In The Gods of Indian Country, Jennifer Graber presents a history of Kiowa resistance to the U.S. conquest of the southern plains with a focus on spiritual belief, ceremonial practice, and religion. The spine of Graber's story is about the continuing development of Kiowa belief systems through the era of colonialism, during which Kiowas sought connection “to sacred power, the land, and each other” through ritual, ceremony, and other spirit practice (122). Graber makes her case with an impressive array of sources, including not only standard archival documents (some of them authored by Kiowas) but also Kiowa ledger drawings and sai-cut, or calendars, artistic renderings by contemporary Kiowas of key events in those years.
Graber begins her story in the early nineteenth century. She discusses, somewhat briefly, Kiowa medicine bundles, which were original to Kiowa spiritual practice. But throughout the first half of the book, the Sun Dance is the Kiowa ceremony that dominates. A ceremonial, communal gathering held annually in most cases, the Sun Dance was a gift to Kiowas from Crow neighbors during their earlier tenure on the northern plains. Graber emphasizes the ceremony's continuities over time. She strives to show how Kiowas continually imbricated or augmented the Sun Dance and the medicine bundle with new innovations. Alongside the Sun Dance, Kiowas received new spirit teachings through visions and dreams, and painted symbols of their meaning on lodge skins and shields. They took power through sacred stones. They consulted with water spirits. In other cases, they introduced new practices regarding traditional objects. Thus bundle owners, who traditionally bequeathed medicine bundles to relatives upon their death, might pass them along to family members while still living, in hopes that the power of the bundle might protect the younger generation in the era of bloodshed, epidemic, and crisis that was the nineteenth century. But the main impression Graber leaves is that the Sun Dance persisted as the central communal gathering and spiritual expression of the Kiowa community into the reservation era.
The treatment of spirit and ceremony is more detailed and nuanced in the book's second half, perhaps because the sources are better for this period. Here, Graber situates Kiowa ceremony opposite the aggressive evangelism of American missionaries. Perhaps Christian evangelism was always inflected with military force, but it became especially so with President Ulysses S. Grant's Peace Policy from 1868–76. The essence of the policy was to place Indian reservations under the management of Christian churches. Instead of civilians appointed by the White House, Quaker, Episcopalian, and even Catholic missionaries would be entrusted with tribal administration and the task of bringing Indians into “civilization.”
Graber's detailed treatment of the American conquest captures its complexity, with missionaries being less a united front than competing, even hostile camps. She is especially interested in how Catholic missionaries angled to expand their limited presence in the West and to solidify their position as agents of God and the U.S. government in Indian country, against the consistent hostility of Protestant rivals. Ostensibly, the Peace Policy was new because it removed Indian reservations from the patronage and graft associated with the Indian Office. But because it brought with it an enhanced rigidity to reservation boundaries—any Indians venturing outside reservations thereby became “hostiles”—the policy brought far more war than peace.
Graber includes many examples of Kiowas’ continuing devotion to their traditional ways during this period, but also some examples of their response to missionaries that suggest they were seeking to reverse the flow of religious instruction. In one such example, a Kiowa leader, after inviting a Quaker missionary to disassemble his shield and handle the sacred items within, concludes that henceforth the missionary “would be safe from bullets and arrows from those who did not trust him” (104). Did such efforts reshape missionary understandings? Missionaries dismissed practically all Kiowa ceremony as “heathenism,” reserving the word “religion” for Christian practice. Yet in 1878, missionary and Indian agent James Haworth cautioned his superiors about the need to respect Kiowas’ “traditional religious belief” regarding their kinship with bison (136). Although Graber does not always assess the significance of such moments, they appear occasionally throughout the book and raise fascinating questions about the ways in which Indians deployed spirit power to reach out to Americans.
The Peace Policy ended in 1877. Thereafter, Indian policy turned toward rapid assimilation via allotment of reservations and the transfer of “excess” lands to settlers, a project that ostensibly would force individual Indians to become self-sufficient, capitalist farmers.
The pace of Graber's story advances here, as reservation confinement seems to have brought Kiowas to explore new spiritual and ceremonial forms. Continuing dedication to the Sun Dance combined with new ritual innovations to restore bison. At the same time, some began to explore Christianity. Warriors imprisoned at Fort Marion, Florida in the 1870s were required to attend church services, and two even opted for extra instruction in New York, ultimately returning to Oklahoma as Episcopal deacons. Meanwhile, on the reservation, others became intrigued with Bible instruction and camp meetings. Simultaneously, Kiowas began to experiment with peyote devotions, a new form of ceremony and belief that spread across Oklahoma reservations.
Officials, of course, were not sanguine about all these developments. Encouraged as they were by the increasing number of Kiowa Christians, they were still aggravated by the continuing appeal of the Sun Dance and outraged by peyote practice, which they saw as nature worship. (They also believed peyote to be a narcotic, which it is not.) Peyote proved impossible to stop, but missionary proscriptions took a toll: Kiowas held their last Sun Dance in 1890.
That same year, Oklahoma was swept by the Ghost Dance, or Feather Dance, as Kiowas called it—the primary ceremonial expression of a movement that promised a renewed, Indian earth and reunion with departed relatives. As Graber shows, Kiowas themselves did not necessarily see all these spiritual observances as exclusive or unrelated. For example, one Fiqi, or “Eater,” recounted that in his Ghost Dance visions, he encountered not only deceased family members, but also Jesus. As reservation boundaries hardened, religious innovations seemed to proliferate, in ways that the “friends of the Indian” could not control.
The fight over allotment culminated in the 1890s, and Kiowas overwhelmingly resisted it, appealing both to Christian teaching and native spirits in their protests. In the end, it was forced upon them: most of their land vanished in a 1901 land run. Kiowas found themselves with no reservation, and faced a future without official recognition of their tribal identity. Nonetheless, Graber concludes, “The gods of Indian Country would continue to play a crucial role in their ongoing communal life” (200).
Despite this abrupt ending, Graber's book captures the continuing ritual innovation and the quest for spiritual power in an era that saw the collapse of Kiowa autonomy. With a diverse source base and close attention to Kiowa voices, The Gods of Indian Country provides a model history of Indian people seeking spiritual assistance in navigating American expansionism.
