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 20th 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.
[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.
Goodbye To All That 