there is “some heritage linking it to ‘Dances with Wolves’.”13 Most i­ mportantly, 9

10 11 12 13

See also the following description for instance: “The Na’vi believe that Eywa acts to keep the ecosystem of Pandora in perfect equilibrium. It is sometimes theorised by human scientists that all living things on Pandora connect to Eywa through a system of neuroconductive antennae; this often explains why Na’vi can mount their ‘direhorse’ or mountain banshee steeds and ride them immediately without going through the ­necessary steps required to domesticate such wild animals” (James Cameron’s Avatar. 2009. Eywa. James Cameron’s Avatar http://james-camerons-avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Eywa. Accessed 19/12/2014. New York Times 10/4/2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/world/americas/11brazil .html?_r=1&. Accessed 15/12/2014. New York Times 10/4/2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/world/americas/11brazil .html?_r=1&. Accessed 15/12/2014. See also Adamson 2012 for other examples of the accommodation of Avatar by ethnopolitical activists. Los Angeles Times (14/7/2009): James Cameron: Yes, ‘Avatar’ is ‘Dances with Wolves’ in space…sorta: http://herocomplex.latimes.com/uncategorized/james-cameron-the-new -trek-rocks-but-transformers-is-gimcrackery/-. Accessed 19/12/2014.

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this is the motif of “a battered military man who finds something pure in an endangered tribal culture.” Furthermore, You see the same theme in […] ‘The Emerald Forest’, which maybe thematically isn’t that connected but it did have that clash of civilisations or of cultures. That was another reference point for me. […]. I just gathered all this stuff in and then you look at it through the lens of science fiction and it comes out looking very different but is still recognizable in a universal story way.14 The use of Avatar to target Belo Monte, then, evokes a set of filmic tales ‘­recognisable in a universal story way’: First, Dances with Wolves (1990), the story of a lieutenant who leaves the army to live with the Sioux. Second, The Emerald ­Forest, John Boorman’s Jungle Book-like film about a white boy who grows up with native people in the Brazilian rainforest. Twisting Cameron’s remark slightly, we could say that underneath the particular way of telling these films there is a common, narrative deep-structure (Rimmon-Kenan 1989: 11). I shall now examine The Emerald Forest as a part of the intertextual source domain used to target Belo Monte. What interests me the most is the theme of cultural conversion that marks the end of the movie; a return to tribal harmony accomplished through the final cultural conversion of the white hero. The concluding conversion-as-end is the resolution of a state of conflictive cross-cultural coevalness; the happy ending is a return to a prior cultural state, before the forces of coeval evolution/devolution were set in motion. Moreover, this manner of constructing a narrative ending could be seen as a resolution of the tensions inherent in the figure of the “iconic forest Indians [who] embody the anti-history of the ancient tribal isolate yet also exemplify the survivor of a crushing set of historical transformations” (Nugent 2007: 16), and consequently, also as a purification that re-establishes a clear-cut distinction between the tribal and the modern. Such narrative resolution is clearly impossible in the case of Belo Monte. I shall turn to Michel de Certeau to find an analytical point of entry into what I will call the conversion tale. De Certeau identified an ethnological ‘primary scene’ in Jean de Léry’s account of his life among the Tupinambá in L’Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, autrement dit Amérique (1578). This took the form of a narrative about a passage from ‘over here’ (Geneva) to ‘over there’ 14

Los Angeles Times (14/7/2009): James Cameron: Yes, ‘Avatar’ is ‘Dances with Wolves’ in space…sorta: http://herocomplex.latimes.com/uncategorized/james-cameron-the-new -trek-rocks-but-transformers-is-gimcrackery/-. Accessed 19/12/2014.

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(Brazil) – and back again with a symbolic prize, a “literary object, the Savage, that allows him [Léry] to turn back to his point of departure” (De Certeau 1988: 213). Moreover, the “story [of this passage] effects his return to himself through the mediation of the other” (De Certeau 1988: 213). In the conversion tales, the hero does not return ‘over here’, but returns to himself by going native. The Emerald Forrest (1985) was filmed in the Xingu. As in A Message from Pandora, the construction of a hydroelectric dam is the cause of the conflict. The plot is set in motion when Bill Markham, a North-American engineer, moves to Brazil to work on a hydroelectric dam that will cause massive deforestation. This move from the North to the South introduces the narrative conflict, and as in Avatar, it is the destructive capability of techno-modernity that will make indigenous peoples visible. Bill brings his wife and children to Brazil, but during a picnic on the edge of the jungle, the little boy, Tommy, is abducted by a tribe called the Invisible People. The picnic takes place in the liminal space between the construction site and the forest; the site where the incredible green abundance of the rain forest is brutally stopped by the brown mud left by the bulldozers clearing the jungle. As in the later charter myth of the Rainforest Foundation, this is the liminal space where the struggle between life and death takes place. The ‘chief’ of the tribe is a wise old man who eventually will become the boy’s adoptive father. Expressing his views with natural metaphors, certainly to illustrate a primitive and ecological mind, he declares that he decided to abduct the boy to save him from a life in the land of ‘termites, at the world’s end’ (The Emerald Forest 1985). This combined eco-cultural judgment lies behind the first turning point in the plot. The boy now grows up in the rain forest, in play between two fathers, as his engineer father never stops searching for him. Tomé (as he is called in the jungle) will save the Invisible People from destruction. First, he secures a fresh supply of the sacred stones that make the people invisible, and through this ensures the persistence of a traditional way of life. Next, he rescues the young women of the tribe from captivity in a brothel, and thus secures fertility and the social reproduction of the tribe. As we shall see, he also brings down the dam of the termite people with shamanistic techniques. After the initial action, the turning point associated with the abduction, Tomé will be the agent producing all events. To rescue the abducted women, Tomé seeks the assistance of a group of male caboclos, Amerindians who have left the rain forest, dress as whites and live impoverished in the liminal zone between the jungle and the city – that is a space structurally similar to the one from which Tommy was taken; between the jungle and the construction site, neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’. Towards the end,

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it is foreshadowed that these caboclos will marry the rescued women and return to the forest. Romance is, indeed, a powerful trope of conversion here as well as in Avatar.15 The character Tomé has a narrative function similar to that of Jake Sully. In the beginning of the story the hero forms part of the actant of modernity, the ‘opponent’ that brings tribal people into a conflictive but also coeval, narrative time. In the middle of the tale a change of alliance occurs. Gradually the hero becomes a helper who safeguards the survival of the tribe. Between beginning and end, then, the hero shifts actantial position, the ‘opponent’ turns into the ‘auxiliary’ – who at and as the end becomes fully assimilated. As a result of the upbringing in the jungle, Tomé becomes ‘territorialised’, a local best suited for life in a particular rainforest habitat. When he finally finds him, even the engineer father acknowledges that the boy will have to remain ‘over there’. To salvage his son and the habitat he has adapted to, Bill decides to blow up the dam – another shift of actant – but his explosives fail to do the job. Fortunately, magical bricolage turns out to be more efficient than the explosives of the modern engineer. Tomé, who has been initiated as a shaman, destroys the dam with the aid of his power animal, and makes nature itself (torrents) bring down the dam, and thus also halts the forces of deforestation. Even in the field of magic, the white man is the one who creates events. With the exception of the abduction scene – which turns around the Invisible People’s compassion for ‘us’ and the recognition of human purity (even) in a white boy, narrative agency is attributed to characters associated with intruding modernity. Both destruction and salvation are in ‘our’ hands.16 Conclusion In both films, the ending is a return to the past and harmonious state of ­nature where autochthonous rites again become the sole markers of time. ­Referring to Bauman and Briggs (2003), we could say that the mediations that inevitably characterise a story of a ‘clash of civilisations or of cultures’ 15

16

As in Latin-American literature where inter-racial marriage is a fundamental trope in national literature, it is a man who marries a native woman (Sommer 1991; see also Nunes 1996 on Brazil). A wonderful complication of the conversion tale is found in Michael Cepek’s A Future for Amazonia: Randy Borman and Cofan Environmental Politics, which tells the story about Randy Borman, the son of North-American missionaries, and his role as a ‘white chief’ (as one commentator has it) in the indigenous struggle for land (Cepek 2012: 4).

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here are ­purified infra-textually in the plot about the hero’s conversion (and not by the anthropologist’s wiping out ‘external’ cultural factors when writing up the text). ­Certainly, the conversion tale resembles other narrative forms – like the cowboy variant about good gringos saving Mexican villages from bad Mexicans but leaving when harmony is restored. In our films, however, the notion of the entity to be saved, ‘distinct tribal cultures’, is imported from cultural theory. The conversion stories place ‘us’ in a paradoxical relationship to the indigenous people who will save us by saving the forest. In the environmentalist story they comprise an actant of ‘helpers’, but to be able to help ‘us’ they must themselves be saved by converted heroes. In the ‘universal story’ played out in the films this ensures a new isolation, a re-establishment of “a distinctive culture worth studying and saving” (Tsing 2008: 409). The films thus stage tensions between nostalgia for a lost, cultural past and the fear of destruction wrought by ‘modern’ hands. One set of culturally recognised endings, apocalyptic destruction or the softer variant of gradual devolution, is replaced by a return to the beginning – the time before the narrative conflict interrupted harmony in a closed universe: the end of a ‘traditional’ world is postponed, at the end, and as an end. The human figure situated in such a safe space would simply have no need of communicating across an inter-cultural middle ground with ‘moderns’. Thus, such a symbolic division and purification will not help to stop the dam in Belo Monte (now well under way), nor help global nature/culture survive ecological disaster. Conversion, then, leads to the end – the white hero stays ‘over there’. A consequence of this is that the narrative closure also serves as a cultural boundary marker: there is no return ‘over here’. Typical for this narrative of conversion is that the hero, one of ‘us’, leaves his own culture. In the logic of the plot, it is this transfer that leads to the salvation of (what Cameron designated as) a ‘pure, endangered tribal culture’. Obviously, narratives must end, but this particular kind of ending might actually be conditioned by the theological pre-history of the concept of culture. Frank Kermode has examined ‘the sense of an ending’ in literature. At the end of a story we expect the narrative equivalent to the tack of the clock that gives shape to the unit of time that began with the initial tick (Kermode 1967). The ending is charged with a formal, teleological function; it is the place for the resolution of narrative conflicts (or the conclusion of an argument) – the tack that gives closure to the work (Kermode 1967; see also Becker 1979). ­Kermode underscores that expectations of endings are deeply informed by ­Judeo-­Christian cosmology and the apocalyptic notions of a final closure that give shape to salvation history.

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In our films, the salvation of ‘doomed’ indigenous people only occurs through the conversion of the male hero. It is easy to see that the mediation of Jake Sully and Tommy/Tomé has a Christ-like character; they offer salvation from collective death, and through this intervention traces of Eden remain on earth. Unsurprisingly, critics have argued that Avatar is a variant of the ‘White Messiah Fable’, constructed upon the patronising assumption that natives need ‘white heroes to come and rescue them’ (Grabiner 2012:101). ­However, the conversion story is more complicated: First, the hero is needed to save ancient wisdom that ‘we’ have lost through ‘our’ cultural devolution. Second, in the environmentalist narrative that the films are intertextually indebted to the ‘saved’ natives turn out to be our ecological saviours. Despite this dependency, the purifications accomplished by the conversion story wrap indigenous cultures up as pure and bounded units, as inaccessible as Eden. If they were opened, and made coeval, by the mediations offered by the story of civilisational clash, they become, in the end – and this is the function of the happy ending – unrelated to ‘us’, since the conflict that made them narratively compelling has been resolved. Drawing on Viveiros de Castro, we could argue that ‘culture’ as a concept actually contains an implicit story of religious conversion. Not least, this has to do with the concept’s theological roots: The ‘themes of acculturation and social change […] depend profoundly on a paradigm derived from the notions of belief and conversion’ (de Castro 2011: 11). Changing culture, Viveiros de Castro argues, is construed as equivalent to a change of confession (de Castro 2011: 11). According to this theological model, you either belong to a particular confession/culture, or you do not. A corollary is that cultural change, as a kind of secular conversion, is associated with the inevitable finality we observed when speaking about the devolutionary premise. Another is that change/conversion is already structured as a minimal narrative, a passage from one state to another, where the end of a former identity (state 1) implicates the beginning of a new one (state 2). From different perspectives and Western sensibilities, this passage could be seen alternatively as a gain (evolution, the enlightenment and civilising of ‘primitives’) or a loss (devolution, the loss of authentic culture mourned in the romantic mode). But at any rate the process is irreversible: [O]nce they have been converted into something other than themselves, societies that have lost their traditions have no way back. There is no returning; the previous form has been defaced for good. The most that can be hoped for is an exhibition made of simulacra and false memories, where ‘ethnicity’ and bad conscience feed on the remains of the extinct culture. de castro 2011: 17

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This finality is ‘above all’ a function of ‘our’ belief “that the being of a society is its perseverance: memory and tradition are the identitarian marble out of which culture is made” (de Castro 2011:17). If the symbolic stuff of identity is lost, culture is doomed and can only be celebrated in an inauthentic mode as heritage. Indeed, this evaluation of cultural change presupposes the premise of devolution. If there is ‘no way back’, the indigenous mastery of modern ecocultural discourses will also always be haunted by a suspicion of inauthenticity, or of indigenous spokesmen being dupes of international ngos playing out the ‘white Messiah fable’ – a common enough accusation in Brazil, as well as other places (Conklin and Graham 1996; Prins 2002; Ramos 1998). References Adamson, J. 2012. “Indigenous Literatures, Multinaturalism, and Avatar: The Emergence of Indigenous Cosmopolitics”. American Literary History, 24: 1, 143–162. Bauman, R. and C. Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity. Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Becker, A.L. 1979. “Text-Building, Epistemology, and Aesthetics in Javanese Shadow Theatre.” In A.L. Becker and A.A. Yengoyan, eds. The Imagination of Reality: Essays in Southeast Asian Coherence Systems. New Jersey: Norwood. Benjaminsen, T. and H. Svarstad. 2010. Politisk økologi. Miljø, mennesker og makt. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Carnheiro da Cunha, M. 2009. ‘Culture’ and Culture: Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Rights. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Cepek, M. 2012. A Future for Amazonia: Randy Borman and Cofán Enrivonmental P­ olitics. Austin: University of Texas Press. Certeau, M., de.1988. “Ethno-Graphy: Speech or the Space of the Other: Jean de Léry,” The Writing of History, New York: Columbia University Press, 209–243. Clifford, J. 2012. “Response to Orin Starn.” Cultural Anthropology, 26: 2, 218–224. Conklin, B. and L. Graham. 1995. ‘The Shifting Middle Ground: Amazonian Indians and Eco-Politics,’ American Anthropologist 97:4, 695–710. Derrida, J. 1976. Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Duncan, J. and L. Fitzpatrick. 2009. The Making of Avatar, New York: Abrams. Dundes, A. 1969. “The Devolutionary Premise in Folklore Study.” Journal of the Folklore Institute, 6: 1, 5–19. Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object. New York: ­Columbia University Press. Grabiner, E. 2012. I See You: The Shifting Paradigms of James Cameron’s Avatar. Jefferson: McFarland.

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Guzmán, T.D. 2013. Native and National in Brazil: indigeneity after independence. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hall, A.L. and S. Branford. 2012. “Development, Dams and Dilma: The Saga of Belo Monte.” Critical Sociology, 1–12, 10–12. Kermode, F. 1967. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press. Kövecses, Z. 2002. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nugent, S. 2007. Scoping the Amazon: image, icon, ethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Nunes, Z. 1996. “Race and Ruins.” In V. Daniel and J.M. Peck, eds. Culture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies. Berkley: University of California Press, 235–248. Oakedale, S. 2004. “The Culture-Conscious Brazilian Indian.” American Ethnologist, 31:1, 60–75. Oakedale, S. 2005. I Foresee my life. The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian Community. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press. Prins, H. 2002. “Visual Media and the Primitivist Perplex. Colonial Fantasies, Indigenous Imagination, and Advocacy in North America.” In F. Ginsburg, F.D. Abulughod and B. Larkin, eds. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Ewing: University of California press, 58–74. Rabben, L. 2004. Brazil’s Indians and the Onslaught of Civilization: the Yanomami and the Kayapó. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Ramos, A.R. 1998. Indigenism: Ethnic Politics in Brazil. Wisconsin: University of ­Wisconsin Press. Rimmon-Keenan, S. 1989. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Routledge. Silver, S. 2011. “Cannibalism, nudity, and nostalgia: Léry and Lévi-Strauss revisit B ­ razil.” Studies in Travel Writing: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rstw20 (Published online: 11 May 2011). Sommer, D. 1991. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. ­Berkeley: University of California Press. Starn, O. 2012. “Here Comes the Anthros (Again): That Strange Marriage of Anthropology and Native America.” Cultural Anthropology, 26: 2, 179–204. Tsing, A.L. 2008. “Becoming a Tribal Elder, and other Green Development Fantasies.” In M.R. Dove et al., eds. Environmental Anthropology. A Historical Reader. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 393–422. Turner, T. 2002. “Representation, Polyphony, and the Construction of Power in a Kayapó Video.” In K.B. Warren and J. Jackson, eds. Indigenous Movements, ­Self-­Representations and the State in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 229–251.

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Viveiros de Castro, E. 2011. The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul: The Encounter of Catholics and Cannibals in Brazil. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Williams, R. 1973. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press.

Films The Emerald Forest. 1985. Directed by John Boorman. Embassy Pictures Corporation. Avatar. 2009. Directed by James Cameron. Lightstorm Entertainment, 20th Century Fox. A Message from Pandora. 2010. Directed by James Cameron, http://messagefrompan dora.org/.

chapter 8

Materialising and Performing Hawaiian Religion(s) on Mauna Kea Greg Johnson Introduction Recent disputes over telescope development on Mauna Kea, the highest mountain in Polynesia, exemplify ways Hawaiian religion is being lived, expressed, and challenged in the contemporary moment. In the course of supporting this claim, in this chapter I will also argue that aspects of Hawaiian religion(s) shed comparative light on manifestations of indigenous religion(s) elsewhere, especially by means of up-scaled translations in the present moment of worldwide indigeneity. I use the construction ‘religion(s)’ as it is framed by this handbook’s title and introduction in order to signal a tension and interdependence of highly localised phenomena on the one hand and fairly standardised, transacted, and mediatised phenomena, on the other. This chapter unfolds as follows. I will first provide background for what has been happening on Mauna Kea by means of establishing some context for understanding contemporary Hawaiian religion(s). In the process, I will sketch the contours of three paradigmatic Hawaiian cultural and political developments that have left a lasting mark on materialisations and performances of Hawaiian religion. I will then turn to focus upon Mauna Kea, analysing one object and three performances that encapsulate themes I wish to explore – an ahu (altar), a traditional chant, a contemporary traditional song, and a madefor-media multi-genre musical performance. Concluding, I will consider some ways the Mauna Kea struggle is entangled with elements of the highly diverse sovereignty movement in Hawai‘i, asking what this situation might suggest about the interrelation of indigenous religion(s) and sovereignty in general. Context The Native Hawaiian community is roughly 400,000 people strong. While having no centralised government and multiple legal and cultural modes for identifying membership, the Hawaiian community is remarkably unified on © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_010

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the issue of maintaining cultural practices, including religious ones.1 While many Hawaiians are Christian, most have multiple religious attachments or, alternatively, describe their Hawaiian cultural practices as not conflicting with their ‘religious’ lives. Others have re-engineered Christianity in specifically and palpably Polynesian ways so as to emphasise kinship and place (see Schermerhorn 2017 and Opas 2017, in this volume). At the level of language, Hawaiian is seldom spoken colloquially, though there are increasingly exceptions to this, largely due to the success of the immersion school movement. But even for Hawaiians who do not speak conversationally, most know many phrases, prayers, songs, and chants in Hawaiian, so it is certainly a living ritual language across the culture. Evidence for this can be seen in the way Hawaiian-language speech acts have figured prominently in the Mauna Kea protests, as will be described below. In terms of specific discourse, Hawaiians seldom use ‘indigenous’ as a term of identification, partially due to the mismatch of the term with Hawaiian self-consciousness of being a voyaging people (that is, not autochthonous) and partly due to the history of Hawai‘i as a nation-state. In other words, neither the mythic nor the political connotation of ‘indigenous’ fits squarely with Hawaiians discourses, though increasingly Hawaiians are attentive to u.n.related discourses and occasionally frame their self-understanding as ‘indigenous’ accordingly. Moreover, ‘indigenous’ is a term of comparative relevance for Hawaiians, who do not hesitate, in my experience, to align themselves with other peoples who use the category ‘indigenous’ or ‘native’ (for example, on Mauna Kea, visiting groups of Apache, Navajo, Northern Cheyenne, and Maori representatives). Most typically, however, Hawaiians prefer self-designations in their own language, of which there are several, including Kanaka Maoli (real people) and Kanaka ‘Ōiwi (people of the bone). In English, Hawaiians favour ‘Hawaiian’ or, especially in legal settings, ‘Native Hawaiian’.2 The word ‘religion’ does not translate directly into Hawaiian, and few ­Hawaiians use ‘religion’ to describe their cultural practices, even when these pertain directly to deities, prayer, and ritual, for example. In English, they refer to these acts as ‘traditional practices’ or ‘spiritual practices’ for the most part, though sometimes ‘religion’ is used. That said, ‘religion’ is increasingly invoked when describing and defending traditional practices and sensibilities vis-à-vis 1 About two thirds of the Native Hawaiian population live in the islands, though many Hawaiians live on the mainland of the u.s. for a variety of reasons and especially economic ones. On issues of Hawaiian demographics, colonial history, legal status, and cultural politics, see, inter alia Merry (2000) and Kauanui (2008). 2 On Hawaiian self-designations, see Tengan (2008).

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the state and in venues of state, particularly in the idiom of ‘freedom of religion’. Thus the protests on Mauna Kea, for example, were frequently spoken of as ‘religious’. This is a relatively new phenomenon and one that is instructive with regard to discussions about ‘religioning’ and ‘religion-making’ in our field (see, for example, Dressler and Mandair 2011; Tafjord 2017, in this volume). In my view, religion is ‘made’ twice over in such moments. First, indigenous religions are fitted into Western religious-cum-legal frames and thus potentially changed (at least by way of emphasis and inflection) in the process. Second, because of the oppositional quality of this form of religious discourse (that is to say, it is being articulated against some force or perceived threat) the details and contexts for such claims are researched, refined, and otherwise sharpened thus rendering newly charged and highly detailed iterations of religion in a local key. I want to underscore this point: whether on Mauna Kea or in courtrooms, when contesting religion Hawaiians often do serious background work and come out of the process knowing far more about their ‘religion’ than they had before. In other words, religion-making in response to forces of secularism should not be interpreted as foreclosing the prospect of generative ­religion-related thinking in local terms. The Hawaiian context suggests that such moments can produce at least two forms of ‘religion’ and that these are co-constitutive at times. My hunch is that this twin dynamic is at work in many other contemporary settings where indigenous religion(s) get remade in the face of law. Now I will turn briefly to three examples of Hawaiian religious life that predate the Mauna Kea conflict and which set the cultural framework for ways of performing and materialising Hawaiian religion(s) in the contemporary moment. By far the most widespread and iconic movements that have defined contemporary Hawaiian religious life are: (1) renewed ocean canoeing; (2) the protect Kaho‘olawe movement; and (3) repatriation and grave protection activities. Together, these signal movements have set the stage and script for collective cultural action in Hawai’i such as the protests on Mauna Kea. Each also has features that run parallel to movements in many other contemporary indigenous communities, just as each has influenced articulation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (undrip). Hōkūle‘a, a modern reconstruction of Polynesian voyaging canoes, was built and first sailed in the 1970s as a joint project between anthropologists and ­Hawaiians with the goal of demonstrating that Hawaiians possessed the knowledge and skills to navigate the Pacific and, thus, that settlement across ­Polynesia was undertaken deliberately (Finney 2003). Culturally speaking, Hōkūle‘a figured prominently in the Hawaiian renaissance, adding momentum to growing pride in Hawaiian ancestral skills, and has become the site

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of ­extensive cultural learning and education (Johnson 2008). Additionally, Hōkūle‘a’s voyages to other locales in Polynesia (including, Tahiti, Rapa Nui, and Aoteoroa), Micronesia, and beyond, have reconnected Hawaiians to their cultural cousins and to indigenous peoples far from the shores of Hawai‘i. ­Currently, Hōkūle‘a is circumnavigating the planet’s oceans on a mission called ‘Mālama Honua’ (Care for the Earth), which is sponsored in part by the u.n. and which is specifically intended to share Hawaiian ecological principles on a global scale.3 At the same time that Hawaiian cultural ambitions were achieving a global reach with Hōkūle‘a, focus was also sharpening with regard to issues back home, especially concerning land access and preservation. Several important micro-movements and precedent-setting legal struggles took place at this time (late 1970s and early 1980s), as Hawaiians worked on various fronts to challenge the twin forces of military development and the booming tourist economy (Naone Hall forthcoming). The pivotal land struggle that emerged in this context was over the entire island of Kaho‘olawe, used for much of the twentieth century by the u.s. military for bombing practice, decimating the land and surrounding environments (Blackford 2004). Various modes of protest emerged in this setting, and use of media performance figured centrally. Two basic means of signification became prominent in the movement – wearing protest t-shirts and making signage, which are now staples across Hawai‘i political contexts and which cannot be missed on Mauna Kea today. Kaho‘olawe also served to set a paradigmatic template for direct action; numerous arrests took place as Hawaiians occupied the island. Two famous activists died in this process, disappearing as they attempted to swim to the island. In this way, modern martyrdom became a fact and trope of Hawaiian resistance – willingness to pay high prices for cultural preservation became the litmus test for bona fide religiousoriented protests, a standard that has been hewed to on Mauna Kea and in related protests over a telescope project atop Haleakalā on the island of Maui. The repatriation and reburial movement that began in the 1980s is also a critical piece of context for understanding materialisations and performances of Hawaiian religion on Mauna Kea. The main features of Hawaiian practice that have developed due to this movement are Hawaiian engagements with law as a site of religion-making and with law as process (Naone Hall 2010; ­Johnson 2007). Hawaiians faced significant threats to burial grounds in the 1980s, rallied around these threats, prompted a proactive legislative response as a result, and catalysed living Hawaiian tradition. The federal Native ­American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra) was passed shortly thereafter (1990), 3 http://www.hokulea.com/worldwide-voyage/.

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with considerable input from Hawaiians. While imperfect by most any measure, nagpra and the state burial law are widely regarded as being effective, including by many Native Hawaiians, religious leaders among them. Of particular relevance here, burial protection activists have a measured but firm regard for domestic law in general, and especially for due process and constitutional mechanisms. They have worked extremely hard to get laws on the books, to have them enacted and tested, and frequently challenge the state when legal or administrative processes are flawed. On Mauna Kea, legal issues have hinged on process-related issues of the sort pinpointed by a generation of burial protection activists.

Materialisation and Absence: Ahu o Kauakoko

I will begin to tell the story of the Mauna Kea protests by way of a recently consecrated site and its rapid desecration. The material existence of Ahu o ­Kauakoko lasted a mere three months, but its story provides a window to events on Mauna Kea in general and to themes that cut across numerous contributions to this handbook. The name of the ahu (shrine or altar) is ancient and bespeaks prophecy, war, and a huliau (turning point) in Hawaiian history (Kamakau 1961). It is also powerfully evocative even to ears untrained by l­ ocal knowledge: Shrine of the Blood Rain. Why such a heavy name? Why such a short life? Perched at 11,000 feet (3,350 meters) on the broad shoulder of Mauna Kea, the modest ahu was constructed on the twenty-fourth of June, 2015. A rectangular rock structure that stood about four feet tall (one and a half metres) and six feet wide (two metres), the ahu was built by the self-designated Kia‘i (protectors; a label they prefer to ‘protestors’) of Mauna Kea to honour the mountain and to commemorate their victory that day. On the twenty-fourth of June, more than seven hundred Native Hawaiian activists and cultural practitioners took part in an act of civil disobedience designed to thwart the State of Hawai’i’s attempt to facilitate construction of a very large telescope on the summit of the mountain. The so-called tmt (Thirty Meter Telescope) would be one of the largest in the world and was to be built near the summit of this revered Hawaiian wahi pana (sacred place), which they assert figures prominently in various oral traditions (for example, as Mauna a Wākea, “mountain of the Sky Father”) and in ongoing ritual practices. For these reasons, the Kia‘i were there to stop the construction. Stated motivations of the protectors were based not only on claims of religious violation to the mountain, but also out of a specific legal objection to the permit process for the project, which they

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asserted lacked due process with regard to widely shared cultural concerns. On that day, dozens of police officers from several jurisdictions were to escort construction vehicles up the mountain. Meanwhile, the Kia‘i had been staging a globally mediatised occupation of the mountain for ninety-one days and had been thus far successful at stopping all construction-related traffic. The costs of these actions were mounting in the form of arrests; the payoff was visibility and cohesion – the cause was gaining strength across numerous scales.4 The Governor of the State of Hawai‘i was frustrated and under pressure from investors in the project (including China, India, Canada, and various u.s. universities) to act. How, after all, could a seemingly ragtag and loosely organised group of youth (the Kia‘i are mostly in their twenties and thirties) hold the state and science hostage? Thus was a show of force deemed necessary to restore law and order. But the sides were mismatched, ideologically speaking. Whereas the state was prepared to make a show of force and perhaps to provoke a reaction that would justify escalation of such force, the Kia‘i had defused the situation before it began. They did so by the most traditional means possible – metaphor. The Kia‘i re-articulated religious idioms pertaining to warfare and struggle to fit the current context. This required symbol work, as literal warfare was off the table, no matter how intense some of the Kia‘i felt. Nonetheless, invoking Kū, the god of war, made a great deal of cultural sense.5 Kū Kia‘imauna! This was the chant that reverberated up and down the mountain on the twenty-fourth. War God, Protector of the Mountain! Kū’s energy was channelled into a newly carved ki‘i (image) made and named for this particular struggle. Such an act of materialising religion has ample precedent in myth and history, even in very recent contexts (Promey 2015). But here it was with a twist: while invoking Kū, the Kia‘i simultaneously articulated tradition in the novel form of a kapu (law or rule) that could shield vulnerable Kia‘i against the forces of the state. ‘Kapu Aloha’ (rule of love) was their motto and modus.6 Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other non-violent religious activists were appealed to as models for this way of being warriors for peace. In practice, Kapu Aloha primarily meant not reacting to police provocations. In the words of Kaho‘okahi Kanuha, one of the leaders of the Kia‘i, “We’re bracing ourselves mentally, spiritually for the battle ahead … I don’t mean a physical battle. It’s

4 For a comprehensive timeline of Mauna Kea-related events and pertinent videos, see: http: //oiwi.tv/maunakea/. 5 On Kū historically, see Valerio (1985); on contemporary metaphors of Kū, see Johnson (2003). 6 For a video that describes this well, see “Kapu Aloha 101” (https://vimeo.com/132507823).

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brain against brain.”7 Their strategy was simple – show up in large numbers and peaceably block the road while engaging in acts clearly designed to be interpreted near and far as dignified performances of indigenous religion. Mele (songs), oli (chants), and pule (prayer) filled the air and airwaves that day.8 Such performances convey a range of content, but formally they have a primary message – they demand deference. The formal message can be summarised as: we are here in ritual comportment acting in a manner above and beyond the worldly authority of laws, especially those of a colonial state. Those failing to afford deference to religious performances of this sort – even in agonistic contexts – risk appearing as thugs of the secular state. This was particularly sensitive that day since many of the officers are Hawaiian and were quite aware of the cultural credentials and media reach of the Kia‘i. Furthermore, the Hawaiian community is tightknit and such breaches within and across family lines would no doubt cause reverberations long after the day’s events. This kind of intra-community friction is, of course, well known in the context of minority populations vis-à-vis dominant state apparatuses. The hegemonic potential of state sanctioned power wielded by native police and against native citizens is dramatic not only through action, but most importantly through representation. If the state can foster and promote images of natives arresting natives, this tactic may result in perceptions among the broader public that the movement is self-neutralising. However, the counterhegemonic potential of such moments is rich, too. For example, in the heat of the struggle one Kia‘i lectured an officer about his family name, Kamakau (visible on his badge), saying it was an honoured name in the community and that he had an obligation to live up to it. Another tactic of the Kia‘i was to offer leis (flower wreaths) to the officers, a traditional gesture of peace. Additionally, children and elders were placed between the primary protestors and the police, creating yet another layer of demanded deference. All of this did indeed slow the police, as many appeared reluctant to engage the Kia‘i directly, and several were shown on live television in tears. But commands to arrest eventually were given to the officers by superior authorities at the state level that had been monitoring the situation closely. After hours of strategic protests, arrests were made. Even so, the police were stopped in their tracks by line after line of Kia‘i standing firm, chanting, and signing. No construction

7 “Telescope protestors pile rocks in the road,” Honolulu Star-Advertiser, 24 June 2015. 8 Excellent footage of the protests was filmed and disseminated by ‘Oiwi tv. I was present and made video recordings of the events, which I rely upon for my account. Johnson, field notes and videos recordings 2 June–4 August 2015.

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­vehicles made it to the summit that day and none have since.9 Hawaiian religions and/as indigenous religion stood their ground. Not only did the Kia‘i remain peaceful (other than moving some rocks to obstruct traffic), they became immediately self-aware that they had made history and myth that day. How long had it been since Hawaiians had stopped colonial forces so directly and emphatically on one day? History offers no ­comparable precedent, Captain Cook’s dismemberment aside. Due to this meta-­recognition of history-in-the-making, memorialisation of the day became an urgent and fraught agendum. Considering what happened that day and thinking of it comparatively, I am persuaded that accelerated real-time tradition making is characteristic of much contemporary indigenous religion. Increasingly, and catalysed by heightened telecommunications technology, potent moments emerge dizzyingly fast on the political-cultural scene, and accounts of them circulate fast and without interpretive controls. Savvy practitioners capture and stabilise – even canonise – the zeitgeist of such moments through rapid acts of in situ heritage formation. On Mauna Kea, harnessing the manifest ­energy of the day and translating it into a monolithic physical medium was one central goal. In a Hawaiian way, the answer was as natural as stone: construct an ahu (shrine). Sites of memory and aspiration, traditionally some styles of ahu were constructed to acknowledge important historical episodes and to serve as piko (portals) for the kind of mana (power) understood to be emblematic of the moments they were designed to evoke and honour.10 At the same time, such ahu would be named in a manner to call forth genealogies and the mythhistories of ancestral episodes. Building such ahu was itself a deeply religious act ­requiring various forms of purification and consecration. It also involved skill – pohaku (rock) work is an honoured profession in Hawai‘i, then and now. Once built, such ahu would become shrines for making offerings (ho‘okupu), and practitioners would visit on a regular basis to clean, feed, and otherwise honour the site. Prayers would be made and blessing sought. Thus was Ahu o Kauakoko conceived and constructed on the twenty-fourth of June in the course of the massive protests of that day. On the twenty-fifth, other than rangers and police, no vehicle traffic went up or down the m ­ ountain

9

10

For a representative news report of the day’s events, see: http://khon2.com/2015/06/23/ thirty-meter-telescope-construction-on-hold-again-after-mauna-kea-protests/; see also: www.civilbeat.com/2015/06/mauna-kea-telescope-protesters-arrested-as-tmt-resumes -construction/. This claim remains true as of 24 March 2017. On traditional ahu construction and meanings, see Kamakau (1992).

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for some hours. Later in the morning, with access closed to the public, the ­rangers allowed a group of thirty or so Kia‘i to go up the mountain to check on ahu they had constructed over the period of occupation and to engage in ­various traditional practices. Once these tasks were accomplished, a core group of the Kia‘i perpetuated tradition in the present by celebrating at Ahu o Kauakoko, which had been built on a prominent spot just off the road. A simple but majestic ahu, this offering site was named (echoing a legendary sixteenth century prophecy and battle that took place at the foot of the mountain), consecrated, and prayed over. Songs were sung. Then a very Hawaiian thing happened: ho‘oponopono. A form of traditional dispute resolution, ho‘oponopono (making right) is a method of working out grievances so as to restore solidarity (Haertig, Lee, and Pukui 1983). But what was the need here? In the course of the protests, factions of the Kia‘i conducted themselves in different manners, some hewing more closely to Kapu Aloha than others. This had produced tension in the community; the ahu became the site and occasion for seeking resolution. I had the good fortune to be there, and it was humbling to watch the Kia‘i work through their differences on this newly consecrated ground. This is a key piece of the broader story about Hawaiian religion(s) that I wish to tell: conflict and its resolution is as central to indigenous religion(s) as to other traditions; the tendency in the subfield to avoid or obscure this fact (not only of tension but of its p ­ recondition – namely, the plural nature of lived traditions) leads to misconstruing our subject matter at several levels, including baseline analytical ones. Indigenous religion(s) – in the plural, but most especially in the singular romantic inflection – require/s as much contextualisation as any other subject, which includes acknowledging conflict, tension, and other forms of being historical. Another key piece of what I want to convey about contemporary indigenous religion(s) was front-and-centre at Ahu of Kauakoko that day. The Kia‘i who built, named, consecrated, and conducted rituals at the shrine were ­overwhelmingly young. Elders – whether ritually trained experts or not – are obviously vital to the perpetuation of all traditions, and especially in decentralised contexts that define most indigenous religions. In Hawai‘i this is no different. Indeed, kūpuna (elders) and kāhuna (ritual experts) are accorded immense respect. In the last few decades, however, the grounds of practical authority have shifted. For example, protocols on Mauna Kea are frequently led by youth and in a manner that draws from the received past with a firm command, but also innovates upon it at an unprecedented pace. Whereas the previous generation of religious leaders – like those of several generations prior to them – primarily perpetuated tradition by means of mastering an established

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canon of chants and prayers, leaders of the contemporary generation have the linguistic capacity and audacity (some would say) to generate entirely new songs and protocols. For instance, some anthems sung on the mountain now, as I describe below, were composed only in 2015 but already have obtained the status of classic. Beyond Hawai‘i, it appears to be the case that youth is the face of much global indigeneity, and I suspect this has much to do with the convergence of three comparatively recent phenomena: the development of post-civil rights era, ‘multi-cultural’ institutions in settler states (immersion schools, for example); the rise of extra-state forums that have instruments by which to acknowledge indigenous claims (for example, the United Nations and the World Court); and the dawn of the social media age. On Mauna Kea, the Kia‘i are notable for their language credentials – they are the first generation of Hawaiians to enjoy widespread command of their language since the early twentieth century. These same Kia‘i are highly knowledgeable about United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (undrip; see Kraft 2017 and McNally 2017, in this volume). As to social media, images of Ahu o Kauakoko were posted on Facebook at its very birth, a moment and transaction that can usefully be understood as an example of how indigenous religions on the ground become indigenous religion on the global scene. Indigenous supporters around the globe re-tweeted Mauna Kea images in hyper-real time. Flowing back, videos from global supporters were watched instantaneously on mobile phones on the mountain. The next few months were intense on Mauna Kea. Various police actions resulted in arrests of more Kia‘i. Meanwhile, the social media visibility of the Kia‘i mushroomed, as did visitation to the mountain by various supporters, and especially by indigenous allies, including Maori, Mohawk, and Apache representatives. Building and maintaining ahu sites around Mauna Kea continued, a number of them reconstructions of historical ahu, others more contemporary in the spirit of Ahu o Kauakoko. As to the latter, it continued to hold a place of prominence for the Kia‘i insofar as the events of the twenty-fourth and twentyfifth of June took on increasingly iconic status. Metonymic of the struggle as a whole – and of living Hawaiian tradition overall – Ahu o Kauakoko became revered as the locus of contemporary indigeneity, simultaneously a site of religious expression and sovereign determination. At this juncture, perhaps the only thing that could have amplified the status of the ahu in the community would be its martyrdom. And that is precisely what happened on the twelfth of September 2015. Blamed by the state on the actions of a misinformed Office of Mauna Kea Management employee, the site was bulldozed, leaving only dirt. A moving video of two young Kia‘i at

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the ­desecrated site gives gut-wrenching expression to their grief that day.11 It also serves as a succinct response to critics of the movement who had insinuated that the religious ‘tactics’ of the Kia‘i are insincere. Thus, in an irony all too familiar to indigenous people around the globe, the ‘religious’ quality of Ahu o Kauakoko was proved by its erasure. Mourning – of place, space, and history itself – thus becomes one of the primary acts of contemporary religious indigeneity. But with mourning comes constructive memory work. Ahu o ­Kauakoko is now a site of pilgrimage and remembrance, and of vow taking. On the twenty-fifth of June 2016, I visited the site with several Kia‘i as they undertook this very purpose, re-dedicating themselves to the movement. Images of that moment were circulating on the internet by evening.

Three Performances

Moving from objects to actions, in this section I analyse three paradigmatic performances that took place on the mountain over the spring and summer of 2015. One is an ancient collective prayer, one a neo-traditional chant-style song, and the third a contemporary mixed genre multi-media song. Beyond adding texture to my foregoing claims about living Hawaiian religion(s), these examples serve as means to explore two related themes that are central to studying indigeneity in general: (1) the relationship of continuity and change, which is obviously at the heart of theorising all cultural phenomena, but which is especially poignant in contexts of indigeneity where the manifest ruptures of colonial history are so deep; and (2) the relationship of local and global expressions of indigenous religion(s). In both cases I want to stress up front that I am not construing these analytical frames as strict binaries. I­ ndeed, my point is precisely to challenge binaries of this sort for the very reason that such binaries frequently are central to the construction and maintenance of discourses of authenticity (see Johnson 2008). While frequently embraced and naturalised on the ground for obvious reasons, discourses of authenticity only hamper analytic work (by exaggerating the relevance of some data while ignoring others) and may cause scholars – wittingly or not – to participate in authority contestation in the communities they study (Lincoln 1996). In place of binary structures, I embrace the modest and common insight that scholars should approach such rubrics as ‘continuity and change’ and 11

To gain a grassroots perspective on the Kia‘i and the Mauna Kea movement, see a Facebook page devoted to the cause, Na‘au News Now. See 13 September 2015 for video of the grieving Kia‘i at the site of Ahu o Kauakoko.

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‘local-global’ as constituting spectrums that enable heuristic efforts to place phenomena in relative positions to one another, which in turn begins to enable basic moves of comparison. ‘How connected is this chant to an unbroken chain of use?’; ‘How geographically localised is this phenomenon?’; ‘How did it get here?’; and so forth. As we begin to search for answers to such questions, we may begin to see patterns and linkages to the ways and means other phenomena have remained or have become current and how they have moved from here to there. Once we discern patterns at this level, we might then venture some theoretical gestures so as to create languages for second-order frameworks that may refine our perceptions of the phenomena of indigenous religion(s). Here my only provisional theoretical claim is to conjecture that the terms of the analytical spectrums being considered always entail elements of their apparent opposites, a move that is commonplace with regard to the tradition-invention dialectic but which seems equally germane to thinking through global-local flows. Here a word or two on ‘performance’ as an analytical category is warranted. The spirit by which I engage the category is in line with that sketched in this volume’s introduction. Namely, my aim here is not to suggest that things I label ‘performance’ I thereby regard as mere artifice. Quite to the contrary, I align myself with those who view performance – embodied, articulated, intentional, viewed, and heard – as being at the very heart of cultural identities and struggles over identities. My point in using the frame of ‘performance’ is to draw attention to elements of social drama that might otherwise be missed or dismissed. How do people self-represent in moments of intense and potentially consequential struggles? What layers of culture and tradition do they draw upon and reconfigure? How do they imagine and reach their audiences? Beyond these sorts of orienting questions, ‘performance’ is also useful for the way it attunes us to analytical currents in various fields, provoking us to gauge their relevance for indigenous studies within religious studies (see, for ­example, Graham and Penny 2014).

He Mu Oia

All three of the performances I describe here involve young Kia‘i, and all three have hyper-mediatised social lives, if at different scales (that is, all were recorded in some fashion and circulate on the internet in some manner). Also connecting the performances is place – all were enacted within several ­hundred metres of one another at the 9,200 foot (2,750 metres) level of Mauna Kea, near to Hale Kūkia‘imauna (the Kia‘i basecamp and religious centre), ­immediately

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adjacent to the state facilities under surveillance by the Kia‘i. The first performance I wish to explore is an oli (chant) called He Mu Oia, which is a traditional pule huikala (group prayer). Recorded by David Malo in his classic Hawaiian Antiquities (1951), He Mu Oia pre-dates ‘discovery’ of the islands by Captain Cook (1778). Its key refrain is: He Mu Oia (defend us from them) He mu na moe inoino (defend us from nightmares) Na moe moe a na punohunohu, na haumia (from things in the night and ill omens) Noa Ia‘e (free us) No honua (freedom complete, absolute) malo 1951: 209, 98, 164, 212

A call and response chant, He Mu Oia encourages solidarity in times of fear. So it was on the morning of the twenty-fourth of June 2015, as the Department of Land and Natural Resources police approached the steadfast line of Kia‘i just at the edge of state jurisdiction. Led by Lakea Trask, a young immersion school-trained teacher, this line of Protectors repeatedly intoned the chant, facing a new spectre of cultural death – desecration. The solidarity constructed during the chanting was palpable. I was immediately adjacent to the Kia‘i, up on an embankment filming the approaching officers and the protestors’ responses. He Mu Oia, Na ‘Aumakua, and other traditional chants quite visibly brought the Kia‘i together, their voices booming down the mountain in unison. Never lost or forgotten as a traditional oli, He Mu Oia surely had a new life that day, or at least a new purpose. And it was no accident that it was so effective at drawing the Kia‘i together and at halting the police, which it visibly did. The group’s manifest command of the chant was quite impressive and to me, at least, unexpected. But it was not coincidental. As it turns out, key leaders of the Kia‘i had been conducting chant workshops for just this purpose. Those not trained in immersion schools could nonetheless learn and participate. In addition, those who wished to learn but could not attend the workshops could find video of the training sessions online, ­complete with subtitles.12 Modern media, progressive education methods, and political action thus intersect and underlie the chanting that day. 12

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M5fxYB5nOw.

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Ku Haaheo

Among the many collective speech acts on Mauna Kea, perhaps the most audible have been the many renditions of Mele Ku Haaheo e Kuu Hawai‘i (Ku Haaheo) that have serenaded the mountain. Composed in a traditional style, the song is utterly contemporary, having been written in the context of the Mauna Kea dispute. This is a significant barometer of the living quality of Hawaiian tradition – a young generation of practitioners and artists so command tradition that they innovate with it intentionally, as I noted above. In other words, they relate to tradition as producers, not only as consumers. That is too simple a way to parse the matter of course; I only mean to suggest how profound a phenomenon it is that after having been banned in 1895, the language enjoys an active social life now. Thematically, this song fuses ancient and contemporary concerns. In fact, it might be better to say it carries forward classical cultural concerns by means of revised idioms for the time, such as ‘civil justice’. The last two refrains go thus: E nāue imua e nā poki‘i a e inu wai ‘awa ‘awa (Move forward young ones and drink of the bitter waters) E wiwo‘ole a ho‘okūpa‘a ‘a‘ohe hope e ho‘i mai ai (Be fearless, steadfast for there is no turning back) A na‘i wale nō kākou kaukoe mau i ke ala (Let’s press onwards straight on the path of victory) Auē ke aloha ‘ole a ka malihini (Alas! Woeful are the heartless foreigners!) E lei mau i lei mau kākou e nā mamo aloha (Be honoured always oh beloved descendants of the land) I lei wehi ‘a‘ali‘i wehi nani o ku‘u ‘āina (Let us wear the honoured ‘a‘ali‘i of our beloved land) Hoe a mau hoe a mau no ka pono sivila (Paddle on in our pursuits of civil justice) A ho‘iho‘i hou ‘ia mai ke kū‘oko‘a (Until our dignity and independence is restored)13 Once again, metaphor is a key vehicle of tradition. Paddling – a collective activity in service of an envisioned destination – is a trope that speaks directly

13

For full lyrics, a link to performances, and a biography of the composer, see: http:// kumuhina.tumblr.com/post/37020256496/kū-haaheo-e-kuu-hawaii-by-hinaleimoana.

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to Hawaiian settlement, traditions of warfare, and of modern reconstructions of tradition. Metaphor suggests innovation, and here too plenty is apparent not only in the content of the words but also in the person of the composer, Kumu ­Hinaleimoana Wong. Mahu (transgendered), Wong has lived most of her adult life as a female. This has placed her in an occasionally tense position within the community. While homosexuality and transgendered lives were common and sometimes revered in traditional (pre-Cook) times, that is not always the case today, largely due to conservative Christian influences in the community. Even so, Wong has many supporters and is very influential and respected in the immersion school community. One basic index of respect accorded to her is the rapid spread of her signature song across Hawai‘i and among the Kia‘i. I have heard the song many times, but one performance stands out for a few reasons. In this instance the singer was Lanakila Mangauil, one of the stalwart figures among the Kia‘i and, though young, someone who commands considerable respect across the community for his knowledge of ritual protocol. The setting was the Hale Kūkia‘imauna, the locus of Kia‘i occupation on Mauna Kea. The occasion was the striking feature of the performance. A group of Maori visitors had come up to the hale (house) to ‘talk story’ (share traditions) and to honour the Kia‘i struggles. Food, laughter, and songs filled the afternoon. Gifts were exchanged, and Mangauil was given a traditional Maori vestment. Matters escalated as the Maori departed. Not in a violent way, but most certainly in a competitive way. In terms of Polynesian settlement and cultural frameworks, Hawaiians understand themselves to be older brothers to the Maori on the basis that Hawai‘i was settled first and that aspects of ancient Hawaiian tradition find expression in Maori myths and rituals. Maoris seem to accept this status, which is one reason they regularly pay homage to Hawai‘i. However, Maori cultural ­revitalisation happened a little earlier than similar processes in Hawai‘i, especially with regard to language recovery and restored traditionalism that goes with this and which is specifically indexed by competence in ritual protocol. Thus it was that younger brother insulted older brother. As described above, ­Hawaiians were rightfully proud of Hōkūle‘a and its voyages to Tahiti and elsewhere in Polynesia in the 1970s. Building on this success, Hōkūle‘a was sailed to Aotearoa (New Zealand) in 1985 (Finney 2003). There the Maori heartily and traditionally welcomed her. This seemingly benign gesture was the source of the aforementioned offence. The Maori greeting protocol was traditional and as such involved a call and response element. The Hawaiians, for all of their successes recovering sailing traditions, had yet to tap into their rich heritage of cultural protocol, at least in this context. Thus the sailors were humbled when

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they failed to perform their ritual role, standing mute when called to respond to their hosts. This wound was generative, however. Hawaiians are now intensely expert at greeting and departing protocols, among other ritual forms. And should a Maori initiate a greeting or parting protocol, every effort will be made by ­Hawaiians to end it on their terms. So it was on the sixteenth of July 2015. The Maori sang an impressive group song as their goodbye. The Kia‘i returned the favour with songs of their own. The Maori answered in kind as they attempted to get in their cars. But not before Mangauil sang an absolutely rousing and long version of Ku Haaheo. He began it solo but soon other Kia‘i joined in. Older brother was in charge that day.

Warrior Rising

Warrior Rising, the song, brings together many of the themes I have been pursuing in this chapter, especially with regard to local-global dynamics. The Mauna Kea movement is widely known across the globe for a variety of reasons, including the fact that several Hollywood stars have lent their faces and names to the Kia‘i’s struggle. In tandem with this, Hawaiians have performed and broadcast music directly from the mountain, sometimes with professional video teams and by means of established media outlets, including the Native Hawaiian broadcast station ‘Oiwi tv. As among the Sámi, for example, professional indigenous media is a thriving reality and one that appears to be a major shaping force across the local-global spectrum. And, as with media and social media in general, indigenous media outlets are increasingly making use of the internet to disseminate their material, making it available far and wide. In addition, some indigenous media sources are building consortia so as to have master networks that provide ready and immediate platforms for globalising local images. Warrior Rising is part of this phenomenon. Moreover, Warrior Rising was made with an eye to a global audience. The song itself, and especially its preface by lead singer Hawane Rios, is an appeal to audiences to see features of the struggle that go beyond Mauna Kea and that speak “to every cell” and to “our evolution together.” Rios declares, “The name Mauna a Wākea is being uttered around the world … in answer to our collective prayers.”14 The song taps into language that moves between hyper-local Hawaiian expressions and macro-global discourses of sacred land and ritual purity. The performance was at Hale Kūkia‘imauna, but much of the video is 14

Warrior Rising, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NwHVxrVXQ4.

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overlain with images shot elsewhere. As with the lyrics, these images translate between local idioms (shots of specific ritual plants, for example) and global expressions (for example, signs declaring the holy status of the mountain and of all sacred places). The images also suggest the vast range of materialisations of performance: of courtroom settings, of altar building, of parades, and of schoolrooms, for instance. Warrior Rising includes a cameo appearance by Lakea Trask, who featured in the discussion above concerning the traditional He Mu Oia chant. In that case, I emphasised his language credentials and the ways performing He Mu Oia as a form of protest catapulted tradition into the present by articulating it with reference to contemporary fears and threats. If by extension we can speak of Trask himself as traditional, which I should think makes sense, then we also need to grapple with his sense of style – he dons hoodies and basketball shoes – and his favoured cadence, which happens to be rasta-inflected rap. In Warrior Rising, Trask’s cameo stands at the nexus of local-global flows, just as it teleports tradition into the present. He begins by welcoming the incoming mist, then breaks into pounding rap lines, some delivered in staccato Hawaiian, others in rhyming English. Themes range from the hyper-local (of dirt and place) to the pan-indigenous and even universally human (revolution, justice, and nationhood). Were someone to ask me for two images that convey a sense of Hawaiian religious sensibilities today, I’d suggest the juxtaposition of Trask’s performance of He Mu Oia and in Warrior Rising. One mountain, one man, and several iterations of indigenous religion(s). Conclusion I will conclude with a note about how sovereignty debates have influenced discourse and action on Mauna Kea.15 I do so not in order to emphasise friction – of which there has been plenty – but to begin theorising the relationship of sovereignty struggles to religious issues, as these are intractably related, ­especially in asymmetrical contexts of colonial jurisprudence and Protestantcentric religion-making. Simply put, indigenous religion and religions are place-based. Places are grounds, of course, and grounds are, in the hegemonic optic of modernity, jurisdictions. All is mapped, divided, and subject to adjudication. There is no practising religion outside of some jurisdiction or another. So battles over sovereignty are already struggles over the very grounds of ­religious expression. Likewise, to practise religion is already to enact a stance 15

On Hawaiian sovereignty movements, see Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, Hussey, and Wright (2014) and Kauanui (2013).

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relative to sovereign authority, sometimes more emphatically than others. In a world that includes quasi-state apparatuses (for example, the u.n.) and numerous forms of indigenous quasi-sovereignty, the question is not only ‘What jurisdiction?’ but also ‘What overlapping jurisdictions?’ and, very significantly, ‘Whose rhetoric of jurisdiction?’ That is, questions are often about competing aspirations and visions, not only about direct, if consequential, procedural issues. On Mauna Kea this has all come into stark relief over the past two years as the timeline of the protests maps directly onto the timeline of a highly contentious Native Hawaiian ‘recognition’ process undertaken by the u.s. federal government and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (a State of Hawai‘i agency). The issue of ‘recognition’ (a quasi-sovereign status modelled on the relationship of American Indian tribes to the u.s. government) has intensely divided the Hawaiian community while at the same time generating huge amounts of cultural commentary. Those in favour of recognition cite the troubling record of u.s. jurisprudence on ‘race based’ issues (including freedom of religion) and seek a legislative remedy to protect and enhance existing Native Hawaiian rights, entitlements, and services. Those objecting range a huge gamut, but collectively insist that the Kingdom of Hawai‘i was illegally overthrown by the u.s. government and that the u.s. and its entities have no legal jurisdiction in Hawai‘i. Thus, recognition is not the issue. Restoration of the Hawaiian Kingdom is the goal. On the mountain, the issue has become a source of friction. Some Kia‘i favour recognition and the limited but concrete promises it entails, especially in the near-term future. Others – and they are in the majority – are sympathetic to various iterations of the Kingdom position and the strong claims to Hawaiian jurisdiction on the mountain that such a view makes possible. The issue is too mid-stream in its unfolding to analyse further at the moment, but it strikes me that similar intersections of political and religious issues are configuring indigenous religion(s) across the globe. Further, I suspect that these struggles are more homogenous today than in the past due to the levelling influences of ­social media and shared discourses drawn from the undrip and related international mechanisms. Surely it is an urgent future agenda item for scholars of indigenous religion(s) to continue to explore this fraught site of religion making. References Blackford, M. 2004. “Environmental Justice, Native Rights, Tourism, and Opposition to Military Control: The Case of Kahoʻolawe." Journal of American History 91: 2, 544–571.

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Dressler, M. and A. Mandair, eds. 2011. Secularism and Religion-Making. New York: ­Oxford University Press. Finney, B. 2003. Sailing in the Wake of the Ancestors: Reviving Polynesian Voyaging. ­Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press. Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, N., I. Hussey, and E. Kāhunawaika‘ala Wright, eds. 2014. A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Graham, L. and H.G. Penny, eds. 2014. Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and C ­ ontemporary Experiences. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Heartig, E.W., C.A. Lee, and M. Kawena Pukui, 1983. Nānā I Ke Kumu (Look to the Source), Volume 1. Honolulu: Hui Hanai. Johnson, G. 2003. “Ancestors Before Us: Manifestations of Tradition in a Hawaiian Dispute.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71:2, 327–346. Johnson, G. 2007. Sacred Claims: Repatriation and Living Tradition. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Johnson, G. 2008. “Authenticity, Articulation, Invention: Theorizing Contemporary Hawaiian Traditions from the Outside.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 20:3, 243–258. Johnson, G. 2015. Field notes and video recordings. June 2–August 4. Kamakau, S. 1961. Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii. Honolulu: Kamehameha Schools Press. Kamakau, S. 1992. Ka Po‘e Kahiko: The People of Old. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press. Kauanui, J.K. 2008. Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kauanui, J.K. 2013. “Precarious Positions: Native Hawaiians and U.S. Federal Recognition.” In A.E. Denouden and J.M. O’Brien, eds. Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights: A Sourcebook. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 314–336. Kraft, S.E. 2017. “U.N.-Discourses on Indigenous Religion(s).” In G. Johnson and S.E. Kraft, eds. Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s). Leiden: Brill, 80–91. Lincoln, B. 1996. “Theses on Method.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8: 225–227. Malo, D. 1951 [1898]. Hawaiian Antiquities: Mo‘olelo Hawai‘i. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press. McNally, M. 2017. “Religion as Peoplehood: Native American Religious Traditions and the Discourse of Indigenous Rights.” In G. Johnson and S.E. Kraft, eds. Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s). Leiden: Brill, 52–79. Merry, S.E., 2000. Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Naone Hall, D. ed. 1985. Mālama: Hawaiian Land and Water. Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press.

Materialising AND Performing Hawaiian Religion(s) on Mauna Kea 175 Naone Hall, D. 2010. “Sovereign Ground.” In C. Howes and J. Osorio, eds. The Value of Hawai‘i: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 195–201. Naone Hall, D, forthcoming. The Life of the Land: Articulations of a Native Writer. Honolulu: Ai Pohaku Press. Opas, M. 2017. “Not Real Christians? On the Relation between Christianity and Indigenous Religions in Amazonia and Beyond.” In G. Johnson and S.E. Kraft, eds. Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s). Leiden: Brill, 120–137. Promey, S. 2015. “Material Establishment and Public Display.” http://mavcor.yale.edu/ conversations/mediations/material-establishment-and- public-display. Schermerhorn, S. 2017. “Global Indigeneity and Local Christianity: Performing O’odham Identity in the Present.” In G. Johnson and S.E. Kraft, eds. Handbook of ­Indigenous Religion(s). Leiden: Brill, 192–203. Sullivan, R. 2000. A Whale Hunt. New York and London: Touchstone Books. Tafjord, B.O. 2017. “Towards a Typology of Academic uses of ‘Indigenous Religion(s),’ or, Eight (or Nine) Language Games that Scholars Play with this Phrase.” In G. Johnson and S.E. Kraft, eds. Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s). Leiden: Brill, 25–51. Tengan, T.K. 2008. Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai‘i. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Valeri, V. 1985. Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

chapter 9

Becoming Human: ‘Urban Indian’ Decolonisation and Regeneration in the Land of Enchantment Natalie Avalos On my first visit to La Plazita today, I noted two large tipis and a sweat lodge (a branch hut used for purification) located in the rear part of their large grounds. Tomas Martinez greeted me when I walked in. Tomas is an elder within the community; he seems to be in his 50s, is covered in tattoos, with dark brown skin, and a wiry build. His long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail and he wore a large handlebar moustache. When he told me he was in one of the first gangs in the area I believed him. This man has seen a lot of life and a lot of hardship. He has been with La Plazita for 7 years and says that it has really been about a lifestyle change. He ran the Thugs Making a Change (tmac) programme, which was created to bring Native and Chicano men who had been caught up in the criminal justice system into a supportive community of men, like Tomas, who are ex-cons or former gang members and have turned their lives around by reconnecting with traditional Indigenous practices and values. They act as role models to the men and women who come through La Plazita, many still in their teens, encouraging them to consider life beyond the streets – gangs, dealing drugs and other illegal activity. They advocate for them in court, help them get their General Education Development exams (geds) and/ or enrolled in college. As I sat and talked to Tomas and the other men present at La Plazita that day, they explained that many of their mentees have gone on to become social workers or educators, some receiving an A.A., B.A. or even a Master’s degree. However, they stressed that while education is important, inner transformation is the key to living successfully off the streets. If people don’t authentically change and come to know who they are and begin to use their power in an appropriate way, they are more likely to return to ‘the life’.1 Fieldnotes 30 July 2012

∵ 1 Some names of informants in this paper have been changed to protect the person’s privacy. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_011

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Introduction Decolonisation has often been understood in statist terms; as a project of national sovereignty and political consolidation by a formerly colonised nation. Contemporary discussions of decolonisation in Native American and ­Indigenous studies frequently describe it as a project of undoing; undoing of the discourses of colonialism, its psychological effects, and naturalised structures of oppression. In this chapter, I focus on decolonisation as a religious, even ontological endeavour among ‘urban Indians’ in Albuquerque, New Mexico (u.s.), specifically the diverse Native community associated with La Plazita Institute, introduced above. My research demonstrates that an emerging pan-Indigenous identity in conversation with religious revitalisation is healing/­empowering these individuals and regenerating them as a united ­people. While ‘urban Indians’ are considerably diverse, they often align themselves with other American Indian communities concerning their shared goal of Native survival – cultural but also political – and resistance. The multiple layers of colonial history (Spanish, Mexican, American) in the Southwestern u.s. make its Indigenous identity complex (Spicer 1997). An active slave trade orchestrated by the Comanche brought Plains Indians who were kidnapped as children – mostly Navajo, Apache, Pawnee, Paiute, Kiowa Apache and Utes – to Spanish settlements as domestic labour resulted in a de-tribalised peasant class referred to as genízaros by the Spanish caste system (Brooks 2002; Gutiérrez 1991; Magnaghi 1990). Although many New Mexicans who trace their families to the Spanish colonial period consider themselves ‘Hispano’, meaning of ‘Spanish’ descent – partially due to the racist stigma associated with Indian-ness – others recognise that they are in fact the mixedblood descendants of genízaros. Unlike the Métis in Canada, genízaros are not federally recognised; however, local agitation led the state of New ­Mexico to recognise them as Indigenous people in 2007 (HM40 2007). Thus, New ­Mexican Chicanos may recognise themselves as descendants of genízaros or as having an Indigenous heritage from south of the u.s./Mexico border, resulting in complex and overlapping identities among Native and Chicano peoples. In this context, Indigeneity is understood as both a personal and political category; it is lived. Indigeneity can be defined by who you count as family, who counts you, but also how you walk in the world, your ethics and being within it. It may also include an investment in deconstructing the settler state (u.s. and elsewhere), as well as asserting your lifeways in the face of assimilation and white supremacy. While the boundaries of Indigeneity as a category are contested, for instance, between enrolled tribal members, mixed-tribe Indians and mestizo peoples who do not belong to any one tribe, there are multiple iterations of Indigenous

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identity thriving in urban spaces and, in Albuquerque, a growing movement to recognise a shared hemispheric (Indigenous to the Southwest, Indigenous to North America, and so on) and even transnational Indigenous identity, meaning an Indigenous identity that crosses borders (u.s./Mexico, North/South America). Speaking to these contemporary realignments of identity articulation, my research illustrates the ways a diverse ‘urban Indian’ community uses Indigenous religious lifeways to heal from historical trauma and regenerate as peoples. In his Returns: Becoming Indigenous, James Clifford notes that the decentring of political/economic power in a global age creates spaces for the re-emergence of Indigenous visibility and claims (Clifford 2013). The resulting Indigènitude acts as a placeholder for diverse, yet parallel, socio-political goals. While this volume seeks to understand contemporary I­ndigenous reemergence (becoming) and religious expression in conversation with these still-forming transnational alliances and goals (pathways), my own work seeks to understand these phenomena in explicitly onto-theological terms. If we understand Indigeneity to be shaped by familial/historical relations and ways of being in the world, both rest on metaphysical claims – a s­ acred connectedness to the living world and its inhabitants. Thus, I understand Indigenous re-­ emergence, as Native cultural but also ontological regeneration, as a dialectical unfolding between persons and the spirit world; it is a process of becoming.2 This process of becoming has no end point. It is a spiritual actualisation in motion; a coming to know one’s self through time and space in a sentient, interconnected and dynamic world. In what follows, I contextualise Native decolonisation as a process of becoming in Native America through an ethnographic vignette. On-site ethnographic field research took place in Albuquerque and Santa Fe from December 2011 until June 2013 and, through correspondence, to the present (March 2016). In my research, I utilise critical Indigenous methodologies, which like Indigenist innovations in the study of Native American religious traditions recognises ­Native logics and voices as salient in theoretical construction and analysis (Pesantubee 2003). A critical Indigenous approach considers how this research may benefit Native communities and is conducted dialogically with multiple consultants who chose to share their experiences and expertise in order to support continued Native visibility and decolonisation.

2 Regeneration is a concept explored by Mohawk scholar, Taiaiake Alfred, in his work Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (2005). He argues that the first step in attaining true autonomy for Indigenous peoples is their cultural regeneration – a form of conscious re-traditionalism that asserts Native lifeways.

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Historical Trauma and Decolonisation

Historical trauma has been described as a group traumatic experience ­resulting from genocide – dispossession of lands, forced removal, and compulsory schooling – and the affects of which are cumulative and persist over generations, engendering an epidemic of domestic violence, drug and ­alcohol abuse, suicide, and depression (Duran 2006; Brave Heart 2003). Unfortunately, ­historical trauma is exacerbated among Native Americans through ­structural violence such as racial profiling and poverty (Kirmeyer et al. 2014). Native ­Americans in border towns are more likely than any other community of colour to experience discrimination in schools, qualifying for housing and through the criminal justice system (u.s. Commission on Civil Rights 2011). Although Native people make up about 1% of the u.s. population they actually comprise 2% of those killed by police (Males 2014). Native people have the highest incarceration rates, 38% higher than the national average, and Native youth are 30% more likely than whites to be referred to juvenile court (Perry 2004; Hartney 2008). They are the group most likely to be victims of a violent crime, twice the rate of other u.s. residents, 88% of which is perpetuated by non-native persons (Perry 2004). In these ways, historical trauma does not exist in an ancestral past for Native peoples; it is compounded through present conditions. While decolonisation projects are diverse, they generally call for both the undoing of colonisation as a structure and the removal of its psychological effects. Colonialism is not just a structural phenomena, it is one that takes place within persons – in their own perceptions of self as well as the world’s ­perception of them (Fanon 1967). The colonised, as subjects of empire, can no longer seek refuge in their own cultural forms because they have either been destroyed or are reviled. With colonial subjects viewed as having no ontological capacity (to reason or feel), their metaphysical systems are obliterated in the name of the civilising project (Fanon 1967: 110). Thus the struggle for freedom includes freeing oneself from an ontological double bind in which one’s own access to traditional lifeways is compromised and normative social acceptance through assimilation is unlikely. This double bind results in internalised racism, feelings of inferiority, and other forms of internalised violence –­ essentially a state of historical trauma that is reflected in the contemporary dynamics discussed above. As scholars such as Franz Fanon argue, it is the colonised who must recognise their own value, their own self-worth on their own terms (Fanon 1967: 229). One can choose to recognise one’s own agency, assert one’s own identity and make one’s self anew by one’s own/ community ­standards – it is the capacity to take back the power to name one’s self and

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shape one’s future. Thus, decolonisation is much more than a historical moment, an event; it is way of life, a way of being in the world. Decolonisation is a creative reclamation, a making anew. My research takes hold here, exploring ways that Native communities are making themselves anew through the multi-logical strengths of their religious traditions to regenerate as peoples and assert their sovereignty. The radical work of resistance among Native communities in the 1970s and 1980s created a space for Indians to assert their identity with pride (Clifford 2013; Nagel 1995). Liminal and mixed-blood Indians, such as Chicanos and genízaros, took note. It was finally okay for them to be Indian again and so they began reclaiming this identity. The diversity of this regeneration demonstrates that Native people need not rely on static notions of what it means to be ‘Native’ and can continue to explore identity expressions collectively. However, it also reveals the ways that community reliance on religious traditions and cultural forms accommodate their needs to honour their complex histories as peoples. My research demonstrates that Albuquerque’s ‘urban Indians’ engage their religious traditions dialectically, in conversation with one another and the spirit world in order to fashion new ways of being/ acting in the world. In this way, there need not be one form of ‘Native-ness’; there are multiple expressions of identity that act like a matrix of difference instead of a spectrum of ‘more’ to ‘less’ authentic. Decolonisation in Native American communities is contingent on regenerating spiritual ethics and worldviews. Santa Clara Pueblo scholar, Gregory Cajete, develops Indigenous pedagogy not just for the sake of knowledge acquisition but also for (re)learning who we are in the world – our reason for being: “As indigenous people recovering from centuries of colonisation, we need a perspective from a higher place to understand where we have come from, where we are, and where we wish to go” (Cajete 2000: 181). For Native people, decolonisation requires cultural recovery but also a return to the spiritual path. For example, according to Chicana/Apache scholar Inés Talamantez: In Apache culture, the religious concept of dííyi is translated as spiritual strength and sacred power that enables one to walk in balance and harmony in one’s everyday reality…. Living in a sacred manner and following the demands it requires are achieved through participation in daily ritual processes and in ceremonies. These allow us to be connected to the land, the natural universe, and remind us of our daily relationship with and responsibility to Mother Earth. This is called following the pollen path. talamantez forthcoming: 28

Forming a relationship with dííyi – the Apache word for spiritual power – ­enables one to have a vibrant religious life. A principal telos of Apache life is to

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maintain a conversation with the spirit world for spiritual/personal wellbeing and growth throughout one’s life. In this modality, a critical goal of decolonisation is religious reclamation. However, little work has been done on what the return to a spiritual path entails as well as what decolonisation may look like when viewed from this perspective. While I understand decolonisation as an ontological project, I frame it as a process of becoming following Talamantez in respect to her work on the Mescalero Apache girl’s puberty ceremony, ‘Isánáklésh Gotal (Talamantez forthcoming). During the ceremony, the girl undergoes a process of transformation, or becoming as she transitions from girlhood to womanhood. This process is not finite. It is ongoing through one’s life. The ceremony marks a time when an Apache woman concertedly embodies and performs not only ‘womanhood’ but also what it means to be a contributing and moral member of society. I think of becoming as a component of a larger flux, a concept articulated by Leroy Little Bear that describes a universe in motion wherein human activity contributes dialectically to larger cycles of life. This metaphysical notion is predicated on the understanding that all phenomena are a material expression of the same essential energy and thus interrelated, contributing to the dynamic and interconnected cycle we call life (Little Bear 2000: 77–78). Given this metaphysical backdrop, human experience can be understood to consist of cycles – micro cycles (days, months, seasons) but also macro cycles (birth, death, rebirth) – and human activity (songs, ceremonies) was understood to correspond to local and cosmic cycles. The flux is the prism from which to understand life’s events; becoming is the unfolding self within it. Thus, religious life consists of a continual dialogue with the spirit world wherein we come to know who we are and what our aims should be. Similarly, my Native consultants testify that as they ‘decolonise’ through religious regeneration, they are not only making themselves anew but also coming to know who they are in the world in relation to larger cycles of life.

