New Book: Land Is Kin

Dana Lloyd, Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites (2024).

The library has just added Land Is Kin by Dana Lloyd to our collection, and it’s a great read for anyone interested in Indigenous rights, environmental justice, or how U.S. law shapes our relationship to the land.

In Land Is Kin, Lloyd offers a powerful analysis and reimaging of U.S. legal and moral frameworks around land, arguing that U.S. law lacks the conceptual and legal tools necessary to protect Indigenous sacred sites. The usual legal framing, sacred land as a religious right, almost always gives way to property rights, usually those of the federal government. Neither religious rights nor property rights can meaningfully protect sacred places because Indigenous relationships to land do not map onto the categories that structure U.S. law. Lloyd, a non-Indigenous author who positions herself as an ally and listener, argues that we must step away from settler understandings of land as property and from the false choice between land rights and religious rights. Instead, she urges adoption of a distinctly Indigenous framework: land as kin.

Lloyd structures the book around five conceptualizations of land—home, property, sacred site, wilderness, and kin—each shaping different understandings of the High Country, an area in northern California managed by the US Forest Services and sacred to the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa Indigenous Nations.

This land is at the center of the Supreme Court case Lyng v Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1988) where the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa opposed the logging and construction of road in the High Country which would irreparably harm their ability to practice their religion. Lower courts agreed and ruled that the road would interfere with Indigenous practices and that timber needs did not justify the intrusion. The Supreme Court, however, ruled in favor of the Forest Service, effectively subordinating Indigenous spiritual practices to property rights. Lloyd shows how this reasoning echoes in later cases such as Employment Division v. Smith (1990) and Navajo Nation v. United States Forest Service (2008).

Eventually, the land was protected as wilderness when Congress passed the 1984 California Wilderness Act. But land as wilderness still fails to protect Indigenous sacred land, reinforces federal control, and prioritizes protecting land over recognizing Indigenous sovereignty.

In the final chapter, Lloyd proposes a paradigm shift arguing for understanding land as a living, relational, and sovereign entity. This concept is seen in the 2019 Tolowa decision to extend right to the Klamath River and more effectively captures the true relationship between Indigenous people and land. Acknowledging the kinship ties to land that have not been severed by colonialism, Lloyd points to the emerging global trend of granting legal personhood to rivers, mountains, and ecosystems as a path forward to protecting not just the planet, but Indigenous religious freedom and sovereignty.