Dana Lloyd's "Land Is Kin"

Dana Lloyd is assistant professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites, and reported the following:

Land Is Kin offers five conceptions of land at play in legal cases about Native American sacred sites. Page 99 falls in the chapter about land as sacred, in a section where I survey past cases about Native American sacred sites. The point of the book is that seeing land as sacred is not enough, that courts tend to pit against each other ideas about land as sacred and about land as property as mutually exclusive, when, in fact, land means much more than that. And so, in a way, if you only read page 99 of Land Is Kin you might get the wrong idea about this book and my argument in it.

However, one sentence in the middle of page 99 does capture an important aspect of what I argue in the book as a whole: “Without acknowledgment of the colonial, genocidal history of the place in question, religion is doomed to be depoliticized and indigeneity essentialized.” Even if we think of a place primarily as sacred, we need to remember that its sacredness to Indigenous peoples has led to violence, and that protecting it today must include protection of Indigenous peoples from such violence.

The other ideas about land that appear in Land Is Kin center around home, wilderness, and kinship. I read trial testimonies and evidence, Supreme Court decisions, and legislation—both federal and tribal—protecting Indigenous lands. While Native American sacred sites cases are usually argued and decided as cases about religious freedom (the right of Indigenous nations to use places sacred to them for worship), I argue that these cases are actually about Indigenous sovereignty (that these places are not just sacred to Indigenous nations, that these places are their homelands and their kin).

What I say on page 99 is that even if cases about Native American sacred sites are decided as cases about religious freedom, judges should still take into account the settler colonial context of these cases. But the book’s journey takes us away from settler law and into Indigenous law (specifically, the Yurok Tribal Court) as a site where Indigenous sovereignty is enacted—where sacred land is protected as kin.

Learn more about Land Is Kin at the University Press of Kansas website.

--Marshal Zeringue