Transnationalism or Indians Crossing Borders

Native American religious traditions are not static – they are revealed in conversation with the spirit world and continue to change based on the needs of the community (Deloria 1994: 67). However, as Myla Vicente Carpio explains, traditions travel with Indigenous migration, which took place throughout the Americas for centuries (Carpio 2011). The work of Renya Ramirez demonstrates that ‘urban Indians’ form complex ‘hubs’, or networks of Indian community, that support their spiritual, social and political wellbeing (Ramirez 2007). She frames ‘urban Indians’ as ‘transnational’ in order to trouble the oversimplified

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stereotypes that they are either de-indigenised or not invested in Native sovereignty saying, Thinking of urban Native Americans as transnationals complicates prior definitions of transnationalism that were based on relationships between nation-states, ignoring the importance of tribal nations as well as other cultural or national identities. ramirez 2007: 200–201

As ‘transnationals’, Native relationships to homelands and peoples are emphasised; Native nations become salient and agentive. Thinking of ‘urban Indians’ as transnational – moving across multiple borders (u.s./ Mexico, reservations, border towns) – also recognises their diversity: they may retain cultural citizenship for generations outside of their ‘home communities’ or reclaim their Indigenous identities. They may be enrolled members of tribes or not. Cultural identity does not stop at national lines or through relocation; citizenship often involves multiple sites of allegiance. In this way, we can better imagine the possibility that inter-tribal communities may articulate a claim to community – peoplehood and even nationhood – outside a singular Native nation.

The ‘Urban Indian’ Community at La Plazita

La Plazita is a non-profit organisation formed in 2004 in Albuquerque’s South Valley, primarily funded by grants, donations, and grassroots fundraising. On their website they describe themselves as providing: [C]ultural healing services to Albuquerque’s most vulnerable youth, adult populations, and their families… participants are of Hispanic/ L­ atino, Chicano, and Native American heritage [who have been] previously incarcerated and/ or gang involved, and come from families with multigenerational legacies of poverty, gang involvement and substance abuse.3 La Plazita has developed relationships with local institutions and government agencies, such as the Adjudicated Youth programme, AmeriCorps, ­Central New Mexico Community College, and detention centres to advocate for youth, men and women who might be directed to La Plazita for community service or work-study. They partner with state programmes to improve ­community 3 La Plazita Institute. 2016. http://laplazitainstitute.org/about/. Accessed 12/3/16.

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health outcomes, for instance, University of New Mexico’s ‘Pathways’ programme identifies La Plazita as a ‘Community Health Navigator’ meaning they connect low-income and uninsured South Valley residents with social, medical, or even education services (unm Pathways 2016).4 La Plazita Institute has leveraged its position with these diverse agencies to influence public policy, impact recidivism and act as a culturally relevant (Indigenist) beacon of support in a complex web of local and state institutions. In this way, the programmes at La Plazita contribute to both personal and structural change that benefits the lives of urban Indian and Chicano communities. The central philosophy of La Plazita is ‘la cultura cura’, or culture cures, meaning one’s culture and traditions are the antidote to life on the street or in the system. Their Apache/Chicano director, Albino Garcia, is an ex-con who seeks to disrupt the school to prison pipeline by providing alternatives to assimilation and creating an Indigenous oriented community – a tiyospaye that serves the neighbourhood.5 He was inspired to open the institute after being initiated into the Lakota Sun Dance tradition. The Sun Dance, a plains tradition of self-sacrifice involving fasting, prayer, and hours of dancing in the summer sun, has made a remarkable recovery since its ban in the 1880s and is currently one of the more popular and accessible Native American religious rituals in the u.s., though not without contestation.6 As Sun Dancers, Albino and his son, bring their spiritual training to others at La Plazita. They hold a L­ akota style sweat lodge once a week and take a group of young men and women up to the Dakotas every summer to participate in a Sun Dance, if they choose. These 4 unm Pathways 2016. http://hsc.unm.edu/community/chwi/pathways/community-navigators .html Accessed 12/3/16. 5 Tiyospaye is the Lakota word for the community of extended family who set up their tipis in a group and travel together. 6 Bruce Lincoln (1994) positions the Sun Dance as a revitalised plains tradition shaped by a history of racist dispossession, spectacle and activist intervention. Although the Sun Dance’s aspirations of sociocosmic reunion have re-emerged with a sober commitment in a post-aim moment, the ceremony itself struggles to reconcile this history with a religious leader’s instructions to make the Sun Dance ‘open to all’. The proliferation of Sun Dances in the plains, South West u.s. and even elsewhere is both testament to the ritual’s popularity but also to its contestations. Some dances are open to non-Native people, others are restricted to people of colour, others are for queer women of colour, and so on. La Plazita’s own inipi sweat lodge ceremony and yearly pilgrimage to a Sun Dance in the Dakotas avoids these tensions with non-Native peoples to some degree. The lodge itself resides in a primarily Native and Chicano neighbourhood, is chiefly used by Native and Chicano residents of the South Valley but is open to all that have come to participate in the tiyospaye – the circle of community made by La Plazita itself.

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sweats are open to anyone in the community but are primarily intended for those they mentor. La Plazita recognised a hemispheric Indigenous identity, meaning that they acknowledge the long-standing relationship between tribes of the Southwest and Mexico, uniting the diverse Indigenous and Chicano communities represented in Albuquerque and the greater SouthWest (sw). The South Valley is an unincorporated area that borders Albuquerque’s sw side, dating back to the Spanish colonial period and initially settled by genízaros who worked the land as farmers (Magnaghi 1990; Gallegos 2010). While the South Valley is rich in culture, many of its residents are struggling to get by. Like Albuquerque’s own se Heights, known as the ‘war zone’ – made famous by the hbo series Breaking Bad – drug trafficking and gang violence have deeply transformed the neighbourhood. La Plazita manages several community and private farming spaces throughout the South Valley. Their participants tend the land and sell their harvests at local farmers markets, setting aside a percentage in a free box for local residents who may not have access to healthy food, which directly supports La Plazita’s cultural works. The farms serve as a venue to teach young men and women to view themselves as its stewards. Their agricultural consultant, Esteban Velez, a genízaro from Peñasco in N ­ orthern New Mexico, explains that the cycles of the earth also act as an educator, teaching that life is dynamic and ever changing (Interview with Velez, 1 August 2012). For Esteban, this work tethers him to his own history as a genízaro but also reinforces his sense of querencia, which he defines as a sense of care for the land. Taiaiake Alfred, a leading theorist of Native self-governance, argues that the first step in attaining true autonomy for Indigenous peoples is cultural regeneration (Alfred 2005: 19–35). For Alfred, regeneration means choosing to live a distinctly Native ‘lifeway’ (for example, the Apache context described by Talamantez above). The move by ‘urban Indians’ to reclaim Native religious lifeways is a form of regeneration that also enables peoplehood outside a singular Native nation. This reclamation follows a long line of making anew by genízaros as some of the first urban dwellers in this area, American Indian movement activists in the post-relocation programme era u.s., and pan-tribal sweat lodges created by growing numbers of Indians in urban spaces (Ramirez 2007; Treat 2003). However, this new iteration of reclamation re-frames the urban landscape as a partner-in-living as opposed to a commodity for consumption or an otherwise meaningless place. The La Plazita staff utilises a diverse array of Native religious modalities to cultivate regeneration in the community, particularly modalities for healing and purification, such as the inipi ceremony or sweat lodge. By using more easily exportable features of Native ceremonial life, such as the plains-style

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medicine wheel – signifying the four directions and the sacred cycle of life – and generalising upon them to acknowledge sacred relationships to land and community, they develop a lingua franca that brings ceremony to participants. The emphasis on spirituality reinforces an overall goal to help participants cultivate personal accountability and consider how their actions affect material outcomes in their community. While the projects at La Plazita and life in the South Valley are sometimes complicated by ‘tribalism’, or the bias that tribal members may hold against Native peoples who are mixed-race, have been raised off reservation, or are un-enrolled, they seek to meet the social and spiritual needs of those marginalised by these biases. For instance, one young staffer, Rosie Thunderchief who is Diné, Pawnee, Arapaho and Ho-Chunk and grew up in the South Valley says, “my people don’t accept me because of my hair and the fact that I was born and raised here” (Interview with Thunderchief 21 September 2012).7 However, La Plazita has welcomed her and other displaced or relocated Native peoples with open arms. So far, this has been effective. Rosie counted over forty people on average at their weekly sweat, many of them rotating members, meaning that not all the same people come every week, estimating that 100–200 people in the community participate. My consultants position themselves as stewards of this land base. While their transnational dislocation has made regeneration fraught with contestations, their testimonies demonstrate that these Native ‘hubs’ are a critical factor in their personal and communal decolonisation. At La Plazita, ‘urban Indians’ re-envision what it means to be a people outside of individual tribal nations but are also able to build coalitions with the larger critical mass working towards the dissolution of settler states and empire more generally. In this way, while articulations of Native decolonisation vary in and around Albuquerque, it is generally understood as a project that takes place within persons – in one’s heart and mind – and in conversation with the larger community of human and other than human persons. Soon after I began visiting La Plazita, Albino invited me to a staff meeting where he explained that he used what he called a ‘five worlds’ model based on the creation narrative of the ‘Aztec’ or ‘Mexica’ people adapted from a similar programme in the Watsonville, California area as it brought down recidivism rates among ex-cons and former gang members. The model asks participants to complete five actions, one for each ‘world’. In the staff meeting, Albino drew each ‘world’ like a circular constellation on a white board: oneself, family, community, institution and in the centre, Spirit. Participants are asked to do 7 Rosie is referring to the way she has been treated by Pueblo people that see her wavy hair as a sign of being mixed-blood and thus, not as ‘Indian’ as they are.

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something significant for each component, which are followed like a pathway; for instance, cook dinner for one’s family or interview someone in the community. As participants travel the path, they must evaluate the significance of each world. Ideally, these steps help them reintegrate into the community in a healthy way by recognising their own role in the greater web of relations – a web that, ideally, is mutually self-sustaining. Healing in Native communities has been defined as the restoration of a self-identity that exists in proper relationship with “spatial, human, and ecological” communities (Crawford O’Brien 2008: 5). When Native people revitalise sacred relationships with the land, the spirit world, and one another they are both healing and decolonising. La ­Plazita’s models of wellness are decolonisation in motion, healing metaphysical ruptures and regenerating spiritual pathways. Tomas Martinez is living proof that the diverse programming and spiritual works at La Plazita are effective. After he joined La Plazita through a community college work-study programme, he decided to work for them full-time. ­Tomas, who is Apache/Chicano like Garcia, describes himself a btdt, or a ‘Been There Done That’, meaning he has experienced life on the streets and in the system, and has no illusions that it is a viable option for anyone. He has done three terms in prison for dealing drugs – the last one for fourteen years. After the death of his partner from cancer and dealing for thirty-eight years, he grew weary of the system and decided to fight his last charge. He enrolled in school and a friend connected him to La Plazita for work-study. At first, he struggled to see himself as someone who could help others. Once he started to participate in the sweat lodge and ‘cleanse himself’ his transformation began: When I started working here through work-study and started working with these youth… and I did the sweat lodge. That thing saved my life. It changed me completely. You know, cleansing myself inside the mother’s womb. Something I always tell everybody, ‘You know what? You have to find a spiritual – something, spirituality is gonna change you, because we can’t do it alone. Interview with tomas martinez 9 August 2012

He began to recognise that Creator was there to help and support him. He ­realised that after all the damage he had done – the ‘evil’ he had visited upon his community – he should be dead. Yet, he wasn’t. At the time of our conversation, he had been with La Plazita for seven years and said it had given him a new purpose in life. He saw himself as a warrior. Not fighting the law or rival drug dealers but fighting for his people, like a steward and protector. “I’m a warrior now because I live for my people. I want to help my people.” He was

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able to give back to his community in a way he never imagined. He is respected and sought out by others because they know he can help them. Tomas’ shift in identity also transformed his relationship to life; he feels good about who he is and recognises that he is happier being an actively supportive member of his community. As noted in the ‘five worlds’ model, reintegrating into the community in a productive way enables one to reconnect with one’s humanity but also the humanity of others. This kind of ontological regeneration is evident in Tomas’ case but is also taking place slowly among the younger participants. Victor ­Gomez was nineteen years old when we spoke. He is Chicano/ Apache and had been working with La Plazita since he was sixteen but initially came to them while serving time. His sheepish grin radiated a kind of sweetness that seemed both natural and manicured, not like he was trying to fool you but instead was unlearning his tough guy persona. His baggy clothes and tattoos testified to his recent life as a gang member. Victor was arrested for armed robbery at sixteen, tried as an adult, and posted bond because it was a high profile case (Interview with Victor Gomez 3 August 2012). Once out on bond he was placed in a daytime detention centre and had worn an ankle bracelet for about three years. He met Tomas through some family friends and was recruited to participate in their programme. La Plazita helped him get his ged. Soon after, he began classes at Central New Mexico Community College (cnm). He did well there for two semesters until he slipped up again. He says, “I got too used to freedom” and thought he could dabble in his old habits of selling drugs. ­Despite these slip-ups and new charges he continued to receive support from La Plazita, whose representatives advocated for him in court. One of Victor’s major challenges at La Plazita was developing a sense of personal accountability. He initially dismissed the admonitions of the elders, or ‘ogs’, but eventually he realised that they were right; he did have a choice not to be in this life. Both his parents struggled with addiction, were in gangs, and were in and out of prison, so he thought it inevitable. His Lipan Apache grandfather, who held sweats at their home in a rural part of se New Mexico, raised him but Victor moved to Albuquerque with his mom when he was eleven, which is when his street life began. The ceremonial life at La Plazita resonated with his memories of these sweats; even some of the songs sung were familiar. At first, he resisted the inipi ceremony, or sweat lodge, and lay on the floor until it was over. Eventually he sat up and intentionally submitted to the process of purification, learning he could release whatever burden he carried. Reconnecting to his Indigenous identity helped him understand his role in the community in a new way. He realised he could let go of the tough outer exterior that was expected of him on the streets. He spoke of Albino and the other

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men who run the sweat lodge with respect, saying that he would eventually join them at the Sun Dance, supporting them in prayer but he was not ready to dance. To Victor, these men were warriors; warriors fought to protect their people and land because they had to whereas “soldiers don’t do this; they just take orders.” His sense of masculine identity had shifted from wielding power through money, guns, and street cred to gaining respect by serving and protecting his community. He also recognised that he was not on his own in the way he had previously believed; he was being guided and protected by Creator. The accountability La Plazita sought to cultivate was grounded in a pan-Indian metaphysic that recognised human life as an extension of larger cycles of life. Thus, participants were encouraged to value themselves as individuals in order to step into their personal power in a positive way and become productive members of their community; for their and its survival. In this way, embodying power did not have to be at the expense of others; power was shared and diffuse. The idea that power is shared in a sacred (and unfolding) relationship with the spirit world was articulated most beautifully by one of La Plazita’s youngest staff persons, introduced above, Rosie Thunderchief. In our meetings, Rosie was soft-spoken and reserved, her pretty round face adorned with wirerimmed glasses and her long black wavy hair tied back in a knot. Her parents, who were transplanted through the federal relocation programme, are both Sun ­Dancers and Rosie attended her first Sun Dance at age two. She decided to commit to her spiritual path as a Sun Dancer at age six. She met La Plazita’s director, Albino Garcia, at a Sun Dance many years ago and worked for them through AmeriCorps while attending the University of New Mexico. Rosie is keenly aware of her spiritual life and mission and asserts that we are all in a struggle; a struggle to reconnect with spirit and come to understand what it means to be human, to know our calling and live it out in the world. Rosie explains that what makes the human experience unique is that we do not necessarily know what it means to live; how to be in the world: We’re all here to learn something together. There’s a struggle for us as human beings to remember what it means to be human beings and that a lot of us – maybe not even myself – don’t truly know what that means to be a human being…. we are a part of something greater. Interview with Thunderchief 9 November 12

For Rosie, working at La Plazita was meaningful because she was able to explore reconnecting to the spirit world with others, who also recognised the spiritual dimension of their collective struggle. In order to understand ‘what it

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means to be human’, one must connect spiritually to the forces of the universe and seek insight on what it means to live – what is most valuable, what are one’s responsibilities to self and others. It is this reconnection to the process of life itself that facilitates ontological and community regeneration. Participants are ‘made anew’ by discarding negative and limiting self-images and connecting to a process of life, of becoming wherein they come to know themselves and their spiritual purpose as part of a larger whole. When Tomas and Victor frame themselves as warriors, it is not a show of bravado. They know they are intimately connected. Their collective survival in the face of ongoing white supremacist violence is contingent. To be a warrior is to fight for a particular way of life, a radically sacred way of life. It is to celebrate life that is connected. Life lived with others. It is healing an ontological wound that has divided peoples and rendered them less human. Decolonisation is a process of becoming; of coming to know one’s self as a spiritual being who is connected to all life. It is hands reached out to the sun, honouring the processes of life. It is finding one’s spiritual directive in one’s community and choosing to honour it everyday. Religious regeneration empowers this Native community to reassert their claims to land, not as its owners but instead as its stewards; its protectors and relatives. In the process, the settler state is further decentred when political (and spiritual) authority lay not in statist claims but in continued relations with the land and community. An ‘urban’ Native nation is articulated in the pursuit of food sovereignty, alternative forms of education and even health care that addresses the needs of the people through their own metaphysical logics (Corntassel 2012: 93). Conclusion Framing decolonisation as a process of becoming makes the spiritual dimension of Native resistance salient. Spiritual actuation demands that you understand yourself in the world, not only through asymmetrical relations of power but also in the greater spiritual universe. ‘Urban’ Native religious reclamation heals wounds and heals communities through space and time. It radically transforms spaces to envision what alternatives to the settler state might look like. It transforms relationships to power; to oneself and others. Individuals and communities are ‘made anew’ as they reconnect with a Native metaphysic of interconnectedness. As Vine Deloria, Jr. (1994) noted, a Native metaphysic has a moral dimension; it forces one to carefully consider how one’s actions affect others in a deeply interconnected cycle of creation. In this context, lateral relations of power are nurtured. Decolonisation is accomplished on two

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registers: liberation from ontological dispossession/ historical trauma but also liberation from (and transcendence of) an unjust and illegitimate state. A ­dynamic process of becoming repositions people as an extension of life itself, allowing one to embrace the coming days of transformation – of birth, death and re-birth. It is living once again. References Alfred, T. 2005. Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Brave Heart, M.Y.H. 2003. “The Historical Trauma Response Among Natives and Its Relationship with Substance Abuse: A Lakota Illustration.” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 35, 1: 7–13. Brooks, J.F. 2002. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Williamsburg: University of North Carolina Press. Cajete, G. 2000. “Indigenous Knowledge: The Pueblo Metaphor of Indigenous ­Education.” In Marie Battise, ed. Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 181–191. Carpio, M.V. 2011. Indigenous Albuquerque. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press. Clifford, J. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Corntassel, J. 2012. “Re-envisioning Resurgence: Indigenous Pathways to Decolonization and Sustainable Self-Determination.” Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education & Society 1:1, 86–101. Crawford O’Brien, S.J. 2008. “Introduction.” In Suzanne J. Crawford O’Brien, ed. Religion and Healing in Native America: Pathways for Renewal. Religion, Health and Healing Series. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1–16. Deloria, Jr. V. 1994. God is Red: A Native View of Religion: the Classic Work Updated. ­Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing. Duran, E. 2006. Healing the Soul Wound: Counseling with American Indians and Other Native People. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Fanon, F. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York, NY: Grove Press. Gallegos, B. 2010. “Dancing the Comanches: The Santo Niño, La Virgen (of Guadalupe) and the Genizaro Indians of New Mexico.” In K.J. Martin, ed. Indigenous Symbols and Practices in the Catholic Church: Visual Culture, Missionization and Appropriation. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishers, 203–208.

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Gutiérrez, R.A. 1991. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hartney, C. 2008. “Native American Youth and the Juvenile Justice System.” National Council on Crime and Delinquency, Focus, March 2008. House Memorial 40 (HM40). 2007. “In Recognition,” New Mexico State Legislature, Regular Session. Kirmeyer, L.J., J.P. Gone, and J. Moses. 2014. “Rethinking Historical Trauma.” Transcultural Psychiatry 51: 3, 299–319. Lincoln, B. 1994. “A Lakota Sun Dance and the Problematics of Sociocosmic Reunion.” History of Religions 34: 1, 1–14. Little Bear, L. 2000. “Jagged Worldviews Colliding.” In M. Battise, ed. Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 77–85. Magnaghi, R. 1990. “Plains Indians in New Mexico: The Genízaro Experience.” Great Plains Quarterly 10: 2, 86–95. Males, M. 2014. “Who Are Police Killing?” Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, ­August 24, http://www.cjcj.org/news/8113. Nagel, J. 1995. “American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Politics and the Resurgence of ­Identity.” American Sociological Review 60: 6, 947–965. Perry, S.W. 2004. “American Indians and Crime” (pdf, 56 pages). A BJS Statistical Profile 1992–2002, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCJ 203097. Pesantubee, M. 2003. “Religious Studies on the Margins: Decolonizing Our Minds.” In R.A. Grounds, G.E. Tinker, and D.E. Wilkins, eds. Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 209–222. Ramirez, R. 2007. Native Hubs: Culture, Community and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Spicer, E.H. 1997. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Talamantez, I. Becoming‘Isánáklésh: The Mescalero Apache Girls Puberty Ceremony. University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming. Treat, J. 2003. Around the Sacred Fire: Native Religious Activism in the Red Power Era. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. 2011. “Discrimination Against Native Americans in Border Towns,” A Briefing Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights Held in Washington, D.C.

chapter 10

Global Indigeneity and Local Christianity: Performing O’odham Identity in the Present Seth Schermerhorn The fact of global indigènitude is inescapable. clifford 2013: 21

…

Native Christian life [is] a highly localised phenomenon. treat 1996: 21

∵ Introduction The complexities of indigenous being and becoming in the present are eloquently captured by Greg Johnson and Siv Ellen Kraft: “Extremely distant and distinct indigenous communities have over recent decades become more like themselves and more like each other. While not equally characteristic of all contemporary indigenous discourses of religion, this paradox is as prevalent on the global scene as it is inadequately accounted for by means of inherited analytical frames, especially with regard to religion” (Johnson and Kraft 2017: 1). This apparent paradox is perhaps most acute when the religion of the indigenous peoples in question is a so-called ‘world religion’ such as Christianity. In turn, this brings us to the deliberately perplexing categories juxtaposed in the title of this paper: global indigeneity and local Christianity. How is it meaningful to speak of the indigenous, that heir to the anthropological category of the ‘tribal’ which has long been associated with the local, as global? And how is it meaningful to speak about Christianity, that tradition which according to so many of its own apologists is universal, as local? In other words, how is it that some practices, images, and sounds enjoy global uptake as ‘indigenous’ at the same time that other practices, images, and sounds of a putatively ‘universal’ © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_012

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tradition lack such global uptake, remaining profoundly local, as a locale tradition (Johnson 2006: 1341), albeit one that is also concurrently interconnected with a global community of Christians (Robbins 2009; Marshall 2016) as well as a global community of indigenous peoples (Niezen 2003; Cadena and Starn 2007; Clifford 2013)? Although these questions are posed here ahistorically, there is an important historical implication in the fact that, without speaking anachronistically, so many peoples who today call themselves ‘indigenous’, first called themselves ‘Christian’ (prior to calling themselves ‘indigenous’). Indeed, without looking any farther than the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the Wycliffe Bible Translators, one can surmise that if as Johnson and Kraft (2017:  11) put it, ­“indigeneity [is] most effective when understood as a circuit that is switched ‘on’ when ‘the indigenous’ is no longer only local or exclusive,” then Christianity itself is a significant circuit of indigeneity. Moreover, these overlapping circuits of ‘indigeneity’ and ‘Christianity’ are dialectical, as diverse peoples engage global categories that in turn feed back into local traditions (Bialecki et al. 2008; Robbins 2004; Keane 2007; Lassiter et al. 2002; Treat 1996; Treat 2003; McNally 2009a; McNally 2010; Marshall 2016). Nonetheless, to appropriate playfully the words of anthropologist Webb Keane for the purposes of this chapter, “[t]he global circulation of seemingly familiar things like Christianity or, say, money [we might add indigeneity] does not eliminate the difficulties of understanding. If anything, thoughtful attention to that circulation should begin to make them seem unfamiliar” (2007: 287). And so, my goal here is to unsettle established ways of casting both Christianity and indigeneity through playful (therefore, serious) juxtaposition in the hope that both categories will begin to seem somewhat strange.

Local Christianity

By the early twenty-first century, both indigeneity and Christianity have gone global (Clifford 2013; Robert 2009; Sanneh 2003). However, much like indigeneity, the global history of Christianity is not merely a story of continuous growth and expansion, as it is sometimes presented, but also a story of decline, and in some cases extinction (Wilken 2012).1 Furthermore, precisely because 1 While the uptake of indigeneity has flourished in the Americas, Australia, the Island Pacific, and the Arctic, indigeneity has experienced far more limited uptake in much of Asia, particularly Southeast Asia and India, most of Africa, and even less in the Middle East and most of Europe. For Tibet, see E.T. Yeh (2007). For India, see A. Baviskar (2007).

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­ hristianity has a history, as well as a global reach, in order to say anything C meaningful about Christianity, it is imperative to be as specific as possible about what kind of Christianity one means. In particular, Christianity is vulnerable to transformation through what mission historians Lamin Sanneh (1989) and Andrew Walls (1996) call ‘translatability’ and what anthropologist Anna Tsing (2005) has called ‘friction’. Therefore, it is perhaps necessary to refer to Christianities in the plural rather than speaking about Christianity in general. And while I am ultimately persuaded that “there is not one Christianity but many” (Vilaça and Wright 2009: 2), as an analytical exercise I am still intrigued by scholarly depictions of Christianity as monolithic (Whitehouse 2006). Take, for example, anthropologist Fanella Cannell’s definition of Christianity as “a complex historical object whose parameters are by no means arbitrary but which also cannot plausibly be described except as being in tension with itself…as a fundamentally paradoxical tradition” (2006: 43). As Cannell herself points out, two significant implications of this model of Christianity are first, that “when a locality encounters Christianity, it is never obvious in advance what ‘Christianity’ is,” and second, that Christianity “can never contain only a single message with single possibilities of interpretation, because Christian doctrine is in itself paradoxical” (2006: 43). As a consequence, Christianity appears as an emergent category that, far from being a known quantity, requires constant re-examination. This burgeoning anthropology of Christianity, however, also requires an awareness of ‘the Christianity of anthropology’ (Cannell 2005), since Talal Asad (1993; 2003) has forcefully shown the category of religion to be a product of Christian theology that entered anthropological theory. However, if Christianity is ‘the repressed’ of anthropology (Cannell 2006: 4), then it is also, and no less, ‘the repressed’ theological baggage of the putatively secular academic discipline of religious studies (Masuzawa 1993; Masuzawa 2005). To return to Cannell’s conception of Christianity as paradoxical, I am particularly interested in the ways in which Christianity, conceived as a tradition in tension with itself, has been transformed by indigenous peoples. My own research with the Tohono O’odham, a transnational indigenous people who live on the second largest reservation in the United States along the u.s.– Mexico border separating the states of Arizona and Sonora, has focused on O’odham pilgrimages to Magdalena in honour of their patron saint, Saint Francis. ­Elsewhere, I have argued that some O’odham have made Christianity their own, by embedding, or emplacing, Christianity within their ancestral landscapes (Schermerhorn 2013). In other words, I argue that some O’odham have indigenised Christianity by localising it.

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However, this argument is hardly novel. For instance, Church historian Andrew Walls claimed two decades ago that the ongoing lives of traditional religions in Africa lie within African Christianity, arguing that “the real continuities between pre-Christian and Christian African religion lie in worldview and perception” as well as a “this worldly” orientation (Walls 2002: 123). I stress the lack of originality in my own thesis because, while I do think that some O’odham have made Christianity their own in distinctive ways, I do not want to argue that this is in any way unique. Whereas distinctness is a relational category, which invites comparison, uniqueness is an absolute category, forestalling comparison (Smith 1990). For the purposes of comparison, consider the Yoemem, or Yaquis as they are conventionally known in ethnographic literature, who are neighbours of the O’odham living primarily in pueblos (communities) in Sonora and refugee communities in southern and central Arizona. They have similarly emplaced Christianity in their ancestral landscape, albeit in distinctly different ways ­(Erickson 2008; Shorter 2009). As Peter Nabokov describes Yoeme emplacements of Christianity: [T]hese Yaqui did not consider the Old Testament heroes and prophets to be Middle Eastern characters. They were Indians. The Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, all the rest of it happened here. Nor did the Passion unfold in Galilee. Christ first walked the Americas. His miracles took place along the Yaqui River. This was not any Holy Land; here lay the Holy Land. (2006: 122) And yet, while many O’odham have made Christianity their own, many of these same O’odham have also found ways to keep Christianity foreign. For example, the Spanish songs, sung for saints on their feast days by older O’odham women who do not speak Spanish, contain many sounds that do not constitute recognisably Spanish words (Bahr 1980). Rather than phonemically transforming the Spanish words into a more O’odham-friendly phonemic system, which might constitute something of a phonemic indigenisation of Spanish, these hymns preserve what linguist Jane Hill (2008) might call ‘mock Spanish’, or more specifically, Spanish which sounds Spanish to O’odham. While this O’odham ‘mock Spanish’ is not meant to insult the saints, who are the primary audience of these songs, this indigenous strategy of defamiliarisation amidst other O’odham familiarisations of Christianity is striking. This example also forces me to recall a historical claim voiced publically during the authorisation of my research. The claim was that O’odham practised a different religion­one

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hundred years ago and that they will practice a different religion in another one hundred years from now, thereby almost dismissing the significance of contemporary Catholic religious practices as anything other than an academic­ interest, and thereby perfectly suited for a non-O’odham scholar to study. ­Making Christianity their own, as well as marking its foreignness, are two unfinished projects for contemporary O’odham, and there is no room here for foregone conclusions. Still more, strategies such as these that may seem to be in tension with one another are not merely expressions of O’odham ambivalence towards Christianity, or even the inherent ambiguity of Christianity itself, but also that this is yet another example of Christianity, if conceived of monolithically, as a fundamentally paradoxical tradition that is undeniably in tension with its range of countervailing self-representations. Fundamentally, I am interested in the variety of ways in which indigenous peoples have indigenised Christianity by territorialising, terrestrialising, localising, and locale-ising it. For Christianity in these cases may not only be emplaced, or embedded within particular landscapes, but also within particular species. In this sense, in some forms of indigenised Christianity, Christianity has come full circle. Once tied to a particular Mediterranean landscape with specific place names and intimately related with particular species, as Christianity struggled to cope with dislocation and displacement from its original Holy Land, much of western Christianity began to defensively imagine itself to be a transcendent, universal tradition (Smith 1987). In studying O’odham pilgrimages to Magdalena, part of the appeal to me was that by participating in and studying these practices and associated lore, I could not easily be accused of appropriating ‘Native American Spirituality’ since, at least in the North American context, when non-native peoples romanticise and exoticise indigenous religious traditions, they usually do not have Christianity in mind (Jenkins 2004; Owen 2008). And yet, I was, and remain, convinced that there is much indigenous knowledge that is embedded in contemporary O’odham Catholic practice (Schermerhorn 2013; Schermerhorn 2016a; Schermerhorn 2016b). Conclusion As the category of indigeneity becomes more salient, the repertoire of articulations and performances of indigeneity may remain somewhat fixed ­(Clifford 2013: 16; Johnson and Kraft 2017: 9). One prominent example of this is the ­‘hyperbolic valorisation’ (Hill 2002) of the relationships between indigenous peoples and their land (Gill 1987; Johnson 2007; Schermerhorn 2008;

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­Schermerhorn 2009). Nonetheless, if scholars of religion must denaturalise Christianity as a known quantity, the same must also be done with the category of ‘indigenous religion(s)’ (Tafjord 2013; Tafjord 2016; Tafjord 2017). However, if anthropologists, religious studies scholars, or other non-O’odham indigenous peoples are likely to imagine O’odham indigeneity, ­images of pilgrimages to Magdalena are not likely to come to mind. Rather, the images that are likely to come to mind are of Tohono O’odham women harvesting haṣañ, the giant saguaro cactus that visually indexes the Sonoran desert. Thanks to Arizona Highways, National Geographic, and many other popular publications, to non-O’odham around the world, Tohono O’odham are best known as the indigenous people who harvest the fruit from these enormous cacti, known as bahidaj, both for eating and for making cactus wine, or nawait. And while the global reach of u.s. media may have insured that American Indians are a prototype of the indigenous, the O’odham have never perfectly fit this mould. While a preference for Plains Indians might be cited here, I suggest that the Christianity of O’odham is not least among the reasons for the relative neglect of O’odham within anthropological literature. The popular and ethnographic preference for fruit-picking and wine-drinking O’odham over walking, saintcarrying O’odham is not altogether innocent. Rather, I would argue that this ‘purist preference’ (Martin 1991) for an imagined, simplistic global indigeneity actively eschews the complexity of actual indigenous peoples with real commitments to Christianity. The erasure of indigenous Christianity in this context is tantamount to a ‘folklorisation’ of indigeneity. Ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino (1991; 1993) introduced the concept of ‘folklorisation’ to describe the process of state-­ sponsored relocations of panpipe music from Andean villages to new urban contexts in Lima, Peru. Elaborating on Turino’s concept of ‘folklorization’, ­Michelle Bigenho argues, indigenous identities depend in part on the circulation of images and sounds of indigeneity, often as created, modified, and sustained by ­nonindigenous Others. In this sense, labels of indigeneity circulate as commodities that are sometimes taken up by or forced on those who ­self-identify as indigenous. 2007: 248 2

2 For indigenous soundscapes, songscapes, and their commodification, respectively see S. Feld 2012; S. Schermerhorn 2016a; M. Bigenho 2002; 2012; R.I.J. Hackett 2017.

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Similarly, Michael McNally defines ‘folklorisation’ as that which “interrupts the flow of living culture from elder to younger generation and calcifies it into something that is seen in increasing contrast to living communities and oral traditional knowledge” (2009b: 206). Doubtlessly, some O’odham youth are committed to the revival of saguaro harvests and other subsistence activities, and there likely remain O’odham families like the extended Lopez family of Kaij Mek (Burnt Seeds, also known as Santa Rosa) who continue to harvest saguaro for themselves and their communities, and not merely for non-O’odham audiences. However, with wine feasts now only held in two O’odham communities (Lopez 2016), ‘folklorisation’ aptly describes the staging of saguaro harvests on special occasions by various institutions and agencies in Arizona for primarily non-O’odham audiences at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Colossal Cave Mountain Park, the Desert Botanical Garden, and Saguaro National Park. Saguaro seeds can also be purchased at Native Seeds/SEARCH in Tucson, as well as at the Tohono O’odham Community Action (toca) gift shop in Sells, on the Tohono O’odham Nation. Stella Tucker, who has directed the saguaro-harvesting programme for Saguaro National Park West since the mid-1980s, is the most well-known O’odham associated with contemporary saguaro fruit harvests. As of the eleventh of October 2015, a search of her name and ‘saguaro’ yields 29,600 hits on Google. This is up from 4,420 hits on Google in 2012 (Fitzgerald and Miguel 2012: 396). Tucker also partakes in discourses of declension, which strike a chord with the pervasive ‘imperialist nostalgia’ (Rosaldo 1989) of indigenous and non-indigenous audiences alike. In her own words, spoken to a non-O’odham tourist in a video produced by the Arizona State Museum, “Yea, this culture is dying. It’s like I said, nobody’s keeping it up. There’s so much out there in the desert, you know. There’s so much food out in the desert that we used to eat. And our people, our young generation, are not, you know, going out there now, you know, to appreciate it.”3 That these staged saguaro harvests are performed primarily for the benefit of non-O’odham audiences should not be doubted. For example, the sixty-five dollars per person fee to participate in the Saguaro Harvest Celebration at ­Colossal Cave Mountain Park buys you an O’odham blessing at dawn, instruction in making a fruit-picker from the ribs of a saguaro, known as a ku’ipaḍ, an opportunity to harvest the bahidaj fruit yourself, an opportunity to make

3 “Saguaro Harvest Traditions of the Tohono O’odham.” Arizona State Museum. At http://www .statemuseum.arizona.edu/exhibits/saguaro/transcript.shtml. Accessed 27/7/2015.

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your own syrup, or bahidaj sitol, as well as an ‘O’odham-inspired’ breakfast.4 ­However, that these contemporary performances of O’odham identity are primarily for the benefit of non-O’odham should not be construed as particularly nefarious or somehow inauthentic. As James Clifford reminds us, “Cultural subjects ‘play themselves’ for multiple audiences: the police, state agencies, schools, churches, ngos, tourists; they also perform for family, friends, generations, ancestors, the tribe, animals, and a personal God” (2013: 47).5 Nonetheless, saguaro harvesting is significantly in decline among O’odham, in a way that pilgrimages to Magdalena notably are not.6 Crucially, both Christian O’odham, whether Catholic or Protestant, and even some anti-Christian O’odham, expressed concern that my own study of O’odham pilgrimages to Magdalena would folklorise this lived tradition. At times I shared this fear too. And yet it was this very context in which these traditions were assumed to be in peril, that cultural preservation documentation was required, as a sort of indigenous nation-sponsored ‘salvage ethnography’, if you will. If the category of ‘indigenous religion’ is less capable of accommodating O’odham pilgrimages to Magdalena than declining O’odham saguaro harvests, this is not due to the decline of O’odham traditions in the present, but rather because of the impoverished nature of the category of ‘indigenous religion’. The shared repertoire of indigeneity, which Johnson and Kraft describe as “a flexible, but fairly standardised, vocabulary of assumed similarities” including “the global patois of Mother Earth” (2017: 2) is fundamentally broken as an analytical category if it continues to privilege nostalgic, commodified, folklorised forms above dynamic living traditions. References Aikau, H.K. 2012. Chosen People, a Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawai`i. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: ­Stanford University Press. 4 “Ha:san Bak Saguaro Harvest Celebration.” Colossal Cave Mountain Park. At http://colossalcave .org/hasan-bak-saguaro-harvest-celebration-2/. Accessed 27/7/2015. 5 For attention to similar issues in Hawai`i at the Polynesian Cultural Center, see H. Aikau (2012). 6 For a view of O’odham pilgrimages to Magdalena as ‘waning’, see K. Madsen (2015: 197).

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Bahr, A. 1980. “The Spanish Songs of the Papago Indians.” Unpublished manuscript. Baviskar, A. 2007. “Indian Indigeneities: Adivasi Engagements with Hindu Nationalism in India.” In M. De La Cadena and O. Starn, eds. Indigenous Experience Today. Oxford: Berg, 275–303. Bialecki, J., N. Haynes, and J. Robbins. 2008. “The Anthropology of Christianity.” R ­ eligion Compass 2: 6, 1139–1158. Bigenho, M. 2002. Sounding Indigenous: Authenticity in Bolivian Music Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bigenho, M. 2007. “Bolivian Indigeneity in Japan: Folklorized Music Performance.” In M. De La Cadena and O. Starn, eds. Indigenous Experience Today. Oxford: Berg, 247–272. Bigenho, M. 2012. Intimate Distance: Andean Music in Japan. Durham: Duke University Press. Cadena, de la M. and O. Starn. 2007. Indigenous Experience Today. Oxford: Berg. Cannell, F. 2005. “The Christianity of Anthropology.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11:2, 335–356. Cannell, F. 2006. “Introduction: The Anthropology of Christianity.” In F. Cannell, ed., The Anthropology of Christianity Durham: Duke University Press, 1–50. Clifford, J. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Erickson, K.C. 2008. Yaqui Homeland and Homeplace: The Everyday Production of ­Ethnic Identity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Feld, S. 2012. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. 3rd ed. Durham: Duke University Press. Fitzgerald, C.M. and P. Miguel. 2012. “The Albino Saguaro: Contemporary Storytelling in Tohono O’odham.” In D.L. Kozak, ed. Inside Dazzling Mountains: Southwest Native Verbal Arts. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 391–405. Gill, S.D. 1987. Mother Earth: An American Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hackett, R.I.J. 2017. “Sounds indigenous: Negotiating Identity in an Era of World Music.” In G. Johnson and S.E. Kraft, eds. Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s). Leiden: Brill, 108–119. Hill, J.H. 2002. “‘Expert Rhetorics’ in Advocacy for Endangered Languages: Who is Listening, and What Do They Hear?” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12: 2, 119–133. Hill, J.H. 2008. The Everyday Language of White Racism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Jenkins, P. 2004. Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, G. 2006. “Native Traditions of North America.” In K.V. Stuckard, ed. Brill ­Dictionary of Religion. Leiden: Brill, 1341–1350. Johnson, G. 2007. Sacred Claims: Repatriation and Living Tradition. Charlottesville: ­University of Virginia Press.

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Johnson, G. and S.E. Kraft. 2017. “Introduction.” In G. Johnson and S.E. Kraft, eds. Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s). Leiden: Brill, 1–24. Keane, W. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. ­Berkeley: University of California Press. Lassiter, L.E., C. Ellis, and R. Kotay. 2002. The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, and Indian Hymns. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lopez, C. 2016. “O’odham New Year.” At https://camillussite.wordpress.com/oodham -new-year/. Accessed 09/11/2016. Madsen, K.D. 2015. “Research Dissonance.” Geoforum 65, 192–200. Marshall, K.J. 2016. Upward, Not Sunwise: Resonant Rupture in Navajo Neo-­Pentecostalism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Martin, J.W. 1991. “Before and beyond the Sioux Ghost Dance: Native American Prophetic Movements and the Study of Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59: 4, 677–701. Masuzawa, T. 1993. In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion. ­Chicago: Chicago University Press. Masuzawa, T. 2005. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: Chicago University Press. McNally, M.D. 2009a. Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion. 2nd ed. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. McNally, M.D. 2009b. Honoring Elders: Aging, Authority, and Ojibwe Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. McNally, M.D. 2010. “Coda: Naming the Legacy of Native Christian Missionary Encounters.” In J.W. Martin and M.A. Nicholas, eds. Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 289–304. Nabokov, P. 2006. Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred P­ laces. New York: Penguin Books. Niezen, R. 2003. The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Owen, S. 2008. The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality. London: Continuum. Robbins, J. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Robbins, J. 2009. “Afterword.” In A. Vilaça and R.M. Wright, eds. Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. ­Farnham: ­Ashgate, 229–238. Robert, D.L. 2009. Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Rosaldo, R. 1989. “Imperialist Nostalgia.” Representations 26, 107–122.

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Sanneh, L.O. 1989. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. ­Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Sanneh, L.O. 2003. Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Schermerhorn, S. 2008. “Regulating Desecration and the San Francisco Peaks: Native American Sacred Land Claims and the Problem of Authenticity.” MA. University of Colorado, United States of America. Schermerhorn, S. 2009. “Secularisation by the ‘Sacred’?: Discourses of ‘Religion’ and the San Francisco Peaks.” Eras 11, 1–17. Schermerhorn, S. 2013. “Walking to Magdalena: Place and Person in Tohono O’odham Songs, Sticks, and Stories.” PhD. Arizona State University, United States of America. Schermerhorn, S. 2016a. “O’odham Songscapes: Journeys to Magdalena Remembered in Song.” Journal of the Southwest 58:2, 237–260. Schermerhorn, S. 2016b. “O’odham Walkers and their Staffs: Walking Sticks by way of Calendar Sticks and Scraping Sticks.” Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 12:4, 476–500. Shorter, D.D. 2009. We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances. ­Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Smith, J.Z. 1987. To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Smith, J.Z. 1990. Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the ­Religions of Late Antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tafjord, B.O. 2013. “Indigenous Religion(s) as an Analytical Category.” Method and ­Theory in the Study of Religion 25: 3, 221–243. Tafjord, B.O. 2016. “Scales, Translations, and Siding Effects: Uses of Indígena and ­Religión in Talamanca and Beyond.” In C. Hartney and D.J. Tower, eds. Religious Categories and the Construction of the Indigenous. Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion. Leiden: Brill, 138–177. Tafjord, B.O. 2017. “Towards a Typology of Academic Uses of ‘Indigenous Religion(s)’, or Eight (or Nine) Language Games that Scholars Play with this Phrase.” In G. Johnson and S.E. Kraft, eds. Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s). Leiden: Brill, 25–51. Treat, J. 1996. “Introduction: Native Christian Narrative Discourse.” In J. Treat, ed. ­Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and C ­ anada. New York: Routledge, 1–26. Treat, J. 2003. Around the Sacred Fire: Native Religious Activism in the Red Power Era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tsing, A.L. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Turino, T. 1991. “The State and Andean Musical Production in Peru.” In G. Urban and J. Shertzer, eds. Nation-States and Indians in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 259–285.

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Turino, T. 1993. Moving Away from Silence: Music of the Peruvian Altiplano and the Experience of Urban Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vilaça, A. and Wright, R.M. 2009. “Introduction.” In A. Vilaça and R.M. Wright, eds. ­Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Farnham: Ashgate, 1–19. Walls, A.F. 1996. “The Translation Principle in Christian History.” In The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 26–42. Walls, A.F. 2002. “African Christianity in the History of Religions.” In The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 116–135. Whitehouse, H. 2006. “Appropriated and Monolithic Christianity in Melanesia.” In F. Cannell, ed. The Anthropology of Christianity. Durham: Duke University Press, 295–307. Wilken, R.L. 2012. The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity. New H ­ aven: Yale University Press. Yeh, E.T. 2007. “Tibetan Indigeneity: Translations, Resemblances, and Uptake.” In M.D.L. Cadena and O. Starn, eds. Indigenous Experience Today. Oxford: Berg, 69–97.

chapter 11

Spiritual, Not Religious; Dene, Not Indigenous: Tłįchǫ Dene Discourses of Religion and Indigeneity David S. Walsh Introduction During a particularly long late-winter cold snap in the Northwest Territories, Canada, with daily temperatures reaching -35 degrees Fahrenheit, I witnessed a Tłįchǫ Dene man take a bucket of ash from his wood stove, walk down a snowmobile track to the frozen lake behind his home, and pour the ash into a neat pile on the ice. He explained to me that a deceased relative, a medicine man, taught him that doing this while asking the Creator for warmer weather would thaw the ice and hasten a warm front. I asked an elder with whom I had been spending time how ash on the lake would affect the weather, thinking I had stumbled upon a glimpse into pre-contact Dene religion. The elder responded that he did not know about this tactic but that it must work for that man’s family, implying, I would later learn, a dynamic and on-going personal relationship between the man, the lake, the wind which causes fluctuations in weather, and the man’s deceased relative. I was awestruck, as to how this elder, whom I considered to be very knowledgeable, was unaware of this practice, and how traditional religion could be relative even at the familial level. I began my fieldwork in the Northwest Territories in early 2011 during what is typically the peak of the Tłįchǫ Dene winter caribou hunt. I was to study what I termed traditional Dene religion: how the Dene have developed over millennia an intimate, knowledgeable, and spiritual engagement with the land and animals. I was quickly dismayed by two factors that impeded my study. First, in 2010 the Government of the Northwest Territories banned the caribou hunt due to a dramatic decline in the populations of the herds. Second, as the story above attests, I could not discern in discourse or practice a Dene religion, yet when Dene leaders spoke publicly against the caribou ban they often invoked religious terminology and drew spiritual connections between their people, the caribou, and their sense of identity. My consultants construct their sense of native identity on various levels from the macro (indigenous) to the micro (extended family) and various points in between. Along this spectrum one could plot, albeit very roughly, shifting © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_013

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discourses from the spiritual/religious at the macro-indigenous level, to personal environmental relationships on the micro level of Tłįchǫ Dene family traditions. This spectrum correlates to a shift from external, public expressions of identity on the macro-indigenous-religious level to internal, private expressions on the micro-familial-environmentally-relational level. I do not intend to oversimplify identity in establishing an overly-neat spectrum; Tłįchǫ Dene often blur the lines between macro and micro expressions of identity. Dene are more likely to employ key terms for indigenous religion (in the singular; see Johnson and Kraft 2017, introduction to this volume) developed from Western religious terminology that have no Tłįchǫ linguistic equivalent, such as sacred relationships with caribou and the importance of Mother Earth as an abstract term, when speaking about Dene traditions and environmental relationships to non-Dene people, whether indigenous or not (see also Tafjord 2017, in this volume). Discussions internal to Dene communities, however, do not employ these same key terms but rather focus on social relationships with caribou and other earthly beings. The term Dene has different referents depending on context. As a language group Dene speakers are part of the Athapaskan linguistic family that spreads across northern Canada and interior Alaska as well as the Navajo and Apache in the southwest United States. More specifically Dene refers to Athapaskans of eastern Alaska, the Northwest Territories, Yukon, and northern Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia (Abel 2005: xxiv). Additionally, the Dene Nation refers to a political body formed in 1978 that unites the five Dene nations of the Northwest Territories, including some who have complex h ­ istories of peace and warfare, but excluding Dene beyond the territories.1 The Tłįchǫ Dene, with whom I conduct my ethnographic work, are members of the Dene Nation.2 Dene is often translated as people (for example, Sharp 2001: xv). 1 Goulet (2001: 151) states that delineating different Dene nations is difficult as they have shifted over time and adopted English and French names due to differing political contexts. He says that pre-contact Dene nations did not have political unity. The Dene Nation complicates this further as it excludes Dene beyond the territorial boundary, regardless of historical and familial ties (Goulet 2001: 155), and includes nations with historical animosity, such as the Tłįchǫ and Yellowknife Dene whose history of warfare is memorialised in their oral traditions and was exacerbated by European trading companies in the late 1700s (Helm 2000: 107; Abel 2005: 74). 2 The Tłįchǫ Dene reside on their ancestral homeland between Great Bear Lake and Great Slave Lake in the present day Northwest Territories, Canada. Tłįchǫ territory encompasses 39,400 square kilometers or 15,212 square miles as of their Land Claim and Self-government Agreement with the Canadian and Northwest Territories governments on 4 August 2005 (Zoe, Zoe, and Willet 2009: 5). The Tłįchǫ Nation is comprised of approximately 3,000 citizens

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However, people or person, is a philosophical concept referring to a culturally constituted being.3 The term Dene does not refer to non-human persons but specifically to human beings of a certain kind.4 The pronunciation and spelling of Dene is taken from a Chipewyan Dene linguistic tradition; the Tłįchǫ word for person is Done, pronounced doe-nay rather than den-nay (Tłįchǫ is pronounced clee-cho). Dene is a modern construction of an expanded native identity and Tłįchǫ have adopted the Chipewyan pronunciation of Dene when referring to themselves as a larger political body.5 If indigenous designates in part a collective of diverse peoples who share in similar histories of colonialism and unite in contemporary response to (post)colonial powers, then in the Canadian North Dene is a more local designation of the indigenous. In this chapter I intend to demonstrate that my Tłįchǫ consultants and other Dene both participate in and contest various identity constructions while complicating Western academic descriptions of indigenous religion. ­Before addressing the complicated Dene engagement with religious discourse I ­demonstrate that non-Dene have often denied a Dene religiosity, stating that Dene had no traditional religion or that it was supplanted by Christianity. These statements reveal more about Western constructions of religion, and its historical ties to colonialism, than they do about Dene traditions. I then move from etic perspectives to macro-level public expressions of an indigenous religion. My primary example of public indigeneity in which some Dene participate is the Idle No More movement. Idle No More articulates a pan-indigenous who, since the cessation of their nomadic lifestyle in the 1960s, have settled predominantly in four communities, three of which are fly-in communities or are accessible in winter by vehicle on ice roads, leaving a sparsely inhabited land on the edge of the taiga forest and the beginning of the arctic tundra (Helm 2000: 136). Tłįchǫ and other Dene continued nomadic lifestyles post-contact and travelled in annual rounds (see Kehoe 2006: 14) trapping, fishing, and living off the land. 3 Personhood is a concept in many indigenous ontologies that extends beyond the bounds of humans to include other beings (see Morrison 2002 on the Algonkian; Hallowell 2002 [1960] on the Ojibwe; Shorter 2009 on the Yaqui; Astor-Aguilera 2010 on the Maya; and Walsh 2015 on the Dene). Harvey (2005) gives indigenous conceptions of personhood prime importance in his definition of ‘new animism’, which couples personhood with religion, suggesting a unification of indigeneity and indigenous religion. 4 Elsewhere I have written on the limits of personhood for the Tłįchǫ Dene – in terms of extending personhood within environmental relationships – and the term Dene also refers to a limited conception of human persons and indeed of indigenous persons (Walsh 2015). 5 A consultant told me that for her Tłįchǫ refers to her specific people and Dene is a broader term for all native people. She also suggested that the Tłįchǫ refers specifically to Tłįchǫ people. This consultant indigenised the concept of the indigenous by replacing the term indigenous with an emic linguistic equivalent: Dene.

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identity and religion constructed in opposition to Western influence and expressed as resistance. I then turn from the macro to the micro to examine Dene discourses of environmental relationships from which we may arrive at an emic sense of identity and religion. I have participated in multiple community projects that involve elders teaching Tłįchǫ youth about their environmental traditions and which are responses to both the environmental policies of the Canadian government, such as caribou hunting restrictions, as well as to the caribou themselves who are said to be listening.6 Elders at these community projects are less likely to use religious terminology such as sacred or spirituality but rather use Tłįchǫ terminology that has no exact English translation and defies Western compartmentalisations of religion, science, philosophy, and politics. Religion and indigeneity are markers of identity applied and contested on macro levels, yet rarely brought home to Tłįchǫ Dene communities.

Dene (non)Religion(s) and Western Influence

Both Dene people and non-Dene who work with tribal organisations have expressed the idea that Dene abandoned their traditional religion after contact. An anthropologist who had worked for a Dene nation for a number of years, upon learning of my interests in religion, posed the question to me “Why did Dene so easily abandon their religion and convert to Christianity?” I ­remarked that they did not, and that I am constantly seeing Dene religiosity in acts such as dreaming and ghàts’eèdi; making offerings to the land, water, fire, and ancestors (Walsh 2015). Additionally, I became increasingly aware of my consultants’ ontological assumptions about the environment: that animals, ancestors, and other environmental beings are agents who can be engaged in social relationships for the benefit of the community. This ontology informs indigenous ­cosmologies throughout the Americas and stands in stark contrast to contemporary Western secular and religious cosmologies which posit a firm distinction between nature, culture, and the supernatural, otherwise known as 6 I owe a debt of gratitude to the Rae-Edzo Friendship Centre of Behchokǫ̀, and anthropologist Alice Legat, for inviting me to participate in multiple workshops including the ones discussed here. I am deeply grateful to the Tłįchǫ elders and youth with whom I worked at these workshops and to others in the community who came. To protect their anonymity I refer to them as my consultants throughout this chapter. I must also thank the Tłįchǫ Nation and the Aurora Research Institute for accommodating my research interests, and the Canada Fulbright Program, Arizona State University Graduate College, and Gettysburg College for supplying funds to make my research possible.

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Cartesian dualism (see for example, Astor-Aguilera 2010). While I was piecing together a sense of indigenous religious traditions among these Catholic Dene, others were drawing an opposite conclusion which regards Western civilisation and Catholicism as forces to which Dene were subjugated. The first academics and missionaries among the Dene mirrored this contemporary denial of Dene religiosity. They remarked that Dene lacked codified systems of religion, ritual, or social organisation. John Alden Mason wrote of the “Northern Athabaskan Tribes” in 1914 that: The social and religious life seems to be quite as bare as heretofore supposed. No evidences appear of any ceremonies or ritualism, totemism, clan organisation, civil organisation of any kind, theology, or even demonology. The social organisation appears to be very weak with little or no recognised authority… To sum up in a single phrase, the impression received is that the culture of these peoples is on a strictly individual basis. mason 1914: 376

Yet elsewhere Mason remarks that leaders of the hunt, typically elders, were feared and respected because of their “powerful medicine,” a reference to medicine power, or ik’ǫǫ̀ (Mason 1946: 34). Mason was not alone in this denial of Dene religiosity. From 1862 to 1882 Father Émile Petitot was the first missionary to travel throughout Tłįchǫ and neighbouring Dene areas. Beaudry notes that Petitot often made “contemptuous and contradictory remarks about native shamans, superstitious beliefs, and absence of religion” (Beaudry 1992: 78). Petitot employed a number of strategies to deny Dene religion: he stated Dene had no religion, stated they had only superstitions, and stated that what could be perceived as religious practices were empty gestures and what resembled religious statements were illusions and hallucinations (Beaudry 1992). On other occasions Petitot suggested Dene traditions were partial remnants of a forgotten and deteriorated religion (Petitot 2005: 213). At one instance Petitot explains a totemic system stating that environmental beings “come alive for them and become superior beings, talk to them, reveal supposed mysteries of another world… [the animal becomes] his protector, his guiding genie, his god” ­(Petitot 2005: 133). Yet he states of Slavey Dene, “These people have absolutely no knowledge of religion nor any desire to know it” (Petitot 2005: 201) and quotes a Chipewyan Dene elder as stating, “I assure you that before the coming of the French priests, we did not know any deity” (Petitot 2005: 69). Throughout his journals Petitot maintained that the Dene had no religion while he

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simultaneously interwove discussions of a primitive and misguided religious system. Why would contemporary discourses portray Dene religion in a state of loss – as expressed by the anthropologist above who questioned why Dene so readily abandoned their traditions for Catholicism – if Dene religion was not purported to have previously existed? David Chidester demonstrates a similar pattern among Europeans in colonial southern Africa who oscillated between denial, denigration, and a lament for the loss of indigenous African religion. He charts how the European denial and discovery of indigenous A ­ frican religions waxed and waned in conjunction with shifts between colonial ­formations and indigenous resistance. When these colonial frontiers became solidified as ­colonial lands European discourse in southern Africa shifted again from the absence and discovery of religion, to the loss of religion as an inevitable and immediate byproduct of the colonial encounter (Chidester 1996: 265).7 Chidester suggests that the denial of indigenous religions by European outsiders in contested ­African frontiers and the subsequent ‘discovery’ of religion in newly colonised contexts is itself the creation of religion; defining not just indigenous religion and culture but ‘civilised’ religion and culture in contrast. Similarly, statements about Dene religion by non-Dene outsiders – as nonexistent, as primitive superstition, or as overpowered by Catholicism – derive from a colonial narrative of progress that privileges Western civilisation as normative and creates a notion of indigenous religion defined in distinction to this norm. The argument that Western civilisation overpowered Dene traditions is not supported by the history of contact. Until relatively recently Dene have had a short and sparse history of contact with non-Dene as compared to other indigenous peoples, particularly in North America, and the Tłįchǫ were isolated for longer than other Dene, making contact with Europeans in 1786 (Helm 2000: 107–109; Abel 2005: 74). Helm contends that contact between Tłįchǫ, and the Dene in general, and the “few agents of the fur trade and the church” were 7 Chidester states that Europeans found sparse, no, or only demonic representations of religion during periods of African resistance to colonialism, yet when colonial structures had solidified power in a region religion was ‘discovered’, however rudimentary or deteriorated. During moments of renewed indigenous resistance, or when colonial frontiers expanded to include more remote indigenous populations, the denial of religion emerged again. Chidester concludes from this pattern that the study of religion in Africa was advanced “not only in the service of a ‘theoretical’ project but also in support of the practical interests of Protestant colonialists in southern Africa,” and thus tied to the colonial project (Chidester 1996: 264).

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defined by infrequent exchanges which only slightly altered Dene lifestyles (Helm 2000: 107). In the 1920s the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Corporal for Fort Rae stated that the Tłįchǫ were “practically isolated from contact with the white man” (Fumoleau 2004: 232). Jarvenpa suggests that Europeans found the subarctic to be unsuitable for settlement because it lacked agricultural possibilities, thus ensuring Dene culture remained “poorly known to outsiders” (Jarvenpa 1998: 3). Additionally, Dene have been among the least studied indigenous peoples of North America (Nelson 1983: 1). Jarvenpa concludes from this history that the subarctic is “one of the last great regions to evade the imprint of Western culture and the capitalist world system” (Jarvenpa 1998: 3). Today Dene predominantly self-identify as Roman Catholic; a statement of identity that is often taken by non-Dene as contradictory to indigeneity. Catholic and Anglican missionaries first entered Denetah (Dene lands) in the mid-1800s and promptly entered into a competition to convert Dene, yet postconversion interactions between Dene and priests remained infrequent (Helm 2000: 162). Ryan states that Dene incorporation of Christianity provided new means for interacting with the environment and another source of ‘luck’ – ­referring to ik’ǫǫ̀ or medicine power (Ryan 1995: 3). Catholicism was not a force that supplanted Dene traditions as Dene had space from the interpretations and tutelage of the Church in which to incorporate Catholicism into Dene worldview.8 I previously stated that Dene also remark that their ancestors turned from tradition to Catholicism. However, rather than the inevitable loss of indigenous religion, Dene understandings of this process differ radically from the nonDene cited above. My Tłįchǫ consultants assume Dene agency in the mission encounter and that their ancestors saw something relatable in ­Catholicism and thus chose to incorporate the religion into Dene ways. Contemporary Dene religion represents a continuity with the past, not a break from the ways of their ancestors. Non-Dene understandings of Dene religion – as lacking from the beginning yet doomed to extinction just as it was being discovered – tell us more about non-Dene perceptions of religion, culture, and colonialism as a homogenising force than they do about Dene themselves. For that understanding we must turn to Dene discourses. 8 The compulsory education of Dene children in Church-run boarding schools beginning in 1920 presents a counter-example to my argument that Dene incorporated Christianity on their own terms. Abel states that boarding schools “created a conflict with Dene socialisation and, in fact, removed the children from the continuity of generations and oral traditions” (Abel 2005: 183). Boarding schools are cited by both Dene and non-Dene as severing an entire generation from the traditions of their ancestors.

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Macro Discourses

Dene discourses regarding their traditions vary greatly. One distinction which I find illuminating is between public and private expressions of identity, religion, the sacred, and Dene conceptual equivalents (emic concepts that I analyse within a religious studies framework yet which defy easy categorisation as religion). Perhaps what best distinguishes public versus private expressions is the audience for whom one is performing. Johnson and Kraft state in the introduction to this volume that “[Performances] can be explored as ‘sites of persuasion’ – arenas in which indigenous people present their values to themselves and others” (Johnson and Kraft 2017: 8). The audience at public sites of persuasion is explicitly non-Dene, non-indigenous, often government representatives, scientists, and environmentalists. However, implicitly the audience is the Dene community, as speakers speak back to their sense of identity as distinct from non-Dene. At times this distinction is articulated as the indigenous versus the settler state. When self-identifying as indigenous the distinction is often framed around the concept of the sacred – the environment, the caribou, and Mother Earth, are sacred to indigenous peoples. These articulations derive from an adopted discourse, one brought back, as Johnson and Kraft state in the introduction, and placed into local Dene contexts, but which appeal to a homogenous indigenous identity opposing that of the coloniser (Johnson and Kraft 2017). The Idle No More movement offers a public site of identity construction. Idle No More began in December 2012, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, as a teach-in against Prime Minister Harper’s ‘Jobs and Growth Act, 2012’ omnibus Bill C-45 which would remove certain environmental protections to open development possibilities and natural-resource extraction. Idle No More opposed the measure, arguing it violated treaty rights, threatened sovereignty for numerous indigenous nations, and would threaten environmental sustainability through weakening environmental protection laws (see Ross 2013). In early 2013 the scope of Idle No More grew to include protests across Canada that continued to focus on two key issues with the omnibus bill: indigenous sovereignty and environmental concerns. The Idle No More movement articulates indigenous responses to the two primary inquiries of this edited collection: indigenous identity as an expression of solidarity across cultural, linguistic, and other differences in response to colonial pressures, and an intimate link between indigenous identity and the importance placed onto the environment that could be discussed in religious terms. The name Idle No More suggests a political shift from victims of colonialism to defenders against ongoing injustices. Implicit in the title is

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the solidification of disparate indigenous Canadians; an expanded identity beyond band, tribe, and nation to include all Inuit, Métis, and First Nations under a common cause and, thus, identity. I do not mean to suggest that this form of identity construction is inauthentic nor novel. Rather, I suggest that Idle No More is a product of and a response to historical formations of indigeneity visà-vis colonialism. A primary site of contention in which Idle No More and local Dene, Cree, and Métis have presented environmental concerns in spiritualised terms is the tar sands of northern Alberta and the proposed Keystone xl pipeline that would carry crude oil from the tar sands to the United States.9 The documentary film Profit and Loss, of McLeod’s Standing on Sacred Ground series, addresses indigenous struggles against the tar sands development and outlines how the project has devastated the local environment and led to increased cancer rates and sicknesses of local indigenous residents (McLeod 2013). A Métis interviewee states in the documentary that everything Mother Earth provides is sacred, and a Dene interviewee, one of the primary subjects of the film, follows by stating that the water, air, rocks, plants, and trees are all sacred because they provide life for the Dene (see McLeod 2013: minutes 31:53 and 32:15). When speaking in general terms about the earth, particularly in public settings, the films’ interviewees use abstract terms such as ‘Mother Earth’ and ‘sacred’, yet the underlying emphasis is on specific environmental beings – water, air, rocks, plants, trees, and so on – and relationships with those beings who provide real-life sustenance. The concept ‘Mother Earth’ has gained contemporary importance as a religious trope that speaks across unique traditions while constructing a larger indigenous identity and sense of the sacred. In addressing threats to indigenous sacred sites by non-indigenous entities, the documentary focuses on indigenous people’s macro-level public sentiments. Public statements against the tar sands tend to express a spiritualised indigenous identity as opposing Western colonialist and capitalist ideologies. 9 The Canadian government first became aware of the mineral potential of the tar sands in 1891 when the Department of Indian Affairs delivered a report, based on Senator Shultz’s Senate committee report, stating that “immense quantities of petroleum” had been discovered in the Mackenzie District. According to Abel, “The Department of Indian Affairs appears to have been convinced that development of these resources was imminent” (Abel 2005: 164). This sense of expectancy precipitated the need to incorporate northern Indians and the federal government signed Treaty 8 on 21 June 1899, guaranteeing the rights of Dene living south of Slave Lake, Northwest Territories, to hunt and live off the land in exchange for Canadian rights to development. Dene have been fighting for their full treaty rights ever since.

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Idle No More also expresses religious discourse through the protest tactic of flash-mob round dances in public spaces. Round dance protests at malls in December, 2012, juxtaposed the commercial holiday season with a contemporary expression of indigenous culture.10 It was a poignant critique of colonialism’s silencing of the colonised, a reminder of the cost of Western wealth. The round dance is a social dance associated with contemporary powwows (see Ellis, Lassiter, and Dunham 2005). If contemporary powwows are sites of pan-indigenous identity construction, the round dance is event par excellence. The round dance and powwow harken back to plains Indian dances which became popular after the suppression of the Ghost Dance.11 Wovoka’s Ghost Dance was a messianic religious movement that began with the Paiute in 1889 and spread into the first major pan-indigenous movement throughout the western United States and parts of Canada (see Kehoe 1989). The Ghost Dance melded political resistance to the colonial state with a religious movement that appealed to different native nations and adapted to their specific cultures and traditions. Idle No More’s round dances participate in this history of resistance that articulates identity across difference, in juxtaposition to the nation-state, and which ties pan-indigeneity and religious tradition. Many Dene joined the Idle No More movement and protests were held in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories on the twenty-second of December, 2012, and early 2013 while I was conducting research.12 Protests included the flashmob round dances, although my Dene consultants referred to them as tea dances – a traditional Dene dance without drums, similar to the plains-style round dance, popularised by the Dene prophet movement of the 1960s (Helm 1994: 40). Protests began with a kǫ̀ ghàts’eèdi ceremony (making an offering to the fire, called in English ‘feeding-the-fire’) and a Catholic prayer, both 10

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On 20 December 2012, Idle No More protesters formed a flash-mob round dance at a shopping mall in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (“Idle No More does Round Dance at Saskatoon mall.” cbc News, December 20, 2012. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/ idle-no-more-does-round-dance-at-saskatoon-mall-1.1241848. Accessed 11/3/16. Ten days later protestors performed a round dance at the Mall of America in Bloomington Minnesota in the United States (Regan 2012). The Sioux received both the Ghost Dance from the west and the dance that would become the powwow dance from Oklahoma at the same time and practised both dances together (Ellis 2005: 15). Following the United States Army’s suppression of the Ghost Dance, particularly the massacre of 250 Sioux dancers, the powwow dances became the main pan-indigenous dance movement. “Idle No More protests held in North: People in Iqaluit, Yellowknife and Whitehorse join nationwide event.” cbc News North, 21 December, 2012. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ north/idle-no-more-protests-held-in-north-1.1136370. Accessed 11/3/16.

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c­ onsistent with how Dene begin important events. Although participating in a pan-indigenous movement, Dene translated elements of the movement into their traditional frameworks. Discourses of identity as indigenous vis-à-vis colonialism do not hold Dene attention for long, however, as Dene speakers return to more immediate environmental and political concerns, such as over the caribou population crises I alluded to earlier and discuss below. This shift from macro to micro concerns coincides with a shedding of the indigenous versus coloniser identity for the more prevalent discourse of Dene versus territorial government. Here, global indigeneity serves less of a purpose for identity claims or land use claims and the notion of the sacred abstracted in the term ‘Mother Earth’ becomes embedded in direct Dene environmental relationships. These relationships take discursive form in private conversations, workshops, and gatherings of Dene people to address the issue of caribou viability.

