In the Light of Reverence and the Rhetoric of American Indian Religious Freedom: Negotiating Rights and Responsibilities in the Struggle to Protect Sacred Lands

American Indian activists often describe their work in terms of responsibilities. They assert that because all beings—humans and others—are related, they are also responsible for one another’s welfare. Some activists contrast this American Indian focus on responsibilities with the U.S. government’s focus on rights, granted in the Constitution, upheld by congressional legislation, and defended through the courts. In their view, the responsibilities paradigm emphasizes a person’s interdependent relationships whereas a system based on rights prioritizes the needs and wants of individuals. Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford Lytle contend that the U.S. government used the particular type of tribal courts it created through the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act (ICRA) to impose its belief in “a society based on rights” onto a “traditional Indian society [that] understood itself as a complex of responsibilities and duties.” “The impact of the ICRA,” Deloria and Lytle argue, “was to make these responsibilities impossible to perform because the act inserted the tribal court as an institution between the people and their responsibilities.”¹ Throughout his work, Deloria calls on Indigenous communities to practice true self-determination by turning away from the political models of the dominant culture and restoring traditional relationships and responsibilities.² Deloria and other American Indian activists also, however, appeal to rights, especially when seeking redress from the U.S. government and when appealing to potential non-Native allies. In particular, when working to protect sacred sites, objects, and human remains, activists draw attention to American Indians’ First Amendment rights, as U.S. citizens, to freely exercise their religions.

As it attempts to garner support to protect Native American sacred lands, the 2001 documentary film In the Light of Reverence strongly appeals to the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment even as it stresses the value of an Indigenous responsibilities paradigm. Three million people viewed In the Light of Reverence when PBS broadcast it on August 14, 2001, and thousands more have seen it in classrooms as well as public and private viewings.³ The film features three communities—the Lakota, the Hopi, and the Wintu—struggling to protect sacred lands from desecration or complete destruction. In the film’s representation, the Lakota protest mountain climbing on Mato Tipila (“Devil’s Tower” in Wyoming) during their sacred month of June; the Hopi attempt to halt mining at the San Francisco Peaks, Woodruff Butte, and other sites in Arizona; and the Wintu critique people practicing New Age spirituality at a spring on Mount Shasta (California) while also speaking out against a ski resort proposed for the mountain.⁴

In the Light of Reverence frequently employs the term “sacred land,” but rather than defining this term in general, it instead shows particular Indigenous communities being drawn into relationships of responsibility with other people, ancestors, ecosystems, and spirits at the sites they are defending. As members of these communities, along with other interviewees (including Vine Deloria Jr.), discuss Native American religion in the film, viewers come to realize that the Lakota, Hopi, and Wintu consider certain places “sacred” because the sites remind the people of their relationships of responsibility while also enabling the continuance of such relationships through place-dependent revelation, ceremonies, and prayers.⁵ Indeed, when Indigenous individuals featured in the film speak of interacting with the “spirit world” on “sacred lands,” they characterize spiritual and material categories as inseparable. As it employs the term “sacred land,” then, In the Light of Reverence draws on the Western sacred/secular distinction in order to mark particular sites as worthy of special protection based on religious significance even as it also troubles a strict spiritual/material binary in its portrayal of Native American religions.⁶ The film’s use of the term “sacred land” reflects larger tensions brought on by at once appealing to and challenging dominant Western perspectives on religion as well as land. These tensions permeate the entire film and are drawn into sharp relief as the film negotiates the discourses of rights and responsibilities...