Land Is Kin : Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites

Honorable Mention: Best First book in the History of Religions Responding 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.Deloria suggested using the principle of religious freedom, but this principle 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. Through an analysis of the 1988 US Supreme Court case Lyng v.Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, which she interprets as a case about sovereignty and the meaning of land, Lloyd proposes a multilayered understanding of land and the different roles it can simultaneously play.Rejecting the binary logic of sacred religion ve