The suppression of Native religion in the United States was not chiefly a matter of law passed by Congress. In 1883 the Office of Indian Affairs issued rules governing Courts of Indian Offenses, drafted at the urging of the Secretary of the Interior, making the Sun Dance and comparable dances, the giveaway, and the practices of medicine men punishable offences on reservations, enforced through imprisonment and the withholding of rations. Being administrative regulations rather than statute, they were never tested against the First Amendment as a law would have been, and they governed reservation life for half a century. The dance provisions were dropped in 1933.
Running in parallel was the school system. Children were removed to off-reservation boarding schools built on the principle of assimilation, forbidden their languages, and drilled into Christian observance. A federal investigation completed in 2024 identified 417 such schools in 37 states and territories, documented at least 973 child deaths, and located burial sites at 65 of them. Canada operated a comparable residential system through which roughly 150,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children passed; its Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported in 2015 and called the system cultural genocide.
The reversal sits within one lifetime. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 declared a federal policy of protecting the right to believe, express and exercise traditional religions, including access to sites and use of sacred objects. It carried weak enforcement, and the Supreme Court found in 1988 and again in 1990 that it did not by itself stop government action burdening Native practice. Sacred sites on federal land remain the weakest point, and cases about mining, roads and dams on such sites are still being lost.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 addressed a separate injury, the mass collection of Native dead by museums, universities and federal agencies, and requires inventories and return to descendants and tribes. Compliance took decades, and revised regulations in 2024 forced a wave of exhibit closures as institutions found they could not lawfully display what they held.