Every Sunday morning, two groups gather to pray on opposite sides of a fence on Wyoming's Wind River Reservation.
Inside, Pastor Sarah Lucas of Foundations for Nations Church leads a Christian service. Outside, Northern Arapaho protesters hold signs and pray in their own way, with coffee and sweetgrass in the air. The weekly demonstrations began after Lucas used her July 5 sermon to condemn the Arapaho Sundance and the sacred pipe as idolatry. The Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes, which share the reservation, have since told the non-Native pastor and her church to leave.
Lucas says she is entitled to preach the Bible as she understands it. Tribal leaders say an outside ministry operating within their homeland crossed a line when it condemned Arapaho religious traditions. Caught between them are Arapaho Christians who do not believe they should have to choose between Jesus and their own people.
For protester MiRae Yellowbird, the sermon echoed an era when Native religion was not merely condemned but criminalized. “We weren't allowed to practice our powwows, our Sundances, any type of ceremony,” she told Wyoming Public Radio. “They would throw us in jail.”
“A Pipe Cannot Hear Your Prayers”
The Northern Arapaho Sundance is a weeklong period of prayer, sacrifice, renewal and connection that coincides with the start of a new year in Arapaho tradition. Ceremonial leaders regard some of its details as private. On the final day of this year's Sundance, Lucas spoke about participants praying with the pipe and to their ancestors. She told her congregation that Jesus alone could free and heal the community.
“A pipe cannot hear your prayers,” Lucas preached.
Those words came from a pastor who says God called her to serve Wind River. Lucas and her husband, Jason, founded Foundations for Nations within the reservation nine years ago. The church grew into a 21,000-square-foot complex with an indoor playground, community rooms, and programs that supplied food, clothes, childcare and home repairs. Its congregation included both Native and non-Native worshipers.
Lucas's sermon asked Native Christians to renounce the Sundance, sweat lodges, the burning of cedar during prayer, and other practices she considers idolatrous. Her argument draws on an exclusivist form of Christianity: There is one God, salvation comes through Jesus, and worship directed anywhere else violates the first commandment.
That conviction is neither invented for this dispute nor held only by Lucas. Some Arapaho Christians agree with her theology. Tearany Black, a congregant who considers Lucas a parental figure, told the Associated Press that Native Christians should leave traditional ceremony behind. Black nevertheless considered the sermon racist and said Lucas did not understand how it sounded to Arapaho people.
When Ceremony Was a Crime
The United States did not introduce Christianity to tribal nations through persuasion alone. Beginning in the late 19th century, federal agents prohibited the Sundance and other Native ceremonies. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act did not make protection of traditional Native worship an official federal policy until 1978.
Churches were also deeply involved in the federal Indian boarding school system. A 2024 Interior Department investigation identified 417 federally supported boarding schools that operated between 1819 and 1969. Religious organizations ran 210 of them. Within these facilities, Native children were separated from their families, discouraged or forbidden from speaking their languages, and taught to reject their religions and cultures.
That history does not make Lucas personally responsible for schools she never ran, nor does it make theological disagreement equivalent to government coercion. But it explains why a non-Native pastor's call to abandon Arapaho ceremony cannot be heard at Wind River as theology in a historical vacuum.
Yellowbird recalled that people could be jailed for the practices Lucas now condemns. DJ Gardner, a 28-year-old former member of Foundations for Nations, grew up both reading the Bible and praying in sweat lodges. His grandfather survived an assimilationist boarding school. Gardner joined Lucas's church believing both sides of his religious life would be welcome, then left after hearing the controversial sermon.
Other relationships have frayed as well. Mary Rose Goggles once appreciated the church's children's activities and assistance while she was raising grandchildren. Jenea Mandan, an Arapaho traditionalist, relied on its summer camp when she was a single mother who needed affordable childcare. After the sermon, Mandan told the Associated Press she felt the church had taken advantage of her circumstances.
At Wind River, food, childcare and home repairs built the relationships that brought families into Lucas's church. For some former participants, the sermon changed how they understood those years of help.
Can You Be Christian and Arapaho?
Wind River's answer has never been limited to a clean yes or no.
Catholic and Episcopal missions have operated on the reservation since the 1880s, and both have their own histories within the assimilation era. St. Stephens Indian School, still in operation, acknowledges that its early students were discouraged from speaking Arapaho or practicing their traditions. Today the school teaches Arapaho language, history and ceremony. At the nearby St. Stephens Catholic church, Arapaho designs fill the sanctuary, cedar may be burned and the altar and baptismal font resemble drums.
