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The fields of Native American religious traditions and American religious history have reached something of a shared critical juncture. Although there has been a long standing scholarly interest on writing about missions to Native Americans from a variety of viewpoints, recent years have seen the publication of a number of fresh considerations of the diversity and texture of Native American Christianity—or better, native Christianities. Native communities have long woven the stories, signs, and practices of the Christian tradition into the fabric of their lifeways, in rich and resourceful ways, even under the direst of colonizing circumstances. But only recently has scholarship begun to take this fuller texture into account: most recently, Native and Christian (1996), edited by James Treat; Native American Religious Identity (1998), edited by Jace Weaver; Sergei Kan's Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries; Clara Sue Kidwell's Choctaws and Missionaries; and Christopher Vecsey's multivolume study of the varieties of native Catholicism, of which volume two, The Paths of Kateri's Kin (1998), is of most interest here. This recent scholarship reflects new perspectives of native scholars entering the field and more publications that anthologize a range of native Christian viewpoints into single volumes. It has also to do with more sustained accountability among normative scholars to native communities and the way that consultants in those communities imagine their religious lives.

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Each summer from 1901 to 1918, and intermittently thereafter through 1965, Odawa and Ojibwe actors in Northern Ontario and Michigan took part in operatic Native language performances of Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha financed by area railroads and captured on silent film. While audiences and reviewers understood the pageants to validate the reality of Longfellow's representations of vanished noble savages and while Native actors performed this script for pay in lean times, a closer look at their offstage lives, their onstage improvisations, and especially their humor reveals that these were also Indians playing Indian for Indian reasons. In an era of assimilation policies that outlawed drumming, dancing, and ceremony in public, and on stages designed to render them absent as twentieth century Native people, the actors insinuated their presence in heavily ramified, if subtle, ways. Crucially, performances enabled them to embody and thereby maintain a musical and dance repertoire associated with peoplehood and power, that could be rekindled with greater sovereignty by subsequent generations.

In Navajo Nation v. U.S. Forest Service, 535 F.3d 1058 (9th Cir. 2008), cert. denied, 129 S. Ct. 2763 (2009), the Ninth Circuit seated en banc found that federal approval of a plan by a ski resort to make artificial snow with treated sewage effluent on Arizona's San Francisco Peaks, a mountain massif held sacred by the Navajo, Hopi, and four other claimant tribes, did not violate their religious liberty under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The court accepted numerous factual findings about sincere religious exercise, but found federal approval of the scheme did not constitute a “substantial burden” on religion; rather, it only “decreased spiritual fulfillment” of tribal members. Despite a spirited dissent, the Ninth Circuit narrowly interpreted RFRA's language of “substantial burden” by making reference to the Supreme Court's 1988 holding in Lyng v. Northwest Cemetery Protective Association, 485 U.S. 439 (1988). This article shows how conventional wisdom about individualistic, subjective, and protean “spirituality” and in particular about “Native American spirituality” equips the court to denature highly specific and collective religious claims about the mountain by plaintiff tribes, and in turn to naturalize those claims as merely spiritual. Misrecognition of Native religions as Native spirituality then troubles the substantial burden analysis. While Navajo Nation suggests courts may never fully understand Native claims to sacred sites, the Supreme Court's 2014 holding in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2751, 2759 (2014), opens the door to revisiting the interpretive posture spelled out in Navajo Nation, and the Ninth Circuit's interpretive approach to “substantial burden” bears revisiting.