Micro Discourses

I return now to the issue of caribou hunting restrictions in the Northwest ­Territories. Scholars and popular writers often disassociate their studies of indigenous religions and environmental relationships from political context. What I found upon arriving in the Canadian North, eager to learn about traditional ways, was a politically charged climate in which Dene relationships with caribou were negotiated through various and competing discourses. Since 2010, Dene relationships with caribou have been impacted by declines in species population and subsequent hunting bans.13 The Bathurst caribou, the primary herd for Tłįchǫ Dene hunters, has had one of the steepest declines from approximately 475,000 animals in the mid 1980s to as low as 16,000 animals in 2015, or a loss of nearly 97% in thirty years (Livingstone 2015). The Bluenose East herd, which travels north of the Bathurst but also through Tłįchǫ hunting areas, showed signs of recovery in the early 2000s but has since plummeted from 80,000 animals in 2006 to half that, approximately 35,000 to 40,000 animals, in 2015. The Government of the Northwest Territories and Dene elders and hunters have radically different ontological assumptions about caribou that resulted in radically different responses to the caribou crises. The territorial government and wildlife biologists insisted that hunting must be curtailed to allow c­ aribou 13

For a similar study of caribou population declines in Newfound and Labrador and indigenous Innu responses, see Blaser (2016).

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populations to recover and in 2010 declared a complete hunting ban on the caribou herds. Dene, Métis, sport hunting outfitters, and non-­indigenous territorial residents were outraged and a series of negotiations ensued. ­Non-indigenous hunters were banned from all hunting of caribou herds in the Northwest Territories. Indigenous Dene and Métis negotiated with the territorial government for a compromise that does not impinge on treaty rights yet respects the government’s position on caribou conservation. This compromise has evolved since 2010, at times including a limited tag system on the Bathurst herd and complete access to the Bluenose East herd, to a Bathurst herd mobile no-hunting zone that followed the core of the herd throughout their migration, to a ceremonial hunt of just 15 caribou, to most recently when the Tłįchǫ Dene government declared its own ban on hunting of the Bathurst herd and limited hunting of the Bluenose East.14 In contrast to the territorial government’s conservation strategies, Dene elders stated that respectful hunting practices were necessary in order to demonstrate to the caribou that they were still needed and would thus be persuaded to return to the people. One common manner for Dene to publicly articulate such concerns, and express Dene identity, was through community workshops and gatherings, some of which were open to the larger public and some of which were internal to Dene communities. In March, 2011, The Rae-Edzo Friendship Centre of Behchokǫ̀, Northwest Territories, hosted the community-led workshop “Tłįchǫ Traditional Caribou Conservation: Youth and Elders Working Together” (Drybones and Walsh 2011). I was asked to cofacilitate the workshop alongside a Tłįchǫ researcher and a group of Tłįchǫ elders and youth. The Friendship Centre coordinated the workshop in response to caribou hunting restrictions, however, the goal of the workshop was not to address government intervention but for elders to offer their own form of caribou conservation management through discussions of respect. The elders understood caribou as agents who have chosen to remain inaccessible to humans in response to human disrespect towards the caribou, which contrasts to notions of caribou viability as passively affected by climate change and human intervention (see Walsh forthcoming). Elders did not discuss the workshop in terms of religion but instead used the Tłįchǫ Dene term dò nàowoò. Our workshop defined dò nàowoò as the living-out of Tłįchǫ Dene culture, traditional knowledge, and way of life ­(Drybones and Walsh 2011: 3, 9). Embedded in this term is an epistemological theory wherein knowledge is culturally contingent and is a product of intimate 14

For a more detailed history of the decline of caribou herds in the Northwest Territories, territorial regulations, and Tłįchǫ Dene responses, see Walsh (forthcoming).

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r­ elationships with one’s community, ancestors, and beings in the environment from whom one learns.15 Dò is the prefix term for Dene. Added to nàowoò, the prefix suggests that the culture, knowledge, and way of life referred to is specific for the Dene and that nàowoò is relative to which people are being discussed, human or other. Our workshop also pertained to ekwǫ̀ nàowoò. Ekwǫ̀ translates as caribou (specifically referring to tundra caribou as opposed to woodland caribou), thus this term refers to caribou knowledge. Caribou knowledge is more than conservation, stewardship, or hunting knowledge as it pertains to overall Tłįchǫ “way of life with the caribou” (Drybones and Walsh 2011: 9). Elders elaborated that ekwǫ̀ nàowoò includes knowing Tłįchǫ responsibilities to caribou and how to respect caribou. Ekwǫ̀ nàowoò is within the category of dò nàowoò, meaning knowledge of caribou is part of Dene knowledge. However, the term also refers to the knowledge caribou have, suggesting that for Dene to be knowledgeable of caribou is to know as caribou know; there is no knowledge of the other without a relationship with the other. I find a cognate to religion within the Dene relational concept of dò nàowoò, yet the concept is radically different from Western conceptions of religion. Dene themselves do not articulate dò nàowoò as religion when shifting to public discussions of a spiritual relationship with the environment and they do not perceive their traditions in religious terminology.16 Conclusion If Dene articulated their public concerns in the context of the United States rather than Canada they would be more likely to employ religious language, particularly in the courts (see McNally 2017, in this volume). Beaman addresses why indigenous Canadians have not articulated religion in the courts like their indigenous counterparts have in the United States (Beaman 2002). She suggests that Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees freedom of 15 16

On Dene ways of knowing see Goulet (1998), on specifically Tłįchǫ ways of knowing see Legat (2012). When I first began fieldwork I would get confused looks when telling potential consultants that I was studying Dene religion. Typically their response was to tell me about ­Catholicism. I began saying instead I was studying traditional spirituality but that also led to confusion. I was able to hear how they would articulate my presence during a Catholic church service after my uncle had passed away and a consultant was kind enough to request prayers on my behalf. Her public introduction included that I was studying dò nàowoò.

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religion as the United States’ First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion, and she finds a similarity for both countries in that “[indigenous] spirituality is legally constructed outside the boundaries of religious freedom” (Beaman 2002: 136). Yet, indigenous Canadians, unlike their southern neighbours, have seldom argued for freedom of religion to practise their traditions, to lay claim to hunting and land rights, or to block resource extraction and land development (Beaman 2002: 143). Since the 1982 adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, only two Canadian court cases pertaining to indigenous rights have focused on indigenous religion.17 In both cases the Canadian Supreme Court sidestepped the issue of constituting or defining indigenous religions. Yet, indigenous ­Canadians confront an irony that while religiously based arguments have been denied as legitimate claims the courts apply religious discourse onto their arguments nonetheless. Canadian courts have articulated an indigenous spirituality and affirmed a “core of ‘Indianness’” that suggests a pan-indigenous, and uniquely indigenous, spirituality which has been applied to defendants despite a lack of indigenous defendants arguing for indigenous religious freedoms (Beaman 2002: 143–144). The Canadian courts have de-emphasised spirituality in their decisions while simultaneously articulating an indigenous religion. Paul Nadasdy argues that for indigenous peoples to have a voice in the modern era of conservationism, climate change science, land claims, and comanagement, they must “speak the unfamiliar languages of wildlife biology and bureaucratic resource management… and the Euro-North American legal language of property law” (Nadasdy 2003: 2). Participating in these discourses, particularly in public forums, forces indigenous people to alter how they discuss, portray, and conceive of their environmental relationships. Nadasdy argues that indigenous peoples become alienated from the traditions they are trying to preserve when participating in Euro-Canadian discourses. While I agree with Nadasdy that thus far the burden of cross-cultural understanding 17

The first was the 1985 R. v. Jack decision in which two Coast Salish defendants in British Columbia were convicted of hunting deer out of season and off Indian reserve land. The deer meat was to be used ceremonially for the defendants’ great-grandfather but they were apprehended with the carcass in their trunk. The court upheld the conviction “by separating the killing of the deer from the ritual itself” and determined that the defendants could have used defrosted deer meat and thus did not need to hunt out of season for religious purposes (Beaman 2002: 142). The second case is that of R. v. Sioui in 1990 in which Huron band members “cut down trees, camped, and built fires as part of their customs and rituals” within a provincial park (Beaman 2002: 143). The Supreme Court of Canada circumvented the religious freedom issue by finding that the defendants’ activities were protected under a 1760 treaty.

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falls on the Dene, I caution against perceiving this discursive change as loss of tradition. The majority of Dene are not part of public conversations. It is not the elders or the youth nor the typical hunter or the mine worker who participate in these conversations. The participants are the translators (Johnson and Kraft 2017; introduction in this volume), those who must speak two languages: a Dene language of social dynamics with the environment which, I argue, frames ‘the religious’ as dò nàowoò, and a Euro-Canadian language in which dò nàowoò is framed within religious and indigenous discourses as cognates to Western science, law, and secular ways of knowing. Most Dene do not participate in the public discussions, but these discussions are well known to them. They are aware of the oil sands and Idle No More and some have participated in protests. They are aware of discourses of the environment as sacred and the concept of Mother Earth. Are public discourses brought home, do indigenous identity constructions impact individual senses of self, and does a sense of indigenous spirituality shape Tłįchǫ spirituality? If I were to pose these questions to the Tłįchǫ Dene elder I quoted at the opening of this chapter – who stated he was unaware of Dene pouring ash on a frozen lake to bring about a thaw, but that that must work for them – perhaps he would answer similarly and state that he does not think of his traditions as religion, but, perhaps others do, and that must work for them. References Abel, K. 2005. Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History. 2nd ed. Montreal: McGill-Queen´s University Press. Astor-Aguilera, M. 2010. The Maya World of Communicating Objects: Quadripartite Crosses, Trees, and Stones. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Beaman, L.G. 2002. “Aboriginal Spirituality and the Legal Construction of Freedom of Religion.” Journal of Church and State 44:1, 135–149. Beaudry, N. 1992. “The Language of Dreams: Songs of the Dene Indians (Canada).” The World of Music 34: 2, 72–90. Blaser, M. 2016. “Is Another Cosmopolitics Possible?” Cultural Anthropology 31: 4, 545–570. Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 1982. Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), c 11. Chidester, D. 1996. Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. Drybones, R., and D. Walsh. 2011. Tłįchǫ Traditional Caribou Conservation: Youth and Elders Working Together. Behchokǫ̀ : Rae-Edzo Friendship Center.

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Ellis, C., L.E. Lassiter, and G.H. Dunham, eds. 2005. Powwow. Lincoln: University of ­Nebraska Press. Fumoleau, R. 2004. As Long as This Land Shall Last: A History of Treaty 8 and Treaty 11. Calgary: University of Calgary Press and Arctic Institute of North America. Goulet, J.A. 1998. Ways of Knowing: Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Dene Tha. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Goulet, J.A. 2001. “Denendeh: Anthropologists, Politics and Ethnicity in the Reorganization of the Canadian Northwest Territories.” Senri Ethnological Studies 56, 151–161. Hallowell, A.I. 2002 [1960]. “Ojibwa ontology, behavior, and world view.” In G. Harvey, ed. Readings in Indigenous Religions. London: Continuum, 17–49. Harvey, G. 2005. Animism: Respecting the Living World. London: Hurst and Company. Helm, J. 1994. Prophecy and Power Among the Dogrib Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Helm, J. 2000. The People of Denendeh: Ethnohistory of the Indians of Canada’s Northwest. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. Jarvenpa, R. 1998. Northern Passage: Ethnography and Apprenticeship Among the Subarctic Dene. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc. Johnson, G. and S.E. Kraft. 2017. “Introduction.” In G. Johnson and S.E. Kraft, eds. The Brill Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s). Leiden: Brill, 1–24. Kehoe, A.B. 1989. The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Kehoe, A.B. 2006. North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account. 3rd edition. ­Upper Saddle River: Pearson, Prentice Hall. Legat, A. 2012. Walking the Land, Feeding the Fire: Knowledge and Stewardship among the Tlicho Dene. Tuscan: University of Arizona Press. Livingstone, A. 2015. “Declines in NWT Barrenground Caribou Continue.” Government of the Northwest Territories, Last Modified September 28, 2015. Accessed March 11, 2016. http://www.gov.nt.ca/newsroom/news/declines-nwt-barrenground-caribou -continue. Mason, J.A. 1914. On Work among Northern Athabaskan Tribes, 1913. Canada: Geological Summary Report, Sessional Paper No. 26. Mason, J.A. 1946. “Notes on the Indians of the Great Slave Lake Area.” Yale University Publications in Anthropology 34. New Haven: Yale University Press. McLeod, C. 2013. Standing on Sacred Ground 2: Profit and Loss. Bullfrog Films. Morrison, K.M. 2002. The Solidarity of Kin: Ethnohistory, Religious Studies, and the ­Algonkain-French Religious Encounter. Albany: State University of New York Press. Nadasdy, P. 2003. Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal – State Relations in the Southwest Yukon. Vancouver: UBC Press. Nelson, R.K. 1983. Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Petitot, É. 2005. Travels Around Great Slave and Great Bear Lakes, 1862–1882. Toronto: Champlain Society. Regan, S. 2012. “Idle No More Flash Roundy fills Mall of America Rotunda.” Twin Cities Daily Planet, December 30, 2012. http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/idle-no-more-flash -roundy-mall-america/. Accessed 11/3/16. Ross, G. 2013. “The Idle No More Movement for Dummies (or, ‘What the Heck Are All These Indians Acting All Indian-Ey About?’).” Indian Country Today, January 16, 2013. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/01/16/idle-no-more-movement -dummies-or-what-heck-are-all-these-indians-acting-all-indian-ey. Accessed 11/3/16. Ryan, J. 1995. Doing Things the Right Way: Dene Traditional Justice in Lac La Martre. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Sharp, H.S. 2001. Loon: Memory, Meaning, and Reality in a Northern Dene Community. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Shorter, D.D. 2009. We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances. ­Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Walsh, D.S. 2015. “The Nature of Food: Indigenous Dene Foodways and Ontologies in the Era of Climate Change.” Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 26 (Religion and Food), 225–249. Walsh, D.S. forthcoming. “‘They Call Us Caribou Eaters’: Negotiating Tłįchǫ Dene Relationships with Caribou.” In M. Pesantubbee and M.J. Zogry, eds. Native Foodways in a Global Economy, SUNY Press. Zoe, T., P. Zoe, and M. Willet. 2009. Living Stories: Godi Weghàà Ets’eèda. Markham: Fifth House Ltd.

chapter 12

Unsettled Natives in the Newfoundland Imaginary Suzanne Owen Introduction In Newfoundland, the last Beothuk died nearly two hundred years ago and both European settlers and Mi’kmaq have been blamed for their demise. This history is contentious, as is the way the demise of the Beothuk is represented in museums, literature and the arts, which may be regarded as public acts of remembering. Indigeneity debates on this island relate to other identity issues linked to resisting the subsumation of Newfoundland into Canada since confederation in 1949. Drawing on postcolonial literature studies, this chapter investigates how the theme of ‘unsettled natives’ – referring to both the subject (contemporary Newfoundlanders) and the object (Beothuk) – is portrayed in literature and art where the presence of the extinct Beothuk haunts the ­Newfoundland imaginary. The context of Newfoundland in Canada illustrates the concept of indigeneity as a political construct to articulate cultural differences between people of settler and indigenous descent, while incorporating an indigenous identity as ‘first peoples’. Occasionally, an indigenous identity is a matter of choice, whether or not they have registered as such, as many have mixed heritage. However, until the 1980s, the extinct Beothuk were the only recognised native people on the island, which was at the expense of the Mi’kmaq, who were thought to have arrived in Newfoundland from mainland Canada just before or after (depending on who is stating this) the European settlers. There are now competing claims to being ‘native’ in Newfoundland, affected by global discourses on indigeneity relating to land, culture and heritage. In the midst of this, the Beothuk are frequently defined as ‘culturally’ extinct. As a people they are no more, but in recent decades a few Mi’kmaq and settlers have claimed Beothuk descent.

Who were the Beothuk?

Beothuk means ‘people’ in their language, thought to be a branch of the Algonquian language group predominant in Eastern Canada. However, the

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consensus has been that they were a distinct cultural group who moved with the seasons, hunting in the interior of Newfoundland in winter and fishing along its shores in summer. It is thought the British term ‘Red Indian’ was first applied to the Beothuk, who covered themselves with red ochre. The reasons for that are not well understood, but the ochre was applied ceremonially ­(Marshall 1996: 385). The Beothuk did not reveal much about their religious views, apart from a belief in a ‘great spirit’, a reverence for the sun and moon, and that they regarded­ the northern lights as messengers of the “good spirit” (Marshall 1996: 378), not so different from views of neighbouring indigenous groups. Archaeologists Kristensen and Holly (2013) put forward an intriguing theory that the long feather-shaped bone pendants, which were also attached to clothing, and bird feet and skulls found in Beothuk graves indicated a bird-centred cosmology where birds represented spirit messengers and a Beothuk’s soul or spirit in flight after death. However, contact between Beothuk and settlers was too minimal, and in hostile conditions, to gain a better understanding of their cosmology. When Europeans came and encroached upon their hunting and fishing territories, in the competition over resources, settlers killed many Beothuk, especially in central Newfoundland where conflict was at its most intense. By the end of the nineteenth century Beothuk numbers declined rapidly, as many more died of disease and starvation. Ingeborg Marshall (1996: 284) put estimates of their population as between 500 and 1600 at the time of contact. By 1823, there were thought to be only thirteen Beothuk left. Towards the end of that decade, trappers found three starving Beothuk women. Two of them did not survive much longer. When the last of them, Shanawdithit, died of tuberculosis in 1829, there were no other reported sightings of Beothuk by settlers.

The ‘Last Beothuk’

Shanawdithit became one of the first to receive the epitaph of ‘the last of’ her people, and has since been romanticised by those who contributed to her people’s demise, “with both guilt and relief,” according to Fiona Polack (2011: 333). Polack has compared the cultural interest in Shanawdithit ‘as the last’ with that of Truganini in Tasmania, who died in 1876 and was reportedly the last of her kind. In California, the interesting case of Ishi, the last Yahi Indian, comes to mind, also known as the ‘last wild Indian’, who was taken in and studied by anthropologist Alfred Kroeber in 1911, living at the University of Berkeley until he died in 1916 (see Starn 2004). Gerald Vizenor, who was once at Berkeley, wrote that “Ishi was christened the last of the stone agers; overnight he became

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the decorated orphan of cultural genocide, the curious savage of a vanishing race overcome by modernity” (2009: 240). Like the last Beothuk, Ishi died of tuberculosis. The discourse on Shanawdithit being the last of her people supports the settler position against the view that the Beothuk may have been closely related to other indigenous groups. According to Fiona Polack: The cultural weight given to Shanawdithit’s death has historically proven­ a particular problem for the Mi’kmaq population on the island. The obsession with her designation as ‘last’ has also, arguably, caused a lack of interest in archaeological research suggesting the Beothuk may have been part of the Innu nation. 2009: 54

Since then the Mi’kmaq in particular (there are also Innu and Inuit, who are mainly in Labrador, and a few Métis Indians) have had to struggle against the perception that in Newfoundland aboriginals were extinct. When the Mi’kmaq presence is acknowledged, they are dismissed as immigrants who came to the island after the Europeans. The majority of Mi’kmaq reside in Nova ­Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, the south of Quebec and northern Maine, but they did travel by canoe to Newfoundland. There is a popular notion that Mi’kmaq helped kill off the Beothuk (Baehre 2013: 83). A 1908 report on the Mi’kmaq of Bay D’Espoir by William MacGregor, Governor to the Secretary of State at the time, stated: The unfortunate Beothuk was thus crushed out of existence by the white man and the invading Micmac. Between the white man and the Beothuk there was always hostility; and I have not heard of any family or person in Newfoundland in whose veins flows Beothuk blood. 1908: 6–7.

He also claimed that there were no pure-blooded Mi’kmaq in 1908 and thought they could hardly be called an ethnic unit. This view, of course, served the interests of the settlers and would later support the claim that there were ‘no Indians’ in Newfoundland, as stated by Joseph Smallwood when the former Dominion confederated with Canada in 1949. Regarding the terms of Union between Newfoundland and Canada, Maura Hanrahan concluded: Because there was no mention of First Nations, the Indian Act was not a­pplied in Newfoundland. This meant that the province’s Innu and

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Mi’kmaq were ineligible for the range of programs and services enjoyed by their counterparts in continental Canada. hanrahan 2003: 3

Eventually, one community at Conne River was granted First Nations Reserve Status in 1987, as Miawpukek Mi’kamawey Mawi’omi, and gained a new lease of life as a result.

Newfoundland Mi’kmaq

The Conne River Mi’kmaq promote their culture through the annual powwow, which is a fairly standardised intertribal gathering centred on dance displays. Ostensibly about sharing culture, it seeks to inculcate certain ‘traditional’ values among the Mi’kmaq families who attend, such as respect for elders, but it is also a means of articulating difference from people of European descent. As well as Conne River, there are dozens of other Mi’kmaq communities in other parts of Newfoundland and several thousand or more individuals with Mi’kmaq heritage. After protracted negotiations, a deal was struck in 2008 between the Federation of Newfoundland Indians and the federal government to recognise landless Mi’kmaq in the province. This caused some resentment among both Mi’kmaq and non-Mi’kmaq. A common perception I heard several times in my fieldwork was that many of the new applicants were motivated to take advantage of benefits, such as university places. For the most part, Mi’kmaq people’s own reasons were more to do with recovering a lost heritage that was supressed or denied them. Discovering or reclaiming their Mi’kmaq heritage has been liberating for them. In Newfoundland, only a few elders could speak the Mi’kmaq language and they had lost much of their ceremonial culture through the impact of Catholicism, though fragments of oral tradition had been retained. Other sources include written and photographic records of Europeans. For the most part, they speak of following ‘traditional spirituality’, and generally avoid the term ‘religion’, often associated with more institutional forms such as Catholicism, to which most Mi’kmaq still adhere. By their own admittance much of their ‘traditional spirituality’ and ceremonies have been learned from neighbouring and Plains Indian nations, such as the sweat lodge ceremony and powwow dances, and combined with what they remember of Mi’kmaq cosmologies. At an Aboriginal Day (21 June) sunrise ceremony I attended in 2005, St George’s band Mi’kmaq led the construction of a stone ‘medicine wheel’, marking the eight compass points, with each having an associated

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power or meaning, following the pattern derived from the Ojibwe and found on the Northern Plains (Owen 2008: 132). Localised Mi’kmaq traditions, such as uses of herbs, have been handed down through the generations, or drawn from elders’ memories, while some information comes from writings by Europeans. The Mi’kmaq of other provinces, particularly Nova Scotia, have also contributed to the revival of Newfoundland­ Mi’kmaq traditions and culture, including the language. By reconstructing their indigeneity, albeit from a wide range of sources, and identifying with Mi’kmaq people elsewhere and native North Americans more widely, Mi’kmaq gain political representation, economic benefit with increased hunting and fishing rights, and cultural capital.

Indigeneity in Newfoundland

The increase in confidence of Mi’kmaq in their identity as indigenous people coincided with renewed interest in the Beothuk. Ingeborg Marshall’s tome on A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk came out in 1996, the year the Conne River Mi’kmaq held their first powwow, and then from the 1990s on a number of artistic representations were created – novels, sculptures and paintings. Mi’kmaq Chief Mi’sel Joe of Conne River, Newfoundland, has claimed that the Beothuk live on in the Mi’kmaq. Supporting this view, in 2007 dna testing on teeth belonging to Nanosabasut and Demasduit, whose skulls are in the care of Museums Scotland, showed common ancestry with the Mi’kmaq (Kuch et al. 2007). Beothuk remains were once on display at the old Newfoundland Museum in St John’s, the capital of Newfoundland. Now they are currently kept in a room, which was blessed by First Nations, in the basement of Queen’s College in St John’s. Applications to view them go to a committee that includes First Nations. There have also been recent calls by Saqamaw (traditional Mi’kmaq chief) Mi’sel Joe of Conne River to bring back to Newfoundland other Beothuk remains, including the skulls of Nanosabasut and Demasduit, held in Scotland and elsewhere in Canada. For some of those of settler decent, recognition of Newfoundland Mi’kmaq as First Nations has posed a threat to their own claims to ‘indigeneity’. Terry Goldie, writing in the 1980s, observed that: There is a constant concern in Newfoundland with who is a ‘native Newfoundlander’. This means in its essence that the individual was not only born in the province but is a product of generations of residents.

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The ­extinction of the Beothuk leaves no native contradiction. Recent attempts by the Micmacs in Newfoundland to assert their aboriginal tenure have been strongly opposed. The argument might be interpreted as “We had natives. We killed them off. Now we are natives.” goldie 1989: 157

In the view of Cynthia Sugars, “the decimation of the Beothuk constitutes the ‘national Holocaust’” (Sugars 2005: 163). No other indigenous group in North America had been completely extinguished during the colonial period (Wyile 2009: 230). In a changing, globalised world, with an increasing awareness of indigenous issues, the horror of the past that cannot be redressed – of a whole ethnic group becoming extinct due to the impact of colonisation – has led to a sense of loss and guilt in much of the literature about the Beothuk. However, this fixation excludes the Mi’kmaq, or they have been treated as irritants for challenging the view that Newfoundland’s indigenous people are extinct. Only since 2005 perhaps, when Saqamaq Mi’sel Joe opened The Rooms Provincial Museum, have Mi’kmaq been included more prominently in exhibitions about indigenous peoples of Newfoundland.

Imagining the Beothuk in Literature

This exclusory practice is particularly apparent in literature, where it is the settler who replaces the Beothuk as the ‘native’. Fiona Polack writes that: Historical fictions by Newfoundland writers published since the 1980s ­repeatedly express white guilt about the fate of the Beothuk but also persist in highlighting Shanawdithit’s status as “last” of the indigenes. In addition, these texts assume her perspective on the world is accessible to contemporary white Newfoundlanders and, moreover, that her sympathies lie with them. 2009: 54

As the Beothuk are no longer here, they are unable to challenge these appropriations. In any case, as Richard Budgel claims, present-day discussions about the Beothuk have “more to do with the nature of contemporary non-aboriginal Newfoundlanders than with the nature of the Beothuk themselves” (1992: 16). The Beothuk extinction due to the impact of colonisation is also an example of a ‘public secret’, described by Michael Taussig (1999) as knowledge of ­something

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generally known but not discussed, which Margot Francis explores in Creative Subversions, arguing “that the everyday iconography of Canadianness is itself a form of cultural work through which Anglo-Canadian settlers have engaged with the symbolic inheritance of these traumatic legacies” (Francis 2011: 5). It is through cultural productions that ‘public secrets’, such as the manner of the Beothuk’s extinction, become visible. Historical fictions retelling the story of the last years of the Beothuk include Annmarie Beckel’s All Gone Widdun (1999), Michael Crummey’s River Thieves (2001) and Bernice Morgan’s Cloud of Bone (2007). There was also a musical Shanadithit (1987) by Eleanor Cameron-Stockley of Twillingate, northeastern Newfoundland, where Demasduit, Shanadithit’s aunt, had resided briefly at the house of an Anglican parish priest, and an orchestral piece also called ­‘Shanadithit’ composed by Michael Parker, which premiered in Corner Brook in July 1983 as a commemorative piece for the 400th anniversary of the claiming of Newfoundland for England by Sir Humphrey Gilbert on August 5, 1583. In describing the issues of land rights and the process of decolonisation in Australia, Gelder and Jacobs note that “what is ‘ours’ is also potentially, or always had been, ‘theirs’, the familiar is becoming strange” (1998: 23). They refer to the “unsettled settledness” (1998: 25) of those of settler descent in relation to aboriginal land rights and anxieties linked to a changing environment. Likewise, in Newfoundland there is a postcolonial uneasiness that can disrupt a sense of belonging in a place where once dwelled the Beothuk. Already in a precarious position, the ‘settler’ becomes ‘unsettled’. Writing about ­Crummey’s River Thieves, which reimagines the story of the capture of Demasduit, Cynthia Sugars says: “The formative event here is not the Beothuk dispersal so much as the European unsettlement that derives from this dispersal” (2005: 162). Gelder and Jacobs also claim that contemporary settlers either see themselves as innocent – they were not involved in the earlier events, so disconnected to the past – or guilty, “in the sense that everyone… is drawn into ‘the guilt industry’ whether they like it or not” (1998: 24). In Newfoundland, rather than try to expunge this guilt, many writers and artists “seem to wish to retain their guilt,” according to Martina Seifert (2002: 97). A poem by Al Pitman called ‘Shanadithit’ encapsulates this postcolonial guilt in Newfoundland, which ends with: Lie easy in your uneasy peace, girl, And do not, do not, forgive those Who trespass against you. pitman 1978

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However, this guilt remains projected into the past, or onto a dead people, ­giving the illusion of absolution, while tensions with living indigenous people continue. The extinction of the Beothuk then became a popular subject among ­Newfoundland writers and artists who reimagined the Beothuk speaking back to us. The appropriation of the Beothuk perspective is used to lament the past and to long for a harmony that never existed. In a poem on display in ­Twillingate Museum by Ron Young, ‘Manitou of the Beothuk’, a Beothuk tells present-day Newfoundlanders: I used to walk these lonely hills, long before you came, Your people called me Beothuck but never knew my name… Men of your tribe with fire sticks, erased me from this land, I won’t hold you in reproach for those, who didn’t understand… young 1987

I came across this poem twice in June 2013. It was on display in a section of a museum about the Beothuk in Twillingate, northeastern Newfoundland, and it was read out loud by a First Nations woman during a sunrise ceremony on Aboriginal Day in St John’s, which was attended by Mi’kmaq, Innu, Inuit and a few of European decent. In the poem, the poet appears to absolve himself from the actions of his settler ancestors, while also seeking forgiveness, which cannot be given, unless offered to ghostly presences. Writing about ‘Beothuk gothic’ in Crummey’s River Thieves, Wyile states that “because the colonial enterprise is premised on a largely brutal and illegitimate suppression of Aboriginal cultures, this legacy is figured through tropes of ghosts and hauntings in many colonial and postcolonial texts” (2009: 229). In River Thieves, the Beothuk are like ghosts, seen fleetingly, ‘shadow Indians’, Dalton says of the Beothuk in Newfoundland literature, “who serve us beyond the grave” (1992: 144). This ghostliness presages that they are already gone, as viewed from the hindsight of the author, in this case Crummey. Yet the ghosts linger. During a storm at sea, artist Gerald Squires was in a boat going past the uninhabited Grassy Island when he saw a vision of a woman pulling a cloak around her, thinking it was “a very unusual place to have a sighting of a ghost” (Owen 2015: 127; interview, St. John’s, 20 June 2013), he later concluded it was the spirit of Shanawdithit, the last Beothuk. This inspired him to create a life-size bronze statue of her, which can be seen in the woods at the Beothuk Interpretation Centre in Boyd’s Cove, where there are remains of a Beothuk village. She was not associated with that location, so for this reason the statue was named ‘Spirit of the Beothuk’ rather than Shanawdithit. While

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recently the Beothuk Interpretation Centre has been engaging more with living indigenous people, Squires himself said regarding the statue that “the intention was not to promote native peoples but to pay homage to her” (Owen 2015: 128; interview, St. John’s, 20 June 2013).

Imagining the Beothuk in Art

The fascination with the Beothuk goes from feelings of ‘regret’ in literature to a reassertion of indigeneity in visual art. Several Newfoundland artists with Mi’kmaq heritage have also depicted Beothuk in their work. During interviews, they said they did not know they had Mi’kmaq ancestry until they were adults (fieldwork interviews, Grand Falls and St. John’s, 19 June–5 July 2013). A common story I heard from several Mi’kmaq who were not from Conne River was that their parents or grandparents were ashamed to be Mi’kmaq and there was lots of name-calling while they were at school. In some cases parents told their children they were descended from the Spanish, to explain their darker skin tones. This was the case with Jerry Evans, a Mi-kmaq artist. As a child he was aware of his Welsh ancestry, but not of his Mi’kmaq ancestry. This changed when Conne River gained Reserve Status and more Mi’kmaq began to fight publically for recognition. An important result of this reservation status is that the young children today are able to feel proud to be Mi’kmaq. Evans, who is a master printmaker, supports the view that the Mi’kmaq are related to the Beothuk. He pounds powdered red ochre into a transparent base to use in his prints, much as the Beothuk used to mix red ochre with seal fat to spread over themselves and their belongings. In one print called ‘Living Spirits’, he includes the well-known nineteenth century portraits of Demasduit by Lady Henrietta Hamilton and Shanawdithit by William Gosse (though the latter seems to be a copy of the former) alongside images of Mi’kmaq women. It seems to assert the kinship between them while also declaring that there are still indigenous people in Newfoundland – not all are extinct. Another artist, Jonathan Howse, recalled that at school he was taught there were no natives in Newfoundland at all since the extinction of the Beothuk (Owen 2015: 131; interview, St. John’s, 5 July 2013). When his grandfather died, his grandmother began to speak about being Mi’kmaq. Then, Tony Stuckless, related to Howse on his mother’s side, claimed Beothuk ancestry in a ­self-published book The Stucklesses of Newfoundland (2005). Claims to Beothuk ancestry from what might be regarded as ‘settler’ families have prompted a few Mi’kmaq to also claim Beothuk ancestry, saying there were mixed marriages between Mi’kmaq and Beothuk (and there might be descendants in Iceland, too).

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In a series of paintings by Howse called Return of the Native, the settler-native distinction becomes blurred as he includes portraits of family members as well as one of Shawnadithit. The ‘unsettled native’ of Newfoundland has never been more apparent.

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Beothuk

There is an interesting parallel to Newfoundland in the story of the Hopewellian Indians who constructed the ancient Newark Earthworks in Ohio, usa. After the Hopewellian Indians left the area, other native groups moved in. The people there now are not their direct descendants, raising the question of who has a claim to the Newark Earthworks, which have since been nominated as a World Heritage site by unesco. In the case of Newfoundland, the question is who has a claim to the Beothuk, not only their physical remains but also their history and identity. With regard to the Newark Earthworks, in Mary ­MacDonald’s view, other indigenous people have a greater claim to the site than those of settler descent. While it makes sense, then, in the spirit of unesco, that the Newark Earthworks belong to all of us, we could also make a case that they belong in a special way not only to Native Americans but also to the indigenous peoples of the world who are increasingly entering into solidarity with each other and forming alliances to ensure that their heritage and contemporary ways of life are recognised and respected. macdonald 2016: 235

By this logic, First Nations such as Mi’kmaq, and indigenous people generally, have a greater claim through solidarity (even if they may have once been in conflict) on matters to do with the Beothuk, such as having a say about managing their sites, remains and even their representations. In practice, a more popular solution is to have a shared responsibility. In recent years, Mi’kmaq have been consulted, alongside academic specialists and others, on museum displays and included on committees looking after Beothuk remains. Another cultural aspect emerging from reimaginings of the Beothuk since the 1980s is the persistence of a primitivist ideal when depicting the Beothuk in art and literature. It reverses the aims of early nineteenth century setters who sought to civilise indigenous people. The original 1819 portrait of Demasduit by Lady Henrietta Hamilton shows a Beothuk woman with cropped hair and a fur-lined shawl or cloak, in the style of European portraiture of the time,

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while two hundred years later Beothuk women are depicted as ‘savages’, in the sense of being untamed, glimpsed in the woods and dressed in skins – a primitivist vision of a lost innocence. Cultural primitivism, according to Armin Geertz, is “the discontent of the civilised with civilisation” and belief that “a life far simpler and less sophisticated in some or all respects is a more desirable life” (Geertz 2004: 38). This mode of life is thought to be characteristic of native peoples in far-flung places or in a distant time. This position is thus often motivated by an attraction of the exotic (Geertz 2004: 39). The Romanticism of the late nineteenth century is imbued with primitivist notions about nature being connected to the moral good. However positive the Romantic ideals, they often keep living indigenous people out of the picture. It is discomforting that contemporary indigenous people are often compared to these vanished ‘noble savages’ as if they ought to still represent the imaginary Indian of European romanticism. ‘Noble savages’ are generally emblematic of a lost harmony with nature. For Martina Seifert, “the Beothuk are especially appealing because they’re dead” (2002: 98). Their complete absence in the present makes them the ultimate resource for the imagination and they cannot return to challenge depictions of them. However, creative works on the Beothuk also represent a longing for an alternative past where the Beothuk do survive, but, as the story progresses, the end is always tragic. Yet while the Beothuk may be extinct, there are still natives in Newfoundland. References Baerhe, R. 2013. “Indigenising the Academy: The case of Grenfell Campus of Memorial University of Newfoundland and the resurgence of Newfoundland Mi’kmaq.” In K. Anderson and M. Hanrahan, eds. Indigenising the Academy. 40th anniversary edition of The Morning Watch. St John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 81–103. Beckel, A. 1999. All Gone Widdun. St John’s: Breakwater Books. Budgel, R. 1992. “The Beothuks and the Newfoundland Mind.” Newfoundland Studies 8: 15–33. Cameron-Stockley, C. 1987. Shanadithit (a musical). Crummey, M. 2001. River Thieves. Toronto: Doubleday. Dalton, M. 1992. “Shadow Indians: The Beothuk Motif in Newfoundland Literature.” Newfoundland Studies 8: 2, 135–146. Francis, M. 2011. Creative Subversions: Whiteness, Indigeneity, and the National Imaginary. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

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Geertz, A.W. 2004. “Can We Move Beyond Primitivism? On recovering the indigenes of indigenous religions in the academic study of religion.” In J.K. Olupona, ed. Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity. New York; London: Routledge, 37–70. Gelder, K.D. and Jacobs, J.M. 1998. Uncanny Australia: sacredness and identity in a postcolonial nation. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Publishing. Goldie, T. 1989. Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Hanrahan, M. 2003. The Lasting Breach: The Omission of Aboriginal People From the Terms of Union Between Newfoundland and Canada and its Ongoing Impacts. Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada. At http://www .gov.nf.ca/publicat/royalcomm/research/Hanrahan.pdf. Accessed 09/03/2016. Kristensen, T.J. and Holly D.H. Jr 2013. “Birds, Burials and Sacred Cosmology of the Indigenous Beothuk of Newfoundland, Canada.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 23: 1, 41–53. Kuch, M. et al. 2007. “A preliminary analysis of the DNA and diet of the extinct Beothuk: A systematic approach to ancient human DNA.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 132, 594–604. MacDonald, M.N. 2016. “Whose Earthworks? Newark and Indigenous People.” In L. Jones and R.D. Shiels, eds. The Newark Earthworks: Enduring Monuments, Contested Meanings. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 230–242. MacGregor, W. 1908. No. 54. Newfoundland. Report by the Governor on a Visit to the Micmac Indians at Bay d’Espoir. London: HMSO. Marshall, I. 1996. A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Morgan, B. 2007. Cloud of Bone. Toronto: Knopf Canada. Owen, S. 2008. The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality. London; New York: Continuum. Owen, S. 2015. “The Demise of the Beothuk as a Past Still Present.” Journal of the Irish Society for the Academic Study of Religions 2:1, 119–139. Pitman, A. 1978. ‘Shanadithit’. Once When I was Drowning. St John’s: Breakwater Books. Polack, F. 2009. “Memory against History: Figuring the Past in Cloud of Bone.” English Studies in Canada 35: 4, 53–69. Polack, F. 2011. “Art in the Bush: Romanticist Painting for Indigenous Audiences in Tasmania and Newfoundland.” Nineteenth Century Contexts 33: 4, 333–351. Seifert, M. 2002. Rewriting Newfoundland Mythology: The Works of Tom Dawe. Berlin: Galda & Wilch Verlag. Starn, O. 2004. Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian. New York; London: Norton.

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Stuckless, T. 2005. The Stucklesses of Newfoundland. Self-published. Sugars, C. 2005. “Original Sin, or, The Last of the First Ancestors: Michael Crummey’s River Thieves.” English Studies in Canada 31: 4, 147–175. Taussig, M. 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labour of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Vizenor, Gerald. 2009. Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press. Wyile, H. 2009. “Beothuk Gothic: Michael Crummey’s River Thieves.” In C. Sugars and G. Turcotte, eds. Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 229–249.

chapter 13

The Shamanic Festival Isogaisa (Norway): Religious Meaning-Making in the Present Trude Fonneland What is Isogaisa? Isogaisa is a mountain, a goal in the distance. A wish to experience something beautiful, something indescribable. The Isogaisa festival is a social meeting place, where different cultures blend. The old Sámi spiritual way of seeing the world is combined with modern ways of thinking. Indigenous people present their own culture and then take part in the performances of other groups. In this way shamanism is brought to a higher level and achieves broader professional content.1

∵ Introduction In 2010, the festival scene in Norway was enriched with yet another entrant, the shaman festival Isogaisa, located in the county of Lavangen, Northern Norway, and presented as an indigenous festival highlighting spiritual traditions of indigenous people. Here various indigenous cultures and traditions, symbols and narratives serve as inspirational sources for the programme and for the products on offer. At the same time, festival organisers say they want to communicate these expressions in a modern language, making them inspiring and relevant for people in contemporary society. At the festival shamans from all over the world yearly gather to perform ceremonies and exchange knowledge. Concerned with sense making on emic grounds, this chapter focuses on ways contemporary shamans anchor their practices in ancient indigenous pasts. While festivals, like Isogaisa, are 1 http://www.isogaisa.org/. Accessed 22/09/2015.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_015

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i­mportant vehicles for cultural continuity and the passing on of traditions, they are also important instruments employed in situations of cultural and religious renewal. In this chapter, I will explore how the festival then not only reflects cultural conditions, but becomes a means of renegotiating or even producing new cultural forms. The chapter also sheds light on how inter-cultural commonality between indigenous people has become infused with notions of them as one spiritual community, or what James Clifford refers to as indigènitude (2013: 16). This chapter is based upon my own fieldworks at Isogaisa from 2010 to 2016, as well as on meetings and interviews with festival leader Ronald Kvernmo and other festival participants. The information about the event presented on Isogaisa’s homepage and Facebook page, also forms a central part of my analysis.2

Shamanism in Norway

Core shamanism gained a foothold in Norwegian society in the 1980s. Prior to the late 1990s, contemporary shamanism in Norway differed little from core shamanic practices found elsewhere on the globe and in the areas of their origin. Since then, a Sámi version of shamanism has been established as one of several contemporary shamanic innovations. In the wake of Sámi shamanism a wide range of new products have been developed, including courses on Sámi shamanism; on the making of ritual drums (goavddis/goabdes/gievrie); guided vision quests in the northern Norwegian region; and healing-sessions inspired by Sámi shamanism. The various products are offered by Sámi and ethnic Norwegians alike. In 2012 the Shamanistic Association, which combines a view of shamanism as a universal path with an emphasis on local Sámi and Norse roots and connections, was recognised by the government as a religious denomination. According to the laws regulating religious bodies in Norway, the Shamanistic Association thus may perform such religious ceremonies as baptisms, confirmations, weddings and funerals, and, additionally, gain financial support from the membership (see Fonneland 2015). Sámi shamanism is perhaps the most complex and multifaceted shamanistic tradition thus far to emerge in Nordic landscapes (see Fonneland and Kraft 2013). In addition to the religious context, Sámi shamanism has entered 2 This chapter builds partially on a previously published article; “The Festival Isogaisa: Neoshamanism on New Arenas” (Fonneland 2015), but it also adds new aspects to the analysis of the festival.

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­cultural and entertainment institutions such as museums, festivals, tourist locations, theatres, music, and films and also comes in a cultural heritage–style version, as part of Sámi nation building and the ethno-political field of indigenous revival (Kraft 2009; Christensen 2015; Fonneland 2012). As stated by Siv Ellen Kraft and Greg Johnson, processes of indigenous revitalisation often include attempts to bring to life again ancient religious traditions that have been disrupted or erased from memory (Johnson and Kraft 2017). In Norway the pre-Christian Sámi religion that gradually receded some three hundred years ago as a result of the Christianisation of the Sámi, “has become increasingly important as a source of national identity symbols and tourism, as well as for the indigenisation of Christianity and of New Age and neo-shamanic milieus” (Johnson and Kraft 2017: 10). However, the pre-Christian religion remains controversial, particularly among conservative Christians. As Thomas A. DuBois underlines: “The old religion continues to be viewed as ­illicit among many Nordic Sámi Christians, who belong to either the Lutheran church or the Læstadian sects within it and who often view pre-Christian traditions as irreligious and idolatrous” (2000: 268). Still, the opposition to shamanism seems during recent years to be limited to its presence in Christian contexts; on church grounds, and as part of Christian liturgy and ceremonies (see Fonneland and Kraft 2013). Developments within the global indigenous movement and transnational indigenous coalitions have also influenced and helped to legitimise the practice of Sámi shamanism. Several scholars have referred to notions of a religious dimension of indigeneity. According to James Clifford “Indigènitude is sustained through media-disseminated images, including a shared symbolic repertoire (‘the sacred’, ‘Mother Earth’, ‘shamanism’, ‘sovereignty’ the wisdom of ‘elders’, stewardship over ‘the land’)” (2013: 16). Popular culture has also been important for such images to become more widespread (see Christensen 2015). Kraft in several articles refers to this type of shared symbolic repertoire as ‘indigenous spirituality’ (Kraft 2009; Kraft 2010). Shamanism in Norway is not a unified, organised movement, but a patchwork of shifting and elastic networks, stretching across both regional and ­national borders (Fonneland 2010). There are still some events that can be said to act as focal points where shamans from all over the country meet to socialise and share their knowledge. This primarily applies to the annually arranged New Age fairs organised in cities all over the country and not least to the Isogaisa festival.3 3 On their webpage, one can find information on this year’s and last year’s programmes, exhibitors, central themes, practical information and registration forms for voluntary workers.

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Festival Life at Isogaisa

In the present (2016) several Sámi festivals with an indigenous profile are arranged annually in Norway. These events range from one-day happenings with a focus on film, music, culture, history, literature or sports, to a small number of larger events with a national or international outline. As festivals, these events offer a break from daily life; they provide a sense of community, and yield an abundance of stimuli for the senses. Festivals are often held up as being an expression of a changing cultural scene. Music, art, literature, sports as well as religious rituals and expressions, are here extracted from their traditional contexts. These types of events also blur the boundaries between the hall and the stage; between the performers and the audience; between the organisers and the voluntary workers. They create new arenas, reach a wide audience and represent opportunities to be seen and heard (Pedersen and Viken 2009: 185). Isogaisa belongs to the category of indigenous festivals with an international profile. Here shamanic practitioners and sympathisers from all over the world gather for a whole week to take part in workshops, rituals, market, ceremonies and concerts.4 Shaman Ronald Kvernmo is the founder and leader of Isogaisa.5 In our interviews, he points out that the motivation behind the festival is to unite a pre-Christian Sámi worldview with modern ways of thinking, and thus create a spiritual meeting place where different cultures are fused together. Over the past two years, there have been around 500 people visiting the festival ­annually. Kvernmo notes that the objective of Isogaisa is to reach the widest possible ­audience by tailoring a festival programme that targets all age groups; children, youths, adults and families. In one interview Kvernmo underlined the point: Some go there to meet like-minded people, some go there to attend seminars and workshops, and some go because they are curious. Isogaisa is On their home page, one can also find a YouTube link where those who are interested may see, listen to and take part in a special Isogaisa dance, which is accompanied by a special festival joik. 4 Among the highlighted exhibitors on the festival’s website coming to Isogaisa in 2015, 19 of 25 were from abroad (http://www.isogaisa.org/spennende-personligheter-2015.php. Accessed 23/2/2016. 5 The festival organisers are part of foreininga Isogaisa, which is headed by festival leader Ronald Kvernmo and his wife Beate Sandjord. Annually around 50 volunteers also take part in organising the festival. Isogaisa hosts several co-organisers; among them are Spansdalen Sameforening (Spansdalen Sámi Associaiton) and Foreningen Kystsamene (coastal Sámi Association).

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suitable for families. There are arrangements for children, young people and adults. The volume of the music will be comfortable, and there are no age restrictions. Interview with kvernmo at the Isogaisa festival, August 2014

In one area, Isogaisa deviates from most other Norwegian festivals, namely the choice to place value on total abstinence from alcohol. People who bring alcohol or other kinds of drugs to the festival venue are excluded from attending Isogaisa for ten years.6 Kvernmo argues that shamanism cannot be combined with alcohol and on the homepage of the festival website, he writes: There are many people who never go to festivals because of alcohol and drug abuse. We have the pleasure to offer these women and men a festival where everyone can be themselves and act in a natural way. There are also many who like to go to a festival with their children. At Isogaisa they don’t need to worry. The elders of the Sámi shamans agree on one thing; drugs and alcohol have never been a part of Sámi shamanism. And it never will! So we hope that you will respect our old Sámi culture and traditions, and come to our festival as the nice human you are.7 In addition to confronting historical stereotypes, abstaining from alcohol involves a wish to be taken seriously, and to be on par with other, more established religious traditions. According to Kvernmo, shamanism is a serious spiritual practice in which all senses must remain sharp. Thus at the festival, he notes, one is to obtain intoxication only from spiritual experiences. Sámi religious symbols, such as the drum (goavddis/goabdes/gievrie) the joik (an ancient form of Sámi music) and the noaidi (Sámi religious specialist), and narratives as well as various expressions of indigenous spirituality serve as inspirational sources for the programme and for the products on sale. At the same time, festival organisers say they want to communicate these expressions in a modern language and adapt them to contemporary life. The programme of the festival changes from year to year with different shamans taking part and different artists and musicians responsible for the entertainment. But some parts of the programme happen every year. Among these is a New Age fair, which operates in parallel with the other festival activities.

6 see http://www.isogaisa.org/rusfritt-arrangement.php. 7 http://www.isogaisa.org/drug-free-arrangement.php. Accessed 21/9/2015.

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Compared with other annual New Age fairs arranged in cities all over Norway, this festival fair is a ‘mini New Age fair’ with about twenty exhibitors. Whereas the traditional New Age fairs gather a wide range of exhibitors, the focus of the Isogaisa fair revolves around shamanism; selling drums, brass rings, duodji (Sámi artwork) and other products related to the practice of shamanism. In addition, a course in drum making is held yearly. Here participants are trained by a professional duodji artist to create their own ritual drums. Another regular part of the festival is a mountain hike to a Sámi sieidi (Sámi pre-­Christian sacrificial stone) where participants take part in a ritual and a sacrifice under the guidance of Sámi shaman, Eirik Myrhaug. The religious creativity and blending of cultures and traditions are particularly visible in the various ceremonies that are held during the festival week. Here shamans from all over the world share their knowledge and act together. The pipe ceremony, hunting ceremony, ceremony against mining, tea ceremony, and the many drumming journeys offer ritual passages in which the sensing of the landscape, the sound of the drum, tastes and scents represent liminality, transformation and inner self-development. Isogaisa is thus not a festival in which the audience is supposed to just come and be entertained; the objective is to come, experience, and be changed. This implies an active and tangible relationship with the products and activities on offer as well as the place in which they are offered.

Isogaisa as a Venue for the Development of Indigenous Identity

In order to create room for this type of coming together in a remote place like Lavangen, the festival is financially supported by the Barents Secretariat, the Norwegian Cultural Council and the Sámi Parliament. The main intention behind the funding is to establish a bond between Sámi shamans in Norway and indigenous cultural workers from other countries. From these institutions’ perspectives, Isogaisa is seen as a venue for intercultural negotiation, and the festival week is embraced as a potent site for cultivating understanding and dialogue on indigenous histories, cultures, and religions in indigenous terms. Yearly shamans from the Murmansk region have participated at Isogaisa. The festival is now also included in a two-year cooperation project named Joik & Daina, a project supported by the Latvian Ministry of Culture to promote contemporary art, in which Sámi artists and culture workers take part in the Sviests festival in Cezis, Latvia, and in which Latvian artists also attend Isogaisa.

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In the aftermath of Isogaisa 2013, local newspapers announced that some Sámi communities were highly critical of the funding of the festival because of Isogaisa’s promotions of parts of Sámi culture that from ancient times are not to be made public, such as the practices surrounding healing and the contact with spiritual powers. The Barents Secretariat thus ordered an independent review of the ethical aspects to support the event and in February 2014 two researchers at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (niku) drew up a report. The report highlights that the festival’s marketing of shamanism violates the traditional principle of secrecy of spiritual and healing powers or abilities. But it also further points out that this is how Sámi shamanism generally is practised in contemporary society and that the festival is an important arena where the Sámi can take part in shaping a global indigenous spirituality. The researchers outline the idea that: The festival is based upon a global concept that has been given a local anchoring […]. We [would] suggest that the differences between old and new practices are greater than the similarities and they should be considered as different practices. There is no evidence that Sámi neoshamans represent a threat for practitioners of healing in today’s Sámi Christian tradition. […] Based on our impressions the festival reaches out to an audience that would not otherwise be affiliated with Sámi culture. It supports local culture, but at the same time, it connects to a multifaceted global movement, of which Sámi spirituality is already a part. That Sámi people actively participate in this movement with their own offerings and on their own terms is a strength for the Sámi community and indigenous peoples in general. The fact that Sámi people can represent themselves in the religious field can counteract the global tendency that indigenous spirituality is separated from its historical and local context and is represented by others. brattland and myrvoll 2014: 5–6; my translation

The tension surrounding the funding of Isogaisa gives us a glimpse into the ways communities cope with social flux and cultivate creativity. What we have here is a tension between different views on what is local and what is global, what belongs to the past and what can be communicated as a resource for the Sámi community in the present. What some local voices see as an assault against Sámi religious traditions is, in the report, described as an important Sámi resource and voice in the development of global indigenous identity as well as religion.

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That the festival may serve as a cradle for a development of indigenous identities, as pointed out in the report, is a primary concern to the festival leader, Kvernmo. He himself grew up in an environment and a time when being Sámi was stigmatised. When during adolescence he moved to Guovdageaidnu (Kautokeino), a county in one of the main Sámi areas, Kvernmo felt he did not fulfill the ‘requirements’ to call himself a Sámi, as he did not speak a Sámi language nor did he come from a family who herded reindeer, a traditional Sámi occupation (see Hovland 1996; Stordahl 1996; and Gaski 2008). Selecting a Sámi identity in spite of the experienced lack of prerequisites can be demanding (see also Gaski 2008: 222). It was not until adulthood and through contact with a shamanistic environment that Kvernmo felt he could be proud of his own background and history and choose to call himself Sámi. This personal development also triggered a desire to learn more about shamanism, and eventually to teach others about the subject (Kvernmo 2011). As Kvernmo points out in our conversations, common conceptions about what Sámi culture and identity is, are challenged in the shamanistic environment. According to him, to be Sámi deals with more than practising a language or engaging in traditional reindeer herding. Getting to know shamanism, he found that to be Sámi also included a spiritual and mythical dimension. From this perspective, the shamanic environment represents a context that challenges the traditional concept of identity, and allows for new and ambiguous ways to be Sámi. This is a perspective that is also pointed out in the report on Isogaisa. The festival is acknowledged as an important venue where ‘new’ Sámi identities can take shape and be developed. The processes of constructing new Sámi identities, shaped through contact with a global shamanistic movement, can be seen as an example of what Greg Johnson and Siv Ellen Kraft, in the introduction to this volume, with reference to Clifford (2013), highlight as a dynamic of back – how global indigeneity plays back home and is made local once again (Johnson and Kraft 2017). The process of becoming Sámi and indigenous through shamanistic knowledge generation expresses a transformative renewal of attachments to culture and place where the concept of Sámi identity is expanded as well as contested. During the festival, also non-indigenous shamans, exhibitors, and performers take part in the programme. One can still trace an indigenous flavour in many of these participants’ presentations on festival posters, in ritual performances as well as on their homepages. Marcos Rodriguez, also known as ‘Bearcub’, is from Spain and working as a medicine man. He has been part of the Isogaisa programme for the last two years. On the festival’s homepage he presents himself as an Earth Native and a world citizen; “Meaning that I am a Native from this beautiful planet we call (Mother) Earth as we all are in

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this life time.” Rodriguez finds his own strategy of inclusion in an indigenous ­community by highlighting his own notion of an indigenous ‘we’ in pointing out, “‘we are all natives’ in virtue of belonging to the world.”8 What is expressed here are notions of a global indigenous spirituality, presented as a shared, ­symbolic ­repertoire for indigenous as well as non-indigenous people worldwide. Participants point out that this type of spirituality is coloured by different local grounds, but primarily it is global and accessible to all. Presentations like this are representative of how many of the non-native shamans choose to perform and market their services at the festival, and reflects the high regard for indigenous people and indigenous religious traditions in contemporary shamanism. This high regard has become increasingly visible since the late 1960s and is at present more prominent than ever. As Graham and Penny note, indigeneity is no-one’s primary identity: individuals and groups across the globe fashion themselves as ‘Indigenous’ through performance and performative acts in intercultural spaces (2014: 14). Isogaisa is precisely such a space where festival participants get to claim inclusion in the indigenous rubric. Performances of indigeneity remain dialogic on multiple levels. “‘Insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, performers, and audiences, public and individual subjects continually interact to shape emergent Indigenous identities” (Graham and Penny 2014: 4). The Isogaisa festival in this perspective constitutes an intertwined stage where notions of being and belonging are recast.

Isogaisa and the Performance of Indigenous Spirituality

In the report, the festival is also welcomed as a resource for the development of local knowledge on the Sámi past, as well as for a growing discourse on global indigenous spirituality. Brattland and Myrvoll, in their report, point out: The festival’s local roots and the inclusion of local Sámi culture are supportive to Sámi culture and society in southern Troms and northern Nordland and for the Sámi community beyond the region. It contributes to more knowledge about the pre-Christian Sámi society, about […] the Sámi sacred sites (sieidi) that are of great importance not only for Lavangen, but also for the entire society. The fact that the festival in addition has an international flavour makes it no less important. [….]. Isogaisa does not contribute to ethical concerns for the Barents Secretariat and 8 http://elkurandero.com/about/index.html. Accessed 17/9/2015.

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similar institutions that provide support. The alternative Sámi m ­ ovement should be welcomed as a resource for local Sámi communities and for the global movement on indigenous spirituality. brattland and myrvoll 2014: 6; my translation

Isogaisa is presented as being a learning arena where a dynamic process of remembering brings elements from the past forth. Assumptions that religious traditions that have been lost can be retrieved and shared are here generated. And, by sharing and exchanging spiritual knowledge this type of expertise, according to Brattland and Myrvoll, will develop and grow for the benefit of the local community as well as for indigenous people globally. As I argue in the article “The Festival Isogaisa: Neoshamanism in New Arenas” (Fonneland 2015) the festival landscape is interpreted as having the imprints and traces of ancestors, and this crossover between time and space gives places a touch of mystery. Isogaisa offers a perceptible access to the Sámi past, and thus forms a bond between the past and the present. The festival generates a feeling of how it all happened here; and that here it is all happening now. It is loaded with powerful symbols, which not only bring us back in time, presenting tales of the past; but also convey information about which types of values we regard as important in the present. The past, which is revived during the festival, is not the past we know from history books and the discourse of scholars. At Isogaisa, it is a link between memory and the imaginary world that is being staged (see Lowenthal 1998; Eriksen 1999; Frykman 2002). Here, the past is not a closed chapter; it is a process that extends into the present and reaches into the future. In this way, Isogaisa can be said to be a monument to Sámi pre-Christian traditions as well as to indigenous spiritual expressions that are being created within a certain framework every year. Being a monument, Isogaisa contributes to a ‘coding’ of the local place, which can be deciphered by the participants at the festival (Fonneland 2015). The Isogaisa monument however, is not solely based on the local landscape, but considers the festival arena to be a centre and a specially selected representative for shamanism globally. The ­festival participants are mobile and fluid, and thus the practices and ideas cultivated in the local landscape during the week of the festival are transported to contexts far away from Lavangen. This development, it is also noted, not only takes shape through contact with indigenous culture workers from other countries. It is particularly these types of exchanges and developments in local traditions that both the Sámi Parliament, the Cultural Council and the Barents Secretariat wish to

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­encourage through their yearly financial support, and why Isogaisa is marketed as a resource for local Sámi communities and the global indigenous movement. Conclusion Isogaisa is an important venue for expressions of people’s ideas, values, memories, traditions, and aspirations. As a festival Isogaisa acts as a contact zone, where people negotiate and reflect on their identities. Understanding the significance of festivals like Isogaisa in a globalising sphere of indigenous cultural production has implications beyond the aspect of entertainment (see Phipps 2009; Phipps 2010). At Isogaisa, different indigenous cultures and pre-historical traditions are highlighted as sources of inspiration for religious practice and an environmentally friendly relationship to the earth, though shamanic practices are shaped in relationship to contemporary Euro-American society. This involves a projection of desired states or abilities of various indigenous populations, which are then perceived to provide the answer to what is experienced as an alienating and oppressive culture. As Åsa Trulson argues; “It involves the risk of essentialising quite diverse cultures and, furthermore, harmonising them against contemporary Euro-American spiritual needs” (2010: 328). However, the processes involved at various workshops, seminars and ceremonies at Isogaisa are more complex than the construction of a romanticised other. At Isogaisa, indigenous people are able to contribute to the shaping of the discourse of indigenous spirituality and to utilise it for their own strategic purposes. The study of newly emerging festivals, such as Isogaisa, provides a window onto processes of ritual creativity. The festival is, in my view, a clear example of how religious labels are formed in ever-changing contexts – as a by-product of broader historical processes. References Brattland, C. and M. Myrvoll. 2014. Etiske problemstillinger ved støtte til Sámisk nyreligiøsitet. Tromsø: Rapport NIKU, Barents Secretariat. Christensen, C. 2015. “Sámi Shamanism and Indigenous Film: The Case of ­Pathfinder.” In S.E. Kraft, T. Fonneland and J. Lewis, eds. Nordic Neoshamanisms, New York, ­Palgrave Macmillan, 175–190.

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Clifford, J. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: ­Harvard University Press. Dubois, T. 2000. “Folklore, Boundaries and Audience in The Pathfinder.” In J. Pentikäinen, ed. Sámi Folkloristics, Turku: NIF, 255–274. Eriksen, A. 1999. Historie, Minne og Myte. Oslo: Pax Forlag AS. Fonneland, T. 2010. Sámisk nysjamanisme: i dialog med ( for)tid og stad. Doctoral dissertation, University of Bergen. Fonneland, T. 2012. “Spiritual Entrepreneurship in a Northern Landscape, Tourism, Spirituality and Economics.” Temenos. Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion 48:2, 155–178. Fonneland, T. 2015. “The Festival Isogaisa: Neoshamanism in New Arenas.” In S.E. Kraft, T. Fonneland and J. Lewis, eds. Nordic Neoshamanisms, New York: Palgrave Macmillan,­ 175–190. Fonneland, T, and S.E. Kraft 2013. “Sámi Shamanism & Indigenous Spirituality.” In I. Gilhus and S. Sutcliffe eds. New Age Spirituality: Rethinking Religion. London: Equinox Publishers, 132–145. Frykman, J. 2002. “Place for Something else: Analysing a Cultural Imaginary.” Ethnologia Europea 32: 2, 47–68. Gaski, L. 2008. “Sámi Identity as a Discursive Formation. Essentialism and Ambivalence.” In M. Henry, ed. Indigenous Peoples: Self-Determination, Knowledge, Indigeneity. Delft: Eburon Academic Publishers, 219–236. Graham, L.R. and H.G. Penny. 2014. “Performing Indigeneity: Emergent Identity, SelfDetermination, and Sovereignty.” In L.R. Graham and H.G. Penny, eds. Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1–31. Hovland, A. 1996: Moderne urfolk. Sámisk ungdom i 90-årene. Oslo: Cappelen Akademisk Forlag. Johnson, G. and S.E. Kraft. 2017. “Introduction”. In G. Johnson and S.E. Kraft, eds. Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s). Leiden: Brill, 1–24. Kraft, S.E. 2009. “Sámi Indigenous Spirituality. Religion and Nation Building in Norwegian Sápmi.” Temenos: Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion 4, 179–206. Kraft, S.E. 2010. “The Making of a Sacred Mountain. Meanings of Nature and Sacredness in Sapmi and Northern Norway.” Religion 40: 1, 53–61. Kvernmo, R. 2011. Sjamanens hemmeligheter. Own Imprint. Lowenthal, D. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Pedersen, P. and A. Viken 2009. “Globalized Reinvention of Indigenuity. The Riddu Riddu Festival as a Tool for Ethnic Negotiation of Place.” In T. Nyseth and A. Viken, eds. Place Reinvention; Northern Perspectives. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited.

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Phipps, P. 2009. “Globalization, Indigeneity and Performing Culture.” Local-Global: Identity, Security, Community 6, 28–48. Phipps, P. 2010. “Performances of Power: Indigenous Cultural Festivals as Globally ­Engaged Cultural Strategy.” Alternatives 35, 217–240. Stordahl, V. 1996. Same i den moderne verden. Endring og kontinuitet i et Sámisk lokalsamfunn. Karasjok, Davvi Girji O.S. Trulsson, Å. 2010. Cultivating the Sacred: Ritual Creativity and Practice among Women in Contemporary Europe, doctoral dissertation, Department of History and Anthropology of Religions, Lund University.

chapter 14

Are Adivasis Indigenous? Gregory D. Alles Introduction I remember well when the term ‘indigenous’ first appeared on my mental radar­ screen. It was in the year 1990, at most a year or two earlier, and I thought it was a brilliant and simple solution to a terminological problem: what designation to use for groups of people who were too easily demeaned? It was certainly much better than many of the other terms that had been used. By that time everyone squirmed – or at least knew to squirm – when they heard terms like primitive, savage, Naturvölker – Nature people – as they were known in German, and archaic. Even terms like “aboriginal, tribal, primal, oral, ethnic, traditional, ancestral, [and] local” (Rothstein 2014: 685) were less than satisfying. By this time Canadians were speaking of ‘First Nations’, but I was tending to favour ‘Native’, as in ‘Native Americans’ or ‘Native Peoples’. But ‘Native’, of course, can sound pretty colonialist, as in ‘the natives are getting restless’. A former colleague who is from the Muskogee nation (also known as the Creek tribe) told me that I should use the term ‘indigenous’, and in framing a programme of events on indigenous reactions to the Columbus quincentenary, we did. Recently she told me that she thinks she got the term from Chief Oren ­Lyons of the Onondaga Nation, who was promoting it, but that she does not use it anymore. She simply identifies as Muskogee. There were obvious problems with the literal implications of ‘indigenous’, starting with identifying to whom the term applied, given the long history of marriage between peoples whose ancestors were living in the Americas before 1492 and those whose ancestors were not. Nevertheless, I jumped at the term, and, perhaps oblivious to certain implications, I have been using it ever since. In 1990 I was just barely aware of adivasis. I had been trained in classical and Sanskrit philology, and I do not remember thinking much about these people until I spent several months in India in 1989 – except perhaps for knowing that some people identified them with the monkeys and bears who figured as characters in the Ramayana, the epic that I was working on.1 Starting in 1 If I remember correctly, I first came across this idea in the writings of H.D. Sankalia (1973; 1982). See also Russell (1916: 1.17, 23), and Ramdas (1925).

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1989, ­however, I quickly became disappointed with the rise of Hindu nationalism and the use it was making of the Ramayana. Adivasis and their religions seemed to provide an intriguing research alternative, although one that it has taken me a couple of decades to embrace fully. One result of that embrace has been an inevitable confrontation with the difficulties of translating the term ‘indigenous’ from one regional context – North America – to another – South Asia. (I am using ‘translate’ in the broad sense that James Clifford (2013) intends.) Are adivasis indigenous? In one sense the question could not be simpler. Adi means ‘first’ or ‘original’. Vasi is a noun that derives from the Sanskrit root √vas, meaning ‘to dwell or live’. An adivasi is an ‘original dweller or inhabitant’. In other words, adivasis are the indigenous people of India. Unfortunately, translation is rarely this simple. As Megan Moodie points out, “A good deal of work has to be done to make ‘adivasi’ equivalent to the international language of ‘indigenous people’” (2015: 190, n. 12). I do not intend to do that work here. Instead, I intend to highlight the difficulties of translation, but also perhaps its possibilities. It is important not to overlook the possibilities, because for some adivasis I know, the international discourse of indigeneity has assumed some of the functions that scholars of religions used to assign routinely to myth.

Who are Adivasis?

Adivasis have been called many different things. In Gujarati, the contemporary Indian language I know best, they have been referred to not only as ­adivasis but also as bhumijan (people of the earth), girijan (mountain people), ­jangali ­(people of the jungle), kaliparaj (black people), raniparaj (wild people), and vanyajati and vanavasi (forest people) (Vyas 2010: 26). While today these terms are widely seen as denigratory, they may not always have been so. Ajay Skaria has argued that in the Dangs, the forested hills of southernmost ­Gujarat, ­wildness was once a self-identification that people celebrated to contrast themselves with the people of the plains, with whom they had an agonistic relationship, that is, a relationship characterised by trade but also by raiding. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century, with the increasing influence of upper-caste (brahmin and ksatriya) values and increased control by the British through instruments such as writing, that wildness came to be equated with ignorance and so framed as backwardness (Skaria 1999: 38–43, 164, 179–193). The association with wilderness, forests, and hills has remained an important feature in the contemporary imagination of the adivasi, even when the

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people involved are agriculturalists settled in plains (see also Ghurye 1980: 7). But there are other significant aspects as well, and they derive from the manner in which British colonialists came to conceive of Indian social structure. A distinction between tribes and castes was entrenched in the British mindset, but just what these terms referred to was a subject of some discussion. In attempting to make sense of the ‘Hindu tribes and castes’ that he encountered in Banaras, the Protestant missionary, M.A. Sherring, took statements that he found in the Manusmrti (the ‘Laws of Manu’) and combined them with both the British idea of an Aryan invasion of the Indian subcontinent in antiquity and the manner in which various communities were distributed geographically. He did not, however, sharply distinguish tribes from castes. For him, ‘tribe’ was a term of art. It was the ethnological equivalent of the local term ‘caste’ (Sherring 1872: xxiii). As a result, he could speak comfortably of ‘Brahmanical tribes’ and ‘Kshatriya tribes’. He did, however, imagine that the indigenous people of the subcontinent had reacted to the advance of the Aryans in two different ways. Some of them remained around Aryan settlements and became servants, that is, Sudras; others withdrew to wilderness areas and remained distinct, becoming ‘aboriginal tribes’ (Sherring 1872: xxi). Today Sherring’s equation of ‘tribes’ and ‘castes’ seems idiosyncratic. In administrative parlance the two terms quickly came to refer to two mutually exclusive categories. H.H. Risley, a racialist who applied anthropometry in his attempt to identify various communities (Risley 1891; Risley 1892), carefully distinguished tribes from castes according to their social characteristics: castes profess to follow specific occupations whereas tribes do not; castes allegedly descend from a human or divine mythical ancestor whereas the mythical ancestor of tribes may be human or animal; tribes speak the same language and occupy a particular territory (apparently castes do not); and castes, but not tribes, are necessarily endogamous (Risley 1908: 61, 67). Aside from the reference to descent from animals, this list notably lacks any reference to wildness, forests, or hills. To his credit, Risley expressed hesitations about the factual implications of the word ‘aborigine’ (Risley 1908: 72), but in other respects his conceptions of tribal peoples correspond to images of the primitive current at the time in British anthropology. He presumes that tribal culture is the starting point of all development in India and that the original tribal religion, still preserved among those who have not converted to Hinduism, Christianity, or something else, is ‘animism’ (Risley 1908: 209, 262). The only people indigenous to India were, he thought, the Dravidians (Risley 1908: 266). Risley’s British administrative colleagues – at least some of them – ­politely but firmly rejected his racial approach to tribes and castes (Crooke 1896: 1.cxix–cxxxvi; Enthoven 1975 [1920]: 1.xiv–xvi), but like him, they just as ­firmly

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d­ istinguished between the two. Writing about the Central Provinces, R.V. ­Russell formulated his understanding of the distinction succinctly: In the fourth group are … the non-Aryan or indigenous tribes. Most of these cannot properly be said to form part of the Hindu social system at all, but for practical purposes they are admitted and are considered to rank below all castes except those who cannot be touched. russell 1916: 1.31

He repeats the origin story already familiar from Sherring: … those tribes which were subjugated and permitted to live with a servile status in the Hindu villages have developed into the existing impure castes of labourers, weavers, tanners and others, who form the lowest social group. The tribes which still retain their distinctive existence were not enslaved in this manner, but lived apart in their own villages in the forest tracts and kept possession of the land. russell 1916: 1.65

He seems, however, more hesitant than Risley when it comes to the subject of tribal religion. Given that tribal people often adopt Hindu practices in an attempt to elevate their status, he notes, “[a]t each census the question arises which of them should be classed as Hindus, and which as Animists or worshippers of their own tribal gods” (Russell 1916: 1.65; many more examples in Ghurye 1980: 2–6). Writing about the Bombay Presidency, R.E. Enthoven distinguished tribes from castes somewhat differently. “[T]he term tribe is used,” he wrote, “for a unit based on common descent as opposed to the term caste which is applied to a social unit founded on common occupation, common residence, common language or common political control. A social unit based on religion is described as a sect” (Enthoven 1975 [1920]: 1.iv). At the same time, he envisioned a genealogical relationship between the two: the tribe was “the forerunner of the caste” (Enthoven 1975 [1920]: 1.vi); castes were formed as a result of the influence of race, occupation, residency, language, and religion. He also saw religion as an important domain in which “primitive, i.e., pre-Aryan” elements had been preserved on the subcontinent (Enthoven 1975 [1920]: 1.x; see the entire discussion 1.v–xi). This, at least, is what he says when talking about tribes and castes in general. When he turns to the major tribal groups found in the Presidency, the Bhils and Kolis, he shifts to talking about distance in time and cultural space: Bhils and Kolis are aboriginal, and they mostly inhabit jungles and hills (Enthoven 1975 [1920]: 1.xviii).

