When the Sacred Was Called a Sin

Christian colonialism, the breaking of cultural belonging, and the spiritual freedom no institution has the right to take.

Image created by the author using AI.

There is something I find difficult to reconcile with the language of salvation.

The belief that we can bring another person closer to the sacred by teaching them to feel ashamed of where they come from.

Their mother’s language. Their grandparents’ ceremonies. The ways their community remembers its dead and teaches its children how to belong.

I find myself pausing there.

What happens within a child when the people who hold authority over them call these things sinful?

What becomes of prayer when it is taught through fear?

These questions trouble me because I care about spiritual life. I care about what happens when a person begins to listen more deeply, to recognise their own cruelty, to become more capable of love.

And I struggle to understand how that work could ever require the destruction of another people’s belonging.

When salvation became a condition

Colonisation, often accompanied by Christian missionary expansion, took different forms in different places. Governments, settlers, churches, and missionary organisations had different powers and responsibilities. Their actions cannot be folded into a single story.

But across several histories, I encounter a recurring demand: to become acceptable, people were expected to surrender what made them recognisably themselves.

The spiritual injury is difficult to measure.

Someone in authority decides which language may be spoken. Which ceremony may continue. Whose understanding of the sacred will be respected, and whose will be treated as evidence of ignorance.

I think about the certainty required to make those decisions for another person.

And the humility that certainty leaves no room for.

The authority to call a place discovered

Before I can understand the taking of land, I have to consider the ideas that made taking it seem legitimate.

The legal and political tradition known as the Doctrine of Discovery gave European claims precedence over the rights of peoples already living on the land. Christian imperial expansion drew on religious justifications as well as military and legal power. In its 2023 repudiation of the doctrine, the Vatican acknowledged that associated papal documents failed to respect Indigenous peoples’ equal dignity and rights, and that colonial powers used them to justify abuses. [1]

I linger over the word discovered.

A place can be unfamiliar to an arriving stranger and already be home to generations of people. It can have names, laws, responsibilities, and histories that the stranger has never learned.

Calling it a discovery becomes dangerous when the arrival is made more important than the lives already there.

The same presumption troubles me in spiritual life: the belief that the sacred becomes real in another people’s world only when we arrive to name it.

I want to ask what the newcomer was willing to recognise before claiming the authority to teach.

The losses that carried other losses

Introduced diseases were devastating across the Americas. One major study estimates a population decline of around ninety per cent in the century after European arrival; its account describes epidemics alongside warfare, famine, and enslavement. That estimate concerns a continent-wide catastrophe whose course varied between regions. [2]

In the Amazon, research documents repeated contact-related epidemics well into the twentieth century. In Sydney, the devastating epidemic of 1789 is generally identified as smallpox, although its precise origin remains unresolved. These histories cannot all be attributed to missionaries or to deliberate infection. [3, 4]

What I struggle to hold is the loss within the loss.

A person dies, and a family loses someone they love. When deaths come in great numbers, a community also loses people who teach, care, remember, and help others make sense of what has happened.

Grief arrives alongside the need to survive.

I want to remember this when a population is reduced to a percentage on a page. Every number contains lives that were particular to someone.

To be separated from Country

Dispossession reached into the conditions of everyday life.

In Australia, people were forcibly relocated to missions, stations, and reserves. Under some administrations, officials controlled movement, employment, food rations, visitors, and marriage. AIATSIS describes Country through interconnected relationships involving law, language, spiritual belief, sustenance, family, and identity. Removal therefore meant much more than a change of address. [5, 6]

I think about the difference between choosing to leave a place and being forbidden to return.

Between deciding how to feed your family and waiting for someone else to authorise what you receive.

The harm becomes clearer when I consider how many ordinary decisions were taken out of people’s hands.

In the United States, the Dawes Act sought to break collectively held reservation lands into individual allotments. The consequences included extensive loss of Native land. Although women could receive allotments, the policy sought to replace collective landholding with a system designed by the state. [7]

I keep returning to the authority assumed in such policies: the belief that an outside government was entitled to remake another people’s relationship with the ground beneath them.

