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Chapter 3 explores traditions that confer sacred meaning and power onto landscapes; the communities compared—one largely Euroamerican and the other South Asian—both strove to transplant their South Asian traditions onto North American terrain during the late twentieth century. Here, the increasingly utopian Rajneesh community that briefly settled in eastern Oregon in the 1980s is contrasted with diasporic Hindu communities whose ongoing religiously informed settlements are labeled as heterotopian. This chapter argues that whereas the Rajneesh community's abstracted utopian vision enabled settler dynamics reminiscent of colonial times, Hindu diaspora communities’ sense of sacred terrain that is historically and religiously—and therefore more realistically—layered creates settlements that tend to steer clear of colonizing impositions. Despite these differences that ultimately distinguish failed and successful settlements, a shared challenge faced by these communities has been an ironic “indigenous” nationalism that likewise expresses itself in religiously laden, utopian claims on the land.

This chapter examines the failure in the courts of Native appeals to religious freedom protections for sacred lands, and it extends the previous chapter's analysis of the reception of Native claims to religion as religion. Where a religious claim conforms to the subjective, interior spirituality that has become naturalized in the United States, it has worked reasonably well in the courts. This is emphatically not the case where claims involve religious relationships with, uses of, and obligations to, land. The chapter explains how courts reason their way out of taking steps to protect Native American religious freedom when sacred places are threatened, a puzzling matter in that courts consistently acknowledge the sincerity of the religious beliefs and practices associated with those sacred places. Along the way the chapter develops a fuller sense of the workings of the discourse of Native American spirituality as it comes to control judicial comprehension of Native religious freedom claims.

Many examples exist that reveal structures common to all sanctuaries in Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor and illustrate that a religious sphere can be distinguished within any context of life in ancient Anatolia. This chapter examines how unusual cults, for example the so-called temple-states in central Anatolia, fit into the patterns observed; whether the economy of cults were of the same quality; how processes of Hellenisation and urbanisation affected the role of cults; how and by whom the economy of the sacred was maintained or changed; and whether Asia Minor was an area distinct from other areas, possibly because of its compartmented religious life, because of an exceptional history, or because of its theocratic origins. The chapter also explores sacred finances, sacred land, and religious administration.

This chapter takes up the question of Christianity's earthen identity by way of a biblically inflected, nature-based retrieval of the Holy Spirit as the green face of God in the world. Drawing on the Bible's definition of the Spirit according to the four cardinal elements, it begins with an analysis of how the Spirit reveals herself in the scriptural literatures as a physical, earthly being who indwells the earth—even as the earth enfleshes the Spirit. To make this point, the chapter develops a case-study of a local watershed, Crum Creek, as a Spirit-filled sacred place because it continues to function as a vital if threatened habitat for a wide variety of plant and animal species. But if it is the case that the earth embodies the Spirit's power and love for all things, then whenever this fragile, green planet—God's earthen body, as it were—undergoes deep environmental injury and waste, it follows that God in Godself also experiences pain and deprivation. Since God and the earth, Spirit and nature, share a common reality the loss and degradation of the earth means loss and degradation for God as well. This model of sacred-land theology raises two troubling criticisms that are addressed.

This concluding chapter gives a nod in the direction of successful negotiated settlements and other agreements that grab fewer headlines and leave fewer public traces because they can avoid the courts altogether and proceed in the context of the nation-to-nation relationship. For an example, it turns to the newly created and recently embattled Bears Ears National Monument, a collaboratively managed preserve of sacred lands, cultural landscapes, and traditional knowledge in southern Utah. Since the quiet goal for most Native people is to protect what is sacred to them without calling attention to themselves, the best outcomes for Native American religious freedom are so far beyond the First Amendment and its legal counterparts, they can remain entirely off line. Here, the story of Bears Ears is less the story of the Obama administration than it is the story of decades of activism and the concerted strategic efforts of a consortium of Native nations. When President Barack Obama designated 1.35 million acres of southeast Utah lands as Bears Ears National Monument, he authorized a new experiment in cooperation, even collaboration, between the United States and Native nations in safeguarding sacred lands.

This chapter examines how globalized formations of indigeneity were shaped and made in relation to environmental winds in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It begins with an overview of the ethnography of an indigenous space, paying attention to how nature conservation efforts in the PRC opened up space for the emergence of indigeneity. It then discusses official and popular conceptions of ethnicity in the PRC, along with the articulation of environmentalism in the creation of an indigenous space in Yunnan Province by Chinese experts and scientists. Focusing on the controversy in Yunnan over the issue of “sacred lands,” the chapter explains how Yunnanese scientists started to argue for sacred lands and indigenous knowledge and eventually expanded these arguments to foster a broader sense of environmental justice for all (rural) people.