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In other words, British administrators were convinced that it made sense to distinguish castes and tribes in India, but they disagreed on just what sense it made. There was, however, a pronounced if not universal tendency to associate tribes with aboriginality conceived as residence prior to the Aryan invasion. This British administrative distinction forms the background to a famous debate that occurred shortly before Indian Independence in 1947. On the one side stood the British missionary and Gandhian turned ethnologist, ­Verrier ­Elwin, who adhered to the notion that tribes constituted a distinct group and drew administrative consequences from it; on the other stood the Indian armchair sociologist at the University of Bombay, G.S. Ghurye, who rejected the distinction and drew different policy implications (R. Guha 1999: 155–160). Both were speaking about groups to which they did not belong. Elwin, who spent many years of his life in tribal areas and who, somewhat controversially, married two tribal women (in succession), thought of tribal peoples as ‘aboriginals’ threatened by modernity and commercial interests (Elwin 1943; Elwin 2009 [1957]: 12). Although theoretically naive by today’s standards, he published many volumes documenting tribal cultures and traditions (see also Elwin 2009). In his more careful moments he insisted on the impossibility of totally isolating these people from the modern world and on the need for what he considered a proper form of development, as opposed to ‘detribalisation’ (Elwin [1957] 2009). In a perhaps less guarded, more enthusiastic moment he floated a rather different proposal: “The first necessity is the establishment of a sort of National Park, in which not only the Baiga [a tribal group], but the thousands of simple Gond [another tribal group] in their neighbourhood might take refuge” (Elwin 1939: 515). In effect, this proposal would carve the theoretical distinction between tribe and caste deeply into the natural and political landscape, with the tribal protected by the distant but patronising gaze of the modern. Ghurye disagreed with Elwin sharply in both theory and practice. S­ urveying a vast quantity of administrative reflections, he argued that there were no grounds for making a firm distinction between tribal peoples and Hindu society, whether the purported grounds be cultural difference or distance, priority of residence (which could be almost impossible to determine), language, or religious practice. About religion he writes, “The only sound conclusion is that the creeds of the so-called Animists and the Hinduism of some sections of Hindu society have so much material which is either similar or common or both, that demarcation between the two, being almost impossible, is thoroughly artificial” (Ghurye 1980: 7). But even if tribal peoples were somehow distinct, Ghurye did not see any practical reasons to consider them ‘aboriginal’. Specifically, such a label was not needed for them to qualify for various socialuplift programmes (Ghurye 1980: 12). Once India became independent, he

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c­ onceded that he was not totally averse to denoting certain groups as tribal, so long as one were clear just what one was saying: “The so-called Aborigines who form the bulk of the Scheduled Tribes and have been designated in the Censuses as Animists are best described as Backward Hindus” (Ghurye 1980: 20). When independence came to India in 1947, the new government preserved the administrative distinction between tribes and castes. The Constitution of India, implemented in 1950, continued the term, ‘Scheduled Tribe’ (commonly abbreviated st), which had been introduced by the British. Article 342 provided the legal basis for recognising certain “tribes or tribal communities or parts of or groups within tribes or tribal communities” (India 1950: Article 342), as ‘Scheduled Tribes’, but it did not specify which communities these were or what criteria should be used in determining them. That was left up to the government. Still today the Government of India considers the identification of Scheduled Tribes to be an ‘ongoing process’. The criteria that it currently applies in identifying Scheduled Tribes are: “(a) indications of primitive traits; (b) distinctive culture; (c) shyness of contact with the community at large; (d) ­geographical isolation; and (e) backwardness” (India 2013: 1). ­Although these criteria are generally attributed to the “1931 Census, the reports of first Backward Classes Commission 1955, the Advisory Committee (Kalelkar), on ­Revision of sc/ st lists (Lokur Committee), 1965 and the Joint Committee of Parliament on the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes orders (Amendment) Bill 1967 (Chanda Committee), 1969” (India 2013: 323), they were actually first articulated as such by the Lokur Committee in 1965 (Lokur Committee 1965: 7).2 As of 2013 the Ministry of Tribal Affairs recognised 705 Scheduled Tribes. Their numbers have, in fact, been steadily growing. In the 1961 Census sts constituted 6.9% of the Indian population; in the 2011 Census they constituted 8.6% (India 2013: 1–2). One could make any number of comments about the five criteria listed above. For example, even disregarding the social prejudices implicit in the categories ‘primitive traits’ and ‘backwardness’, are they clear enough to result in crisp, consistent delimitations of Scheduled Tribes from the rest of the population? What is perhaps most important to note here, however, is that a trait that was frequent in earlier discussions is now absent: aboriginality or, as we say today, indigeneity. The Ministry of Tribal Affairs makes no presumption that the groups it designates as Scheduled Tribes somehow represent the descendants of the original – that is, the pre-Aryan – population of India. They are marked out instead by difference and distance: they are not like the people who inhabit the cosmopolitan centres of government, and they prefer to keep it that way. 2 For an eye-opening account of the application of these criteria, see Middleton 2011.

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The notion of aboriginality did not simply disappear once India became independent. For one thing, it continued to appear in the writings of influential European anthropologists such as Stephen Fuchs (1973) and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (1982). More consequentially from our point of view, it also found its way into the self-designation that some of the people concerned had begun to use: adivasi. It is not entirely clear – at least, it is not entirely clear to me – just when the word adivasi came to be used. The subaltern historian, ­David Hardiman, locates the invention of the term in the Chhotanagpur area of Bihar (now Jharkhand) in the 1930s, where it came to prominence in the founding of the Adivasi Mahasabha. From there, Hardiman says, it was picked up by A.V. Thakkar, a social worker, in the 1940s and spread more widely (Hardiman 1987: 13; see also Rycroft 2014: 7–8; Mann 2015: 195). Others have traced the term further back in time to the founding of the first Adivasi Mahasabha in the Chhotanagpur area in 1915 (Carrin and Guzy 2012: 1). In any case, the term ­adivasi is a relatively recent one, at most only a century old. Despite its recent origin, however, it is now widely used as a self-designation by many of the people whom the Government of India classes as Scheduled Tribes. Those who do use it often insist that their religion is distinct from Hinduism. Examples include the Adidharma systematised by Ram Dayal Munda (2000) and Sarnaism (Carrin 2012: 212–213; Carrin 2013: 112–113; Beggiora 2014), which has become the object of some political agitation. Not everyone, however, favours the term adivasi. One group that does not are the Scheduled Tribes who live in India’s northeastern states, according to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs one of the two distinctly tribal areas of the country (India 2013: 3). In this area the state with the lowest concentration of tribals is Assam, whose population is only 12.4% Schedule Tribes, but in other states tribals make up the vast majority of the people. For example, in Mizoram they constitute 94.4% of the population, in Nagaland 86.5%, and Meghalaya 86.1%.3 In the Northeast the local tribal population does not refer to itself as adibasi (a linguistic variant of adivasi). It reserves that term for people who migrate to the Northeast for work from eastern central India, the area where the term adivasi originated.4 These people, although adibasis, are clearly not original inhabitants.

3 See http://tribal.nic.in/Content/StatewiseTribalPopulationpercentageinIndiaSchedule Tribes.aspx, last accessed 1 October 2015. 4 Moodie (2015) identifies another grouping of sts who have a complex relationship to the category adivasi: people who identify their past but not their present identity as adivasi in order to emphasise their social advancement.

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Another significant group that rejects the term adivasi are Hindu nationalists. From their point of view, the notion that Aryans came to the Indian ­subcontinent from somewhere else is false; caste Hindus are in fact indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. For this reason, Hindu nationalists call tribal people vanvasis, ‘forest dwellers’, not adivasis, although significant numbers of tribal people do not live in forests (Baviskar 2007: 297, n. 19). A good example is the name of the social service organisation, the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (the tribal welfare ashram) associated with the so-called Sangh Parivar, the ‘family’ of Hindu nationalist organisations. Occasionally one hears echoes of this usage in official terminology, too. A case in point is the name of the Vanbandhu Kalyan Yojana – literally, the ‘Forest-Relatives Welfare Plan’ – launched by the Tribal Development Department of the state of Gujarat in 2007, when the ­Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) was the ruling party.5 Following the election of Narendra Modi, the bjp governor of Gujarat, as Prime Minister of India in May 2014, the central government’s Ministry for Tribal Affairs introduced a national Vanbandhu Kalyan Ashram in the second half of 2014.6 We should note that Hindu nationalists have a distinct view of tribal religion as well as of tribal identity. For them, tribal religion is not different from Hinduism but rather a degenerate form of it that needs to be reformed. Perhaps we can summarise the results of the above survey as follows. ­Unlike the situation in the nineteenth century, when the distinction between tribe and caste was still somewhat fluid, there are now distinct groups of people, known as Scheduled Tribes, whose identity is legally established by the ­government. There are significant differences about what to call these people. A ­self-­designation that many, but not all, tribals prefer is adivasi, a term built on the notion of priority of residence. Caste Hindus who want to think of themselves as native to the Indian subcontinent prefer the term vanvasi, which imagines tribal people as living (temporarily) apart from settled, civilised society. Each term – Scheduled Tribe, adivasi, and vanvasi – picks up on different operative distinctions, and while it would be wrong to associate each term with three mutually exclusive discursive communities – actual usage is not that distinct – each originates from different communities with its own distinctive political interests and projects. Despite the differences, however, all are local designations in the sense of being internal to India. To what extent can a global discourse on indigeneity be mapped onto them? What happens when it is? These are the questions to which we now turn. 5 http://vky.gujarat.gov.in/, last accessed 1 October 2015. 6 http://vky.tribal.nic.in/circular/BackgroundNoteonconvergence.pdf, p. 6, and http://pib.nic .in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=110870, both last accessed 1 October 2015.

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Adivasis and the Discourse of Indigeneity

Introducing a collection of twenty-five articles drawn from the Indian socialscience journal, Economic and Political Weekly, Indra Munshi writes, “Most of the contributors to this volume seem to have used the terms ‘adivasi’, ‘tribal’ and ‘indigenous communities’ interchangeably” (Munshi 2012: 1). It has in fact been common, at least in some quarters, to use these terms as synonyms ever since the emergence of the discourse of indigeneity at the United Nations (Shah 2007: 1807–1808). For example, the anthropologist B.K. Roy Burman represents the academic and activist, Ram Dayal Munda, as equating the terms indigenous and tribal in India during discussions that took place in 1993. He also quotes Munda as stating that “indigenous in the old and the new worlds are not the same” (Roy Burman 2003: 10). The observation that indigeneity is somewhat different in Africa and Asia than it is in the Americas and Oceania is hardly unique (for example Béteille 2006: 21–22; Clifford 2013: 14–15). It has led the anthropologist, Richard Lee, to suggest that we need at least two different notions of indigeneity. These two notions correspond to the different political experiences from which the concept of ‘indigenous’ is derived as a secondary formation (Lee 2006: 134–135). Even this suggestion, however, does not do justice to the complexity of the issues involved in the relationship between the terms adivasi and ‘indigenous’. Here I wish to distinguish schematically three different moments in that relationship.7 These moments – locations within a conceptual field – occupy positions between two extremes. On the one extreme is the claim, noted above, that caste Hindus are the true Indian indigenes, a claim made in the course of promoting the notion that India is – or should be – a Hindu nation (Hindutva). At the other extreme is the official position of the Government of India, which has been reluctant to recognise anyone at all in India as indigenous (Karlsson 2009: 26–28). The first moment insists that tribal people are not indigenous; the two terms are incommensurate. As Amita Baviskar has noted, “It is easy to demolish the Adivasi claim to indigeneity in ‘objective’ terms” (Baviskar 2007: 289). Many voices have articulated this view (see S. Guha 1999; Roy Burman 2003; Skaria 1999; see also Xaxa 1999: 3591–3592), but the sociologist André Béteille (1986; 1998; 2006) has been among the most influential. He points out that the distinction between tribals or adivasis and their non-tribal neighbours is inexact; there are no criteria, whether language, religion, or history, that crisply 7 For a discussion of different meanings of the word indigenous itself, especially chronological, relational, and normative, see Roy Burman 2003: 8–10.

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d­ istinguish the two. Furthermore, although the history is murky, it is clear enough that in some cases, such as the Oraon, adivasis are not actually the original inhabitants of their territories but relatively recent arrivals (Béteille 1998; 2006: 24). Not only that, but inasmuch as tribe refers to a type of social organisation, it is possible for a group of people to stop being tribal or adivasi ­(examples in Steuer 2011: 61; Moodie 2015). Is it possible, Béteille asks, for a group of people to stop being indigenous (Béteille 1998: 190)? This critique continues today, often with an overtly political dimension. The claim of indigeneity is not just historically and socially inaccurate but also a strategic political error. In promoting a politics of culture and identity, it distracts attention from the economic, political, and social issues that so-called indigenous peoples have in common with other marginalised people and so diverts action from its appropriate channels (Shah 2007; Ismail and Shah 2015; see also Steuer 2011; Guha 2015). In an important article published in 1999, Virginius Xaxa conceded that using “the term indigenous to describe tribal people in India is fraught with difficulties” (Xaxa 1999: 3593). But then he changed the terms of the debate. The adivasi consciousness and the articulation of indigenous people status is not so much about whether they are original inhabitants of India as about the fact that [unlike dominant communities associated with states, such as Bengalis in West Bengal or Gujaratis in Gujarat] they have no power whatsoever over anything (land, forest, river, resources) that lies in the territory they inhabit. Xaxa 1999: 3595

This is the second moment in the relationship between the terms tribal, adivasi,­ and indigenous. At a minimum it argues that the term ‘indigenous’ is now so commonly used in a variety of spheres that its use cannot be undone. To quote Bengt Karlsson, “it is a rather futile exercise to go on debating for or against the notion of indigenous peoples as if this was an open question and, even more so, as if this was up to ‘us’ (anthropologists) to decide upon” (Karlsson 2006: 66). The point, however, is generally stronger than simply that the terminology is a fait accompli. Adivasi people stand to benefit in any number of ways from being recognised as indigenous, including the application to them of the u.n. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (many authors in Karlsson and Subba 2006). As Xaxa noted, such recognition may require us to reconceptualise just what we mean by indigenous, but this requirement is hardly limited to the Indian subcontinent. I have already mentioned Richard Lee’s two notions of indigeneity. In addition, Alan Barnard (2006) has noted that it is possible to

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define indigeneity in terms of non-dominance and self-ascription­rather than original habitation and cultural difference (see also Guzy, Alles, and Skoda 2015: 14). A third moment in the relation of tribal or adivasi discourse to the discourse of indigeneity has been introduced in exemplary fashion by the anthropologist Peter Berger (not Peter L. Berger, the well-known sociologist of religion) ­(Berger 2014). His concern is not whether adivasis really are indigenous, or whether there is a legitimate sense in which we can make sense of referring to them as indigenous. It is, rather, to observe the different ways in which the concept of indigeneity is actually being used, not throughout India but locally in highland Odisha, specifically among a group of people known as the Gadaba. Berger identifies three different uses of indigeneity. The first he calls ‘indigenous indigeneity’. This refers to local practices that assert and reproduce indigenous status, such as rituals that celebrate particular groups of people as originating from particular places, generally villages. The second he calls ‘ascribed indigeneity’, as in the attribution of indigeneity by teachers, government officials, and the tourism industry. The third is ‘claimed indigeneity’, that is, claims people make to being indigenous in public, political arenas. According to Berger, claimed indigeneity – so prominent in the first two moments identified here – has developed relatively little among the Gadaba. In this respect Berger’s article invites us not only to examine the ways in which the language of indigeneity is used but to broaden the places where we look for it.

Conclusion: The Myth of Indigeneity

The relationship of the global discourse of indigeneity to adivasis continues to attract serious attention, especially in the context of political questions (Deka 2013; Rycroft 2014; Rycroft 2015). Several scholars have also noted that there are sometimes severe disjunctions between the way this discourse imagines indigenous people and the actual aspirations of adivasis and the structures that shape their lives (Ghosh 2006; Whitehead 2007; Shah 2007; Shah 2010). Such topics are compelling, but in concluding this chapter I want to follow a different path. I want to note some local manifestations of the global discourse on indigeneity among people who self-identify as adivasis in an area where I do fieldwork, Chhotaudepur taluka, in the eastern part of the state of Gujarat. From the point of view of the study of religions, one might say that, questions of historical accuracy, sociological adequacy, ethnographic correctness, and political strategy aside, for these people the discourse of indigeneity has begun

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to function as a myth. It defines values, shapes worldviews, and underlies ritual performances. To illustrate, I give three short vignettes. Vignette 1: One morning I was sitting having tea with a friend in the front room of his home, which is also his office. An adivasi himself, he has founded a centre to advise adivasi high school and college students about educational and employment opportunities open to them. In the course of our conversation, his eye caught a small booklet that was lying on his desk. He held it up and showed it to me as a document important to his well-being and that of people like him. It was the u.n. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. Vignette 2: Jitendra Vasava is a younger poet and writer. Among other things he edits his own literary magazine and serves as assistant editor of the semipopular, bimonthly Gujarati periodical Adilok, ‘First People’. I once recorded him proudly performing a song, ‘Manai Adivasi Re’, ‘I am an adivasi’ (or ‘We are adivasis’). As is evident from Jitendra’s writing, the global discourse on indigeneity has significantly framed his conception of what this phrase means. He has published an evolutionary account of universal history that sees ­adivasis – indigenous people everywhere – as the source of all culture (Vasava 2008). He has also invoked at length Chief Seattle’s famous but perhaps apocryphal speech as expressive of true adivasi values (Vasava 2010; Vasava 2011). More generally, he often distinguishes the ritual practices of adivasis from that of their Hindu neighbours as being a worship of nature. This is, in fact, a rather common trope in Adilok (for example, Kullu 2012). Since many adivasis are non-literate, including the majority of adivasis in Chhotaudepur taluka, where they make up over 90% of the population, we should not read too much into Jitendra’s writings. They may only attest to views among the educated elite. Vignette 3: On the ninth of August 2015, I received a photo via WhatsApp from a friend in Chhotaudepur. Our conversation proceeded like this: ME: What is this a photo of? HIM: We had celebration of Adivasi din [Adivasi day] at Chhotaudepur. ME: That’s right. Happy Indigenous People’s Day. [I sent a digital greeting card] where is this exactly? HIM: At Vasedi, Chhotaudepur. Zoz Road. ME: I remember Vasedi. Do you know who organised the celebration? HIM: Sarpanch and my friend. Our Rathva people organised. ME: Only coconuts? No chickens or goats? No badvo? Or was this ­Catholic? Bhagat? Maybe that doesn’t matter. [Then questions about his parents’ health] HIM: No man; pure Adivasi. All people gathered. [Social chat and photos] In all area they celebrated Adivasi day. In each place they had function [sic].

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I do not know where my friend acquired a copy of the u.n. Declaration, or how Jitendra acquired his knowledge of indigenous peoples, including Chief Seattle, or when people in Chhotaudepur taluka learned to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day.8 These questions would be worth investigating. But we can say this much: at least in this locality the global discourse on indigeneity is making inroads, and it is contributing to the ways in which adivasis imagine themselves and act religiously. References Barnard, A. 2006. “Kalahari Revisionism, Vienna and the ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Debate.” Social Anthropology 14:1, 1–16. Baviskar, A. 2007. “Indian Indigeneities: Adivasi Engagements with Hindu Nationalism in India.” In M. de la Cadena and O. Starn, eds. Indigenous Experience Today Oxford: Berg, 275–303. Beggiora, S. 2014. “Sarna Devī: feste di primavera, folklore e sostenibilità nelle tradizioni del Jharkhand.” Ethnorêma 10, 19–40. Berger, P. 2014. “Dimensions of Indigeneity in Highland Odisha, India.” Asian Ethnology 73: 1–2, 19–37. Béteille, A. 1986. “The Concept of Tribe with Special Reference to India.” European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie / Europäisches Archiv für Soziologie 27: 2, 297–318. Béteille, A. 1998. “The Idea of Indigenous People.” Current Anthropology 39: 2, 187–192. Béteille, A. 2006. “What Should We Mean by ‘Indigenous People’.” In B.G. Karlsson and T.B. Subba, eds. Indigeneity in India. London: Kegan Paul, 19–31. Carrin, M. 2012. “The Billavas of Karnataka and the Santals of Orissa: Two Peripheries Asserting their Position towards the Centre.” In M. Carrin and L. Guzy, eds. Voices from the Periphery: Subalternity and Empowerment in India. London: Routledge, 203–224. Carrin, M. 2013. “Jharkhand: Alternative Citizenship in an ‘Adivasi State’.” In P. Berger and F. Heidemann, eds. The Modern Anthropology of India: Ethnography, Themes and Theory. London: Routledge, 106–120. 8 As might be expected, there is a much bigger story to tell here. In its first year of publication, the Gujarati magazine Adilok [‘First People’] published a cover story on Indigenous Peoples Day (Patel 2008: 5–10) in its July–August issue. Since then its September–October issues have contained brief reports on Indigenous Peoples Day celebrations throughout the state of ­Gujarat, although not in Chhotaudepur. I have not yet determined how the celebration was transmitted to Chhotaudepur, but in any case the Adilok story and reports may be only one piece of a larger puzzle.

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Carrin, M. and L. Guzy. 2012. Voices from the Periphery: Subalternity and Empowerment in India. London: Routledge. Clifford, J. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Crooke, W. 1896. The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Province and Oudh. ­Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Deka, A. 2013. “Indigenous People and the International Discourse: Issues and ­Debates.” IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science 17: 1, 87–99. Elwin, V. 1939. The Baiga. London: John Murray. Elwin, V. 1943. The Aboriginals. London: Oxford University Press. Elwin, V. 2009. The Oxford India Elwin: Selected Writings. G.N. Devy, ed. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Elwin, V. 2009 [1957]. A Philosophy for NEFA. Delhi: Isha Books. Enthoven, R.E. 1975 [1920]. The Tribes and Castes of Bombay. Delhi: Cosmo Publications. Fuchs, S. 1973. The Aboriginal Tribes of India. Delhi: Macmillan. Fürer-Haimendorf, C. von. 1982. Tribes of India: The Struggle for Survival. Berkeley: ­University of California Press. Ghosh, K. 2006. “Between Global Flows and Local Dams: Indigenousness, Locality, and the Transnational Sphere in Jharkhand, India.” Cultural Anthropology 21: 4, 501–534. Ghurye, G.S. 1980. The Scheduled Tribes of India. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books. Guha, R. 1999. Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India. Chicago: ­University of Chicago Press. Guha, S. 1999. Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guha, S. 2015. “States, Tribes, Castes: A Historical Re-exploration in Comparative ­Perspective.” Economic and Political Weekly 50: 46/47, 50–57. Guzy, L., G.D. Alles, and U. Skoda. 2015. “Emerging Indian Adivasi and Indigenous ­Studies in Ireland: Local Agents, Performances and Traditions.” Irish Journal of A ­ nthropology 18: 2, 12–20. Hardiman, D. 1987. The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. India, Government of. 1950. Constitution of India. Implemented 29th January 1950. India, Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Statistics Division. 2013. Statistical Profile of Scheduled Tribes in India 2013 New Delhi: Ministry of Tribal Affiars, Government of India. Ismail, F. and A. Shah. 2015. “Class Struggle, the Maoists and the Indigenous Question in Nepal and India.” Economic and Political Weekly 50: 35, 112–123. Karlsson, B.G. 2006. “Anthropology and the ‘Indigenous Slot’: Claims to and Debates about Indigenous Peoples’ Status in India.” In B.G. Karlsson and T.B. Subba, eds. Indigeneity in India. London: Kegan Paul, 51–73.

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Karlsson, B.G. 2009. “Asian Indigenousness: The Case of India.” Indigenous Affairs 3–4: 08, 24–30. Karlsson, B.G. and T.B. Subba. 2006. Indigeneity in India. London: Kegan Paul. Kullu, M.L.N. 2012. “Pūrvottaranāṃ rājyono phasalano tahevār: Karam.” Ādilok 4: 6, 22–24. Lee, R.B. 2006. “Indigenism and Its Discontents.” In Max H. Kirsch, ed. Inclusion and Exclusion in the Global Arena. New York: Routledge, 129–159. Lokur Committee. 1965. Report of the Advisory Committee on the Provision of the Lists of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. New Delhi: Government of India, Department of Social Security. Mann, M. 2015. South Asia’s Modern History: Thematic Perspectives. London: Routledge. Middleton, C.T. 2011. “Across the Interface of State Ethnography: Rethinking Ethnology and Its Subjects in Multicultural India.” American Ethnologist 38: 2, 249–266. Moodie, M. 2015. We Were Adivasis: Aspiration in an Indian Scheduled Tribe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Munda, R.D. 2000. Adi-Dharam – Religious Beliefs of the Adivasis of India: An Outline of Religious Reconstruction with Special Reference to the Jharkhand Region. Coimbatore, India: Sarini. Munshi, I. ed. 2012. The Adivasi Question: Issues of Land, Forest, and Livelihood. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan. Patel, Arjun. 2008. “9mi Ogast: Vishva Adivasi Din” [in Gujarati]. Adilok 1: 4, 5–10. Ramdas, G. 1925. “The Aboriginal Tribes in the Ramayana.” Man in India 5, 22–45. Risley, H.H. 1891. The Tribes and Castes of Bengal: Anthropometric Data. Calcutta: ­Bengal Secretariat Press. Risley, H.H. 1892. The Tribes and Castes of Bengal: Ethnographic Glossary. Calcutta: ­Bengal Secretariat Press. Risley, H.H. 1908. The People of India. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. Rothstein, M. 2014. “Review of James L. Cox, ed., Critical Reflections on Indigenous R ­ eligions (2013).” Numen 61: 5–6, 685–687. Roy Burman, B.K. 2003. “Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in World System Perspective.” Studies of Tribes and Tribals 1: 1, 7–27. Russell, R.V. 1916. The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India. London: Macmillan. Rycroft, D.J. 2014. “Looking Beyond the Present: The Historical Dynamics of Adivasi (Indigenous and Tribal) Assertions in India, Part 1.” Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies 1:1, 1–17. Rycroft, D.J. 2015. “Looking Beyond the Present: The Historical Dynamics of Adivasi ­(Indigenous and Tribal) Assertions in India, Part 2.” Journal of Adivasi and Indigenous Studies 2: 1, 1–10. Sankalia, H.D. 1973. Ramayana: Myth or Reality? New Delhi: People’s Publishing House.

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Sankalia, H.D. 1982. The Ramayana in Historical Perspective. Delhi: Macmillan India. Shah, A. 2007. “The Dark Side of Indigeneity?: Indigenous People, Rights and Development in India.” History Compass 5/6, 1806–1832. Shah, A. 2010. In The Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Sherring, M.A. 1872. Hindu Tribes and Castes, As Represented in Benares. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink. Skaria, A. 1999. Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Steuer, L. 2011. “Adivasis, Communists, and the Rise of Indigenism in Kerala.” Dialectical Anthropology 35, 59–76. Vasava, J. 2008. “Bhīlomāṃ mātṛsattā ane strīśaktinuṃ daivīkaraṇ.” Ādilok 1: 2, 18–19. Vasava, J. 2010. “Ādivāsī dṛṣṭikoṇ thakī viṣvane mārgdarśan.” Ādilok 2:1, 3–4. Vasava, J. 2011. “Sāhityano vilakṣaṇ adhyāy: Ādivāsī sāhitya.” Ādilok 3:1, 4–8. Vyas, T. 2010. “Mahān Ādivāsī Karmaśīla: Jugatarām Dave.” Ādilok 2:4, 26–28. Whitehead, J. 2007. “Sunken Voices: Adivasis, Neo-Gandhian Environmentalism and State–Civil Society Relations in the Narmada Valley 1998–2001.” Anthropologica 49:2, 231–243. Xaxa, V. 1999. “Tribes as Indigenous People of India.” Economic and Political Weekly 34: 51, 3589–3595.

chapter 15

Is Hinduism the World’s Largest Indigenous Religion? Arkotong Longkumer Introduction When David Frawley,1 international activist for the Vishva Hindu Parishad (vhp), was touring the Northeast of India in 2002, he claimed at a Janjati (tribal) Festival in Guwahati that “Hinduism is the largest indigenous tradition in the world, which is inclusive of all indigenous traditions” (Bhide 2004: xx). Frawley was referring to the idea that different indigenous traditions in the Northeast of India were in harmony with the rest of Hindu culture, highlighting the fact that tribal and Hindu practices shared many similarities. He was also making the case for a unified ‘Hindu’ culture in an effort to include those marginal ‘tribes’ in the Northeast of India who have often argued that they are culturally distinct from ‘Hindu’ civilisation. During my own work on the activities of the Hindu-right in the Northeast, I realised the significance of Frawley’s observations. What happens once Hinduism is seen as an indigenous religion? Do our notions of indigenous religions change, simply because of Hinduism’s numerical strength and popularity? In answer to these questions, this chapter will examine the way the concept ‘Hindu/Hinduism’ is viewed and represented as ‘indigenous tradition/ religion’ by the Hindu-right in the Northeast of India. For them, Hindu/Hinduism is a practice developed in the realm of ‘Mother India’. This notion plays into the discourse of the global indigenous movement itself in which images of ‘mother earth’ and ‘sacred land’ are powerfully evoked to draw legitimacy and claims over land (Johnson and Kraft 2017, introduction in this volume). It could even be suggested that the very notion ‘indigenous’ serves to globalise local traditions. This ability to ‘encompass’ a wide variety of religious practices, including indigenous religions, it is argued, means it has the potential to become the world’s largest indigenous religion. This chapter responds by asking: (1) How are we to understand the status and deployment of the terms ‘Hindu’ 1 Frawley is the Founder/Director of the American Institute of Vedic Studies and has toured the Northeast of India on several occasions.

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and ­‘Hinduism’ in this argumentative context?; and (2) To what extent are ­Hindu-right ideologues, aided by local indigenous elites, successful in deploying the term ‘indigenous religion’ to shape common practices in the service of a unifying national identity? I will chart two simultaneous processes with regard to these interactions: (1) the ‘hinduising’ of these ‘indigenous religions’ by encompassing them under the umbrella of ‘Indic civilisation’; and (2) the valorising of ‘traditional culture’ to the extent that ‘animism’ – here used positively – is tied specifically to a form of ‘natural religion’. The strategic way the two interactions move from one to the next are illuminating, particularly in the way ‘Hindu/Hinduism’ is equated with indigenous religions. ‘Indigenous’ then serves the Hindu-right’s purpose in pursuing the discourse of ‘locality’, powerfully articulated through the nationalist term Hindutva (or Hinduness) that captures its ability to discount foreign – de-territorialised – religions (Islam and Christianity) while forging links with those whose religions are of the soil. While in many scholarly discourses using terms such as ‘tradition’ and ‘religion’ interchangeably is highly controversial (for example, Engler and Grieve 2005), in the Northeast of India they are used together (in English). Although these English language terms have their roots in a western understanding, once they are used in another context, often where English is a second language, they can take on new meanings and make distinctions between these terms very unclear. In this chapter I examine how these terms become blurred, especially when the issue of translation between multiple languages and cultures is involved. But this should not surprise us, as many scholars (for example, Asad 1993) have noted how unstable these categories are, especially in cross-cultural situations. What is interesting, however, is how indigenous actors use them and in which context.

Hindu or Hinduism

Before proceeding further it is important to give a sense of the scholarly debates concerning the two ambiguous terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’. Much has been written on whether Hinduism is a religion at all and the extent to which lay people understand the term ‘Hindu/Hinduism’ to signify their sense of belonging within the vast geographical space of the sub-continent (for example, Sweetman 2003). This essay does not rehearse all the numerous positions, but simply points to debates that are pertinent to the argument I will be pursuing. Also keenly debated is the nature of the relationship between the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’ (Lorenzen 1999; Searle-Chatterjee 2000; Lipner 2006).

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While the latter, in the broadest sense, is generally thought of as ‘religion’, the former – ‘Hindu’ – is more ambiguous. Is it an ethnic, national, religious or even civilisational entity? The answer to this question will require a brief exposition of the historical development of the term and how different audiences have utilised it as an effective strategy. Context here is vital. My concern is primarily with how the term Hindu/Hinduism is understood in the Northeast of India. It is out of the tempestuous history of the region since Indian independence that the very notion of Hindu/Hinduism has been fashioned in conversation with the ‘tribals’ of this and other areas into a national rhetoric of inclusion through the politically charged, though convenient, term ‘indigenous religion’. David Lorenzen in his now famous essay, “Who Invented Hinduism?” ­(Lorenzen 1999), notes the two camps in this debate: the constructionist camp – those who argue that Hinduism was imagined, or invented in the nineteenth century by British colonial administrators, missionaries, scholars and the Indian elite, and that before this date Hinduism did not exist as a substantive category (see, for example, Hawley 1991). On the other hand, some scholars argue that a ‘Hindu religion’ did express itself – through the Bhagavad gita, the Puranas, and philosophical commentaries based on the six darsanas and debates between Hindus and Muslims around 1200–1500 – and that it was “firmly established long before 1800” (Lorenzen 1999: 631; see also Lipner 2006). While these debates are clearly spelt out in terms of whether ‘Hinduism’ can be imagined as a category long before 1800 or not, the same is not true with the term ‘Hindu’. The term ‘Hindu’ has been recognised long before the nineteenth century where it was first used by the Persians to differentiate the geographical area beyond the Sindhu or Indus River in present day Pakistan. It was, some argue, used as a geo-ethnic category. The historian Romila Thapar argues: “it was gradually and over time that it was used not only for those who were inhabitants of India but also for those who professed a religion other than Islam and Christianity” (Thapar 1989: 222). Thapar’s discussion is interesting because it shows that both the brahmanas (the priestly caste) and the lower castes were conflated within this category ‘Hindu’ which was, of course, contrary to the precepts of Brahmanism. The definition was bewildering for those on the receiving end of it for the simple reason that such diversity and multiplicity of practices were now conjoined as a singular tradition (Thapar 1989: 223). So was the use of ‘Hindu’ a geo-ethnic marker or a religious one? The constructionist camp clearly argues that it was primarily a geo-ethnic marker before it was turned into a religious one in the nineteenth century that reflected the colonial, missionary, and Indian intellectual strategy of consolidating a single, coherent identity. Lorenzen, however, argues that the religious and the ­geo-ethnic meanings long coexisted and overlapped in the subcontinent.

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What then of the vast majority of Muslims in India who were indigenous converts of low-caste Hindu origin? If ‘Hindu’ remained a purely ­ethno-geographical term, except perhaps in the eyes of a few Muslim intellectuals, at least these converts should have been ‘Hindus’ or ‘Hindu Muslims’. 1999: 636

However convincing Lorenzen’s arguments are with regard to overlaps between ‘Hindu’ as a religious and as a geo-ethnic marker, Thapar demonstrates that these representations were far from clear-cut. While historians have tried to make a clear distinction between Hinduism and Islam in the second ­millennium a.d., this was based on a simplistic reading of the court chronicles of the Sultans. Therefore, it is important to note that these chronicles themselves describe Hindus as “sometimes indigenous population, sometimes as a geographical entity and sometimes as followers of non-Islamic religion” (Thapar 1989: 224). Regardless of the time gap, Thapar’s readings of the chronicles are valuable, primarily because this uncertainty is an issue that has not disappeared from discussions surrounding Hindu/Hinduism. If we are to take Thapar’s suggestion that the fluidity of the term ‘Hindu’ illustrated different notions of how the community was represented by ‘others’ (Muslims, British, Christians), and eventually how it represented itself internally – say, between different castes – then it illustrates that there is no one conception of this category. For instance, even recently, Mary Searle-Chatterjee observed that the term ‘Hindu’ is perplexing when perceived from a regional level. Research in North India suggests that the term was used primarily by the lower castes to refer to the ‘upper caste’, while for the upper caste, the term was reserved to connote those who were truly ‘Indian’ – those without any religious allegiance to foreign traditions (2000: 504). This demonstrates that the pervasiveness of the term ‘Hindu’ is not without its problems when viewed from regional and oral perspectives. This challenges much of the textual evidence that is used both by the constructionist and the ­non-constructionist camps. What is certain however is that Hindu/Hinduism was forged into a common set of practices due to the political climate of nineteenth century India (see Hansen 1999). Mobilising religious communities became central to how power was ordered: to gain access to maximum economic resources; to take advantage of the numerical size of a community; and to bring many into this religious fold. This modern idea also ironically played on the vagueness of what constitutes a ‘Hindu’. Thapar argues that it encouraged an almost new perception of the social and political uses of religion. Conversion to Hinduism was invented largely to bring in the

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­ ntouchables and the tribals. The notion of purification, suddhi, permitu ted those who had been converted to Islam and Christianity to be reintroduced to the Hindu fold. A Hindu community with a common identity would be politically powerful. 1989: 230

Thapar further notes that this enabled the parallel creation of a ‘Hindu community’ that obviated caste and regional distinctions and identified itself by religion which had to be reformulated to, in Durkheimian terms, bind the group and consolidate group identity. This brief discussion of terminology has been necessary in order to establish that these terms have a bearing on how people use Hindu/Hinduism when considering national identity. As has been shown, the terms themselves  – whether geo-ethnic, or religious – are far from unambiguous or settled in terms of their associations, even though much has been written to delineate these usages. While depending on textual sources has certain advantages, oral narratives are also useful to gain a sense of how these terms resonate with people, when discussing issues of national identity in India. Having established a working knowledge of these terms, the context for this particular chapter needs elaboration.

Northeast India: Historical and Cultural Differences?

When India gained independence in 1947, the precarious territorial arrangement under the British Empire began to unravel, with a major reordering of state boundaries and regions. Indeed, the demand to create new federal states based on ethnic boundaries has still not subsided in contemporary India. Nowhere was this truer than in Northeast India. Sandwiched between Indic and Mongoloid Asia, Northeast India is a mountainous region comprising of eight states: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, ­Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim.2 It is a region that borders four nation-states: Bangladesh, Burma, China and Nepal. The region consists of a diversity of ethnic groups whose phenotype features are closer to people in Southeast and East Asia and whose language is primarily from the

2 Sikkim, once a sovereign Himalayan Kingdom, became a part of India in 1973 and was included, in official usage from 2003, as part of Northeast India, although it was not a part of Assam like the other states. For this paper, however I exclude Sikkim from my analysis of Northeast India.

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­ ibeto-Burman family. Due to these factors, the region is viewed as “marginal T and even alien to their surrounding ‘Indic’ civilisation” (Ludden 2003: 11). Unlike other parts of India, it has a large Christian population that has been wary of Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim influences. A combination of postcolonial uncertainty, significant cultural differences, and the emergence of an assortment of indigenous nationalists movements demanding sovereignty, has meant that the region is represented as a “periphery of the periphery on the road to nowhere” (Verghese 1997: 281). The political scientist, Sanjib Baruah, uses the language of the World Bank to illustrate this: the region is marked by “low-level equilibrium of poverty, nondevelopment, civil conflict, and lack of faith in political leadership” (­ Baruah 2007: vii). As one newspaper column put it, the Northeast is “on the map but off the mind” (Tehelka 2006). Due to its distinct culture, topography and constellation of ethnic groups, this region has eluded broader integration with the Indian nation-state. Partly to counter these feelings of alienation, a conglomeration of right-wing Hindu organisations (known as the Sangh Parivar) has started to work in the Northeast. The Sangh Parivar have always insisted that their main goal is to understand the region, and to educate the Indian public that this region has always been an integral part of Bharatvarsh (ancient name of the Indian subcontinent).

Civilisational Discourse: The Work of the Hindu-Right

In an important publication entitled Ashwattha, which is read widely by Sangh Parivar activists in Northeast India, the author, Narendra Joshi, remarks: Some committed intellectuals spend their lives to highlight their connections with Burma and hide their connections with the mainland of India. These things are going on systematically for the last 100–150 years for the simple reason that the Northeast frontier is strategically important in the global scenario. This is accepted blindly or taken lightly because we are really very ignorant…to this part of Punyabhumi [pious or sacred land] Bharat [also used as India]. 2000: Foreword

For the Hindu-right, the Northeast is seen as an extremely sensitive border area. The Chinese claims to Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim, coupled with Westernisation (read Christianity) is encouraging isolationism and s­ eparatism that is cultivating an attitude that “they are not children of Mother India”

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(Parameswaranji 1996). As a result, various Hindu organisations have s­ tarted work to, as they see it, protect and preserve the territorial unity of India. The ­Ramakrishna Mission (rkm) started its operation in 1964 in Arunachal Pradesh, followed by Vivekananda Kendra (vk) in 1977, which now runs around 30 schools. The Vishva Hindu Parishad (vhp) opened a hostel for ‘tribal’ children in Haflong of Assam in 1965 while the Kalyan Ashram (or tribal association) started working amongst the Nagas of Nagaland in 1975. It is important to differentiate between these organisations, though they share resources and personnel when required. Whereas the vk and the Kalyan Ashram are formally connected to the Sangh Parivar and particularly the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (rss), the general tenor of the rkm is ‘Hindu’ and ‘nationalist’. They tend to offer a more ‘spiritually oriented’ service (Beckerlegge 2003). This is not the place to tease out the complex layers of their philosophies or their different works in the Northeast – ranging from education, health, and financial support. I will, however, examine how the Hindu-right position themselves, through the discourse of ‘indigenous religions’, to make their connection to this region and its people more secure and lasting. It will demonstrate their non-homogenous character and ability to be malleable to the specific environments in which they operate.

Animism, Tribes and Indigenous Religions

According to the Indian sociologist, Virginius Xaxa, there is an interesting nexus between the Hindu-right and the work of G.S. Ghurye, another prominent ­Indian sociologist. Ghurye argued that the tribes of India were “backward ­Hindus” (Xaxa 2005: 1364). The conclusion, based on second hand ­Census reports culled from various administrative reports between 1891 and 1931, ­highlights how Census materials can be used effectively to categorise. Mr ­Enthoven, the Superintendent of the 1901 Census for Bombay, expresses the difficulty in distinguishing ‘regular Hindu castes’ from that of the ‘so-called Animists’. He says, “No sharp line of demarcation can be drawn between Hinduism and ­Animism. The one shades away insensibly into the other” (Ghurye 1980: 2). This ambiguity seems less of a problem in the census of 1891 in which Sir Athelstane Baines, the C ­ ensus Commissioner, reports that the religion of those who did not adhere to the “wider creeds” (probably referring to the main religious traditions of I­ndia) was termed “Tribal Animism” or “Tribal Religion” (cited in ­Ghurye 1980: 30). However, by 1921, Sedgwick, the Superintendent of the 1921 ­Census for ­Bombay, categorically states that “I have…no hesitation in saying that ­Animism as a [religious category] should be entirely abandoned, and that

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all those h ­ itherto classed as Animists should be grouped with Hindus at the next census” (Ghurye 1980: 30). It is largely within either of these two broad camps that most scholarship falls: either tribal people are ‘animists’ and therefore grouped as Hindus, or they represent a distinct religion on account of their isolation from the larger society. Certainly J.H. Hutton, the Commissioner of the 1931 Census, favoured the term ‘Tribal Religions’ in contradistinction to Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. He viewed ‘Tribal Religions’ as “surplus material not yet built into the temple of Hinduism” (cited in Ghurye 1980: 4), yet swiftly provides a caveat that ‘Tribal Religions’ have not reached a stage where Brahmanical authority is paramount, where the sacred cow is not consumed, or where Hindu temples are established as places of worship in their villages. Ghurye himself favours the position that tribals are Hindus, and distinguishes between three kinds of tribes: those integrated into Hindu society; those loosely integrated, who form the majority; and a minority living in the hills and the “depths of the forest” untouched by Hinduism (Ghurye 1980: 19). Of the latter, he says that they can be viewed as the “imperfectly integrated classes of Hindu society” due to their distinct tribal creeds and organisation, but in reality they are, he says, backward Hindus (Ghurye 1980: 19). It is interesting that Ghurye’s position demonstrates the hierarchising logic of ‘encompassment’ that is associated with dominance and ‘caste’ structures. Such attitudes are also maintained by the Hindu-right, as already mentioned – attitudes that are not usually associated with indigenous religions. While the above discussion gives an idea of the ambiguous relationship between ‘tribal religions’ and ‘animism’ in parts of India, it must be noted that Ghurye omits the Northeast from his tribe/Hindu analysis. Ghurye himself suggests that this region is “still forming part of India (Bharat)” because it was an area acquired by the British, and handed to the Indian Government on independence (Ghurye 1980: 313). Ghurye is a proponent of the view that tribal regions are part and parcel of Bharat (India), with any attempts to treat them as ‘separate’ as unwise for the future of the country as a whole. While it is debatable whether tribes can be seen as Hindu, the similarity appears to be that both tribal and animist are asserted as “natural religions” (Xaxa 2005: 1365),3 3 The relationship between the problematic classifications, ‘caste’ and ‘tribe’, is worth noting here primarily due to the mobility between the two, by which some ‘tribes’ have historically been absorbed as ‘castes’. While Hinduism was traditionally represented as caste-centric, based on hierarchy and ritual purity (Dumont 1981), others have complicated this picture, especially in the case of the modern era, by describing caste as increasingly a “horizontal array of disconnected ethnic groups” (Fuller 1996: 22). In the Northeast of India, the ­Hindu-right

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an issue I return to below. The categorisation within the census reflects much of the way the Hindu-right understand the ‘tribals’ as Hindu. The Hindu-right’s work appears to carry forward Ghurye’s ideas into new areas. By conflating ‘animism’ with being ‘Hindu’, the Hindu-right seeks to encompass tribals into the Hindu fold. Many Hindu-right activists that I have spoken to echo this point: Hindus are animists – both Hinduism and tribals worship ‘nature’. The standard explanation usually offered is typified in the words of vk activist, Ankush, who said to me in Guwahati (Assam) in ­December 2015:4 Tribals also worship the sun, moon, and trees. In that sense there is a common identity. I consider tribals as a part of Hinduism. Because of their innocence, they are being separated. In concretising this connection, Hindu-right writer, Narendra Joshi, refers to the work of popular Naga Christian scholar Wati Longchar who writes on ‘tribal theology’ (Longchar 1995). He reaffirms Longchar’s premise that “religion was centred on earth and creation and there was sense of cosmic oneness” (Longchar 1995: 7). Joshi lists Longchar’s 11 features of the so-called ‘animism’ of the tribal world, arguing that these have been features of Hinduism since time immemorial: to list a few – “all take part in creation; animals are personified; oneness of nature and culture; [and] unity of nature and religion.” At the end Joshi notes, “And still they want to prove that Animism is something separate from Hinduism” (2000: 108). In another context, this rationale is offered: Janjatis (tribals) and Hindus have always worshipped nature, or ‘natureworship’: “…all sanatan dharmas (eternal religion of all the janajatis [sic]) fall under the category of Hinduism” (Rajkhowa 2007). Hindu-right writers assert solidarity with the ‘tribals’ of Northeast of India who were often derided by missionaries for practising perfunctory and primitive ‘animism’. Nivedita Bhide, Vice President of the Vivekananda Kendra in Kanyakumari, notes how, according to dictionary definition, ‘animism’ actually means the “attribution of life (soul) to natural objects and phenomena” (Bhide 2002: xx). Terming this a positive description, and linking anima, soul, to atman, Bhidi concludes that Hindus believe that the soul (atman) ­pervades have said that the ‘tribes’ could easily be integrated into the Kshatriya (warrior) caste. But such mobility has been challenged by sociologists like Virginius Xaxa who questions the idea of “the Hindu method of tribal absorption,” that denies tribes their distinctiveness in language, culture, tradition and social organisation (2005: 1364). 4 All names have been changed to protect identities.

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the entire universe: “if we go by the dictionary meaning of Animism, then all Hindus are animist, too” (Bhide 2002: xx). Tylorian theories are used to ­substantiate these claims. Some of these writers believe that the present crisis, where Hindus have been separated from animist tribals, is due to the colonial and missionary strategy to ‘divide and convert’. Even the census officials, they argue, though reluctant to make this distinction, were overpowered by this agenda (Bhide 2002). Let us consider again David Frawley’s idea that Hinduism is the world’s largest ‘indigenous tradition’, and the discussion over the terms ‘Hindu/Hinduism’. It is useful to consolidate some of the discussions on this matter from the point of view of the Hindu-right in the Northeast. Expanding on Frawley’s comments, Nivedita Bhide proposes the following rationale: Some ‘evolved souls’, she says, probed the diversity of indigenous faiths and found a commonality: that of the relationship between humans and nature. When other communities encountered this ‘commonality’ they too became integrated. Over time, this was codified and labelled ‘Hinduism’. Communities, who approached the ‘commonality’ with their own rituals, symbols, icons and so on, found that they had the same approach to life. Bhide continues, “Hinduism is not a religion aiming at uniformity but a harmonising-integrating-principle, and therefore unless we see it in this light ‘as ever growing, indigenous and inclusive religion’ we would not be able to appreciate distinctness of religions of each Vanavasi [tribal] community” (Bhide 2002: xx). Therefore, Hinduism can be represented ideally as the “common principle of all native-indigenous traditions of various communities” (Bhide 2002: xxiii). In other words, it is the mother of all indigenous religions. Conversing with one of the rss activists working for the Vivekandra Kendra in November 2015 in Itanagar (Arunachal Pradesh), I asked if these connections were exaggerated and if it was difficult to conflate ideas and deities like Om, Shiva, and Ram with tribal ones. Haresh replied, “Faith wise, tribal religion and Hinduism is the same, because we pray to similar concepts – trees, sun.” He agreed that Ram and Shiva were different to, say, tribal deities. But Haresh continued by saying that just like Ram, Shiva and Hanuman (Hindu deities), indigenous religions of the region also venerate their leaders. For example, the Apatani from Arunachal Pradesh, he said, pay obeisance to their religious heroes such as Talom Rukbo. So through veneration Talom Rukbo is becoming like “Maha Purush, Maha Rishi” [great man, great seer] and so he is becoming like Ram.” “The method is the same,” he said. “People like Ram also began their journey like Talom Rukbo. We can see the same process – so here the indigenous religions are the beginnings of Hinduism. So this is pre-Vedic type.

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I experience these indigenous festivals and they directly touch the heart – it is alive, happy, and enthusiastic.” The eagerness and romanticism of those seeking these similarities between indigenous/tribal religions and Hinduism is infectious. As a result, different actors find meaning in these explanations. Even for adherents of indigenous religions, drawing on these similarities provides broader connections and solidarity with their Hindu counterparts. L. Khimun, a Tangsa Naga from Arunachal Pradesh and the General Secretary of the indigenous Rangfraa Faith Promotion Society, suggests this narrative: since the janjatis (tribals) are jungle dwellers, they are closest to nature through their dependence on the forest for their livelihood; because of this they are ‘spiritual’ in a sense that they are as ‘sacred’ and ‘pure’ as ‘mother earth’; due to this relationship they worship her (Khimun 2012: 14). Similarly, according to Khimun, ‘Hindus’ worship the elements of the earth (fire, water, air and sun) and thus revere ‘mother earth’ – often depicted as goddess Kali maa. These similarities confirm that the Hindus, like the janjatis, are also indigenous. Here ‘mother earth’ is the ideal representation of sanatan dharma in the whole of Bharat (Khimun 2012: 20). This brings us to the final point. Earlier I pointed to the fact that the distinction between Hindu/Hinduism is ambiguous in terms of whether it is a geo-ethnic or religious marker. The discussion so far suggests that it is far from clear how these terms have been managed amongst the Hindu-right themselves, lending credence to the point made by Romila Thapar about the instrumental ways religion can be deployed to make certain arguments. This is certainly true in the case of the Northeast. Hinduism, for many that I spoke to, is a particular way of worship, and is associated with deities and rituals. In contrast, Hindu, for many is dharma, duty, or a way of life. Speaking at length with a Kalyan Ashram worker, Atul, in Dimapur (Nagaland) on 2005, he made the point that “none of the Holy Books mention anything about Hindus, or there being Hindus.” He said he prefers the word dharma. “Everybody has a dharma (duty) to the world and this is manifested in many ways: a son has a duty to his father (pitru dharma) or a father has a duty to his son (putra dharma) and so on.” This dharma – by which “I mean ‘a way of life’ from the root ‘to hold’ – has panths (which can be translated as a sect or religion).” He said that a panth has certain characteristics: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

It has a founder It has a particular book It has a worshipping place It has systems of prayer and worship It has adherents, followers, disciples

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He then offered a clear exposition that I quote at length: This classification cannot be applied to dharma, because dharma has various Holy Books, has no founder, has no single worshipping place, neither does it have a system of prayer or worship. It does not have followers, in the sense of a particular faith tradition, the Hindu way of life welcomes everyone; it has atheists, agnostics. Sometimes, these panths are exclusive (that is, Christianity) but dharma is inclusive. So I don’t care whether a particular indigenous religion is Hinduism or traditional, whatever its form is, it is Hindu. In dharma we have no exclusion, everyone is treated equally; Christians are also part of this dharma. They are not excluded. Therefore, just as many streams empty out in the sea, so are the panths which are just part of the dharma. So yes, people may say, Heraka [an indigenous religion] is Hindu, and it is, yet it has its distinct practice that makes it different in some ways, but essentially they are Hindu, because they have developed their practice within the realm of Mother India. This Hindu nationalist ideology of ‘oneness’ provides a powerful rhetoric for defining indigeneity. Simply put, any religious allegiance that is external to the soil, land of Bharat, is foreign and therefore devoid of any legitimacy. It is suspect and even dangerous to the national narrative of Hindutva. While Hindutva activists are quick to exclude Christians and Muslims in the rest of India as anti-national, in the Northeast, as the above quotation makes clear, Christians are not excluded. This is partly due to their large numbers in the region, but also because Christians in the Northeast want to exclude themselves.5 Northeast Christians have developed a national identity that rests upon their Christian beliefs, and in this way, their ethnic and their regional identity arise from Christianity. However, their exclusion then, on the basis of being Christian, would essentially mean the exclusion of the Northeast and this would be to cause division in the territorial unity of Bharat that the Hindutva wish to promote. But it is also interesting to note the inconsistency. For the Hindu-right, Christians in other parts of India are not ‘Indian’ because they have divided loyalties. Although they share a common culture and lifestyle with other Indians and regard India as their ‘fatherland’ (pitrubhumi), they do not regard it as their ‘holy land’ (punyabhumi) (Savarkar 1969). Dharma, then, is very much related to the soil and does not have global – by this I mean deterritorialised – aspirations in the same way that Abrahamic world religions 5 For reasons of space it is not possible here to elaborate the ways in which the Hindu-right encompasses Christianity in the Northeast (see Longkumer 2016).

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do. Here it is strategic­for the Hindu-right to present a version of Hinduism that is very much ‘indigenous’, that is part of the soil of India as a way to differentiate themselves from the ‘foreign’ or world religions such as Christianity and Islam. Furthermore, these narratives suggest that ‘Hindu’ can be distinguished from ‘Hinduism’ as a form of worship. For Atul, for instance, ‘Hindu’ is very much a secular, cultural identity, that includes the nation, race, and civilisation. This view is consistent with that espoused by Savarkar, the principal ideologue of Hindutva, who distinguishes between “Hindu-dharma, Hinduism as a religion…and Hindutva, Hindudom [sic] as the unifying socio-cultural background of all Hindus” (Klostermaier 1994: 463). Such a clear separation, however, is untenable, argues Tanika Sarkar, because Hindutva paradoxically conjoins “nation with faith, and, in the same move, makes the land of India the property, in a literal sense, of Hindus alone…” (2012: 279). Therefore, the ambiguity over the term Hindu/Hinduism continues and remains unresolved. But this very ambivalence is what makes it a powerful tool for manipulation. Could it be that Hindu/Hinduism is both “a religion and not a religion” (Thal 2002) because of the irresolute tension that exists between it as cultural nationalism and as a community defined by its faith? Conclusion Is Hinduism an indigenous religion? And if so, is it the world’s largest? Answering these questions, as I have shown, is made complex by the shifting discourse of national identity and its ties with religion. I have shown that Hindu-right activists in Northeast India present Hinduism as equivalent with tribal religions and thus find commonality through the term ‘animism’. Understanding Hinduism as an indigenous religion also means that one needs to keep in mind the nationalist project promulgated by the Hindu-right that is both about integrating the tribals with Northeast India and also assimilating their practices within the civilisational reality of Hindu traditions. The use of terms such as ‘tradition’ and ‘religion’ are usefully deployed by the Hindu-right to make certain claims. First, although many use them interchangeably and perhaps innocently, I suspect that tradition is used as a way to chart a common genealogy with tribal traditions within the Hindu orbit, whereas ‘religion’ is used in a more profound way, for example, to connect with the anima, the soul, the atman, that universalises these ideas at a more ‘spiritual’ level. The Hindu-right use the language of universalism, inherited from figures such as Vivekananda, who were influenced by nineteenth century ideas. Religion, for Vivekananda, was indeed

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something that could be powerfully evoked to connect humanity, regardless of locality. But as I have shown, locality, and rootedness is ­precisely what is ­argued for by the Hindu-right, and its two-pronged strategy is to convince­people that the Hindus are ‘indigenous’ and belong to a particular ‘religion’. This is both to play into the nationalist and international rhetoric of indigeneity and also to connect with indigenous religions in the region. The images used by the Hindu-right – that of ‘mother earth/sacred land’ – relate to the global indigenous movement in significant ways. When applied to marginalised indigenous religions, it provides a powerful legitimation. When used by a large universalising force, it carries less weight. If indigenous religions allow themselves to become part of the global discourse, then, they need to be aware that they lend themselves to a diverse array of forces beyond their control. It could be entirely possible then that the term ‘indigenous religions’ itself is used as a globalising discourse to usurp other less powerful local traditions. The rhetoric that the Hindu-right construct is that ‘indigeneity’ itself has common traits (animism, veneration of nature). They contrast this with ‘world religions’, which they argue have no claim to national territory. However, by highlighting these common traits which constitute ‘indigeneity’ the Hindu-right could be seen as eradicating local practices and thus uprooting traditional philosophies for a more globalised discourse. But such a project, as I have shown, comes with overt nationalist proclivities. This is especially true in respect to how Hindu/Hinduism is utilised. Some say that Hinduism is a religion, and an indigenous one at that; others define Hindu as sanatan dharma in the sense of “eternal or primordial religion practised by our forefathers through the ages” (Rajkhowa 2007). Both though argue for indigeneity, which cannot be separated from national citizenship. It naturalises land, deity, culture, and religion into one seamless continuum that precisely brings to the forefront the imagination afforded by the word ‘indigenous’ – that which is above all ‘rooted’. In both a national and religious sense, and using Klostermaier’s broad distinction based on his reading of Savarkar, the term indigenous is powerfully evoked to suggest that Hindu is national citizenship, while Hinduism is, potentially, the world’s largest indigenous religion. Acknowledgements An early version of this paper was first presented at the European Association for the Study of Religion Conference in the panel Rethinking indigenous religions in the contemporary world, held in Liverpool Hope in 2013. My

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thanks to the vibrant community of scholars interested in indigenous religions for ­engaging with the presentation. A revised version was presented in the R ­ eligious Studies Seminar at Edinburgh. My thanks to the participants, particularly­Afe Adogame, for allowing the space to share some loosely formed ideas. Steven Sutcliffe provided a helpful observation – reflected in the title – that has now become the focus of this paper. The current version of the paper was read by Jeanne Openshaw, Jacob Copeman, Aya Ikegame and Lindsay ­Graham. My thanks to all of them for engaging with the ideas, and if any errors remain they are my own. References Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Baruah, S. 2007. “Postfrontier Blues: Toward a New Policy Framework for Northeast India.” Policy Studies 33. Washington: East West Centre. Beckerlegge, G. 2003. “Saffron and Seva: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s Appropriation of Swami Vivekananda.” In Anthony Copley, ed., Hinduism in Public and Private: Reform, Hindutva, Gender, Sampraday. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 31–65. Bhide, N. 2002. “Prologue.” In P.C. Sarma, ed. Traditional Customs and Rituals of Northeast India, Vol I. Guwahati: Vivekananda Kendra Institute of Culture. Bhide, N. 2004. “Prologue.” In P.C. Sarma, ed. Traditional Customs and Rituals of Northeast India, Vol II. Guwahati: Vivekananda Kendra Institute of Culture. Dumont, L. 1981. Homo Hierarchicus: The caste system and its implications. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Engler, S. and G. Grieve, eds. 2005. Historicizing “Tradition” in the Study of Religion. ­Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Fuller, C. 1996. “Introduction.” In C. Fuller, ed. Caste Today. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ghurye, G.S. 1980. The Scheduled Tribes. Bombay: Prakashan. Hansen, T.B. 1999. The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hawley, J.S. 1991. “Naming Hinduism.” Wilson Quarterly, 15: 3, 20–34. Johnson, G. and S.E. Kraft. 2017. “Introduction.” In G. Johnson and S.E. Kraft, eds. Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s). Leiden: Brill, 1–24. Joshi, N.M. 2000. Ashwattha. Chennai: Vivekananda Kendra Prakashan Trust. Khimun, L., ed. 2012. Socio-cultural and spiritual traditions of Northeast Bharat. Guwahati: Heritage Foundation. Klostermaier, K. 1994. A Survey of Hinduism. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Lipner, J. 2006. “The Rise of “Hinduism”; or, How to Invent a World Religion with Only Moderate Success.” Hindu Studies 10, 91–104. Longchar, W. 1995. The Traditional Tribal World View and Modernity. Jorhat: Eastern Theological College. Longkumer, A. 2016. “The Power of Persuasion: Hindutva, Christianity and the discourse of Religion and Culture in Northeast India.” Religion. (DOI: 10.1080/0048721X.2016.1256845). Lorenzen, D. 1999. “Who Invented Hinduism?” Comparative Studies in Society in History 41: 4, 630–659. Ludden, D. 2003. “Where is Assam? Using Geographical History to Locate Current Social Realities” (CENISEAS Papers 1). Guwahati, Assam: Centre for Northeast India, South and Southeast Asia Studies, Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social change and Development. Parameswaranji, M.P. 1996. A Dream Come True. Guwahati: Vivekananda Kendra Institute of Culture. http://www.vkic.org/a-dream-come-true.html. Accessed 3/11/15. Rajkhowa, J.P. 2007. “Protect and Project Indigenous Culture.” The Sentinel, Guwahati, 21st January. Sarkar, T. 2012. “Hindutva’s Hinduism.” In John Zavos et al., eds. Public Hinduisms. New Delhi: Sage. Savarkar, V.D. 1969. Hindutva: Who is Hindu? Bombay: Veer Savarkar Prakashan. Searle-Chatterjee, M. 2000. “‘World Religions’ and ‘ethnic groups’: Do these paradigms lend themselves to the cause of Hindu nationalism?” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23: 3, 497–515. Sweetman, W. 2003. “‘Hinduism’ and the history of ‘Religion’: Protestant Presuppositions in the critique of the concept of Hinduism.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 15, 329–353. Tehelka. 2006. “Summit of the Powerless: On the Map, but off the Mind?” http://archive .tehelka.com/story_main23.asp?filename=Dont_deal_Teresa_ Rehman_SP.asp. Accessed on 3 November 2016. Thal, S. 2002. “A religion that was not a religion: The creation of Shinto in ­nineteenth-century Japan.” In Derek R. Peterson and Darren R. Walhof, eds. The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and History. Rutgers: Rutgers ­University Press. Thapar, R. 1989. “Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity.” Modern Asian Studies 23: 2, 209–231. Verghese, B.G. 1997. India’s Northeast Resurgent: Ethnicity, Insurgency, Governance, Development. Delhi: Konark Publishers. Xaxa, V. 2005. “Politics of Language, Religion and Identity: Tribes in India.” Economic and Political Weekly, 40: 13, 1363–1370.

chapter 16

Literacy as Advocacy in the Donyipolo Movement of Northeast India Claire S. Scheid Introduction In 1986, Adi activist Talom Rukbo, a prominent indigenous religious leader from the Northeast Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, attended a world conference on interfaith religions in Bangalore. He told his protégé, fellow intellectual Kaling Borang: “The learned people say that [for] a faith to be called a religion [it] must have a scripture; it must be prepared and practised. So we must work on it very fast. Unless we do it now, we may not do it at all” (Borang 2002: 3). He was speaking about the Adi tradition of Donyipolo1 (Sun-moon), a network of beliefs that is shared among Tani2 tribes in the Eastern Himalayan foothills – an ontology which had not previously been articulated through written materials, prayer halls, or iconographies. Following his comments, the Adi began to take concrete steps towards religious reorganisation (see Scheid 2015) that have resulted in a multitude of changes to vernacular religious life: the creation of prayer books, enhancing a rich oral narrative culture; the establishment of ganggings (prayer halls), replacing worship in the home; the introduction of iconography in lieu of bamboo and straw structures, representing images of the divine;3 the codification of holy days and holidays, in part to accommodate the new schedules of Arunachalis beginning to engage more with the subcontinent’s timetables for work and school; and the establishment of new roles for the ritual specialist position of the tabe, along with ­instituting ‘trainings’ for 1 I have here used the simplest phonetic representation of Adi terms; there is not one codified system for transcription of this Tibeto-Burman language. Words such as Donyipolo, Abang, and tabe all utilise elongated vowels and could be written Doonyipoolo, Aabang, taabe (or Do:nyipo:lo, A:bang, ta:be). However, in the interest of simplicity for the reader, in this article I approximate the sound in the most basic way possible. 2 The Tani tribes comprise the Adi, the Apatani, the Nyishi, the Tagin, and the Mising (in Assam). The Galo and Adi have been conflated in some historical sources. Today, some Galo self-identify as their own tribe with their unique identity, heritage, and faith. 3 As has been acknowledged widely, the Mopin festival has been an exception to this rule (that is, Rukbo, no date: 15; Chaudhuri 2013: 269).

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this position. These deliberate changes have been enacted by cultural elites as a conscious response to a perceived need for preservation – and deliberately designed to fill the cultural void that the introduction of more ‘conventionally’ organised religions had created in the Arunachali social sphere. This case study follows the narrative of the Adi4 as they have embraced the written word as one part of this larger formalisation. It is particularly important to examine literacy among the Adi as they exist within the Indian context, in which many Adivasi and other indigenous groups have experienced ‘Hinduisation’. This has not been the case for the Adi: rather than being considered a ‘corruption’ or ‘Hinduisation’ of the faith, the introduction of the written religious word in Donyipolo should be highlighted as a communal step that has furthered the indigenous preservation agenda. It is necessary to note that the Adi now use the term ‘indigenous’ to refer to themselves and their ‘historical’ way of life, and they extend the definition to Donyipolo, which they identify as their ‘indigenous religion’. In this chapter, I use the term in the same manner: many Adi have remained in relative i­ solation and Donyipolo is an independent, complex, and nuanced faith without major similarities to other belief systems, based in the relationship between man and nature as chronicled in oral narratives (Abangs). Thus I too c­ ategorise the Adi as ‘indigenous’ and Donyipolo as an ‘indigenous religion’. Self-­identification with the term ‘indigenous’ has played a large role in the development of Adi literacy. The particular developments in literacy among Donyipolo practitioners in part result from the prevalence of the Arunachali context over the Indian context, subject as it was to the unique administrative initiatives of the NorthEast Frontier Agency (nefa). Although nefa, under the guidance of eminent anthropologist Verrier Elwin, was successful in implementing many tribal preservation initiatives that served to preserve customs, these successes were obtained, in part, by the promotion of ethnic isolation and, arguably, early British Colonial movements against indigenous advancement. Textual articulations of Donyipolo function as indigenous advocacy, hold a complex relationship to Colonialist initiatives, were furthered by local and international influences, and succeeded in preserving Donyipolo within the community and connecting the Adi with other first peoples.5 4 The Indian government recognises the ‘scheduled tribes’ of the Adi, the Adi Padam, and the Adi Minyong in Arunachal Pradesh, Northeastern India. The Adi primarily live in the Siang districts, which lie between Assam, India, and the high peaks of Tibetan Himalayas. 5 This research was made possible by the University College Cork Graduate College of Arts, Celtic Studies, and Social Sciences, National University of Ireland, and the Government of

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Based on fieldwork in Arunachal Pradesh in 2013, 2014, and 2015 and ­archival research among the holdings of the International Association for Religious Freedom (iarf),6 this piece will (1) chronicle the history of literacy in Adi communities by tracing the development of the education infrastructure in the area, to provide context; (2) explore the influence of the local Seng Khasi community on written Donyipolo religious initiatives, to expose links between local indigenous communities; (3) examine the relationship between the indigenous Adi community and iarf, to highlight the emic and etic categories, terminologies, and texts used as the movement developed and spread to neighbouring groups; and (4) analyse the impact that literacy has had on societal worship, to reveal the new roles that the written word has created for ritual specialists. Throughout the chapter an attempt will be made to note when the Adi have taken steps against literary assimilation. In this way, this piece aims to illustrate that an indigenous community that becomes both literate and reflexively aware of its identity as an endangered first culture can use the written word as a formalisation measure to enact preservation of its historical religion and demarcate the boundaries of its beliefs.

