The Clash of Stories at Sacred Sites: Reframing the Task of Protecting Indigenous Sites

Efforts to protect indigenous sacred sites in the United States by framing conflicts over them in adversarial terms that employ the vocabulary of conventional legal doctrine on religious liberty and property rights have failed to succeed despite the creative efforts of many advocates. One cannot understand these failed efforts and move toward the development of a more hopeful approach to these conflicts without taking seriously the contrast between Indigenous views of the land and the view of land embedded in the rights vocabulary of conventional property law. Thus conflicts over protection of sacred sites are not susceptible to resolution by decision making bodies shaped by the conception of land found in the principles of property law. This essay describes these difficulties and offers a constructive proposal for addressing the conflict in a non-adversarial setting through collaborative “Restorative Justice Dialogue from the Heart” that takes seriously the clash of master stories underlying these conflicts. Such an approach takes the narrative dimensions of these conflicts as of utmost importance and reframes these conflicts by asking the following questions: (1) “What is sacred?”; (2) “What is authentic knowledge for the purpose of determining what is sacred?”; and (3) “Who gets to decide these questions?”