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This chapter discusses the Native American groups that first inhabited the Klamath Mountains. It describes the pre-European Indian population and how they practice sustainable management of their natural resources. The chapter also discusses the discovery of gold in California in 1848, which initiated the fifteen-year annihilation of the Klamath Mountain Indians. By 1864, the only areas with substantial Indian populations were the Mattole Valley, the Hoopa Valley, and southwestern Trinity County in the Yolla Bollys. The Klamath Mountains had few free-living Indians and most of those alive were restricted to reservations. The northern Klamath tribes were confined to the Klamath River Reserve in 1855 and to the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation in 1864. The Round Valley Indian Reservation was established in 1870 for all southern tribes. Populations continued to decline until 1900.

This chapter introduces the central themes of the uses and abuses of state power that appear throughout the narrative of the Christian Reconstruction. As a young missionary on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Nevada in the 1940s, Rushdoony had built remote connections with a surprisingly diverse body of intellectual figures that fundamentally shaped the project of Christian Reconstruction. As he engaged with these thinkers, Rushdoony refused to constrain his intellectual development to a narrow disciplinary horizon and instead aspired to use the entire arch of Western Christian tradition to illuminate contemporary religio-political problems, including the threats of fascism and communism and the closing of the American frontier as embodied in the reservation system.

Marty Bowers offers a perspective on the THPO as a citizen of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and a member of the Wind Clan. Born in 1971 and raised on the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation, Bowers rode the bus eighty miles round-trip every day to attend public school in Clewiston, Florida. On the weekends, he joined his father’s Creek-speaking family for services at a Baptist Church on the Brighton Reservation. Raised in a bilingual household, Bowers is today more fluent in the Miccosukee language, the dominant language on the Big Cypress Reservation. Throughout his career, Bowers worked for the Seminole Tribe as a ranch hand, librarian, and museum exhibits specialist. From 2007 to 2010, Bowers served as a cultural advisor to the Tribal Historic Preservation Office. In this wide-ranging and insightful interview, he relates his personal journey of cultural discovery and shares his thoughts and feelings about Seminole history and the work of the Tribal Historic Preservation Office.

This chapter presents the author's account of his visit to Fort Yates, North Dakota, to see what evangelical impulses persist within the Episcopal Church, a denomination not generally associated with evangelicalism. He also wanted to assess the extent to which Christian missions engaged in a kind of cultural imperialism, an insistence that converts adopt the missionaries' culture along with their religion. He describes how a handful of Episcopalians at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation are struggling to retain a foothold and to temper some of the cultural imperialism that has characterized Christian mission efforts in the past.

The decade of the 1880s marks the end of the Plains communal bison hunting. Taking Carole Crumley's “core values” in historical ecology as an organizing concept, this chapter examines the ecological, economic, social, political, and ritual conditions under which a Plains Indian society coped with sudden and devastating territorial circumscription, repression, and environmental change by modifying their relationship with the landscape within acceptable cultural parameters. Among the Montana Blackfeet, resilience was achieved largely through the development of a post-bison hunting complex that preserved ancient core values while allowing rapid shifts to intensive high-elevation hunting of ungulates, change in the size and composition of hunting groups and hunters’ social networks, and adjustment of traditional religious views and practices to new hunting conditions.