"You can't draw lines or die while trying to defend them. You find yourself in a circumstance where, as Lear puts it, "the very acts themselves have ceased to make sense."
the goals or ends of the Crow way of life have been made impossible. The result is a kind of confusion, mingled with shame. As one Crow woman said in the aftermath: 'I am trying to live a life I do not understand.'"

This whiplash in finding yourself suddenly without cultural guidelines, in a world where all of your beliefs are made unapplicable, has always been unbearable. And it has been going on for thousands of years. The conquering of a people, the destruction of their dieties and attempting to assimilate survivors into your own society. Eventually, however, there came a time when leaders wanted to switch their own religions and ways of live - switch cultures. they couldn't slaughter their own people, and they wanted to switch to be smooth and relatively painless. Such was the case in the Roman transition to Christianity. Like the native american chief, who used a central part of his own culture- the profet dream- to smoothly transition to westernization, romans adapted pagan holidays and rituals, such as the spring festival, into their new religion. Religion as we know it is shaped by the need to prevent whiplash. to keep ones citizens from feeling like they are "trying to live a life [they] don't understand".
This fluidity in religious/cultural beliefs I believe is the best way to be. Allowing rules to change with the times so your beliefs keeps up with your renewed understanding. If you dont cement your culture, if you follow Coups example of adaptation, you hold more of a chance of surviving with the core of your beliefs intact, instead of being torn apart because you wouldn't let go of the details. "We have encouraged an identity, a self-definition, of which the core is the ability to 'reinvent' ourselves". Many see this as a defect, a cop out modernization of good religion. But I see it more from Coup's point of view. It's a smooth transition to a new world. you dont know exactly what's coming, but your bending with the times, and thus your core, for lack of strain, will hold strong.