Crow Jesus: Personal Stories of Native Religious Belonging

Mark Clatterbuck (editor) & Jace Weaver (Foreword by)

ISBN 10: 0806155876 / ISBN 13: 9780806155876

Published by University of Oklahoma Press 2017-02-28, 2017

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-IUK-9780806155876

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Crow Jesus: Personal Stories of Native Religious Belonging
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press 2017-02-28
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0806155876
• ISBN 13: 9780806155876
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Crow Christianity speaks in many voices, and in the pages of Crow Jesus, these voices tell a complex story of Christian faith and Native tradition combining and reshaping each other to create a new and richly varied religious identity. In this collection of narratives, fifteen members of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation in southeastern Montana and three non-Native missionaries to the reservation describe how Christianity has shaped their lives, their families, and their community through the years.

Among the speakers are elders and young people, women and men, pastors and laypeople, devout traditionalists and skeptics of the indigenous cultural way. Taken together, the narratives reveal the startling variety and sharp contradictions that exist in Native Christian devotion among Crows today, from Pentecostal Peyotists to Sun-Dancing Catholics to tongues-speaking Baptists in the sweat lodge. Editor Mark Clatterbuck also offers a historical overview of Christianity’s arrival, growth, and ongoing influence in Crow Country, with special attention to Christianity’s relationship to traditional ceremonies and indigenous ways of seeing the world.

In Crow Jesus, Clatterbuck explores contemporary Native Christianity by listening as indigenous voices narrate their own stories on their own terms. His collection tells the larger story of a tribe that has adopted Christian beliefs and practices in such a way that simple, unqualified designations of religious belonging—whether “Christian” or “Sun Dancer” or “Peyotist”—are seldom, if ever, adequate.

About the Authors

Mark Clatterbuck is Associate Professor of Religion at Montclair State University and the author of Demons, Saints, and Patriots: Catholic Visions of Native America. He lives with his family in the Susquehanna River Hills of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Jace Weaver is Franklin Professor of Native American Studies and Religion at the University of Georgia. He is the author of The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927.