Description
Book SynopsisResponding to Vine Deloria, Jr’s call for all people to ‘become involved’ in the struggle to protect Indigenous sacred sites, Dana Lloyd’s
Land Is Kin proposes a rethinking of sacred sites, and a rethinking of even land itself.
Trade Review"Until the tired and faulty precedent of Lyng is dethroned, Indigenous sacred sites in the United States will continue to suffer the consequences of being treated as mere property. Dana Lloyd challenges this paradigm in Land Is Kin by looking backward and forward, asking how such a problematic framing of sacred land as government property came to be. She explores how this knotty tangle might be undone in a way that foregrounds Indigenous sovereignty, focusing on kinship with the land and the relationship work such intimacy demands. This important book will be compelling to readers across several fields—Native American and Indigenous studies, religious studies, and law—and to communities on the ground seeking fresh insights for gaining protection of their sacred places as relatives."—Greg Johnson, professor, Department of Religious Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Sacred Claims: Repatriation and Living Tradition
"This book is as refreshing as it is lucid. Where most observers consider a 1988 loss before the Supreme Court to be the end of the story for Native American sacred place protection in the land of religious freedom, Dana Lloyd presses through and beyond the language of religious freedom or wilderness to hear how Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa peoples themselves assert their rights and responsibilities to land as kin."—Michael McNally, professor of religion, Carleton College, and author of Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom beyond the First Amendment
"Dana Lloyd has written an important book. Ever since the Supreme Court decided the Lyng case in 1988, it has been used to severely limit and almost completely erase Indigenous land-based religious rights. Lloyd provides a new critique and analysis on how to understand and work around Lyng."—Robert J. Miller, coauthor of A Promise Kept: The Muscogee (Creek) Nation and McGirt v. Oklahoma
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword by Judge Abby Abinanti
- Introduction: The High Country
- 1. Land as Home in the G-O Road Trial
- 2. Land as Property in the Lyng Decision
- 3. Land as Sacred in Justice Brennan’s Dissent
- 4. Land as Wild in the California Wilderness Act
- 5. Land as Kin in the Klamath River Resolution
- Conclusion: Land as Sovereign
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
