ENTERING SACRED LANDSCAPES: CULTURAL EXPECTATIONS VERSUS LEGAL REALITIES IN THE NORTHWESTERN PLAINS

• Published in: Great plains quarterly Vol. 24; no. 3; pp. 163 - 183
• Main Authors: CAMPBELL, GREGORY R., FOOR, THOMAS A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Lincoln THE CENTER FOR GREAT PLAINS STUDIES 01-07-2004; Center for Great Plains Studies; Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska Lincoln
• Subjects: Administrative Policy; American Indians; Animation; Beliefs; Case Studies; Civil Rights; Court Litigation; Cultural landscapes; Environment; Federal Indian Relationship; Folk medicine; Geographic Location; Geography; Human Geography; Land Use; Law Enforcement; Medicine; Native American dance; Native Americans; Native North Americans; North America; North Americans; Physical Geography; Public Agencies; Public land; Public lands; Religion; Religious Factors; Religious freedom; Religious laws; Religious places; Society; Spiritual belief systems; Spiritual Development; Spirituality; Task forces; Tribal land; Universe; Values; World Views; North America
• ISSN: 0275-7664; 2333-5092

Sacred and cultural geography is a universal feature of indigenous religious practices across Native North America. However, in a growing number of cases, conflicts have developed between Native North American religious practitioners and land-managing federal agencies. The contentious situations often come down to Indian peoples struggling to reassert their religious rights within an environment of "due process, federal and state statutes, and administrative policies." Here we take a case study, the Big Horn Medicine Wheel, and examine the problem of weighing a value system based on inextricably associating a spiritual world and physical geography against a system that inherently separates the two.