tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/blackfeet-tribal-territory-32871/articlesBlackfeet tribal territory – The Conversation2017-04-20T23:19:36Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/759832017-04-20T23:19:36Z2017-04-20T23:19:36ZWhy Native Americans do not separate religion from science<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166148/original/file-20170420-20050-1k83oho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A Menominee Tribal biology class in Green Bay, Wisconsin.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/usdagov/13906215926/in/photolist-nbQZvy">U.S. Department of Agriculture Follow</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Last year five Native American tribes in Washington state managed to repatriate the remains of the “Ancient One,” as they called him, or <a href="https://theconversation.com/kennewick-man-will-be-reburied-but-quandaries-around-human-remains-wont-59219">“Kennewick Man,”</a> as scientists called him. </p>
<p>For the tribes, the Ancient One is to be revered as a human ancestor. But for the scientists, the rare specimen of a 9,000-year-old Kennewick Man was important to understanding the history of North America. After a 20-year court battle, the tribes finally reburied the Ancient One. However, this could be done only after scientists had created his multi-dimensional model for future study.</p>
<p>For a long time, the relationship between Native Americans and scientists has been a <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo21358784.html">contentious</a> one. It would appear from this case that what matters most to Native Americans are religious beliefs and not science.</p>
<p>While this might be the case with human remains, which are a sensitive issue with most tribes, scientific endeavors are very important to Native Americans.</p>
<p>That is why indigenous scientists and scholars including myself supported the March for Science on April 22. </p>
<h2>Sacred ecology</h2>
<p>Scientists began thinking and writing about how Native Americans understand the natural world in the 20th century. Instead of seeing a conflict between Western science and Native American knowledge, they started thinking about ways to learn how Native Americans addressed environmental and ecological issues differently. </p>
<p>Ecologist <a href="http://environment-ecology.com/academicians/303-fikret-berkes.html">Fikret Berkes</a> pointed out these distinctions in his seminal book “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/Sacred-Ecology/Berkes/p/book/9781138071490">Sacred Ecology</a>,” where he noted that both Western and indigenous science can be regarded as “the same general intellectual process of creating order out of disorder.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166129/original/file-20170420-20071-2o125d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166129/original/file-20170420-20071-2o125d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166129/original/file-20170420-20071-2o125d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166129/original/file-20170420-20071-2o125d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166129/original/file-20170420-20071-2o125d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166129/original/file-20170420-20071-2o125d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166129/original/file-20170420-20071-2o125d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Native American traditions blend science and religion.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/myguerrilla/1423195889/in/photolist-pVWWoN-pW7HzR-qbf3o3-pVWQVy-qdw7F6-pW6La2-pgx7mL-pVXVR3-pW5QAa-pgwKk7-pgwFLy-pgM7L4-pVYqz7-pW6GzX-pVXSxu-pgLY3c-pW6yPP-qdm1DT-qdwcjz-pgwR2s-pW6MYn-qdtwEG-qdsVwq-pW5FPn-pVY8NG-pgLdXz-pVXf6G-qdmLCz-qdmNq2-3aQK7G-p16h3f-phyMe8-3aLfya-pgxu55-3aQJBm">Carling Hale</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
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<p>He provided his own research as an example. He stated that the Native Americans he worked with knew far more than he did about aquatic ecological systems, even though he had academic training. He noted their knowledge was both scientific and viewed through a religious lens. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“One important point of difference is that many systems of indigenous knowledge include spiritual or religious dimensions (beliefs) that do not make sense to science…. This is ‘sacred ecology’ in the most expansive, rather than in the scientifically restrictive, sense of the word ‘ecology.’” </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Traditional knowledge</h2>
<p>Native American scholars are now writing about this blending of science and religion.</p>
<p>Native American scientist <a href="http://www.esf.edu/faculty/kimmerer/">Robin Kimmerer</a>, for example, tells her story as a trained botanist learning about Native American worldview in her book <a href="https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass">“Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.”</a> She describes how she learned words in her native language, Anishinaabe, that explained biological processes better than Western science could in English. </p>
<p>As a Native American scholar, I, too, have spent the past year at the intersection of science and religion at Harvard Divinity School, researching “ethnobotany” and “ethnopharmacology” – the scientific study of the medicinal qualities of plants and Native American belief.</p>
