by Walter Echo-Hawk

About the author: Walter Echo-Hawk is a Native American activist and the senior staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund in Boulder, Colorado.

The Indian plays much the same role in our American society that the Jews played in Germany. Like the miner's canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, marks the rise and fall of our democratic faith. —Felix Cohen, the "Father of Federal Indian Law"

[The] Supreme Court [has] created a crisis in religious liberty for Native Americans. [It] held that the First Amendment does not protect tribal religious practices and referred the task of protecting Native worship to Congress. Stripped of any constitutional or statutory protections...