Land is Kin
Dana Lloyd
The following is a forward of Dana Lloyd’s book, Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites (University Press of Kansas, 2023).
“The struggle by American Indians to protect their sacred sites and to have access to them for traditional ceremonies is a movement in which all peoples should become involved,” wrote Lakota scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., in 1991. The book you are holding in your hands, Land Is Kin, answers Deloria’s call to join the movement. What is required is a rethinking of Indigenous sacred sites, indeed, a rethinking of land itself. Deloria called for incorporating and applying the “unique needs of Indian religions” into the religious freedom principle. But a lot has changed in the thirty years that have passed since Deloria wrote this text: on the one hand, religious freedom has become the tool of conservative Christians; on the other, the United States has appointed a Laguna Pueblo member as its secretary of the interior. Religious freedom may not be the right tool to protect Indigenous sacred sites at all. Indeed, settler law does not offer the right tools for protecting them. This book explains why religious freedom in particular, and settler law more generally, is not the answer that those who want to protect Native American sacred sites are looking for, and it looks for alternatives. To do so, I ask what land means—and what it could mean—to the different parties involved in Indigenous sacred sites cases. Ultimately, it is those who are in kinship relationship with sacred lands who are leading the struggle to protect them. In writing this book, I, as a non-Indigenous immigrant to the United States, follow them as I respond to Deloria’s call to join the movement. What I have learned is that to protect what we have come to refer to as Indigenous sacred sites, it is necessary to understand that land is kin.
Native American sacred sites cases present us with two competing rights—one party’s religious freedom is in tension with another party’s property rights. For example, a Native nation argues that a specific place is sacred to it, but this place is officially owned by someone else, usually the US government. If the nation asks to be able to use the place for religious purposes (to hold a ceremony, for example), one might think that what it is really asking is to suspend the government’s property rights in order to protect Native religion. But if this is how the issue is framed—as a competition between property rights and religious rights—we can expect the Native claimants to lose, because in liberal political discourse, property is the paradigmatic right and land is the paradigmatic property. At the time of writing this book, a case of this kind is making its way through the federal court system. Various Apache peoples are asking the court to stop the US Forest Service from transferring to a mining company land that the Apache hold sacred. Chi’chil Bildagoteel, known in English as Oak Flat, is the place where Ga’an (guardians or messengers between Apache peoples and the Creator, Usen) reside. It is a 6.7-square-mile stretch of land within what is currently managed by the US federal government as TontoTonoto National Forest, east of Phoenix, Arizona. Since 2014, a proposed copper mine has threatened to permanently alter the area through an underground mining technique that would cause the earth to sink, up to 1,115 feet deep and almost two miles across. The Apache have argued that destroying their sacred sites would infringe on their free exercise of religion, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their claim, allowing the federal government to use its property as it sees fit. One might say that because of religion’s special status in the US Constitution’s First Amendment, religion actually transcends property relations, that it is the one thing that is excluded from property relations. However, in such cases, religion—understood as one right among many—does not challenge the logic of property; rather, it lies comfortably in the sphere to which this logic allocates it. Understanding sacred sites cases in this way sets two (ostensibly) mutually exclusive conceptions of land against each other: either land is sacred or it is property.
This book argues that this binary logic is false. Through an analysis of one sacred land case, which started its way through the federal court system some thirty years before the Oak Flat case, the book demonstrates that land can play different roles simultaneously and that a multilayered understanding of land is possible and leads to a more just treatment of this land and its inhabitants. These arguments respond to the very questions that animate the field of North American religions, about how the state, and specifically legal systems, shapes religion while managing the land. While religious studies scholar Kerry Mitchell examines these questions through the example of national parks, and law and religion scholar Winnifred Sullivan offers the example of cemeteries, Land Is Kin looks at one controversy around the intended development of a sacred area in a national forest.