When ceremony became an offence

In Canada, the potlatch was outlawed in 1884. The provisions banning it and other ceremonies were removed in 1951. In the United States, the 1883 Code of Indian Offenses targeted ceremonies including the Sun Dance, with penalties that included withholding rations and imprisonment. [8, 9, 10]

I pause at the withholding of food.

A spiritual practice could carry a punishment that reached directly into a person’s ability to eat.

Under those conditions, obedience cannot be read as agreement. Silence cannot be taken as proof that people had willingly surrendered what mattered to them.

And the official disappearance of a ceremony does not tell us whether people stopped believing in it.

When spiritual resistance became a threat

The suppression of ceremony could also become a confrontation with armed power.

In 1890, officials moved against the Ghost Dance among the Lakota. The crackdown formed part of the events leading to the Wounded Knee massacre, where U.S. soldiers killed Lakota men, women, and children. The violence was carried out by the military; naming the suppression of religion within that history does not make the military and the churches the same institution. [11]

What stays with me is the fear that another people’s spiritual gathering could arouse in those governing them.

People who continued to gather were making decisions about their own lives. Their continuing faith could reveal the limits of the authority imposed upon them.

I find it difficult to hear the language of religious freedom without thinking about whose gatherings were protected and whose were treated as a danger.

The freedom to pray means very little if it belongs only to people whose prayers resemble our own.

A child’s language

In the United States, the federal Indian boarding school system sought to assimilate Indigenous children through practices including changing their names, cutting their hair, and suppressing their languages, religions, and cultural practices. Christian institutions were deeply involved alongside the state. The Department of the Interior’s 2024 investigation found that religious institutions or organisations operated 210 of the 417 identified federal Indian boarding schools. [12, 13]

I keep returning to the changing of a name.

A name is something we hear before we understand very much about the world. It is spoken when we are called home, comforted, recognised.

To replace it as part of a programme of assimilation is to claim authority over the way a child is known.

The reports describe policies and institutions. I find myself thinking about what those policies asked of a young person: to live under the authority of people who treated their inherited identity as something to overcome.

How could a child freely choose what to believe under those conditions?

The children who did not return

The separation of children carried dangers beyond cultural suppression.

Canada’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation documents overcrowding, inadequate education, physical and sexual abuse, and a failure to hold staff accountable in residential schools. It also maintains the record of thousands of children known to have died. [14]

I cannot approach those deaths as another example to make an argument stronger.

A child had a name. People who knew them. A life that should have been allowed to continue.

The responsibility to remember belongs alongside the responsibility to investigate, to hear Survivors, and to let families guide how their children are honoured.

When an institution describes itself as a place of care, it accepts an obligation to protect those placed within it.

Religious authority makes that obligation more serious. It can never excuse its betrayal.

Here, on this continent

In Australia, the Bringing Them Home inquiry documented the forced separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. Churches were among the institutions involved in administering removal policies. The report also recorded the suppression of languages in missions, including physical punishment for speaking them. [15, 16]

This history belongs close to where I live.

It asks more of me than sorrow at a distance.

I think about language as a way of being held by other people. The familiar voice that knows how to reassure us. A family story that can be told with all its humour and meaning intact.

Languages carry knowledge, law, relationships, and ways of remembering. Oral transmission is central to many traditions, alongside material, visual, performative, and other forms of keeping knowledge. Suppressing a language can interrupt those relationships without making the culture or its people disappear.

To punish a child for speaking their language is to make that familiarity dangerous.

There is something profoundly wrong in requiring a child to fear the words through which they first knew affection.

I cannot reconcile that with the compassion I seek within spiritual practice.

When the judgment followed them home

Institutional assimilation did not end at the school gate. The residential-school histories record damage extending into families, communities, and later generations. [14]

I think about the difference between being prohibited from doing something and being taught to believe that wanting to do it makes you inferior.

