First, I thank Dana Lloyd for organizing the American Academy of Religion panel from which this book review symposium springs and Silas Allard for coordinating us. Also I thank Michael McNally for writing a most impressive and useful book. I have learned so much from Defend the Sacred and rely upon it as a kind of field manual and roadmap. It speaks to many issues that I have faced in the classroom and in the field. Most of all, subsequent to its publication, I have learned a great deal from my regular conversations with McNally about the topics the book opens up and about possible future trajectories for defending the sacred. My aim in this brief essay is to share a bit along these lines.

This book is impressive for the amount of learning it displays, but even more so for the kinds of learning McNally draws upon. In Defend the Sacred, McNally engages religious studies literature, law scholarship, and a massive body of primary legal documents, as well as lessons from his considerable experience working with various tribes and nations and his direct engagement with advocates who have been at the leading edge of making change, including, among others, Suzan Shown Harjo. Another important aspect of the book is McNally's practical intent. McNally's concern is not only that of a historian, though the histories he depicts are rich and reliable. He is focused on the unfolding present and the looming future, asking about paths forward. McNally takes readers with him as he ventures brave steps down those paths. Now that a little timed has passed since its publication, what I want to convey in this review essay is my sense that McNally is staying the course, walking the walk. To change metaphors, his chips are on the table in a wager that we scholars of religion have something to contribute to the future of religious freedom for Native peoples, and I am quite sure McNally would like to see more of us making this bet with him.

Is he getting traction? Certainly people in law and advocacy worlds are paying attention. For example, Defend the Sacred is likely to be the only religious studies book that receives a fifty-three-page review with 299 footnotes in the Harvard Law Review, in this case by American Indian law scholar Kristen Carpenter.Footnote ¹ I commend her review, especially for the ways she understands McNally's effort as participating in a broader juris-generative moment. I see my comparatively modest task here as adding a few footnotes to Carpenter's magisterial and lawyerly citations.

One area not addressed at length in Carpenter's review is McNally's contribution to discourses about religious freedom in our field. Here I summarize what McNally says on this point, as I stand in agreement with him. Absolutely, we should follow Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, and others in problematizing religious freedom.Footnote ² It is a realm of law and public discourse that has a history of being hijacked by the interests of majorities, states, and corporations. Even so, it remains an arena of law and a way of speaking that Native peoples still appeal to in a range of ways and with considerable hopes and investments. As scholars and citizens we should find this worth tracking and learning from. McNally is a consummately skilled guide in this context.

I read the through-line of the book as the importance of shifting analyses of and strategies about Indigenous religious freedom to a focus on collective stakes and claims in a way that foregrounds peoplehood and modalities of self-determination. In other words, Native American religious freedom is not only a First Amendment issue relevant to individual believers. Such freedoms and the ability to exercise them depend upon the political and cultural sovereignty of nations and subsets thereof. Following upon this general observation, the importance of which should be manifestly evident, I flag six topics for consideration. My emphasis falls upon sacred land protection, which is a central theme of the book. McNally addresses other topics, including peyote religion and the use of protected species in ritual settings. In all cases, this is not merely a just-so story. In each instance, readers will find McNally hard at work ferreting out the causes and consequences of framing issues in particular ways, at every turn asking how specific histories either advance or inhibit the protection of religious freedom.

The first issue I flag pertains to recent, high visibility protests. I would be eager to know more about how visiting Standing Rock during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests affected McNally's thinking, since that happened right as he was writing the book. For me, being at Standing Rock and on Mauna Kea during respective protective actions staged on those lands had a relativizing effect wherein quotidian forms of lived sovereignty stood out in stark relief from just about everything else. On the ground, people were organizing and living in what—at least temporarily—felt like an unmediated way (at the risk of sounding too romantic). Federal legal issues and even tribal politics, let alone academic discourses about these, seemed secondary to the experience of being on the land as a collective. I wonder if for McNally and others who visited it seemed that way, too, and if so, what does that tell us about future efforts to defend the sacred? Said another way, what will the legacies of Standing Rock and other recent protective actions be beyond the frames of law? Here I am thinking in particular about the secondary and tertiary discursive force of legal struggles as mediated by popular culture, alternative news platforms, and social media exposure.

Second, and on a related note, I would be eager to know what McNally makes of the Land Back movement and NDN Collective,Footnote ³ which is certainly shaking things up and has considerable resources to back up its multipronged agenda. Now highly visible, this movement was just taking shape while McNally was writing the book. NDN Collective is a fascinating instance of an Indigenous nonprofit organization that is not coextensive with a tribal nation. How has its momentum and visibility changed the landscape of sacred land protection strategies? How about possible sites of friction between their full-throated decolonial claims and the more bureaucratically channeled approaches that many tribal representatives pursue? How might philanthropic giving, both to Native-run entities and by them, shape land struggles in coming decades? I press these points because I think I am not alone in seeing a paradigm shift in the unfolding. McNally's focus on collective attachments to land and collective modes for exercising claims is spot-on in terms of helping us understand this emergent phenomenon, even if the shift to non-tribal entities is taking many of us by surprise.