Contextualising Literacy in Adi Communities

To properly examine the advance of religious literacy in Donyipolo, it is helpful to first contextualise the unique situation and relative isolation of the Adi. ­Despite the variegated impact of missionaries and the spread of new technologies and foreign faiths across parts of the Adi belt, many Adi still follow aspects of the historical Donyipolo with little to no apparent impact from ‘mainstream’ religions, and that was certainly the case in the 1930s, when this narrative begins. Donyipolo practitioners are considered to be loosely unified by their transmission of Abang (metaphysical oral narratives) and their focus on the exaltation of the sun (Donyi, female energy) and the moon (Polo, male energy) as complementary powers that are representative of the (unknown) source of creation. Multiple manifestations of the non-human (uyu) and benevolent tutelary deities (for example, Doying Bote, the deity of wisdom; Dadi Bote, the deity of animals; and Kine Nane, the deity of agriculture) are also vehicles through which the divine can be accessed – or the wrath of the ­malevolent Ireland Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship Fund. Audio and/or video recordings exist as reference for this material; on the occasions that informants did not consent to recording, such participants can be located and consulted freely by contacting the author. 6 These archives are held at Hartley Library, University of Southampton, United Kingdom.

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uyu deterred. Until the early twentieth century, social education occurred in the dere and raseng system – boys’ and girls’ dormitories, respectively – but there was little to no knowledge of reading or writing. The ‘divide-and-rule’ system of tribal governance under the British Colonials (North-East Frontier Agency) seemed to curb early attempts at opening schools, Christian or otherwise, although the Lower Primary School in Pasighat (the largest Adi town) was founded in 1935–36 (Ering 2005: 6). Soon after, the messages of inspiration from Gandhi that were trickling up towards the isolated Northern states and the relaxation of isolation policies by the North-East Frontier Agency changed the status quo, requiring education for all children. This first generation of Adi that began to attend Lower Primary were immediately required to learn Assamese rather than be instructed in their native tongue (Ering 2005: 6). Oshong Ering writes that as students progressed through the earlier classes, instruction moved from learning to write with fingers in the sand, to ‘slates and stone pencils’, to ‘wooden pencils and papers’, and finally ink via ‘tuber and horn-bill feather pens’ (Ering 2005: 7–8). Within a decade, Pasighat also had developed high-school level education. However, throughout the mid-century many students still travelled to the neighbouring state of Assam for education. Mixed student population exposed the Adi to classmates who would treat them as untouchables (Ering cites the Assamese, Bengalese, and Ahoms [Ering 2005: 8]). However, “The attempt to treat us [as] untouchables did not last long. It died a natural death” (Ering 2005: 8). Education in Assam was primarily restricted to Christian missionary schools, which began to impact Adi communities as children would return home singing Christian hymns. Kaling Borang, charismatic leader of the modern Donyipolo Yelam Kebang (Donyipolo Faith Council) – the religious governing organisation – recounts this trend as one of the early inspirations for creating Adi religious hymns, discussed later in this chapter; social organisers among the Adi realised that the singing of Christian songs was potentially a form of subtle conversion (Interview, Pasighat, 2014). These early examples of Adi awareness – in which they fought to maintain their indigenous status, rather than assimilate, and to counter Christian songs with Adi tunes – can perhaps be considered active acts of non-conformity to ‘Hinduisation’ within the context of literacy. In the 1950s, the first Adi students travelled to Shillong, Meghalaya, to attend college, including Oshong Ering, Talom Rukbo, and Thumpak Ete, all of whom would be prominent in the introduction of the written word in Donyipolo – all participated in the reformation, and Ete would also go on to build one of the earliest printing presses in Arunachal (in the town of Aalo). The medium of

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their education in Shillong was English, which the students were required to learn; learning English also contributed to the religious output of the Donyipolo reformation, as from a relatively early point in the reformation materials were produced in both Adi and English. While at St. Edmund’s7 circa 1950, Talom Rukbo and Oshong Ering participated in an initiative to translate books into Adi – however, the initiative was sponsored by the North-East Frontier Agency and required the use of the Devanagari script (used for Hindi), which was how Adi was taught from 1953–1960.8 However, this use of Devanagari was considered by some Adi translators (such as Ering) to be an imposition and an attempt at Indianisation of their indigenous tongue; thus this ‘Tribal Text Book Branch’ in Shillong was closed in 1960 (Adi Agom Kebang 2013). The resistance to the use of Devanagari to represent the Tibeto-Burman language of Adi can also be seen as using literacy as a tool for indigenous advocacy. But Shillong, in general, provided much information that would contribute to the reformation. The experiences offered by being in such a city, which functioned as the headquarters for all of Northeast India, directly exposed these students to policy-makers such as Verrier Elwin, who would call for Adi students such as Ering to meet with him (Interviews with Oshong Ering, Pasighat, 2014 and 2015). But the connection between the inspiration for literacy in Donyipolo and Shillong can be expanded to include the Khasi people of the area, who had themselves used the written word as a means of indigenous preservation for half a century prior. To investigate more thoroughly the textual formalisation of Donyipolo, it is helpful to address briefly the organised religion Seng Khasi, which can in many ways be considered a precursor to Donyipolo: it is the Khasi peoples’ ‘institutionalised’ indigenous system of faith, thriving in Shillong for decades before the first Adi attended university there. 7 It is elsewhere reported that Rukbo attended St. Anthony’s College (Koyu, no date, The Life and Times of Golgi Bote), but other sources (Borang 2002, Borang 2013) state St. Edmund’s College. 8 The first attempts to create a script to write Adi are credited to the early Christian missionaries Reverend J.H. Lorrain and F.W. Savidge, who stayed in Arunachal from 1900–1906; they were assisted by Adi community members Mupak Mili and Atsong Pertin, today described by the Agom Kebang as the ‘fathers of Adi script’ (Adi Agom Kebang 2013). The American Baptist Mission published two texts on Adi language in 1937 and 1947; still today, a translated version of the Bible into the Adi language seems to be the primary text available online. All of these initiatives used the Latin script to approximate the Tibeto-Burman Adi language.

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Organisational Influences on Donyipolo Written Initiatives – Seng Khasi and the International Association for Religious Freedom (iarf)

It can be argued that Seng Khasi laid the groundwork for the Adi indigenous preservation via literacy insofar as it proved that textual output of indigenous religious content was a powerful tool that allowed historical faith to survive, and thus served as an example to early Donyipolo organisers. The religious council of the matrilineal first peoples of Meghalaya, Seng Khasi, founded in 1899 by sixteen young men in Shillong in an attempt to preserve indigenous Khasi faith in light of a majority conversion to Christianity, was established “to protect and preserve the cultural values, social values, and religious beliefs of the people” (Interview with Rynjah, Shillong, 2015). The early success of Seng Khasi had been assisted by the Ri Khasi Press, founded in 1896, which facilitated­the printing of promotional materials. The organisation has thrived since – the current secretary, Banteilang Singh Rumnong, states that today Seng Khasi functions like a federal structure (Interview, Shillong, 2015). It is fair to assume that early Adi attendees of college were exposed in Shillong to Seng Khasi. But it was not until the 1980s that these connections were significantly strengthened: the intersection of Seng Khasi, the Adi community, and a global organisation called the International Association for Religious Freedom (iarf) played a very large role in the development of written texts for Donyipolo. iarf was founded in 1900 and is a London-based charitable organisation that promotes interfaith dialogue by bringing together different religions for discussion, prayer, and the promotion of world peace. Beginning in 1976, they organised numerous local and international conferences in India. Seng Khasi joined the International Association for Religious Freedom as an ‘associate member’ in 1980. Banteilang Singh Rumnong describes below the relationship between Seng Khasi, iarf, and Donyipolo: [Early founders] felt that there was a need for our religion to get recognised in the world – felt the need for projecting and sharing – and what better sharing would there be, when you get a chance like participating in iarf. So in the eighties, they did in that time. That was the only time that our leaders participated in iarf. … Somehow, [in the] late nineties we had slight disconnect. What … [Seng Khasi] did with Donyipolo: I am … aware that there was a lot of interactions when Donyipolo wanted to [formalise], these people who wanted to start Donyipolo, wanted to be more systematic – there were conversations with Seng Khasi because

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Seng Khasi had been formalised since 1899! They were far ahead of all other religions in the Northeast. So there were a lot of interactions. … Hipshon Roy was a person who had worked in …. the North-East Frontier Agency9 [and thus interacted with many in Donyipolo in the state of Arunachal Pradesh]. Interview, shillong, February 2015

The Donyipolo literacy movement, therefore, can be seen as linking a local indigenous network and a global organisation that shared common goals: in March 1985, it was this same Hipshon Roy of the Seng Khasi (who had interacted­in Arunachal Pradesh with early Adi organisers) that nominated the ‘Donyi-Polo­[sic]10 Mission, a tribal organisation in Northeast India’ for iarf membership (iarf Archives, 1984–1994; Scheid 2015: 132). Following this union, throughout the 1980s, representatives from the Donyipolo Adi community11 attended these international meetings at various locations in India: Calcutta (1984);12 New Delhi (1985); Bangalore (1986); Bombay (1987); Calcutta (1988). Participation continued into the 1990s and most notably included Donyipolo attendance at the Hamburg, Germany conference in 1990. It is worth taking time to describe the content of these conferences as they had a direct impact on how Donyipolo would later style itself. Other groups in attendance shifted over the years but encompassed Indian representation (including Brahma Samaj; Guru Nanak; Unitarian Union of Northeast India [primarily Khasi], Seng Khasi, Sikh organisations, Jain organisations), an ongoing presence of the Japanese group Rissho Kosei-kai, on occasion Jewish and Islamic­groups, and consistent representation of organisers from Europe. 9 10

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North-East Frontier Agency was the former name of what is today Arunachal Pradesh. Today, the administration is clear that there should not be a hyphen, as the powers of Donyi (the sun) and Polo (the moon) work in synthesis. The Donyi-Polo [sic] Mission was the school that sponsored attendance; opened in 1979, it was chaired by Shri Gegong Apang, who would later serve as Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh. In the following years, a number of affiliate schools were also opened, focusing not only on literacy but also on agriculture, music, information technology, and special education (Roy 1995: ­178–179). The movement did not formally adopt their official title of Donyipolo Yelam Kebang (Donyipolo Faith Organisation) until 1986. Adi participants in iarf events included Talom Rukbo, Kaling Borang, Mameng Dai, B. Pertin, Oshong Ering, and Thumpak Ete (a member of the Galo tribe). R.K. Patir and T.K. Bhatacharjee also appear on some early correspondences as representatives of the Mission. It is not recorded in the iarf archives whether representatives attended in 1984; however, because of the executive minutes preserving their nomination in 1985 referencing Adi attendance in the previous year, it is a fair assumption.

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Topics­discussed during these years spanned explorations of the role of religions leading up to the millennium; the cultivation of ideas for a peaceful (non-nuclear) world; and the consideration of integration in the context of globalisation. Via their participation with iarf, Donyipolo representatives, therefore, were exposed not only to the structure of what constitutes a sustainable religion (including the need for written materials) but also to a wealth of discussion about different faiths and analytical considerations of world events. Examining the representation of Donyipolo in the iarf archives – both from the group’s submissions to iarf and iarf’s etic categorisation of them – yields some interesting observations. While in some conferences, Donyipolo representatives were placed in workshops with fellow Indian peoples (for example, Sikhs), in others they were grouped with ‘tribals’ from Assam and Arunachal, markedly separated from Indian groups such as Dalits (‘Untouchables’). This reveals that iarf grouped, in part, indigenous peoples as one unit, within the Indian context, categorising even on geography (‘tribals’ from the Northeast). However, the etic categorisation of Donyipolo representatives changed in the one conference that they attended outside India, in Hamburg, Germany, in 1990. On this occasion, they were assigned to participate in a workshop entitled ‘Indigenous Religious Communities: Crow Indians, usa and Donyi Polo Mission [sic], India’, revealing iarf’s prioritisation of indigeneity over geography. This external link – enacted by a European organisation – draws a connection between the Adi and the Crow that is based only on an etic conceptualisation of their indigenous status. In examining international categorisations, iarf’s placement of Donyipolo with the Crow Indians is revealing: it shows that in their conception at the time, ‘indigenous’ was a linking factor, despite the fact that the Adi and the Crow were in very different places developmentally in their movements towards preservation, and had questionable similarities in their spiritual belief structure. However, examining participation from the Adi perspective reveals that already in the mid-1980s Donyipolo representatives were interested in demarcating their own religious boundaries as separate from other religious groups. On the feedback sheets from the 1985 conference, Talom Rukbo suggested themes for upcoming meetings: the first was “Religious path to non-interference to sister minor community religions” – implying a desire not to be conflated with Seng Khasi or other Northeast Indian indigenous peoples (iarf Archives: 1984–1994). Again here appears a strong Adi statement against conflation with other ‘indigenous’ groups and against ‘Hinduisation’, written in English by Rukbo and submitted to iarf. Consistently the Adi do not identify as Adivasi, the term encompassing indigenous peoples of the Indian subcontinent. By the 1990s, the identifier ‘indigenous’ appears self-referentially in Adi documents

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submitted to iarf: in 1994, Talom Rukbo is referred to as “a voice toward the protection of indigenous faith” (iarf Archives: 1984–1994).

The Birth and Spread of Adi Religious Texts

In an initiative, no doubt, that resulted from their collaboration with iarf and the obvious need to define themselves within this international network, the group began to publish in English soon after its official council was founded in 1986. Two prominent English language publications are Directive Principles of Donyipolo Faith (Yelam) and Donyipoloism13 through Questions and Answers, both penned by Talom Rukbo. These books explained Donyipolo belief and codified ritual, functioning as publications that separate Donyipolo from being a vague ‘Northeast Indian tribal association’. In this way, the creation of the text is an act of preservation – the written words are identifiers for the Adi activists. Writing in English allowed a larger audience to see, and understand, these boundaries. The primary Adi-language publication, conversely, is the prayer book, the Angun Bedang (‘Way of Light’; ‘Light Way’; ‘Illumination’). It contains a variety of prayer songs, some newly penned additions to complement traditional hymns now placed in textual form. It is written, for the most part, in a new language designed for the reformation, a hybrid between conversational Adi and ‘priestly’ Adi. ‘Priestly’ Adi is not understood by much of the population, and thus the creation of a hybrid text makes the content more accessible for the layman while preserving its sacred associations. Texts for the Angun Bedang were written by Rukbo himself and other community members; tunes were composed by Tain Tamuk and Manik Pao (Interviews, Pasighat 2014 and 2015). The selection of texts to be included ultimately was made by Rukbo and Borang, although a larger selection board chose the tunes (and did so, formally, on 31 December 1986, the first ‘Donyipolo Day’). As the use of these books spread, some ganggings (prayer halls) began to offer literacy courses as part of larger community improvement programmes. The Adi Agom Kebang – Adi Literary Society – continued to thrive and began to expand in the 1970s. In the early 1990s, Donyipolo leaders also distributed English-language versions of the Angun Bedang to other Tani groups, including the Galo, the Nyishi, the Apatani, and the Tagin. Parallel movements (and textual preservation) began among each of these Tani groups – yielding the Nyishi 13

In the early days (mid-1980s to mid-1990s) the movement used ‘Donyipoloism’. Today, participants generally say ‘Donyipolo’, having dropped the ‘ism’.

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Indigenous14 Faith and Culture Society; Galo Indigenous Faith and Cultural Council; and Meder Nello Council and Dani-Piilo Society of Apatani. Today, villages that have minority Tani populations or are in very remote locations may adopt a shared gangging for worship that crosses Tani boundaries (for example, Mechuka gangging, which is constructed in the Adi tradition but is attended also by the Tagin, Nyishi, and so on). In some non-Adi villages, the Adi Angun Bedang is still used as a prayer book, but since each Tani group speaks its own language, many groups have assembled their own, separate prayer texts.15 In this way – through reaching out with English-language translations of their new texts – Adi activists spread the religious literacy movement to neighbouring Tani tribes – remaining within the Donyipolo network. But in 1999, the Indigenous Faith and Cultural Society of Arunachal Pradesh (ifcsap), registered under the Society Registration Act (Fourth Talom Rukbo Fest 2012: 2), was founded. The institution pushes for ‘indigenous’ (English language) unity in a greater manner; youth awareness camps (Dangmei 2014: 123; interviews, Komkar 2015) are used to highlight ‘shared difference[s]’ and utilise local dialects, Hindi, and sometimes English. Its stretches over an even larger network which encourages worship across ethnic lines, reaching out additionally to the ­Tirap, Buddhists, Hrusso (Aka), and Tangsa Rangfraa movement (­Dangmei 2014: ­122–123). These initiatives have arisen following the formalisation of D ­ onyipolo, facilitated in large part by the shift to a literate religion. The results of Talom Rukbo’s decision to create a written text have inspired change and self-aware indigenous advocacy across the state.

Changes for the Ritual Specialist: The ‘Tabe’

In the realm of worship and ritual, the most significant change brought upon by literacy has been the new institution of the tabe. Today, literacy has become a significant role for these ritual specialists, whereas historically the written word played no part in ritual specialist responsibilities (absent, as it was, from 14 15

It is perhaps worth noting that the Nyishi chose the English word ‘indigenous’ for their group. For instance, I have seen a Nyishi worship group use Adi language prayer texts; a Galo group in Aalo, conversely, is very particular that they have their own prayer book in the Galo language, Donyi Boi. Additionally, see Dangmei (2014: 113) for a chronicle of a list sent from the village of Ngopok to the Central Gangging which includes, among other concerns, a desire for more instructional texts.

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the culture). To comprehend this change, it is necessary to understand the multiple societal roles that could be classified as ‘ritual specialist’ (‘shaman’ – miri) among the Adi. The Adi word for supernatural power is uyu, a term that refers both to power (as a quality that can be held) and to ‘spirit’ (as a nonhuman entity), and the word for those who possess it is miri, which also means ‘song’. Historically, there are large variations in the roles, powers, and functions of these ritual specialists. Our society has very limited institutionalisation of certain practice, even in terms of miri. If there is a possession, it’s not always like possessed [equates to] ‘oh, go call miri’. It’s not like ‘oh, I’m sick, go call doctor’. It’s not an immediate reaction. The question will start from the family and [they will] try to deal with [the situation] first, there. And if there is no help then [they] look for some other ways. And that’s where you look for miri. … Miri is not an immediate binary of possession. Interview pasighat, April 2015.16

It is often the case that ait miri, also known as uyu miri, are perhaps the type of miri most associated with the typical ‘ritual specialist’ role: often of neutral intention (and thus endowed with the possibility to be either benevolent or malevolent), sometimes these ait miri inspire fear, and it is they who are understood to ‘keep’ uyu (non-human ‘spirits’) – uyu-ko (‘uyu children’17). Those who recite Abangs – oral narratives – particularly well are also considered to be miri, due to their knowledge of ‘priestly’ Adi; the ability to speak this language is sometimes considered to be supernatural. There are also elig miri, who assume physiotherapy roles, ‘healing’18 by touch – who may or may not have uyu-spirits. Among some Adi Minyong, the term myibu is further used in self-identification by those who are ‘divine’ or have ‘healing’ powers, in some cases with the help of uyu-spirits. The term tabe is occasionally used in these manners as well and also occurs in some Abang (oral narratives). However, historically, attainment of miri status was limited to self or ‘divine’ selection. Powers afforded to the miri and the myibu generally manifest through dreams or visions and there has traditionally been no formal ‘initiation’ process. Miri transitions are marked by repeated appearances or possessions by uyu of an 16 Female Adi academic speaking in English. 17 These uyu-ko are sometimes the returning dead of children in particular; on other occasions, the term refers to uyu, regardless of age. 18 The Adi do use the English term ‘healing’ to refer to the special abilities that some miri have to cure illness, disease, or pain.

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individual, which usually occurs in youth but can occur at any stage of life. Often, becoming an ait miri – one who deals with the ‘spirit world’ – is undesirable, and some take steps to try to reverse the change, should it begin. Once one is an ait miri, one functions, in many ways, at the service of the community, interrupting one’s desired life path. Conversely, contemporary tabe – those who may be required to read and function as overseers of the gangging (prayer hall) – are primarily self-­selected. They have been incorporated in the reformation since the beginning – Ogom Dai was the first tabe for the Central Gangging in Pasighat, with the corresponding ceremonial title Tapu Bote (Interview Pasighat, March 2015). Today, the role of the tabe may fall to those who can read and, thus, lead the chanting (Dangmei 2015: 112).19 Those who would like to orchestrate prayer or help organise services therefore can assume a type of ritual specialist role that does not require inborn qualities or supernatural selection. However, it is also not uncommon in villages where ganggings are under construction (for example, Riga Village 2015) or are very isolated (for example, Mechuka 2015) – for the ‘in-born’ miri to still operate as the tabe, despite a lack of literacy. Describing the difference between a miri and a tabe, an elderly male tabe explains: [This miri] can’t read the Angun Bedang. But he knows it. He can tell about [holy vines], oil, and [ginger] but he can’t read the book. [The tabe] might study Rukbo’s book but [the miri] still knows more than [the tabe]. [The tabe] only can sing and talk but I can say the things, tell who is sick or not. [The tabe] can study all night but cannot tell everything. Interview riga village, March 2015

However, in many cases, tabe – even those who are not miri – also perform ‘healings’ within the gangging, either during the service or immediately following it. They do so by touch, by leaf, or by water. But in the case of tabe this power is usually understood as coming from Donyipolo directly rather than particular personified uyu.20 This was also delineated in Rukbo’s writings – preserving­a ‘healing’ method for the Adi – relevant, today, as some view the ‘traditional’ miri as becoming increasingly commercialised. Gangging attendance is based on donation, while miri may charge many animals or other valuables to perform a ‘healing’. The same elderly tabe quoted above elaborates: 19 20

Dangmei notes that in his observation, in some ganggings the ‘chanters’ who lead gangging services change each week. That is, individual uyu (‘spirits’) that would be associated with (or ‘kept by’) a given miri in the historical system.

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I am a tabe. [But] I am not a miri. I do not have any uyu. I don’t know any stories. If she’s sick, I can touch her and I can tell. Donyipolo gifted me with the ability to tell if someone is sick. It’s a natural power. Interview riga village, March 201521

In this way, the new institution of the tabe is a re-mapping of an indigenous role within a recently formalised articulation of Donyipolo that requires literacy. It also centralises the source of ‘healing’ from individual supernatural entities (uyu) to Donyipolo as a core ‘healing’ force. Such skills are taught at tabe trainings – instruction sessions – that create one institutionalised method for worship and ritual that is repeated in ganggings across the state. By altering the ritual specialist system in this manner, literacy has also created consistency in worship among the Adi, so that attendance at a prayer hall is a similar experience each week, anywhere – and consistency of practice promotes longevity. This, too, exemplifies literacy as advocacy for preservation among the Adi. Conclusion This narrative of Adi literacy has highlighted some questions of emic and etic categorisation and terminology. While officially its own member, under its own name, Donyipolo was only variably viewed as separate from other Indian ‘tribal’ groups by the European organisers of the International Association of Religious Freedom (iarf): throughout their affiliation with iarf in the 1980s and 1990s, they were usually placed in conversation with other Indian groups; at the one international conference which they attended, they were placed in a panel with Native Americans. Internally, the group embraced the English word ‘indigenous’ as far back as 1986, when it was exposed to both the term and the self-reflexive idea via iarf; subsequently, first peoples across Arunachal Pradesh have adopted the term. Primarily, this case study has attempted to illustrate that the Adi have used literacy as advocacy and religious demarcation: the Adi avoided ‘Hinduisation’ when students first attended Assamese schools in the mid-twentieth century. They were not classified as ‘Untouchables’ or assimilated into the Hindu system. Additionally, they countered Assamese Christian hymns with Adi Donyipolo hymns and rejected Devanagari as a writing method for their language. Further, the Adi realisation that religious texts were necessary came from the 21

Thus, it could also be the case that the assumption of a tabe role is sometimes considered in-born as well.

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need to identify themselves as separate from other Northeastern groups, including Seng Khasi; simultaneously, Seng Khasi functioned as an inspiration and example of indigenous religious textual success for early Donyipolo organisers. Thus, texts were created in English for this deliberate purpose. These English texts allowed the Adi to declare themselves on global stages such as the International Association for Religious Freedom. They also allowed for distribution to neighbouring tribes, who successfully followed the Adi example to create their own prayer books and religious textual output. Texts created in Adi, including the prayer book the Angun Bedang, have shifted the roles of ritual specialists by instituting the position of the gangging tabe. This tabe position allows for an alternative to ‘healing’ by the miri ritual specialist and, through its institutionalisation, preserves the ritual specialist role among the Adi, due to the association with the printing of the Angun Bedang. The movement had similar results across the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh (among the Tani groups of the Apatani, Nyishi, Tagin, Mising, and Galo) and contributed also to the founding of the Indigenous Faith and Cultural Society of Arunachal Pradesh, which incorporated these Tani groups as well as other peoples indigenous to Arunachal Pradesh. This chapter began with an anecdote in which Talom Rukbo told Kaling Borang that the Adi must have a scripture if they wanted to sustain their faith and survive in the rapidly changing world. His realisation, combined with the group’s exposure to local and international networks, has revolutionised not only the Adi religion but also inspired multiple neighbouring tribes to do the same. Further, it has led to a united front of ‘indigeneity’ across Arunachal Pradesh. The Adi decision to wield the written word as a shield against religious and cultural assimilation should be considered prescient. Other indigenous groups who find themselves at the crossroads of literacy and globalisation might consider the Adi example of redefining religious boundaries through the use of the written word – a revolutionary blueprint that uses literacy as advocacy for first peoples. References Adi Agom Kebang. 2013. Literary Society. Available at [http://adiagomkebang.org]. Borang, K., ed. 2002. Golgi Bote Talom Rukbo: His Thoughts and Deeds. Pasighat: Central Donyipolo Yelam Kébang. Borang, K. 2013. “Golgíboté – His Thoughts and Deeds.” In: K. Borang, ed. Én-Géna Pu:né (The Leading Star): A Commemorative Volume on Golgíboté Talom Rukbo. Guwahati: Heritage Foundation.

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Chaudhuri, S.K. 2013. “The Institutionalization of Tribal Religion: Recasting the Donyipolo Movement in Arunachal Pradesh.” Asian Ethnology 72: 2, 259–277. Dangmei, S. 2014. Religious Politics and Search for Indigeneity: A Study of Donyi-Polo Movement in North East India. New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House. Ering, O. 2005. The Lingering Memories. Pasighat: Siang Literary Forum. Fourth Talom Rukbo State Level Indigenous Youth Fest. 2012. Milestone Report. 1–3 December. Guwahati: Indigenous Faith and Society Council, Arunachal Pradesh. International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF) Archives (1984–1994): Hartley Library, University of Southampton. MS256 A986: 1/17; 2/10; 2/12; 2/21; 5/33. (Paper archives held in library.). Koyu, T. scriptwriter. no date. The Life and Times of Golgi Bote, Directed by T. Darang. Documentary film. Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh, India: Donyipolo Yelam Kebang. Rukbo, T. 2002. Directive Principles of Donyipolo Yelam (Faith). (The Code of Conduct). Pasighat: Central Donyipolo Yelam Kébang. Rukbo, T. no date. Donyipolosim through Questions and Answers. Pasighat: Adi Cultural and Literary Society. Roy, R. 1995. The Donyipolo Cult of Arunachal Pradesh: A Study in Textualizing Oral Religion. DPhil Thesis, North-Eastern Hill University. Scheid, C.S. 2015. “Talom Rukbo and the Donyipolo Yelam Kebang: Restructuring Adi Religious Practices in Arunachal Pradesh.” Internationales Asienforum 46: 1–2, 127–148.

chapter 17

Ethnographies Returned: The Mobilisation of Ethnographies and the Politicisation of Indigeneity in Ifugao, the Philippines Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme Introduction I had not been in the rural village deep in the highland province of Ifugao, the Philippines, for long when Bangaw, the skinny, old neighbour who eventually would become my adopted father, told me “It’s good that you came. When all the mumba’i [ritual experts] disappear, we can read in your book what to do when we get ill.”1 If I only did my research in a proper way, he added, I would get the complete and true account of their culture. To my surprise, he did not refer to the authority of the mumba’i of the village, but to scholars I knew well from my pre-fieldwork readings. “You must do as Lambrecht and Newell did. Get all the mumba’i together so that they can discuss and find our correct culture.” Bangaw’s familiarity with these ethnographers was by no means uncommon among the villagers, and as my fieldwork progressed, I realised that the work and methodology of these and other scholars were familiar to many of the villagers in a way that both limited and enhanced their expectations about my work. Some did not really see the point of me coming to their village to study what they themselves referred to as ‘their culture’. After all, my anthropological predecessors had pretty much covered that already, and people today had anyway far less comprehensive knowledge about these matters than what I could find in their books or at the museum in the main village. They were skeptical when I, disciplined to pay attention to situated knowledge, partial connections, contextual contingency and the mutual implications of power and knowledge, insisted on talking also with the young, with women and other people who claimed no authorised knowledge of their animistic rituals.

1 I conducted fieldwork in Ifugao in 2003–2004 and 2007–2008, carrying out interviews, informal conversations and participant observation in both daily life and a variety of rituals. All quotes from informants in this paper are from this period of fieldwork.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_019

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They knew what an anthropologist was supposed to be doing, so why did I not spend more of my time talking with the old men about the olden times? Others, like Bangaw, were more optimistic on my behalf. Finally, they too would have their culture written down. They too would have a complete and authoritative account they could consult during discussions over ritual procedures. In either case, the ethnographies of earlier anthropologists were familiar and used as a reference point for their own relation to their ugalin, tradition, and for those of us who were trying to learn more about it. It seemed that there were other pathways in and out of these villages than the narrow trails through irrigated terraces and jungle clad, precipitous mountain ridges I had traversed to get there, pathways on which ethnographies had travelled out and returned for decades. In Ifugao, as in many other societies around the world, ethnographies and their associated anthropological ‘regimes of truth’ seem to have a quite palpable social presence. Indeed, as Bessire and Bond have noted, the norm nowadays “is that ethnographers venture to the field only to confront discarded anthropological models reanimated as social fact” (2014: 442). Much anthropological work has bemoaned this development on behalf of indigenous people, and anthropology, with its intrinsic embeddedness in processes of colonisation, has also, as Clifford points out, “become a negative alter ego in contemporary indigenous discourse, invoked as the epitome of arrogant, intrusive colonial authority” (2013: 213). Consequently, contemporary anthropologists have tended to support postcolonial attempts, often by indigenous anthropologists themselves, to rid themselves of the suffering caused by these discarded anthropological models (Smith 2012; Bessire 2014). Bessire’s (2014) account of how many of his Ayoreo2 informants diabolised anthropologists is particularly illustrating in this regard. Bessire shows how the anthropologists’ collecting, ordering, and translation of the Ayoreo world into a more or less static ‘traditional culture’ concealed the plastic and transformational character of Ayoreo ontology. While becoming human was for Ayoreo closely linked to the capacity to transform, anthropologists’ traditionalisation alienated Ayoreo individuals from themselves and withdrew their capacities for making themselves humans. The return of discarded anthropological models may thus contribute to painful memories, feelings of loss and colonial resentment, and in some instances prevent anthropologists to re-gain access (see also Rosaldo 1986; Scheper-Hughes 2001). 2 Ayoreo are an indigenous people inhabiting northern Paraguay.

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As the following exploration of ethnography and ethnographers’ presence in Ifugao will demonstrate, however, the return of ethnography may also affect societies in a different way by, for instance, being appropriated in native discourses and invoked in revivals or attempted salvage of traditions (Clifford 2013: 213). Ethnographies and their models – discarded or not – can thus be involved in a variety of ways in indigenous identity politics, sometimes ‘mobilised’ (Callon 1986) as sources of pride and dignity and sometimes ‘enrolled’ (Callon 1986) as allies in the negotiation of authority. Moreover, they may contribute to the expectations and commitments that ethnographic relationships almost inevitably entail (Salmond 2013: 3). The conceptual apparatus of Michel Callon (see also Latour 2007) alluded to above indicates my approach in investigating the relations between indigenous religions and ethnography in this chapter. I consider indigenous religions here as assemblages that are enacted by a variety of heterogeneous elements. Ifugao indigenous religion is continuously enacted but this does not mean that it is enacted similarly or continuously as the same in each and every context. Indeed, Ifugao indigenous religion is here approached not as a singular entity but rather as multiple entities (Mol 2002). Various components coalesce and assemble to enact indigenous religions differently in different contexts, in various locations and times, and by an assortment of actors. I do not intend to disentangle all of these enactments or all the actors and actants involved. I limit my focus here to showing how ethnography enters into these assemblages, and does so in different ways in different contexts. The ethnographers who used to work in the region and the work they produced thus form part, for better or for worse, of the assemblages through which indigenous religions are enacted. I attend therefore in this chapter to the “effective purchase of ethnography” (Bessire and Bond 2014: 442) and to the variety of ways in which these ethnographies are mobilised in processes of what Clifford (2013) terms articulation and disarticulation, translation, and performance (see also Johnson and Kraft’s introduction to this volume). Taking as my point of departure my encounters with ethnographies and ethnographers as social facts in the field, I discuss how ethnographies and ethnographers of the Ifugao have influenced the ongoing becoming and transformation of Ifugao indigenous religion, creating a specific kind of ethnographically grounded self-awareness that is both performed and negotiated in a variety of contexts like cultural festivals and museums. Moreover, I discuss how this ethnographically shaped indigenous religion becomes entangled in and disentangled from explicitly political identity processes. I thus address ethnography’s involvement in both the politicisation of indigeneity and its disarticulations.

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The ‘Manifest Absence’ of Ethnographers in Ifugao

The Ifugao with whom I have conducted fieldwork for a total of about 2 years inhabit the steep and verdant Cordillera Mountains of Northern Luzon.3 Famous both in the Filipino popular imagination and in anthropological literature for their former headhunting practices (Barton 1930; Barton 1978), their extensive traditional law system and not least their impressively extensive system of irrigated rice terraces, the majority of the Ifugao are farmers, cultivating wet rice in terraces and sweet potatoes and vegetables in swidden gardens. Although many are Catholics and some Pentecostals, the area is still a stronghold for traditional animistic practices. The Ifugao share their world with a host of ancestors and various other ‘other-than-human beings’ (De la Cadena 2010) generally referred to as ba’i. Enacting relations with the ba’i in proper ways is the source of both health and agricultural yields, and rituals that include sacrifices of pigs always led by initiated ritual experts, the mumba’i mentioned above. It was the relations between humans and ba’i, and by implication their entanglement with and through pigs, that eventually came to occupy my own ethnographic interest (Remme 2012; Remme 2014). I had a wealth of earlier scholarship to draw upon, including among others Lambrecht’s seven volume collection on rituals (1932; 1935; 1938; 1939; 1951; 1955; 1958), Otley Beyer’s explorations of Ifugao ethno-history (1913; 1955), Barton’s lively descriptions of the traditional legal and economic system, myths, and religion (1922; 1946; 1954; 1969; 1978), and Conklin’s ethnographic atlas outlining systems of land use in the area (1980). In all of these accounts, Ifugao traditional religion was presented as consisting of an extensive, complex but nevertheless coherent cosmological system with different kinds of spirits inhabiting the various regions of the world, the Skyworld, Underworld, the Earth, the Upstream and Downstream regions. Needless to say perhaps, things on the ground were quite different. The comprehensive accounts of rituals and spirit worlds that these earlier scholars provided were nowhere to be found. People knew different, often contradictory, things, and even those purportedly having expert knowledge on matters pertaining to ritual practices claimed their knowledge was incomplete. Given that most of these accounts came out of research conducted in the first half of the twentieth century, the differences between them and the current situation was no surprise. What was all the more striking, however, was the way these 3 Fieldwork was conducted in 2003–2004 and 2007–2008, totalling two years.

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ethnographies had become a part of local knowledge practices and enactments of Ifugao identity. Although the actual content of these works was not well known, people knew about them and the ethnographers who had written them. In a variety of contexts, they referred to these ethnographies, and they drew on them in different contexts for different purposes and with different implications.4 As mentioned above, Bangaw knew about how earlier ethnographers had worked – by summoning a group of male experts to get the complete and accurate account of their tradition – and expected me to follow suit. Both he and others readily acknowledged that different experts knew different things, indeed they were expected to since access to and authorised performance of certain ritual knowledge is distributed between different clans. Secrecy and ambiguousness were intrinsic to this distribution as well, and Bangaw and others claimed that only by emulating the synthetisation and ordering of earlier ethnographers could a truthful and complete account of their tradition be elicited. Hence, the return of ethnographies to Ifugao gave rise to a certain ‘regime of truth’ and specific epistemological implications in terms of the relations between completeness, truth, authenticity. In this way, while most of these ethnographers had departed both from these villages and from this world long time ago, they maintained nevertheless a ‘manifest absence’ (Law 2007) through the way their persona and their work figured in popular imagination and, as we shall see, significantly influenced relations between young and old ritual experts and inter-village relations. Furthermore, these works were articulated and disarticulated with wider highly politicised discourses and thus entered into regional and national identity politics centred on notions of ‘indigeneity’ and ‘nativeness’.

Young and Old Mumba’i

Relations between humans and ba’i figure centrally in Ifugao villagers’ life. Humans’ health and well-being depend on enacting relations with ba’i in proper ways, including cultivating terraces as the ancestors did, observing a range of rules and taboos, and inviting ba’i to take part in rituals whenever they are arranged. Illness is most often a result of distorted human-ba’i relations, resulting 4 I stress that, in the discussion that follows, I relate to how these ethnographers and their works formed part of local discourse, without engaging with how these perceptions aligned with my own readings of them or the critique they have met in current anthropological and archeological scholarship.

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in the separation of the two components constituting humans, namely odol which can be translated as ‘body’ and the soul stuff or life force called lennawa. Retrieving a lost lennawa requires arranging a ritual in which the ba’i are called upon to take part in the feast and receive offerings such as rice wine, betel nuts, chicken, and most importantly, pigs. The ba’i live, as mentioned above, in various parts of cosmos, some in the distant regions of the Skyworld or Underworld, some – like the ancestors – in vaguely indicated death villages somewhere ‘behind that mountain’ and some in quite specific places like large stones and river creeks in and around the village. Rituals in which relations with ba’i are enacted and transformed are led by ritual experts, called mumba’i. They recite myths about the ba’i and invite them to come to the house where the ritual is held so that people can see them dance, talk to them, and give them the lennawa of the pigs that are killed and butchered. Training for becoming a mumba’i begins in practice already from early adulthood as young men are allowed to sit inside the house where the other mumba’i perform their invocations and chants and can thus pick up and possibly memorise some of the stories and a long list of names of ancestors and other ba’i. More formal training starts when they approach one of the mumba’i to start learning properly. The teaching should be done secretly, and if the chanting one learns is to be effective and powerful, one should learn from one source only and that source should be from within one’s own kin. This means that although one may learn chants and invocations through listening in during rituals, one cannot perform them effectively oneself without having been authorised to do so. The result is that the various mumba’i of the village know and are authorised to perform different chants, thus enforcing a distribution of ritual knowledge among them. Learning is usually done by memorisation of orally transmitted ritual knowledge. It is the vocalisation of the ba’i chants and invocations that is effective, and memorising the names of mythical characters and lineages is of absolute importance for the effect to be realised. An apprentice’s ability to do so is tested throughout the teaching period, which may stretch over several years, by inspecting the bile sac colour and the size of sacrificed chickens, since it is through this the ba’i communicate their acceptance of the apprentice. It should be noted that this demand for memorisation of ba’i names does not inhibit creativity and adaptability, and particular mumba’i are well-known for their ability to both memorise and adapt stories according to circumstances. While such distributed memorisation of orally transmitted ritual knowledge used to be the norm for Ifugao ritual knowledge practices and, according to the elderly mumba’i, still is, both the elderly and the younger mumba’i expressed their concerns about the threats these practices were facing from

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Protestant Christianity, tourism and what they generically referred to as modernisation. They saw that the occasions in which ritual knowledge was applied and transferred were dwindling and feared generally for the gradual forgetting and eventual disappearance of their religious practices. However, elderly and younger mumba’i responded to this situation differently and mobilised ethnography in different ways. The elderly mumba’i were clearly concerned with the disappearance of ritual knowledge. They worried about the lack of recruitment of new mumba’i and referred to the disinclination of the young to endure the ordeals of the taboos on eating, washing and sexual interactions that the mumba’i must observe before and after rituals. The content of ethnographies, with their lists of names of ba’i and detailed descriptions of ritual procedures, could thus rescue what was left and be used for reference later. During a dispute between two families, an unspecified book on customary law and conflict resolution had in fact been consulted since knowledge of the procedure was partly forgotten and partly disputed. Also the younger mumba’i shared the elders’ concerns about the future of their practices, and they too appealed to ethnography to salvage them but they did so with reference more to the methodology and epistemology that ethnography here involved than with the actual content of previous ethnographic works. Some of them said explicitly that they knew what the anthropologists had done and that they wanted to do the same. They had therefore begun compiling and writing down long lists of ba’i names and ritual procedures. Associating this with the work of ethnographers, the young mumba’i used this ­technology to tap into the power and authority of these ethnographic methods, engaging in a form of ‘mimesis’ (Taussig 1996) of earlier ethnographers. Beside the notable fact that the number of young mumba’i seemed to be, relative to village size, considerably higher in the villages of Banaue and Baynīnan, both of which have close relations with anthropologists like Henry Otley Beyer and Harold Conklin, than those which had not encountered the same intensity of ethnographic interest, the knowledge and appropriation of ethnographies seemed to influence significantly the relations between young and old mumba’i. The elderly mumba’i accused the younger of being lazy and not making an effort at memorising properly. Writing down the chants, names, and myths also entailed that they were made available to all, with no lineage restrictions, which according to the elderly would diminish their effects and actually could be dangerous to those applying it without proper spiritual authorisation. The younger mumba’i responded, however, by claiming that they accessed the complete list of names, chants, and myths and reproached the elderly for making shortcuts, inventions and for forgetting things. They thus

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enacted Ifugao indigenous religion in different ways, and the methods and epistemologies of ethnographies and earlier ethnographers were mobilised in different ways. I should emphasise that not all mumba’i aligned with their peers, but the dividing lines seemed anyhow to generate a lively debate on the authority and completeness of the ritual knowledge of the actors involved and references to both ethnographies, methods, and their implied epistemologies occurred frequently in it.

Inter-village Relations and Regional Identity Politics

These ethnographically mediated relations between mumba’i translated also into inter-village relations. When I arrived to live at the village of Batad, many expressed their appreciation. “Now we too will have an anthropologist,” they said. To be sure, they had been visited by other scholars before. One of them, Len Newell, a Canadian linguist, had lived there for over two decades, but nevertheless, another anthropologist who could write down ‘their culture’ seemed a promising prospect.5 The villagers compared their own ritual traditions to those of other villages and found them to be incomplete and full of shortcuts. Even some of the mumba’i self-depreciated their ritual knowledge and claimed their ritual knowledge as partial and therefore inferior to that of their neighbours. While I continued showing interest in their ritual knowledges, I was often referred to the village of Baynīnan, where Conklin had done his work, or to Banaue, where Otley Beyer had lived and where there was a cultural museum. The village of Baynīnan was well known in the area for hosting Conklin. Conklin had bought a house there, and in an attached building he had set up a form of research centre and library in which some of the local villagers worked while he was away. His authority and fame in the area was great, and when it occurred that the great ethnographer had actually returned and was present in Baynīnan, I suggested to my co-villagers that I might pop down there for a visit. They responded, however, with hesitation. I could not simply do so but had to send him a letter first, asking for his permission. So I did, and a few days later, a boy came running up to my house carrying an envelope from Yale 5 Leonard Newell, or “Len” as he was commonly referred to, was highly respected in the village. Newell had come to Batad as a Bible translator together with his wife. Lively documented in his book Headhunters’ Encounter With God: An Ifugao Adventure (2007), Newell combined his ethnographic and linguistic research with missionary work, and thus approached Batad animistic practices as something to be documented but also something that the villagers should abandon.

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University, yet another way in which anthropology materialised in the field. I was invited, and within a week or so I was accompanied by a villager to Baynīnan where Conklin and I met for lunch and a chat. My visit with Conklin immediately changed things in Batad. I had been accepted in the village and was met with great expectations regarding documenting their traditions. My insistence on talking to a wide variety of people, not only the experts, seemed nevertheless to worry them just a bit. But now, when everyone knew about my meeting with Conklin, their expectations of my work were enhanced, and I gained a certain methodological authority within the village. Eventually, my meeting with Conklin influenced inter-village relations as well. While we visited other villages together, my travel companions would introduce me as “our anthropologist” followed by “He knows Conklin.” However, Conklin’s authority was up for grabs. As part of his visit to Baynīnan, the municipality of Banaue arranged an official ‘recognition rite’ of the great professor. At the stairs of the municipal hall, Conklin was honoured by a recognition ritual with speeches by the mayor and congressmen, and at the old wooden, stilt built ‘native houses’ behind the hall, a traditional ritual to bless his work was performed by a selection of the areas mumba’i. That the ritual was held in Banaue and not in Baynīnan was partly due to logistical matters, but as much related to the appropriation of Conklin by the former and his enrollment as an ally in local and regional identity politics. When I later returned to the area to conduct another year of fieldwork, another pathway for ethnographic returns emerged. This time I settled down in Banaue, the main village of the area and a centre for tourists coming into the highlands to appreciate the rice terraces. Here ethnography was translated not only into the dynamics of authority and ritual knowledge. It did that too, but here ethnography formed a significant element in Ifugao identity politics on a somewhat larger scale. This was centred on the work of Henry Otley Beyer, an American anthropologist who had lived in the village for several years and had married an Ifugao woman. Villagers frequently pointed to a large house overlooking the village and proudly proclaimed: “You know, that is Otley Beyer’s house.” Attached to the house was a small museum exhibiting a variety of pictures of life in the village in the early 1900s as well as artefacts collected in and around Banaue. Most importantly, however, was Otley Beyer’s work on Ifugao ethno-history (1913; 1955) in which, according to the villagers, it was confirmed that the Ifugao had migrated from mainland Southeast Asia to the area and started building their rice terraces about 2000–3000 years ago. Some of the villagers actually knew that Otley Beyer’s theory was highly disputed and in archeological circles considered refuted, but his theory continued to feed popular imagination. All over the village, various ‘technologies of imagination’,

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(Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen 2009) infused the idea; in tourist lodges and souvenir shops, posters and tourist brochures referred to the two millennia old origin of the terraces, and in various websites promoting both tourism and terrace conservation, the two millennia origin theory was set forth repeatedly. At the crossroad plaza overlooking the village, the ancientness of the terraces was literally carved in stone at the base of a large flag post. As the municipal centre of this part of the province, Banaue villagers seemed to enroll Otley Beyer in identity practices that grounded their traditions in an ancient past. Along with the inclusion of the rice terraces in the unesco World Heritage List and the, half-jokingly, nicknaming of them as the eighth wonder of the world, these mobilisations of ethnography were conducive to extending the reference points of Ifugao identity politics both temporally and spatially.

The Politicisation of Indigeneity and Its Disarticulations

The ancientness of the Ifugao population, and their cultural and religious practices enacted through the translation of Otley Beyer’s theory into identity politics, could easily have been mobilised and translated further into a specific political discourse on indigeneity and indigenous religion. This has happened, however, only within certain contexts. Within tourism and associated cultural performances such as the annual cultural festival called Imbayah, Ifugao performances of rituals figure centrally, but they are not referred to as either ‘religion’ or ‘indigenous’. Here terms like ‘native’ and ‘rituals’ are used instead. To understand why, I suggest we look towards the way the two former terms are associated with wider – historically contingent – socio-political processes. In their writing down of ritual knowledge, young mumba’i are allied with the employees at the local office of the government agency National Commission of Indigenous Peoples (ncip). Located in a nondescript office at the back of a concrete building in the outskirts of Banaue, ncip envisions, according to the ‘mission and vision’ poster decorating the otherwise empty wall, “genuinely empowered iccs/ips whose rights and multi-dimensional well-being are fully recognised, respected and protected and promoted within the framework of national unity and development” (fieldwork notes Banaue, 2008). ncip comes out of a long colonial and political history, having grown out initially from the American colonisers’ Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes, later developed into the Commission on National Integration and re-shaped in 1972 by President Marcos into the Presidential Assistance on National Minorities before it finally found its current form in 1997. This particular colonial and political history of ncip has had implications for the term ‘indigenous’ in local discourse, as it has become a

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term associated with political strife and governmental control. Although ncip promotes itself as a protector of the rights of indigenous people, it does this “within the frame of national unity and development.” So strong is the ncip’s association with governmental control that at the thirteenth session of the un Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2014, a joint statement of a variety of Filipino and Cordilleran human and women’s rights organisations claimed that ncip had “served as a tool for land grabbing, human rights violations, and violations to our right to self-determination” and criticised them for remaining “silent on the militarisation of indigenous communities; and the unabated extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, harassment, forced evacuation, filling of trumped-up charges and other human rights abuses committed against indigenous peoples” (Cordillera Peoples Alliance 2014). The tense political situation associated with the term indigenous was deliberately­shunned by the employees at the local ncip office of Banaue. In our conversations, the term ‘indigenous’ was hardly ever used. Instead, as one of them said, “we call them natives.” And the term ‘native’, less fraught with contested political connotations than the term ‘indigenous’, is ubiquitous in the village. Tourist lodges are named ‘Banaue Native Village Inn’ and tourists are offered trips to visit ‘native houses’ and see ‘native dances’. In the cultural festival called Imbayah, this ‘nativeness’ is performed in a ‘Native Attire Fashion Show’ and a ‘Native Song Competition’. The potential for articulating Ifugao ritual practices within a discourse of indigeneity remains unrealised here, however, although the potential for doing so is quite evident given the way the festival activities – sacrificial rituals, traditional wrestling games and tugs-ofwar for instance – are entrenched in traditional prestige rank performances and therefore closely associated with identity politics. Instead, what appears is rather a performance of disarticulation from the discourse of indigeneity. However, this does not mean that the nativeness discourse is totally antipoliticised (Ferguson 1994), but rather that it has taken on a different form of identity politics, more targeted at the enhancement of cultural self-awareness among the young generation and at attempts at attracting tourists. Hence, the disarticulation of native practices from indigeneity is accompanied by a different form of enacting identity politics. A similar process seems to be at work with regards to the term ‘religion’. A major ethnographic source in Ifugao scholarship is Roy Franklin Barton’s lengthy article, The Religion of the Ifugaos, which outlines the cosmology and pantheon of the Ifugao spirit world (Barton 1946). Although Conklin, Newell, and Otley Beyer were much more widely known, Barton’s work in the region was sometimes also referred to in my fieldwork area. His descriptions of the Ifugao spirit world as a religion on par with Hinduism, due to its comprehensive

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and complex pantheon, has not been mobilised in the same way as other ethnographic works, and performances of Ifugao human-spirit relations are by and large referred to as ‘rituals’ and ‘native rituals’. The term ‘religion’ is used, however, for Catholicism and the various Protestant and Pentecostal congregations that have appeared in the area in the latest twenty to thirty years. Conclusion Ifugao indigenous religion is enacted in multiple ways and could be understood as assemblages that are continuously formed and re-shaped by the shifting coalescing of heterogeneous elements. I have in no way intended to lay out these processes in all their complexity, but rather focused on the way ethnography and ethnographers enter into these assemblages in various ways and with various implications. My main focus here has been the ‘manifest absence’ of former ethnographers, but that of course does not mean that I exempt myself from entering into those assemblages too. As I have indicated, becoming ‘their anthropologists’ had implications for the inter-village relations my home village was enmeshed in, and my relations with other ethnographers such as Conklin did that too. Conducting fieldwork where the presence of earlier scholars’ work was so palpable and figured so strongly in popular imagination was admittedly quite daunting. As mentioned, my work was met with expectations I could hardly meet and which I found both ethically and epistemologically difficult to cope with. I could not and would not provide them with a definite and authoritative account of their ritual practices, regardless of how much they wanted me to. And the task of writing ethnography that would eventually and hopefully return someday became all the more daunting when, during my second fieldwork period, I spent the majority of my time investigating ritual practices in the Pentecostal congregations in Banaue; that is, those whom my initial informants saw as the most dangerous threat to their cultural practices. I wanted to explore the heterogeneity of human-spirit relations in Ifugao, both in terms of how people engaged differently with the ba’i in different contexts and also how conversion to and the presence of Pentecostalism entailed new enactments of human-ba’i relations. Although my Pentecostal informants had redefined ba’i as demons, they struggled with enacting the required detachment from them. They attempted to distance themselves as much as possible, but the requirements of kin related obligations to participate in sacrificial rituals, for instance, made this difficult. Heterogeneity and partial connections became even more evident here. How could such an ethnography be mobilised and what translations

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would it imply? The answers still await response, but judging from the reaction by my former informants on my association with what they considered their most eminent threat to survival of ‘native’ practices, I do not expect much. Anthropological discourse on indigeneity is replete with calls for allying with indigenous voices, for co-authoring, and for releasing them from the seemingly inevitable objectification that results from being ‘informants’. In no way would I object to these attempts at redeeming anthropology’s colonial past, but I offer here reflections on how such objectification and the ethnographic results thereof may return and become mobilised in identity politics, a process that warrants ethnographic attentions in non-reductive ways. This chapter thus pays heed to Dider Fassin’s call for paying attention to the ‘public afterlife of ethnography’ (Fassin 2015), that is, to critically examine the public presence of ethnographic work and how it is transformed and mobilised in different ways by different actors at different times. Hence, in the assemblages through which indigenous religion becomes and transforms – ­processes that we as ethnographers attempt to describe and analyse – ethnography, both former and current – plays a part. As Margaret Wiener points out, “what some people write plays a role in the process through which other people make history in circumstances not of their own choosing”. Paying attention to how the relations between informants and researchers operate – how the pathways between them are two-way streets – is most certainly warranted in a world in which these relations, through global internet access and open access publishing, are becoming ever more entangled and transparent. References Barton, R.F. 1922. “Ifugao Economics.” American Archaeology and Ethnology 15:5, 385–446. Barton, R.F. 1930. “Hunting Soul-Stuff: The Motive Behind Head-Taking as Practiced by Ifugaos of the Philippines.” Asia: Journal of the American Asiatic Association 30, 188–195, 225–226. Barton, R.F. 1946. “The Religion of the Ifugaos.” American Anthropologist 48: 4, Part II, 1–211. Barton, R.F. 1954. “Myths and Their Magic Use in Ifugao.” Journal of East Asiatic Studies 3: 4, 477–479. Barton, R.F. 1969. Ifugao Law. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barton, R.F. 1978. The Half-Way Sun: Life among the Headhunters of the Philippines. New York: Brewer and Warren Inc.

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Bessire, L. 2014. Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Bessire, L. and D. Bond. 2014. “Ontological Anthropology and the Deferral of Critique.” American Ethnologist 41:3, 440–456. Callon, M. 1986. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay.” In J. Law, ed. Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge, 196–223. Clifford, J. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Conklin, H.C. 1980. Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao: A Study of Environment, Culture, and Society in Northern Luzon. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cordillera Peoples Alliance. 2014. “Joint Intervention in Relation to Agenda Item 3: Study on Best Practices and Examples in Resolving Land Disputes and Land Claims, in Relation to the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines.” At https://cpaphils.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/5/. Accessed 08/01/2016. De la Cadena, M. 2010. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond ‘Politics’.” Cultural Anthropology 25:2, 334–370. Fassin, D. 2015. “The Public Afterlife of Ethnography.” American Ethnologist 42: 4, 592–609. Ferguson, J. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lambrecht, F. 1932. “The Mayawyaw Ritual, No. 1: Rice Culture Ritual.” Publications of the Catholic Anthropological Conference 4: 1. Lambrecht, F. 1935. “The Mayawyaw Ritual, No. 2: Marriage and Marriage Ritual.” Publications of the Catholic Anthropological Conference 4: 2. Lambrecht, F. 1938. “The Mayawyaw Ritual, No. 3: Death and Death Ritual.” Publications of the Catholic Anthropological Conference 4: 3. Lambrecht, F. 1939. “The Mayawyaw Ritual, No. 4: Property and Property Ritual.” Publications of the Catholic Anthropological Conference 4: 4. Lambrecht, F. 1951. “The Mayawyaw Ritual, No. 5: Go-Betweens and Priests.” Publications of the Catholic Anthropological Conference 4: 5. Lambrecht, F. 1955. “The Mayawyaw Ritual, No. 6: ‘Illness and Its Ritual’.” Journal of East Asiatic Studies 4: 4, 1–55. Lambrecht, F. 1958. “The Mayawyaw Ritual, No. 7: ‘Hunting and Its Ritual’.” Journal of East Asiatic Studies 6: 1, 1–28. Latour, B. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, J. 2007. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Mol, A. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Newell, L. 2007. Headhunters’ Encounter with God: An Ifugao Adventure. New York: iUniverse. Otley Beyer, H. 1913. “Origin Myths among the Mountain Peoples of the Philippines.” The Philippine Journal of Science 8:2, Sec. D. Otley Beyer, H. 1955. “The Origin and History of the Philippine Rice Terracers.” Proceedings, 8th Pacific Science Congress I, 380–398. Remme, J.H.Z. 2012. “Manifesting Potentials: Animism and Pentecostalism in Ifugao, the Philippines.” PhD. Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. Remme, J.H.Z. 2014. Pigs and Persons in the Philippines: Human-Animal Entanglements in Ifugao Rituals. Lanham: Lexington Books. Rosaldo, R. 1986. When Natives Talk Back: Chicano Anthropology since the Late 60s. Tuscon: Mexican American Studies and Research Center, University of Arizona. Salmond, A.J.M. 2013. “Transforming Translations (Part I): ‘The Owner of These Bones’.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3:3, 1–32. Scheper-Hughes, N. 2001. Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, L.T. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Sneath, D., M. Holbraad, and M.A. Pedersen. 2009. “Technologies of the Imagination: An Introduction.” Ethnos 74:7, 5–30. Taussig, M. 1996. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York and London: Routledge. Wiener, M.J. 2015. “Island Cooking.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5:1, 535–540.

chapter 18

The Beginning of a Long Journey: Maintaining and Reviving the Ancestral Religion among the Ainu in Japan Takeshi Kimura Introduction Like many other indigenous peoples, the Ainu have suffered and endured long years of colonisation, assimilation and discrimination since the midnineteenth century. When they re-emerged as an ethnic minority after World War ii, their ‘traditional’ social system had collapsed, and their ordinary lives were almost the same as many other Westernised Japanese. Since the 1960s, a cultural and religious revival movement has emerged, aimed at the protection and revival of traditions, including language; inspired by global indigenous networks and the international movement of indigenous peoples. The Japanese government today recognises the Ainu as an indigenous people in Japan, and supports the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (undrip), yet it denies any claims to political sovereignty made by the Ainu. This chapter explores how some Ainu have become aware of their places within a global indigenous community, have been empowered by such awareness, and are struggling to maintain and revive their traditions. In examining these issues, the following questions will be addressed: What form does the revival of the Ainu culture take after their traditional social lives of hunting and gathering have been lost and their associated religious practices have become obsolete? What are the roles played by Ainu museums in the revival of the Ainu tradition? With these questions in mind, I visited Ainu museums, talked with their staff, and observed some of the cultural performances presented there.

Recent Scholarly Studies of the Ainu Cultural Revival

There are numerous studies of Ainu culture, society and religion, but not many cover the revival of this culture in relation to connections with indigenous people elsewhere. In The Return of the Ainu: Cultural mobilization and the practice of ethnicity in Japan, Katarina V. Sjöberg (1993) examines on-going cultural efforts to construct and reconstruct Ainu cultural identities, especially focusing © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_020

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on the interaction between the Ainu and the Wajin (Japanese). She pays little attention to the Ainu people’s effort to connect to the global indigenous community. In Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan, Richard M. Siddle (1996) locates­the social development of the Ainu resistance first in Japanese domestic history, and second in global indigenous communities. Though the Ainu people are usually regarded as an ethnic cultural group, Siddle emphasises that each local Ainu community has its own distinctive history and culture. Therefore, even though population numbers are low, it is important to recognise this diversity. He notes that by the 1980s, the Ainu people had become aware of indigenous resistance movements through which many indigenous communities assert sovereign status, if in varying degrees. In his article “Rethinking Ainu Heritage: A Case Study of an Ainu Settlement in Hokkaido, Japan,” Sidney C.H. Cheung (2005) focuses on a specific settlement on Lake Akan and examines the past and present Ainu community there. Their cultural performances have become well-known tourist attractions, and in this way some of their traditions have been maintained.

The Present Condition of the Ainu People

In Japan, the majority of the Ainu people are presumed to live in Hokkaido, northern Japan, but quite a number live in the Tokyo Metropolitan area too. The exact number is hard to estimate because many still hide their ethnic identity due to historical, and continued, Japanese discrimination. Based on the 2015 census, which counts the number of Ainu households, the municipal offices estimated the number residing in Hokkaido, as 16,786, down from 23,782 in 2008. In 2013, approximately 5,000 Ainu were living in the Metropolitan Tokyo area and 2,700 within Tokyo proper. It should be noted that many Ainu children are not told by their parents that they are Ainu descendants, and accordingly do not know. Their legal status is Japanese, since the Japanese government does not recognise the sovereignty of the Ainu ‘nation’ but recognized the Ainu as being an indigenous people in 2008. Before the end of World War ii (wwii), the Ainu lived not only in Hokkaido, but also in Sakhalin and the Kuril-Chishima islands just off the north coast of Japan. These islands have been a source of considerable dispute between Japan and Russia, with Russia claiming the islands at the end of wwii. Therefore, after the war, most Ainu living in Sakhalin were transported to Hokkaido and so there is a very small number of Ainu descendants in Russian territory today. The Ainu in Japan do not appear to have developed ‘ethnic’ connections with these Ainu remaining in Sakhalin but instead have developed connections with other ethnic minorities in Russian Siberia.

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Below, in order to tackle the topic of the Ainu in the global context, I focus on exploring the cultural and social roles of Ainu museums mainly in three towns across Hokkaido: Shiraoi, Niputani and Akan. From April to July 2015, I visited these places and their local museums, and interviewed several people concerning their knowledge and views of Ainu relationships to indigenous communities and movements outside Japan, and collected information on Ainu activities and practices. Since Western notions of ‘religion’ do not fit very well with traditional Ainu religion, I will pay special attention to sub-categories such as rituals, mythic narratives, human relationship to landscape, and daily practices. At this point, it is necessary to note that Ainu traditions displayed local diversity and that there were sometimes conflicts among local communities. It is important to refrain from projecting our romantic view of the ‘pure’ indigenous community when addressing the living traditions of these diverse communities. Recent important social developments concerning the Ainu revival include the so-called New Ainu Law, passed by the Japanese government in 1997. The Hokkaido Utari Association (Now the Hokkaido Ainu Association) during the 1970s started compiling the draft for a new law to improve the social, political and legal status of the Ainu and demanded, without success, that the Japanese Government acknowledge them. The late Mr Kayano, the first Ainu politician of the Upper House, elected in 1994, was actively involved in designing the Law. After the Ainu New Law, the government promoted the preservation and enhancement of the Ainu culture and cultural activities, but without recognising the political sovereignty some Ainu people have claimed. This new law became a milestone in changing the governmental attitude to the Ainu people though there remain many unsolved problems. The Japanese government treats Ainu issues as cultural issues, not political ones. In 2009, the Ainu traditional dance was designated as a unesco World Culture Heritage, and non-Ainu Japanese became more interested in visiting the Ainu settlements and museums. In 2014, the Japanese Government announced that the National Ainu Cultural Museum would open in Shiraoi as a symbol of coexistence and planned to coincide this opening with the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.

Global Connections

Shiraoi, Niputani and Akan have different cultural and historical backgrounds, and have developed different global connections with other indigenous communities. How they meet other indigenous people is also variable from one Ainu person to another, and the kind of cultural awareness each acquires in

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the process is also different. Encounters with other indigenous peoples have, for instance, been important and inspiring occasions for young Ainu people in thinking about their own cultural and social situations. There are a variety of ways that the Ainu peoples have developed relationships with other indigenous communities. For example, in Lake Akan, Mr Hideo Akibe, a local craftsman and political activist, told me that on his trip to Canada when he was young, he met several First Nations people, and learned that indigenous issues are global (fieldwork notes, Lake Akan, May 2015). Before that experience, he thought that the Ainu issue was just domestic, an issue of the relationship between minority and majority, that of colonised and coloniser in Japan. In meeting the First Nations people in Canada, he realised that the Ainu belong to a global indigenous community and that the issue of the status of the Ainu is part of a larger, global indigenous movement. A young Ainu staffperson at the Shiraoi Ainu Museum told me that during her college trip to Hawaii, she saw the Hawaiian indigenous people proudly dancing and singing in their traditional manner, and found out that she could do the same things with the Ainu tradition. After this trip, she began to learn more about the Ainu culture (fieldwork notes, Shiraoi, April 2015). Evidence of Ainu ties with global indigenous communities manifested in their contemporary practices and their memories of past meetings. At ­several craft shops, for example, memories of their relationship with indigenous people elsewhere can be found. On the wall of a craft shop owned by Mr ­Morita in Akan, a flag is hung with names of the Ainu and Brazilian indigenous peoples such as Bororo, Kaxinawa, Xavante, and Karaja (fieldwork notes, Lake Akan, May 2015). In the early 1990s, Mr Morita and his friends visited Brazil and shared their experiences with Brazilian indigenous peoples. At the Takano craft shop in Niputani, a poster from the Biratori Niputani Ainu and Indigenous Exchange in 2005 can still be seen today. Keeping these posters on the wall of their shops demonstrates, both to themselves and to visitors, that the Ainu people have connections with indigenous people in other parts of the world, and that they are not merely an ethnic minority in Japan. Municipal offices and museums have played very important roles in not only developing global connections but also in preserving traditions and educating young Ainu about their traditions.1 According to Mr Itsuki Nakamura,­ the former director of the Ainu Museum in Shiraoi, which opened in 1984, has developed very close ties with Northern European indigenous people, 1 The Ainu Museum in Shiraoi, a private institute, has a long history. The Kayano Shigeru Ainu Museum in Biratori, a private institute, and the Biratori Ainu Museum in Niputani, a municipal museum, respectively have very important functions.

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especially with the Sami Museum in Norway, and with other European and Russian indigenous communities and museums (fieldwork notes, Shiraoi, April 2015). This is also evident in the exhibition at the Museum. The Shiraoi area was chosen as the location for the National Ainu Museum in 2014 because of its long and productive history as a museum with educational and apprenticeship programmes, and because of its geographical location in Hokkaido. The Ainu people in Niputani, where the largest Ainu population is found, have been developing relationships with other indigenous peoples since 1974. Since the Ainu population is also a relative majority in Niputani, such relationships have been supported by the local municipal offices. The Ainu in Niputani have held Indigenous Forum meetings twice, in 1993 and 2005, bringing together indigenous peoples from different countries (Niputani Foramu Jikko Iinkai 1994). Those indigenous people who participated in the 1993 forum were mainly from North America, in addition to one from South Africa, one from the Philippines and one Sami; thus reflecting the global recognition of the contribution of the Native American leaders.2 After ten years, the Ainu people’s relationship to indigenous communities has broadened. In the Biratori Niputani Forum of 2005, for instance, indigenous people from Southeast Asian countries comprised a large percentage of the visiting participants. In Biratori, Niputani, the ties between Ainu and Maori have been strengthening over the last few years. On 26 January 2012, Maori Party leader Mr Te Ururoa Flavell attended the launch of the Ainu Party, which has a stated policy to foster the implementation of undrip. On that occasion, he suggested that some Ainu youth visit Maori communities in New Zealand so that they learn about Maori efforts to revitalise their cultures and languages. This resulted in the highly successful exchange programme, Aotearoa Ainu Mosir, where Ainu visitors went to New Zealand to study the variety of Maori activities. There is also an interesting case from the Kayano Shigeru Ainu Cultural Resource Centre in Niputani. The former Director of the Centre, late Mr Kayano, was a local Ainu writer, educator, town congressman, member of the Upper 2 To mention these indigenous people: Ernest Alfred of Namgis, Canada, Stephen Azak of Nisgaa, Canada, Dennis Banks of Chippewa-Anishinabe, us, Kelly Brown of Heiltsuk, Canada, Frank Arthus Calder of Nisgaa, Canada, Bill Cranmer of Kwagiulth, Canada, Gloria Cranmer Webster of Kwagiulth, Canada, Tom Dostou of Abenaki, us, Joseph Arthus Gosnell of Nisgaa, Canada, David Gladstone of Heiltsuk, Canada, Guujaaw of Haida Nation, Canada, Johannes Marainen of Saami, Sweden, Victor Matom of Republic of South Africa, Elizabeth Nelson of Mamalilikala, Canada, Annette Reed-Grum of Tolowa, us, Elena R. Regpala of Cordelliera, Phillippines, Henry Seaweed of N´akwaxdaw, Canada, and Jeffrey Wood of Chemehuevi, Canada.

