We Have a Religion in Retrospect

Tisa Wenger

October 23, 2025

Who gets to decide when a practice or a tradition can count as religious? What is at stake in that designation? To what extent is the very idea of religion a European imposition onto other cultures and traditions? How does this category as it operates in the United States reflect and impose Christian standards for what religion should be? And, what happens when Indigenous and colonized peoples claim and redefine the category of religion for themselves? These questions animated my first book, We Have a Religion: The Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and remain central to my work today.

We Have a Religion showed how labeling something as religion can impact the daily lives of people, especially those like the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico who have managed to survive under colonial rule. Its key questions grew out of my graduate studies at Princeton, where several mentors shaped the direction of my research. Albert Raboteau’s scholarship and teaching on race and religion in the colonial Atlantic world helped me think in new ways about my childhood as a missionary kid. Living and working in Swaziland (now eSwatini), my parents had wondered out loud about their role in a region fractured by apartheid and by the geopolitical inequalities forged by past and present empires. 

As an Americanist, I wanted to think about related problematics within the United States. A seminar with Davíd Carrasco and a small cohort of graduate students working on the Southwest led me to focus on New Mexico, a place with multiple layers of colonial history, where US empire was a relatively late arrival. (With the help of settler colonial and Indigenous studies, I would soon come to see the United States as always having been an empire, with Native American nations as colonized nations consigned to internal colonies better known as reservations.) And finally, the critical questions of the book could not have taken shape without Leigh Schmidt, who helped me connect the themes of race, colonialism, and missions with emerging debates about the category of religion and the cultural history of the study of religion.

What would I do differently if I were writing We Have a Religion today? An early reviewer pointed out that the book concludes with a very broad discussion about the ongoing problem of religious freedom for Native Americans but does not follow the story of the Pueblo Indians into the present. No doubt that absence reflects my own failures in research and imagination. But it also hints at the siloing of academic fields and the marginality of Native American studies in many universities at the time. Although ample scholarship then already demonstrated the importance of centering contemporary Indigenous voices, I was not directed towards it while I was working on the dissertation that would become this book. I hope that such an absence would no longer be possible, in religious studies or in any other field.

Some of these connections developed along the way. The gift of a postdoctoral research fellowship at Southern Methodist University’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies introduced me to interdisciplinary conversations in Southwest studies, borderlands studies, and Indigenous studies. Eventually I reached out to the leading Pueblo historian Joe Sando (Jemez), who had by then retired from his longtime position as director of the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque and generously read the unrevised manuscript. Sando upended my thinking on how to tell this story. In no uncertain terms he informed me that I was making a mistake common to non-Indian historians—including some who had previously written on the Pueblos—who always seemed to foreground White perspectives and only later added in Native voices. This structure granted too much prominence to colonial distortions, including lurid allegations about supposed sexual immorality in the Pueblo ceremonies that had circulated in the 1920s. Whatever my intentions and however sophisticated my theoretical framework might be, some readers could stop there and never hear from the Pueblo people who had rebutted these charges at the time. Sando’s feedback essentially led me to turn my structure inside out, so that Pueblo voices became much more prominent in every chapter and in the whole book.  

In the past two decades, the fields of Native American and Indigenous studies have created new methods and theories that could have deepened my arguments. Excellent new scholarship in Pueblo history has appeared. Andrea McComb Sanchez’s new book Of Corn and Catholicism (University of Nebraska Press, 2025), for example, provides a richly textured account of how the Pueblos decided to incorporate Catholicism into their own ceremonial lives. More broadly, recent work in Indigenous studies explicitly pushes back against the assumed universality of colonial frameworks of knowledge and calls for Native epistemologies to be centered in research on Native people. With the benefit of this newer work, I could have deepened and extended my arguments about the coloniality of the category of religion and its complexities for Pueblo people. Moving further, to consider how Pueblo people have made and remade their own worlds over time, would require deep and sustained ties to Pueblo communities that an Indigenous scholar may be best positioned to cultivate. 

Knowledge is always situated, and good scholarship is an art as well as a discipline. Like mine, any scholar’s motivating questions reflect their own identities, experiences, and commitments. These questions can often lead to novel sources and generate new insights that address current problems in an academic field. In the process, serendipitous encounters and juxtapositions can lead to new ways of seeing the history we study. The sources we locate—material, ethnographic, literary, or archival—are never neutral. All are generated for specific purposes and reflect their creators’ points of view. Nor can they be dismissed or ignored. Following their lead can take a project in unexpected directions. We Have a Religion benefited from many such fortuitous juxtapositions, making it (like any book) a product of its time and of all the people who helped me understand more deeply along the way.