Religion as Spirituality
Religion as Spirituality
Native Religions in Prison
This chapter considers the relative success of court decisions accommodating certain individual Native American inmates in their religious exercise in prisons, especially the sweat lodge. These cases reveal a pattern of what officials refer to as “Native American Spirituality.” In the prison cases, Native American Spirituality emerges as a term of art from corrections management, a line on the intake form for religious preference, and keyed to the language of the federal chaplaincy manual. Prison chaplaincy programs use it in an effort to articulate what's often exceptional and irreducibly diverse about Native religious traditions and to articulate what makes them so difficult to pin down. Especially insofar as the cases largely involve a triad of intertribal practices: sweat lodges, pipe ceremonies, and access to medicinal tobacco, sage, cedar, and sweetgrass.
Keywords: prison, intertribal practices, Native American Spirituality, sweat lodge, religious exercise, corrections management, federal chaplaincy, Native American inmates, spirituality, courts
Princeton Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.