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House of the National Congress, and, indeed, the first Ainu member of the National Congress. In the Resource Centre, he collected many Ainu crafts and items, and wrote many books on Ainu culture, myths, and other matters. After his death, his son Shiro Kayano succeeded him at the Centre and he has also taken over as the head of the Ainu Party. The Centre’s exhibition demonstrates ways the Ainu people have developed their relationships with indigenous peoples from around the world (fieldwork notes, Nibutai, July 2015). Far away from Hokkaido, as already mentioned, many of the Ainu people live in the metropolitan Tokyo area. Mr Haruzo Urakawa is one of the leading Ainu elders among the Tokyo metropolitan-area Ainu. He is well respected both by fellow Ainu and local Japanese alike. Harada Yoshito wrote about Urakawa’s life as an Ainu (2003), and a film was later made about Urakawa’s life, entitled Living with Kamuy (2011). In his 40s, Urakawa moved from Hokkaido to the Tokyo area and started his own, successful construction company. When Urakawa, then chairperson of the Kanto Utari Association, heard that many indigenous people were coming to Tokyo to attend the special symposium for the u.n. Year of Indigenous Peoples in 1992, he decided to construct a building named Poro-Chise (big house) in Yamanashi, two hours away from Tokyo, where the indigenous people could stay during their visit. In 2005, Urakawa built another building in Chiba named Kamuy Mintara (meaning the playground of the gods, according to Urakawa), and some indigenous people from abroad came and participated in the opening ceremony of the Symposium. Two Native American medicine men, Chief Thomas Dostou, the Chippewyan/Wabenaki of Fall River, Massachusetts, and Leo Saint-Ange, the Innu of Quebec, visited Urakawa’s Kamuy Mintara. The year before, Saint-Ange presented Urakawa, when he was visiting North America, with a bear’s skull. In 2006, four Tlingit artists, an indigenous people from the Pacific coast of North America, including Keith Wolfe Smarch, a world famous artist, visited Urakawa in Tokyo. In the spring of 2008, an aboriginal artist from Tasmania, a Bandura player from Ukraine named Kateryna, as well as many members of the Mukawa Ainu Cultural Preservation Society gathered together in Urakawa’s Kamuy Mintara. In the summer of 2009, Chief Thomas Dostou revisited the Kamuy Mintara with Lauren Silverbird of the Kiowa Wichita Nations. Urakawa’s relationship with indigenous peoples from around the globe is based upon his own personal efforts to bring people together (Unfortunately, Kamuy Mintara itself was closed at the end of 2015, due to the expiration of the rent of the land) (fieldwork notes, Kisarazu, April 12, 2015). Examples of how the global indigenous movement has impacted the Ainu people’s activities include the interesting issue of returning ancestral bones.

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As early as 1983, the Hokkaido Utari Association had requested that the Hokkaido University offer the appropriate prayers and return their ancestral bones; bones which had been taken by the university (from 1930s to 1950s). Later in the 1990s, many Ainu appealed again, this time citing The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra) of 1990 of the usa as a case in point. In a similar manner to nagpra, some Ainu people began to claim that theft of ancestral bones from Ainu graves was a violation of their human rights. In Hokkaido, some Ainu people have filed a suit every year since 2012 to demand the return of these Ainu ancestral bones to the respective local communities. In the filed document, the Ainu representatives say that they are not able to perform the appropriate ritual prayer for their ancestors, prayers based upon the traditional Ainu religious practice, because the bones have not been returned to them, and that this also violates the freedom of religion guaranteed by the Japanese Constitution. An old Ainu woman named Yuri Jonoguchi recalled that her mother used to tell her how she (her mother) was very sad to see the empty graves from where the bones of her grandparents and relatives were removed, and that she always felt sorry for her ancestors in her prayers to Kamuy, the Ainu deity. She wanted the bones to be returned to the grave. On the other hand, following the recommendation of the Hokkaido Ainu Association, the Japanese government issued a directive stipulating that those bones should be brought to the new National Ainu Museum where there would be space for a memorial. Since the museum would be a national institution, the separation of religion and state would be upheld, which means, a memorial space would probably be designed as a secular one, though paying particular respect to the Ainu cultural traditions. When we consider how actively the Ainu people protest against the Japanese government, there are several important issues to ponder. For example, one Japanese staff worker at the Biratori Ainu Museum shared his view with me on the Ainu peoples’ relationship with global indigenous cultures. He was very impressed by some North American indigenous leaders who were very eloquent in speeches and presentations at public gatherings. In contrast, the Ainu leaders were rather shy, and not so vocal. Yet, he wondered how much their comparative policies and movements had achieved. When he explained to these North American indigenous leaders the policies and movements the Ainu people had instigated, they were rather surprised to hear how much the Ainu people had done. In addition, when he and his Ainu friends passed by an indigenous community on the way from Vancouver to Victoria Island, he heard his Ainu friends saying that the infrastructure of the residential community seemed not to be so well established, in contrast to the relatively wellconstructed infrastructure of Hokkaido (fieldwork notes, Biratori, July 2015).

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The Ainu Language, Ritual Prayer, and Learning Narrative in the Ainu Language

Many Ainu have not been brought up with the Ainu language but became interested in learning later on in their lives. Today, many Ainu people are learning the Ainu language as a second language, through radio programmes and local classes. The situation for the Ainu language is not optimistic, but some manage to speak it fluently. For the revival of religious rituals, this is vital. The situation has remained the same for a long time. In a video showing a performance of Iyomante (1977), the traditional ceremony of killing a brown bear to send its spirit back to the land of the gods, which late Mr Kayano and others from the cultural centre organised, many Ainu youth were shown ­learning the Ainu languages which were associated with the procedure and preparation of the ritual, including the ritual prayer. It is often said that when Ainu men offer prayer, there should not be any mistakes in the way it is performed. In the present day, this traditional saying is particularly striking. Because the Ainu people do not learn the Ainu language as their first language, many of them are not confident in using the Ainu language in religious settings and some feel hesitant to say a prayer in the Ainu language. Today, there is a bilingual book of Ainu prayers available. At the Ainu Museum in Shiraoi, several Ainu people are learning the Ainu language and practising narrating their traditional stories in their own language. Some only start to learn the Ainu language after they are middle-aged. The Iyomante ceremony is often regarded as one of the central religious rituals of the Ainu religion. There are several aspects to consider concerning performances of the Iyomante and the transmittance of knowledge through the ceremony. For example, the main body to perform Iyomante is now the Ainu Museum, and no longer in a kotan, or traditional Ainu village (Ainu Minzoku Hakubutsukan 1990, 1991). This change of the main agency in performing Iyomante indicates the loss of the kotan as the collective ritual performer, along with changes in the social, clan and family relationships, as well as Japanese legal regulations. Since the aim of Iyomante was to ensure the return of the bear by sending the spirit of the cub bear off to the land of the kamuy (deities), the reciprocal cycle of spiritual and bodily existences is no longer so much appreciated and cherished in daily life.

The Ainu Kotan (Village) and the Iwor Restoration Plan

The visual image of traditional Ainu life is always the Ainu Kotan (village) and the Chise, the wooden framed, straw houses. The square shaped form has its

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religious spatial orientation. Today, most Ainu people live in Japanese style houses, which are in fact the Japanised Western style, and they do not live in villages, but rather are scattered in many areas. The traditional style of the Ainu house – chise – is only found in cultural exhibitions, a showcase for the traditional way of living. On the site of the Shiraoi Ainu Museum, there are several styles of chise. In one of them, Poro-Chise, or big house, prayers are offered, and traditional dances performed. In Niputani, Biratori, beside the Ainu Museum, there is Iwor Park, which is a restored imagined kotan. The Iwor Park plan is a public park, recreating the traditional village and houses, with a designated area for traditional cultural activities. Traditionally, the interior of a chise is structured religiously. Some important places are a central hearth, the Eastern Window, and the treasures obtained through trade with the Japanese, which are placed in the North-East corner. At the centre of the house is the hearth, which the people sat around together. The fire in the hearth was called Ape-Fuchi-Kamuy, the god of the old lady Fire, to whom the people offered their prayers with the Iku-pasuy (traditional artefacts) to convey their prayers to other kamuy (deities). A chise has an EastWest structure with an eastern window, which is a sacred window called the Rorun Puyara, through which the head of the dismembered bear with its fur is brought inside. This is the place where several important religious rituals are performed. It is here that the Ainu people offer their prayers to the kamuy of water, the kamuy of woods, and the kamuy of the garden too. There are many rituals associated with building a chise. But the knowledge of the chise construction has been lost and is only preserved in books and audio visual form. The Shiraoi museum functions as a knowledge reservoir and as a performer of Ainu rituals. This was particularly evident when the museum organised the reconstruction of a chise after a fire. Alongside several Ainu elders, the Japanese scholar of Ainu culture Professor Hisakazu Fujimura, instructed Ainu people in the reconstruction of a chise and in the procedures of the ritual dances, explaining the meanings as the construction was happening (Ainu Minzoku Hakubutsukan 2000). The importance of the kotan is seen in the primal Ainu kamuy (deity), ­kotan-kor-kamuy, the protective kamuy of a village, who takes the form of an owl. The Bear ritual of Iyomante is very well known, but the Owl ritual of ­Iyomante was performed among the Ainu kotan before too. In 1983, in the Lake Kusharo kotan, the Owl ritual of Iyomante was restored and performed for the first time in seventy-five years. Actually no Ainu elder of that time had ever observed an Owl ritual of Iyomante. Gaining what they could from a drawing, they performed the restored ritual. However, with the changing times, they could not kill an owl due to government regulations, and therefore, utilised a stuffed owl instead.

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The restored chise became a secular place, intended for non-residential purposes, tourist visits and for the Ainu people to practise and perform their dances and songs. Since the Ainu people now live in non-traditional Japanese style housing, the restored chise offers a place where they can feel connected with their tradition and perform the traditional domestic rituals. Inside the chise, a traditional time and space takes place when traditional rituals are performed, but these rituals also become the object of recording and photography. In some other indigenous societies, photographing and recording of traditional rituals is forbidden. However, the Ainu ritual is no longer performed regularly; therefore it needs to be stored and recorded. For example, the Shiraoi Ainu Museum recorded the construction of the traditional house chise and related rituals, the planned performance of the Iyomante (the Bear Ritual), and others. The Foundation for Research and Promotion of Ainu Culture has begun to record some narratives in the Ainu language and music as well.

Landscape and a Myth of Okikurumi

The Niputani area along the Saru River is the stage where the Ainu cultural hero named Okikurumi performed his heroic deeds. When I asked Mr ­Kaizawa, the middle-aged son of the elderly Ainu couple who ran the inn where I stayed, if he knew the Okikurumi myth, he replied positively (fieldwork notes, Nibutani, July 2015). Then he suggested that I should go and see one of his relatives, a craftsman, who knew the myth. The mythic narrative of Okikurumi is still told and shared among the local Ainu people today. So, I dropped in at the craftshop where I met the man and asked him if he knew the myth of Okikurumi. He hesitated before replying, saying that he does not openly narrate the Okikurumi story, and so could not tell me about the myths. There are several Okikurumi mythic narratives and they mention several characteristic forms of the landscape around Niputani where the myths of Okikurumi are set. I asked Mr Kaizawa to drive me around to show me the landscape. While he was driving, he told me some old stories about the traditional ritual practices conducted beside the cliff, along the Saru river. The location is, according to him, a traditional ritual space for the Ainu people to offer their prayers to Okikurumi. He added that the Ainu people do not do this prayer anymore. The practice is gone, but the memory of it remains. He also told me that there are tour groups who come from Sapporo, the capital city of Hokkaido, to see these landscapes associated with Okikurumi. These tourist visits have awakened in the mind of the Ainu people an interest in the ­Okikurumi myth. Yet, these Ainu people do not consider the Okikurumi myths as a cultural resource for tourism.

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The Biratori Ainu Culture Museum provides information concerning the places related to the myths of Okikurumi such as Hayopira, Ukaeroshiki, Penkechitu kanpira and Opushinupuri, each place has its own significance and story attached to it. In order to understand some of the mythic atmosphere in the landscape of Niputani, it is useful to visit these places after reading or hearing the mythic stories associated with them. Hayopira is the place where Okikurumi descended down from the celestial world and first dwelt on earth. It is where he instructed the Ainu on how to lead their lives, how to pray effectively, how to heal sickness with prayers, and so on. Ukaeroshiki is the place where three triangular standing rocks are seen. It is said that when Okikurumi was hunting in Ukaeroshiki and tried to shoot arrows at one mother bear and two cubs, they repeatedly ran away. After missing the animals several times, he got angry and declared “I, Okikurumi, am trying to shoot you, but you refuse to be shot by me. Then, you must be turned into rocks.” Penkechitu kanpira and Opushinupuri are two rocky mountains, approximately two kilometers away from each other. Penkechitu kanpira is shaped like the head of an arrow, and Opushinupuri is a rock with a hole shaped like a circle. It is said that Okikurumi was practising throwing an arrow here. When he threw the arrow, it missed the body of the mountain but penetrated through the top. The village of Nukabira was created at the place where Okikurumi stood and threw the arrow, where a small residential cluster still exists. For the Ainu residents living in the Niputani, the Okikurumi myth is not only a source of cultural pride and distinctive cultural heritage, but is also a potential source for any legal action. Over the plan to build the Niputani dam along the Saru River, Mr Tadashi Kaizawa, and late Mr Shigeru Kayano, local residents, refused to yield their lands to the state, and filed a lawsuit against the Hokkaido municipal government in 1993. In their statement, they referred to the myth of Okikurumi (just mentioning the name) and explained the rituals and narratives that the Ainu people perform along the Saru River. In 1997 the trial was concluded and the Sapporo District Court formally recognised the Ainu as an indigenous people, primarily based upon these claims. However, despite this recognition, the Niputani dam was eventually built.

Nature, Ecology and the Indigenous Religion of the Ainu

In Akan, eastern Hokkaido, the Marimo festival of returning marimo (endangered algae) to Lake Akan is held in October. The festival started about forty years ago to celebrate the return of marimo (Aegagropila linnaei, Mossimo,

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Lake ball) to the Akan area, after a public call for their return. They had been taken away as souvenirs, were scattered all over Japan, and little left in the lake. For the ceremony, an Ainu elder on a boat receives the marimo from the lake and brings them back to the kotan (village). Then, the next day, a local Ainu elder leads a procession from the kotan to the lake, boards a boat with the marimo, and ceremonially returns them back to the lake. Even though it was only created in a recent moment of local history, it has become a local festive tradition (Irimoto 2001). Any local tourist information (Lake Akan Tourist Information) gives the impression that the Ainu is an ethnic group who traditionally take care of marimo, but actually the Ainu did not regard marimo as important previously. Rather they saw it as a useless thing for human lives, calling it torasampe (lake goblin). As the local Ainu community changed its role in the Akan community, their relationship to nature and to specific natural objects changed too. It is not only the Ainu people who wish to promote the idea that the Ainu culture is concerned with nature. The Japanese society also wants to utilise this image. In Biratori, Niputani, certain mountain areas along the Niputani Dam are designated and preserved for local Ainu people, as a part of the Iwor Park plan, so that they can have free access to plants and wildlife in order to maintain their traditional ways of life. As mentioned, the Niputani Dam was built despite local opposition and resistance against the plan along the Saru River in the 1980s and 1990s. Local Ainu people filed lawsuits against the government, yet, the government carried out these plans. Today, the local municipal government, the town office, has a branch devoted to the preservation and promotion of Ainu culture, which promotes the Iwor Park plan, as the Niputani Dam has indeed destroyed an important part of the Ainu living space and is an area that is also important to the Ainu culturally. In 2014, the Japanese government decided, as part of the Iwor plan, to build the National Ainu Museum in Shiraoi, which is to be opened to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. This began as an initiative driven by the local Ainu people but when the government agreed and chose the location of Shiraoi, the theme was suddenly changed to “The Symbolic Space for Ethnic Coexistence,” with a plan to make the area a sort of ecological zone, showing the Ainu’s ecological view of nature. In July 2015, the Agency for Culture Affairs publicised the basic outline of the National Ainu Museum and we will have to wait and see the final form the Museum will take. “The Symbolic Space” will represent the Ainu view of nature, according to an original plan. However, because it is the National Ainu Museum, the represented Ainu view of nature there, I would suggest, would be heavily framed and influenced by the Japanese view of nature.

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Conclusion After the Ainu New Law, which seeks to improve the social, political and legal­ status of the Ainu, was accepted by both the Japanese and Ainu people, the public perception of the Ainu tradition has become more positive. Yet, the ‘traditional’ society based on hunting and gathering is largely gone. Today, however, the resurgence has meant that the Ainu people are allowed to gather some traditional plants in the protected areas, as designated by the Japanese local government. Considering their past and the social conditions imposed upon the Ainu, the revival of their tradition has only just begun. Nowadays, some Japanese are marrying Ainu partners and, through this, begin to support the traditional Ainu way of life. In talking about a Japanese man who is married to an Ainu woman, Mr Akibe said he is learning the Ainu way of life, and that he would become an Ainu sometime soon. Today, being an Ainu is not only a matter of birth, but learning and appreciating the ‘traditional’ Ainu way of life. In present day Japan, this ‘traditional’ way of life is being seen in new, and novel, articulations. References Ainu Minzoku Hakubutsukan. 1990. Iyomante-Kuma no rei okuri-Hokokusho. Ainu Minzoku Hakubutsukan. 1991 Iyomante-Kuma no rei okuri-Hokokusho II. Ainu Minzoku Hakubutsukan. 2000. Porochise no kenchiku girei. Ainu Mukei Bunka Densho Hozonkai. 1981. Kamigami no Monogatari, Ainu Mukei Minzoku Bunkazai Kiroku 1. Akino, Shigeru, et al. 1998. Ainu Bunka wo denshosuru: Kayano Shigeru Ainu Bunka Koza II. Tokyo: Sofukan. Bachira, J. 1995. Ainu no densho to minzoku. Tokyo: Seidosha. Cheung, S.C.H. 2005. “Rethinking Ainu Heritage: A Case Study of an Ainu Settlement in Hokkaido, Japan.” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 11: 3, 197–210. Endo, M. 1997. Ainu to Shuryo Saishu shakai, shudan no ryudosei no kansuru chirigakuteki kenkyu. Tokyo: Daimeido. Hironobu Kosaka, ed. 2006. Muroran, Noboribetsu no Ainu go chimei kennkyu, Inkar-an ro. Noboribetsu: Chiri Mashiho wo kataru kai. Fujimoto, H. 1994. Chiri Mashio no shogai. Tokyo: Sofukan. Fukuoka, I. 1995. Ainu Shokubutsushi. Tokyo: Sofukan. Haginaka E. et al. 1992. Kikigaki Ainu no Shokuji, Nihon no shokuseikatsu Zenshu 48. Tokyo: Shadan Hojin Nosan Gyoson Bunka Kyokai.

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Harada, Y. 2003. Ainu no Haruzo. Tokyo: Ainu no Haruzo Kankokai. Igarashi, S. 2003. Ainu Emaki Tanpo. Sapporo: Hokkaido Shinbunsha. Irimoto, T. 2001. “Marimo Matsuri no Sozo-Ainu no kizokusei to minzokuteki kyosei.” Minzokugaku Kenkyu 66: 3, 321–343. Izumi, S. 1952. “Saru Ainu no chien shudan ni okeru IWOR (The Iwor and the Territorial Group of the Saru Ainu),” Kikan Minzokugaku 16: 3–4, 213–229. Kanakura, G. 2006. Asahikawa, Ainu Minzoku no Kin Gendaishi. Tokyo: Kobunken. Kayano, S. 2002. Ainu no Itakutakusa: kotoba no kiyome kusa. Tokyo: Toseisha. Kayano, S. 2003. Itsutsu no Shinzo wo motta kami. Tokyo: Komine Shoten. Kayano, S. 2005. Iyomante no Hanaya: Zoku Ainu no hi. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha. Keira, M. 2013. Ainu Shakai to Gairai Shukyo, Sapporo: Jurosha. Kinsei, M. 1961. Ainu Jojishi Yukara Shu II. Tokyo: Sanseido. Kojima, K. 2003. Ainu Minzokushi no Kenkyu, Ezo/Ainukan no rekisitekihensen. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan. Kojima, K. 2009. Emishi, Ezo kara Ainu he. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan. Kubodera I. 2001. Ainu Minzoku no Shukyo to Girei: Kubodera Itsuhiko Chosakushu 1. Tokyo: Sofukan. Nibutani Foramu Jikko IinnKai, 1994, Ainu Moshir ni tsudou: sekai senjuminzoku no messeji. Tokyo: Eiko Kyoiku Bunka Kenkyujo. Ohnuki-Tierney, E. 1981. Illness and healing among the Sakhalin Ainu: A symbolic interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Otsuka, K. 1995. Ainu, Kaihin to Mizube no tami. Tokyo: Shinjuku Shobo. Pon Fuchi. 1976. Ainugoha Ikiteiru: kotoba no tamashii no fukken. Tokyo: Shinsensha. Pon Fuchi. 1978. Yukara ha yomigaeru: Ainugo sekai heno nyumon. Tokyo: Shinsensha. Sakada, M. 2011. Ainu Koshobungaku no Ninshikiron-Epistemoroji-: Rekishi no hoho tositeno Ainu sanbun setsuwa. Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobo. Sapporo Gakuin Daigaku Jinbungakubu, ed. 1990. Ainu Bunka ni manabu. Sapporo: Sapporo Gakuin Diagaku Jinbungakkai. Sasaki, K. 2009. Hokkaido no Shukyo to Shinko. Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppan. Satouchi, A. 2008. Ainu shiki ekoroji-seikatu: Haruzo ekashi ni manabu, sizen no chie. Tokyo: Shogakkan. Segawa, K. 1972. Ainu no konin. Tokyo: Miraisha. Siddle, R. 1996. Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan. New York: Routledge. Sjöberg, K.V. 1993. The Return of the Ainu: Cultural mobilization and the practice of ethnicity in Japan. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Sueoka, T. 1979. Ainu no hoshi. Asahikawa: Asahikawa Shinko Kosha. Takabeya, F. 1943. Ainu no Jukyo, Tokyo: Shokokusha. Tokyo Ainushi Kenkyukai, ed. 2007. Tokyo, Icharupa heno michi. Tokyo: Gendai Kikakushitu. Ui, M. 2001. Ainu tokidoki Nihonjin. Tokyo: Shakai Hyoronsha.

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Utagawa, H. 1988. Ainu Bunka Seiritsushi. Sapporo: Hokkaido Shuppan Kikaku Senta. Watson, M.K. 2014. Japan’s Ainu Minority in Tokyo: Diasporic Indigeneity and Urban Politics. Oxford: Routledge. Yamada, S. 1995. Ainugo Chimei no Rinkaku. Tokyo: Sofukan. Yamakawa, T. 1980. Ainu Minzoku Bunkashiron heno Shiron: Tokyo: Miraisha. Yamakawa, T. 1998. Ainu ha shucho suru. Tokyo: Miraisha. Yura, I. 1990. Ainugo chimei to densetsu no iwa. Asahikawa: Maruyoshi Insatsu Kabushiki Kaisha. Yura, I. 2004 Kamikawagunnai, Ishikawa honshiryu Ainugo Chimeikai. Sapporo: Hokkaido Shuppan Kikaku Senta. Zaidan Hojin Ainu Minzoku Hakubutsukan. 2000. Porochise no Kenchiku Girei, Densho Jigyo Hokokusho. Shiraoi: Zaidan Hojin Ainu Minzoku Hakubutsukan.

chapter 19

Replacing ‘Religion’ with Indigenous Spirit: Grounding Australian Indigenous Identity in Wider Worlds Steve Bevis Introduction This chapter provides a window into recent efforts by indigenous Australians to maintain continuity with tradition – those remarkable ‘songlines’ that represent the ancient indigenous ‘map’ of Australia that contained the laws, stories and values of this land and its peoples – while distilling principles and practices from the past that can inform a revitalised sense of identity and indigeneity in the present. Within this diverse and emerging process can be discerned the attempt, at both the scholarly and populist levels, to posit indigenous spirituality as a key component of an indigenous worldview and the foundation of a way of life that all Australian indigenous peoples may draw upon in their quest for well-being, and political and cultural independence (Calma 2010). Connecting regional stories, building on familial networks, and reclaiming the valuable but often latent spiritual perspectives in what might be called an ‘Australian indigenous worldview’ are all part of this attempt to ground Australian indigenous identity in wider worlds: to connect many local places of meaning with national and global networks of solidarity, and thus to maintain identity and sovereignty within the context of mainstream Australian life. Of course, the positing of indigenous spirituality as a core element of indigeneity in Australian indigenous life raises not only philosophical and epistemological questions best attended to in conversation with theories of indigenous knowledge – a growing area within the academy (Nakata 2007; Tuhiwai Smith 2012) – it also prompts questions regarding the relationship of this discrete notion of spirituality to religion in general. Complexities emerge as scholars attempt to define those elements of traditional Aboriginal Law and custom that might be framed as ‘indigenous religion’, or, when one attempts to articulate the relationship of this indigenous spirituality to Christianity; the still dominant faith affiliation of Aboriginal Australians, and, paradoxically, the prime instrument of governmentality over indigenous Australian communities up until the late 1960s.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_021

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The Australian indigenous present is, of course, connected to a long, contested, and trauma-filled history against which any story must be told, and any analysis situated (Bird Rose 2004). Dispossessed of their land in 1788 by the English and subsequently overrun by ‘settler’ and migrant Australia – and even deemed a ‘dying race’ in the early part of the twentieth century – Australia’s indigenous peoples have not only survived, they have proudly resisted their expected demise and have reclaimed their place as the ‘first peoples’ in the Commonwealth of Australia. Their culture, what is believed to be the oldest continuing culture on the face of the earth, remains strong and vibrant across vast swathes of ‘outback’ and remote Australia, where traditional languages, skin systems, and the ceremonial activities of the Dreaming or ‘Law’ continue to be practised (Cohen 2016:114–115).1 In Australia’s cities and towns these traditions have taken on new life and forms, as indigenous peoples cope with enormous pressure from the forces of assimilation, both national and global. Yet even for these now-urban-indigenous-peoples whose lands were overrun early in Australia’s colonial history, the connection with both local place and tribal lineage remains important (McDonald 1997: 67), and connections with indigenous peoples across the continent who live a more ‘traditional life’ – as it is styled in popular discourse and media – is important to an ongoing national indigenous debate and conversation about identity and the nature of indigeneity. Across this complex arena, where political concerns affirming ongoing sovereignty of land use and custodianship jostle with a more personal politics of identity (Sullivan 2011) – a politics which must negotiate the present with its constraints, shifting intersections, pressures and limits (Austin-Broos 2011) – Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples must forge a path into the future which is not ‘stuck in the past’, but rather is constantly energised by tradition, ancestors and place (Clifford 2013). In attempting to think and act from these deep wells of authority, the voices in this chapter present rich examples of indigenous practice that can helpfully be explored within the theoretical frames of ‘translation’ and ‘articulation’. Australian Aboriginal studies provide fertile ground for such analyses. Histories of readings of a ‘timeless people’ are today challenged not only by the fluid currents of globalisation and post-modernities, and the first peoples creative responses to these currents, but also by a growing awareness of the critical and open practices that always existed within what were too-often characterised as intransigent cultures 1 The term ‘the Dreaming’ has emerged as a popular descriptor of Aboriginal Australian placebased worldviews. Each indigenous peoples group in Australia has their own word for this reality. In this chapter the Adnyamathanha use Muda and the Warlpiri use Jukurrpa.

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(Myers 1991:11–23; Merlan 1997). Theories of translation and articulation help us not only to gain some handle on the active shifts and changes in the experience of indigenous peoples, they also focus attention on the intellectual knowledge work of indigenous subjects themselves. In order to help the reader enter this context, two brief case studies are offered to highlight some of the diversity of approaches to these complex zones and intersections of contemporary indigenous life. The first, drawing on the writing of Denise Champion, highlights an indigenous-led reassessment of Christian faith that attempts to ground Christianity in a local indigenous and place-based culture. This is important because, in the Australian context, the majority of Australia’s indigenous population until the 1970s were forced by law to reside on church or government ‘missions’, with almost every aspect of their lives regimented and enforced, often by missionaries, with the result that the presence of Christianity, for better or for worse, has been deeply woven into the Australian indigenous story (Swain and Rose 1988). While the role of Christianity can be contested by indigenous Australians, or alternatively passionately embraced, the freedom to assess it on indigenous terms and by indigenous leaders is only a relatively recent phenomenon (Loos 2007; Bevis 2016; Trompf 1987). Champion’s work is an example of a growing number of attempts to create local Aboriginal theologies that emerge from an indigenous knowledge perspective (see also Havea 2014; Paulson 2006). Her attempts to seek synergies and explain these ‘connections’ and moments of ‘recognition’ between her ancestral lands and the Christianity that was brought by the missionaries is an example of the desire to reinterpret what an earlier generation of traditional Aboriginal Australians happily called the ‘two-ways’. For these older indigenous people, indigenous religion or traditional Law and Christianity were both ‘true’ and valuable (Austin-Broos 2009: 42). Even today, many traditional Aboriginal people in outback Australia will describe themselves as ‘two-way’ people, and it is not unknown for older generations who grew up on the Christian missions on the East coast of Australia to express this perspective with the same terminology, or to speak with the same intent (Trompf 1987: 90–94). What is new – as seen in Champion’s work – is the attempt to explain and interpret how these two-ways can be understood to interact meaningfully in the present; how they can, perhaps in some deeper way, be seen to be ‘one way’. Parallels, patterns and resonances that are perceived to exist between an indigenous non-materialist worldview, which can include supernatural agents (Hokari 2011: 256), and the worldview of the biblical writers is the key to this enterprise. In turn, these Aboriginal Christian perspectives that affirm a spirituality that is both indigenous in form, and capable of expression by means of a Christian discourse, are also put forward as the foundation of a

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shared commitment to the struggle to maintain identity and sovereignty in the present. Champion’s assertion that Christian faith and local Dreamings are compatible is read in this chapter as an act of translation. Contemporary indigenous-led attempts to hear resonances, to intuit commonalities, to seek non-alienating conjunctions of the presence of universalising traditions of faith within local placed-based ontologies is seen as a mode of translation, of critical indigenous intellectual agency. Champion, an Aboriginal Christian leader from South Australia, utilises the language of ‘recognition’ to intuit underlying deep connections between her Adnyamathanha people’s worldview and the narratives and symbolic-constructions of the Bible. It is here, in this ‘digging’ for wisdom, that we can witness a process of cultural translation between these two traditions of meaning. The question as to “what is lost and what is gained” in such processes (Dejonge and Tietz 2015: 6) will generate debate, but the crucial voices and answers will be those of indigenous people. Along with many Adnyamathanha families, Champion also lives and works across the state and ‘returns’ to country – a widespread phenomenon Clifford has brought to our attention (2013: 74) – and it is this dimension of Champion’s story that also alerts us to the way in which new articulations connecting city and town-based life are part of this same process of discerning meaning. On the one hand, Champion mobilises philosophical and theopoetic analogies in what can be described as a process of cultural and ontological translation, and, on the other, she describes the renewing power of access to country via stories of her experience of family holidays. In Champion’s telling, the living out of an otherwise typical mainstream Australian family experience – going on a holiday in a car – offers up other possibilities for indigenous peoples to ‘be on country’ and to connect with stories that ground a sense of being part of an inherently indigenous family.2 On this reading, I argue that Champion’s work is an example of the articulation of indigenous familial-being in the changing present: a present where people ‘return to country’, not simply inhabit it; a present where the ordinary things of contemporary family life unearth and ground indigenous spirituality. The second case study in this chapter highlights the way in which cultural festivals, social media and contemporary art forms are increasingly utilised in remote Australia to promote interest in traditional Law, and ceremony, and to strengthen the transmission of indigenous worldviews among new generations

2 ‘Country’ is an ‘Aboriginal English’ term used to denote ancestral lands and the sense of intimacy that indigenous Australians enjoy with these homelands.

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of indigenous Australians. This chapter introduces the Milpirri Festival in Lajamanu in Central Australia,3 and draws attention to the way these new forms of celebrating culture and story are increasingly significant not only for local people, but for national conversations about indigeneity among indigenous Australians. The festival is analysed as a contemporary articulation of Warlpiri life that enables publically viewable traditions to live on in the form of shared cultural performances. In this festival we encounter attempts to encourage the interest of younger generations of local Warlpiri people to learn their own Jukurrpa or Dreaming through the use of hip hop beats and global dance culture. The past – the songs of the Emu Dreaming, for example – enters the present through an energetic and imaginative conjunction with imported cultural forms. In this short case study, set among a group who “have become exemplary of a still-accessible traditionalism” (Burke 2013: 415), we can detect the presence of new articulations of Aboriginality and spirituality in the present, even in the remote outback. Throughout the presentation of the case studies, the concept of ‘indigenous spirituality’ is deployed over-against the idea of indigenous religion. The conceptual rationale for making this distinction is that the term is increasingly utilised by both Australian indigenous scholars and at a grassroots community level (particularly those whose main language is English) to give voice to what might be called an indigenous ontology or worldview. Indigenous spirituality here evokes a set of perspectives that articulate an integrated and relational place-based worldview that is not reductionist, or materialistic, and which directly emerges from unique indigenous cultures. This discrete notion of spirituality sits outside general populist notions of spirituality often associated with neo-paganism, shamanism, and recent newage spiritualities. In this chapter, indigenous spirituality is theorised as a core element of an indigenous worldview or indigenous ontology, and the concept also brings into view the field of traditional indigenous practices of healing, health and moral orders (Grieves 2008: 43–57) that are located in complex bodies of ceremony and storytelling known as the ‘Law’. The Law, in Australian Aboriginal culture, is an expression that names both what anthropologists and legal theorists call ‘customary law’, and, specifically in an Australian context, the interrelated body of stories, songs and kinship systems that all indigenous Australians and the country itself are part of, and which the people are charged with the responsibility of maintaining in both daily and ceremonial life. 3 http://www.tracksdance.com.au/milpirri-kurdiji#text.

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The Place of Indigenous Spirituality in the Struggle for Australian Indigenous Identity: Some Considerations

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, the First Nations peoples of this island continent, live within a modern Western democracy radically shaped by forces of global financial capital and its standard-bearers in politics and culture. Though making up only 3% of the Australian population, indigenous people can claim 40–60,000 years of unbroken custodianship of the Australian landmass and of place and kin-based community existence determined by their Dreaming, or Muda, Jukurrpa, Altjira and Wangarr, those bodies of Law and ceremony that establish indigenous groups as ‘people of the land’ (Bowman 2015; Stanner 2010). Despite this astonishing cultural resilience and achievement, today they inhabit a time and place where culture is only deemed to be valuable if it can be marketed or turned into a new wave of tourism. Age-old forms of culture such as the ceremonies which enact Australian indigenous religion – from initiation ceremonies in the desert to smoking ceremonies on the coast – are tolerated to the extent that people can carry them out in their private leisure time; incorporation – or assimilation – into the job market is the order of the day. The drivers of global capital flows and neo-liberal forms of state governance are dramatically incurring into the lifeworlds of indigenous peoples, including those in remote parts of Australia where systems of skin names and totemic identification continue to reinforce collective expectations of behaviour and responsibility (Austin-Broos 2009). It is arguable that the Australian indigenous peoples’ current experience of this demand for proactive participation in the wider society is less marked by successful employment in the mainstream than by the continuity of intergenerational poverty and all the deleterious impacts that go with extreme social marginalisation. For indigenous people, and for those seeking to understand their multifarious engagements with the present – not least the reflexive meaning-making represented in continuities and changes in religion, spiritual ‘values’ and ontologies – this seemingly intractable socio-economic and political context raises a whole gamut of challenging conceptual issues (Myers 1991). Even allowing for the maintenance of language, ceremony, and skin systems in the remote areas of Australia, it is arguable that significant transformations are taking place in today’s indigenous communities (Peterson 2009; Bird Rose 2004). Indigenous people are increasingly driven by public policy, and, yes, are lured by individual desire, to take at least tentative steps into the currents of a fluid and rapidly moving society (Austin-Broos 2011:160). For those living in the urban areas of the nation’s cities, the impacts of modernity have been felt for even longer, and the attempts to maintain culture and identity have generated

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a rich diversity of approaches to being-indigenous-in-Australia (Keen 1988). Yet woven through these diverse historical, geographical and generational experiences of living as indigenous peoples in modern Australia is a common theme: the role of indigenous spirituality as a concept that links people across Australia in a shared experience of indigeneity. The need to constantly articulate and re-enact identity in the face of an implanted but dominant Western culture, and the attempt to underscore indigeneity as a unique cultural, legal and moral standpoint within the Australian nation-state, has seen traditional Law and religion being re-imagined as a body of lore and knowledge that can inform a unique indigenous philosophy and ‘spiritual identity’ (Graham 1999). This notion of indigenous spirituality is posited, in both popular and academic discourse, as a major component of contemporary indigenous life (Grieves 2008). In some scholarly accounts, indigenous spirituality exists as a concept within theories of indigeneity that distills some of the central principles and approaches that emerge from place-based cultures and worldviews, and indigenous spirituality is posited as an essential aspect of a unique cultural formation: that of indigenous cultures (Sutton 2010). Though traditional Australian Aboriginal cultures do not have a discrete notion of religion as something apart from other aspects of Law, land, and kinship, the modern concept of indigenous spirituality is regarded by Australian indigenous scholars as a viable means by which indigenous peoples are able to retrieve from their own traditions a sense of the sacred as woven through a human, relational, and spiritfilled world (Mikhailovich and Pavli 2011:8). Indigenous spirituality emerges in research with Australian Indigenous peoples as a term that can express a sense of connectedness to land, waters and culture, and to express what is seen to be unique to indigenous peoples (Cox and Possamai 2016). While the term may well express what is held in common with indigenous peoples around the globe, and as such, acts as a concept that furthers analysis of indigenous religion generally, in Australia it is often used by both scholars and by government report writers to distinguish urban indigenous peoples experience from the experience and attitudes of mainstream secular Australia. Indigenous spirituality is thus present in this chapter as a public discourse that is regularly deployed by indigenous peoples themselves. It is a discourse that is regularly used to name what is seen as something inalienable to indigenous experience; “you couldn’t lose your spirituality” is the telling phrase used by one informant that Cox and Possamai interviewed in their recent research with indigenous peoples across Australia (Cox and Possamai 2016: 182–183). It also operates as a theoretical terminology employed by both indigenous and non-indigenous academics to unpack the meaning of both indigenous religion and indigeneity in the contemporary context.

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Furthermore, indigenous spirituality is considered to be theoretically accessible by all indigenous peoples, even if they are not able to practise their Dreaming or Law in the present, or to speak the languages which bore it across the millennia. This new/old indigenous ‘spirituality’ can thus be shared by all who are born into the First Nations people of Australia. What is more, there is also a growing and intentional solidarity with all who share parallel indigenous spiritualities globally. Publically accessible stories, dances, ceremonies, images and songs are increasingly shared (Myers 2014) as resources across indigenous peoples groups in order to strengthen this common identity, and as a consequence, a common understanding of indigenous spirituality is also constructed and strengthened. Indigenous religion and Law now offers individuals the building blocks from which to create a common spirituality that may ground them in the wider world of globalisation, as being-people-from-the-land. It is as if, beneath the religious practices of traditional Law and ceremony, there exists an ‘ontology of place’ that can be accessed, and that, once distilled into indigenous spirituality, nurtures all who share this indigenous cultural inheritance (Austin-Broos 2009: 5–7; Swain 1993). Australian mainstream culture is ruggedly secular, with institutional religion a poor cousin to secular bodies of thought in public discourse (Bouma 2006). This thoroughgoing secularism is regarded as a virtue by many mainstream Australians and, in contradistinction to the dominance of this secular worldview as a defining element of a modern globalised Australia, many Australian indigenous people are pointedly choosing to embrace the term ‘spirituality’ as a signifier of indigenous culture and knowledge and to affirm the inextricable link of spirituality with indigenous life, particularly as it is understood to promote a non-reductive worldview that is ‘holistic’, relational, and open to spiritual experience and values (Atkinson 2002: 202–206).4 In turn, despite the old tyranny of distance from the northern hemisphere, global networks, media, conferences and festivals of indigenous peoples are seen as forums in which affirmations of this stance can be validated and affirmed, and are seen as sites that nurture true indigenous identity over-against the pressures of Australian mainstream society.

4 Though there are indigenous Australians who explore indigenous spirituality as a practice that may bear comparison with other contemporary spiritualities, particularly new age practices, it is important to note that both within an indigenous knowledge perspective and within social-scientific paradigms, and other critical discourses, particularly health and wellbeing research, indigenous spirituality is seen as an ontology, a description of being itself, even if it exists in distinction from other models within the academy.

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The privileging of indigenous spirituality as a key aspect marking out indigenous identity from non-indigenous identity is deployed in remarkably diverse contexts across Australia. Arguably, this reflects the way in which indigenous peoples increasingly and proactively seek to build networks where indigenous voices and standpoints are shared and strengthened, with the result that indigenous spirituality as a discourse is, in turn, deepened and expanded as it travels and cycles through these networks (Kolig 1984). The multiple-if-similarland-based spiritualities of indigenous peoples on the Australian continent are being remade into a map of spirituality that can be traversed and drawn from by peoples from across the nation. The era of cheap travel and the explosion of an Aboriginal controlled non-government sector (Sullivan 2011) have provided numerous new points of connection and a coalescing of interests where, perhaps for the first time, the notion of pan-Aboriginal coalitions makes sense in Australia. The ‘songlines’, which in the past connected this land in an astonishing map of kinship, ceremony and trade, and that linked tribes across vast swathes of the continent, are being brought to life as pathways of indigenous spirit and culture in the present. Traditions, stories and cultural motifs located in specific places on these songlines can then inform the thinking of those living on different lands and in diverse relationships to contemporary Australian life-worlds. Conferences and popular festivals such as Milpirri, Barunga, Taranthi, and the Spirit Festival, hosted by Tandanya, the Aboriginal Cultural Institute in South Australia, and the Garma Festival,5 in the Northern Territory, offer celebrations of indigenous life, while national Christian Aboriginal religious gatherings, such as the Katherine Convention, each play their part in connecting and reinforcing these commonalities. Interestingly, for non-indigenous Australia, the ‘sacred’ retains a place in an otherwise thoroughly secular public lexicon via the presence of ‘Aboriginal’ sacred sites (Gelder and Jacobs 1998). These sacred sites cover the Australian continent, and though they were for so long denied, effaced or ignored, have re-emerged since the 1970s with the ever-increasing prominence of indigenous Australians and their assertion of their rights, history and aspirations. Indigenous Australians have won some acceptance as it is they who are the keepers of the sacred stories that lie within and beneath modern Australia, and their ongoing custodianship of these sites and customs has issued in profound legal changes in Australian law with the passing of the Northern Territory Lands Rights Act (1976), and the Native Title Act (1993): pieces of legislation which are built on the acknowledgement of the sacred links that indigenous Australians enjoy with this land. Indigenous spirituality, understood as a particular 5 http://www.garmafestival.com.au.

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commitment to an earth-based spirituality, is also drawn upon by nonindigenous proponents of popular spirituality who increasingly look to indigenous people for leadership in this area (Muir 2011; Tacey 2000). This surprising presence of the sacred in modern Australia is just one indicator that religion, or spirituality, is acknowledged to be central to indigenous Australian experience. This is not to say that all indigenous people in Australia are religious; in the 2011 National Census indigenous Australians had the fastest growing number of respondents reporting ‘no religion’ (Cox and Possamai 2016: 3). Nor are all indigenous people practitioners of an ‘indigenous spirituality’: as if this were some version of the contemporary interest in lifestyle spiritualities. Rather, spirituality, as an expression of a holistic, integrated and place-based worldview is increasingly seen by both scholars and by Australian indigenous peoples – particularly those indigenous Australians who speak English rather than a traditional language – as a core part of an indigenous worldview (Graham 1999). Of course, many indigenous people in Australia remain connected to formal practices and institutions of religion, whether through participation in ‘traditional’ ceremonies or, most commonly, Christian churches: in the 2006 census 73% of indigenous Australians chose to express their affiliation with a Christian denomination – a higher figure than the general population.6 Taken together, the importance of spirituality as a marker of indigeneity, the attempts to maintain ceremony and customary Law in remote Australia, and the strong participation of indigenous individuals and families in other forms of religious life such as membership in Christian churches, indicate that religion and spirituality provide ongoing and important pathways for many indigenous Australians to negotiate the current cultural moment. As the former Australian National Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tolm Calma wrote: Indigenous economic, physical, social and emotional wellbeing are interconnected with spiritual wellbeing. Spirituality and culture are not separate entities and an assault on one is likely to impact upon the other. Therefore, freedom of religion and spirituality is threatened if land ownership is not secure, if Indigenous culture and language are not preserved and if good health and wellbeing are not achieved. How this might best be achieved is at the heart of reconciliation in Australia today, both symbolic and practical. calma 2010: 326

6 http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/5AD6E895236F6CDECA2578DB00283CBD? opendocument.

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How these arenas and discourses interact in the lives of indigenous Australians is a complex area of social research, but what is clear is that the idea of the sacred, and of spirit as connection, relationship, and of the power of immanence, continues to offer indigenous Australians a sense of belonging and identity in an era of dizzying social change and tough political challenges. In the light of this scenario, the nature of the transmission and practice of indigenous religion, and of indigenous Christianities – a significant, if often under-researched, component of the modern Australian indigenous religious experience (Schwarz and Dussart 2010: 1–3) – as well as the ongoing reception and inculturation of other ‘outsider’ faiths, those religions from other lands, continues to be a vital aspect of indigenous life to be both appreciated and analysed. Indigeneity, like spirituality, has also become a catch-all, a rallying cry, and a nomenclature for the unique standpoint of the cultural, political and spiritual markers of indigenous communal and personal life in a postcolonial, globalised human story. It has a lot of weight to carry. Part of the latter process of refining and developing current notions of indigeneity includes the negotiation of the diffusely linked arenas of religion and spirituality, of the process of meaning-making and the articulation of indigenous ontologies (Hunt 2014). And it is here that indigenous Australians, both the traditional peoples of remote Australia, and the urban-based peoples who have survived two hundred years of genocide, mistreatment, mission histories, stolen generations, and impoverishment, today frequently meet to refine this standpoint. There is not always easy agreement around these issues, but the need to hand on traditions that maintain kin-based communities – that uphold the past and the richness of indigenous culture – while allowing a new generation to face the pressures of an individualised world appears to be a key component of this dialogue (Bird Rose 2004). Indigenous peoples, despite the unrelenting pressures they face – the alarming rates of incarceration, and the growing epidemic of youth and child suicide – have the resources of tradition still close to hand: at least while some of the elders who participated in the full ceremonies of the 1960s are present. How Aboriginal peoples in Australia are seeking to ground their indigeneity in wider worlds of indigenous networking and connection, while overcoming the multiple socio-economic problems that beset their families and communities, is the issue that both perplexes and energises those who have emerged as leaders and custodians of their communities and traditions in the present (Atkinson 2002). While concepts of indigenous spirituality happily exist within discourses utilised by indigenous Australians, the use of indigenous religion as a concept is less common. Within the field of the study of religion the concept of

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indigenous religion(s) has carved a respectable, if contested, space out from the dominance of the World Religions paradigm (Cox 2007; Tafjord 2013). In this academic field, the concept names the remarkable durability and marketability of the worldviews, rituals and values of those peoples around the globe who, through their connection to land and ancestors, remain rooted in local traditions of wisdom and small-scale governance. Indigenous religion, of course, is itself an idea that nevertheless is of Western origin, emerging from a way of thinking that has largely severed religion from other arenas of human experience. In Australia, however, the phrase indigenous religion seems to be a non-starter in public debate. The Dreaming, while being described as ‘spiritual’ is not seen as being ‘religious’ in a context where religious activity is so quickly defined by the concepts and books of the Abrahamic faith traditions (Cox and Possamai 2016). Perhaps this situation is itself a product of the heavy-handed actions of Christian missions in Australia, or, as anthropologists have long suggested, that the Dreaming, as a radically locative worldview, struggles to be identified with religions that are time-based (Swain 1993).

New Forms of Aboriginal Christianity: From a World Religion to a Spirituality of Place

One place where the use of the term ‘indigenous religion’ makes sense in Australia is in the attempt by a subset of indigenous Australians to reshape Christianity­into a Jukurrpa or Dreaming that correlates with place-based worldviews. Here, the creator spirits of the Dreaming and songlines are either seen as agents of the one Creator God, or are ciphers for the Creator’s own presence. Indigenous Christianities, though products of the Christian missions, are examples of this wider transformation, and its new forms are arguably as much sites actively shaping indigeneity as any other (Grieves 2008: 374–376). Many indigenous peoples, particularly in remote and regional Australia, remain ‘twoways’ people, committed to both traditional worldviews while also practising Christian faith. Theologically and philosophically clarifying how these ‘twoways’ interact is a growing, if complex, intellectual phenomena among indigenous Christians (Paulson 2006; McDonald 2010: 62); a process that arguably parallels the African and other global experiences that Andrew F. Walls first drew to our attention in previous decades (Walls 2002). It is here that Aboriginal people, both at the academic and community levels, are deepening their understanding of Christianity in dialogue with their own tradition and culture. Christianity is not simply here being imposed into local spaces, following the old missiological methods. Instead, Christianity is interpreted in the light of

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indigenous knowledge and practice and is a determined act of indigenous agency. One signal result of this development is that questions about the interpretation and practice of Christianity are increasingly shaped by Aboriginal leaders, not by the sending churches or missionaries (Loos 2007: 151–162). In this ‘post-mission’ moment, the advocates of this new type of Aboriginal Christianity do not bifurcate reality into a faithful performance of a placeless, disembodied Christianity, locally expressed in cultural symbols and dress: this is no vernacular Christianity as veneer. This movement has been emerging within Aboriginal Christian circles since the formal ending of mission control over the lives of indigenous Australians; a process underway from the late 1960s when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians were first counted in the national census as citizens (Bevis 2016). This long fight for right to be seen as citizens in their own land ended the government’s intimate control over their lives: control that was often enacted by Christian missions on behalf of the governing bodies in Australia. Despite this history, Christianity, for many indigenous Christians, will now stand or fall on the basis of indigenous ontologies and epistemologies. For others, the legacy of a ‘mission-mindset’ remains, with a cautious rapprochement with indigenous culture and religion also underway (Cox and Possamai 2016: 188–193). The mainstream Australian churches are, of course, playing catch up with such developments. And it is this reality that calls for a re-interpretation of this new expression of Aboriginal Christianity. Regardless of whether Aboriginal people maintain a postcolonial association with Christian faith, or embrace a more secular stance, the move to replace religion with indigenous spirituality is present in important, if differing, ways across Australia. One example of an indigenous Christian who inhabits the space of the Christian institutional church as a leader, yet determines her relationship to that faith on the basis of her traditional knowledge, is the Reverend Denise Champion, an Adnyamathanha woman. She provides an insight into the way indigenous knowledge can be deployed to reinterpret Christianity, and her biography at the same time points to the contemporary networks and pathways that enable a cross-fertilisation of ideas among indigenous peoples from different parts of Australia. Champion is from the Ikara-Flinders Ranges in South Australia and is an ordained minister in the Uniting Church in Australia. Her story, of growing up as an Aboriginal person in an era where she must negotiate the two worlds of Aboriginal culture and dominant culture in Australia, is shared with the majority of contemporary indigenous people in Australia, whether they live in remote homelands or in the urban areas of Australia’s cities. Crucially, Champion’s own development of a standpoint of privileging

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indigenous spirituality, rather than accepting Western interpretations of Christian faith, emerged through her connections with the Yolngu people of the far north of Australia, particularly through her meetings with the Reverend Dr Djiniyini Gondarra. This mutual connection, facilitated by a mainstream Australian Church, yet utilised for her own purpose, is itself an example of the expanding networks that link individuals in webs of knowledge sharing and mutual influence. As Champion acknowledges, her ability to articulate a local indigenous perspective was aided by the strategies and wisdom she received from this Aboriginal elder from Northern Australia (Gondarra 1988). Today, cities and towns around Australia are linked in a ceaseless transit of people, ideas and resources, and indigenous people, Christian or otherwise, are as able to make use of these opportunities as any other Australian. The results are seen both in the development and diffusion of shared notions of an indigenous Christianity and in shared concepts of indigenous spirituality (Myers 2010). In a recently published book, Yarta Wandatha, Champion (2014) outlines the place of Christianity in her country. In so doing she also argues for the way in which she believes Christianity is a resource that can be aligned with the indigenous spirituality that she discerns within local traditions, and which can be together inherited in the present. Reflecting on her father’s cultural stories, told as he dug for water in the ground in the traditional manner as they camped on family holidays, she writes: One of the things I’ve struggled with is having to make sense of things when they’re always presented through a Western world lens, knowing full well that Aboriginal people see we still think in our cultural context. But we have to move and speak and think and live in and between two worlds on a daily basis. It’s really hard to live in a bicultural setting. Yet we have stories that stretch back across time and so it is about making sense of what has been revealed to us. The stories themselves were our education. It was the way we were taught about where we can find water and also where we can find food, the two things we needed to survive. But we have to go deep into the layers. Digging for a precious resource, like digging for treasure in a field, reminds me of the parables, the stories that Jesus used… The metaphor for the soakwater in the waterhole is good, because it comes from underneath. We’ve had those stories in our culture for thousands of years and now we are needing to dig for the soakwater, the Living Water of God. champion 2014: 8–9

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The act of digging and the task of discerning spiritual insight are combined in this storied way of approaching meaning and proscribing action. Champion evokes both the practical and metaphorical, the material and spiritual in one single vision. Hers is an epistemology that sits squarely in the middle of indig­ enous knowledge systems, for it is a way of thinking that emerges from the Dreaming; it is a way of thinking that echoes the giving and receiving of Law, the Muda for the Adnyamathanha. Champion speaks as a Christian, but her mode of thinking also draws deeply upon her family’s indigenous knowledge. Practical learning and wisdom are entwined and then provide a springboard to incorporate stories and knowledge from outside. Christianity is to be interpreted on the basis of her ancestors’ stories of water, of place. That Champion can join the dots between Adnyamathanha stories and the Gospels is not unusual among many Australian indigenous people who have both retained links with Law and ceremony, and for whom the Bible is able to be accommodated as a second text alongside the country, the land itself (Gondarra 1986). Perhaps indigenous spirituality, as a holistic and integrating praxis, leads to a hermeneutics that looks for points of agreement, of connection, of affirmation. Champion seems to suggest as much as she goes on to write: It is about recognition. Any connection is recognition – a connection of us recognising that this is who God is. Our words for this are Ngakarra nguniangkulu. Ngakarra: revealed, out in the open. Nguniangkulu: clearly visible, recognised, show plainly. These words are located in the past and continue into the present. This is what happened when the gospel came. It was there and we recognised it… Ngakarra nungiangkulu is the recognition of what we had already known. 2014: 27

This recognition and recovery of a holistic spirituality and use of story and typology that is perhaps buried and subterranean in the text for many Western readers, presents no obstacle for indigenous people who wish to argue that the Bible, rather than being a symbol of colonial imposition and power, is actually ‘at home’ on country – a crucial concept in Aboriginal Australian life (PattelGray 2012). Thinking in terms of translation in an Australian indigenous context helps us to come to terms with the perennial readiness of Aboriginal peoples to make ‘a place for strangers’, as Tony Swain argued (Swain 1993). To see Champion’s work through the lens of translation is to note that the work of translation is carried out on indigenous terms: that ‘revelation’ is accepted because it coheres with the experience of something being ‘out in the open’ and visible

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in a particular place in a way that affirms the right way of being present in that place. Thinking in terms of translation forces us to see Champion’s thought not simply as a forced response to a fluid and shifting present, the deployment of a new strategy in the face of otherness; rather, it foregrounds an epistemological stance that is ready-to-hand in Aboriginal cultures themselves. For Champion, the work of translation is one of ‘recognition’ – a term loaded with political weight in Australia since the 1990s as the Australian public has been called on to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as ‘first Australians’. Rather than being passive recipients of mainstream largesse, Champion claims the right to recognise what is appropriate on Adnyamathanha country. Champion’s exegesis of the Dreaming, or Muda, is also a fine example of how a contemporary indigenous woman distills both a framework for indigenous knowledge and spirituality from tradition and then articulates it in the present. She writes: One of the things that I’ve learned is that Muda teach us three particular things… They teach us about the rules for living… They teach us about the environment… And the other thing they teach us about is the spiritual world. Now that’s really interesting because we don’t mention the word ‘God’ in our Muda but Adnyamathanha people and Aboriginal people in general have a very strong sense of connection with the Creator and with all our creation. When we talk about the Creator Spirit we use different names that talk about creator beings, big ones that made things. Muda are showing us how we can live peacefully with our world – with each other, with our environment, and with God. Not only living peacefully with those three things but how to find a way. The stories actually give us a pathway, the Good Road, Wandu Yapa. champion 2014: 29

As Champion argues, “this is not about a new discovery. It’s about rediscovery” (2014: 29). For Champion, like many other indigenous people, including other Christian pastors, indigenous spirituality and indigenous knowledge lie ready at hand and offer a strategy for living within a postcolonial context as an indigenous person. Champion’s book now circulates as another artefact reinforcing the centrality of indigenous spirituality in a milieu that once resisted similar views as being the work of the Devil, or as instances of pagan attitudes, which had to be suppressed. In this sense, indigenous spirituality is replacing the religion of the West that for so long was a medium of cultural displacement in

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their lives. Whereas Champion’s hermeneutic approach is to carry out what might be called indigenous translation, her personal and family-based storytelling (Champion 2014: 8–12) liberates indigenous readers and listeners to act with confidence, and to see their own lived-experience and histories as both unbroken from tradition and capable of integrating new paths (Christianity) and new approaches to indigeneity: as modern, diasporic, yet capable of digging out resources from country and their family story. In this manner we can situate Champion’s work as one of both translation at a subterranean and ontological level, and as one that contributes to new articulations of indigenous being in the present.

Global Songlines: Dreaming and Dancing to New Beats in Remote Australia

While indigenous Christians seek to ground Christianity and the Bible in an indigenous ontology, other indigenous Australians are attempting to facilitate the translation of ancient ceremonies into something that more closely fits the ‘spirit of the times’. In Lajamanu, a remote township situated seven hundred kilometres north-west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, one Aboriginal community is attempting this transition. Lajamanu is home mostly to members of the Warlpiri community, a significant tribe from Central Australia whose homelands are primarily situated in the Tanami Desert. The Warlpiri were among the later groups brought into ongoing contact with white settler Australia and, infamously, members of the group suffered the last documented massacre of indigenous people in Australia at Coniston Station in 1928, where between fifty to one hundred and ten people were killed in reprisal for the killing of a white station hand (Jurpururla Kelly 2014). Today, the Warlpiri live in several remote towns as well as in the hub town of Alice Springs. Though it is very remote and probably unknown to most non-indigenous Australians living in the cities, Lajamanu has become a site for the creative re-working of Warlpiri identity with a large bi-annual music and dance festival, the Milpirri Festival, that utilises publically performable ceremonial songs and reworks them to contemporary dance beats. The festival is both a means of connecting Warlpiri youth to their traditions and building their interest in learning and maintaining the Jukurrpa, or Dreaming. It is also a means of promoting indigenous culture and arts to the wider Australian community. Stephen Wanta Patrick, who created and directs the Milpirri Festival, has sought to maintain interest in Warlpiri Law among younger Warlpiri by taking elements of traditional song cycles and integrating them with newer cultural values – the values

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of entertainment, of hip hop and dance moves which Warlpiri youth have strongly connected with through global media. He writes about the festival in the following terms: In this process, Lajamanu Warlpiri are revisiting their ancient and continuing culture and rediscovering the values that are imbedded in the jukurrpa: the ceremonies, the songlines, the paintings, the law, the body paintings, the dances and the stories. These underlying values are unchanging and show how to live life, whether in the bush, in the community or in the jungles of modern cities. patrick 2008: 54

Patrick has succeeded in building this festival with government grants and partnerships with cultural producers from mainstream Australia, and the production values of the festival are remarkable considering it is staged in a remote location. This site in itself manifests a defiantly political articulation of indigenous cultural performance. As Newth, McMicken and Biddle argue: Milpirri challenges the teleological narrative that drives the Australian nation state’s deeply assumed position of sovereign centrality; the latent expectation that Indigenous societies embrace modernity (‘Close the Gap’) by leaving their homelands to gainfully ‘participate’ in the nation. 2015: 133

The goal has been to distill from tradition motifs, songs and dances that can act as a pathway that young people can explore and that will reignite interest in the latent possibilities of the Dreaming and customary Law. Here the struggle of kin-and-place-based groups to pass on Law and maintain ceremonial meetings – what might loosely be called indigenous religion in the Australian context – is met in a new way, while also allowing for innovation. Beyond the singing and performance of ‘the Dreaming’, individual Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people can draw on these valuable Warlpiri traditions to anchor a sense of identity and spirituality that is identifiable as being ‘indigenous’, as distinct from Western. At the Milpirri Festival, Warlpiri people have allowed the Jukurrpa to be enmeshed with global music and dance cultures, forming a hybrid that can hold the attention of young people who live in a two-ways world that is radically different to the two-ways world of Christian missions that their grandparents grew up within. Here, instead of replacing ‘missionbased’ religion with the hermeneutic of an indigenous spirituality, a new generation of Warlpiri leaders like Patrick, have replaced a reliance on the strict

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and total performance of the Jukurrpa with a cutting-edge performance that engages the spirits of younger generations who are otherwise at risk of drifting from the Law and losing their identity. For Patrick, Milpirri provides an opportunity for all indigenous people – and indeed all Australians and other visitors – to learn from the Dreaming, to understand how to live in the land of the ‘Kangaroo, Emu and Wedge-tailed Eagle’, and to apply those learnings to one’s own life and community. While the creation of the festival was primarily directed towards maintaining the continuity of culture among Warlpiri youth, the world is welcome at Milpirri. In turn, the presence of new cultural ingredients offers up the possibility of new articulations of Warlpiri being, and the festival format, with all of the significant input required from many people in and beyond the community results in groundbreaking outcomes. Newth, McMicken and Biddle emphasise, “the distinctive capacities of Milpirri to materialise new objects, memory and heritage, from graphics (banners, wristbands, t-shirts, dvds) to school-based teaching of hip hop and traditional Yawalyu and Purlapa ceremonies that activate Ancestral activities, transformed and rejuvenated in the present” (2015: 133), and it is this mix of transformation and rejuvenation that represents a powerful new articulation of one indigenous community’s lifeworld. This is an age of new possibilities, and Australia’s indigenous peoples are adept at seizing these opportunities, even, as we see at Milpirri, from the margins of the Australian polity. Modern transportation, cheap flights, social media and mobile phones have all provided new opportunities for urban-based Aboriginal people to engage with custodians of traditional cultural knowledge, such as the Warlpiri, and from this learning their own conceptions of indigenous spirituality are further refined and grounded in wider Aboriginal contexts. In turn, members of remote communities – such as the Warlpiri themselves – can now visit and remain in contact with family in town and urban communities (Vaarzon-Morel 2014), and urban indigenous people can travel with increasing frequency to remote areas. In an age of globalisation, there is an awareness that social movements can aid the defence of indigenous identity (Clifford 2013: 33–41), and this is contributing to the expansion of the number of conversations between indigenous people both within Australia and across the globe. Social media including Twitter and Facebook are used by countless indigenous Australians to communicate and to reinforce identity on a daily basis (Rice et al. 2016). On the streets of both capital cities and remote communities young indigenous people share stories, convictions and cultural content as quickly as any other young Australian. These conversations no longer have to be mediated by government, missionaries and established churches, as they were for so long, and it is this freedom that enables ideas such as indigenous spirituality

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to increasingly shape a shared sense of indigenous Australian life. Indigenous agency, while always present, is no longer circumscribed or as easily stifled by outsiders, but is free to make the most of the numerous points of connection and interactivity made possible by globalisation. In this fluid, if fraught, moment, spirituality has emerged as a significant theme in an ever-expanding conversation within indigenous Australia; and with new words it affirms the old truth that all indigenous people remain grounded in the land from which their ancestors came, and that wherever they travel, they remain, inextricably, a part of the country, and custodians of its spirit. Conclusion This chapter has argued that the notion of indigenous spirituality exists as a common component within contemporary attempts to understand indigeneity in the Australian context. Under pressure to live within the ‘mainstream’ of Australian life, indigenous Australians choose to maintain cultural traditions as best they can, while finding pathways into the future that are true to Aboriginal worldviews and practices. Distilling what are deemed to be the most enduring ideas, knowledge and practices from tradition, and then passing these on to new generations is at the heart of the case studies in this chapter. The trajectories of the indigenous Christian writings of Denise Champion and the performances of the Milpirri festival organised by Steven Wanta Patrick may differ in their starting points, yet on display is a shared attempt to retrieve stories and perspectives that convey the essence of the Dreaming – the Muda and the Jukurrpa – and to bring them into the present for their communities. Indigenous spirituality is deployed by Champion in order to ground Christianity in local cultural perspectives and to generate a new dialogue with indigenous knowledge; a project that can be understood as an act of translation. Her family’s own history of return to country both enables a new articulation of Australian indigenous familial life while maintaining the connections necessary to provoke ‘recognitions’ of ontological and cultural compatibility. On the other hand, global contemporary cultural forms are utilised by Steven Wanta Patrick to enhance cultural transmission in a changing present, and to touch the spirits of alienated youth now vulnerable to new forms of cultural displacement. This attempt gives rise to startling conjunctions that represent a search for a new articulation of even ‘traditional’ Aboriginal life-worlds. Taken together, these case studies remind us that any analysis that hopes to trace the path of indigenous spirituality and culture in the present will need to conceptualise both interest in grounding the wider world as it is experienced by

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Aboriginal peoples ‘in-and-on-country’, and hence give voice to the continuity of worldview and tradition that is so important to indigenous Australians, while also pointing analysis towards the ‘epistemological openness’ that Francesca Merlan insists on: an openness to new articulations. It is this dialectic at the heart of Australian Aboriginal life – whether the accent is placed on tradition or on current encounters and negotiations – that requires multiple theoretical approaches to be deployed. Against a backdrop of being marginalised peoples within a powerful national polity, Aboriginal Australians seek to distill from their own local traditions core motifs, songs and stories that together can help bring into the present the songlines of old, and to ensure that the spiritual riches of these remarkable maps remain known and enacted within their communities. Traditions are not viewed as something locked in the past, but as storehouses of knowledge and relations that are generative in the present. The views and strategies of both Champion, Patrick and their families and peoples, represent the belief that holding onto the ‘spirit’ of traditional cultural systems is vital to indigenous Australians’ capacity to triumph over poverty and marginalisation in the present, and also to their ability to assert their rightful claims to be the first Australians: the people at the heart, not just of an ancient continent, but at the centre of modern Australia, a people grounded-in-place yet open to a global future. References Ammerman, N. 2013. “Spiritual But Not Religious? Beyond Binary Choices in the Study of Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 52: 2, 258–278. Atkinson, J. 2002. Trauma Trails: Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Austin-Broos, D. 2009. Arrernte Past, Arrernte Present: Invasion, Violence, and Imagination in Indigenous Central Australia. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Austin-Broos, D. 2010. “Translating Christianity: Some Keywords, Events and Sites in Western Arrernte Conversion.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 21, 14–32. Austin-Broos, D. 2011. A Different Inequality: The Politics of Debate about Remote Aboriginal Australia. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin. Bevis, S. 2016. “New Songs and Old Songlines: Aboriginal Christianity and Post-­mission Australia.” In J.L. Cox and A. Possamai, eds. Religion and Non-Religion among ­Australian Aboriginal Peoples. London: Routledge 129–156. Bird Rose, D. 2004. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.

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Bouma, G. 2006. Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Bowman, M., ed. 2015. Every Hill Got a Story: Men and Women of the Central Land Council. Richmond: Hardie Grant Books. Burke, P. 2013. “Warlpiri and the Pacific – Ideas for an Intercultural History of the Warlpiri.” Anthropological Forum 23: 4, 414–427. Calma, T. 2010. “Respect, Tolerance and Reconciliation rather than Opposition and Denial: Indigenous Spirituality, Land, and Future of Religion in Australia.” Pacifica 23: 3, 322–336. Champion, D. with R. Dewerse. 2014. Yarta Wandatha. Salisbury: Denise Champion. Clifford, J. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press Cohen, H. 2016. “The Strehlow-Hermannsburg/Ntaria Perplex: Translation in a Lutheran-Aboriginal Community.” In J.L. Cox and A. Possamai, eds. Religion and NonReligion among Australian Aboriginal Peoples. London: Routledge 109–127. Cox, J. L. 2007. From Primitive to Indigenous: The Academic Study of Indigenous ­Religions. Aldershot: Ashgate. Cox, J. L. and A. Possamai. 2016. “Religion, Cultural Hybridity and Chains of Memory.” In J.L. Cox, and A. Possamai, eds. Religion and Non-Religion among Australian Aboriginal Peoples. London: Routledge 179–203. Cox, J. L. and A. Possamai, eds. 2016. Religion and Non-Religion among Australian Aboriginal Peoples. London: Routledge. DeJonge, M. P. and C. Tietz, eds. 2015. Translating Religion: What is Lost and Gained? New York: Routledge. Gelder, K. and J. Jacobs. 1998. Uncanny Australia: sacredness and identity in a postcolonial nation. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Gondarra, D. 1986. Let My People Go: Series of Reflections of Aboriginal Theology. Bethel Presbytery. Gondarra, D. 1988. Father you gave us the Dreaming. Darwin: Northern Synod of the Uniting Church. Graham, L.R., and H.G. Penny, eds. 2014. Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Graham, M. 1999. “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews.” Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 3, 105–118. Grieves, V. 2008. “Aboriginal Spirituality: A Baseline for Indigenous Knowledges Development in Australia.” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies, XXVIII: 2, 363–398. Havea, J., ed. 2014. Indigenous Australia and the Unfinished Business of Theology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Nakata, M. 2007. Discipling the Savages Savaging the Disciplines. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Newth, T., D. McMicken. and J. Biddle. 2015. “Milpirri.” Cultural Studies Review, 21: 1, 132–148. Onnudottir, H., A. Possamai and B.S. Turner. 2016. Religious Change and Indigenous Peoples: The Making of Religious Identities. London: Routledge. Pattel-Gray, A. 2012. “Methodology in an Aboriginal theology.” In D. Hopkins and E. Antonio. The Cambridge Companion to Black Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patrick, S. 2008. “Milpirri: performance as a bridge that joins the ancient with the modern.” Ngoonjook: a Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues 33, 53–60. Paulson, G. 2006. “Towards an Aboriginal Theology.” Pacifica 19: 3, 310–320. Peterson, N. 2009. “Just Humming: The Consequences of the Decline of Learning Contexts among the Warlpiri.” In J. Kommers and E. Venbrux, eds. Cultural Styles of Knowledge Transmission: Essays in Honour of Ad Borsboom. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Rice, E. S, E. Haynes, P. Royce, and S.C. Thompson. 2016. “Social media and digital technology use among Indigenous young people in Australia: a literature review.” International Journal for Equity in Health 15: 81 (DOI: 10.1186/s12939-016-0366-0). Schwarz, C. and F. Dussart. 2010. “Christianity in Aboriginal Australia revisited.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 21, 1–13. Selvam, S. 2013. “Towards Religious-Spirituality: A Multidimensional Matrix of Religion and Spirituality.” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 12: 36, 129–152. Stanner, W.E.H. 2010. The Dreaming & Other Essays. Collingwood: Black Inc. Agenda. Sullivan, P. 2011. Belonging Together: Dealing with the Politics of Disenchantment in Australian Indigenous Policy. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Sutton, P. 2010. “Aboriginal spirituality in a new age.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 21, 71–89. Swain, T. and D. Rose, eds. 1988. Aboriginal Australians and Christian Missions. Adelaide: The Australian Association for the Study of Religions. Swain, T. 1993. A PLACE for STRANGERS: towards a history of Australian Aboriginal being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tacey, D. 2000. Re-enchantment: The New Australian Spirituality. Pymble: Harper Collins. Tafjord, B. 2013. “Indigenous Religion(s) as an Analytical Category.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 25, 221–243. Trompf, G.W. 1987. The Gospel is Not Western: Black Theologies from the Southwest Pacific. Maryknoll: Orbis Press.

