Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites, Foreword by Judge Abby Abinanti

Dana Lloyd's Land Is Kin challenges the concept of sacred sites and proposes a multilayered understanding of land that includes home, property, sacred site, wilderness, and kin. She argues that settler law creates a tension between religious freedom and property rights, which favours property rights. Lloyd uses the legal dispute over the High Country to show that there are at least five different ways to understand land in the Lyng case, and proposes a framework that shifts sovereignty away from binary oppositions towards seeing the land itself as sovereign.

Format: Unspecified
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 30 November 2023
Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Dana Lloyd's book, Land Is Kin, responds to Vine Deloria, Jr.'s call for all people to become involved in the struggle to protect Indigenous sacred sites. Lloyd proposes a rethinking of sacred sites and even land itself, arguing that the principle of religious freedom has failed Indigenous peoples for decades.

Lloyd argues that religious freedom fails Indigenous claimants because settler law creates a tension between two competing rights: one party's religious freedom and another party's property rights. In this contest, the right of property will always win. Lloyd proposes a multilayered understanding of land and the different roles it can simultaneously play, rejecting the binary logic of sacred religion versus secular property.

To protect the High Country, an area of the Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California sacred to the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa Indigenous nations, the Yurok filed a religious freedom lawsuit but then proceeded to describe the land as their home in court. They lobbied for protecting the High Country through a wilderness designation even as they continued to argue that they had been managing it for centuries. They have purchased large parcels of ancestral land and also declare the land their kin, a relationship that ostensibly excludes the possibility of ownership.

Land Is Kin demonstrates the complexity of land and the different ways it can be understood and protected. Lloyd's book provides a valuable contribution to the ongoing struggle to preserve Indigenous sacred sites and the land that is integral to their cultures and identities.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780700635894