A punishment ends. The expectation of punishment can remain.

A person may leave an institution and still struggle with the judgments repeatedly made about their family, language, or identity. The authority that once stood over them can become a voice they have to learn to question within themselves.

I offer this as a reflection on how shame can operate, rather than an explanation of every Survivor’s experience.

What troubles me is the possibility of a child learning to mistrust affection because the people offering it have been described as ignorant or sinful.

How does someone find their way back to a relationship they were taught to fear?

That answer belongs to the person living it. Healing cannot be prescribed as another demand to become someone else.

Along the Rio Negro

The Amazon contains many distinct peoples, languages, and spiritual traditions. One documented history concerns Salesian boarding schools in the Rio Negro region of Brazil.

Research into these schools describes the prohibition of Indigenous languages, the imposition of Portuguese, and the separation of children from their sociocultural environments as part of missionary education. It also records children’s responses and resistance. [17]

I notice how readily the word education can conceal a demand for obedience.

Learning can enlarge a person’s possibilities. It can also be organised around the assumption that the knowledge of their own community has little worth.

The difference matters.

I want to ask whose knowledge was permitted to enter the classroom. Whose authority was recognised. What a child learned to conceal in order to avoid punishment.

A spiritual teaching should be able to bear those questions.

When the carvings were burned

In Papua New Guinea, the history of the Gogodala people offers another painful example. Missionary activity and local evangelism helped bring about the burning of ceremonial carvings and the suppression of ceremonies in the 1930s. Decades later, work to renew carving traditions contributed to the opening of the Gogodala Cultural Centre in 1974. [18, 19]

I pause at the thought of a carving being placed in a fire.

Someone made it. Learned the skills. Understood meanings that a stranger might never have taken the time to ask about.

I cannot claim those meanings as my own. But I can recognise the violence in deciding that another community’s ceremonial inheritance must be destroyed.

Calling an object evil can make that destruction feel righteous to the person carrying it out.

What troubles me is the refusal to listen before condemning.

And what moves me in the later history is the work of people carving again, teaching again, deciding how their inheritance would continue.

What was taken into collections

Some cultural belongings survived destruction only to be carried far from the people responsible for them.

AIATSIS documents the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage into overseas museums, universities, and private collections. Its return programme works with custodians to restore those belongings and their authority to decide how they should be cared for. [20]

Ancestral remains were taken too. The National Museum of Australia describes widespread unethical collection, including grave robbing, and identifies repatriation as a return of authority to the appropriate custodians as well as a physical return. These collecting practices belong to a wider colonial history and cannot all be assigned to missionary activity. [21]

I pause before the idea that a person could become a specimen, or that a ceremonial belonging could be displayed while its custodians were denied a say in what happened to it.

There are things we are able to see that we are not entitled to possess.

Things we are able to study that we have no right to take.

For me, reverence includes accepting those limits. Curiosity does not place me above another person’s responsibilities to their ancestors.

The question of return is therefore also a question of who has been allowed to decide.

Whose ancestors were allowed to remain?

African cultures cannot be gathered into one spiritual tradition, and African Christian histories cannot be reduced to European missionary activity.

A specific history in southern Africa nevertheless reveals another form of coercion. Missionary churches condemned practices associated with ancestors and required converts to abandon rituals; participation could bring church discipline or exclusion. Research also documents how African Christians maintained these practices, sometimes privately, and how African Independent Churches incorporated them into Christian life. [22]

I find myself thinking about the person asked to choose between their church and an inherited obligation to their family.

The pressure to divide a life that, to them, may not have been divided in that way before.

People responded with discernment and resistance. They made choices, preserved relationships, and shaped forms of Christianity that missionary authorities did not control.

That part of the history deserves attention too.

The people subjected to these demands remained capable of answering them.

The authority carried by women

Another part of this history asks us to look carefully at women.

