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Abstract
This article addresses emergent religious formations at protest scenes in the broader context of indigenous organization and identity-building. Our central example is the Standing Rock protest in North Dakota, 2016–2017, a local encampment-based event that quickly expanded into an international indigenous peoples’ movement. We argue that religion was a key register in the camps, during direct actions, and in solidarity actions around the world, primarily expressed through a limited selection of key terms: water is sacred, water is life, Mother Earth, and ceremony. We argue, moreover, that these terms, and “ceremony” in particular, were a crucial medium of inter-group and up-scaled cultural translations, allowing local identities to come forth as a unified front. Invoking Standing Rock religion(s) as an instance of the broader category indigenous religion(s), we suggest that these identity formations belong to a globalizing indigenous religious formation, anchored in, yet distinct from, discrete indigenous religions, and today performed and mediated in diverse arenas, crisscrossing and connecting indigenous worlds. We are concerned with the translations and comparisons at play, and with the sentiments and moodiness of religion in this particular case, fueled by the cause (a planned pipeline on ancestral lands), the brutality of police encounters, and the sharing of ceremonies, food, and fires at the camps.
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Alia, Valerie. 2010. The New Media Nation. Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication. New York: Berghan Books.
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Allen, Chadwick. 2012. Trans-Indigenous. Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Johnson, Greg. 2017. “Materialising and Performing Hawaiian Religion(s) on Mauna Kea.” In Greg Johnson and Siv Ellen Kraft (eds.), The Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s), Leiden: Brill, 156–175.
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Johnson, Greg, and Siv Ellen Kraft. 2017a. “Introduction.” In Greg Johnson and Siv Ellen Kraft (eds.), The Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s), Leiden: Brill, 1–24.
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Johnson, Greg, and Siv Ellen Kraft. 2017b. “Indigenous Protective Occupation and Emergent Networks of Spirited Refusal.” The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion and the Public Sphere. Posted 21 July. URL: https://tif.ssrc.org/author/siv-ellen-kraft/.
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| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1564 | 274 | 60 |
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| PDF Views & Downloads | 999 | 71 | 5 |
Search for other papers by Greg Johnson in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Search for other papers by Siv Ellen Kraft in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
This article addresses emergent religious formations at protest scenes in the broader context of indigenous organization and identity-building. Our central example is the Standing Rock protest in North Dakota, 2016–2017, a local encampment-based event that quickly expanded into an international indigenous peoples’ movement. We argue that religion was a key register in the camps, during direct actions, and in solidarity actions around the world, primarily expressed through a limited selection of key terms: water is sacred, water is life, Mother Earth, and ceremony. We argue, moreover, that these terms, and “ceremony” in particular, were a crucial medium of inter-group and up-scaled cultural translations, allowing local identities to come forth as a unified front. Invoking Standing Rock religion(s) as an instance of the broader category indigenous religion(s), we suggest that these identity formations belong to a globalizing indigenous religious formation, anchored in, yet distinct from, discrete indigenous religions, and today performed and mediated in diverse arenas, crisscrossing and connecting indigenous worlds. We are concerned with the translations and comparisons at play, and with the sentiments and moodiness of religion in this particular case, fueled by the cause (a planned pipeline on ancestral lands), the brutality of police encounters, and the sharing of ceremonies, food, and fires at the camps.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1564 | 274 | 60 |
| Full Text Views | 873 | 38 | 2 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 999 | 71 | 5 |