Religion, law, and the land : Native Americans and the judicial interpretation of sacred land

Brown, Brian 1948- (Author).

Summary: Examining a series of court decisions made during the 1980s regarding the legal claims of several Native American tribes who attempted to protect ancestrally revered lands from development schemes by the federal government, this book looks at important questions raised about the religious status of land. The tribes used the First Amendment right of free exercise of religion as the basis of their claim, since governmental action threatened to alter the land which served as the primordial sacred reality without which their derivative religious practices would be meaningless. Brown argues that a constricted notion of religion on the part of the courts, combined with a pervasive cultural predisposition towards land as private property, marred the Constitutional analysis of the courts to deprive the Native American plaintiffs of religious liberty.

Record details

ISBN: 0313309728
ISBN: 9780313309724
Physical Description: print
viii, 199 pages ; 24 cm.
Publisher: Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1999.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 191-192) and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

Sequoyah v. Tennessee Valley Authority: The Tellico Dam and the Submersion of Cherokee Sacred Homeland -- Cherokee Legal Arguments -- TVA Response -- Decision of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee and Appeal to the Sixth Circuit -- Badoni v. Higginson: Navajo Religion, National Monuments, and the Colorado River -- Response of the District Court -- Response of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals -- Wilson v. Block: Skiing the Slopes of a Sacred Mountain -- Response of the District Court -- On Appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit -- Decision of the Court of Appeals -- Frank Fools Crow et al. v. Tony Gullet et al.: State Tourism on Sacred Land -- Analysis and Decisions of the Federal District Court -- On Appeal to the Eighth Circuit -- Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association: The Supreme Court and the Triumph of Property over Religion -- Decision of the U.S. District Court -- Decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit -- Decision of the United States Supreme Court.