Religious Freedom and Indigenous Rights: Global Perspectives

The Klamath River, which is of great historical and spiritual significance for the Yurok Tribe, flows through Oregon and Northern California (Photo: Istock).

This series provides comparative interdisciplinary analysis of indigenous spirituality and the legal challenges involved in its protection on national and international levels. Drawing on a variety of cases from the Americas, South Africa, and Australia, contributors discuss specificities of indigenous spirituality and theology, power dynamics behind the discussion of indigenous rights, the sacredness of natural objects for indigenous groups, the insufficiency of protections for indigenous believers within existing religious-freedom frameworks, and legal steps needed to strengthen these protections. This series is based on presentations given at the ICLRS 32nd Annual International Law and Religion Symposium, 6–7 October 2025.

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“You Cannot Harm Your Brother”: Indigenous Rights in Pluriversal World

Cecilia Titizano is core faculty at NAITTS, an Indigenous learning community, and directs the Latina/o Theology and Ministry Leadership Network and the Instituto Hispano of the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University. This post is based on a presentation given at the ICLRS 32nd Annual International Law and Religion Symposium, 6 October 2025.

The post is the part of the Religious Freedom and Indigenous Rights series

Andean Metaphysics: The Interdependence of All Things

In the Andes, everything is alive: plants, animals, water, and even mountains. They are all animated by the same Ajayu or Spirit and share the same organizing and pulsing life force. They all have awareness (each in their own way); they allcommunicate (each in their own fashion); and they all are endowed with a purpose particular to their place in Pacha (all that is). The Aymara and Quechua people describe reality or “what is” as an interconnected web of beings endowed with the same animating life force, where relations constitute beingness or, better yet, becoming (beingness in process). Pacha (all that is) is dynamic and ontologically relational, where relations have priority over substance. Hence, the interdependence of all beings is a constitutive reality of the Andean universe.

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Religious Freedom, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Oak Flat

Dana Lloyd is an assistant professor in the Department of Global Interdisciplinary Studies, Villanova University.

The post is the part of the Religious Freedom and Indigenous Rights series

Chí’chil Biłdagoteel, known in English as Oak Flat, is the place where Ga’an (guardians or messengers between Apache peoples and the Creator, Usen) reside. It is a 6.7-square-mile stretch of land within what is currently managed by the U.S. federal government as Tonto National Forest, east of Phoenix, Arizona. Since 2014, a proposed copper mine has threatened to permanently alter the area through an underground mining technique that would cause the earth to sink, up to 1115 feet deep and almost 2 miles across. Apache Stronghold, a grassroots organization, has challenged the proposed mining plan in court, arguing that destroying their sacred sites would infringe on their free exercise of religion, a right promised to them by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978), and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993).[1]

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