Matrilineal descent means that clan membership or inheritance follows the maternal line. It does not, by itself, mean that women hold the main governing power. Women’s authority took different forms, and it needs to be understood within each society.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy describes Clan Mothers as holding the authority to select chiefs and, when necessary, remove them. They also have responsibilities involving names, marriages, and the welfare of the clan. This is a continuing system of governance, not merely a role remembered from a vanished past. [23]

I find myself thinking about what it means to recognise a woman as someone to whom a leader must answer.

Her judgment belongs within the structure of authority itself.

In Asante, in present-day Ghana, queen mothers and chiefs form a dual-gender political system. Colonial administration marginalised queen mothers, although their institutions survived. Historical research also documents how missionaries and colonial welfare programmes sought to reshape Asante motherhood around European expectations, amid struggles over women’s work, marriage, and economic independence. [24, 25]

The demand for cultural change could reach into a woman’s home and ask her to become a different kind of mother before her care would be considered adequate.

I am troubled by the ease with which an outsider’s preference can become a standard against which another woman’s life is judged.

In much of Bougainville, matrilineal landholding gives women significant responsibilities in relation to land, without necessarily giving them dominant formal political leadership. Women’s own accounts also document their organising and contributions to peace. Their history asks us to recognise both the authority they held and the authority they fought to exercise. [26, 27]

I do not want to turn these different societies into an image of a single, lost matriarchy.

I want to ask more precise questions.

Who could speak about land? Who controlled the proceeds of work? Whose consent mattered in marriage? What support could a woman call upon if her home became unsafe?

These are questions through which claims about spiritual and cultural improvement must pass.

A religious teaching deserves scrutiny when it asks women to submit while leaving their safety and economic freedom out of the discussion.

And a history of colonial harm does not require us to pretend that gender inequality or violence began only with colonisation.

What it requires is attention to the particular powers women lost, the pressures they resisted, and the relationships through which they continued to act.

Across the islands of the Pacific

These questions belong to Pacific Island histories as well, although each island community has its own account of conversion, power, and continuity.

In Hawaiʻi, missionaries condemned hula in terms that associated it with sin, shame, and ignorance. The Bishop Museum traces these judgments through Hawaiian-language newspapers, including their adoption by Hawaiian Christians themselves. [28]

I think about what happens when condemnation moves from the arriving stranger’s voice into the conversation between neighbours.

A familiar movement can become something a person is expected to disavow. The body that carries a cultural practice becomes the place where a religious judgment is felt.

Yet hula continued. The history of disapproval is also a history of people who kept practising.

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In the Cook Islands, Te Papa records the destruction of atua rākau and the targeting of Tangaroa figures during conversion. Some figures were burned; others were collected as evidence of missionary success. In Tahiti, sacred figures were also surrendered or confiscated and sent to a missionary museum in London. [29, 30, 31]

I return to the difference between an object being meaningless to an outsider and having no meaning.

An unfamiliar form is not an invitation to destroy what it holds for someone else.

Pacific peoples also became missionaries and reshaped Christianity in their own languages and cultural forms. Their decisions belong within the history alongside external pressure and the destruction of sacred belongings. [32]

I want to leave room for both truths: harm was done, and the people who experienced it continued to shape their spiritual lives.

The voices of the babaylan

In the Philippines, Spanish colonial accounts often judged Indigenous ritual specialists through the language of idolatry and demonic activity. Traditions and titles varied between communities. The roles known as babaylan or catalonan included women and men, and some specialists lived in ways that did not fit Spanish expectations of gender. [33, 34]

This history brings the question of spiritual authority close to the body.

Who was permitted to lead a ceremony? Whose voice could call a community together? Who decided whether that voice was sacred or dangerous?

I think about the power to describe another person’s prayer as an encounter with evil.

Once that description is accepted, refusing to listen can begin to look like a moral duty.

