Sacred Lands and Political Boundaries: Consolidating the Political West and its Natural Resources

The American West conjures images of striking, sublime landscapes, which vary in their majesty from region to region, state to state. From deep canyons to high summits, these landmarks have attracted attention from all over the country—in fact, from all over the world. These landmarks are tied to the idea of the West: A place where ruggedness dominates the imagination. These landmarks work to reify the political character of the West—again, capturing the rugged individualism of the American spirit that informs the cultural and political zeitgeist. 

In the history of the United States, the natural beauty of the mountains, the canyons, the forests, the deserts, did not stay Americans’ hands, pick axes, and plows as they interacted with these environments. Americans extracted what they deemed necessary to provide for the American settlers, whose needs grew in proportion to their expansion and their need for infrastructure. While Americans, and indeed the world, have looked at these landscapes with wonder, the extraction of resources from these landmarks, such as gold or silver, has necessarily contributed to their ruggedness. Man has subdued the frontier, with its varied landscapes, to support the westward expansion, where settlers build, plow, dig, and mine—in short, where they transform the environment. The beauty of these sites serves as an added benefit to their utility for pragmatic Americans.

But these landmarks and landscapes, with the resources they provide, have not always been aligned with concept of the American West—with its Anglo-American connotations. Rather, these landmarks and landscapes, supporting American Indians for centuries, have a deeper, spiritual meaning. The spirituality of these lands, according to the American Indian, requires those living in these lands to revere them—to preserve them as they have always been.

Military expansion and imperial pursuit of resources to sustain western expansion can adequately explain the United States federal government’s initial seizure of these lands that have been sacred to American Indians—a seizure accompanied by the relocation of American Indians from these lands. If the United States could leverage its strengths to define—indeed, dictate—the political boundaries of the American Indians who had occupied these western lands before them; if the United States could confine tribes to these boundaries, or reservations, to keep vigil over them; and if the United States could use the land gained to support western settlement, then politically, the United States could control the American West, with all of its resources. Without this control, the West would not have been defined and exploited more readily to support settlement. Rather than being an area with political boundaries, with all of the benefits these boundaries allow settlers and companies to enjoy, the West would have remained something of a hinterland settlement, an inchoate region that could not be fully secured while American Indians continued to use the land and its resources in competition with the Americans, who valued the lands and resources quite differently—materially and spiritually.

The Sioux

The history of the conflict between the United States and the Sioux demonstrates the American resolve to maintain complete—and indeed, capricious—control of political boundaries that ensured its mastery of the West. The United States and the Sioux Nation in 1868 resolved their conflicts during the Powder River War with the Fort Laramie Treaty, which established the boundaries of the Great Sioux Reservation that encompassed the Black Hills as well as the lands west of the Missouri River. Despite having “‘solemnly agree[d]’ that no unauthorized person ‘shall ever be permitted to pass over, settle upon, or reside in [the Great Sioux Reservation],’” the United States almost immediately allowed its western settlers to pursue mining interests in the Black Hills.[1] As settlers continued to make incursions into the Black Hills, the United States military, which had agreed to protect the Sioux’s treaty rights, took no action per their treaty obligations.[2] Taking no action, the military, the Department of the Interior, and President Ulysses S. Grant in effect sanctioned the exploitation of the Black Hills—a move that emboldened them further to limit the political boundaries of the Sioux as the United States then coerced the Sioux to surrender the Black Hills through a “Sell or Starve” policy, withholding the rations upon which the Sioux depended as their hunting rights were further limited unless they acquiesced to the government’s demand.[3] Supplementing this threat with another, the United States through the Mannypenny Commission threatened to remove the Sioux wholesale from their homelands near the Missouri River. The Sioux were to be relocated to the Indian Territory of Oklahoma if they did not surrender the Black Hills, with all of its resources to United States’ political boundaries. The United States continued to use this threat of removal to force the Sioux to relinquish even more “surplus” land.[4] 

