A History of Suppression Behind the Caution

United States federal policy actively suppressed Native American religious practice for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including outright legal prohibition of many ceremonies under policies that remained in force in various forms until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 and subsequent legal protections began to formally recognize Native religious practice as protected rather than criminalized, a suppression that ran alongside and reinforced broader federal policies of forced assimilation, including removal of children to boarding schools explicitly designed to eliminate indigenous language and religious identity. This documented history of active, legally enforced suppression is part of why contemporary scholarly and museum practice increasingly treats questions of who may describe, display or discuss specific Native American ceremonial and prayer material as questions requiring direct engagement with the specific nations and communities concerned rather than as settled by outside academic or editorial judgment alone. This entry's general, descriptive approach, and the more specific but still carefully bounded entries elsewhere in this atlas for individual Native American traditions, reflect an attempt to take that history and its ongoing consequences seriously rather than treating Native American religious material as freely available source text.