But these ritual specialists do not belong only to a closed chapter of the past. Grace Nono’s work follows the voices and agency of living practitioners, including women whose ritual knowledge continues through song and speech. [35]

I want to hear those voices without requiring them to become symbols for an argument of my own.

Their lives are larger than the judgments once made about them.

When conversion did not end the scrutiny

In Portuguese Goa, the Inquisition policed the religious lives of local Christians. Historical research describes prosecutions involving practices associated with Hindu traditions and disputes over whether those practices constituted idolatry, heresy, or other religious offences. [36]

Here, even conversion could leave a person under suspicion.

I find myself considering the inherited gesture, the household observance, the relationship that authorities might interpret as evidence of insufficient belief.

It is possible to demand a declaration of faith and then continue searching a person’s life for proof that the declaration was inadequate.

What freedom remains when an institution claims the right to judge every connection to the world a person came from?

The question reaches beyond the moment of conversion. It asks who is permitted to decide what a faithful life looks like afterwards.

The drum that became evidence

In Sápmi, the Sámi homelands across northern Europe, Christianisation and state expansion also brought campaigns against Indigenous religious practices.

The case of Anders Poulsen, tried in Vadsø in 1692, reveals a religious life that crossed the boundaries officials sought to enforce. He described using his drum with reference to Christian figures, while authorities interpreted Sámi practice through ideas of service to the Devil. [37]

Elsewhere, drums were confiscated by church and state agents. Lars Nilsson was executed in Sweden in 1693 after using his drum in an attempt to save his drowned grandson. [38]

I pause before the distance between a person’s purpose and the meaning assigned to it by a court.

An act performed in desperation for a child becomes evidence against the person who performed it.

I cannot know the fullness of what that drum meant. But I can recognise the danger of a system that will hear only its own account of another person’s sacred life.

Conversion carried by an army

Europe also contains histories in which Christian expansion accompanied conquest.

The Northern or Baltic Crusades combined warfare, territorial domination, and conversion. They brought different peoples of the Baltic region under Christian rule through a process that included resistance and coercion as well as religious change. [39]

These histories remind me that Europe was never a single, uniformly Christian world waiting to carry its faith elsewhere.

There were peoples within it whose traditions were also subjected to outside judgment.

The question remains painfully familiar: what can consent mean when those seeking your conversion also possess the power to govern your land?

Closer to Britain and Ireland

England: the healer and the accusation
The National Archives preserves records concerning Jane, or Joan, Guppie, a Dorset healer accused of witchcraft. Members of her community defended her and testified to the help she had given. It is an example of the contested boundary between healing and accusations of supernatural harm. [40]

I am moved by the people willing to say that she had helped them.

Fear did not speak with a single voice. There were also neighbours who refused to let an accusation become the whole account of a woman they knew.

Scotland: fear, belief, and the language of instruction
The Scottish witch trials drew on fears about the Devil and harmful magic. They were not simply the persecution of an organised surviving pagan religion; the University of Edinburgh’s survey finds no evidence for such a cult. Agnes Sampson’s case, preserved by the National Archives, also shows how a confession obtained under probable torture could become part of a prosecution. [41, 40]

I want to be careful here. To turn every accused person into a priestess or healer would give them identities they may never have claimed.

The wrong does not become smaller because a victim was an ordinary Christian accused of an imaginary crime.

Scotland also offers a different example through education. Founded in 1709, the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge initially allowed only English in instruction and conversation among its pupils, alongside its Presbyterian teaching. [42]

That policy brings me back to the child who must learn that the language of home is unwelcome in a place claiming to improve them.

Ireland: faith under restriction
In Ireland, the Penal Laws imposed restrictions on Catholics involving worship, clergy, education, property, and political participation. Their effects varied over time, but the history recorded by Clare County Library shows religious identity reaching into the practical conditions of a person’s life. [43]

Here, the people whose worship was restricted were themselves Christian.

Their faith could be judged unacceptable by another Christian authority, and the consequences extended beyond the church door.

