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Ethnohistory 49.2 (2002) 414-417



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Book Review

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

Native Religions and Cultures of North America


Spirit Wars: Native North American Religions in the Age of Nation Building. By Ronald Niezen. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xviii + 228 pp., illustrations, preface, introduction, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.)
Native Religions and Cultures of North America. Edited by Lawrence E. Sullivan. (New York: Continuum, 2000. 237 pp., images, index. $35.00 cloth.)

In 1933, Robert Ricard coined the phrase "spiritual conquest" (conquête spirituelle) to describe the destruction of Mexico's indigenous religions by Europeans in the sixteenth century. Among the costs of colonialism, he wrote, perhaps the greatest was the wholesale eradication of Indians' spiritual practices, which he found to be utterly devastated within a generation or two of initial contact. Unwilling to accept Ricard's portrait of total spiritual annihilation, many historians and anthropologists have emphasized the persistence of precolonial belief and ritual. From this perspective, the Indians' religion, never static to begin with, dynamically adapted to the devastation wrought by European disease, evangelization, and oppression and emerged changed but nonetheless authentic and vital.

In Spirit Wars, Ronald Niezen offers a survey of the spiritual destruction caused by U.S. and Canadian policies toward American Indians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the tradition of Robert Ricard (chapter 2 is entitled "The Conquest of Souls"), Niezen argues that although "assaults upon religious integrity are not the only outcomes of assimilationist or ethnocidal policies . . . they are the most important" (226). Niezen claims that through a destructive combination of nationalism and exclusive Christian universalism, American governments methodically stamped out Indian religions with overwhelming efficiency. These policies have created a contemporary "spiritual crisis" that manifests itself in the "pervasive sorrow and emotional confusion" that leads to alcoholism, suicide, unemployment, and abuse on many Indian reservations throughout the United States and Canada (xiv–xv).

Niezen begins his survey by tracing the colonial antecedents of American domination, reviewing briefly the conversion efforts of the Spanish, French, and English colonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He then moves to a more detailed discussion of five arenas in which the "spirit wars" of the title were fought: residential education, medicine, law, professional research, and popular culture. In each of these areas, Niezen finds that the overt conversion efforts of colonial missions yielded to subtler [End Page 414] yet even more destructive forms of modern spiritual conquest based on a combination of misguided philanthropy and growing state power. Each chapter is followed by a short supplemental essay from an Indian scholar or activist that places the topic in contemporary focus through the experience of a single individual or tribe.

The real contribution of Niezen's book begins with his discussion of the mid-nineteenth-century reform movements in the United States and Canada that inspired the creation of Indian boarding schools, hospitals, and public health programs. Niezen offers an accessible and nicely illustrated introduction to the development of Indian education, emphasizing the intellectual and institutional connections between U.S. and Canadian policies. Especially informative is Niezen's account of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and its founder, Richard Henry Pratt. Niezen demonstrates the clear contempt that Pratt and other reformers held for Indian spiritual practices and how that contempt led to government policies that gave Christian schoolmasters "almost unlimited power," which they used to inflict "excessive punishment, torture, or sexual abuse" to discourage Indian students from practicing their religion (77).

Similarly, church- and government-sponsored medical programs, Niezen shows, systematically undermined the integrity of indigenous healing systems by offering alternative (and authoritarian) explanations for disease and healing. "A pervasive spirituality in indigenous healing is the general source of differences between it and biomedicine," Niezen writes, and at every turn missionaries and government officials sought to undermine Indians' spiritual orientation in favor of the idea "that disease is fundamentally, even exclusively, biological" (98–99). The book's most important contribution comes in...

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