"Jennifer Graber's The Gods of Indian Country is one the most impressive books I have read in the last few years. The Gods of Indian Country tells a big story with a large cast of players, and yet still manages to focus on the particulars Additionally, it is beautifully written, carefully researched, well-organized, and broad yet nuanced. Most importantly, Graber tells an incredibly important story and offers a significant counter-perspective to how the field typically narrates 19th-century American religion This book is a model piece of scholarship for those working in American religious history and should be on the bookshelves of all in the field. It is a book that hit this reviewer hard and will sit with her for a very long time. Many pages are already dog-eared, have been re-read numerous times, and will be cited for years to come."--Emily Suzanne Clark, Reading Religion "In this important and much-needed book, religion emerges as something quite surprising and new: as a tool of indigenous dispossession and as a means of preserving native sovereignty and cultural autonomy. The Gods of Indian Country uncovers the centrality of religion to what it meant to be a Native American in the 19th-century United States as well as the centrality of Native Americans to the history of religion in America."--Pekka Hmlinen, author of The Comanche Empire "The Gods of Indian Country is American religious history retold with Kiowa Indians at its center.

Graber's analysis of Kiowa art forms is riveting and really a path-breaking contribution. While white Americans invoked the Christian God to sanctify their acts of colonial dispossession, Graber argues, Kiowas engaged with new forms of sacred power to defend their land, sovereignty, and peoplehood."--Tisa Wenger, author of Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal "Stories addressing the physical violence of colonialism abound. This book does something different. Through painstaking research and soul-cracking interpretive care, Jennifer Graber exposes the terrorism of Christian benevolence. The Gods of Indian Country is an act of history that is also an essential message for our time, showing how kindness has been a shroud used to smother human freedom. But also how people interpret, and create within, their debasement. Required reading.

"--Kathryn Lofton, Professor of Religious Studies, American Studies, and history, Yale University "The conquest of the Great Plains was not simply a contest for land but a battle over spirituality as well. In her eloquent and beautifully crafted The Gods of Indian Country, Jennifer Graber highlights the experience of the Kiowa in their collision with an expansive United States, but her study raises questions at the heart of the indigenous encounter with American settler colonialism."--Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History.