Spirit Wars: Native North American Religions in the Age of Nation Building

By Ronald Niezen

Book Overview

Spirit Wars is an exploration of the ways in which the destruction of spiritual practices and beliefs of native peoples in North America has led to conditions of collective suffering--a process sometimes referred to as cultural genocide. Ronald Niezen approaches this topic through wide-ranging case studies involving different colonial powers and state governments: the seventeenth-century Spanish occupation of the Southwest, the colonization of the Northeast by the French and British, nineteenth-century westward expansion and nationalism in the swelling United States and Canada, and twentieth-century struggles for native people's spiritual integrity and freedom. Each chapter deals with a specific dimension of the relationship between native peoples and non-native institutions, and together these topics yield a new understanding of the forces directed against the underpinnings of native cultures.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520219872
• ISBN13: 9780520219878
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 274 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Outstanding!

The author is an historian with an excellent knowledge of anthropology who has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork with native communities in Canada. In this outstanding book he gives us a brilliant and hard-hitting history of native North American (U.S. and Canada) religion or spirituality under siege, from the Spanish conquistadors to the present. The book is tightly organized and well-written. There are seven major topics. The main topic, addressed explicitly in the first and final chapters, is the right of indigenous peoples to practice and preserve their languages, religions, and cultures, which have been under constant assault. The other six topics are the evangelical colonialism of missionaries, focusing on Spanish Franciscans in the Pueblo Southwest; boarding schools; Western medicine and the suppression of native medicine; state suppression, focusing on the Ghost Dance, the Potlatch, the Peyote Religion, and sacred spaces; amateur and professional collectors of native artifacts and cultural knowledge, with a discussion of NAGPRA; and the spiritual imperialism of New Age "healers." We learn that native religions have been, of course, transformed by a long history of Western oppression, but they are alive and dynamic and have served as forms of resistance to assimilation as well as healing wounds of cultural genocide. This is probably the best book I have read on native North America. It should be highly regarded by scholars and by native peoples alike. After reading it, there is no mystery why "despondency and despair" and "hopelessness and self-destruction" are such common experiences in Indian Country. The big question is, what can we do about it?