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International American Studies Association |Review of International American Studies |breakthrough |IASA Emerging Scholars Fellowship Programme |the future of IASA

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The article opening the present issue is based on Paweł Jędrzejko's "Presidential Address" prepared for the audiences of the 11th World Congress of the International American Studies Association. Offering an insight into the most recent transformations of the IASA and of its journal, the Review of International American Studies, the author of the text pays homage to scholars, whose committment has proven instrumental for the development of the Organization itself, but also for the standing of the RIAS, which enjoys the status of a ranking periodical. The article, essentially historical in its assumptions, indicates the need of the adjustment of the Organization's bylaws to account for the changing academic reality in which it now functions.

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Introduction |Review of International American Studies |Sacred Spaces |North America

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The article serves as an introduction to the present issue, offering the reader an insight into the Editors' overall concept, as well as an overview of the contents of the issue's "Features" section.

The connections between the spiritual and natural world and the temporality and permanence of sacred places have found constant expression throughout the history of North America. Places of power drew ancient Indigenous peoples, who came to them to “communicate and commune with higher spiritual powers,” to use the words of Vine Deloria, Jr. They interacted with the landscape, developing a unique sense of space, building shrines, roads, mounds, and other structures. While some of these places may have been abandoned over time (some due to demographic changes before the arrival of the Europeans, others due to the forces of settler colonialism), they continue to hold spiritual meaning for contemporary Native Americans. However, Native claims to these places of power are often challenged by competing claims from the dominant society that often feels entitled to ownership of these places.

As European colonial settlement advanced, many sites sacred to the Indigenous peoples were abandoned (often forcibly), desecrated, destroyed, or left in obscurity for their own protection, only to gain new meanings within the conquering or enslaved cultures taking root. The newly arrived settlers interacted with the landscape, bringing with them their own cultural perspectives. Some of these communities settled in areas where the land’s topography and sounds reminded them of their homelands, and they named them accordingly. The settlers’ religious institutions often played a significant role in the establishment of their communities, producing “shrines and sacred sites discerned by the occupying people” (to borrow Deloria’s words again), from the colonial era through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. As the occupation of the land by the newcomers continued, places of worship and reverence developed and were layered over those that came before them. The landscape then became a visual record of the various expressions of the diverse cultures. Thus, we see the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City rising from the grounds which were once occupied by Tenochtitlán’s sacred pyramids, or the likenesses of US presidents carved into the granite face of the Paha Sapa (Black Hills), sacred to the Lakota and the Tsistsistas (Cheyenne) people.

The questions surrounding ownership and authenticity point to problems inherent in the term “sacred” and, although the title of this issue of RIAS is “Sacred Spaces in North America,” that concept can be misleading as the Western tradition tends to define the “sacred” in opposition to the “profane” or secular. The articles included here aim to broaden the understanding of these and other terms by approaching “sacredness” from a wide range of disciplinary and conceptual approaches to examine the temporality and permanence of the ancient and the modern, the contested definitions of sacredness with their legal and political ramifications, or the questions of cultural appropriation of the Indigenous sacred in art and entertainment, inviting their consideration across the vastness of North America.

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Sacred Spaces |Funeral Traditions |Potlatch |Yukon First Nations

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In Canada, Yukon First Nations are politically powerful and, when viewed by an outsider, everything appears to be progressing well. But the adoption of the Western political model has a downside. We have generally sacrificed our culture for that political power. The loss of our culture has resulted in many social problems and this essay discusses what has resulted from those problems, specifically our high death rate. Ironically, our death ritual, the Potlatch, is one of the strongest surviving cultural traditions we still exercise, while our languages, laws, art, lifestyle, and spirituality are almost all forgotten.

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Chaco Canyon |Chacoan roads |archaeology of religion |Southwestern archaeology

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This paper considers the topic of sacred spaces in North America through the vantage offered by Chacoan roads, monumental avenues constructed by Ancestral Four Corners people of the US Southwest from ca. AD 850-1200. I begin with a critique of the concept of the “sacred” as applied to the Chacoan past, suggesting instead that the Indigenous North American concept of power (in the sense of potent, generative force infused throughout the environment) offers a more culturally relevant framing. Next, I present three examples of locations along Chacoan roads that I argue were recognized as places of power due to the inherent landscape affordances of these locales. I close by briefly describing some of the practices carried out along Chacoan roads and drawing a connection between the understanding of “sacredness” evidenced through the archaeology of Chacoan roads and contemporary Native American activist efforts to protect landscapes of great power and meaning.

