The remarkable story of the innovative legal strategies Native
Americans have used to protect their religious rights
From North Dakota's Standing Rock encampments to Arizona's San Francisco
Peaks, Native Americans have repeatedly asserted legal rights to
religious freedom to protect their sacred places, practices, objects,
knowledge, and ancestral remains. But these claims have met with little
success in court because Native American communal traditions don't fit
easily into modern Western definitions of religion. In Defend the
Sacred, Michael McNally explores how, in response to this situation,
Native peoples have creatively turned to other legal means to safeguard
what matters to them.
To articulate their claims, Native peoples have resourcefully used the
languages of cultural resources under environmental and historic
preservation law; of sovereignty under treaty-based federal Indian law;
and, increasingly, of Indigenous rights under international human rights
law. Along the way, Native nations still draw on the rhetorical power of
religious freedom to gain legislative and regulatory successes beyond
the First Amendment.
The story of Native American advocates and their struggle to protect
their liberties, Defend the Sacred casts new light on discussions of
religious freedom, cultural resource management, and the vitality of
Indigenous religions today.