Native peoples of North America still face an uncertain future due to their unstable political, legal, and economic positions. Views of their predicament, however, continue to be dominated by non-Indian writers. In response, a dozen Native American writers here reclaim their rightful role as influential "voices" in the debates about Native communities at the dawn of a new millennium. These scholars examine crucial issues of politics, law, and religion in the context of ongoing Native American resistance to the dominant culture. They particularly show how the writings of Vine Deloria, Jr., have shaped and challenged American Indian scholarship in these areas since the 1960s. They provide key insights into Deloria's thought, while introducing some of the critical issues still confronting Native nations today. Collectively, these essays take up four important themes: indigenous societies as the embodiment of cultures of resistance, legal resistance to western oppression against indigenous nations, contemporary Native religious practices, and Native intellectual challenges to academia. Individual chapters address indigenous perspectives on topics usually treated (and often misunderstood) by non-Indians, such as the role of women in Indian society, the importance of sacred sites to American Indian religious identity, and the relationship of native language to indigenous autonomy. A closing essay by Deloria--in vintage form--brings the book full circle and reminds Native Americans of their responsibilities and obligations to one another--and to past and future generations. Ranging from insights into Native American astronomy to critiques of federal Indian law, this book strongly argues forthe renewed cultivation of a Native American Studies that is much more Indian-centered. Without the revival of that perspective, such curricula are doomed to languish as academic ephemera--missed opportunities for building a better and deeper understanding of Indian peoples and their most pressing concerns and aspirations. Contributors: S. James Anaya, Ward Churchill, Cecil Corbett, Vine Deloria, Jr., Richard A. Grounds, Joy Harjo, Ines Hernandez-Avila, M. A. Jaimes-Guerrero, Clara Sue Kidwell, Henrietta Mann, Glenn Morris, John Mohawk, Michelene Pesantubee, Ines Talamantez, George E. Tinker, David Wilkins

Highlighting the role of cultures in both the development of the Bible and in its subsequent reception around the world, The Peoples Companion to the Bible enables students to see how social locationincluding gender, ethnicity, social class, and cultural pluralismhas figured in the ways particular peoples have understood the biblical text. But it also helps students formulate their own social location and biblical horizon as a key to understanding the Bible and its import for them.

Why Christian understandings of Jesus and God clash with American Indian worldviews. "Tink" Tinker of the Osage Nation describes the oppression suffered by American Indians since the arrival of European colonists, who brought a different worldview across the ocean and attempted to convert the native population to the religion they also imported. The methodology, language, and understandings of Christian beliefs of the colonists????????????????????????and the majority society since the colonial period????????????????????????have largely failed to Christianize the native population. Different conceptual frameworks and different understandings of terms made (and make) Christian doctrine particularly unappealing and at times incomprehensible to Indians.

Writing from a Native American perspective, theologian George Tinker probes American Indian culture, its vast religious and cultural legacy, and its ambiguous relationship to the tradition-historic Christianity-that colonized and converted it. After five hundred years of conquest and social destruction, he says, any useful reflection must come to terms with the political state of Indian affairs and the political hopes and visions for recovering the health and well-being of Indian communities. Does Christian theology have a positive role to play? Tinker's work offers an overview of contemporary native American culture and its perilous state. Critical of recent liberal and New Age co-opting of Native spiritual practices, Tinker also offers a critical corrective to liberation theology. He shows how Native insights into the Sacred Other and sacred space helpfully reconfigure traditional ideas of God, Jesus' notion of the reign of God, and our relation to the earth. From this basis he offers novel proposals about cultural survival and identity, sustainability, and the endangered health of Native Americans.

This fascinating probe into U.S. mission history spotlights four cases: Junipero Serra, the Franciscan whose mission to California natives has made him a candidate for sainthood; John Eliot, the renowned Puritan missionary to Massachusetts Indians; Pierre-Jean De Smet, the Jesuit missioner to the Indians of the Midwest; and Henry Benjamin Whipple, who engineered the U.S. government's theft of the Black Hills from the Sioux.