This important book engages the ongoing struggle of Native Americans to protect the sacred, their land, and treaty rights. Michael McNally recognizes how the term religion as a western category has failed Native Americans through law by not fully interpreting the complexities of Indigenous religions. Nevertheless, he argues that even though religion is a problematic term, it remains useful, especially if “imagined capaciously as an Indigenous collective right keyed to the collective nation-to-nation relationship [that] can carry the legal teeth of religious freedom” (xv).

What McNally proposes in his latest book on American Indigenous religions is an integrative approach wherein Native American religious claims connect with elements of federal Indian law, while Indigenous rights operate within international human rights law. He argues that not only does the language of religion still have value for Native American religious claims in law, but that sovereignty, religion, and peoplehood should be seen as...

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