Teaching with Native American Religions for Social Justice

This roundtable asks two primary questions: how can we nurture greater respect, more nuanced understanding, more care-full critical thought, and deeper community engagement in teaching on Native American and Indigenous religious traditions? Secondly, how can theories and methods from Native American and Indigenous studies offer critical interventions to responsible pedagogy, making any course in religious studies more responsive to questions of social justice? We seek to shift the focus from probing Indigenous religious traditions themselves, to critically understanding the relationship between Indigenous religions, power, and justice. This involves reassessing misguided colonial attempts to categorize Indigenous religious practices and considering Indigenous contestations and engagements with these approaches. In other words, how might teaching with Native American religious traditions, rather than just about them, be an occasion for better understanding the history and formation of settler colonial societies, and for imagining and enacting more respectful relationships with Indigenous peoples, places, and knowledges?