The Gods of Indian Country

The Gods of Indian Country is a valuable addition to native, western, and religious studies. There are two stories here: how settler colonialism used religion to subdue and force change on the Kiowa; and, the more important story, how the Kiowa resisted, adapted, and maintained their cultural heritage. Missionaries, churches, and “friends of the Indian” groups, in partnership with the U.S. government, worked to limit Kiowa land, change Kiowa traditional hunting, and impose new cultural norms and a new religion. This was all part of the nineteenth-century savagery-to-civilization paradigm. Jennifer Graber's central focus is on how America used religion to take indigenous land. The Kiowa response to these attempts was to defend their sovereignty and their community. This volume follows her excellent The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (2011), in which she examines how Christianity and politics worked to establish America's early penal system. She uses a similar theory and methodology in both studies

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