Religion as Spirituality

This chapter considers the relative success of court decisions accommodating certain individual Native American inmates in their religious exercise in prisons, especially the sweat lodge. These cases reveal a pattern of what officials refer to as “Native American Spirituality.” In the prison cases, Native American Spirituality emerges as a term of art from corrections management, a line on the intake form for religious preference, and keyed to the language of the federal chaplaincy manual. Prison chaplaincy programs use it in an effort to articulate what's often exceptional and irreducibly diverse about Native religious traditions and to articulate what makes them so difficult to pin down. Especially insofar as the cases largely involve a triad of intertribal practices: sweat lodges, pipe ceremonies, and access to medicinal tobacco, sage, cedar, and sweetgrass.

I Surrender to the Sacred Ways and Walk the Inner Places: Donovan’s Poem

The following is a poetic transcription presented as a 12-part poem. The author constructed the poem from an email interview conducted with “Donovan,” a 61-year-old, White, gay man. The interview was part of a larger study on the experience of LGBTQ+ identity as spiritual identity, which focused on individuals who believe their LGBTQ+ identity is imbued or imbues their life with spiritual qualities. Donovan is a monk in a tradition that blends Hinduism, Buddhism, Native American Spirituality, and Paganism and that honors the “Hayamoni,” a Pali word for Two-Spirit people. The narrative poem reflects his perspective on the experience and meaning of LGBTQ+ spiritual identity in his life. The poem is presented without a literature review in an effort to privilege Donovan’s lived experience and perspective.

Spirituality

This chapter traces theological and philosophical uses of the notion of “spirit” in studies of Native religious belief, and argues that these uses that have separated matter from the immaterial, and thus the knowable from the illogical. Such binaries fuel inaccurate ethnographic representations, the consumption of Native American spirituality, and indigenous claims for sacred sites. Rather than framing indigenous religious action in terms of “spirit” and “spirituality,” this chapter argues for the value of an ontological attention to indigenous intersubjectivity and the multiple ways indigenous people maintain practical, logical, and physical relations among humans and other-than-human persons. The chapter proposes replacing the term “spiritual” with the word “related” in describing indigenous world views.