This approach is often called inculturation, meaning that a faith takes root in a local culture and is expressed through its language, art and customs. Christians who believe local practices compromise essential doctrine may reject the same adaptation as syncretism, or the blending of religions. Those terms describe the question now dividing Wind River's churches: how much of their cultural traditions may carry into Christian worship?
The answer also depends on who gets to decide. Generations of Native Christians at Wind River have interpreted and practiced Christianity for themselves rather than simply receiving it unchanged from missionaries. A similar dispute erupted in New Mexico in 2024 when an image of Jesus depicted as an Apache medicine man was removed from a Catholic mission, then restored after an outcry from parishioners.
Lucas made her own decision clear: she has said Christianity cannot be mixed with the Sundance, sweat lodges or prayer with sacred objects. Gardner eventually reached another conclusion, returning to the Catholic church of his childhood, where he can practice Christianity without leaving his Arapaho spirituality at the door.
Who Controls Ministry on Tribal Land?
The church sits within the Wind River Reservation, but the Lucases own its parcel as private “fee land” rather than land held in trust for the tribes. Such parcels are part of a checkerboard created when the federal government broke up collectively held reservation land and opened portions to non-Native ownership. The policy weakened the land base that makes tribal self-government possible.
The Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone councils responded to the sermon by adopting rules requiring outside religious organizations to seek approval before operating on the reservation. The rules have already limited Foundations for Nations beyond its own parcel. The church suspended youth programs because it could no longer transport children across tribal land.
Lucas and her attorneys at Liberty Counsel argue that the tribes cannot banish a church from property it owns or punish a pastor for expressing a constitutionally protected Christian belief. That claim carries weight.
Across the country, conservative Christian groups have spent years arguing that government must protect believers whose teachings offend the surrounding culture. At Wind River, the shoe is on the other foot: Christianity is the outside faith asking a Native government to protect its right to denounce the community’s sacred practices. The reversal tests whether the national religious-freedom movement’s principles survive when Christians are the outsiders rather than the cultural majority.
Tribal governments are separate sovereign entities, not counties or states directly governed by every provision of the Bill of Rights. The Indian Civil Rights Act nevertheless prohibits tribes from restricting the free exercise of religion or abridging speech. How those protections can be enforced differs sharply from an ordinary First Amendment case.
The tribal claim begins with sovereignty. A tribe's power to govern its homeland means little if an outside ministry can enter, run programs for children, condemn the tribe's central ceremony, and then invoke federal law to place itself beyond tribal authority. The dispute resembles conflicts in which missionaries attempt to reach Indigenous communities that have chosen isolation, placing a missionary's call to preach against a people's right to protect its community.
Federal Indian law offers no simple answer. Tribes generally have broader civil power over nonmembers on tribal or trust land than on privately owned fee land. The Northern Arapaho council's August 31 decision recognized the Lucases' rights as private landowners and did not claim authority over otherwise lawful conduct on the church parcel that falls outside tribal jurisdiction. But the council denied Foundations for Nations permission to initiate or expand organized activities elsewhere within the tribe's jurisdiction. The unresolved questions concern the church's activity beyond its parcel and whether any enforcement will reach tribal or federal court.
The Lucases have also reported receiving death threats and threats to burn their church. Those allegations have not been independently substantiated in public reporting. The demonstrations documented by local and national journalists have been peaceful.
Tribal leaders have stressed that Arapaho Christians remain free to attend services at the church. “We don't ostracize any of our people,” Northern Arapaho Chairman Keenan Groesbeck said. Their demand is directed at the ministry and its leaders, not at Native Christians in the pews.
An Apology Without Agreement
The distinction between belief and delivery has shaped Lucas’s response. “Words matter, right? Delivery matters,” she told the Riverton Ranger, saying she felt repentant and was sorry her remarks had come across as mocking. But she immediately qualified that apology: God’s word, she said, remained unchanged, and she could not apologize for the faith to which she had given her life.
Organizer Nicole Wagon called the apology hollow, and said the weekly demonstrations would continue.
There may be no wording that resolves the deeper conflict. Lucas can apologize for mockery without affirming the Sundance. Tribal members can defend her right to be Christian without accepting that an outside church has an unlimited right to evangelize within their homeland. Each side believes yielding the central point would betray something sacred.
Gardner is trying to decide what his faith asks of him now. At his new Catholic church, he has been praying about forgiveness while holding onto the boundary that sent him away from Foundations for Nations.
“In order for me to strive to be like Jesus, I would have to forgive,” he said. “But there are some lines you just don't cross.”
Does religious freedom protect a church's right to call a tribe's sacred traditions demonic, even on the reservation where those traditions were once outlawed? Or does tribal sovereignty include the right to say: You are no longer welcome here?
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