This study of the religions of American Indians covers tribal religions and religions of the American high culture.

In contemporary Indian Country, many of the people who identify as "American Indian" fall into the "urban Indian" category: away from traditional lands and communities, in cities and towns wherein the opportunities to live one's identity as Native can be restricted, and even more so for American Indian religious practice and activity. Tradition, Performance, and Religion in Native America: Ancestral Ways, Modern Selves explores a possible theoretical model for discussing the religious nature of urbanized Indians. It uses aspects of contemporary pantribal practices such as the inter-tribal pow wow, substance abuse recovery programs such as the Wellbriety Movement, and political involvement to provide insights into contemporary Native religious identity. Simply put, this book addresses the question what does it mean to be an Indigenous American in the 21st century, and how does one express that indigeneity religiously? It proposes that practices and ideologies appropriate to the pan-Indian context provide much of the foundation for maintaining a sense of aboriginal spiritual identity within modernity. Individuals and families who identify themselves as Native American can participate in activities associated with a broad network of other Native people, in effect performing their Indian identity and enacting the values that are connected to that identity.

This book tells the gripping story of New England's Natives' efforts to reshape their worlds between the 1670s and 1820 as they defended their land rights, welcomed educational opportunities for their children, joined local white churches during the First Great Awakening (1740s), and over time refashioned Christianity for their own purposes.

Through an ethnohistorical study of the Nagas—a congeries of tribes inhabiting the Indo-Myanmar frontier—this book explores an unusually interesting region of India that is all too often seen as peripheral. G. Kanato Chophy provides a distinct vantage point for understanding the Nagas in relation to colonialism, missionary encounters, identity politics, and cultural change, all seamlessly woven around American Baptist mission history in this region. The book also analyses India's cacophonous postindependence democracy in order to delineate multifaith issues, multiculturalism, and ethnicity-based political movements. Within the West, episodic memories of the "Great Awakening," a significant landmark in the history of Protestantism, have faded into archival records. But among the Nagas of the Indo-Myanmar highlands, Baptist Christianity persists as the dominant religion, influencing the daily lives of nearly three million people. Focusing variously on evangelical faith, missionary zeal, ethnic identities, political struggle, and complex culture wars, Christianity and Politics in Tribal India is an original and major study of how Protestant missions changed the history and destiny of a tribal community in one of the unlikeliest regions of South Asia.

"Creating Christian Indians takes issue with the widespread consensus that missions to North American indigenous peoples routinely destroyed native cultures and that becoming Christian was fundamentally incompatible with retaining traditional Indian identities"--from jkt.

Describes the peyote plant, the birth of peyotism in western Oklahoma, its spread from Indian Territory to Mexico, the High Plains, and the Far West, its role among such tribes as the Comanche, Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, Caddo, Wichita, Delaware, and Navajo Indians, its conflicts with the law, and the history of the Native American Church.