Third, and now getting a bit more specific about issues McNally raises in the book, I am interested in McNally's discussion of the review of the National Historic Preservation Act, with special attention to section 106 and the various ways it has been supplemented and operationalized (chapter 4). I am particularly interested in the risks and rewards of framing religion as/in culture, something McNally navigates with a carefully trained interdisciplinary sextant, because the prospect of section 106 review now looms in the context of the ongoing dispute on Mauna Kea over the Thirty Meter Telescope project, an issue I have long followed. On November 4, 2021, the US National Academies of Science released its decadal survey, revealing priorities for supporting major astronomy projects in the near- and mid-term future. The Thirty Meter Telescope is in a class of projects awarded “highest priority” status, giving the project renewed life, at least in terms of government support and the possibility of a much-needed financial boost from the National Science Foundation. However, US federal funding, something the project has not had up to now (perhaps for strategic reasons), comes with more stringent environmental and cultural impact assessment mechanisms than the project has been subjected to thus far. Now the State of Hawai`i and the TMT International Observatory LLC may need to engage in what promises to be a long, cumbersome review process.

As McNally informs readers, the National Historic Preservation Act has been amended in recent years in ways that enfranchise Native cultural claims, including those of Native Hawaiian organizations. Unlike state review, which relied upon archaeological experts and other non-contemporary and non-Indigenous ways of reckoning the pulse of Hawaiian tradition in affirming the developer's permit, section 106 consultations are in part guided by cultural anthropologists trained to hear and see living tradition. At a minimum, such methods demand time, which is already a win for Native Hawaiians opposed to the project. Most importantly, while doing their work, consulting anthropologists might well be persuaded that culture is unfolding and unfurling in real time on Mauna Kea. Were that to be the case, federal section 106 consultations and the reports that come out of them could tell this important story and in doing so open the door to possible protection of a sacred place without thereby triggering establishment clause provocations or threatening to cast the shadow of Lyng Footnote ⁴ yet again. Beyond setting a new course for the dispute over the observatory, sincere participation in the section 106 consultation process by all parties could serve as an exemplar for future scientific projects that seek Indigenous engagement. But, as McNally reminds us, section 106 consultations are not binding. Furthermore, consultation is too often represented as a stand-in for consent. Native Hawaiians know this well, so I strongly suspect they are not investing too much in this prospect, especially since they have so little to bank on in terms of evidence about the good faith intentions of other parties at the table.

My fourth point, which concerns the so-called degradation principle, also touches upon the Mauna Kea dispute. To my mind, McNally is well positioned to lead the push against this misguided and smug line of reasoning that advances the idea that putatively sacred sites that have experienced prior degradation should not be candidates for legal protection because, so the argument goes, the sites have been profaned by prior development and should not thereby be meaningfully regarded as sacred. This line of reasoning was more or less adopted wholesale by the State Supreme Court of Hawaii in its 2018 affirmation of the observatory's construction permit. In his sharp dissenting opinion, Justice Michael Wilson called out the majority opinion: “Thus, while conceding that Mauna Kea receives constitutional and statutory protection commensurate with its unchallenged position as the citadel of the Hawaiian cultural pantheon, the BLNR [Board of Land and Natural Resources] applies what can be described as a degradation principle to cast off cultural or environmental protection by establishing that prior degradation of the resource—to a level of damage causing a substantial adverse impact—extinguishes the legal protection afforded to natural resources in the conservation district.”Footnote ⁵

McNally touches upon this kind of vertiginous travesty in the book when he discusses cumulative impacts (for example, 163–64), but I am eager for him to take us a little way down the path of his current research and thinking, which takes on this problem more directly. I wholly agree with his intimation that scholars of religion should weigh in on this issue insofar as it traffics in a discourse of purity that we can show to be entirely unrealistic, if not also crassly cynical, not to mention inappropriate for assessing the needs of living religions. Further, it categorically hides from Indigenous claims about religious obligations to minister to degraded sites. What steps might we scholars of religions take to make a difference on this front?

The fifth point I flag is central to McNally's overall argument about collective peoplehood as the proper locus of Native American religious freedoms. This is a crucial future-looking aspect of McNally's vision and one that he is actively engaged with in the present. Namely, McNally is part of a team of scholars, lawyers, advocates, and Native community members who are seeking ways to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).Footnote ⁶ McNally points in this direction in the closing section of the book. At the time of writing the book, McNally and I were privileged to be included in one project making considerable moves in this direction, a joint endeavor by the University of Colorado Law School and the Native American Rights Fund that focuses on implementation of the UNDRIP at various jurisdictional levels but which is especially attentive to facilitating tribal engagement with this promising mechanism, bringing international law “home.”Footnote ⁷ McNally has remained involved in this important work, so I eagerly anticipate his follow-on publications that share his view of this next era of Native rights protections.

The sixth point I call attention to is how McNally views moves made by the Biden administration with regard to advancing Indigenous interests generally. Of course the appointment of Debra Haaland as secretary of the interior is momentous, and she is already resetting federal policies and practices in promising ways, including in general terms but also with reference to specific struggles, for example at Bears Ears. Additionally, the Biden administration is making other moves that may advance Native interests and that map well onto an UNDRIP-inspired agenda. For example, on November 15, 2021, the White House issued a memorandum that “commits to elevating Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge.”Footnote ⁸ How such an agenda will be operationalized remains to be seen, of course, but such gestures seem to be pointing in positive directions and address some of the challenges McNally has identified.

By way of conclusion, I underscore the significance of Defend the Sacred for the academic study of religion. In order to teach our materials responsibly and conduct our research ethically, we scholars of religion absolutely need to be aware of the struggles Indigenous peoples face. Further, we should take on the responsibility to know what mechanisms they have available to assert their interests and we should be aware of possible tools on the horizon. In providing us a book that helps address this responsibility, McNally has done our field a great service. But more than that, he has also attuned us to sites of tremendous religious vitality that we can learn from and that can and should inform the broader study of religion. To quote McNally, whether at Bears Ears, Oak Flat, or Standing Rock, “In and through and after efforts to engage law to protect what's important to them, Native peoples have made more than claims; they have made themselves” (296).