Jacqueline Pata is the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians.

John E. Echohawk, a Pawnee, is executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, a non-profit 501c(3) organization that provides legal representation and technical assistance to Indian tribes, organizations and individuals nationwide. NARF focuses on applying existing laws and treaties to guarantee that national and state governments live up to their legal obligations. Contact Ray […]

The American Indian Movement is a Native American advocacy group that looks to help Native People regain human rights and achieve restitutions and restorations.

Read a Pew Forum analysis (updated in February 2011) titled “Faith on the Hill: The Religious Composition of the 112th Congress.” It finds that Mormons are better-represented in Congress than they are in the U.S. population.

Suzan Shown Harjo, who is Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee, is president of the Morning Star Institute, a national Indian rights organization. She helps Native Americans regain the land that was taken from them, and preserved many sacred places.

Rabbi Shefa Gold is director of the Center for Devotional Energy and Ecstatic Prayer in Jemez Springs, N.M. She teaches workshops and retreats on chanting, devotional healing, spiritual community building and meditation. Shefa combines her grounding in Judaism with a background in Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, and Native American spiritual traditions and says she returned to Judaism because […]

Read an essay on the New Religious Movements website at the University of Virginia, by Timothy Miller of the University of Kansas. Miller examines the 1965 immigration reform and how it changed American religion and paved the way for New Religious Movements and the many “sects” or “cults” inspired by Eastern spirituality.

Michael Winkelman is a professor of anthropology at Arizona State University in Tempe whose research focuses on shamanism and medical anthropology. He has studied contemporary applications of shamanic healing in substance abuse rehabilitation, pioneering the idea of shamanism as humanity’s original neurotheology.

Save Our Selves, or Secular Organizations for Sobriety, was founded in North Hollywood, Calif., in 1985 as an alternative to AA. The largest secular sobriety group in the world, it has 100,000 members, including believers who want to keep religion separate from recovery as well as atheists, secular humanists and non-Christians. It respects diversity, welcomes skepticism […]