<p>I learned from my grandmother, <a href="http://www.montananaturalist.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/Naturalist-Fall-05.pdf">Annie Mad Plume Wall</a>, who was regarded as a “doctor” on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana, that certain plants were medicine. She understood the ethnopharmacology of plants that were used as analgesics, antibacterials or anti-inflammatory agents. She knew which plants to use when one of her patients was ill.</p>
<p>The knowledge of the medicinal qualities of these plants clearly grew out of a process of observation and experimentation. She learned how to distill the essential elements of a plant to create an extract of its medicinal properties. In fact, her refrigerator was filled with bottles of extracts.</p>
<p>However, some of these plants also had mythological stories that spoke of their origin in the supernatural realm. These stories instructed the Blackfeet how to communicate with the plant, to care for it, how to protect its ecosystem, restrict knowledge of the plant and its over-harvesting.</p>
<p>My grandmother believed that a powerful supernatural being, “Ko’komíki’somm,” gave humans certain plants to use as medicine. She also understood, based on their scientific properties, that a plant was indeed a medicine. </p>
<h2>Alternative paradigm</h2>
<p>It is true that Western science and Native Americans have a complicated history, as the struggle over the Ancient One attests. Anthropologist <a href="http://www.dmns.org/science/museum-scientists/chip-colwell/">Chip Colwell</a> discusses in <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo21358784.html">“Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture” </a> that the problem is that the items scientists consider “objects” for study, such as human remains, Native Americans would view through their own worldview, their own belief system.</p>
<p>More recently, there has been a better recognition of the role of indigenous sciences. In 2016, a U.S.-Canada <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/03/10/us-canada-joint-statement-climate-energy-and-arctic-leadership">joint statement</a> on Climate, Energy, and Arctic Leadership recognized the importance of both Western science and indigenous science to help solve global issues. It urged that both “science-based approaches” and “indigenous science and traditional knowledge” be incorporated in efforts to both address commercial interests in the Arctic, such as oil and gas development and shipping lanes, and protect the Arctic and its people.</p>
<p>Native American scientists and scholars have also weighed in on this debate. For the March of Science, many Native American scholars, including Kimmerer and myself, have written a declaration of support that states:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Let us remember that long before western science came to these shores, there were scientists here….Western science is a powerful approach, but it is not the only one. Indigenous science provides a wealth of knowledge and a powerful alternative paradigm.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>For many Native Americans, like my grandmother, myth and medicine, religion and science, are not viewed as separate, but are interwoven into the fabric of our lives.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/75983/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rosalyn R. LaPier volunteers with the March for Science. </span></em></p>Native American scholars joined in the global March for Science. Their science blends seamlessly with beliefs.Rosalyn R. LaPier, Research Associate of Women's Studies, Environmental Studies and Native American Religion, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/747322017-03-21T18:41:00Z2017-03-21T18:41:00ZWhy is water sacred to Native Americans?<p>The Lakota phrase “Mní wičhóni,” or “Water is life,” has become a new national protest anthem. </p>
<p>It was chanted by 5,000 marchers at the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/american-indians-to-march-on-white-house-in-rally-for-rights/2017/03/10/8b327e84-04e3-11e7-ad5b-d22680e18d10_story.html?utm_term=.af983e52c1a2">Native Nations March</a> in Washington, D.C. on March 10, and during hundreds of protests across the United States in the last year. “Mní wičhóni” became the anthem of the almost year-long struggle to stop the building of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-will-native-tribes-fight-the-dakota-access-pipeline-in-court-72839">Dakota Access Pipeline</a> under the Missouri River in North Dakota. </p>
<p>This chant mirrors the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDbSjkkHPGs">civil rights anthems</a> of the past, which emerged out of the African-American church. “Mní wičhóni” in the Lakota language also has spiritual meaning, which is rooted in a connection to nature. As a <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-makes-a-mountain-hill-or-prairie-a-sacred-place-for-native-americans-73169">Native American scholar</a> of environment and religion, I understand what makes the relationship between Native people and the natural world unique. </p>
<p>For Native Americans, water does not only sustain life – it is sacred.</p>
<h2>Water and the American West</h2>
<p>The Great Plains of North America, home to the Lakota, the Blackfeet and other tribes, is a dry, arid place. The U.S. government spends billions of dollars to control and retain water in this “<a href="http://www.lib.msu.edu/branches/map/US/800-c-reg4-D-1823-400/">Great American desert</a>,” as it was described in the early 19th century.</p>