It asks me to think carefully about any claim that persecution is merely a failure to understand a completely unfamiliar belief. Sometimes those exercising power understand enough to know exactly which practice they intend to constrain.

Wales and England: the forbidden gathering
The Conventicle Act of 1664 applied to England and Wales and criminalised certain religious gatherings outside the practices of the established church. Penalties included fines and imprisonment. Parliament’s own account describes the wider persecution of Catholics and Protestant Nonconformists in the seventeenth century. [44, 45]

A gathering for worship could be treated as a threat to public order.

I find myself returning to the room in which people assemble because their conscience leads them there, and the law that decides they have no right to remain.

These histories are not interchangeable with Indigenous dispossession. Their institutions, relationships, and consequences differ.

But they reveal another part of the question this reflection keeps asking: what happens when political power grants one religious authority the right to decide which forms of devotion may exist?

What refused to disappear

I need to be careful with the story I tell about destruction.

The Gogodala work of cultural renewal, the continuing authority of Haudenosaunee Clan Mothers, and African Christians’ maintenance and adaptation of ancestral practices all show people acting within and against the pressures placed upon them. These histories include continuity, argument, change, and deliberate choices about what to carry forward. [18, 19, 23, 22]

If I describe only what colonisers did, I risk making them the authors of every part of the story.

The people they sought to govern were also thinking, deciding, refusing, protecting, and teaching.

I want to make room for that without asking survival to soften the seriousness of the harm.

An inheritance can continue while bearing the marks of what happened to it. A community can renew a practice without recreating every detail of the past. People remain free to change their traditions without that change proving the traditions were worthless.

The right to continue includes the right to decide how.

I think this is where respect becomes more demanding than admiration.

It asks us to recognise living peoples, with disagreements and aspirations of their own, rather than holding them inside an image of what we believe they should have preserved.

The spiritual danger of certainty

As I read these histories, I become uneasy with any spiritual authority that cannot tolerate another person’s freedom.

I recognise how easily certainty can flatter us. It can make us feel responsible for correcting everyone around us while sparing us the harder work of examining ourselves.

A person may speak sincerely about love and still fail to recognise their own need for control.

An institution may call itself compassionate while organising another person’s life around obedience.

For me, spiritual practice has to include the willingness to discover that I have been wrong.

To hear an account that unsettles my beliefs. To recognise harm even when it was committed in language I cherish. To stop asking good intentions to excuse what people actually endured.

Reverence should make us more careful with another person’s life.

Faith must leave room for freedom

I do not want to repeat the same demand in reverse.

An Indigenous person who embraces Christianity does not owe anyone the surrender of that faith to prove their cultural belonging. A person who maintains ancestral practices deserves the same freedom. So does someone whose life includes both.

The right to make those choices belongs to them.

Naming the role of Christian institutions also leaves room to recognise Christians who opposed abuses and defended Indigenous peoples. What matters is an honest account of particular actions and responsibilities, rather than using either compassion or cruelty to erase the other. [1]

My own understanding of the Christ within asks me to examine the impulse to dominate. It asks what becomes of compassion when I meet someone whose experience of the sacred differs from mine.

Can I listen without preparing to correct them?

Can I recognise the limits of my understanding?

Can I let another person remain the authority on what they have lived?

Here, the In-Between becomes a place of responsibility. I can remain with an uncomfortable question long enough to hear an answer that does not protect my familiar beliefs.

I can allow truth to ask something of me.

What reverence requires now

The Bringing Them Home report called for acknowledgment, apologies, reparation, and measures supporting the restitution of land, culture, and language. Its recommendations make clear that recognition has practical responsibilities. [16]

I think that matters for any institution wishing to speak of healing.

Acknowledgment needs to reach into what institutions still control: records, resources, cultural belongings, and the decisions that affect communities.

Sorrow has to become a willingness to relinquish control. To listen when communities name what they need. To support their authority over the work of recovery, rather than deciding once again what is best for them.

