I write these words from my office at Gonzaga University on the unceded traditional and current homelands of the Spokane Tribe of Indians. I begin my review with this note of place because, as Suzanne Crawford O'Brien and Inés Talamantez make clear in their innovative textbook, Religion and Culture in Native America, place matters. I, and they, in this clearly place-based text, mean this in several ways. First, religion and culture in Native America are deeply place-based, emerging and practiced in relation to specific places, specific lands (and waters), specific ecosystems. Second, emphasizing place encourages readers to recognize the diversity and plurality of Native American communities, locating different cultures and nations in particular sites rather than treating them as an abstract whole. Third, foregrounding land and place requires readers to recognize the material realities of the colonial history that has shaped and continues to shape Native American cultures, religions, and identities.

Each of these considerations forms important elements of O'Brien's and Talamantez's text, which is a welcome addition to the existing resources for the study of Native American religions and cultures. Immediately upon opening the book, I was struck by its organizational structure: chapters are titled “Practical Reverence, Radical Reciprocity,” “Earth,” “Climate and Conservation,” “Water,” “Food,” “Medicine,” “Gender and Sexuality,” and “Christianity.” The titles clearly mark this as a work striving to emphasize Indigenous categories of significance, rather than following European, typically Christian, based expectations for what is religiously important. And this attention to reorienting readers to what it might mean to study religion in a Native American context is a central strength of this book. The introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the term religion itself, and its appropriateness and limitations for considering Indigenous cultural forms given its entanglements with imperial and colonial ideologies. Drawing lessons from Indigenous pedagogy and theory, the authors propose to emphasize a holistic, place-based perspective and a commitment to “relational responsibility” and decolonization. Among the methods that they use to achieve this goal is their use of a diversity of Indigenous sources, exhibiting both commonality and variety across indigenous communities and across time, and maps that accompany each chapter indicating the geographical locations where the examples and sources discussed in the chapter are situated.

The authors carefully ground their textbook in history, outlining the impact of historical colonial encounters. An important part of this history, of course, is the relationship between Christianity and colonialism, between Christian-reinforced power and transformations of this land and the cultures and communities Indigenous to it. The final chapter address is this topic directly, exploring the complexity of Native American Christianity and the relationship of Christianity to Native America in the past and the present. And here, too, is one of the important pedagogical strengths of this book: although history clearly matters in this text, Native America is rightfully not left in the past as it so often can be in American popular cultural representation. The authors highlight current issues and the effect of ongoing colonial structures on the practice (and study) of religion in Native America. Students will learn that Native America is a present-day concern, shaped by a complicated past, that is related to religion, politics, economy, and land.

O'Brien, who is a non-Native professor of religion at Pacific Lutheran University, has made a strong choice to be guided by her mentor, the late Inés Talamantez (Mescalero Apache and Chicana), who was an influential professor of Native American religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their intentional use of Indigenous scholarship to direct its form and content make this textbook an excellent choice for introductory courses on religion and culture in Native America.