Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (review)

Andrea Smith's (Cherokee) latest book may be seen as a sequel to her much-lauded 2005 work, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, which it is, if the reader limits her or his focus to the themes of indigenous women's lives and politics, which run throughout both books. At the same time, it is misleading to call Native Americans and the Christian Right a "sequel" for two simple reasons. First, because the latter title was initially Smith's dissertation, which she wrote for the History of Consciousness program at UC-Santa Cruz, the work under review here historically preceded Conquest in development. Second, Native Americans and the Christian Right, while maintaining an activist agenda, works from substantially different premises than Conquest. Whereas Conquest examined the recurring problem of violence against indigenous women, stemming from a history of violence and oppression that defined generations of Indian-white relations, which, Smith argues, we indigenous peoples have internalized into our contemporary communities, thereby causing many of the social issues of today, Native Americans and the Christian Right takes on the difficult task of arguing that there are points at which interests in the Native community intersect with alternate communities in the non-Indian world that many of us have conditioned to reject as possible allies.

Basically, Smith's book is divided into three "unlikely alliances": with evangelical Christians over prison reform; with evangelical Christians over race reconciliation; and with white feminists, including those who identify as evangelical feminists, over women's rights and issues. The book then concludes with a deep reflection on the concept of sovereignty and the complications that her analysis creates for sustaining a strictly decolonizationist agenda. According to Smith, the rationale for pursuing a discourse on Indian-white alliances that cuts across the divide that supposedly divides American Indian activists, not to mention women of color movements such as INCITE! from their "nemeses" in the evangelical Christian community is based on what she has seen in her own experience as an activist and the practical politics that often characterizes organizers in Native communities. Smith states straightaway in her introduction:

My experience with Native activism as well as my findings from the research for this project suggest that not only is it possible to mobilize groups across "Left versus Right" divides but in fact these groups are mobilized on a frequent basis, particularly by Native activists. Because many Native communities are situated in conservative, white-dominated areas of the country, Native peoples have not always had the luxury to work in coalition with "progressive" sectors of society and have often had to find creative ways to work with conservative, even explicitly anti Indian individuals and communities.

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Much of Smith's ensuing analysis rests on the ability of Native groups to "rearticulate" their own issues and ideas into terms that are compatible with their non-Indian, evangelical Christian counterparts. The strategy also works in the other direction, specifically, rearticulating evangelical Christian ideas and issues into progressive terms that still appeal to evangelical Christians. Before the reader can exclaim "Copout!" Smith does not make haste in defending the validity of rearticulation. More to the point, Smith quotes Alex Ewen of the Solidarity Foundation, who once worked at stopping the James Bay Dam in Canada, who said in 1996 about the old confrontational politics, "When you have an 'us versus them' attitude, you unite them against you." To which Smith adds: "Native peoples have, by necessity, used a politics of rearticulation to break this united front of 'them' against Native peoples, and hence a politics of rearticulation emerges organically from Native struggle" (7–8).

Unsurprisingly, the temptation from the beginning is to categorize Smith's work and ideas into the tradition of the "cultural broker," the legendary individuals who arose mainly during the epochs of Manifest Destiny and the Progressive Era, when there was—many, including myself, would argue that there still is—an urgent...