Religion as Weapon

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
Michael D. McNally
Keyword(s):  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Native People ◽  
Legal Doctrine ◽  
Traditional Religions ◽  
Federal Indian Law ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
The Government ◽  
Indian Law ◽  
Native Spirituality

This chapter offers crucial historical context and shows just how freighted the category of religion can be for Native peoples. Religion, or its absence, served as a key instrument in the legalization of the dispossession of North America, first through the legal Doctrine of Christian Discovery, which continues to inform federal Indian law, and second through the criminalization of traditional religions under the federal Indian Bureau's Civilization Regulations from 1883 to 1934. As devastating as the regulations and their assemblage of civilization with a thinly veiled Protestant Christianity were, affected Native people strategically engaged religious freedom discourse to protect those threatened practices that they increasingly argued were their “religions” and protected under religious liberty. Even as the government and missionary sought to curb Native religious practices thought to retard civilization, Euro-Americans began in earnest to fantasize about a Native spirituality that they could collect, admire, and inhabit. But while this awakened Euro-American appreciation for Native cultures served to help lift the formal confines of the Civilization Regulations in the 1930s, it has continued to beset Native efforts to protect collective traditions.

Religion as Collective Right

2020 ◽  
pp. 171-195
Author(s):  
Michael D. McNally
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
First Amendment ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
The United States ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Federal Indian Law ◽  
Indian Law ◽  
The One ◽  
Rhetorical Force

This chapter considers efforts to legislate Native American religious freedom in the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA, 1978). Where courts and even common sense have seen AIRFA as a religious freedom statute—as an extension of the legal protections of the First Amendment into the distinctive terrain of Native American traditions—the chapter suggests a different view. If the legal force of “religious freedom” discourse has been only dimly effective for Native sacred claims in courts, this chapter is the one that most pointedly shows how Native peoples drew on the rhetorical power of the sacred and religious freedom to win significant legislative protections specific to Native peoples. It does so through interviews with Suzan Shown Harjo. These interviews show how the remarkable legislative accomplishment of AIRFA and, later, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990), carry the rhetorical force of religious freedom into the legal shape of federal Indian law, with its recognition of treaty-based collective rights and the United States' nation-to-nation relationship with Native peoples.

Religion as Collective Right

2020 ◽  
pp. 196-223
Author(s):  
Michael D. McNally
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Legal Cases ◽  
Federal Indian Law ◽  
Indian Act ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
Indian Law

This chapter discusses repatriation law and a cluster of legal cases involving possession of ceremonial eagle feathers, where courts have consistently affirmed the collective contours of Native religions. Courts have upheld an exemption to the criminal penalties for feather possession tailored to members of federally recognized tribes against legal challenges by individual practitioners of Native religions who are not members of those tribes. These cases illustrate well the difficulties and the possibilities of religion as a category encompassing collective Native traditions. The coalition that persuaded Congress in 1994 to pass the Peyote Amendment to AIRFA was successful in part because it was largely the same circle of advocates, lawyers, tribal spiritual and political leaders, and allies who had recently won congressional passage of two repatriation statutes: the National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAI) in 1989 and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) the next year. The chapter thus tells the story of Native-led efforts to secure these two laws and offers an interpretation of them not as religious freedom laws, but primarily as additions to federal Indian law that encompass religious and cultural heritage.

Native Acts, Immigrant Acts: Citizenship, Naturalization, and the Performance of Civic Identity during the Progressive Era

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Cristina Stanciu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civic Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Native People ◽  
Immigration Restriction ◽  
Federal Indian Policy ◽  
Federal Indian Law ◽  
New Immigrants ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Law

Abstract This article reveals the complicity of immigration restriction laws and federal Indian policy with organized Americanization in legislating an imagined, desirable “new American” at the beginning of the twentieth century, when resurgent nationalism threatened to restrict undesirable immigrants as it also sought to assimilate Indigenous people into a mass of Americanism. While the immigrant has figured in the U.S. national imaginary as someone who desires America, the American Indian was not desired to enter into political membership—although Native land was desired, and subsequently taken by settlers through strategies of dispossession written into federal Indian law. This essay argues that the Indian—read as an imagined category with little connection to the lives of Native people—occupies an anomalous position in the legal history of naturalization, finalized with the passing of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, at the same time that racist immigration restriction quotas also limited the entrance of new immigrants into the United States through the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. For Native people, Americanization and the imposition of citizenship were extensions of colonialism, adding one civic status over another—domestic dependent, ward, or U.S. citizen. For new immigrants hailing from southern and eastern Europe, forced by economic and cultural constraints to relocate to the United States, in contrast to their Anglo-Saxon or Nordic settler predecessors, Americanization meant a renunciation of political allegiance to other sovereigns, the acquisition of English, and civic education for citizenship. This essay challenges the myth of America as a “nation of immigrants,” and the settler colonial nation-state's ongoing infatuation with its colonial project as it continues to erase Indigenous presence and sovereignty.

Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-133
Author(s):  
Hamid Mavani
Keyword(s):  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Legal Provisions ◽  
Novel Reading ◽  
Analytic Skills ◽  
Do So

The polyvalent Qur’anic text lends itself to multiple interpretations, dependingupon one’s presuppositions and premises. In fact, Q. 3:7 distinguishesbetween muḥkam (explicit, categorical) and mutashābih (metaphorical, allegorical,symbolic) verses. As such, this device provides a way for reinterpretingverses that outwardly appear to be problematic – be it in the area ofgender equality, minority rights, religious freedom, or war. However, manyof the verses dealing with legal provisions in such areas as devotional matters,marriage, divorce, child custody, inheritance and bequest, and specific punishmentsappear to be unequivocal, categorical, and explicit. As such, scholarshave devised certain hermeneutical strategies to situate and contextualizethese verses in a particular socio-historical context, as well as to emphasizethat they were in conversation with the society to which the Qur’an was revealedand thereby underlining the “performative” (p.15) nature of the relationshipbetween the Qur’an and the society.No verse is more problematic, in the sense that it offends contemporarysensibilities and is quite difficult to reconcile with an egalitarian worldviewwhen dealing with gender issues, than Q. 4:34, which allows the husband todiscipline his wife if he deems her guilty of nushūz (e.g., disobedience, intransigence,sexual lewdness, aloofness, dislike or hatred of himself). AyeshaChaudhry undertakes a study of this challenging verse by engaging the corpusof literature in Arabic from the classical period to the seventeenth century; shealso includes Urdu and English sources for the post-colonial period.She starts off by relating her personal journey from a state of discomfortand puzzlement when she first came across this verse in middle school to adefensive posture in trying to convince herself by invoking the Prophet’scompassion toward his wives and in cherishing the idea that the Qur’an gavemore rights to women than either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament.She began a more rigorous and nuanced study of this verse after equippingherself with the necessary academic tools and analytic skills during her universitystudies. Frustrated with the shallow responses and the scholars’ circumspectionas regards any creative and novel reading of the verse for fearof losing their status in the community, she decided to do so herself with thehope of discovering views that would promote an egalitarian reading ...

Insubstantial Burdens

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Vallier ◽  
Michael Weber
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Religious Freedom Restoration Act ◽  
The Government ◽  
A Minor

This chapter articulates and defends a “partially subjectivist” way of defining burdens on religious belief under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). On this view, courts should largely defer to plaintiffs as to what is a burden on their religious belief. There is only a minor requirement that the plaintiffs have to satisfy, which is to show that the government is doing something that pressures them to act in a way contrary to their beliefs—a relatively easy hurdle to clear. In general, courts are ill-equipped to determine what people’s religious beliefs really are, and this extends to determining when those beliefs are substantially burdened. More strongly, there is a tradition that says evaluating when people’s religious beliefs are burdened is really none of the court’s business. The partially subjectivist view honors these principles.

Truth to Power

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Policy Issue ◽  
International Terrorism ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Intelligence Support ◽  
The Cold War

This first-ever history of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) is told through the reflections of its eight chairs in the period from the end of the Cold War until 2017. Coeditors Robert Hutchings and Gregory Treverton add a substantial introduction placing the NIC in its historical context going all the way back to the Board of National Estimates in the 1940s, as well as a concluding chapter that highlights key themes and judgments. The historic mission of this remarkable but little-understood organization is strategic intelligence assessment in service of senior American foreign policymakers. It has been at the center of every critical foreign policy issue during the period covered by this volume: helping shape America’s post–Cold War strategies, confronting sectarian conflicts around the world, meeting the new challenge of international terrorism, and now assessing the radical restructuring of the global order. Each chapter places its particular period of the NIC’s history in context (the global situation, the administration, the intelligence community) and assesses the most important issues with which the NIC grappled during the period, acknowledging failures as well as claiming successes. With the creation of the director of national intelligence in 2005, the NIC’s mission mushroomed to include direct intelligence support to the main policymaking committees in the government. The mission shift took the NIC directly into the thick of the action but may have come at the expense of weakening its historic role of providing over-the horizon strategic analysis.