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chapter 20

Of Ruins and Revival: Heritage Formation and Khoisan Indigenous Identity in Post-apartheid South Africa Duane Jethro Introduction On the morning of the twenty-second of September 2015, a group of Khoisan activists marched through the city of Cape Town to protest against their continued marginalisation by provincial officials.1 On route to the Western Cape Provincial Legislature, the group paused at Krotoa Place to enact a public ritual performance as part of their urban protest (see Watson 2014). The location was symbolically significant in the modern, post-apartheid urban context for highlighting the plight of contemporary young black women and girls, and the indigenous heritage of local people. Named after a seventeenth century young indigenous woman who worked as an ambassador to the Dutch, Krotoa van Meerhof, Krotoa Place was a site of celebration that recalled a little-known figure of indigenous history. Dedicated on Women’s Day, 9 August 2012 by the City of Cape Town, Krotoa Place was marked by the unveiling of a commemorative bench decorated with colourful mosaic art depicting Khoi and Dutch colonial images and a portrait of Krotoa. Funded by Rock Girl, a non-governmental organisation, the bench was also intended to be a defensive place-marker, erected as part of the organisation’s Safe Spaces campaign for women and girls.2 As a strategic piece of urban design, the bench was a functional memorial, marking Krotoa Place as a safe place of indigenous heritage in the heart of 1 Coined in the 1920s, the term Khoisan was meant to refer to people of a similar physical and linguistic type, such as the Khoe or Khoi pastoralist and the San, or Bushmen, hunter-gatherers. This strictly anthropological classification replaced loaded, derogatory designations such as Bushmen and Hottentot, or Hotnot. The latter terms are considered to be deeply humiliating insults especially for the coloured population group, while the term Bushman is still used emically and does not carry the same kind of stigma. Referring to various indigenous groups across South and southern Africa, the term Khoisan masks broad cultural, linguistic and religious differences that will be unpacked in this paper. 2 ‘Rock Girl Safe Spaces Benches’, http://www.rockgirlsa.org/safe-spaces-campaign/safe -spaces-benches/. Last accessed 27/12/15.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_022

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the city. Using the bench as a focus of ritual attention, the group of Khoisan activists gathered on the twenty-second of September engaged in an ancient form of indigenous religious action. Dressed in attire made of skins culled from sacred local animals, they burned incense, they chanted, and they prayed for protection from the ancestors. They then unpacked artisans’ implements such as crowbars and hammers and proceeded to destroy the Krotoa bench. The activists were quickly arrested and held overnight at Cape Town Central Police station. Branded thugs by city officials, they were charged with malicious damage to property and staging an illegal gathering. They were released on the following day, the twenty-third of September, the day before Heritage Day. Protesting their incarceration, the spokesperson for the activist group, the Institute for the Restoration of Aborigines of South Africa (irasa) Tanya Kleinhans-Cedras said, “It’s so disturbing that we have been put behind bars for a seat that discredited the matriarch of the Khoisan in the Western Cape. She is Krotoa, who is also a cochoqua [clan member].”3 For these Khoisan activists, there was nothing to celebrate on Heritage Day. The Krotoa bench was not a dignified celebration of their indigenous heritage, but rather a form of public humiliation. As Tanya Kleinhans-Cedras, a chief of the Cochoqua clan explained, “Well it’s extremely disrespectful because it just shows that the people who commissioned the art work are absolutely culturally naïve, in order to take a matriarch, and to design a seat and place your buttock on her face.”4 Emphasising the butt of the offence, Joe Damons of the Western Cape Legislative Khoisan Council explained, “It was a disgrace for people to sit and fart and urinate on that bench.”5 In their view, the destruction of the bench was not an act of vandalism but rather a religious act of recovery. “All we were doing was defending and restoring our sacred heritage.”6 In their defence, however, irasa members claimed that they did not arbitrarily demolish the bench. They saved key parts for restoration in the future. As Tanya Kleinhans-Cedras explained, “We kept the part of her face and the part containing her name so that a more 3 ‘Khoisan activists arrested for smashing icon’s bench’. http://sbeta.iol.co.za/frontpage/ khoisan-activists-arrested-for-smashing-icons-bench-1919968, Accessed 1/12/15. The spokesperson’s name is spelled Tania, or Tanya Kleinhans in various media reports. For consistency, I have used the most up to date ascription, Tanya Kleinhans-Cedras. 4 ‘Heritage Day’, activists have nothing to celebrate’, http://ewn.co.za/2015/09/24/Heritage -day-Khoisan-activists-have-nothing-to-celebrate Last accessed 1/12/15. 5 ‘Khoisan leaders in court for allegedly vandalising disgraceful tribute bench’, http://www .news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Khoisan-leaders-in-court-for-allegedly-vandalising -disgraceful-tribute-bench-20150925, Last accessed 1/12/15. 6 ‘Khoisan activists arrested for smashing icon’s bench’, http://sbeta.iol.co.za/frontpage/ khoisan-activists-arrested-for-smashing-icons-bench-1919968, Last accessed 1/12/15.

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dignified memorial of her can be erected.”7 Highlighting the power of material indigenous images as heritage, the activists rescued key features of the bench from public defilement in order to restore its sacred significance in the future. Taking its cue from these Khoisan activists, this chapter will address the relationship between heritage formation and indigenous identity in postapartheid­South Africa. It shows how indigenous religious resources were used to make and remake forms of post-apartheid Khoisan subjectivity. This on-going articulation was entangled in discourses of ruin and revival, and the struggle for heritage and belonging. First, I will outline the decline and postapartheid revival of Khoisan indigenous identity, showing how a small group of individuals revitalised the identity using reinvented religious rituals, an indigenous aesthetic style and through new civic organisations to make political claims about belonging. Second, I will show how the state seized upon Khoisan indigenous cultural resources, such as Khoisan language and images, and translated and upscaled them for national heritage formation and sovereign signification. Highlighting the productive tension between the state and local stakeholders, the chapter demonstrates how indigenous revival in postapartheid South Africa is a religiously informed project of political renewal contested in the language of heritage.

Khoisan Decline and Revival

A pile of dust and broken concrete, the ruined Krotoa bench could be construed as a formative assemblage, as rubble, to quote Gastón Gordillo, “a conceptual figure that can help us understand the ruptured multiplicity that is constitutive of all geographies as they are produced, destroyed and remade” (2014: 2). Exploding the possible geographies of the formation of indigenous identity in South Africa, the bench opens up routes of analysis of heritage, sacredness, material culture and indigenous identity. For one, in defending the sacredness of their heritage, the activists echoed Michael Taussig’s proposition that defacement could be seen as a kind of desecration that elevates destroyed material to the status of being almost more “sacred than sacred” (1999: 1). Breaking the Krotoa bench was an act of liberating a sacred surplus and remaking Khoisan identity from its discursive remains. Always incomplete and rendering remains that are never entirely destroyed, ruination allows for creative processes of remaking, for powerful forms of renewal. 7 ‘Khoisan activists arrested for smashing icon’s bench’, http://sbeta.iol.co.za/frontpage/ khoisan-activists-arrested-for-smashing-icons-bench-1919968, Last accessed 1/12/15.

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Yet this public intervention was about more than just a bench. It was about recognition. While the Khoisan were the largest indigenous group in the Western Cape, Tanya Kleinhans-Cedras lamented, they remained “the most unidentified.”8 As such, by engaging in this form of violent political action irasa had hoped to restore the integrity of the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 169 and affirm their claim as indigenous people. “We are going to rectify the ilo (International Labour Organisation) Convention 169. We are bringing life to it and our process of self-destination is under way. Those rights are the rights we are going to affirm with the utmost integrity” she defiantly announced.9 Linking their violent local action to the global struggle for indigenous rights and discourses of indigeneity, the activists framed the material destruction of the Krotoa bench as a calculated act of religious renewal that was part of an on-going struggle for political recognition. Equating destruction with political self-definition, the activists’ ritual ruination of the Krotoa bench was a recuperative act of rescue, a public act of material purification central to the recovery of Khoisan indigenous identity in South Africa and indigeneity in the world. Such destruction is an unfortunate parallel of the ruinous history of the Khoisan. Laura Anne Stoler points out that the standard definition of ‘to ruin’ means “to inflict or bring great and irretrievable disaster upon, to destroy agency, to reduce to a state of poverty, to demoralise completely” (2013: 9). As an active process, ruination is a “vibrantly violent verb” (Stoler 2013: 9). The Khoisan have historically been subject to the violence, destruction and ruination exerted by the forces of colonial modernity and the apartheid state. Reflecting on the history of Khoisan religion during colonial contact, David Chidester (1996), for example, has shown how colonial era validation of the group’s religious beliefs change in line with the expansion of the frontier. ‘Discovered’ by colonialists to first have no religion, once trade relations were initiated at the Cape their beliefs were validated, documented as a religious system concerned with moon worship. Following the expansion of the colonial frontier, and following the Khoisan people’s resistance, these interpretations revert in the historical record to cast the local indigenous people as savage and without religion. In the real and conceptual space of the frontier, a zone of political and ideological contestation between asymmetrical military forces, the Khoisan were seen as either barbarous or harmless depending on the shifting interpretation of 8 ‘Khoisan protesters break princess’s bench’. http://beta.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/khoisan -protesters-break-princesss-bench-1920183, Last accessed 1/12/15. 9 ‘Khoisan protesters break princess’s bench’.http://beta.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/khoisan -protesters-break-princesss-bench-1920183, Last accessed 1/12/15.

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their religious system and the extent of colonial containment and control. By the late nineteenth century, the attrition of wars of resistance, colonial genocide and culturally specific practices of accommodation had so broken certain Khoisan groups that they virtually ‘lost’ their indigenous identity, language, religion and culture. Some indigenous San and Khoe groups like the Griqua did however manage to perpetuate their indigenous traditions and ways of life (Waldman 2007; Cavanagh 2011). Under pressure of colonial modernity, many Khoisan they assimilated into the British Cape Colony as English or African speaking ‘mixed race’ natives that would later be known as coloureds (Marks 1972; Adhikari 2009; Adhikari 2015).10 Colonialism was a project of ruination that systematically destroyed forms of indigenous subjectivity, language and material heritage, rendering some forms of indigenous life nearly illegible.11 Broken by colonial modernity, and subsumed by the apartheid state as a distinct non-indigenous ‘race group’, Khoisan indigenous subjectivity was largely incorporated into a racialised struggle for political freedom during the ­twentieth century. With the shift to democracy in the 1990s, ‘lost’ Khoisan indigenous identities were revived, refashioned and mobilised by conscious, educated and politically active coloured individuals. For example, affirming his indigenous roots, Benny Alexander, a former press secretary for the PanAfricanist Congress, a liberation movement, changed his name in 1994 to Khoisan x. Others followed. Political activist Martin van Wyk began asserting Khoisan consciousness in the 1990s in political meetings, eventually ascending to chief of the Gorachouqua Royal House in 2003.12 Former United Democratic Front activist and chief of the Gonaqua clan, Jean Burgess also discovered her Khoisan roots at this time. She eloquently expressed the racial and political dynamics of her personal transition: “I was part of the Black Consciousness Movement and always saw myself as black. [On Heritage Day] a Xhosa man asked me, in front of all the people in the hall, where my culture and heritage was … It made me feel like nothing. I couldn’t answer him. I started searching 10

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Coloured is a catch all term referring to people of ‘mixed race’. It is an inaccurate, homogenous term for different cultural and religious groups who are not phenotypically black or white. According to official state nomenclature applied for affirmative action, for example, coloureds are however considered black in the sense that they were previously disadvantaged. Indeed it is agreed upon that many Cape Khoi and San languages are extinct with no living speakers left. Few textual records of some of these languages remain. The cultures, traditions and religious beliefs are also considered to have been lost as a result of South Africa’s rapacious racial modernity. ‘Chief Hendrik ‘Hennie’ van Wyk’, accessed at South African History online, http://www .sahistory.org.za/people/chief-hendrik-hennie-van-wyk. Last accessed 1/12/15.

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for it … I wanted it so badly. It’s difficult to explain what it means to have one’s culture denied.”13 By engaging in the recovery of her indigenous identity, Jean Burgess embarked on a personal project of heritage formation that had wider social import. She had the “spiritual responsibility to make coloured people see they are not just a mixture of black and white.”14 By making coloureds aware of their forgotten indigenous heritage, Jean Burgess and other politically astute individuals embarked on the personal spiritual quest of restoring the dignity of a population group ruined by colonialism and apartheid (see Ruiters 2009: 121–124; Besten 2006: 287–289). A leading figure in the revivalist movement was Joseph Little. Born in Plumstead, Cape Town, Little and his family were classified coloured under apartheid. Forcefully removed from Plumstead after it was designated for whites only, the Little family resettled in the coloured suburb of Grassy Park. Growing up, Little’s father cultivated a sense of pride in their Khoisan heritage. Picking up on these strands later in life, Joseph embarked on a personal search for his indigenous roots in the 1980s while living and working in Europe and the uk, rediscovering it in books in the libraries of England. Lacking the ‘concrete’ tenets of indigeneity such as blood ties, language, religion and established cultural tradition, activists like Little used historical evidence derived from texts and personal genealogies to substantiate their claims to authentic Khoisan roots.15 Returning to South Africa, he hoped his knowledge could be of some benefit to the coloured population. As Jean Burgess’s confession shows, a portion of the coloured population harboured feelings of rootlessness and shame that were related to ideas of heritage, belonging and identity. After South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994, Little recognised that the changing political circumstances were ripe for a bold revival of Khoisan identity. Drawing on the provisions made for the recognition of indigenous people in the new Constitution, in 1996 he founded the Cape Cultural Heritage Development Council (cchdc), a non-profit organisation to create awareness about the coloured people’s indigenous heritage and bring to life the dormant, disappeared or nascent Khoisan groups of the Western Cape. Drawing on the legal authority accorded by this instrument, Little actively blurred the distinction between indigenous revival and civic activism. He supposedly used the launch of his 13 14 15

‘Chief Little takes on a Big Job’. http://mg.co.za/article/1997-07-25-chief-little-takes-on-a -big-job. Last accessed 1/12/15. Chief Little takes on a Big Job’. http://mg.co.za/article/1997-07-25-chief-little-takes-on-a -big-job. Last accessed 1/12/15. They would later also mobilise around casts, bones, and dna, substances of dna, according to Katharina Schramm (2016).

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organisation to anoint himself a chief of the previously extinct Hamcumqua clan, and, further, by his ‘traditional authority’, revived other lost royal Khoisan houses by inducting a number of other chiefs. Legal instruments enabled politically conscious coloured individuals like Joseph Little to make persuasive claims about their revived neo-Khoisan indigenous identity. This new prefix is no small point. It is contentious as it situates these claims to indigenous identity in complex debates about historical authenticity. Indigenous activists do not use this term. Taking heed of this complexity, I use the word neo-Khoisan to refer to the contemporary forms of Khoi indigenous subjectivity claimed and re-articulated by indigenous activists in South Africa. Signalling the re-emergence of Khoisan indigenous subjectivity in the postapartheid present, and mobilised for sustaining the subjectivity’s future, the prefix ‘neo’ casts the discussion of indigenous identity in post-apartheid South Africa as concerning unbroken cultural and traditional links to the past. Little’s decision to raise the notion of chieftancy was timeous. While chiefs were historically viewed with suspicion, as complicit with colonial and apartheid forces, in democratic South Africa they were seen as important local political actors, as authorities of tradition and traditional authorities. Under the new Constitution, provision was made for their representation at the provincial level through a representative body called the House of Traditional Leaders, and nationally, through a Council of Traditional leaders. They were also provided with a government salary (van Kessel and Oomen 1997; Williams 2010). Chieftancy therefore had both political and economic currency, as a local political office with national representation that accrued material and symbolic benefits. Styling themselves as chiefs, neo-Khoisan activists clearly aspired to the trappings of this newly revised political office. In 1997 the heritage, culture and status of indigenous peoples became a topic of collaborative discussion at the Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage conference held in Cape Town.16 The conference took place in the context of growing debate about the status of indigenous people in South ­Africa, and the United Nation’s declaration of 1995–2004 as International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People. Local debate about indigenous identity therefore took place within a global discussion about indigeneity. The conference itself was an occasion for the celebration of living Khoisan culture, religion

16

Richard Lee (2003: 96) posits that Khoisan revivalism can be traced to the preceding conference, held in Munich Germany in 1994, where Professor Henry Bredekamp, a scholar from Cape Town who would later go on to head iziko Museums in the Western Cape, rose and proclaimed the significance of his marginalised Khoisan heritage.

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and heritage. Sheep were slaughtered as ritual offerings. There was traditional singing, dance performances and storytelling, part of a live showcase of the vitality of Khoisan culture (Besten 2011: 182). Joseph Little recognised this as an opportune moment to secure legitimacy for his Khoisan revival. His strategy for doing so first concerned soliciting the blessing of recognised Khoisan authorities and establishing important links with them. Second, he mobilised a distinctive indigenous aesthetic of dress, speech and gesture, to create a strong public impression about neo-Khoisan living indigenous primacy. Joseph Little had solicited the blessing of recognised authorities before the conference already, befriending David Kanyiles, leader of the Griekwa Volks Organisatie. Kanyiles supported Little’s endeavours. When Little founded a new organisation, the National Council of Khoisan Chiefs, Kanyiles obliged by lending his authority as a recognised Paramount Chief (Brink 2003). As Michael Besten explains, this led to “New Khoekhoe chiefs linked to the cchdc [being] inducted by Kanyiles at special revived or invented ritual or ‘!nau’ ceremonies from 1998” (2011: 183). !Nau rituals were an important form of indigenous religious action. The anthropologist Winifred Hoernle (1918) documented the !Nau ritual as a central Khoisan rite of passage, for the life-cycle, for purification and for healing of the sick. !Nau rituals are still practised in contemporary South Africa. A ritual was held for laying to rest the remains of Sara Bartman, a Khoisan woman exhibited as the ‘Hottentot Venus’ in Europe during the nineteenth century (Crais and Scully 2009; Qureshi 2004; Holmes 2008). And !Nau rituals are currently held for the induction of new Khoisan members and chiefs, suggesting that it remains a ceremony loaded with cultural and political meaning (see Verbyst 2015: 117–118). Little drew another Paramount chief, Abraham Le Fleur, recognised leader of local Griqua clans, into participating in a validating ritual performance during the Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage conference. Just before the opening of the conference, Little staged a special induction ceremony in the atrium of the South African Museum. Richard Lee describes the events best, “One by one, members of the audience were called to the podium where they donned a highly eclectic mix of regalia and announced to the assembly who they were, what clan they were representing and what Khoi name they were adopting. The atmosphere was one of reverence and joy” (2006: 456). Paramount Chief Abraham Le Fleur had witnessed the induction of the eleven new Khoisan chiefs as part of the conference audience, which led Little to later make the controversial claim that in so doing he recognised the candidates as legitimate Khoisan chiefs. Seeking official recognition, Little actively sought out the endorsement of bona fide Khoisan chiefs who, willingly or not, would lend their authority by officiating or observing rituals of public certification.

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‘Indigenous aesthetics’ was also central to the assertion of persuasive claims (see Conklin 1997). Throughout the conference, Little and his followers associated themselves with ‘traditional’ or even colonial images of Khoisan people derived from history books or museum exhibits. Journalist Gaye Davis’ profile of Little at the conference is a good illustration of this repose: “A band of cheetah skin around his neck, faux leopard-skin tails dangling from his headband, Chief Joe Little strikes a pose next to a reed hut erected in the cobbled courtyard of Cape Town’s South African Cultural History Museum.”17 The portrayal of these primal indigenous images through dress and stagecraft was effective in capturing the media’s attention and visually asserting the authenticity of their claims to Khoisan chieftancy. As Greg Johnson (2005: 58) points out with regard to Native American groups, “simulations … are counteractions taken in the struggle for representation of an impossibility” in the process of public claim making. In the case of the neo-Khoisan, such styling also distinguished them from, but also drew the attention of, other recognised chiefs. During the conference “New chiefly claimants … deemed it necessary to wear clothing with indigenous and African motifs, notably leopard markings, in their attempts to project themselves as creditable chiefs” (Besten 2011: 183). Jostling for position amongst other chiefs and attempting to capture the public’s attention, neo-Khoisan affiliates staged a visual display of indigenous legitimacy by adopting an ostentatious indigenous aesthetic comprised of animal skins, fly-whips, cloaks and tassels styled to publically affirm their living indigenous primacy. It is important to signal that Joseph Little was but one role-player in the contested post-apartheid neo-Khoisan revival. Yet it is clear he helped establish a model for how neo-Khoisan indigenous claims would be asserted in the future. Three features of his cultural and political strategy bear this out. First, he advanced the idea of Khoisan revival as a political and cultural process that would be realised through a strategic set of civic organisations. By establishing a series of civic organisations as vehicles for Khoisan advocacy he blurred the lines between indigenous revival and civic activism. Second, he crafted an indigenous aesthetic, of dress, language and gesture for asserting neo-Khoisan legitimacy. Styling themselves according to primal images of indigenous people, these activists signalled a cultural proximity with authentic Khoisan roots. Third, he used revived, or reinvented indigenous religious ritual as a mechanism for asserting political claims about the continued existence and relevance of neo-Khoisan groups in South Africa. Civic activism, indigenous 17

‘Chief Little takes on a Big Job’. http://mg.co.za/article/1997-07-25-chief-little-takes-on-a -big-job. Last accessed 1/12/15.

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aesthetics and ritual action endure as features of the neo-Khoisan movement in the Western Cape.

Rituals of Reclamation

The ruins of the Krotoa bench bore the hallmarks of this tradition of activism. It was ruined and reclaimed through ritual intervention by neo-Khoisan­ activists­mobilising as a representative civic organisation. As in this case, in post-apartheid South Africa, neo-Khoisan activism was often focussed on or tied to material and symbolic resources that were considered vital for the restoration­of indigenous identity. Ritual reclamation of land and sites of historical significance were especially important for local indigenous renewal. Neo-Khoisan groups held a number of revitalising religious ceremonies aimed at raising awareness about access, control and ownership of important historical sites in Cape Town and the continued oppression of an important indigenous minority. For example, in June 2012 irasa activists unofficially renamed the city of Cape Town, ‘//Hui !Gaeb’, from the Nama, meaning ‘where clouds gather’. They erected a billboard at the entrance to the City Centre, celebrating the unveiling with song, dance and speeches. Earlier that year activists held a land cleansing ceremony on Rondebosch Common, a plot of open ground in a middle class suburb of the city. They put up a sign renaming the site, Tsui Goab, from the Nama, meaning ‘the one who spreads the green shining colour all over the earth’, and built a temporary kraal, or traditional homestead, from grass and wood for the special cleansing ceremony. Dressed in ‘traditional Khoisan attire’, the men entered this ‘very sacred place’, lit a fire and burnt special herbs to ward off evil spirits. They chanted and prayed while women made an outer circle and clapped in support. They then smeared ash on participant’s foreheads, which symbolised death and new beginnings.18 In 2013, the same group of neo-Khoisan activists occupied flats in a housing development in District Six, a site of apartheid era forced removal near the inner city. Built as part of a post-apartheid land restitution project, the flats were set aside for former evictees. With this action, Khoisan activists wished to emphasise their strong ancestral connection to this land and protest against the post-apartheid state’s land restitution project. As Tanya Kleinhans-Cedras pointed out, “We have a right to our customs and our rights to the District Six 18

‘Ritual on Rondebosch Common’. http://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/ritual-on-rondebosch -common-1.1227971?ot=inmsa.ArticlePrintPageLayout.ot. Last accessed 1/12/15.

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land are deep rooted in our indigenous roots.”19 The activists were eventually evicted after a protracted legal battle. Having vacated the flats, they returned later to mark their ancestral bonds to the site by building a Matjieshuis, or a dome shaped dwelling, on a vacant plot of ground in District Six. Neo-Khoisan activists re-established their link with the land and their indigenous history not by breaking down houses or occupying flats but by building a temporary material structure that would be a sacred home for the dwelling of the ancestors. “The matjieshuis is a symbolic gesture that links us to the land before the development took place. It’s a place where we can talk to our ancestors,” Tanya Kleinhans-Cedras explained. This would be the site from where the ancestors would take ownership of the land and provide protection over the Khoisan people. “It’s a great location for it, our ancestors can look over us and their land.”20 Illegally occupying land in the struggle for recognition was part of the contemporary indigenous project of restoring indigenous dignity. “This is just the beginning for restorative justive”, they claimed. Activists argued that forcing them out through court orders and forceful evictions, state authorities were perpetrating a grave form of violence. “It will be tantamount to cultural genocide if the Khoisan people are evicted from the last remaining kraal in this province.”21 Casting contemporary Khoisan land claims in a long history of violence and ruination, activists highlighted the central significance of material forms, of sacred sites, of land, for the restoration of Khoisan indigenous identity. In May 2014, neo-Khoisan activists also illegally occupied the Oude Molen Eco Village Community Hall, in the suburb of Pinelands. The site was historically significant as the location of an important Khoisan kraal, and an important site of colonial resistance (Verbuyst 2015: 97). “We have used that site for sacred ceremonies for as long as we can remember and we intend to preserve it.”22 Attempting to revive the site’s indigenous heritage, they tried to transform the community Hall into a Khoisan kraal. As the spokesperson for the Khoi and Boesman Aboriginal Council, Tanya Kleinhans-Cedras explained, “according 19 ‘Matjieshuis erected to honour Khoi past’. http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/ western-cape/matjieshuis-erected-to-honour-khoi-past-1546642. Last accessed 1/12/15. 20 ‘Matjieshuis erected to honour Khoi past’. http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/ western-cape/matjieshuis-erected-to-honour-khoi-past-1546642. Last accessed 1/12/15. 21 All these last few quotes are from Tanya Kleinhans-Cedras in ‘Khoisan want kraal back’. http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2014/05/29/khoisan-want-kraal-back. Last accessed 1/12/15. 22 ‘Khoisan want kraal back’. http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2014/05/29/khoisan -want-kraal-back. Last accessed 1/12/15.

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to authorities it is called an occupation. To us, it is called restoration.”23 Reviving lost Khoisan identities did not simply entail destruction and illegal occupation. It also concerned the construction of traditional dwellings, of erecting signs, and renaming sites, as part of the process of restorative material remaking.

State Appropriation

In the early post-apartheid era, while activists were mounting a Khoisan revival, state officials cast the Khoisan as dispossessed and even extinct.24 A notable example of this fatalist rhetoric was issued by then deputy president Thabo Mbeki during his parliamentary address on the occasion of the adoption of the new Constitution in 1996. Entitled, ‘I am an African’, the text rhetorically invoked a new post-apartheid national identity based on a wide, yet contested notion of Africanness which was explicitly linked to an extinct Cape Khoisan primordiality. As he put it, “I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape – they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and independence.”25 Cast as ghostly heroic progenitors of the nation, the Khoisan were positioned as South Africa’s first people, as its deceased primal representatives.26 Ironically, at the same time, the state appropriated their religious and cultural resources for purposes of national signification and heritage formation. Khoisan art, language and religious idioms were used in the design of a new national Coat of Arms and adopted for naming a new post-apartheid museum, //hapo, at Freedom Park in Pretoria. Khoisan cultural resources were available for staging a new sovereign, cultural and national identity after they had been cast extinct. Both the National Coat of Arms and the //hapo museum 23 ‘Khoisan activists wont budge’. http://ewn.co.za/2014/05/18/Khoisan-activists-wont -budge. Last accessed 1/12/15. 24 While many Khoi and San people were dispossessed and moved from their land, many continued to practise their religion and culture in different parts of South Africa. 25 Thabo Mbeki’s speech at the adoption of the The Republic of South Africa Constitution Bill, Parliament of South Africa, Cape Town, 8 May, 1996. http://www.anc.org.za/show .php?id=4322. Last accessed 27/12/15. 26 Neo-Khoisan revivalism partly emerged as a response to this kind of national posturing. Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage Conference held in 1997 was a direct response to the state’s fatalist position.

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relate distinct, revealing narratives of loss and recovery of Khoisan indigenous resources. The new Coat of Arms told its own story of ruination and revival. Designed in the late 1990s as part of a broad overhaul of symbols of state and nation, the Coat of Arms is dominated by a gold secretary bird, but also featured ears of wheat, the Protea national flower, elephant tusks and two San figures clasping hands in greeting. The national motto, ǃke e: ǀxarra ǁke, meaning ‘diverse people unite’, curls around the base. Derived from a sacred /Xam narrative, the words were meant to establish a new mythological charter for the post-apartheid nation. As Alan Barnard (2004) explains, president Thabo Mbeki became personally involved in crafting the motto by requesting the Khoisan linguist David Lewis-Williams to translate the words “diverse cultures unite” into the extinct /Xam language. Following through on Mbeki’s request, Lewis-Williams used a dictionary of /Xam terms and phrases compiled in the late nineteenth century by Lucy Lloyd, an amateur ethnographer and folklorist, to translate the words, since the language was extinct. Lloyd and her brother-in-law Wilhelm Bleek had originally built up their archive of San words and stories in the late nineteenth century from the testimony of indigenous informants imprisoned in Cape Town (see Skotnes 1996). Reviving the words of an extinct indigenous language, David Lewis-Williams executed the translation of the sovereign national motto using words of a ruined people whose language lived on in the texts of their scholarly interpreters. The San figures that appear in the coat of arms were copied and modified from the Linton Stone, a rock art panel housed in the South African Museum in Cape Town.27 Described variably as “a major treasure,” and “one of the greatest rock art panels in any museum anywhere in the world” (Lewis-Williams 2011: 14), the Linton Stone had been recovered from a ‘remote rock shelter’ filled with paintings on the Linton farm in the Eastern Cape province. The six foot long panel was brutally carved out of the rock face, and transported over difficult terrain to Cape Town for preservation and display. Today, it is the centrepiece of a large permanent exhibition of San spirituality at the iziko natural history museum. The recovery of the stone was rather fortuitous, since, as David Lewis-Williams explains, “next to nothing remains in the rather damp rock shelter from which the slab was removed. The paintings that [were left behind] have mostly weathered away” (2011: 9). In the same way that their sacred art had been left to ruin, so too have the San people been ruined, dispossessed and marginalised. Yet in their state of virtual material destitution they were available for national signification, as a resource 27

For security reasons, the state insisted the motif used for the coat of arms came from a piece of rock held by a South African museum.

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of national primordial renewal. As Alan Barnard put it, “Khoisan people are not just any people, but … the original people; and thus through them a virtual primordial identity for the nation as a whole can be imagined” (2004: 19). Khoisan language and indigenous religious concepts were also used for national heritage formation. This was the case at Freedom Park, the South ­African state’s premier post-apartheid national heritage venture (Jethro 2013). Freedom Park’s museum was named //hapo, from the extinct Khoi proverb “//hapo ge //hapo tama/haohasib dis tamas ka i bo,” meaning a dream is not a dream until it is shared by the entire community. The choice of name was complex, reflecting a wish to acknowledge a forgotten culture yet at the same time signalling a kind of irony since, in South Africa, there was fierce debate about the representation of Khoisan people in museum spaces (Davison 2001). Jansen van Rensburg (2009: 41) argues that the term //hapo also referred to the trance-like state of entering the mythical world of rock art (see Bednarik et al. 1990). The museum materially replicated the lithic connotations that attached to this interpretation of //hapo since its design was modelled on “rock-like forms placed around a central outdoor space” (Noble 2011: 247). Steeped in the Khoisan religious motifs of rocks, dreams, trance and community, //hlapo registered as a powerful state institution representing the history of South ­Africa, initiating a new set of scales of national time, a primordial time, a new beginning for the post-apartheid nation. Conclusion On the morning of the twenty-third of September, after appearing in court for staging an illegal gathering and malicious damage of public property, the eight Khoisan activists, accused of destroying the Krotoa bench, assembled in front of the Cape Town Magistrates court building. Still dressed in traditional attire, the group clapped hands, danced and chanted, in a public ritual performance of resistance against the legal force of the state.28 Ironically, to commemorate Women’s Day on 9 August 2016, the state chose to commemorate Krotoa, by erecting a commemorative bench, at the old Dutch Castle in the centre of Cape Town. While some neo-Khoisan groups actively supported the unveiling, it also drew fierce criticism from within the neo-Khoisan community. As one such representative Chief Basil Coetzee explained in regard to the religious 28

‘Khoisan leaders in court for allegedly vandalising ‘disgraceful’ tribute bench’. http://www .news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Khoisan-leaders-in-court-for-allegedly-vandalising -disgraceful-tribute-bench-20150925. Last accessed 1/12/15.

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connotations the event was meant to convey, “Krotoa is the mother of our nation and this entire event was done by the Nguni tribe who called her spirit to the castle.”29 As this example also shows, while the state sought to take legal action against the group, in some ways, the state also took a keen interest in the preservation, celebration and display of Khoisan religion and culture in the post-apartheid dispensation. Indeed, this brings us to the very point of this chapter, that neo-Khoisan indigenous revival is a religiously informed project contested between local actors and the state, each of whom scrambled for a different set of resources that appear to be at stake. Khoisan identity was revived in post-apartheid South Africa on the basis of ritual practice, performance and indigenous aesthetics that were mobilised for political activism. Moreover, I tried to demonstrate the significance of heritage as an important discourse for the making and remaking of this indigenous identity. Khoisan activists used it as a motif for framing an indigenous aesthetic style, for engaging public discussion about their political work, and to reassert Khoisan identity into South Africa’s post-apartheid heritage narrative. The state appropriated, translated and upscaled Khoisan indigenous resources for national signification. Khoisan sacred artefacts were stored and displayed as important national artefacts, San language was interpreted for national signification, and local cultural material was upscaled to represent the nation. Certainly, the state’s reworking of Khoisan motifs in processes of heritage formation and signification were attempts to stake a claim over and remake Khoisan indigeneity. It is easy to see these different workings of Khoisan subjectivity as opposed. But in many ways they run in parallel, each expressing the on-going work of interpreting Khoisan identity in post-apartheid South Africa. References Adhikari, M. ed. 2009. Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in Southern Africa. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. Adhikari, M. ed. 2015. Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When Hunter-Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Clash. New York: Berghahn.

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“Khoisan Chiefs unhappy over bankie honour,” Daily Voice, 24 August, 2016. http:// www.dailyvoice.co.za/khoisan-chiefs-unhappy-over-bankie-honour/. Accessed 19/11/16. See also, “Spirit of Krotoa returned to the Castle of Good Hope.” Accessed at http:// www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/spirit-of-krotoa-returned-to-the-castle-of-good -hope-20160819. Last accessed 19/11/16.

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Barnard, A. 2004. “Coat of arms and the body politic: Khoisan imagery and South African national identity.” Journal of Anthropology 69: 1, 5–22. Bednarik, R.G., J.D. Lewis-Williams, and T.A. Dowson. 1990. “On neuropsychology and shamanism in rock art.” Cultural Anthropology 31: 1, 77–84. Besten, M.P. 2006. “Transformation and Reconstitution of Khoe-San Identities: AAS le Fleur I, Griqua Identities and Post-Apartheid Khoe-San Revivalism (1894–2004).” Doctoral Thesis. Leiden University. Besten, M.P. 2011. “Envisioning ancestors: staging of Khoe-San authenticity in South Africa.” Critical Arts 25: 2, 175–191. Brink, G.W. 2003. “Archbishop Daniel James Augustine Kanyiles, a Khoi religious, political and cultural leader.” NGTT 44: 1&2. Cavanagh, E. 2011. The Griqua Past and the Limits of South African History, 1902–1994. Vol. 9. Oxford: Peter Lang. Chidester, D. 1996. “Bushman Religion: Open, Closed, and New Frontiers.” In Pippa Skotnes, ed. Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen, Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 51–65. Conklin, B.A. 1997. “Body paint, feathers, and VCRs: aesthetics and authenticity in Amazonian activism.” American Ethnologist 24: 4, 711–737. Crais, C.C. and P. Scully. 2009. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A ghost story and a biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davison, P. 2001. “Typecast: representations of the Bushmen at the South African museum.” Public Archaeology 2: 1, 3–20. Gordillo, G. 2014. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham: Duke University Press. Hoernle, W. 1918. “Certain rites of transition and the conception of !Nau among the Hottentot.” Harvard African Studies 2, 65–82. Holmes, R. 2008. The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman: Born 1789-Buried 2002. London: Bloomsbury. International Labour Organisation (ILO). 1989. Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, C169, 27 June 1989, http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:1 2100:0::NO:12100:P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312314:NO. Janse van Rensburg, A. 2009. “Comparing altars and agendas-using architecture to unite?” South African Journal of Art History 24: 1, 33–47. Jethro, D. 2013. “An african story of creation: heritage formation at freedom park, south africa.” Material Religion 9: 3, 370–393. Johnson, G. 2005. “Facing down the representation of an impossibility: indigenous responses to a ‘universal’ problem in the repatriation context.” Culture and Religion 6: 1, 57–78. Lee, R. 2003. “Indigenous Rights and the Politics of Identity in Post-Apartheid Southern Africa.” In B. Dean and J. Levi, eds. At the Risk of Being Heard: Identity, Indigenous Rights, and Post-Colonial States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 80–111.

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Lee, R. 2006. “Twenty first century indigenism.” Anthropological Theory 6: 4, 455–479. Lewis-Williams, D. 2011. San Rock Art. Indianapolis: Ohio University Press. Marks, S. 1972. “Khoisan resistance to the Dutch in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” The Journal of African History 13: 1, 55–80. Noble, J.A. 2011. African Identity in Post-Apartheid Public Architecture: White Skin, Black Masks. London: Ashgate Publishing. Qureshi, S. 2004. “Displaying Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’.” History of Science 42: 2, 233–257. Ruiters, M. 2009. “Collaboration, assimilation and contestation: emerging constructions of coloured identity in post-apartheid South Africa.” In M. Adhikari, ed. Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in Southern Africa. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 104–133. Schramm, K. 2016. “Casts, bones and DNA: interrogating the relationship between science and postcolonial indigeneity in contemporary South Africa.” Anthropology Southern Africa 39: 2, 131–144. Skotnes, P, ed. 1996. Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. Stoler, A.L., ed. 2013. Imperial Debris: on Ruins and Ruination. Durham: Duke University Press. Taussig, M. 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press. van Kessel, I. and B. Oomen. 1997. “‘One chief, one vote’: The revival of traditional authorities in post-apartheid South Africa.” African Affairs 96: 385, 561–585. Verbuyst, R. 2015. Claiming Cape Town: Ethnographic Interpretations of Khoisan activism and land claims. Masters Thesis. African Studies Department. University of Leiden. Waldman, L. 2007. The Griqua Conundrum: Political and Socio-Cultural Identity in the Northern Cape, South Africa. Oxford: Peter Lang. Watson, M. 2014. “Cities: Indigeneity and Belonging.” In L. Graham and H.G. Penny, eds. Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 390–414. Williams, J.M. 2010. Chieftaincy, the State, and Democracy: Political Legitimacy in PostApartheid South Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

chapter 21

Global Intentions and Local Conflicts: The Rise and Fall of Ambuya Juliana in Zimbabwe1 James L. Cox Introduction During the discussion period following a paper I presented in June 2015 on my definition of Indigenous Religions as localised and kinship-dominated, the anthropologist Walter van Beek suggested that I replace the term ‘indigenous’ with ‘local’ and speak of ‘localised’ as opposed to ‘globalised’ religions.2 After contemplating this suggestion, I have rejected it because it disqualifies Indigenous Religions from fitting into a collective category, reduces them to a position of insignificance and thereby perpetuates their marginalisation in light of the dominance of the world religions paradigm in the academic study of religions. Despite their limitation to specific geographical locations and their restricted outreach due to membership in their communities being constrained by kinship rules, Indigenous Religions are not passive recipients of global and modernising forces but continue to influence religions that are transnational and missionary, oftentimes demonstrating the greater power the local maintains over outside interference. In this chapter, I demonstrate precisely the power the local can exert on global forces by considering the case of the Ambuya Juliana movement in Zimbabwe, which at its peak in the early to mid-1990s had extended its influence beyond its origin in southern Zimbabwe into neighbouring Botswana and Mozambique. The importance of the Ambuya Juliana movement was emphasised by some notable scholars of Africa, such as the historian Terence Ranger, who referred to it as having “swept across southern Zimbabwe” (1995: 237), while Hezekiel Mafu described “the intensity of its influence” as “phenomenal” (1995: 293). At the height of its impact, it would not have been an exaggeration to predict that the teachings of Ambuya Juliana might inspire one of the most significant new religious movements to develop in Africa towards the conclusion 1 I have written about the Ambuya Juliana movement previously in different contexts and with different aims. See, Cox (1998: 261–265); Cox (2014: 195–222). 2 Symposium in Honour of Jan Platvoet, University of Leiden, 15 June 2015.

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of the twentieth century. This did not occur. The demise of Juliana developed almost as quickly as her accession to a position of regional religious and political influence so that by the end of the 1990s her movement had virtually disappeared. This article suggests that both the rise and fall of the short-lived Ambuya Juliana movement can be explained in terms of the conflict between local interests and global ambitions.

The Case of Ambuya Juliana: Background

The early 1990s saw a series of devastating droughts affecting wide areas of southern Africa. Zimbabwe was hit particularly hard by a lack of rainfall during the 1991–92 season causing crops to fail and cattle to die. Hezekiel Mafu referred to the effects of the drought as “profound and unprecedented” causing “devastation and immense human suffering” (1995: 288). It was in the wake of the ruinous drought of 1992 that Ambuya Juliana, who claimed to be a rainmaker, quickly rose to fame and exerted wide influence throughout southern Zimbabwe. Researchers Abraham Mawere and Ken Wilson report that Juliana “emerged in late 1992 and quickly became a major force across south central Zimbabwe over an area nearly 300 kms across and at least 100 kms deep” (1995: 253). Juliana was variously described as being in her late twenties, early thirties or as being ‘about forty-two years of age’ (Mafu 1995: 294). The title ‘Ambuya’ usually is translated as ‘grandmother’, but in this case denoted not her age but served as a title of respect. The Swedish researcher, Gurli Hansson, who befriended Juliana, described her “as a rather young woman” who normally “dressed in black” and who went around “barefoot” (Ranger 1995: 238). The Ambuya Juliana movement had gained so much attention outside Zimbabwe among African scholars that the Britain-Zimbabwe Society Research Day held at St Antony’s College, Oxford on twenty-third of April 1994 devoted numerous papers to considering its likely social, political and religious significance. Mawere and Wilson sent a paper from Zimbabwe, which was read at the Research Day, dealing with what they called the ‘Ambuya Juliana cult’. This was subsequently published as a substantial article in the Journal of Religion in Africa (1995: 252–287). Gurli Hansson also delivered a paper at the Research Day in which she described the Juliana movement as a religious innovation and as providing evidence of the revival of traditional religion in Zimbabwe (Hansson 1995: 91–114). In their article, Mawere and Wilson argue that the rise of Juliana can be attributed to the fact that her movement “challenged state, business, church and traditional power” while at the same time it “elaborated

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new conjunctions of ecological and political ideas, and significantly restructured local social relations and land-use practice” (1995: 253). In July 1995, I visited the region of Chief Chingoma in south-central Zimbabwe near the town of Mberengwa, where I had conducted research during the drought of 1992, with the aim of determining how the persistent droughts were being interpreted by those I had interviewed previously. To my surprise, I encountered a great deal of enthusiasm and some controversy surrounding Ambuya Juliana, who throughout the sixteen chieftaincies of the Mberengwa District was introducing substantial variations in the way traditional rain rituals were being carried out and was delivering a message that contained elements of longstanding indigenous practices combined with clear Christian teachings. Although I did not meet Juliana personally, I interviewed five people who had attended her large gatherings held in November 1994 in Chief Chingoma’s region and I visited Juliana’s extensive sacred enclosures where she performed rain rituals and preached to the people explaining to them her message (see Cox 1998: 141–146). According to those I interviewed, Juliana, who is from the Karanga ethnic group,3 testified that at the age of seven she was taken underwater by an njuzu, often translated as mermaid, but actually refers to a water spirit with great powers. Frequently, stories are told about people, who after approaching the edge of a dark, deep pool or river, disappear for long periods of time. The concerned family members consult a traditional diviner or healer (n’anga), who tells them that the person has been taken underwater by an njuzu. The family members are advised to show no remorse and to brew beer in honour of the water spirit. They also are not to speak about the disappearance or to show undue concern. Eventually, the missing person returns and usually reports having learned many things while in the company of the njuzu and is ready to assume a role in society as a newly initiated n’anga. Quite frequently, those who go missing are young girls, who in some cases have offended nature spirits. One widespread story I discovered in my research relates how several girls 3 The two main ethnic groups in Zimbabwe are the Shona and the Ndebele, terms which refer to the languages spoken by each group, both of which form part of the extensive Bantu linguistic family, and at the same time are used to designate their distinctive cultural identities. The Shona comprise the majority of Zimbabwe’s population, approximately 80% of the now nearly 13 million inhabitants, but they are broken into various groupings distributed largely throughout the northern, eastern and central regions of the country, including the Korekore in the far north, the Zezuru in the north-central region around the capital, Harare, the Manyika and Ndau in the eastern regions and the Karanga in the south-central portion of the country. The other main Shona-speaking group is the Kalanga, located in the extreme south-western area along the border with Botswana.

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went to the forest to pick wild fruits. One girl comments that one of the trees has humanlike breasts and expresses great surprise. This offends the spirits of the forest and the girl disappears. Later, the family learns that she has been taken by an njuzu through one of the many underground water passages that flow into rivers and pools. Another common story I discovered describes an exceptionally beautiful girl whose immense attractiveness creates feelings of intense jealousy in the other girls. The story relates that some of the jealous girls capture the lovely girl and fling her into a river hoping she will be eaten by crocodiles. Instead, she is taken by an njuzu, taught many things and after a period of time re-appears carrying a bag of traditional medicine and now is able to act for the community as a healer (Cox 1998: 169–170). During my research trip in 1995, my informants told me that Juliana spent ten years under the water with an njuzu, who taught her traditional African customs and teachings from the Bible. She also learned church songs from the njuzu. In an interview with Gurli Hansson, Juliana described her experiences: We lived like crocodiles, ate soil and mud. I was very skinny and pale when I returned from her. When you stay with the Njuzu you learn to be humble and well behaved. I was also taught about the Bible there. There is everything down there. When I left, I had a Shanga – reed, growing on my head. Cited by cox 1998: 143; See also hansson 1995: 98

After she emerged from her long period of initiation and instruction by the njuzu, Juliana went almost immediately to the Mwari or High-God shrine in the Matopos Hills in south-west Zimbabwe. A word of explanation about the Mwari shrines and their connection to local chieftaincies is needed at this point. Today throughout southern Zimbabwe, chiefs from a wide region (up to four hundred kilometers around) pay tribute at the Mwari shrines. The most notable shrine of the regional cult devoted to Mwari is located at a hill called Matonjeni. It consists of hereditary officials and various messengers. The Zimbabwean anthropologist Michael Bourdillon (1987: 279) reports that the principal officials are a high priest and priestess (a brother and sister who inherit their positions), a keeper of the shrine and the ‘voice’ (an elderly woman married into the high priest’s family). Bourdillon explains further that the shrine is located in a cave from which the voice of Mwari speaks its oracles. Representatives from wide ranging chieftaincies consult the voice about various matters such as the appointment of a new chief, the acceptance of a new spirit medium, drought or some other communal disaster. The representatives will have collected money, organised by each

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chief through his headmen, and will deliver this to the keeper of the shrine. The ‘voice’ of Mwari speaks, but in an ancient dialect which must be translated into the language of the clients. At the local level, the traditional social organisation still in force today in Zimbabwe consists of a hierarchy extending from a chief, who has responsibility over a designated region, through headmen within a particular chieftaincy and who are responsible for a village consisting of numerous extended families, to elders in a specific extended family and then to others within the family ordered by strictly delineated communal functions. This social organisation is mirrored exactly by a corresponding hierarchy in the spirit world, with the chief’s ancestor spirits interacting with communities within his chieftaincy, followed by the spirits of headmen and those of members within the extended family (see Cox 2007: 125–129). The relationship between the Mwari Cult and local chieftaincies represents a delicate balance between regional and local authority, which is maintained by the chief and his headman through their exercising power to raise money (rusengwe payments) for the Mwari shrines, by appointing the messengers (vanyusa) that represent them at Matonjeni and by their taking responsibility for organising mitoro or rain rituals. Mawere and Wilson explain: In south-central Zimbabwe the Mwari cult has long been organised at the local level by chiefs, ward heads and village elders. Previous work in the area has demonstrated that these traditional leaders utilise the organisation of rusengwe payments for the cult, the sending of the vanyusa messengers, and the mentioning of Mwari during the holding of mitoro rain making ceremonies to complement their legitimacy, and this generates something of an alliance of convenience between local ‘traditional authorities’ and the cult centre and its messengers. 1995: 274

Juliana reported that on arriving at the Mwari shrine at Matonjeni, she became an mbonga or virgin attendant in the Mwari cult. This corresponds to what Mawere and Wilson refer to as one who is “based out of the shrines, who in the case of women must be virgins” (1995: 286), and to what Leslie Nthoi calls the ‘wosana’ whose main duty at the shrine is “to dance and sing to the High-God during rain ceremonies” (1998: 70). Hezekiel Mafu, who interviewed Juliana in July 1994, adds a further dimension to Juliana’s assertions of authority. According to Mafu (1995: 294), Juliana claimed to have been authorised to undertake her mission by six spiritual forces: Musikavanhu, Mapa, Nehanda, Chaminuka, the Ancestors and Jesus

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Christ. Musikavanhu means creator of people, and although it is often used as an equivalent to Mwari and as another name for God, it refers frequently in oral traditions to an autochthonous ancestor or the first human from which all people originated. It is most likely in this sense that Juliana was using Musikavanhu, since as a representative of the Mwari shrines, she would not have conflated the two names for God. Chaminuka, again according to oral traditions, is an ancient, perhaps founding ancestor, of the Shona people. Nehanda follows in the lineage from the original Chaminuka. The spirit of Nehanda, which is most associated with the first Chimurenga or war of liberation in 1896, is believed to have possessed mediums and urged the people to rise up against the colonial government. The Nehanda spirit was also alleged to have inspired the second, successful, Chimurenga. Through an old woman named Charwe, who served as the medium of Nehanda, important information was communicated to the freedom fighters that contributed to their eventual victory. Ancestors operate at various levels from chiefs to extended families and provide the most frequent source of protection and guidance for communities. The addition of Jesus Christ as a source of her authority, shows how Juliana was drawing from a global religious tradition to legitimise her mission. Mafu (1995: 294) suggests that only Mapa is unusual and unexpected among the six deities mentioned. He calls the Mapa “a new and unknown element in the traditional religious structure,” explaining that in Shona the word “is associated with giving” (Mafu 1995: 294). Juliana seems to have invented this type of deity by inserting it into the traditional hierarchical spiritual scheme. She explained to Mafu that Mapa are “Divine Beings ranked second to Musikavanhu” (Mafu 1995: 294). Mafu adds that “they also seem to be the agents of communication for the divine sextet” (1995: 295–296). By the time Juliana began her mission across southern Zimbabwe in 1992, she had carefully established her authority as a religious leader by having been initiated in a traditional manner by an njuzu into the role of a n’anga with a specialisation in producing rain, by her close association with the principal Mwari shrine in south-west Zimbabwe, by her knowledge of the Bible, which she had learned from the njuzu, and by claiming to have been sent by a pantheon drawn largely from traditional religious figures, but which also included Jesus Christ and new deities that she had invented for the purposes of endorsing her commission to the nation. She was ideally placed to launch her new religious movement containing elements of local religious traditions combined with an intimate knowledge of the regional High-God rain rituals, both of which she integrated with her interpretation of Christian teachings. Sometime in mid-1992, after the consistent failure of the rains, Juliana felt ready to begin her mission to the people of Zimbabwe by going out from

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Matonjeni to various regions, largely across the south-central area as an nyusa, defined by Mawere and Wilson as a “sacred messenger” for the “Mwari cult” (1995: 254). She announced her mission as informing the people of “their wrongdoings” and explaining “why rainfall is not experienced” (Mawere and Wilson, 1995: 254). She was received enthusiastically and by 1993 had constructed a number of enclosures she called rainmaking villages (Majacha Emapa), generally at the base of sacred mountains. She also had developed an organisation in cooperation with the chiefs and headmen, through which money was collected for the Mwari shrine and delivered by Juliana accompanied by representatives of the chiefs whom she had selected personally. At the beginning of the 1993 rainy season, around October, Juliana began conducting rituals in her sacred enclosures, which attracted huge crowds. Similar rainmaking villages had been constructed across south-central Zimbabwe and reports indicate that Juliana was developing plans to expand her mission into Botswana to the west and as far as Mozambique to the east. Evidence of ­Juliana’s popularity at the height of her influence can be found in the description of one of her rain rituals as provided by Mawere and Wilson. The specific ritual they witnessed occurred on the eighteenth of September 1993. Each village had been ordered to supply five huge clay pots (makate) for holding beer, so hundreds of pots of beer were produced. On the assigned day of the 18th people came in large numbers, and in a state of some excitement. They were convinced that the rains would start the very same day…. During the ceremony Ambuya Juliana danced and sang in a really inspiring fashion, and people really enjoyed it. The slaughtering of cattle and goats proved astonishing. The beasts simply lay down to be slaughtered when she blew her horn. Even cattle could be killed with just knives, and goats were silent as they died. mawere and wilson 1995: 261



The Content of Juliana’s Message

Juliana’s message began with Mwari (also referred to in the outlying regions as Musikavanhu), whom she taught is the Creator of all things and hence more powerful than ancestor spirits, living humans or nature spirits. As the Creator, Mwari is responsible for providing rain on which the people depend for their well-being. Nonetheless, Mwari has devolved some responsibilities for providing adequate rainfall to lesser spirits such as njuzu and to spirit leopards and spirit lions that, in the words of Mawere and Wilson, “live on top of hills

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and bring rain” (1995: 255). A direct connection between the failure of sufficient rainfall and human moral behaviour was made by Juliana. She demanded that the killing of wild animals must stop, since such animals attract rain. In addition, people were offending God by pretending to go into the mountains or hills to pray, but in fact they committed adultery there. The result is that God is punishing the people for such immoral acts by causing persistent droughts. All forms of promiscuity must cease if the people hope for the rains to return. Two holy days, Wednesday, which is a traditional day reserved to honour ancestors, and Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, must be observed by the people. No work is to be performed on these days. Mawere and Wilson note that for Juliana this meant that “a complete ban was instituted on normal work,” including “fetching firewood, sweeping yards, making hoe handles and yokes, drawing water and washing clothes” (1995: 257). She claimed further that many messengers chosen by the chiefs and sent to Matonjeni with money collected from the people were embezzling the funds and not turning the full amount over to the shrine. These misdeeds, she announced, incur the wrath of God. Juliana’s message extended also to political issues. She contended that Mwari should be honoured and thanked directly at the shrines by Government Ministers for giving the people independence in 1980. The fact that Government Ministers all the way up to President Mugabe have failed to travel to Matonjeni to thank God in a traditional way provides another explanation for the recurrent droughts. The lack of rain provides evidence to Ministers and the President himself that any power they possess comes ultimately from God. She maintained further that the government’s policies of blocking streams to make dams have interfered with the movement of the njuzu and should stop. Wells and boreholes that are made by using explosives should also cease since this frightens the water spirits away. Later, Juliana expanded this rule and forbade the use of boreholes altogether. Instead, people should extract water from sand in riverbeds. Rituals were to be conducted in strict conformance to Juliana’s dictates. The common practice of mediums becoming possessed during rain rituals by territorial spirits or ancestors of chiefs must stop. It is likely that Juliana regarded mediums who became possessed during her rituals as a threat to her authority. Mawere and Wilson claim that Juliana “wanted to monopolise the ritual power generated by the rain-making ritual for herself” (1995: 275). In a clear criticism of the practices of African Independent Churches, Juliana demanded that all drum beating, jingling of bells and rattles during worship services be forbidden. She claimed that the people who use these methods of prayer have no idea why they employ these instruments. They should instead pray to God.

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In rain rituals only traditional gourds should be used in distributing the beer. No metal instruments should be employed. We can see from these basic teachings that, according to Juliana, beliefs about God, moral injunctions and ritual behaviour were all inter-related and acted as causal explanations for the persistent droughts. Her message emphasised that so long as God is unhappy about moral behaviour or about ritual infringements (including the failure of government officials to give thanks to God), rainfall will never be sufficient to supply the needs of the people. For this reason, she instituted strict rules regulating social and ritual behaviour which combined traditional beliefs about how spiritual forces influence material well-being with Christian ideas of the Creator God. She also elevated her own role beyond that of being a messenger to the various chieftaincies for the Mwari shrine at Matonjeni to one approaching messianic status, as confirmed by her assertion that one of the commissioning deities was Jesus Christ. She is even reported to have had a vision for extending her mission beyond southern Africa as far as the United Kingdom, which she believed stood in need of a re-awakening of traditional values. At the height of her popularity in 1993, it appeared that the Juliana movement would become one of southern Africa’s most important and influential new religious movements.

Explanations for the Demise of the Juliana Movement

Despite her apparent popular appeal and her global intentions, Juliana’s influence began to fade rapidly, beginning as early as 1994. In their article appearing in the Journal of Religion in Africa in 1995, Mawere and Wilson described the Ambuya Juliana movement as being in ‘terminal decline’. When I visited southcentral Zimbabwe in July 1995, I learned from Chief Chingoma that many chiefs in the Mberengwa region were no longer planning to support Juliana’s rain rituals, which normally would begin in late September or early October. I also detected a distinct lack of enthusiasm for Juliana’s teachings about not doing work on Wednesdays and Sundays, and encountered strong resistance to her restrictions against drilling and using boreholes. My observations were confirmed by the research conducted by Mawere and Wilson, who in August 1994 interviewed one of Juliana’s assistants in Mazvihwa, near the town of ­Zvishavane, who told them that “the Chief and some of the sub-chiefs are still interested in Juliana, but the majority are not” (1995: 264). As we have seen, numerous explanations are offered for Juliana’s rapid rise to power, the most compelling of which relates to her alliance with the chiefs who had experienced a diminution of influence under the Mugabe regime.

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This represented her efforts to reassert tradition in the face of modernity and confirms how she mobilised local support for her movement. This same alliance paradoxically contributed to her rapid loss of popularity when, in the words of Mawere and Wilson, she challenged the chiefs’ “ritual monopolies” and usurped “certain of their powers in the name of Matonjeni” (1995: 271). Mawere and Wilson explain: “Juliana banned all the small mitoro ceremonies used by each headman to secure his own legitimacy, and, furthermore, … she did not allow her major mutoro to be legitimated for the chiefs by their spirits being possessed by mediums” (1995: 271). They add that she wanted to claim “the ritual power generated by the rain-making ritual for herself, by making sure it was seen purely connected to the Mwari Cult” (1995: 275). By contravening the traditional authority of the chiefs’ ancestors as expressed through the chiefs’ customary organisation, Juliana lost the local support of the chiefs by challenging their authority, by asserting her regional and potentially global ambitions over and above the chief’s identifiable and geographically restricted ancestral lineage. In effect, Juliana set herself up in competition with the chiefs by usurping their traditional role of appointing representatives to collect money to take to the Mwari shrines. Juliana travelled with her disciples to Matonjeni and made her own representation to Mwari at the shrine. This is in line with her self-elevation to messianic status, acting within chieftaincies as Mwari’s own representative and approaching Mwari on behalf of the chiefs. This brought widespread disfavour among the chiefs whom she had originally courted successfully. With the loss of the support of the chiefs, Juliana no longer could speak as a representative of the locally entrenched authoritative tradition. Paradoxically, she also offended the officials at the Mwari shrine by claiming to represent all the chiefs collectively, thereby assuming a role inconsistent with tradition. Moreover, Juliana lost popular support because her regulations were unfeasible and unenforceable in local contexts. By prohibiting the performance of necessary activities on two days of the week, she alienated ordinary people. The eventual restriction against using boreholes was impractical and unsafe, since drinking water from rivers was often contaminated. As a result, the people to whom her message was directed refused to follow her injunctions. This conflict between the local and the trans-local Mwari shrines caused considerable confusion among the people in various chieftaincies, which also contributed to Juliana’s eventual loss of popularity. She used local leaders, such as headmen and family elders, to gain access to the community, but then she disregarded their positions by usurping their authority and assuming it for herself. Again, Mawere and Wilson explain: “Although she approached the people

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through local leaders, her emphasis was on communicating in a direct and inspirational fashion with rural communities” (1995: 275). In the end, Juliana lost her following by her refusal to follow longestablished traditional protocols whereby the parameters of authority were rigidly enforced. Local elders, headmen and chiefs each exercised power within restricted and well-defined boundaries. Access to and the relationship with the Mwari shrines were also carefully circumscribed within lines of traditional patterns of authority. Ostensibly, Juliana adhered to these protocols by finding legitimisation through accepted cultural beliefs, such as living for years with the njuzu. And initially she followed regulations by representing the Mwari shrines as a messenger to the chieftaincies. It was when she began to assert her own authority over the locally established traditions that her programme began to unravel. That this was her intention all along is confirmed by her interview with Mafu in which she disclosed that her authority derived from six deities, including Jesus Christ. This led rather quickly to her alienating chiefs by asserting her own authority over theirs. Moreover, she circumvented traditional communication patterns by speaking directly and charismatically to the people while ignoring the role of headmen and elders; she contradicted the manner whereby chiefs communicate at the Mwari shrines by claiming to speak for them collectively; and her vision of establishing a trans-national and potentially global movement alienated her from the localised, kinship-orientated indigenous societies out of which she had emerged and from which she originally obtained recognition and legitimacy. Conclusion The Ambuya Juliana movement did not develop into a major new religion in southern Africa. It was short-lived and, one could argue, as a result it was insignificant. In this chapter, I have attempted to demonstrate, on the contrary, that it exemplifies precisely how local traditions exercise immense power over movements with intentions transcending local and regional limitations. If the local protocols are not integrated into the movement with global ambitions, it will alienate itself from the base it needs to succeed and, ultimately, it will lose legitimacy. This contention, which is well supported by the Ambuya Juliana movement in Zimbabwe during the 1990s, can be applied to all religions with global intentions, including the so-called world religions, which always must adapt to and be influenced by local customs, conventions and lines of authority if they are to take root and become incorporated into the cultures they are attempting to influence.

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References Bourdillon, M.F.C., ed. 1987. The Shona Peoples. An Ethnography of the Contemporary Shona, with Special Reference to their Religion, 3rd revision. Gweru, Zimbabwe; Mambo Press. Cox, J.L. 1998. Rational Ancestors. Scientific Rationality and African Indigenous Religions. Cardiff: Cardiff Academic Press. Cox, J.L. 2007. From Primitive to Indigenous: The Academic Study of Indigenous Religions. Aldershot: Ashgate. Cox, J.L. 2014. “Can Christianity Take New Forms? Christianity in New Cultural Contexts.” In P. Hedges, ed. Controversies in Contemporary Religion III. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 195–222. Hansson, G. 1995. “Religious Innovation in Zimbabwe. Mbuya Juliana Movement.” In T. Negash and L. Rudebeck, eds. Dimensions of Development with Emphasis on Africa. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 91–114. Mafu, H. 1995. “The 1991–92 Zimbabwean Drought and Some Religious Reactions,” Journal of Religion in Africa 25: 3, 288–308. Mawere, A. and K. Wilson. 1995. “Socio-Religious Movements, the State and Community Change: Some Reflections on the Ambuya Juliana Cult of Southern Zimbabwe,” Journal of Religion in Africa 25: 3, 252–87. Nthoi, L.S. 1998. “Wosana Rite of Passage: Reflections on the Initiation of Wosana in the Cult of Mwali in Zimbabwe.” In J.L. Cox, ed. Rites of Passage in Contemporary Africa Cardiff: Cardiff Academic Press. Ranger, T. 1995. “Religious Pluralism in Zimbabwe. A Report on the Britain-Zimbabwe Society Research Day, St Antony’s College, Oxford, 23 April 1994.” Journal of Religion in Africa 25: 3, 226–251.

Afterword: The Study of Religion and the Discourses of Indigeneity Thomas A. Tweed There is no such thing as religion-in-general and no place the interpreter might stand that would provide a bird’s eye view. We are always situated somewhere in the natural terrain and the social landscape. As for me, I teach and write at a Catholic university in the traditional homeland of the Pokégnek Bodéwadmik, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi. I am a historian of religion who has done historical, ethnographic, and theoretical work and tried to craft more inclusive and responsible historical narratives about religion in the Americas (Tweed 1997). So my reflections here are positioned sightings from that particular site. I have made that point many times because I always want to acknowledge the limits of my vantage point and challenge the pretensions of those who claim too much for their accounts. That caution seems especially appropriate as I take on this formidable task. I’ve been asked to add an afterword, more words after the contributors’ words, in order to put the comparative and cross-disciplinary study of religion in conversation with the contributions in this volume and, more broadly, with native and non-native discourses about indigeneity. The editors’ fine introduction and the subsequent theoretical interventions in the first section already have provided orientation, and the second section’s rich cases studies have deepened what we know about peoples and practices in the Americas, the Pacific world, Europe, Australia, Asia, and Africa. What is left to say? Perhaps it might help to offer a positioned reflection about what seems to be gained and lost, what the discourses about indigeneity – and analyses of those discourses – illumine and obscure for scholars of religion.

What These Discourses Illumine

These chapters advance the conversation about the study of religion. Perhaps most notably, they highlight the political and legal uses of indigeneity discourses and trace the transcontinental flow of representations in multiple media. If the religious negotiate power and status as well as make meaning and identity, as I have argued (Tweed 2006: 74), then we should be grateful for the examples of how indigenous peoples have appealed to terms such as religion © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004346710_024

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and spirituality – and often tradition – to fight for legal leverage, economic equity, and political clout. In this sense, Michael McNally’s observation in this volume seems right. These categories are more than scholarly terms. They circulate in “public domains beyond the scholar’s study,” including in the political and legal domain (McNally). Recent documents produced in extra-state forums, like the United Nations, have provided language for use in international law, state legislation, and local disputes. The authors (McNally; Johnson) show how tribal leaders and state actors have strategically cited statements like the 1976 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, including Article 27’s assertion that minority communities should not be denied the right “to profess and practice their own religion,” and the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, including Article 12’s safeguarding of “the right to manifest, practice, develop, and teach their spiritual and religious traditions.” Religious practice is always mediated by technologies and institutions (Tweed 2006: 124–127), and this volume illustrates how communication technologies have shaped public representations and indigenous rhetoric. We are reminded of how cultural heritage institutions transmit representations, as with the Sami exhibition in the Tromsø University Museum in Norway and the Khoisan religious concepts employed in South Africa’s heritage museum in Freedom Park (Fonneland; Jethro). And this book shows how cultural practices like filmmaking and musical performance circulate representations among native and non-native media outlets (Christensen; Hackett; Johnson). One noteworthy effect of the media flows is that some contemporary indigenous communities have creatively re-appropriated media representations to form and transform transcontinental connections and global identities. Some shared terminology has emerged, these chapters show, including the widespread use of a noun (shaman) apparently derived from a Tungic word (šamān) describing ritual specialists, and the frequent use of an adjective, traditional, to formulate claims about the practices and artifacts of geographically distant peoples. This common indigenous vocabulary employed across global networks challenges some influential (and demeaning) nineteenth-century classifications of religion, which identified indigenous peoples only with the local landscape. In his influential entry on ‘Religions’ for the 1886 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, C.P. Tiele, one of the early leaders in the comparative study of religion set up a scale of five religious types, from localised ‘primitive naturalism’ to transnational ‘universal religions’ (Tiele 1886). That classificatory scheme was not morally neutral or socially benign, however. He and other scholars imagined the boundary-crossing traditions, especially Christianity and Buddhism, as more complex and mature, and dismissed simple and

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childish religions linked with the land – Hindu and indigenous traditions. By attending to the circulating discourse of indigeneity, however, the volume’s contributors make it impossible for any fair-minded interpreter to dismiss the practices of contemporary native peoples as irrevocably simple or solely local.