Navajo and Hopi

Navajo and the Hopi have likewise been at the mercy of the United States, which, after annexing New Mexico Territory (comprising modern-day New Mexico and Arizona) from Mexico, sought to assert its exclusive political control in the Southwest by declaring all enemies of the New Mexicans their enemies as well.[5] In effect, because the Navajo had an adversarial relationship with the New Mexicans under Mexican rule, the United States approached them as a challenge to their authority and to their manifest destiny. After subjugating the Navajo and marching them into New Mexican concentration camps in the 1860s, the United States eventually relocated the Navajo to lands that had belonged historically to the Hopi—a relocation project that has been a continued source of conflict between these two peoples, who both claim these lands as their spiritual homes. Despite continued protest and observable conflict between the two tribes, the United States continued to operate under the assumption that this arrangement could be remedied with a Joint Use Area, but this area likewise created conflict between these groups, whose population growth saw them need more and more resources.[6] With such a heavy burden placed on these tribes, as well as on the United States, one finds it difficult to determine what interest the United States had in perpetuating such a zone of renewed conflict. One might conclude that while these tribes remained in a state of conflict within these defined borders, established by the United States, the United States might have better guaranteed stability for itself within its own political boundaries, for the Navajo had been a hinderance to smooth expansion and “pests” to everyone in the region, especially the Hopi, whose agricultural lifestyle did not align with the Navajo’s pastoral lifestyle.[7] Better the Hopi continue dealing with pests within their boundaries than the United States having to deal with them in theirs.

Sacred Lands, Religious Liberty, and the First Amendment

Placing the Navajo, the Sioux, and other American Indian tribes within these reservations, which do not correspond with their aboriginal homelands, has had many religious implications. The Black Hills, for example, are sacred to the Sioux, yet their United States, through coercion, seized the hills and has since administered the land use, where mining historically has been pursued. The Navajo’s sacred Rainbow Bridge and its surrounding Glen Canyon environment, under federal control since the 1930s, has been impacted by the creation of Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which submerged much of the canyon under water, thus altering these sacred lands where Navajo had worshipped for more than 120 years.[8] The San Francisco Peaks, well beyond the Hopi reservation but nevertheless sacred to the Hopi, have been the site of pumice extraction, sanctioned by the federal government.[9]

In the United States, which is a secular republic, economic and material pursuits are paradoxically tantamount to sacred pursuits. The ancillary is that private property, which allows people and industry to secure material resources for economic gain to the exclusion of others, is also a sacred institution. Thus, land may be used, enjoyed, appreciated, and exploited, as sanctioned by the government, as a part of the sacred. The federal government has prioritized land use along this paradigm, allowing, for example, the Woodruff Butte to be pulverized for gravel necessary to build roads in the Southwest to the dismay of the Hopi.[10] As the American West continued to expanded its infrastructure, requiring resources and infrastructure commensurate with this growth, it has been culturally, economically, and politically expedient to pursue land use along these sacred lines, not according to the Native American applications of sacred.

As tribes have sought restitution in the 20^th century, and as they have sought to reclaim rights to their sacred lands and their resources, the differing definitions of sacred and the different concepts on the practice of religion continue to complicate American Indian efforts in the court of law where the First Amendment, written from a western paradigm of religious practice, does not readily accommodate American Indians’ needs as religious practitioners. Granted, the United States no longer criminalizes American Indian attempts to worship as it did when the government outlawed the Ghost Dance in 1890 in the wake of Wounded Knee.[11] The United States no longer pursues Indian Schools in conjunction with Catholic and Protestant churches to convert “heathens” to an American lifestyle.[12] But courts have had a difficult time siding with American Indians as they appeal to the First Amendment to protect their ancestral sites because Anglo-American religion practices, centering on a Judeo-Christian worldview, might take place in physical structures, but these practices are not exclusive to those structures. In other words, Catholics may worship their God at any Catholic Church, irrespective of its location.[13] To limit God to a location would be to make God a temporal entity, when God instead is omnipresent. Because American Indian religions are spatially located, meaning that the divine is manifest at specific locations such as mountains, hills, forests, or desert landscapes where specific events occurred, courts have not readily been able to accept American Indian arguments that the sites are themselves divine, and that their (mis)use or alteration is tantamount to deicide. The Supreme Court, in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, held that even if an alteration would “virtually destroy” American Indians’ ability to practice religion at a site, the federal government could nevertheless destroy this site on public lands because doing so would not coerce belief or force American Indians to abandon their beliefs.[14] Religion, in other words, is separate from the site itself, according to this western paradigm.

To be sure, conservation efforts in the United States, in national parks and beyond, have halted certain private forms of extraction and consumption, such as logging and mining, so that Americans could also enjoy these landmarks for posterity. On the surface of things, conservation efforts appear to offer at least partial redress to the many land abuses that have provoked the ire of Native American communities who hold these lands as sacred. The conservation efforts seem to speak to the spiritual goals of American Indian, who want their sites unaltered and therefore respected. But as generations of Americans continue coming to the West either as tourists or as residents, climbing or descending the mountains and the canyons, they participate in their own forms of consumption,[15] which continue to impact these landscapes. They are participating in the American West experience, encouraged to do so tacitly by the government who has controlled these areas for public use. The current and predominant uses of these sites serve as a continued source of lament for American Indian groups, whose sacred sites, while better protected and respected, still must accommodate the consuming American public as they climb, camp, drive, and need facilities. These sites, as they are managed in American political boundaries by the federal government, continue to reinforce America’s political power in the West. To compromise, to concede, to reconcile with the American Indian would be to relinquish some of this political power. 