The Revival of Buddhist Nationalism in Thailand and Its Adverse Impact on Religious Freedom

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Adverse Impact ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
The Government

Abstract Triggered by the sense of crisis, the Thai state and Thai Buddhism are renewing their traditional relationship kindled by the monarch-led reform over a century ago. Thai Buddhism is reviving its lost aura and hegemony while the political conservatives are looking for legitimacy and collective identity in a time of democratic regression. The result is the rise of the Buddhist-nationalistic movement, Buddhist-as-Thainess notion. The phenomenon has grown more mainstream in recent years. These extreme Buddhists pressure the government to adopt a new constitutional relationship that brings the two entities closer to a full establishment. They also target both religious minorities as well as non-mainstream Buddhists. The revival of Buddhist nationalism foretells rising tension as well as diminishing religious freedom.

scholarly journals Special Solicitude: Religious Freedom at America’s Public Universities

Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
William E. Thro
Keyword(s):  
First Amendment ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Public Universities ◽  
Religious Organizations ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
University Campuses ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Government

Rejecting the Obama Administration’s argument that the First Amendment requires identical treatment for religious organizations and secular organizations, the Supreme Court held such a “result is hard to square with the text of the First Amendment itself, which gives special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations.” (Hosanna-Tabor, 565 U.S. at 189). This “special solicitude” guarantees religious freedom from the government in all aspects of society, but particularly on public university campuses. At a minimum, religious expression and religious organizations must have equal rights with secular expression and secular organizations. In some instances, religious expression and religious expression may have greater rights. The Court’s 2020 decisions in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, and Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, reinforce and expand the “special solicitude” of religion. Indeed, Espinoza and Our Lady have profound implications for student religious groups at America’s public campuses. This article examines religious freedom at America’s public universities. This article has three parts. First, it offers an overview of religious freedom prior to Espinoza and Our Lady. Second, it briefly discusses those two cases. Third, it explores the implications of those decisions on America’s public campuses.

scholarly journals THE REFLECTION OF FAMINE IN MODERN KAZAKH NOVELS

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (15) ◽  
pp. 1474-1482
Author(s):  
Gulnaz Tokshylykova ◽  
Tolkyn Kalibekuly ◽  
Gulmira Karimova
Keyword(s):  
Native People ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
Indigenous Nations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Preliminary Preparation ◽  
The Government ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
Future Citizen ◽  
The Mind

The interrelation of literature and the history of Kazakh people, we can say, go “hand in hand”. In the history of Kazakh people there are many events related to the capture of Kazakh youth in the royal army, “Goloshchekin's jute”, “Stalinist repressions”, “December events”. As a scientist and encyclopedist of the Kazakh steppe A. Margulan has mentioned that Kazakhstan has become a place where you can quickly multiply through various paths of aggression, deception, looking for a career in the periphery, wanted to adjust financial resources, and it was also a decent land. They led to the fact that on the Kazakh land “to deploy on a spacious steppe”, “to rob the Kyrgyz and bring a silk satin ribbon dress to their wives for their money.” At the same time, as last year, the government never did good for the Kazakh people. Delivery of the literature to the church through a thick historical truth is the result of an independent Kazakh literature. The article deals with the problem of famine in the Kazakh land due to the totalitarian regime. In modern Kazakh prose, a series of works have written the realities of the tragic years in the history of the country. This topic was widely covered in the genre of the novel, a novel of an independent Kazakh literature, in poetic works. At the same time, as a monument to the memory of the victims of the famine during the years of Nubet, it complements its story. The article discusses author’s thematic, ideological, artistic views on the topic of famine. In particular, Turysbek Sauketaev’s novel “Vulture's Winter”, Nagashybek Kapalbekuly’s “ The fume of ground oven ”, Nurdaulet Akysh’s “Merciless spring” and Jh. Shashtayuly’s “ The old man and horse ” were taken to the research object. The article focuses on the fact that the story on the topic of famine is the future memory in the personages’s mind, recalling the past. Awakening of memory in the mind is an literal approach that is actively used by most modern Kazakh prose writers. At the same time, all the works of this subject are proved by actual examples that the difficult moment of a person is in contact with the authors’ natural phenomena. Before dwelling on the tragedy of famine which millions of Kazakhs have done in the center, it is clear that the authors describe in more detail the picture of harsh nature and turn to the method of preliminary preparation of the reader. In this way, writers were able to give the atmosphere of that era. Although the language of the authors is easy to read, all narratives are sketched in accordance with reality. Each generation has to know the history of their native people, literary works of it. If we develop a personality through the patriotic spirit of the history of indigenous nations, this will be a reflection of their consciousness and future citizen who will defend the country and the land with national and civil dignity. Keywords: modern Kazakh novel, famine problem, national tragedy, jute, famine strike, awakening of consciousness.

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