Regarding peyote use among Native Americans, an ethnologist noted in 1891: "The ceremonial eating of the plant has become the great religious rite of all tribes of the southern plains." But, as Lisa D. Barnett observes in Peyote Politics: The Making of the Native American Church, 1880-1937, Peyotism quickly came under scrutiny, with opponents, both non-Native and Native, seeking to prohibit the religious practice by transforming peyote into a narcotic, thereby drawing Indigenous people into the emerging racialized campaign against drugs. A history of the rise of Peyotism and the Native American Church from the 1880s to the 1930s, Barnett's work details the ensuing struggle and its significance in reshaping Peyotists' identity as "Native" and "American" and establishing their place in the American political and legal systems. Barnett describes the strategies of resistance that Peyotists employed against opponents of their religious practice, including incorporating in 1918 as the Native American Church. In doing so, they secured their religious freedom but also formed a new, hybrid cultural sense of "Native American" that emphasized the reality of honoring both Native identity and American identity on the path to citizenship status. Placing the story of Peyotism within the broader historical context of federal Indian policy and Progressive Era politics, Peyote Politics shows how, despite their minority status in the American religious landscape, Peyotists were determined to secure constitutional protections for their religion and its rituals. Through their tireless efforts to protect their religion within the legal and political system, these Native Americans, many of whom were not yet American citizens, proved to be the true proponents of the constitutional idea of religious freedom.
Lisa D. Barnett is Assistant Professor of American Religious History at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
"Lisa D. Barnett demystifies the practice of Peyotism without disparaging its adherents. The use and spread of peyote among Native American peoples responded to a difficult political situation in the early twentieth century. Barnett shows how Peyotism and the Native American Church fit into this vast and complicated contact zone between settler colonialism and Indigenous ways of life."-Russell Cobb, author of Ghosts of Crook County: An Oil Fortune, a Phantom Child, and the Fight for Indigenous Land "A nuanced history of the Native American Church, Peyote Politics powerfully analyzes the ways Indigenous communities have fought for religious freedom, at times employing the very tools of the settler colonial state as a means of resistance."-Suzanne Crawford O'Brien, author of Religion and Culture in Native America "In writing about peyote and the Native American Church, Lisa Barnett addresses the multiple political views of Native people, missionaries, and bureaucrats. Peyote Politics is a welcome contribution to understanding the pivotal years when many Native people forged a new religion that gave them hope in the face of twentieth-century modernity."-Donald L. Fixico (Muscogee, Seminole, Shawnee, and Sac and Fox enrolled), author of The State of Sequoyah: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Quest for an Indian State
