Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places offers an excellent example of how scholars can illuminate indigenous cultures while avoiding either ethnocentrism or essentialism. In sixteen chapters divided into four parts (corresponding to the East, South, North, and West of the United States), Peter Nabokov leads the reader on a well-executed tour of selected Native American sacred places. His aim: “to establish the pre-Christian origins of religion in North America, to give readers a sense of the diversity of American Indian spiritual practices by focusing on beliefs related to different American environments, to remind them of the profound affection and affiliation that many Indians felt and still feel toward this American earth and to illustrate the persistence of those beliefs, practices and feelings against great odds” (xi).

The book is enriched by Nabokov's decades-long experience traveling the country, visiting sacred places, meeting tribal leaders and ordinary folks. In so doing, the author (Professor of American Indian Studies and World Arts and Cultures at UCLA) avoids shoehorning indigenous spiritual practices into an inapt Eurocentric model of religions. Focusing on the lives of sixteen tribal communities, he scrupulously avoids generalizing their encounters with the sacred in situ as instances of a romanticized “Native religious experience” or transcendental nature mysticism. A special contribution of the book is its treatment of tribes in the East — Penobscot, Ojibwa, Choctaw, and Eastern Cherokee — which are often overlooked in law-based analyses of sacred places in favor of tribes in the southwestern and western United States, whose sacred geography has triggered much high-profile litigation.

Less successful, from this reader's point of view, is Nabokov's organizing schema, which assigns to each of the four geographical coordinates a landmark case in the federal jurisprudence of Indian sacred sites. Coming at the close of each major part and preceded by three other stories of sacred places, these four cases, decided between 1980 and 1988, form a sort of canon of “Native American religions and the law” literature for the years before congressional and executive action conferred meaningful rights of religious freedom. The canon culminates in the U.S. Supreme Court case, Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, holding there is no right under the Free Exercise Clause to engage in religiously-motivated conduct on public lands.

Nabokov successfully unites the threads of these four cases by his critique of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 (AIRFA). Each case illustrates the tragic consequences for Native practitioners of a mere sense-of-Congress resolution endorsing respect for Indian spiritual practices. However, since approximately 1990, a series of congressional acts have addressed some of the limitations of “toothless” AIRFA (as the Act's congressional sponsor called it). They include, for all religious adherents, the federally-applicable Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, as well as numerous legislative acts specific to American Indians. Among the latter are those that mandate that federal project managers consult with affected tribes; provide for protection of Indian burials on federal land and require the return of remains and grave goods from federally-funded museums; make traditional cultural sites eligible for the federal Register of Historic Places; and amend AIRFA to allow sacramental peyote use. In addition, in 1996, President Clinton promulgated a still-effective executive order calling on federal agencies to accommodate tribal access to and use of sacred sites.

While it is beyond the scope of this admirable book to address this sea-change in federal law — which, in its patch-work and politically-based form, still does not provide the kind of comprehensive, reliable protection of sacred places that a constitutional right might — the omission of this welter of law in any sustained way gives the book a curiously dated quality that undercuts the impact of its superb story-telling. Thus, when Nabokov informs the reader, at the end of his final chapter, on the 1988 Lyng decision, “Successive federal and state laws in 1991 and 2001 tightened protection of Indian sacred places on federal lands” (295), the reader is left to wonder what those dates signify, and may have the false impression that significant legislation was passed only in 1991 and 2001. Nabokov does mention some of the salient legal developments occurring after his quadrilogy of cases ( xvii referencing amendments to the National Historic Preservation Act and Clinton's executive order), but he does so only in passing. Readers interested in a fuller picture of Indian religious freedom today would do well to consult Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law (2005).

At its best, however, Where the Lightning Strikes lights up the landscape of American Indian sacred places like few other books. The author's easy erudition, sensitivity to cultural differences and the vitality of indigenous communities, intelligent selection of material, and years of field experience, deployed in a lucid and compelling writing-style, easily allow its recommendation to anyone interested in learning how “the diversity of native heritages and the complexities of Indian-white relations … still echo in their own backyards” (Pp. xvii).