<p>Geologist <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060955861/down-the-great-unknown">John Wesley Powell</a>, an early director of the U.S. Geological Survey, pointed out in an important <a href="https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70039240">1878 government study</a> that the defining characteristic of the Great Plains and the West was its lack of water. He attempted to promote land ownership that was based on watersheds, instead of dividing land into the rectangular lots still in use today. </p>
<p>Powell also recommended that America adopt a new type of land development – one that worked with nature, so everyone had access to water.</p>
<p>The U.S. government, however, ignored Powell’s ideas. Writing on this issue later, author <a href="https://wallacestegner.org/bio.html">Wallace Stegner</a>, who was passionate about the West, <a href="https://www.press.umich.edu/7374/american_west_as_living_space">commented</a>, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“[W]hat do you do about aridity….You may deny it for a while. Then you must either adapt to it or try to engineer it out of existence.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Lakota, the Blackfeet and the other tribes understood how to live with nature. They knew it was best to live within the restrictions of the limited water supply of the Great Plains. </p>
<h2>Water as sacred place</h2>
<p>For thousands of years, Native American tribes across the <a href="http://www.oupress.com/ECommerce/Book/Detail/272/common%20and%20contested%20ground">Great Plains</a> developed their own methods of living with the natural world and its limited water supply. They learned both through observation and experiment, arguably a process quite similar to what we might call science today. They also learned from their religious ideas, passed on from generation to generation in the form of stories.</p>
<p>I learned from my grandparents, both members of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana, about the sacredness of water. They shared that the Blackfeet believed in three separate realms of existence – the Earth, sky and water. The Blackfeet believed that humans, or “Niitsitapi,” and Earth beings, or “Ksahkomitapi,” lived in one realm; sky beings, or “Spomitapi,” lived in another realm; and underwater beings, or “Soyiitapi,” lived in yet another realm. The Blackfeet viewed all three worlds as sacred because within them lived the divine.</p>
<p>The water world, in particular, was held in special regard. The Blackfeet believed that in addition to the divine beings, about which they learned from <a href="http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Invisible-Reality,677467.aspx">their stories,</a> there were divine animals, such as the beaver. The divine beaver, who could talk to humans, taught the Blackfeet their most important religious ceremony. The Blackfeet needed this ceremony to reaffirm their relationships with the three separate realms of reality.</p>
<p>The Soyiitapi, divine water beings, also instructed the Blackfeet to protect their home, the water world. The Blackfeet could not kill or eat anything living in water; they also could not disturb or pollute water.</p>
<p>The Blackfeet viewed water as a distinct place – a sacred place. It was the home of divine beings and divine animals who taught the Blackfeet religious rituals and moral restrictions on human behavior. It can, in fact, be compared to Mount Sinai of the <a href="https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Exodus-Chapter-1/">Old Testament</a>, which was viewed as “holy ground” and where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments.</p>
<h2>Water as life</h2>
<p>Native American tribes on the Great Plains knew something else about the relationship between themselves, the beaver and water. They learned through observation that beavers helped create an ecological oasis within a dry and arid landscape. </p>
<p>As Canadian anthropologist R. Grace Morgan hypothesized in her dissertation “<a href="https://era.library.ualberta.ca/files/df65vb64j#.WMxDHW_yvX4">Beaver Ecology/Beaver Mythology</a>,” the Blackfeet sanctified the beaver because they understood the natural science and ecology of beaver behavior. </p>
<p>Morgan believed that the Blackfeet did not harm the beaver because <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/leave-it-to-beavers-leave-it-to-beavers/8836/">beavers built dams</a> on creeks and rivers. Such dams could produce enough of a diversion to create a pond of fresh clean water that allowed an oasis of plant life to grow and wildlife to flourish.</p>
<p>Beaver ponds provided the Blackfeet with water for daily life. The ponds also attracted animals, which meant the Blackfeet did not have to travel long distances to hunt. The Blackfeet did not need to travel for plants used for medicine or food, as well. </p>
<p>Beaver ponds were a win-win for all concerned in “the Great American desert” that <a href="https://theconversation.com/give-beavers-permanent-residence-wed-be-dam-stupid-not-to-55256">modern ecologists and conservationists</a> are beginning to study only now.</p>
<p>For the Blackfeet, Lakota and other tribes of the Great Plains, water was “life.” They understood what it meant to live in a dry arid place, which they expressed through their religion and within their ecological knowledge.</p>
<h2>Rights of Mother Earth</h2>
