Peyote Religion: A History

Omer C. Stewart was an anthropologist, and this University of Oklahoma Press book is his standard scholarly history of the peyote road and of the legal incorporation of the Native American Church in the United States. Its strength is that it remains the field's standard comprehensive history, tracing the practice's spread among Native American communities and the sustained legal battles over religious freedom that led to the Church's formal incorporation, grounded in archival and documentary research. Its limit is that it documents this history as understood at the time of Stewart's writing in the 1980s, so a claim about more recent legal developments, such as later federal religious freedom protections for peyote use, needs a source current to that later period alongside this foundational history.