This is an accessible, concise survey of the disruption and dispossession of the religious life of North American indigenous peoples caused by Euro-American domination. In the first chapter, Jeffrey Niezen introduces his aim to reveal the hidden complexity of "social forces behind spiritual change" and thus demystify the outsider's gaze that totalizes modern Native American ritual as ahistorical and consensually authentic (p. 1). Beneath this presentism, he argues, are powerful, enduring tensions generated during the "age of nation building" in North America. Drawing mainly on the existing literature, Niezen moves from the older forces of Christian missionization and state-imposed assimilation to the less obvious, more recent forces of biomedicine, New Age appropriation, and archaeological-ethnographic "culture collecting" itself. Using the format of many texts on Native American history, Niezen follows each chapter with a brief narrative supplying an indigenous perspective.

Overall Niezen dissolves a popular, static view with a sober, incisive history of the main ethnocidal effects of domination and the religious changes they engendered. Within this scope, Spirit Wars is ideal for introducing students new in the field to the striking evidence for and durable contradictions within Euro-American-imposed religion, pedagogy, and science. In the ongoing search for course texts, this one stands out among very few that confront rather than handily discard those contradictions. By sharply foregrounding the destructiveness of Euro-American expansion and clearly identifying opposing views on each issue, Niezen provokes new readers to reflect critically on past and current social forces, especially those generally held in a progressive light, such as formal education, biomedicine, liberal social programs, and social science itself.

As social scientific inquiry, however, Spirit Wars contains no major breakthroughs toward analyzing the contradictions of domination and the complexity of religious change. The question of what theoretical orientation will be employed to identify and analyze deeper social forces remains unanswered, and Niezen fails to place the book within the vast literature on relevant topics. Furthermore, the author proposes to reveal all modes of domination as manifestations of a deeper religious conflict or "spirit war," yet he never fully articulates this reduction. Some particular clarification is needed for how Niezen, in seeking the religious ground for Euro-American domination, departs from and advances beyond Vine Deloria's classic work God Is Red, (Grosset and Dunlap, 1973). The result is a detached anthropological perspective that presumes an inclusive overview of generic perspectives in conflict. This increasingly familiar anthropological parallax objectifies but does not penetrate multiple outside and inside views on moral, legal, and religious issues. Once at this juncture, there are two ways to transcend mere description. One is reflection on the contradictions involved in practicing anthropology itself. Niezen thankfully avoids a total commitment to this path, but the question remains as to how his own inquiry breaks from the dominant social forces of knowledge production it objectifies. A second option is to intensively analyze perspectives and practices at multiple levels. Eluding this, Niezen's conceptualization of the social forces hovers in generality.

Most notably, Niezen does not fully engage the complexities of local knowledge. Although he offers glances at some local particulars, he eludes or oversimplifies the lived contradictions ever present to indigenous peoples. Native American discourses and practices have long tried to make sense of and propose strategies to reckon with the contradictions of Euro-American domination. Thus, the issues Niezen presents from a national frame of reference are neither identical in form nor equal in intensity to those affecting indigenous communities at the local level. He mentions some divergence among inside views, such as that between tribal political authority and ritual leadership (p. 7) or between elders and younger generations (p. 2), but what exactly are the social forces generating these differences? Excluded or only mentioned are such issues as the spread of fundamentalist Christian missions on reservations, language loss and renewal, conflicting definitions of identity, the rapid expansion of pan-Indian neotraditions, the tumultuous relationship between money and religion in indigenous political economies, stresses generated by mass popular culture, and multiple, often overlapping, forms of factionalism. Indeed, these issues can be more disruptive and destructive than national-level controversies.

In concluding, Niezen concedes confusion about the sources of the past and present cultural genocide accompanying religious change. He recognizes that the social forces are many and complex and declares that responsibility remains difficult to assign. In the final chapter he hints at the possibility of a dialectical approach for relating externally imposed forces of domination to self-destructive forces inside communities. Niezen further divides external forces of domination into malicious and philanthropic forms, both of which, he argues, sustain unrealizable missions for indigenous peoples. Thus, there is an "uncompromising exercise of domination" (p. 228) regardless of the content or intentions of the Euro-American ideologies engaged. This is a valuable point, but the question remains as to how this dialectic works in the terms Niezen delimits. How are the larger forces behind, say, biomedicine, repatriation, or cultural appropriation tied to specific self-destructive processes, such as suicide, chemical dependency, violence, or crime? In the end, one is left with the sense that domination is a diffuse, even ethereal, power emanating from everywhere but nowhere in particular in Euro-American society. This problem can be resolved by study of the concrete social relations of dominance constructed and reproduced in local contexts, as well as research on the great diversity of local modes of empowerment throughout the continent.

For its attempt to grasp such a complex process, though, Spirit Wars deserves serious attention by all investigators of domination. Niezen’s description of the dialectic between Euro-American domination and Native American responses, creative as well as self-destructive, is indeed a valuable resource for understanding expansive power over the long duration.