In Peyote Road, Thomas Maroukis offers a meticulously researched, detailed, and helpful narrative history of perhaps the most significant and lengthy struggle for religious freedom in U.S. history. For more than a century, Native Americans of various tribal affiliations who participate in the Peyote tradition, a ceremonial tradition and ethical system revolving around the sacramental ingestion of the Peyote cactus button, have faced intensive efforts on the part of missionaries, government agencies, attorneys general, and even other Native Americans to denigrate, suppress, and even criminalize the practice. The controversy, of course, stems from what scientists refer to as the hallucinogenic effect, however mild, of ingested Peyote, and from the late nineteenth century, Peyote has been regarded with suspicion, and later legally classified as a “drug.” By contrast, practitioners regard Peyote not as a substance with chemical properties, but a sacramental presence, referring to it as “medicine,” “healer,” and “teacher.” Peyote worship, we learn, is a highly disciplined and controlled ceremonial affair involving careful arrangement of sacred space, cycles of music and prayer, and more music and more prayer, and embodying and promoting an ethical way of life. Indeed, practitioners have long spoken of the Peyote Road as a crucial path toward addressing, not promoting, substance abuse.

While Peyote has long been a ceremonial medicine for indigenous peoples in what is now Mexico, Maroukis's focus is on the emergence of the intertribal religious movement that swept north from the Southern Plains and captured the religious imaginations of many Comanche, Navajo, Ho-chunk (Winnebago), and Lakota/Dakota Sioux in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. These were difficult years for American Indian communities that were suffering catastrophic loss of land, buffalo, and livelihood. It was also an era of formal assimilation policy: the break-up of communal lands and kin networks, forced boarding school educations, and the discouragement and even criminalization of cultural practices, especially religious practices, that were deemed inimical to “civilization.”

But Maroukis's shows that the struggle to outlaw Peyotism, like the struggle to practice it, was complex. Some of the more vocal and organized early opposition to Peyote surprisingly came from educated American Indian figures like Dakota writers Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala Sa) and physician Charles (Ohiyesa) Eastman. And the Navajo tribal government formally prohibited Peyotism on the reservation. And although Native Peyotists like Albert Helmsley were remarkably resourceful in their own right as they tried to answer these challenges before Congress and in state houses, anthropologists like James Mooney and Weston LaBarre played key advisory roles in successfully preventing, at the federal level anyway, successful passage of any anti-Peyote legislation at the federal level.

Indeed it was the effort to seek religious freedom protection by incorporating the Peyote community as “the Native American Church,” first in Oklahoma in 1918 and later elsewhere, that makes this story so remarkable, not just for the resourcefulness of these legal moves, but for the inadequacy of their protection through the twentieth century under the discourse of religious freedom. Even when some courts upheld Peyotists' rights against state and local laws, others did not. And as recently as 1990, when the U.S. Supreme Court in Employment Division, State of Oregon v. Smith upheld application of state drug laws in a workers compensation dispute concerning card carrying members of the Native American Church. The good news is that because Congress in 1994 amended its American Indian Religious Freedom Act to explicitly protect ceremonial Peyote use by members of federally recognized tribes, the Peyote Road no longer faces obvious legal roadblocks.

Clearly there is no shortage of book length treatments on the Peyote tradition and these struggles, notably Omer Stewart's and more recently, Carolyn Long's discussion of the story behind and through the 1990 Supreme Court case, Religious Freedom and the Indian Rights: The Case of Oregon v. Smith (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000), and Reuben Snake and Huston Smith's One Nation under God: The Triumph of the Native American Church (Santa Fe, N.M.: Clear Light, 1996). Still Maroukis makes a welcome contribution to this literature in several respects. First, he brings a long story up to date, including the 1994 Congressional amendment to and exploring the ecological and international challenges to the harvest and supply of Peyote buttons from the Peyote Gardens of the Texas borderlands. Secondly, he draws on the best of scholarship by Omer Stewart and others while elaborating on it through careful research in the papers of those scholars and in government transcripts of congressional hearings, official correspondence, and various Native American Church documents gathered resourcefully together. Finally, because he goes into greater archival detail than any of the other books with a rather light interpretive touch, he delivers a one stop shopping book, filled with Peyotists' voices, and in this does a real service to those who wish to fashion further interpretations of the movement.

But this reader would have welcomed more such analysis to help make even more sense of a well told story. Maroukis persuasively argues that the Peyote Road could make sense to so many Native people from various tribal and linguistic contexts because it conformed to the idiom and texture of their tribe specific traditions, but no equally developed analytical argument attends to the spirited opposition to the Peyote way among others in those communities, including “traditionalists.” I wish Maroukis would go into finer grained analysis on such questions he poses about whether incorporation as the Native American Church was sincerely Christian or only strategically so. Finally, because it came out probably while Maroukis's book was in press, I do not fault him for failing to note Tisa Wenger's We Have a Religion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), a study of the Pueblo Dance controversies of the 1920s that examines similar, and similarly complex, Native American claims to legal protection of ceremonial and cultural practices as “religion.” But given what we learn of the long haul of the Peyotist's struggle to practice their tradition, and especially given their repeated experience of religious freedom as one more empty American promise, it is more than a quibble to want to hear what Maroukis thinks about how the legal and political discourse of “religious freedom” functions to delimit the very possibilities it ostensibly opens up for the traditions of marginalized people.