Confrontation.

By the early nineteenth century all Native Americans had been touched to various degrees by contact with Europeans. Historians often analyze the social, political, and economic challenges presented by white culture, yet to most Native Americans contact and its consequences had to be grasped first in religious terms. From the perspective of the Native American "West," religion in the first half of the nineteenth century was characterized by the struggle to reconfigure sacred worlds in light of shifting circumstances. Unfortunately, most of the available information concerning nineteenth-century Indian religions comes not from the Indians themselves but from the observations of whites, whose cultural and individual biases influenced what they saw and recorded. Euro-Americans and Native Americans had to fit their experience of the other into their own framework. The European understanding of different religions was generally based on...