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[1]. John P. La Velle, “Rescuing Paha Sapa: Achieving Environmental Justice by Restoring the Great Grasslands and Returning the Sacred Black Hills to the Great Sioux Nation,” Great Plains Natural Resources Journal 5, no. 1/2 (Spring and Summer 2001): 44-45.

[2]. La Velle, “Rescuing Paha Sapa,” 46.

[3]. La Velle, 51.

[4]. La Velle, 53-60. See also footnote no. 64.

[5]. Catherine Feher-Elston, Children of Sacred Ground: America’s Last Indian War (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Publishing, 1988), 22.

[6]. Feher-Elston, Children of Sacred Ground, xxiii.

[7]. Feher-Elston, 25.

[8]. Amber L. McDonald, “Secularizing the Sacrosanct: Defining ‘Sacred’ for Native American Sacred Sites Protection Legislation,” Hofstra Law Review 33, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 751.

[9]. Nancy Stimson, “Interpreting Reverence in American Indian Sacred Sites,” Legacy Magazine 21, no. 5 (October 2010): 16.

[10]. Stimson, “Interpreting Reverence,” 16.

[11]. Shawna Lee, “Government Managed Shrines: Protection of Native American Sacred Site Worship,” Valparaiso University Law Review 35 (October 2000): 269.

[12]. See Robert Utley, The Indian Frontier in the American West, 1846-1890 (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 215.

[13]. McDonald, “Secularizing the Sacrosanct,” 756.

[14]. Kristen A. Carpenter, “Old Ground and New Directions at Sacred Sites on the Western Landscape,” Denver University Law Review 83, no. 4 (January 2006): 986; Karly C. Winter, “Saving Bear Butte and Other Sacred Sites,” Great Plains Natural Resources Journal 13 (Spring 2010), 73-74.

[15]. Richard White, “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscape: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History,” in A Companion to American Environmental History, ed. Douglas Cazaux Sackman (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), 186.

Bibliography

Carpenter, Kristen A. “Old Ground and New Directions at Sacred Sites on the Western Landscape.” Denver University Law Review 83, no. 4 (January 2006): 981-1002.

Feher-Elston, Catherine. Children of Sacred Ground: America’s Last Indian War. Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Publishing, 1988.

La Velle, John P. “Rescuing Paha Sapa: Achieving Environmental Justice by Restoring the Great Grasslands and Returning the Sacred Black Hills to the Great Sioux Nation.” Great Plains Natural Resources Journal 5, no. 1/2 (Spring and Summer 2001): 40-101.

Lee, Shawna. “Government Managed Shrines: Protection of Native American Sacred Site Worship.” Valparaiso University Law Review 35 (October 2000): 265-308.

McDonald, Amber L. “Secularizing the Sacrosanct: Defining ‘Sacred’ for Native American Sacred Sites Protection Legislation,” Hofstra Law Review 33, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 751-783.

Stimson, Nancy. “Interpreting Reverence in American Indian Sacred Sites,” Legacy Magazine 21, no. 5 (October 2010): 16-17.

Utley, Robert. The Indian Frontier in the American West, 1846-1890. Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

White, Richard. “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscape: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History.” In A Companion to American Environmental History, ed. Douglas Cazaux Sackman, 183-190. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2010.

Winter, Karly C. “Saving Bear Butte and Other Sacred Sites.” Great Plains Natural Resources Journal 13 (Spring 2010): 71-84.

Religion and Reception: The Evolution of the Reception of the Founding Fathers

As the first two clauses of the First Amendment in the Constitution, the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause have paramount importance in the United States. The founding fathers understood the historic impact religion had on government, as well as the impact government had on the practice of religion. Nevertheless, the founding fathers, despite the corporate name and reputation given to them, each brought different philosophical and theological perspectives into the product of the religious liberty Americans take for granted as they attend, or do not attend, churches of their choice. Some framers and signers of the Constitution might have been orthodox Christian believers; others such as Thomas Jefferson, as it might be concluded from the preponderance of his writings, aligned more with the deistic views prevalent among his Enlightenment antecedents and contemporaries. Thus, while many theological and philosophical views have informed the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause in the United States Constitution, theological and philosophical views have likewise influenced how Americans throughout history have interpreted both the limitations religious liberty and, by implication, how Americans have received the founding fathers who reasoned how important this liberty was in the maintenance of the United States. As the era of the founding fathers moves further into history, Americans, shaped by their own realities, increasingly interpret the founding fathers through the lenses of those realities.