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Mounds |Earthworks |Sacred Sites |World Heritage |Settler-colonialism

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Mound-building was a preoccupation for the original, Indigenous occupants of the eastern portion of North America for at least six centuries. The efforts, from small to monumental, reflect a precision, often reflecting astronomical phenomena and are proliferated across the region. Today many remnants of these extraordinary efforts remain despite the systems of erasure that are characteristic of settler colonialism. Two such sites are the focus of this paper: the Newark Earthworks and Serpent Mound. Both sites are short-listed for UNESCO World Heritage status. Newark, Hopewell, and Serpent are all names given by dominant culture with no relation to the Indigenous architects and builders. They endure and resist, despite a long and complicated history of dominance. This paper offers a brief historical contextualization to demonstrate the ramifications of settler colonialism, which ruptured connections between Indigenous people and this land while simultaneously reinterpreting the sites as distinctly American. This lays a foundation for the web of narratives refashioned and recirculated in today’s contest over World Heritage status. Central to these narratives is ascribing the label of “sacred” to the sites and the vast number of constituents who claim “ownership” of them, including both local and global governmental agencies, historical societies, Native peoples, academics, and golfers. Furthermore, we can include those with religious and/or spiritual claims to the mounds such as the Mormons, new-agers, fundamentalist Christians, and contemporary Native tribes. Many of these stakeholders have come together to work toward the coveted World Heritage Status. But, if and when that happens, whose story will dominate? Who will make decisions? Whose voice will be heard?

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Religion |Immigration |United States of America |Czech Texans

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The process of Czech and Moravian immigration to Texas is a well-known phenomenon. Since 1848, tens of thousands decided to cross the ocean to seek a better future in the “Lone Star state.“ Although their history is well documented, there are still themes to be explored. Their religious activity and the connection it has created with their metropolis is one of them. The church and its institutions sent priests to America to attend to the immigrants in their mother tongue and helped them preserve their cultural identity. Furthermore, they organized the construction of their sacred places that would remind the parishioners of their home country. One example could be the famous painted churches still present in Texas today.

This topic has not received proper attention from historians because it requires studying sources on both sides of the Atlantic. The presented contribution tries to change this unflattering fact using the microhistorical approach. Its aim is threefold. First, explain the historical dimension of the religious connection between the Czech and Moravian immigrants in Texas with their metropolis. Second, describe the sacred places of the immigrants, how they were built, what role they played in their everyday life, and how they established a bond with their country of origin. Third, what importance did the sacred places of the Czechs and Moravians have in preserving their language and cultural identity? The microhistorical approach demands the use of various and fragmented sources, and this study will be no exception. It will use archive material from Austria and the Czech Republic, principally the funds of the religious organizations that supported the immigrants in Texas, such as the Leopoldine Society. Furthermore, the article will use published contemporary personal recounts and secondary literature. The content of these sources will be critically analysed to answer the research questions and hopefully contribute to the theme of religion and its invaluable role in an immigrant society.

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indigenous |authenticity |religion-making |Navajo |sacred places |San Francisco Peaks

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Navajo claims pertaining to the sacredness of the San Francisco Peaks (as well as those of several other Native American tribes), while no doubt profoundly sincere, are necessarily and strategically positioned in relation to the contemporary legal struggles within which they have arisen. However, I cannot stress too heavily that this should not suggest that their claims are spurious, invented, or in other words “inauthentic.” Greg Johnson asserts that “frequently, the specter against which authenticity is measured is what critics might call “postured tradition,” a shorthand means of suggesting that tradition expressed in political contexts is ‘merely political’” (2007: 3). To be sure, the discourses that posit the sacredness of the Peaks are fundamentally and simultaneously both religious and political; yet this does not necessarily mean that traditional religious claims made in contemporary political contexts are motivated by purely political considerations. Although these claims are necessarily formulated to persuade others of the incontestable “authenticity” of their claims, I suggest that the degree to which this incontestability is achieved is directly related to an accumulation and accretion of discourse resulting from nearly four decades of continuing conflict at the Peaks.