<p>Indigenous people from around the world share these beliefs about the sacredness of water. </p>
<p>The government of New Zealand recently recognized the ancestral connection of the Maori people to their water. On March 15, the government passed the “Te Awa Tupua <a href="http://www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2016/0129/latest/DLM6830851.html?src=qs">Whanganui River Claims Settlement</a> Bill,” which provides “personhood” status to the Whanganui River, one of the largest rivers on the North Island of New Zealand. This river has come to be recognized as having “all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person” – something the Maori believed all along. </p>
<p>Many other countries have come to view the natural world and water from a similar perspective. In Bolivia, for example, the government passed laws in 2010 and 2012 for the “<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41268-016-0001-0">Law of the Rights of Mother Earth</a>,” which were motivated by the belief that nature has legal rights. The <a href="http://pdba.georgetown.edu/Constitutions/Ecuador/english08.html">Ecuadorian constitution</a> in 2008 recognized the rights of “Nature, or Pacha Mama,” with “respect for its existence,” which included water.</p>
<p>The United States does not have such laws. This is why the Standing Rock Lakota have been demanding for almost a year a right to clean water – free from the threat of potential environmental harm and to protect its sacredness.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74732/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rosalyn R. LaPier does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>For the Blackfeet, Lakota and other Native American people, water does more than sustain life – it’s the place of the divine.Rosalyn R. LaPier, Research Associate of Women's Studies, Environmental Studies and Native American Religion, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/680322016-11-03T00:13:10Z2016-11-03T00:13:10ZWhy understanding Native American religion is important for resolving the Dakota Access Pipeline crisis<p>In recent weeks, protests against the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline across North Dakota have escalated. Native American elders, families and children have set up tipis and tents on a campsite near the pipeline’s path in the hope of stopping the pipeline’s construction.</p>
<p><a href="https://votedavearchambault.wordpress.com/about/">Dave Archambault Jr.,</a> the leader of the <a href="http://standingrock.org/">Standing Rock Sioux Tribe</a> that is leading the efforts to stop the pipeline, summed up what is at the heart of the issue. In a <a href="http://indianlaw.org/undrip/Standing-Rock-Sioux-Tribe-Takes-NODAPL-to-the-United-Nations">brief two-minute statement</a> before the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, he said,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Oil companies are causing deliberate destruction of our sacred places.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>As a Native American scholar of environmental history and religious studies, I am often asked what Native American leaders mean when they say that certain landscapes are “sacred places” or “sacred sites.” </p>
<p>What makes a mountain, hill or prairie a “sacred” place?</p>
<h2>Meaning of sacred spaces</h2>
<p>I learned from my grandparents about the sacred areas within <a href="http://blackfeetnation.com/">Blackfeet tribal territory</a> in Montana and Alberta, which is not far from Lakota tribal territory in the Dakotas. </p>
<p>My grandparents said that sacred areas are places set aside from human presence. They identified two overarching types of sacred place: those set aside for the divine, such as a dwelling place, and those set aside for human remembrance, such as a burial or battle site.</p>
<p>In my <a href="http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Invisible-Reality,677467.aspx">forthcoming book “Invisible Reality,”</a> I contemplate those stories that my grandparents shared about Blackfeet religious concepts and the interconnectedness of the supernatural and natural realms. </p>
<p>My grandparents’ stories revealed that the Blackfeet believe in a universe where supernatural beings exist within the same time and space as humans and our natural world. The deities could simultaneously exist in both as visible and invisible reality. That is, they could live unseen, but known, within a physical place visible to humans.</p>
<p>One such place for the Blackfeet is Nínaiistáko or Chief Mountain in Glacier National Park. This mountain is the home of Ksiistsikomm or Thunder, a primordial deity. My grandparents spoke of how this mountain is a liminal space, a place between two realms. </p>
<p>Blackfeet tribal citizens can go near this sacred place to perceive the divine, but they cannot go onto the mountain because it is the home of a deity. Elders of the Blackfeet tribe believe that human activity, or changing the physical landscape in these places, disrupts the lives of deities. They view this as sacrilegious and a desecration. </p>
<h2>A living text</h2>
<p>Sacred places, however, are not always set aside from humanity’s use. Some sacred places are meant for constant human interaction.</p>
<p><a href="http://blog.nmai.si.edu/main/2013/08/in-memoriam-keith-h-basso-19402013.html">Anthropologist Keith Basso</a> argued in his seminal work <a href="http://www.unmpress.com/books.php?ID=770">“Wisdom Sits in Places”</a> that one purpose of sacred places was to perfect the human mind. The Western Apache elders with whom Basso worked told him that when someone repeated the names and stories of their sacred places, they were understood as “repeating the speech of our ancestors.”</p>
