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The settler religion of Indian religion: Kenneth J. Richards, The Settler Doctrine: Indians, Religion, and the Land, PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2024

27Dec24

Abstract: In this dissertation, I propose the Settler Doctrine to position federal Indian law as profoundly determined by and organized around the legal, historical, and mythical entanglements between land, religion, and indigeneity. Neither land, religion, nor indigeneity are given natural categories. They emerged as anthropological concepts, pop culture fantasies, colonial myths, racist categories, and legal terms from a history of power relations, discursive expressions, lived experiences, and practical negotiations. In federal Indian law, I argue that their genealogies emerged and evolved in codeterminative and deeply entangled relationships. This means that the application of federal Indian law and the interpretation or construction of federal Indian policy depends upon these categories’ maintenance and developmental characteristics. In delving deeper into case histories and materials in federal Indian law, I was surprised to learn that “religion” was consistently deployed as an important, if not deciding characteristic, in the judicial opinions supporting a majority of Indian cases that, on the surface, had nothing to do with religion. These cases range from water allocations to fishing rights and property law or into the very bedrock of US federal recognition and protection of tribal sovereignty. Everywhere I looked, I found Indian religion. If not overtly addressed in judicial opinions, courts implicitly relied upon Indian religion through court citations, references, and precedence. In the process of my research, while pulling on the threads of religion, I found statements about land. This connection should not be a surprise. Federal Indian law, after all, is essentially about the land and the result of over five hundred years of colonial endeavors to dispossess Indian peoples of it. In addition, for native peoples in the US, there is a considerable amount of native voices and scholarship stating that whatever Indian religion may be, it is almost certainly tied to the land and quite often to particular places for specific native peoples. When the thread is pulled in the other direction, beginning from legal questions of land, I quickly found court concerns over religion. This dissertation is an analysis of the settler-colonial entanglement between land, religion, and the Indian in federal Indian law.


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