the legal protection of religious and cultural practices

In 1787, the United States Constitution was established and within this document is a list of different amendments. Ever since the 1790’s, the First Amendment of the Constitution has assured Americans the right to “free exercise of religion”. However, the promise of American Indian religious freedom has historically fallen short. The religious freedom for Native Americans has been actively suppressed because their practices and beliefs are often viewed to be unconventional classifications of “religion”. Because of this, the Native traditions are not protected under the First Amendment. Undeniably though, this does not come as a shock because constitutional protection has only recently become applied to Native Americans when they were granted citizenship in the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, U.S. policy attempted to include Native people in the protection and responsibilities of United States law. Unfortunately though, authorities saw Native beliefs and rituals as “savage or primitive obstructions” to religious and cultural integration (Brown, 2003). Between 1887 and 1934, agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs as well as Christian missionaries were given discretionary authority on any reservation. Although most violations of religious freedom did not require Congressional action, some ceremonies were restricted by Executive Order. For instance, the Dawes Act of 1887 completely restricted Native religious services and the practice of their traditional values. Other rituals that were banned included the Great Sun Dance of the Lakota and other Northern Plains Indians. The most devastating ceremonial termination was of the Ghost Dance Movement. This was an intertribal visionary an...

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...-Dare, 2002).
Because the AIRFA lacks direct implementation, it often requires federal agencies to review their rules and regulations to accommodate the practice of Native religions. In the 1988 Lyng vs. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, the people of the Yurok, Karok, and Tolowa tribes challenged the U.S. Forest Service regarding the construction of a logging road through sacred land. The Supreme Court allowed the project to go on, viewing the land as dispensable to Native religious life (Deloria, 1992). The verdict was determined regardless of the Native testimony stating that the area “is not even a part of this world that we live in here. That place up there, the high country, belongs to the spirit and it exists in another world apart from us” (Deloria, 1992). This court case is just one of the numerous cases regarding Native sacred land claims.