The founding fathers had their antecedents, whose examples and definitions of religious liberty influenced their concepts. Just as Abraham Lincoln would refer to John Adams and his cohort as forefathers, John Adams referred to the Pilgrims as America’s forefathers whose struggles in the New World to escape the tyranny of the English monarchy inspired his condemnation of feudal and canon law, especially as the temporal and the spiritual offices often worked in conjunction with each other. Adams likewise admired the Pilgrims for their value of education and literacy, which Adams reasoned was necessary to combat the machinations of crown and mitre. Adams celebrated Protestantism as the watershed moment when believers could think according to their consciences, uncoerced, and therefore participate in society with the same freedom of conscience.[1] Thomas Jefferson, meanwhile, admired English dissenter James Burgh or Rhode Island’s Roger Williams, who was a vocal proponent of the separation of church and state. Arthur Scherr argues that Jefferson likely received his metaphor Wall of Separation from either of these two men.[2]

At the end of their lives, the founding fathers were highly concerned with their reception for greater posterity. Alexander Hamilton’s sons and Thomas Jefferson’s grandsons compiled their respective father’s and grandfather’s treatises into multivolume works that might clarify their views for generations consulting their political philosophies.[3] These works would no doubt have served the growing historical and biographical literature centered on the founding fathers and the legacies at this time, in the late 1820s and 1830s. In particular, Abiel Holmes and Charles Goodrich were clergymen who sought to educate schoolchildren on the lives of the founding fathers, instilling within them patriotism and civic responsibility.[4] The fact that clergymen recognized the founding fathers and their labors as central lessons in patriotism would indicate that they, as men of God, accepted the merits of the breadth of the founding fathers’ works. One might reasonably assume that these men of God accepted the First Amendment for its Free Exercise Clause, which protected the free exercise of religion, but also for the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which prevented religion and its moral prescriptions from impacting secular government. Others who spoke from the position of faith seemed also to celebrate the legacy of the founding fathers, particularly the deistic Thomas Jefferson, whom they eulogized (along with John Adams, who died on the same day) with analogies to Biblical patriarchs.[5] Irrespective of his skepticism of the Trinity or theism in general, the public respected Thomas Jefferson and his Wall of Separation as a necessary institution, even in a country that might have regarded itself as Christian in spirit.

Decades after the death of the founding fathers, however, a significant evolution in their reception occurred. Abraham Lincoln had framed his opposition to slavery within the context of the laws of nature, meaning that slavery deprived those in bondage of their rights to liberty per these laws of nature.[6] However, R.B. Bernstein reasons that after the Civil War, particularly in the victorious North, Americans developed a smug sense of pride in having solved problems the founding fathers could not solve in their lifetimes.[7] It was this generation, having lost hundreds of thousands of lives as they compelled the South to end its dependency on the bondage of humans, that fully realized the mission of the Declaration of Independence. While the emancipation does not immediately speak to the Free Exercise Clause, the issue of emancipation is nevertheless a religious one. Emancipation fully implements the initial self-evident truth of the Declaration of Independence, namely, that all men are created equal. If America was to live up to the first principle of the Declaration, then it had to free those who for so long could not enjoy the protections of the Constitution. This generation therefore contributed to the concept of religious liberty, extending the laws of nature to former slaves.

The 20^th century would see the Supreme Court and the public disagree over their interpretations of the Establishment Clause. The Supreme Court between the 1940s and the 1960s applied a strict interpretation of the Establishment Clause, holding the Virginia Statute as its precedent and the legal authority by which the First Amendment should be interpreted.[8] Chiefly, in the landmark decision Everson v. Board of Education, while the court ruled 5-4 that the school district could reimburse parents who used public transport to send children to religious schools, both the affirming opinion and the dissenting opinion enumerated a clear wall of separation between Church and State. Justice Hugo Black, writing for the majority, gave significant weight to the Establishment Clause, maintaining that “neither a state nor the federal government can, openly or secretly, participate in affairs of any religious organizations or groups, and vice versa.”[9] Writing the dissenting opinion, which also gave significant weight to the Establishment Clause, Justice Wiley Rutledge argued that, “[the tax reimbursement] aids [parents] in a substantial way to get the very thing which they are sent to the particular school to secure, namely, religious training and teaching.”[10] Through his dissent, Rutledge maintained that the school district, an arm of local government, could not aid parents as they sought religious instruction. This aid, he maintained, clearly transgressed the wall. Even as the court ruled the tax reimbursement did not violate the Establishment Clause, the court’s strict interpretation of the Wall of Separation nevertheless generated backlash from the public, as well as from historians, who argued that while the Establishment Clause barred the government from supporting specific Churches, it did not prevent the government in general from giving preference to religion over irreligion.[11]