<p>For these Apache elders, places were not just names and stories – their landscape itself was a living sacred text. As these elders traveled from place to place speaking the names and stories of their sacred text, they told Basso that their minds became more “resilient,” more “smooth” and able to withstand adversity. </p>
<h2>The sacredness of the pipeline site</h2>
<p>At different national and international venues, Lakota leader Dave Archambault Jr. has stated that the Lakota view the area near the potential construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline as both a “sacred place” and a “burial site,” or as both a place set aside from human presence and a place of human reverence.</p>
<p>Lakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_World_We_Used_to_Live_in.html?id=S6F7MKRoFS4C">described the “sacred stones”</a> in North Dakota in his book “The World We Used to Live In” as having the ability of “forewarning of events to come.”</p>
<p>Deloria described how Lakota religious leaders went to these stones in the early morning to read their messages. Deloria shared the experiences of an Episcopal minister from 1919.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“A rock of this kind was formerly on Medicine Hill near Cannon Ball Sub-station…. Old Indians came to me… and said that the lightning would strike someone in camp that day, for a picture (wowapi) on this holy rock indicated such an event…. And the lightning did strike a tent in camp and nearly killed a woman…. I have known several similar things, equally foretelling events to come, I can not account for it.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_World_We_Used_to_Live_in.html?id=S6F7MKRoFS4C">Deloria explained</a> that it was “birds, directed by the spirit of the place, [that] do the actual sketching of the pictures.” The Lakota named this area Ínyanwakagapi for the large stones that served as oracles for their people. The Americans renamed it Cannonball.</p>
<h2>Not just Dakota</h2>
<p>Historians, anthropologists and religious thinkers <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Where_the_Lightning_Strikes.html?id=UpIMJdc29qoC">continue to learn and write</a> about Native American religious ideas of place. In so doing, they seek to analyze complex religious concepts of transformation and transcendence that these places evoke.</p>
<p>However, despite their contributions to the academic interpretation of religion, these understandings do not often translate into protection of Native American places for their religious significance. As <a href="https://www.aclu.org/bio/stephen-pevar">legal scholar Stephen Pevar</a> <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-rights-of-indians-and-tribes-9780199795352?cc=us&lang=en&">tells us,</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>“there is no federal statue that expressly protects Indian sacred sites…. in fact, the federal government knowingly desecrates sites.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the past year we have seen protests over the potential <a href="https://www.hawaii.edu/offices/bor/regular/testimony/201504161130/4-14-2015_Toledo_TMT.pdf">desecration of sacred places</a> at Mauna Kea in Hawaii (over the construction of another telescope on a sacred volcano), <a href="http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/03/30/oak-flat-deal-violates-apache-rights-mining-best-practices">Oak Flats in Arizona</a> (over a potential copper mine on sacred land) and now at <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37834334">Standing Rock in North Dakota</a>. </p>
<h2>Lack of understanding of sacredness</h2>
<p><a href="http://hds.harvard.edu/people/william-graham">William Graham, a former dean</a> of the Harvard Divinity School, <a href="http://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/articles/summerautumn2012/why-study-religion-twenty-first-century">wrote that</a>, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Religion… will long continue to be a critical factor in individual, social, and political life around the world, and we need to understand it.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The intimate connection between landscape and religion is at the center of Native American societies. It is the reason that thousands of Native Americans from across the United States and Indigenous peoples from around the world have traveled to the windswept prairies of North Dakota.</p>
<p>But, despite our 200-plus years of contact, the United States has yet to begin to understand the uniqueness of Native American religions and ties to the land. And until this happens, there will continue to be conflicts over religious ideas of land and landscape, and what makes a place sacred.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68032/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rosalyn R. LaPier receives funding from University of Montana. She is affiliated with Saokio Heritage. </span></em></p>A scholar explains what makes landscapes sacred in Native American religion and why there needs to be a better understanding of the ties to the land.Rosalyn R. LaPier, Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies, Environmental Studies and Native American Religion, Harvard UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.