And no one owes forgiveness on demand.

I cannot make these histories less painful by ending with a beautiful sentence. I can only try to remain honest about what they ask us to see.

A language spoken without punishment.

A ceremony practised without fear.

A child able to learn from their elders without being taught to despise them.

These are freedoms worth defending.

When I think of the sacred now, I find myself returning to the care with which we approach another person’s belonging.

The willingness to listen before claiming authority.

The humility to recognise a life beyond our understanding.

The courage to let that life remain its own.

If these reflections spoke to you, you are welcome to clap, follow, or subscribe. Join me here in the In-Between, where we sit with difficult questions and consider what it means to live with greater honesty, tenderness, and responsibility.

Historical sources

1. Vatican, Joint Statement on the Doctrine of Discovery, 30 March 2023
2. UCL, “Great Dying” in Americas disturbed Earth’s climate (2019)
3. Mortality from contact-related epidemics among indigenous populations in Greater Amazonia (2015)
4. National Museum of Australia, Smallpox epidemic
5. AIATSIS, Missions, stations and reserves
6. AIATSIS, Welcome to Country
7. U.S. National Archives, Dawes Act (1887), introduction and full transcript
8. Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, report highlights
9. Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, First Nations in Canada
10. New-York Historical Society, The Code of Indian Offences, including the 1883 primary document
11. Library of Congress, Disaster at Wounded Knee
12. U.S. Department of the Interior, Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, Volume I (2022)
13. U.S. Department of the Interior, Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, Volume II (2024)
14. National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, Residential School History
15. Australian Human Rights Commission, Bringing Them Home, Chapter 14: Making Reparation
16. Australian Human Rights Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report Recommendations
17. Mauro Gomes da Costa, Institutionalization and disciplination of indigenous children in the salesian missions of Amazonas/Brazil (1923 – 1965), Revista Brasileira de História da Educação (2021)
18. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Gogodala: A Cultural Revival?
19. Ronin Films, Gogodala: A Cultural Revival?, documentary synopsis
20. AIATSIS, Return of Cultural Heritage
21. National Museum of Australia, Repatriation Handbook, Chapter 1: What is repatriation?
22. The trajectories of Christianity and African ritual practices: The public silence and the dilemma of mainline or mission churches, Acta Theologica (2015)
23. Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Government
24. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, Asante Queen Mothers in Ghana
25. Jean Allman, Making Mothers: Missionaries, Medical Officers and Women’s Work in Colonial Asante, 1924 – 1945 (1994)
26. Parliament of Australia, Bougainville report, Chapter 4, The Role of Women and Women’s Groups
27. As mothers of the land: the birth of the Bougainville women for peace and freedom, ANU repository
28. Bishop Museum, Hula Resilience
29. Te Papa Tongarewa, Atua rakau (staff god)
30. Te Papa Tongarewa, Tangaroa (god of the sea)
31. National Museum of Australia, No presence in the case: looking for Tahiti in world museums
32. Te Papa Tongarewa, Spreading the word
33. Intersections (ANU), Gender Fluidity and Shamanism in the Spanish Philippines
34. Grace Nono, Babaylan Sing Back, introduction
35. Ateneo de Manila University Press, Babaylan Sing Back
36. From Idolatry to Gentilidade: Assessing Local Christians’ Religious Offences in the Goa Inquisition (17th Century)
37. Scandia, The Christian practice of the Varanger Sámi in the face of missionary activities and colonialism
38. Collecting, connecting, constructing: Early modern commodification and globalization of Sámi material culture
39. The Cambridge History of the Crusades, Crusading in the North
40. The National Archives (UK), Witchcraft: Agnes Sampson and Jane Guppie records
41. University of Edinburgh, Survey of Scottish Witchcraft: FAQ
42. Tasglann nan Eilean, Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge
43. Clare County Library, Penal Laws
44. Conventicle Act 1664, original legislation
45. UK Parliament, Persecution