Author Description
During the nineteenth century, white Americans sought the cultural transformation and physical displacement of Native people. Though this process was certainly a clash of rival economic systems and racial ideologies, it was also a profound spiritual struggle. The fight over Indian Country sparked religious crises among both Natives and Americans. In The Gods of Indian Country, Jennifer Graber tells the story of the Kiowa Indians during Anglo-Americans' hundred-year effort to seize their homeland. Like Native people across the American West, Kiowas had known struggle and dislocation before. But the forces bearing down on them-soldiers, missionaries, and government officials-were unrelenting. With pressure mounting, Kiowas adapted their ritual practices in the hope that they could use sacred power to save their lands and community. Against the Kiowas stood Protestant and Catholic leaders, missionaries, and reformers who hoped to remake Indian Country. These activists saw themselves as the Indians' friends, teachers, and protectors. They also asserted the primacy of white Christian civilization and the need to transform the spiritual and material lives of Native people. When Kiowas and other Native people resisted their designs, these Christians supported policies that broke treaties and appropriated Indian lands. They argued that the gifts bestowed by Christianity and civilization outweighed the pains that accompanied the denial of freedoms, the destruction of communities, and the theft of resources. In order to secure Indian Country and control indigenous populations, Christian activists sanctified the economic and racial hierarchies of their day.The Gods of Indian Country tells a complex, fascinating-and ultimately heartbreaking-tale of the struggle for the American West.
Menrva's Summary
THE THESIS
This work investigates how religious ideologies and spiritual practices functioned as central drivers in the nineteenth-century conflict between the Kiowa people and Anglo-American expansionists. Jennifer Graber, a scholar of religion and American history, utilizes archival records, missionary reports, and Kiowa oral histories to argue that the struggle for the American West was as much a theological battle as it was an economic or political one. She demonstrates how Christian reformers justified the displacement of indigenous populations through a framework of spiritual paternalism, while the Kiowa adapted their own ritual practices to navigate and resist these existential pressures.
THE SCOPE MAP
What You Will Find
- Analysis of nineteenth-century Kiowa ritual adaptation in response to colonial pressure.
- Examination of the role of Protestant and Catholic missionaries in shaping federal Indian policy.
- Historical documentation of the intersection between Christian expansionism and racial hierarchies.
Scope Limits
- The study focuses specifically on the Kiowa experience and does not provide a comprehensive history of all Native American tribes during the period.
- The text does not offer a broad survey of Western theology but focuses specifically on the application of Christian doctrine in the context of American frontier expansion.
THE AUTHORITY PERSPECTIVE
Historians and scholars of American religion frequently cite this work for its nuanced examination of how spiritual rhetoric was weaponized to facilitate territorial dispossession. Readers often note the academic rigor of the research and the author's ability to balance the perspectives of both the Kiowa people and the Christian reformers who sought to transform them.
Page Count:
312
Publication Date:
2018-01-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
019027963X
ISBN-13:
9780190279639
History
Religion
West Us
Christianity And Culture
American West
United States
History of the Americas
American History
Colonialism
Native American
Christianity and other religions
Sociology of Religion
Indians religion