Supreme Court cases such as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Inc. indicate that issues of religious liberty remain contentious into the 21^st century. Likewise, the 21^st century has seen Christians and nonbelievers alike attempt to enlist the founding fathers as partisans to their own religious and political cause. Alan Gibson dismisses Brooke Allen’s Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding fathers as “puerile and unoriginal” as Allen argues that the founding fathers drafted and ratified a “‘godless constitution’” to keep the project a purely secular one that would prevent the United States from devolving into wars of religion. Gibson concedes that Allen provides ample research and ample quotes from the founding fathers to allow readers to construct their own views, but Gibson maintains that Allen’s study is another “missive in the culture wars” and that its clear objective is to refute the thesis of the religious right, namely, that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.[12] While Gibson criticizes Allen for downplaying Christianity among the founding fathers, Arthur Scherr criticizes the methodologies of historians and biographers who portray Thomas Jefferson as sympathetic to evangelical Christianity. For example, he criticizes Edwin S. Gaustad’s analysis of an 1814 letter between Thomas Jefferson and Charles Clay, the rector of St. Anne’s parish. Based on this one letter, Gaustad concludes that Jefferson was a champion of religious conservativism, as the letter asserted that no system of morality could survive without the sanction of divine authority.[13] This one letter, Scheer argues, diverges from Jefferson’s views on religion, as expressed in other letters and writings—so much so that readers need to view this one letter with the exceptional care. Reading this letter with such care, and exploring it ethically as a scholar should, would reveal that this letter’s authorship belonged to Charles Clay, not Thomas Jefferson.[14]

The founding fathers are only available to the public, historians, and legal scholars through their writings, which, despite their volume, does not show their religious views with the clarity people need or want in order to maintain unequivocally that the founding fathers would agree with them, especially on matters of religion. Just as the Americans reflect on their faith, oscillating between doubts and certainties, perhaps they should recognize this same right for the founding fathers, who have recognized so many of theirs.

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[1]. John Adams, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law” (1765), TeachingAmericanHistory.org, accessed October 18, 2018, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/a-dissertation-on-the-canon-and-feudal-law/

[2]. Arthur Scherr, “Thomas Jefferson Versus the Historians: Christianity, Atheistic Morality, and the Afterlife,” Church History 83 no. 1 (March 2014), 60-61.

[3]. R.B. Bernstein, The Founding Fathers Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 85.

[4]. Bernstein, The Founding Fathers Reconsidered, 86.

[5]. Bernstein, 87.

[6]. Allen Guelzo, “Lincoln’s Moral Constitution,” Word & World 31 no. 2 (Spring 2011), 143.

[7]. Bernstein, 88.

[8]. Bernstein, 108.

[9]. Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 16 (1947), accessed October 20, 2018, https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3620075287275437211&q=Everson+v.+Board+of+Education&hl=en&as_sdt=2006#p16

[10]. Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 45 (1947).

[11]. Bernstein, The Founding Fathers Reconsidered, 108.

[12]. Alan Gibson, review of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, by Brooke Allen, The Historian 71 no. 3 (2009), 590-591.

[13]. Scherr, 77.

[14]. Scherr, 78.

Bibliography

Adams, John. “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law” (1765). TeachingAmericanHistory.org. Accessed October 18, 2018. http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/a-dissertation-on-the-canon-and-feudal-law/

Bernstein, R.B. The Founding Fathers Reconsidered. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. (1947). Accessed October 20, 2018. https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3620075287275437211&q=Everson+v.+Board+of+Education&hl=en&as_sdt=2006#p1

Gibson, Alan. Review of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, by Brooke Allen. The Historian 71 no. 3 (2009): 590-591.

Guelzo, Allen. “Lincoln’s Moral Constitution.” Word & World 31 no. 2 (Spring 2011): 138-158.

Scherr, Arthur. “Thomas Jefferson Versus the Historians: Christianity, Atheistic Morality, and the Afterlife.” Church History 83 no. 1 (March 2014): 60-109.