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Sacred Space |Onondaga Lake

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Onondaga Lake, located in what is now Central New York, is the sacred place of the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. It is where the Peacemaker paddled his stone canoe and established the Great Law of Peace that has stood for centuries. In 1654 Simon Le Moyne, S. J. arrived on the shores of Onondaga Lake. In 1656 the French government, in accordance with the Christian Doctrine of Discovery, granted the Jesuits rights to the lake and the surrounding land, much prized for its abundant salt springs. They built a mission to lay claim to both the land and the souls who occupied it. It is this moment that sets off the contest for control of the lake and the history. The lake remains the sacred center of the Confederacy, which has survived despite attempts to eradicate it. The future of both is dependent on the recognition of its sacred status by those who have seen the lake as a source of profit and power as well as a convenient dumping ground. This is the story of that struggle.

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film |indigenous |horror |Mi'gmaq |Pet Sematary |Rhymes for Young Ghouls |ancient Indian burial ground

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The term “ancient Indian burial ground” holds bifurcated meaning for Indigenous and mainstream populations. What one group may respect as sacred ground where their ancestors rest, another sees the mystical –and frequently evil– site of forces beyond their knowledge influenced by an ethnic Other. This paper explores this dual labeling of North American Indigenous burial sites through media by looking at representations of Mi’gmaq burial gravesites. In director Jeff Barnaby’s 2013 Rhymes for Young Ghouls, main character Aila (Devery Jacobs) confronts two burial sites that turn the mainstream stereotype on its head: that of her mother which situates Indigenous burials in a contemporary context and that of a mass grave of children at her residential school which places malintent on settler colonial practices. The film highlights Indigenous ways of coping with these practices including violence, substance abuse, and art. Dissimilarly, Pet Sematary’s (1989) plot involves no Mi’gmaq representation but follows non-Indigenous Louis (Dale Midkiff) as he interacts with a stereotypical Indian burial ground imbued with evil, unknown magic that leads to the inevitable downfall of his entire family. Both films interestingly include zombies, and they portray Indigenous burial spaces similarly as shot from above and filled with fog. However, their conclusive statements placing the blame behind the horror are vastly different.

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digital games |videogames |place attachment |iconoclasm |Spanish conquest history |Aztec architecture |settler colonialism |Age of Empires (game) |New World (game) |spiritual conquest

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Intricately concocted temples—seemingly historically accurate down to the pixel—flash across the gamer’s screen, as the player-conquistador re-creates the downfall of the so-called “Aztec Empire,” circa 1521, a keyboard at hand instead of a cutlass. Playing the Spanish Conquest has never been easier or more exciting for the victor. Today’s recreational sundering of Indigenous-American sacred spaces and cultural monuments repeats disturbing patterns in colonialism and cultural imperialism from the Early Modern past (Carpenter 2021; Ford 2016; Mukherjee 2017). What are the lessons gamers learn by reducing digitized Mesoamerican temples, such as the grand teocalli of Tenochtitlan, to rubble? This article explores sacred landscapes, archaeology, and art relating to acts of conquest and sixteenth-century Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica. This study of Mesoamerican sacred environments supports my interpretation that careless approaches to early-modern contexts and virtual geographies created by game designers reduce the presence of Mesoamerican place-identity. I highlight empire-building games based on historical events and situate gaming experiences, old and new, as interventions in sacred architecture. The study draws in ethnospatial considerations of settings and ornamentation to furthering the recent Game Studies critiques on cartographies, narratologies, and play mechanics, here focusing on the geo-spiritual components of playing out aspects of Mesoamerica’s encounters with Spanish military and cultural conflict (Lammes et al. 2018). I reveal the importance of place attachment, ethnohistory, and archaeology in making more meaningful experiences and argue that current art history-adjacent gaming agendas create fun and profit at the expense of iconic structures of Mexico’s heritage, such as the Postclassic single- and double-topped teocalli (temple-pyramids). The final thoughts call for increased interventions from scholars upon developer-player negative feedback loops that repurpose inaccurate mythos from historiography of the “Spiritual Conquest” paradigm.