What These Discourses Obscure

These circulating discourses about indigenous religion – and related terms – obscure as well as illumine, at least when they are employed by historians of religion rather than native activists and legal advocates. To put it simply, these discourses do not allow the historian to fully account for moving and mixing, though I suggest that some new narrative themes and slight terminological shifts might help. I would hate to diminish the political and legal power of discourses about the indigenous and aboriginal. At the same time, I worry that these categories might have unintended consequences, at least from my perspective as a historian of religion. Scholars have used the term indigenous in many ways (Tafjord). Yet if we take it to refer to an absolute starting point and an unchanging assemblage of practices that continue from the beginning (rather than the long-established practices of inhabitants who encountered modern colonisers), then that usage might unwittingly remove peoples and practices from the story of human migration and the flow of historical processes (Wolf 1982: 385). That epistemic ‘removal’ – to use a morally charged phrase to describe the consequences – is much less brutal than the displacements native peoples have suffered around the world. Yet that interpretive pattern still worries me because it makes it more difficult to show that those who claim native identity have been active participants in humanity’s global history, moving and mixing just like everyone else. To put it differently, sometimes the discourse of indigeneity implies stasis and minimises movement. Native communities and their advocates talk that way for several good reasons. Activists claim an aboriginal link to a particular place in order to assert rights. It is a pragmatic strategy used more vigorously in recent decades (Niezen 2003; Clifford 2013). For example, drafters of the 2009 Indigenous Peoples Statement to the World advocated for native rights by suggesting they have been performing their sacred practices ‘since time immemorial’. And there are other reasons for this linguistic usage. Scientific narratives challenge native origin stories. Population geneticists posit that modern humans originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago then started migrating in

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one or more dispersals between 130,000 and 40,000 years ago (Tucci and Akey 2016; Mallick et al. 2016; Fu et al. 2014). In that account, almost all peoples – including those that claim indigenous status – have been migrants, people on the move across oceans and continents. Finally, native peoples sometimes de-emphasise historical change because they are suspicious of scholars who specialise in recovering the distant past and reconstructing the early history of migration. That mistrust was earned: researchers sometimes disrespectfully handled unearthed remains and excavated artifacts, even if in recent decades more geneticists and archaeologists have sought consent, returned remains, and consulted communities. That 2009 joint statement noted the earlier abuses and claimed “burial and sacred sites, human genetic materials, ancestral remains, so often stolen” are crucial cultural expressions (Indigenous Peoples Statement 2009). So it is not surprising that some indigenous communities have hesitated to collaborate with scholars who map the pathways of their ancestors. But I wonder if some religion scholars who work with native communities might engage more fully with archaeological, historical, and genetic scholarship? That scholarship actually might help explain shared contemporary features and recover longstanding connections. Consider just two examples. Suzanne Owens’ chapter here on the Beothuk in Newfoundland suggests that even the pejorative British colonial term for “Red Indians” reveals hints about widely shared ritual: that label derived from observation of the very ancient and globally diffused practice of using red ochre for personal adornment and ceremonial practice (Owens; Marshall 1996: 385; see also Roebroeks et al. 2012; Campbell 2007). And, to offer a second example, analysis of human remains in some North American Paleoindian communities suggests those people might have shared ancient Pacific ancestors with the Ainu of Japan and the Moriori of the Polynesian Chatham Islands (Walker and Owsley, 2012: 118). So scholarship might provide resources for heightened communication and converging identity among indigenous communities from different parts of the world. Even more important, engaging that scholarship can help historians construct narratives that align natives with other peoples and resituate them in the flow of history, as with studies of the Red Atlantic that trace indigene interactions in the making of the modern Atlantic World (Weaver 2014). Small terminological shifts might help with that effort. We might talk about the “trans-indigenous” (Allen 2012) or “international indigenism” (Neizen 2003), or appeal more to traditional, an already popular adjective that appears in that 2009 statement and is the most-often used term in un documents (Kraft). That term provides a way to recognise relative temporal priority without making historically unsupportable claims about an absolute beginning or an unchanging

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essence. Traditional refers to ‘the long established’ and stands in opposition to ‘the recently established’.1 That relative (not absolute) framing fits better with the cross-disciplinary evidence but still provides a rhetorical platform for important rights-talk. Perhaps claims phrased in terms of ‘traditional’ practices, artifacts, and sites might be both historically defensible and politically useful. The discourse about indigeneity also can imply that native peoples have not been mixing. To put it differently, the dominant interpretive frame has some trouble accounting for contacts and exchanges and dual belonging – political, geographical, and religious. Rights-talk often appeals to the sovereignty of Indian nations, but that strategic focus on local land claims can inadvertently obscure global connections and dual political belonging. Those “nationalistic perspectives” have had “clear pragmatic importance” but risk “erasing broad networks of interaction” and misrepresenting indigenous histories that “always have included transnational elements” (Huang et al. 2012: 2). Native peoples have had exchanges with others who live beyond their natal place for a long time. Further, the focus on native nations can risk “oversimplifying complex tribal identities” (Huang et al. 2012: 2): indigenous peoples in settler states like the United States have had overlapping and dual political identities since the rise of the nation state. And multiple religious belonging has been a persistent pattern in native communities, as chapters in this volume show (Schermerhorn; Alles; and Longkumer). Again, legal claims and political clout rest on arguments about distinctiveness. Without a strategic appeal to essential distinctiveness – on religious, spiritual, or cultural grounds – political advocacy­ and legal advances might be threatened, since legal logic requires restrictive classifications. So indigenous leaders and rights activists sometimes feel compelled to use terms that map borders and enforce exclusions. However, that legally necessary practice can marginalise those who identify as Christian, Buddhist, or Hindu but also claim membership in a native community and express respect for its traditional artifacts, sites, and ceremonies. That rhetorical practice can prompt anxiety about religious identity and ancestral heritage. It can make some dual-belonging members feel perpetually outside and compel those who assert tribal membership while also affirming alternative faith affiliations continually to prove their authenticity in both domains. However, from the perspective of the history of religion, mixing has characterised all peoples and traditions. There is mixing – and even multiple belonging – all the way back. Authorising states and native communities have practical reasons 1 ‘Traditional’. 2016. oed Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016.

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to establish criteria for membership, but they need not insist on an imagined religious purity. Insisting on purity never bodes well for those who are judged impure. As the global experience of native communities has shown, the drive to distinguish the pure and the authentic from the impure and inauthentic can yield intellectual frameworks and political policies that sanction injustice and violence.

What Religion Scholars Might Do Next

I would not presume to tell indigenous communities what they might do next. But what about religion scholars who want to fairly represent and respectfully engage those communities? I think we can do two things. First, when scholars are talking with those who specialise in the study of religion, we might seek narrative themes that allow us to attend to both emplacement and displacement, root and route (Tweed 2006; DeLoughrey 2007), and help us to recover the robust historicity of indigenous communities, who have been moving across boundaries and sacralising local landscapes for thousands of years. A number of different motifs might be useful, and I think that the themes in my theory of religion might help. Religion, as I understand it, situates devotees in time and space. It involves crossing and dwelling, or attempts to orient individuals and groups temporally and spatially (Tweed 2006: 54–79; Tweed 2015). Religious crossings can be terrestrial or aquatic, and include pilgrimages as well as forced or voluntary migration; but the religious also mark and cross stages in the life cycle and the boundary between this world and the next. Communities use what I call figurative tools – analogical language like metaphors, symbolic actions like burial rituals, and resonant objects like images of spirits – to transform the local ecology and construct an imagined world (Tweed 2006: 68). In this sense, religion is homemaking. It is about making a dwelling place or, to borrow a term from the evolutionary biologists, constructing a niche (Odling-Smee et al. 2003; Bulbulia 2008; Purzycki and Sosis 2013). Humans’ ecological-cultural niches are more complex than those of other animals – think of ant hills or beaver dams – and religion’s figurative tools have done some of that work of clearing the ground and making a world. Humans’ cultural niches can be carried or broken. Ancient and modern migrants carried niches and recreated new ones by combining the cultural materials they brought from afar with those they found nearby. Yet niches also can be ‘cracked’, again to use the scientists’ language. They can become unsustainable when resources diminish, disease devastates, injustice pervades, or

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violence mounts (Odling-Smee et al. 2003: 420; Laland et al. 2000). Sustainability, in other words, has a social as well as an ecological meaning. This broader notion of sustainability – and the talk about making and breaking niches – can be useful as we narrate religious history, including the religious history of native peoples. It offers language that illumines environmental history and more fully acknowledges a pivotal historical process – the creation of ‘shatter zones’ during the brutal and dehumanising destruction of indigenous cultural niches (see Ethridge and Shick-Hall 2009). In the Americas and around the globe, settlers destroyed habitats, ‘removed’ inhabitants to designated territory, and restricted them to ‘reservations’. For example, all four migrant-receiving nations in the Western hemisphere – the u.s., Canada, Brazil, and Argentina – “carried out Indian removal policies of greater or less harshness” during the nineteenth century (Nugent 1997: 393). Despite those forced crossings, indigenous exiles managed to recreate a meaningful habitat, though always within the dispiriting constraints of physical violence and structural inequity. I do not have the space to say more here, but I hope you have some sense of how these paired themes of crossing and dwelling might allow us to tell stories that acknowledge native peoples’ continuing concern to honour local homelands while also recognising ancient transcontinental flows and contemporary global exchanges. Historians of religions might use those narrative themes to ensure that the scholarly ‘transnational turn’ highlights rather than erases the history of indigenous peoples and that the historical experience of native peoples informs – and challenges – broader theorising about transnational flows in the present. And when religion scholars are talking with development experts, rights advocates, lawmakers, and peace builders about how to promote human flourishing around the world, we might continue to agitate for attention to the religion of indigenous peoples. At least since the publication of Religion, The Missing Dimension in Statecraft (Johnson and Sampson 1994), some dialogue partners have been more attentive to religion’s role in development projects, human rights, and conflict resolution, though there is still much to do. There are notable exceptions (for example, Niezen 2012), but even when religion does enter those conversations that usually means the so-called world religions. Yet development experts and peace builders in most places in the world cannot understand local problems or propose viable solutions if they overlook the ways that indigenous worldviews shape attitudes and indigenous peoples interact with other local actors. Further, some indigenous traditions actually have functioned as ‘world religions’, as scholars of Yorùbá Òrìsà devotion have suggested (Olupona and Rey 2008), and, as this book demonstrates, global indigenous connections increasingly transform local political contexts.

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References Allen, C. 2012. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bulbulia, J. 2008. “Meme Infection or Religious Niche Construction?: An Adaptationst Alternative to the Cultural Maladaptionist Hypothesis.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 20, 67–107. Campbell, P.D. 2007. Earth Pigment and Paint of California Indians. Los Angeles: Sunbelt Press. Clifford, J. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Deloughrey, E.M. 2007. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Ethridge, R. and S.M. Shick-Hall, eds. 2009. Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South. Lincoln: University of Nebraska. Fu, Q. et al. 2014. “Genome Sequence of a 45,000 year-old Modern Human from Siberia,” Nature 514 (23 October), 445–449. Huang, H. and P. Deloria, L. Furlan, and J. Gamber. 2012. “Special Forum: Charting Transnational Native American Studies.” Journal of Transnational American Studies 4:1, 1–15. Indigenous Peoples Statement to the World. 2009. Delivered at the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Convened at Melbourne, Australia, on the Traditional Lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation. 9 December. Available: https:// berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/publications/an-indigenous-peoples-statement-to -the-world. Accessed 1 October 2016. Johnson, D. and C. Sampson, eds. 1994. Religion, The Missing Dimension in Statecraft. New York: Oxford University Press. Laland, K.N., J. Odling-Smee, and M.W. Feldman. 2000. “Niche Construction, Biological Evolution, and Cultural Change.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23, 131–175. Mallick, Swapan et al. 2016. “The Simons Genome Diversity Project: 300 Genomes from 142 Diverse Populations.” Nature advance online publication, 21 September (DOI 10.1038/nature18964). Marshall, I. 1996. A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Niezen, R. 2003. The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Niezen, R. 2012. “Indigenous Religion and Human Rights.” In John Witte Jr. and Christian Green, eds. Religion and Human Rights: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Nugent, W. 1997. “Four New-World Migration Targets: Some Comparisons.” Amerkiastudien/American Studies 42:3, 391–406. Odling-Smee, F.J., K.N. Laland, and M.W. Feldman. 2003. Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Monographs in Population Biology, volume 37. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Olupona, J.K. and T. Rey, eds. 2008. Òrìsà Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yorùbá Religious Culture. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Purzycki, B.G. and R. Sosis. 2013. “The Extended Religious Phenotype and the Adaptive Coupling of Ritual and Belief.” Israel Journal of Ecology and Evolution, 59:2, 99–108. Roebroeks, W. et al. 2012. “Use of Red Ochre by Early Neanderthals.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109:6 (2 February), 1889–1894. Tiele, C.P. 1886. “Religions.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 9th ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Tucci, S. and J.M. Akey. 2016. “A Map of Wanderlust.” Nature, advance online publication, 21 September (DOI 10.1038/nature19472). Tweed, Thomas A., ed. 1997. Retelling U.S. Religious History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tweed, Thomas A. 2006. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tweed, Thomas A. 2015. “Space.” In S. Brent Plate, ed. Key Terms in Material Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 223–229. United Nations. 2007. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Available: http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf. Accessed 1 October 2016. United Nations. High Commissioner for Human Rights. 1976. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Available: http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/ pages/ccpr.aspx. Accessed 1 October 2016. Walker, S.M. and D.W. Owsley. 2012. Their Skeletons Speak: Kennewick Man and the Paleoamerican World. Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Books. Weaver, J. 2014. The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Wolf, E.R. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Index Abangs (narratives, Adi) 280, 281, 289 Abel, Kerry 210n, 212n Abeyesekara, Ananda 13 Aboriginal Australians 17–18, 93, 94, 105, 112–113, 114, 324–348 Christianity 326–328, 332, 335–340 & demise 325 & marginalisation 329, 344 & modernity 329, 344 & ontology 331 & poverty 334, 344 & secularism 336 Walbiri 35 Warlpiri 325n, 328, 340–43 & westernisation 330, 339–40 worldview 324, 333 Aboriginal Cultural Institute 332 Aboriginal Day, Canada 224, 228 Aboriginality 325–329 Indian 253 Aboriginal Law. See Dreaming Aboriginal tribes 249, 251 ‘Aborigine’ 249 Abrahamic faiths 335 Activism 30, 363 indigenous 109, 110 Khoisan 358–60 South Africa 349–351, 358– 360, 363 Adibasi. See adivasis Adi, India 279–93 deities 281–2 & education 282 & Hinduisation 280, 282, 286, 291 & ‘indigenous’ 286–7 & isolation 281 & language 282, 283, 287, 289 & nature 280 & technology 281 & texts 287–288 translation 283 Adilok 258, 259n

Adivasi Mahasabha Party, India 253 Adivasis 247–262 definition of 248 & discourse 255–257 as indigenous 247–262 & politics 256 & power 256 Adnyamathanha, Australia 325n, 327, 336, 338, 339 Adogame, Afe 29 Advocacy 357–8 Aesthetics. See indigenous aesthetics Africa 15, 20, 108–119, 195, 209, 349–77 African Independent Churches 373 Agency for Culture Affairs, Japan 320 Ahu (altar, Kia`i) 156, 160, 163–165 Ahu o Kauakoko (Shrine of the Blood Rain) 160–66 Ainu, Japan 17, 309–323, 381 cultural identity 309–10 dance 311 language 309, 316 & sovereignty 311 Ainu Law 311, 321 Ainu Museums, Japan 311, 312, 312n, 313, 315–320 Ainu Party, The 314 Akan, Japan 311, 319 Akibe, Hideo 312 Alaska, usa 204–220 Albuquerque, New Mexico 16, 176–191 Alcohol 125–126 Alexander, Benny. See Khoisan X Alfred, Taiaiake 178n, 184 Alia, Valeria 9–10 Alice Springs, Australia 340 Alles, Greg 41 All Gone Widdun 227 Amazonia 15, 33, 120–155 in film 138–55 Kayapó 145n & missionaries 122–124

388 Amazonians 120–137 as animist 120 identity 124–26 & nature 129 Amazon Watch 142, 144, 146 Ambuya Juliana Movement, Zimbabwe 366–77 authority of 371 & authority 375, 376 demise 374–76 as messiah 374, 375 mission 371–372 & politics 373 rain ritual 372 American Indian Religious Freedom Act (airfa) 57, 59–61, 74 amendment 61 American Indians 60, 176–191 Ancestors 1, 28, 34, 41, 144 Aboriginal 335, 342, 343 Ainu 314–315 Dene 207, 210 Ifugao 297–301 & Isogaisa 243 Khoisan 359 lineage 375 Zimbabwe 370, 373 see also Musikavanhu Andes, the 39 Angun Bedang (prayer book, Adi) 287, 288, 290, 292 Animism 8, 32–34, 41, 127, 129, 146–147, 264 & Christianity 249 & commonality 275 definition of 271–272 & Hinduism 249, 251, 269 & Hindus 271 & indigenous religions 269–275 New ~ 206n3 Aoteoroa, New Zealand 159, 170 Apache 157, 165, 177, 180–181, 186, 187, 205 Teleology 180–181 see also Native Americans Apartheid 114, 352–354 Arara 147 Arbor Records 111 Archaeology & indigenous religions 26, 34–36, 46n Argentina 384

Index Arizona Highways 197 Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum 198 Arizona State Museum 198 Arizona, usa 58, 194, 195, 198 Art & Beothuk 229–30 & indigenous religions 36–38 & nature 37 & technology 37 Articulation 325–328, 340, 343 Arunachal Pradesh, India 267–269, 272, 273, 279–93 Asad, Talal 194, 264 Ashwattha 268 Asia 20, 247–323 Assam, India 253, 267, 269, 282, 286 Assimilation 309 & Adi 279–293 Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner 93, 96 Atman (soul, Hindu) 271–272, 275 Aurality 108, 110 Australia 15, 17–18, 20, 35, 88, 92–107, 112, 114, 116, 227, 324–348 Census 333, 336 Australian National Race Discrimination Commissioner 333 Authenticity 39, 112, 116, 121, 131, 139, 166, 180, 298, 382–383 Ainu 318 & identity 111 Khoisan 356–357 & liveness 111, 113 O’odham festivals 198–199 & performance 113 & sound 115 & technology 110, 113, 115 Avatar 15, 138, 148, 150 as metaphor 144–47 Axial Age 35 Ayreo, Paraguay 295 ontology 295 Aztec 185 Backward Classes Commission 252 Bahidaj (fruit, O’odham) 198 Ba’i (spirit, Philippines) 297–301, 305 as demons 305 & humans 305 & illness 298

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Index Baines, Sir Athelstane 269 Banaue, Philippines 300–305 Bangalore 285 Bangladesh 267 Barclay, Barry 92, 95 Barento Secretariat 239, 240, 242, 243 Barnard, Alan 256, 361–362 Bartman, Sara 356 Barton, Roy Franklin 297, 304–305 Baruah, Sanjib 268 Barunga festival, Australia 332 Batad, Philippines 301–02 Bauman, Richard 142, 150 Baviskar, Amita 255 Bayininan, Philippines 300–02 bbc 129 Beaman, L.G. 216–217 Bear ritual, Ainu. See Iyomante Beaudry, Nicole 208 Beckel, Annmarie 227 Becoming. See ontology Bedevil 94 Beek, Walter van 366 Belize 41 Bellah, Robert 35 Belo Monte, Brazil 15, 138–155 Belonging, dual 382–383 Beothuk 16, 221–233, 381 art 229–230 & colonisation 226 cosmology 222 extinction 222–228 literature 226–229 & primitivism 230–231 see also Shanawdithit Beothuk Interpretation Centre 228 Berger, Peter 257 Berkeley, University of, California 222 Berlin Film Festival 92 Bessire, Lucas 295, 296 Besten, Michael 356 Béteille, André 255, 256 Bhagavad gita 265 Bharat (Mother India) 19, 268–270, 273, 274 Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) 254 Bharatvarsh 268 Bhide, Nivedita 271–272 Bible, The 283n, 327, 338, 340, 371 & colonialism 338

Biddle, Jennifer 341, 342 Bigenho, Michelle 197 Biratori, Japan 313, 320 Biratori Niputani Ainu and Indigenous Exchange 312 Biratori Niputani Forum 313 Black Consciousness Movement, South Africa 353 Bleek, Wilhelm 361 Bolivia 75 Bombay, India 285 Bond, David 295, 296 Boring, Kaling 279, 282, 285n, 287, 292 Bororo, Brazil 312 Bostwana 366, 368n, 372 Bourdillon, Michael 369 Bowen v. Roy 1986 58 Brahmanism 265, 270 Brahma Samaj, the 285 Brattland, Camilla 242, 243 Brazil 138–155, 384 indigenous peoples 312 Tupinambá 148 Bribris, Costa Rica 9, 45 Briggs, Charles 142, 150 Brothers Grimm, the 141n Buddhism 2, 39, 268, 288, 379, 382 Budgel, Richard 226 Bureau of Indian Affairs, us 60 Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes 303 Burgess, Jean Chief 353–354 Burke, Paul 328 Burma 267 Bush, George H. W. President 59 Cajete, Gregory 180 Calcutta, India 285 California, usa 222 Callon, Michael 296 Calma, Tolm 333 Cameron, James 15, 138–139, 144–145, 147, 148n, 151 Cameron-Stockley, Eleanor 227 Canada 16, 161, 204–220, 312, 384 Cree 212 Canadian Supreme Court 217 Cannell, Fanella 194 Cannes Film Festival 92

390 Cape Cultural Heritage Development Council, South Africa (cchdc) 354, 356 Cape Town, sa 349, 358, 362 Capitalism 212 Caribou 204, 207, 211, 214–216 agency 215 declines 214 knowledge 216 ontology 214 as sacred 205 Carpio, Myla Vicente 181 Cartesian Dualism 208 Caste 266, 270, 270n ancestors 249 Spanish 177 & tribals 248–254 Catholicism 39, 122–123, 196, 208, 209, 297, 305 & Dene 210 & indigenous religions 124 & Mi’kmaq 224 prayer 213 & shamanism 123 see also Christianity Census Australian 333, 336 Indian 252, 269, 270, 272 Japan 310 Central New Mexico Community College (cnm) 187 Cepek, Michael 150n16 Champagne, Duane 72 Champion, Denise 326–327, 336–340, 343, 344 Chanunuka (deity, Zimbabwe) 370, 371 Charter of Rights and Freedom, Canada 216–17 Cheung, Sidney C. H. 310 Chhotanagpur, Bihar 253 Chhotaudepur talaka, Gujurat 257–259 Chidester, David 27, 40/41, 44, 209, 209n, 352 Chieftancy, South Africa 355–7 see also Little, Joseph Chimurenga (war, Zimbabwe) 371 China 161, 267, 268 Chingoma, Chief Zimbabwe 368, 374 Chise (house, Ainu) 316–318 & authenticity 318 Poro-Chise 314

Index Christensen, Cato 38 Christianities 120–127, 194 Christianity 2, 15, 16, 18, 29, 39, 84, 86, 379, 382 & ancestral landscape 195 & animism 249 of anthropology 104 & the body 125–6 & creator God 374 & Dene 206, 207, 210 & the Dreaming 327 as foreign 19, 278 Hawaiian 170 as Hindu 274 hymns 291 & indigeneity 10 indigenised 56, 120–137, 194, 196, 236, 326, 335–340 & indigenous spirituality 324 & Khasi 284 legitimate 124–126 Sámi 236, 240 as stable 121 transforming 127 & tribal religions 264–267, 270 see also Aboriginal; Catholicism; Protestantism City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation 2005 57 Civil disobedience 44, 160 Clifford, James 4, 7, 12, 40, 110, 111, 116, 117, 178, 199, 235, 236, 241, 248, 295, 327, 342 Clinton, Bill President 74 Cloud of Bone 227 Coetzee, Basil Chief 362–363 Colonialism 19, 39–40, 110, 127, 130, 131, 163, 177, 205, 210, 266, 267, 270, 272 American 177 & anthropology 295 British 248–254, 282 Christian 141 critique of 213 & Hinduism 265 images 357 & indigeneity 212 Japanese 309 Mexican 177 & modernity 352–354 & Northeast India 271 Portuguese 141 & representation 102

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Index & rupture 125, 166 Spanish 177 & trauma 179 see also post-colonialism Colossal Cave Mountain Park, usa 198 Coloured, definition of 353–354, 353n10 Comaroff, Jean 114, 117 Comaroff, John 114, 117 Commission on National Integration, Philippines 303 Commonality 327, 330–331, 338 Comparison 4–6, 11–14, 27, 82, 378 & indigeneity 3 & translation 12 Coniston Station massacre, Australia 340 Conklin, Beth 140 Conklin, Harold 297, 300–302, 304, 305 Constructionism 265–266 Contribution of Eco-Feminism & Indigenous Religions to a Theology of Environment 31/2 Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Racial Discrimination 53 Conversion 138–155 & salvation 147–150 ~ tale 151–152 Cook, Captain 163, 168, 170 Cordillera Mountains, Northern Luzou 297 Cordillera Peoples Alliance 304 Cosmology 41, 207 Ifugao 297, 304–305 indigenous 122–126, 130, 132 Judaeo-Christian 151–152 Western 207–208 Costa Rica 9, 41, 45, 46 Costner, Kevin 100 Council of Traditional Leaders, South Africa 355 Cox, James 18, 27, 35, 125 Creative Subversions 227 Creator God Aboriginal 335–340 Dene 204 American Indian 186, 188 see also Musikavanhu; Mwari Crummey, Michael 227 ‘Cultura cura, la’ 183 Culture & heritage 67

indigenous spirituality 71 & religion 52–79 & religious rights 55, 56 as sacred 54 self-identification 140 Da Cunha, Carneiro 139/40 Da Silva, Manuel 33 Dai, Mameng 285n11 Dai, Ogom 290 Dalits 286 Dalton, Mary 228 Dances with Wolves 100, 101, 147–148 Dangs, South Gujurat 248 Dani-Piilo Society of Apatani 288 Darsanas 265 Davis, Gaye 357 De Castro, Viveiros 152–53 De Certeau, Michel 148–149 De Heer, Rolf 93 De La Cadena, Marisol 42–43, 193 De Léry, Jean 148 Debenbach-Salazar Sáenz, Sabine 39–40 Decolonisation 176–191, 227 & La Plazita 185 & trauma 179–181 as undoing 177 Deconstructionism 41 Delorica, Vine Jr 189 Demasduit 227, 229, 230 Demonology 31, 123 Dene Nation 205, 205n1 Dene Religion 207–210 Dene, Alaska 204–220 & agency 210 as catholic 210 & Christianity 206, 207 definition of 205–206 education 210n & law 216–218 & missionaries 210 ontology 207–210 protests 213–214 rights 212n Slavey 208 see also Tłįchǫ Dene Denetah (Dene lands) 210 Desert Botanical Garden, usa 198 Deskaheh, Chief 62

392 Devolution 141–144 Dharma (duty, Hindu) 273–275 Diamond, Beverley 112–113 Didjeridu 114–116 Diiyi (sacred, Apache) 180–181 Directive Principles of Donyipolo Faith (Yelam) 287 Disarticulation 303–305 Discourse & aboriginal spirituality 330–31 civilisational 268–269 & indigeneity 204–220, 378–386 of indigeneity 247–62 & indigenous film 92–107 & indigenous religions 14, 26, 40–42, 46n indigenous rights 52–79, 120 macro- 204–205, 211–14 micro 204–205, 214–16 & stasis 380 topos 40 transnational 126–129 Discrimination 309 Djigitt, Peter 93 Doctrine of Christian Discovery 57 Dò nàowoò (traditional knowledge, Dene) 215–216, 218 Donyi (sun, Adi) 281 Donyipolo movement, India 17, 279–293 Donyipolo Yelum Kebang (faith council)  282 Donyipoloism 287n Donyipoloism through Questions and Answers  287 Dostou, Thomas Chief 314 Dowell, Kristin 100 Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 53, 69–72 Dravidians 249 Dreaming, the 324, 325, 325n, 327–331, 333, 335, 340–343 & Christianity 327 performance of 340–343 see also Muda and Jukurrpa Dressler, Markus 41 Drum 113 Sámi 238, 239 as sacred 112 DuBois, Thomas 236 Dundes, Allan 141–42

Index Duodji (Sami artwork) 239 Durkheim, Émile 32, 267 Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds 43 ‘Earth beings’ 43 Echo-Hawk, Walter 62 Eco-feminism 32 Ecology 32, 138–155 Economic and Social Weekly 255 Ecuador 147 Eden 152 Eisenlohr, Patrick 113 Ekwǫ̀ nàowoò (caribou knowledge, Dene)  216 see also caribou Eliade, Mircea 32, 44 Elwin, Verrier 251, 280, 283 Emancipation 100–104 Emerald Forest, The 139, 148–150 Employment Division v. Smith 1990 58, 61 ‘Encompassment’ 270 Encyclopedia Britannica 379 Enlightenment, the 75 Enthoven, Reginald Edward 250, 269 Environmentalism 2, 20, 33, 90, 211, 244 beings 205, 208 relationships 207, 217 & religion 138–155 & spirituality 86 see also indigenous peoples as saviours Epistemology Aboriginal 336, 338, 339, 344 Ering, Oshony 282–283, 295n Essentalisation 41, 100–104, 121, 126, 129, 244, 381–382 strategic 30 Ete, Thumpak 282–283, 285n Ethnicity, Inc. 114, 117 Ethnography 35 imagined 32 mobilisation of 294–308 Europe 354 Evans, Jerry 229 Evolution 26, 34–36, 46n Ewe, Ghana 123 Exoticism 4, 129–130, 231 Experience, as cycles 181, 188 Eyre, Chris 101–103

Index Fabian, Johannes 143–144 Facebook 342 faienap 123, 132 Fairclough, Norman 81 Fanon, Franz 179 Fassin, Dider 306 ‘Federal trust responsibility’ 53 Federation of Newfoundland Indians 224 Festival Isogaisa: Neoshamanism in New Arenas 243 Festivals authenticity 198–199 Ifugao 303, 304 Garma 332 O’odham 195, 198 see also Isogaisa Film Australian 105 global 98 & hybridity 103–104 indigenisation 98 indigenous 92–107 local 98 post-colonial 103 First Amendment, usa 56–58, 60, 63, 69, 217 see also religious freedom First Cinema 95 First Nations 113, 212, 225, 247, 312 ‘Five worlds’ model, Aztec 185–87 Flavell, Te Ururoa 313 Folklorisation 197–199 Fonneland, Trude 127–128 Foundation for Research and Promotion of Ainu Culture 318 Foundation for Shamanic Studies 33 Fourth Biennial VisionMaker Film Festival 94 Fourth Cinema 95 see also film, indigenous Francis, Margot 227 Francis, Saint 194 Frawley, David 263, 272 Freedom Park, Pretoria 360, 362, 379 Frith, Simon 113 From Primitive to Indigenous: The Academic Study of Indigenous Religions 27 Fuchs, Stephen 253 Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von 253

393 Gaia 88, 146 Galo Indigenous Faith and Culture Council 288 Gandhi, Mahatma 161, 282 Ganggings (prayer halls, Adi) 279, 288, 290, 292 Gangs, Albuquerque 176, 182–189 Garzia, Albino 183, 185, 186, 188 Gaup, Nils 38, 92, 98–100 Gautier, Ana Maria Ochoa 110 Gayapa (plant, Amazonia) 123 Geertz, Armin 35, 231 Gelder, Ken D. 227 General Education Development exams (geds), New Mexico 176, 187 Genizaros (peasant, New Mexico) 177, 180, 184 Geography & indigenous religions 26, 39–40, 46n Ghàts’eèdi (offerings, Dene) 207, 213 Ghost Dance, the 213, 213n Ghurye, Govind S. 251–252, 269–271 Gilbert, Humphrey Sir 227 Ginsburg, Faye 100–101, 105 Globalisation 19, 29, 286, 309, 311–315, 334 & indigeneity 4–5, 20–21 & indigenous identity 342 & indigenous peoples 140 & land 331 & world music 108 Global movements 355 Khoisan 352 & local 324 vs local 366–77 God 31, 32, 337–339, 373, 374 causality 374 Goldie, Terry 225–226 Gomez, Victor 187–189 Gondarra, Djiniyinc, Rev. Dr 337 Gordillo, Gastón 351 Gosse, William 229 Graham, Laura R. 98, 140, 242 Grave protection 158–160 see also nagpra Great Bear Lake, Canada 205n2 Great Slave Lake, Canada 205n2 Gregory, Derek 32 Griekwa Volks Organisatie, South Africa 356 Guatemala 40

394 Gujurat, India 248, 254, 256 Guwahati, Assam 263, 271 Guzmán, Tracy D. 140 Hale (house, Hawaiian) 170 Hale kukia`imauna 167, 170 Hamburg, Germany 285 Hamcumqua clan 355 see also Little, Joseph Hamilton, Henrietta Lady 229, 230 Hanrahan, Maura 223–224 Hansson, Gurli 367, 369 Hanuman (deity, Hindu) 272 //hapo (­museum, Khoisan) 360, 362 Harada, Yoshito 314 Harare, Zimbabwe 368n Hardiman, David 253 Harner, Michael 33 Harper, Stephen Prime Minister, Canada 211 Harvey, Graham 29, 32, 43, 206n3 Haudenosaunee government, Canada 62–3 Hawai’i 2, 10, 15, 16, 45, 60, 156–175, 312 as nation-state 157, 160, 161 Hawaiian activists. See Kia`i Hawaiian Antiquities 168 Hawaiian Kingdom 173 Hawaiian religion 156–175 Hawaiians, Native 60, 156–175 community 156–60 images 165–166 language 157 & Maoris 170–171 Martyrdom 159, 165 recognition 173 & sovereignty 156 Hayopira, Japan 319 He Mu Oia (Hawaiian chant) 167–168, 172 Headhunters’ Encounters with God: An Ifugao Adventure 301n Headhunting 297 Healing 182–183 Heathendom 27 Helm, June 209–210 Heritage 10, 18 & culture 67 Hawaiian 163 indigenous 116 Khoisan 349–65 & sound 116

Index Hervien-Léger, Daniele 28 Hierchisation 122, 124, 130, 270 Hill, Jane 195 Himalayas 17 Hindu 263–278 & animism 271 & Christianity 274 ‘community’ 267 definition of 265 & Islam 266 nationalists 254 & oneness 274 & sanatan dharma 276 as true Indians 255 & worship 275 Hinduisation 264, 280, 282, 286, 291 Hinduism 2, 17, 19, 32, 84, 86, 263–278, 304, 382 & animism 249, 251, 269 & colonialism 265 & commonality 275–6 definition of 265 vs Hindu 263–78 vs indigenous 250 & land 379/80 & politics 267 & power 267 & worship 275 Hindu-right 264, 268–272 Hindutva 255, 264, 274, 275 Hisakazu, Fujimura Prof. 317 History and Ethnography of the Beothuk 225 History & indigenous religions 26, 39–40, 46n Hoernle, Winifred 356 Hokkaido Ainu Association, Japan 311, 315 Hokkaido University, Japan 315 Hokkaido, Japan 310, 314, 315, 318 Hōkūle`a (canoe, Hawaiian) 158–159, 170 Holism 32, 38, 41, 127 Honduras 41 Hong Kong, China 40 Ho`oponopono (making right, Hawaiian) 164 House of Traditional Leaders, South Africa 355 Howse, Jonathan 229, 230 Huarochirí manuscript 39 //Hui! Gaeb, South Africa 358. See also Cape Town Huliau (turning point, Hawaiian) 160 Human rights. See rights

Index Humanity 43 origin of 380–81 Hunter-gatherers 34, 36, 349n Husserl, Edmund 44 Hybridity 103–104 Hymns O’odham 195 Iceland 229 Identity 8, 12, 80, 89, 116 Amazonian 124–126 Ainu 309–310 & authenticity 111 as choice 221 collective 97, 180 hemispheric 184 & indigeneity 82, 221, 242 indigenous 108–119, 296, 298, 301–03 & Isogaisa 243 national 263–78 O’Odham 192–203 & orality 267 pan-indigenous 177 & performance 8, 167 politics of 325 & powwow 112 private expression 211 public expression 211 & Sámi religion 236, 241 & solidarity 211 & sound 108–119 transnational 178 Idle No More Movement 206–207, 211–214, 213n10, 218 Idolatry 31 Ifugao, Philippines 17, 294–308 ancestors 297 cosmology 297 identity 301–303 migration 302–303 rights 304 ritual practice 304 Ik’ǫǫ̀ (medicine power, Dene) 208, 210 Ikara-Flinders Ranges, Australia 336 ilo Convention 169 68, 80–83, 99, 126, 127, 169, 351 ‘Imagined demography’ 32 Imbayah (festival, Philippines) 303, 304 ‘Imperialist nostalgia’ 198

395 Inculturation 122–123, 128, 132 India 19, 20, 161, 247–262, 293 Apatani 279n, 287–288, 292 census 252, 269, 270, 272 constitution 252 Gadaba 257 government 252, 253, 255 independence 251, 253 Kolis 250 social structure 249 Tirap 288 see also Northeast India Indian Act, The 223–224 Indian law 52–53, 60 Indian theology 127, 128/9 Indianisation 283 Indigeneity 117, 255, 354 ‘ascribed’ 257 & authority 296, 301 as category 11 & Christianity 10, 194, 196 ‘claimed’ 257 & comparative religion 2, 8 definition of 72, 257 & difference 97 discourse 352 discourse of 204–220, 378–386 as dominant 20 & film 92–107 global 110, 166, 171, 172, 192–203, 214, 241, 242, 355 & globalisation 4–5, 20–21, 53 & Hindu 274 & identity 82, 108–119, 221, 242 images of 165–166, 197 ‘indigenous’ 257 internationalisation 98, 381 & land 54 & language 52–79 & law 8, 216–218 as lived 177 local 2, 166, 171, 172, 241 & myth 48, 257–259 in Newfoundland 221–233 notions of 334 & ontology 176–191 performance 11, 98 as political construct 221 politicisation of 294–308

396 Indigeneity (cont.) politics of 108–119 & powwow 112 reconstructing 221 as reluctant 20 as retroactive 20 & sacred 54 sounds of 108–119, 197 & story telling 96 & universalism 275–276 & vocabulary 8 & youth 164–165 Indigenisation 39, 41, 42 & Christianity 194 Indigenìtude 4, 110, 178, 235 Indigenous Aesthetics 95 Indigenous aesthetics 95–96, 357–358, 363 & indigenous religions 26, 36–38, 46n & liveness 112 & sound 111 western 37 Indigenous Faith and Cultural Society of Arunachal Pradesh 288, 292 Indigenous Faith and Culture Society 288 Indigenous identity Australian 324–348 & globalisation 342 & Isogaisa 239–42 Khoisan 349–365 & South Africa 349–365 Indigenous peoples 28–29 & British colonialism 280 as category 83–85, 126 & Christianity 84 commonality 235 & globalisation 140, 378–386 & Hinduism 84 images of 129 & Islam 84 labels of 247 & law 380, 382 & modernity 138–155 myths of 100 & nature 87, 126–127, 143 as plural 84, 90 & politics 378–386 rights 52–79, 129 as saviours 127, 128, 140, 142–144, 152 self-representation 92–107

Index as singular 84, 90 & stereotype 100–101, 104 transnationalism 126–129 see also Aboriginal Australians; Adi; adivasis; Dene; Khoisan; Kia`i; O’odham; Tribals; Yine Indigenous Peoples Day 258, 259, 259n Indigenous Peoples Statement to the World 380–381 Indigenous Religions and Environments: Intersections of Animism and Nature Conservation 32 Indigenous religions as adjective 28–30 & aesthetics 26, 36–38 Amazonian 120–137 & animism 269–275 & anthropology 39–40 & archaeology 26, 34–36 & art 36–38 as category 25–51, 80–91, 197, 366 categories of 55–56 & Catholicism 123 characteristics 38 & Christianity 368 as class of religions 26–28 & commonality 266, 269–275 & conversion 131 definition of 121 & discourses 80–107 as discourse 14, 26, 40–42 & essentialisation 30–31 & evolution 26, 34–36 & film 92–107 as flexible 121 & geography 26, 39–40 global 12 & globalisation 80 & Hinduism 263–278 & history 39–40, 216, 380–81 & idolatry 31 vs indigenous spirituality 121 & isolation 141–142 & language games 25–51 local 1, 12 & materiality 26, 42–44 as noun 28 pan ~ 20 & performance 242–244

Index plural 2, 11, 15, 41, 96, 104 problem of 55–56 protection of 56 & purity 197 & revival 309–323 singular 2, 4, 11, 15, 41, 97, 104 & spirituality 85–88 & stasis 380 & theology 26, 31–34 & tourism 234–246 & typology 25–51 vs universal 379–80 & usage 25–51 Indigenous rights 52–79 Indigenous spirituality 32, 38, 324–348 & Christianity 324, 326, 343 & commonality 330–331 & culture 33, 71 definition of 328 as discourse 330–331 as holistic 331, 333, 338 vs indigenous religions 121 & land 332 & law 216–218 & modernity 340–343 as shared 330 & tourism 329 & westernisation 339–340 Indigenous theology 127–129, 132 Indigenous vs Hindu 250 translation of 247–262 Inipi. See sweat lodges Innu, Quebec 223, 228, 314 Institute for the Restoration of Aborigines of South Africa (irasa) 350, 352, 358 International Association for Religious Freedom (iarf), Northeast India  281, 284–287, 291, 292 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (iccpr) 63–65, 67–68, 76, 379 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (icescr) 65–68, 76 International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People 1995–2004 355 International Indigenous Women’s Forum 84–85 International law. See law Inuit 93, 212, 223, 228

397 Isánáklésh Gotal (ceremony, Apache) 181 Islam 2, 29, 84, 86, 285 as foreign 275 & Hindus 266 & tribal religions 264, 265, 267, 268, 270 Isogaisa 16, 17, 234–246 & ancestors 243 & cultural renewal 235 & identity 239–243 & performance 242–244 Isolationism 268 Iwor Restoration Plan, Japan 316–318, 320 Iyomante (bear ritual, Ainu) 316–318 iziko Museum, South Africa 361 Jacobs, Jane M. 227 Jainism 185 Japan 17, 39 census 310 Constitution 315 government 309–311, 315, 320, 321 see also Ainu Law Jarvenpa, Robert 210 Jesus, Christ 140, 144, 151–152, 195, 337, 370, 371, 374, 376 Jobs and Growth Act 2012, Canada 211 Johannesburg, South Africa 114 Johnson v. McIntosh 1823 57 Johnson, Greg 42, 44, 59, 193, 211, 218, 236, 241, 357 Johnson, Paul C. 41 Joik (Sámi music) 238 Joik and Daina 239 Joint Committee of Parliament on the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, India 252 Jones, Steve 114–116 Jonoguchi, Yuri 315 Joshi, Narenda 268, 271 Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 32 Journal of American Academy of Religion 33–4 Journal of Religion and Film 94 Journal of Religion in Africa 367, 374 Jukurrpa, Australia 325n, 328, 335–341 Juruna people 138 Juruna, Sheyla 138

398 Kabekirs, Costa Rica 9 Kachinas (spirits, Native Americans) 58 Kaho`olawe island, Hawai’i 159 Kaho`olawe movement, Hawai’i 158 Kāhuna (ritual experts, Hawaiian) 164 Kalyan Ashram, India 254, 269 Kamalampi (plant, Amazonia) 123 Kamuy (deity, Ainu) 315–317 Kamuy Mintara (god building, Ainu) 314 Kanaka maoli (real people), Hawai’i 157 Kanaka ‘Oiwi (people of the bone), Hawai’i 157 Kanto Utari Association 314 Kanuha, Kaho`okahi 161–162 Kanyiles, David 356 Kapu (law or rule, Hawaiian) 161 Kapu Aloha. See kapu Karajá, Brazil 312 Karlsson, Bengt 256 Kaxinawá, Brazil 312 Kayano Shigeni Ainu Cultural Resource Centre, Japan 313–314 Kayano, Shiro 314 Keane, Webb 193 Kellner, Douglas 97 Kermode, Frank 151 Keystone xl Pipeline, Canada 212 Keywords in Sound 109 Khasi, the 281, 283–287 & Christianity 284 see also Seng Khasi Khimun, L. 273 Khoe, see Khoisan tribes Khoi and Boesman Aboriginal Council 359 Khoi, see Khoisan tribes Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage Conference, South Africa 355, 356 Khoisan tribes 18, 349–365, 379 decline 351–358 definition of 349n global movements 352 Griqua clans 356 history of 352–353 language 363 neo- 355, 358–360, 360n Nguni tribe 363 recognition 352 resources 351

Index Khoisan X 353 Kia`i, Hawai’i 160–175 King, Martin Luther Jr 161 Kinship 28, 229, 332, 334, 366, 376 & the Dreaming 328, 341 mumba’i 299 Kiowa Wichita Nations 314 Kirkegaard, Annemette 116 Kleinhans-Cedras, Tanya 350–352, 358–360 Klostermaier, Klaus 276 Knabe, Susan 102, 104 Knopf, Kirstin 92, 101, 103–104 Kotan (village, Ainu) 316–318, 320 Kraft, Siv Ellen 38, 99, 127–128, 211, 218, 236, 241 Kroeber, Alfred 222 Kū (god, Hawaiian) 161 Ku Haaheo (song, Hawaiian) 169–171 Ku-ipad (O’odham) 198 Kunuk, Zacharias 93 Kūpuna (elders, Hawaiian) 164 Kuril-Chishima Islands, Japan 310 Kvernmo, Ronald 237–238, 240–241 La Plazita, New Mexico 16, 176, 182–189 & decolonisation 185 Lake Akan, Japan 310, 312, 319 Lambrecht, Francis 294, 297 Land 236, 335, 343 Ainu 318–319 & globalisation 331 & indigenous religion 141 Khoisan 358–360 as sacred 186 & spirituality 332, 333 & spiritual relationship 120, 127–129, 131 see also querencia Language 8 Adi 282, 283 Ainu 309, 316 extinct 361 floating signifier 87 O’odham 195 philosophy of 25–51 San 361 second order abstraction 89, 90 Language games 25–51 Las Huertas Canyon, New Mexico 74

Index Latin America 9, 29, 128 Latvia 239 Law 10–11, 28, 44 Hawai’i 159–160 Indian 52–53, 60 & indigeneity 8 & U.N. 52–79 Le Fleur, Abraham 356 League of Nations, Switzerland 62 Lee, Richard 255, 256, 356 Leis (flower wreath, Hawaiian) 162 Lennawa (soul, Philippines) 299 Leuthold, Steven 36–38, 95/6 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 141, 143 Lewis-Williams, David 361 Life, cycles of 181, 188, 189 Lightning, Georgina 94, 103 Lima, Peru 197 Lincoln, Bruce 40, 89, 183n6 Linton Stone, South Africa 361 Literacy & the Adi 279–293 as advocacy 279–83 & the tabe 288–291 Literature & Boethuk 226–229 Little Bear, Leroy 181 Little Big Man 100, 101 Little, Joseph 354–357 see also Chieftancy, sa ‘Liveness’ 111–112, 114 aesthetics of 112 & authenticity 111, 113 Living with Kamuy 314 Lloyd, Lucy 361 local 192–203 & global 324 vs global 366–77 as monolithic 196 paradox of 194, 196 traditions 366–377 & world religions 376 Longchar, Wati 271 Longkumer, Arkotong 32 Lorenzen, David 265–266 Lorrain, James Herbert, Rev. 283n8 Lovelock, James 89 Ludden, David 268

399 Lutheran Church, the 236 Lyden, John C. 94 Lyng v. nw Indian Cemetery Prot. Association 1988 58 Lyons, Oren Chief 247 MacDonald, Mary 230 MacGregor, William Governor of Newfoundland 223 Mafu, Hezekiel 366, 367, 371, 376 Magdalena, Mexico 194, 197, 199 Maine, usa 223 Mālama Honua (care for the Earth), Hawai’i 159 Malo, David 168 Man Called Horse, A 100, 102 Mana (power, Hawaiian) 163 Mangauil, Lanakila 170, 171 Manai Adivasi Re (song) 258 ‘Manifest absence’ 297–298 Manioc beer 125–126 Manipur, ne India 267 Manitou of the Beothuk 228 Manusmrti (Hindu text) 249 Maori 157, 165, 313 & Hawaiians 170–171 revitalisation 170 Maori Cinema 95 Mapa (deity, Zimbabwe) 370, 371 Marcos, Ferdinand President 303 Marimo (algae, Ainu) 319–320 Marimo Festival, Japan 319 Marshall, Ingeborg 222, 225 Marshall, John Chief Justice 62 Marten, Emil 92 Martinez Cobo Study, The 80–82, 85, 86n, 87–88 & State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples 83 Martinez, Tomas 176, 186–187, 189 Marxism 44 Mason, John Alden 208 Masuzawa, Tomoko 27, 194 Materiality 160–166 & indigenous religions 26, 42–44, 46n Matjieshuis (building, Khoisan) 359 Matopos Hills, Zimbabwe 369 Maui, Hawai’i 159

400 Mauna Kea, Hawai’i 16, 156–175 Mauri (film) 95 Mawere, Abraham 367–368, 370, 372–376 Mazvihwa, Zimbabwe 374 Mbeki, Thabo 361 Mberengwa, Zimbabwe 368, 374 Mbonga (shrine attendant, Zimbabwe) 370 McLeod, Christopher 212 McMicken David 341, 342 McNally, Michael 198, 379 ‘Meaning-making’ 234–246 Medicine wheel ceremony 185, 224–225 Meerhof, Krotoa van 349–351, 362–363 Meghalaya, ne India 253, 267, 284 Meintjes, Louise 113–14 Mele (songs, Hawaiian) 162, 169 Merlan, Francesca 344 Message from Pandora, A (film) 138, 144, 145, 147, 149 Métis, North America 177, 212, 215, 223 Metropolitan Museum of Art, The, usa 36 Mexican Chicanos 177, 180, 183n, 186, 187 Mexico 194 Meyer, Brigit 113, 123 Mi’kmaq 16, 221–233 & Beothuk 222–224, 229–230 & Catholicism 224 Conne River 224–225 & land 224, 227 recognition 225–226, 229 rights 227 Mi’sel Joe, Mi’kmaq Chief 225, 226 Miawpukek Mi’kamawey Mawi’omi, Canada 224 Migration 181–182, 381, 383 Mili, Mupak 283n Milpiri Festival 328, 332, 340–343 Mimesis 300 Ministry of Tribal Affairs, India 252–254 Miri (spirit, Adi) 289, 292 & tabe 288–291 Missionaries 10, 19, 281, 282 in Amazonia 122–124 American Baptists 283n Australia 326 Canada 208 Catholic 120 & Dene agency 210 post 336

Index see also Catholicism; Christianity; Protestantism Mita, Merata 92, 95 Mitoro. See rain rituals Mizoram, ne India 253, 267 Modernity 300, 344 & Aboriginality 329 & indigenous people 138–155 & Shamanism 237–238 vs tradition 138–155 Modi, Narendra 254 Moffatt, Tracey 94 Moodie, Megan 248, 253n Mopin festival, India 279n Morgan, Bernie 227 Moriori, Polynesia 381 Morton v. Mancari 1974 60 Mother Earth 2, 4, 8, 15, 19, 53, 84–85, 89, 127–128, 180, 205, 211, 212, 214, 218, 236, 241, 263, 273, 276 Mother India. See Bharat Mozambique 366, 372 Muda, Australia 325n, 338, 339 Mugabe, Robert 373, 374 Mukawa Ainu Cultural Preservation Society, Japan 314 Mumba’i (ritual expert, Philippines) 294, 297–303 & kinship 299 & story telling 299–300 Munda, Ram Dayal 255 Murmansk region, Norway 239 Museums Scotland, uk 225 Music 108–119 as idea 109 & sacred 110 Musikavanhu (deity, Zimbabwe) 370–372 see also Mwari shrines Mwari shrines, Zimbabwe 369–370, 372–375 Myrhang, Eirik 239 Myrvoll, Marit 242, 243 Myth Hawaiian 163 use of 248, 257–259 N’anga (healer, Zimbabwe) 368, 371 Nabokov, Peter 195 Nadasdy, Paul 217–218 Nagaland, ne India 253, 267, 269, 273

Index Nakamura, Itsuki 312–313 Nation building 10, 19, 85n Nation states 73, 89 National Coat of Arms, South Africa 360–361 National Commission of Indigenous Peoples (ncip) 303–304 National Congress, Japan 314 National Council of Khoisan Chiefs, South Africa 356 National Geographic 197 National Heritage Day, South Africa 350 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra) 57, 59, 61, 159–160, 315 Native Americans 111, 247 activists 56–62 Chippewyan 314 & Christianity 56 collective rights 61, 69–72, 75, 76 & consultation 74 Hopi 58 Kiowa Apache 177 & local 55, 56 Mohawk 165 Muskogee Nation 247 Northern Cheyenne 157 Onondaga 247 Pawnee 177 & preservation 74 Sandia Pueblo 74 & savagism 57 Sioux 213n11 traditions 52–79 & universal 55 Utes 177 Yaquis 195 Yoemem 195 see also Apache; Navajo Native Title Act, The 332 Natural religion 31, 270 Natural theology 31 Nature 2, 4, 41 & Adi 280 & Ainu 319–320 & Amazonians 129 & art 37 & Dene 208 & humanity 43

401 & indigenous peoples 126–127, 143, 146–147 as sacred 212, 218 & society 43 worship of 258, 271, 273 Navajo 35, 58, 157, 177, 205 Navajo Nation v. us F.S. 2008 58 Nebraska, usa 94 Nehanda (deity, Zimbabwe) 370, 371 Neo-liberalism 140 Neo-paganism 87, 328 Nepal 267 Neuenfeldt, Karl 114–116 New Age 2, 85, 87, 109, 113, 121, 127, 328 New Brunswick, Canada 223 New Delhi, India 285 Newell, Len 294, 301 Newfoundland, Canada 221–233 & indigeneity 225–26 Twillingate 227, 228 see also Mi’kmaq New Media Nation, The 9–10 Newth, Tim 341, 342 New York Times 138 New York, usa 83n New Zealand 20, 313 Ngakarra nguniangkulu (Adnyamathanha expression) 338 Nicaragua 41 Niezen, Ronald 5, 28, 40, 97, 110, 193 Niputani Dam, Japan 319, 320 Niputani, Japan 311–313, 318–320 Njuzu (spirit, Zimbabwe) 368–369, 371–373, 376 Noaidi (Sámi religious specialist) 238 Noble savage, the 140, 142, 146 Non-constructionism 265–266 North America 15, 20, 35, 313, 315 Ojibwe 225 see also Métis; Mi’kmaq Newfoundland North East Frontier Agency (nefa) 280, 282, 283, 285n see also Arunachal Pradesh Northeast India 253, 263–278 & colonisation 271 Galo 287–288, 288n, 292 Guru Nanak 285 Heraka 274 Hrusoo (Aka) 288

402 Northeast India (cont.) independence 265, 267 Mising 279n, 292 Nyishi 279n, 287–288, 288n, 292 Tripura 267 & westernisation 268 see also India, Meghalaya Mizoram; Nagaland; Sikkim; Tagin; Tani Northern Territory Lands Act 332 Norway 92–107, 234–66 see also Sámi Norwegian Cultural Council 239, 243 Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (niku) 240 Nova Scotia, Canada 223, 225 Novak, David 109 Nthoi, Leslie 370 Nugent, Stephen 141, 142 Nyusa (messenger, Zimbabwe) 372 O’Odham, Tuhono 192–203 festivals 195 hymns 195 identity 192–203 language 195 pilgrimage 197 Obama, Barack President 59, 74 Occupy Wall Street 140 Ocupao Belo Monte 140, 147 see also Belo Monte Odol (body, Philippines) 299 Office of Hawaiian Affairs 173 Ohio, usa 230 Okikurumi myth, Japan 318–319 Oklahoma, usa 57 Older Than America (film) 94, 103 Oli (chants, Hawaiian) 162, 168 Om (sacred sound, Hindu) 272 Ontology 32, 42–43 Aboriginal 328, 331, 334, 336, 340, 343 & caribou 214 Dene 207–210 & indigeneity 176–191 onto-theology 178 Opushinupuri, Japan 319 Orality 36, 299–300 & identity 267 Oraon, Southeast Asia 256 Organisation of American States (oas) 53, 69–72

Index Originality 121 Orthodoxy 121, 125–126 Orthomorphia 125–126 Oskal, Nils 88 Otley Beyer, Henry 297, 300–304 Otto, Rudolph 44 Owen, Suzanne 35 Owl ritual, Ainu 317 Pacific Islanders. See Hawai’i; Hawaiians Paiute, usa 177, 213 Pan-Africanist Congress 353 Pan-indigenous movement 213–214 Panth (religion, Hindu), characteristics 273–4 Pao, Manik 287 Parker, Michael 227 Parsons, Janet 31/32 Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh 282, 290 Pathfinder (film) 93–94, 96, 98–100, 102, 103 Patrick, Stephen Wanta 340–344 Pearson, Wendy Gay 96, 102, 104 Pedagogy, indigenous 180 Pegnum, Nigel 115 Penkechitu kanpira, Japan 319 Penny, H. Glenn 98, 242 Pentecostalism 297, 305 Performance 6, 8–9, 12, 19 & authenticity 113 & deference 162 definition of 167 Hawaiian religion 156–175 & identity 8, 108–119, 167 & indigeneity 11 & indigenous religions 242–244 & Isogaisa 242–244 O’Odham 192–203 & ritual 310 Personhood 114, 206n3 & indigenous rights 62–67 & religion 52–79 Pertin, Atsong 283n Petitot, Father Émile 208–209 Peyote (cactus, Native American) 61 Phenomenology 27, 44 Philippines 17, 294–308 Piko (portals, Hawaiian) 163 Pitman, Al 227 Plumstead, Cape Town 354 Polack, Fiona 222, 223, 226

403

Index Politics & adivasis 256 of difference 97 & identity 296, 298, 301–304, 306 & indigeneity 20, 294–308 & indigenous filmmaking 94 & indigenous religions 26, 46n international 82 Polo (moon, Adi) 281 Porsanger, Jelena 44 Post-apartheid 349–365 Post-colonialism 40, 43/4, 268, 334, 336 & film 103 Power 189 & adivasis 256 & Hinduism 267 & ‘religion’ 56, 57, 266 & spirit world 188 Powwows 111, 213, 224, 225 & identity 112 Prayer 166–168 Ainu 316 see also pule Preservation 159, 359 Ainu 312–313 international agenda 280 & written word 279–293 Preservation law 52 Presidential Association of National Minorities 303 Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion 34 Primitivism 27, 36, 87, 89, 100–104 & Beothuk 230 & nature 230 & sound 110 vs universal religion 379–80 Prince Edward Island, Canada 223 Print 279–93 Profane, the 55, 57 Profit and Loss (film) 212 Protest 164–166 dance 213 Dene 213–214 as ritual 349–352 & technology 165 Protestantism 122–123, 300, 305 Pueblo Dance 57 Pueblo of Sandia v. us 1995 74 Pule (prayer, Hawaiian) 162, 168

Punyabhumi (holy, Hindu) 268 Purification 139, 142, 267, 383 & technology 145–146 Quebec 223 Querencia (care for land, Apache) 184 R v. Jack 1985 217n R v. Sioui 1990 217n Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan 310 Raheja, Michell H. 95–96, 100–01 Rainforest Foundation, The 143, 146, 149 Rain rituals 369–370, 372–375 Ram (deity, Hindu) 272 Ramakrishna mission (rkm) 269 Ramirez, Renya 181–182 Ranger, Terence 366 Rangfraa Faith Promotion Society 273 Rapa Nui, Polynesia 159 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (rss) 269, 272 Red Indians 222 see also Native Americans Regeneration 176–191 Religiology 32 Religion in Human Evolution 35 Religion-making 158, 159, 165, 168–169, 172 & technology 173 Religion, the Missing Dimension in Statecraft 384 Religion as adjective 70 as category 13, 56–57, 131 as culture 69–71 & culture 52–79 definition of 86 denial of 207–210 displays of 93–97 as human expression 2 as identity 90 & indigenous religions 26, 46n as indigenisation 97–100 & language 122 non-~ 204–220 & peoplehood 52–79 & power 56, 57, 266 primitive 27 as resource 5 & universality 2 see also indigenous religions

404 Religionisation 42 Religious freedom 52–79, 157–158, 173, 217–218 discourse 56–58 & us law 52–62 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, usa  58, 60 Remembering 242–243 Rensburg, Jansen van 362 Representation 43, 379 Amazonia 129–130 & colonialism 102 images 129 & technology 129 transnational 97 Reservation status 229 Resistance 213 Return of the Ainu: Cultural Mobilisation and the Practice of Ethnicity in Japan, The 309–10 Return of the Native 230 ‘Return to country’ 327 Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the 21st Century 12, 178 see also Clifford Revival 309–323 Khoisan 349–365 Ri Khasi Press 284 Rights 10, 19, 28, 90, 380, 382 Aboriginal 332, 336 categories of 56 collective 60, 61, 69–72, 75, 76 Dene 212n, 215 Ifugao 304 indigenous peoples 129 land 227 law 52–79 religious 54–56 Rios, Hawane 171 Risley, Herbert Hope 249–250 Ritual 270n, 358–360, 363 creativity 242–44 Ifugao 304 & identity 351 !Nau 356 & performance 310 as protest 349–351, 362 River Thieves 227, 228 Rodriguez, Marcos 241

Index Romanticism 231 Rondebosch Common, Cape Town 358 Rosaldo, Renato 198 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 141 Roy Burman, B.K. 255 Roy, Hipshon 285 Ruination 352–353 Rukbo, Talom 279, 282–283, 283n, 286–288, 292 Rumnong, Banteilang Singh 284–285 Rupture 125, 166 Russell, Robert V. 250 Russia 310 Russian Association of the indigenous Peoples in the North 83n Sabbath 373 Sacred 2, 4, 15, 53, 88, 89/90, 211, 236, 330, 332–333, 334, 351 definition of 75 land 186, 263, 276 & music 110 & nature 212, 218 & the profane 55, 57 Safe Spaces, South Africa 349 Saguaro (cactus) 197–199 Saguaro National Park, usa 198 Said, Edward 32 Saint-Ange, Leo 314 Sakakeeny, Matt 109 Sakhalin, Japan 310 Salafism 39 Salvation 147–150 ecological 138–155 Sámi 9, 16, 17, 39, 44, 45, 85n, 88, 93, 94, 98–100, 112, 171, 313, 379 Christianisation 236 & globalisation 240 & global spirituality 240 & identity 241 nation building 236 & nature 99 & political rights 99 revival 236 ritual practice 239 & stigma 240–241 see also Sámi shamanism Sámi Museum, Norway 313 Sámi Parliament 239, 243

Index Sámi shamanism 234–246 vs Christianity 240 as idolatry 236 & modernity 237 San Diego, usa 34 San Francisco Peaks 58, 59 San, see Khoisan Sanatan dharmas 271, 273 as Hindu 276 Sandjord, Beate 237n5 Sangh Parivar 254, 268, 269 Sankalia, Hasmukh D. 247n Sanneh, Lamin 194 Sapmi. See Sámi Sapporo, Hokkaido 318 Saru River, Japan 319, 320 Satan 123 Savarkar, V. D. 275, 276 Savidge, Frederick W. 283n8 Scales, Christopher 111–112 Scandinavia 20, 39 see also Norway Scheduled tribes 252 definition of 252 Searle-Chatterjee, Mary 266 Seattle, Chief 258, 259 Second Cinema 95 Secularism 75, 89 Aboriginal 336 Australian 331 Seifert, Martha 227, 231 Self-determination 66, 67, 72, 73 Self-representation 92–107 Seng Khasi 281, 283–287, 292 ‘Sense of an ending, the’ 151 Sequoyah v. T.V.A. 1980 58 ‘Settlers’ guilt’ 227–228 Shamanic festivals 234–246 see also Isogaisa Shamanism 7, 19, 32–34, 41, 85, 88, 234–246, 328, 379 & alcohol 238 Amazonian 127 & Catholicism 123 history of 235–237 & indigenous past 234 & modernity 237–238 see also Sámi shamanism Shamanistic Association 235

405 Shanadithit 227 Shanawdithit 222–224, 226, 228–230 Sharma, Arvind 34 Sherring, Matthew A. 249, 250 Shillong, ne India 283, 284 Shining on Top 58, 59 Shinto, Japan 39 Shiraoi, Japan 311, 313 Shiva (deity, Hindu) 272 Shona, Zimbabwe 368n, 371 Shun-hing, Chan 40 Siberia 7, 310 Siddle, Richard M. 310 Sieidi (Sámi sacred site) 239, 242 Sikhism 285, 286 Sikkim, ne India 267, 267n, 268 Silverbird, Lauren 314 Sindu River, Pakistan 265 Six Nations Haudenosaunee Confederacy 62 Sjöberg, Katarina V. 309–310 Skaria, Ajay 248 Skin systems 325, 329 Slave trade 177 Smallwood, Joseph 223 Smarch, Keith Wolfe 314 Smith, Jonathan Z. 27 Smoke Signals 101–103 Snodgrass, Jeffrey G. 32 Solidarity 324 Song 166, 169–72 see also mele and oli ‘Songlines’ 332, 335, 340–344 Sonora, Mexico 194, 195 Sound 108–119 & aesthetics 111 & authenticity 115 & heritage 116 & indigeneity 197 & knowledge 109 mixing 110–111 see also liveness South Africa 15, 18, 40, 113, 114, 209, 349–365 constitution 354, 355, 360 indigenous identity 360–62 indigenous peoples 313 state appropriation 360–62 see also apartheid; Khoisan South African Museum, South Africa 356

406 South America 15, 20, 35 Sovereignty 6–7, 10–11, 18, 61, 90, 236, 268, 327 Hawai’i 156 indigenous 211 & religion 172 & rights 56 Spain 39 Spirit of the Beothuk 228 Spiritual definition of 86 & environment 86 & indigenous religions 85–88 & u.n. 80–91 Spiritualism 62 Spirituality 8, 37, 45 Sámi 240 Squires, Gerald 228, 229 St Anthony’s College, Oxford 367 St John’s, Newfoundland 225, 228 Stability 125, 130–132, 380 Standing on Sacred Ground (film) 212 Starn, Orin 193 State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples 15, 80, 82, 85–88 & Coby Study 83 & religion 83, 85–88 & vocabularies 83–85 Sting 143, 144 Stolter, Laura Anne 352 Storytelling 12, 96 see also film, indigenous Structuralism 141 post-~ 40 Stuckless, Tony 229 Stucklesses of Newfoundland, The 229 Study of the need to recognize and respect the rights of Mother Earth 85 Sufi, India 39 Sugars, Cynthia 226, 227 Sun Dance, the 57, 102, 183, 183n6, 188 Sundance Film Festival 92 Sundström, Olle 38 Supreme Court, usa 60, 64 see also First amendment Swain, Tony 338 Sweat lodges 176, 183, 183n6, 184, 185, 187–188 & transformation 186

Index Tabe (priest, Adi) 279, 292 & literacy 288–291 Tafjord, Bjørn Ola 14, 131 Tagin, ne India 279n, 287–288, 292 Tahiti 159 Talamanca, Costa Rica 41, 46n Talamantez, Inés 29, 180, 181 Tamuk, Tain 287 Tanami Desert, Australia 340 Tangsa Rangfraa Movement, India 288 Tani tribes, ne India 279, 287–288, 292 Tar sands, Canada 212, 212n, 218 Tarathi festival 332 Tasmania 222 Taussig, Michael 226, 300, 351 Taylor, Bron 32 Technology 6, 9–10, 111–112, 116, 145n, 379 & Adi 281 & art 37 & authenticity 110, 113, 115 as power 114 & protest 165 & purity 145–146 & religion-making 173 & religious practice 379 & representation 129 & tradition 112 Teleology Apache 180–181 Tellico Dam, usa 59 Ten Canoes (film) 93, 96 Territory 12, 56, 196, 269, 274 & Abrahamic faiths 274 Thakkar, Amritlal V. 253 Thapar, Romila 265–267, 273 Theology Aboriginal 326 & indigenous religions 26, 31–34, 46n indigenous ~ 31 liberation 32 natural 31 onto-theology 178 Thief of Time, A (film) 103 Third World Cinema 95 Third World Theologies 127 Thugs Making a Change Programme (tmac), New Mexico 176 Thunderchief, Rosie 185, 188–189 Tiedje, Kristina 32

Index Tiele, Cornelis P. 379 Tiyospaye (community, Apache) 183, 183n5, n6 Tłįchǫ Dene 16, 204–220 definition of 206n5 see also Dene Tłįchǫ Nation 205n2 Tohono O’odham Communication Action (toca) 198 Tokyo, Japan 310, 314 Toronto Festival 92 Torres Strait Islanders. See Aboriginal Australians Tourism 234–246 indigenous spirituality 329 Japan 318–320 Tradition 379, 382 vs modernity 138–155 salvage of 296 & technology 112 Trans-indigenous 381 Translation 6–8, 12, 18, 43, 194, 325–328, 338–340, 343 Adi 283 Amazonia 122 & global indigeneity 6 & indigenous 247–262 as recognition 338–339 Transnationalism 181–182 definition of 182 Trask, Lakea 168, 172 Trauma 179–181 Tribals as aboriginal 251 ancestors 249 & caste 248–254 Tromsø University Museum, Norway 379 Tromsø, Norway 3n Trulson, Åsa 244 Tsing, Anna 139, 194 Tsonis, Jack 35 Tucker, Stella 198 Tucson, Arizona 198 Turino, Thomas 197 Turner, Terence 145n Twitter 342 ‘Two-ways’ 326, 335, 341 Tylor, Edward Burnett 32, 272 Typology 25–51

407 Ugalin (tradition, Philippines) 295 uk 354 Ukaeroshiki, Japan 319 U.N. 5, 13, 20, 28, 157, 159, 172, 255, 379, 381 & indigeneity 80–91 & Law 15 & the spiritual 80–91 U.N. Charter 68 U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 10–11, 15, 53, 54, 56, 64, 68–76, 80–83, 126, 127, 158, 165, 173, 256, 258, 259, 309, 313, 379 language 53 U.N. Economic and Social Council (unesco) 65, 81, 230, 303, 311 unhrc 65–66, 68 Unitarian Union of Northeast India, the 285 United Democratic Front, South Africa 353 Uniting Church, Australia 336 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 63 Universalism 116, 275–276, 327 & indigeneity 275–276 U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous I­ ssues 15, 80, 83, 83n, 76, 89, 128, 304 ‘Unsettled natives’ 221–233 U.N. Year of Indigenous People 314 Urakawa, Haruzo 314 U.S. law & religious freedom 56–62 u.s. Military 159 u.s. v. Wilgus 2011 60 u.s.a. 52–79, 156–220, 241–262 Native Alaskans 60 see also Native Indians; American Indians Uyu (deity, Adi) 281–282, 289 & miri 288–91 Vanbandhu Kalyan Yojana (welfare plan, India) 254 Vanbandhu Tribal Development Department, Gujurat 254 Vancouver, Canada 315 Vanvasis 254 Vanvasis Kaylan Ashram. See Kaylan Ashram Vargas, Luis 147 Vasava, Jitendra 258, 259 Vásquez, Manuel 43 Velez, Esteban 184 Vilaça, Aparecida 194 Vishva Hindu Parishad (vhp) 263, 269

408 Vitality of Indigenous Religions 29 Vitebsky, Piers 32 Vivekananda Kendra (vk) 269, 271–272, 275 Viverios de Castro, Eduardo 32 Vizenor, Gerald 222 Vocabularies 8, 41 indigenous 81, 88, 89 & State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples 83–85 Wahi pana (sacred place, Hawaiian) 160 Walls, Andrew 195, 335 & translatability 194 Warrior Rising (song, Hawaiian) 171–172 Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom 178n Washington v. Yakima Nation 1979 60 Watsonville, California 185 Weaver, Jace 35 Wenger, Tisa 42 West Bengal, India 256 Western Cinema 104 White messiah fable 153 White, Bob W. 108 Who Invented Hinduism? 265 Wiener, Margaret 306 Williams, Robert 73 Wilson, Ken 367–368, 370, 372–376 Winnipeg, Canada 111 Wisconsin v. Yoder 64 Witchcraft 126 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 25–26 Women’s Day, South Africa 349, 362 Wong, Kumu Hinaleimoana 170 Wood, Houston 96, 98 Working Group on Indigenous Populations (wgip) 81 World Congress of International Association for History of Religions 35 World Council of Churches 128

Index World music 108–119 & globalisation 108 World religions paradigm 18, 27, 29, 121, 132, 335, 366 World War ii 309, 310 Wosana (shrine attendant, Zimbabwe)  370 Wovoka 213 Wright, Robin M. 33, 194 Wycliffe Bible Translators 123 Wyk, Martin van 353 Wylie, H. 228 /Xam (narrative, Khoisan) 361 Xavante, Brazil 312 Xaxa, Virginus 256, 269, 271n Xingu River, Brazil 138 see also Belo Monte Xingu, the 139, 143, 144, 146, 147 Yale University 301/02 Yamal Nenets Autonomous Okrug 83n Yamanashi, Japan 314 Yarta Wandatha 337 Yine People, Amazonia 120–137 You-tube 9 Young, Ron 228 Zimbabwe 18 chiefs 369–370, 375, 376 indigenous movement 366–377 Karanga 368n Korekore 368n Manyika 368n Ndau 368n Ndebele 368n social structure 366–76 Zezuru 368n see also Mwari Zulu, South Africa 113