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Crow Jesus
Personal Stories of Native Religious Belonging
Edited by Mark Clatterbuck
Foreword by Jace Weaver
Published by: University of Oklahoma Press
Imprint: University of Oklahoma Press
280 Pages | 6 x 9 | 26 b&w illus.
$29.95
$26.95
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.
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.
“Firmly grounded in the author’s extensive fieldwork and informed by a deep understanding of Crow Agency’s social, political, and spiritual contours, this absorbing discussion will decisively shift our understanding of contemporary Crow religious belief.”—Clyde Ellis, coauthor of The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, and Indian Hymns
“This timely and original work showcases modern Crow Christianity’s complicated and multifaceted realities. Clatterbuck’s interviews with Crow Nation members give us one of the clearest pictures of how ordinary Native Christians practice and understand their religious identity.”—Angela Tarango, author of Choosing the Jesus Way: Native American Pentecostals and the Fight for the Indigenous Principle