By Linda Benally | November 13, 2024 | News
Washington, DC
From the shadow to public consciousness into the light. With the crispness of a new day and the light shining bright, Indian Country reflects on the federal policies and actions that led, in part, to the AIRFA 1994 Amendments.
On November 18, 2024 at the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, DC Terry Dayish (Navajo), NAC-SNM member and NACNA Editor, will serve on a panel with Jon Brady (MHA), NACNA President and their co-officers. The Native American Church of North America (NACNA) leadership will share policy recommendations to strengthen the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) and offer viewpoints regarding Congressional oversight and measurable Trust obligations and standards related to AIRFA.
Editor Dayish’s briefing will build on congressional testimony from June 2022 at which time he testified about measures needed for (1) access to private land where Peyote grows wild; (2) Peyote habitat protection to prevent habitat destruction from land development and root-plowing, and (3) enforcement of AIRFA 1978 and 1994.
Current day impacts of federal policy in Indian Country.
During the Indian Boarding School Era, US federal policy authorized the forced dispossession of Indian land, assimilation of Indian children, destruction of tribal identity, and the dissolving of Indian families. Native communities were devastated by “federal policies [that] were set out to break us, obtain our territories, and destroy our cultures and our lifeways,” said Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland (Ojibwe).[1] This intergenerational trauma reverberates today.
Federal policy in the 2020’s resulted in a comprehensive report examining the historical and current day impacts of federal Indian boarding school policies in the United States. For the first time in the history of the United States, the federal government is accounting for its role in operating historical Indian boarding schools that forcibly confined and attempted to assimilate Indigenous children. Editor Dayish notes that “AIRFA and the investigative report addresses the historical injustices faced by native communities and advances healing and cultural renewal.”
The NAC of Oklahoma, Inc. 1918 is a stronghold.
In this horrific period of attempts of Native American cultural erasure, tribal nations persevered and fought to retain their culture, including indigenous language, ceremonies and indigenous traditional knowledge. To navigate these challenging times in tribal communities, statesmen from the Cheyenne, Otoe, Ponca, Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, and Arapaho Indian Nations gathered in Calumet, Oklahoma to sign a charter of incorporation for the “Native American Church,” determining a legal definition for their way of life that was recognized by the state government. The Native American Church of Oklahoma is the architect of the framework deployed to protect the Peyote sacrament.
NAC-SNM President Leo Dayish said, “the challenge historically has been getting the government to understand the sacredness of the Peyote and its tradition and ceremony to American Indians, further exacerbated by the government telling native people what was best for us.”[2] At the NAC of Oklahoma’s 100th Anniversary commemoration held on October 10, 2018, Charlie Haag, then NAC of Oklahoma president, praised those “who had the foresight to create a document so that we could sit down and talk to God the way the rest of society understands it.”[3]
What does this history have to do with the AIRFA?
The Boarding School Era underpinned stripping indigenous children of their language and ceremonies. Additionally, there were broader federal attempts to wipe out Native American culture in the tribal communities and family units. As a move towards redress of the wrongness of these federal policies, Congress enacted the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 (1978 Act), which stated a new and different federal policy:
It shall be the policy of the United States to protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religions of the American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut and Native Hawaiians including but not limited to access to sacred sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and freedom to worship through ceremonials and traditional rites.
The 1978 Act was amended on October 6, 1994 such that the United States or any states shall not prohibit the traditional use of Peyote for bona fide ceremonial purposes in connection with the practice of a traditional Indian way of life.
The work endures.
In modernity, tribal Nations face challenges to: (1) traditional medicine security; (2) protection of indigenous knowledge, and (3) access to sacred sites, including medicinal plants’ natural habitat. The goal is to achieve “equity in accessing federal conservation programs that could incentivize public private partnerships to protect culturally irreplaceable landscapes,” said NACNA President Brady. Newland urged ongoing efforts saying, “we must bring every resource to bear to strengthen what they could not destroy. It is critical that this work endures, and that federal, state and Tribal governments build on the important work accomplished as part of the Boarding School Initiative.”
Religious freedom for Native people is never freely given. It must be demanded, fought for, then vigilantly protected is a statement by Walter Echohawk that befits the work of the NAC community, said Leathan Dayish, NAC-SNM Vice-President. He continued, “we thank all who have vigilantly defended this way of life—there are many luminaries across Indian Country.”
Apropos that the AIRFA congressional briefing will be held in The Kennedy Caucus Room—noted as one of the grandest and most historic rooms in the nation’s capital. The Room is named after three Kennedy brothers: John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Edward M. Kennedy—to honor the spirit of compassion and compromise, the fierce advocacy and tender friendship that they brought to the Senate body.
Traveling mercies.
Copyright 2024, NAC-State of New Mexico