discontinue their practices, which are not only without benefit to them but positively
injurious to them.???2
Religious offenses on the reservations were later codified by the Commissioner of
Indian Affairs, Thomas J. Morgan, in 1892 in his “Rules for Indian Courts,??? whereby he established a series of criminal offenses aimed at Native American religious practices.
He wrote:
Dances—Any Indian who shall engage in the sun dance, scalp dance, or war
dance, or any similar feast, so called, shall be guilty of an offense, and upon
conviction thereof shall be punished for the first offense by with holding of his
rations for not exceeding ten days or by imprisonment for not exceeding ten
days; for any subsequent offense under this clause he shall be punished by
withholding his rations for not less than ten days nor more than thirty days, or
by imprisonment for not less than ten days nor more than thirty days.
Medicine men—Any Indian who shall engage in the practices of so-called
medicine men, or who shall resort to any artifice or device to keep the Indians of
the reservation from adopting and following civilized habits and pursuits, or
shall use any arts of conjurer to prevent Indians from abandoning their barbarous
rites and customs, shall be deemed guilty of an offense, and upon conviction
thereof, for the first offense shall be imprisoned for not less than ten days and not
more than thirty days: Provided that, for subsequent conviction for such offense
the maximum term or imprisonment shall not exceed six months.3
These laws not only abrogate First Amendment rights in a conscious and well-documented policy of religious oppression, they also reveal a systematic attempt on the part of highly placed government officials to stamp out Native American religious practices. They also represent a determined policy to reconstruct Native religions in conformity with dominant Protestant majority values in a myopic vision of what constitutes “civilized??? religious behavior. Such policy is found consistently in the Annual Reports of many commissioners of Indian Affairs from the creation of the office in 1832 through the appointment of John Collier in 1934. 4
These oppressive policies can be traced through the writings of not only the
Indian commissioners and other heads of state who managed Indian affairs such as
various secretaries of state (after 1849) as well as various secretaries of war (1824—48), to an even earlier policy, that of the 1819 Indian Civilization Fund Act, the primary intent of which was to create a fund to reform and “civilize??? Indian peoples in accordance with alien cultural norms imposed on them by a conquering majority
http://www.sacredland.org/resources/bibliography/Irwin.pdf