The sacred land that is offered as an example in this book is the High Country, a forest of Douglas firs taller than three hundred feet, where prehuman entities called woge reside, Indigenous doctors across tribal nations and borders train, and medicine to heal the sick and bring peace to earth is gathered and made. The High Country is managed by the US Forest Service as the Six Rivers National Forest, among the Siskiyou Mountains in northern California, and it is the sacred homeland of the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa Indigenous nations. The area includes Peak Eight, Doctor Rock, Golden Stairs, Chimney Rock, Elk Valley, and Sawtooth Mountains, but it is called the High Country because of its spiritual power rather than its elevation. Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa men and women who are called by the Creator or the Great Spirit to attend the High Country go there to gather and make medicine and to attain the power, or maximize one’s potential, to act in a desired way. Making medicine may involve rituals and prayer, but it is essentially an inward experience, and following all prescribed rituals does not guarantee than one would succeed in making medicine. By the mid-1920s, because of white invasion of the area, only one sweathouse remained in the High Country, but natural prayer seats still abound there. Reading the 1988 US Supreme Court case Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association would not tell you all of this. In a case where the Supreme Court allowed the Forest Service to construct a road and to harvest timber in the High Country, despite the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa nations’ argument that these actions would severely harm their ability to practice their religion in the area, including gathering medicine, training medicine people, and communicating with the woge, the High Country is referred to simply as “federal land.” The road construction and timber harvest were constitutional, according to the court, because, sacred or not, the High Country was government property.
The Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa nations argued in court against cutting 733 million board feet of the trees in the High Country over eighty years and against the construction of the final, six-mile-long section of a road, known as the G-O Road because it was supposed to connect the towns Gasquet and Orleans in Nnorthern California and thus support the logging plan. They argued that the construction of the road and the logging would irreparably damage their ability to practice their religion in the High Country and that their right to practice their religion freely is granted to them by the Free Exercise Clause of the US Constitution’s First Amendment and by the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. While the case has been argued, decided, and studied as one about the free exercise of religion, I argue that Lyng is a case about sovereignty. This is so because the question at its heart is the following: who is the sovereign who can (and should) decide the fate of the High Country? If we do not think of Lyng through the lens of sovereignty, it would be difficult to explain how it came to be that a dispute over a six-mile segment of a road reached all the way to the Supreme Court. It would be even more difficult to explain why the Indigenous plaintiffs lost the case.
The court is charged with the task of interpreting land, and the interpretation it chooses would determine the fate of the High Country: on the one hand, Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa traditional lands, a sacred area vitally important to ongoing cultural and social practices and, on the other, public property. But what does “public property” mean? Who is the “public” whose opinion about the fate of this land should be considered? This question is complicated by the fact that this is Karuk aboriginal territory, but one does not learn that from reading the Supreme Court decision in Lyng.
Despite the binary sacred/property presented in the Supreme Court decision, at least five ways to understand land are offered to us in the Lyng case and its aftermath. The Yurok and Karuk witnesses in the Lyng trial relate to the High Country as their home and their kin, but they are heard by the Forest Service and by the courts as relating to this area as sacred; the Forest Service and the Supreme Court also tell a story about land as property—something that can be owned and whose resources may be used by the owner. Environmentalists who were involved in the case as plaintiffs see the High Country as wilderness, and eventually Congress protected it from development as such. I used to think this was only strategic, but the more I read, the more I learned how essential the idea of wilderness is to American identity, and especially to American environmentalists’ identities. All these discourses on land coexist in Lyng. While they sometimes appear to contradict each other, this book sets out to show that they can complement and complicate each other in productive ways. Bringing together these discourses on land sheds light on the multifaceted nature of sacred sites cases that the Lyng decision conceals.
This book explores the different discourses on land and the roles they played in the Lyng case and its aftermath, as the Yurok Tribe organized according to the Indian Reorganization Act in 1993 and established a tribal court that has become a model for other tribal courts around the United States. The Yuroks’ recent acquisition of more than fifty thousand acres of ancestral lands and their resolution to recognize the Klamath River, which is sacred to them and central to their vitality, as a rights-bearing entity are only some examples of bringing together notions of land as property, as kin, and as home to inspire action and to assert their sovereignty in the area without seeking the recognition of the US Supreme Court. Through close readings of legal documents, as well as accounts by Yurok and Karuk elders, I tell the story of the High Country and the different roles it has played—as property and commodity, as home and kin, and as sacred wilderness—in the Yurok and Karuk struggles for sovereignty and for religious freedom. ♦
Dana Lloyd is an Assistant Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies and affiliated faculty at the Center for Peace and Justice Education at Villanova University. She is the Author of Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites (University Press of Kansas, 2023) and the co-editor of American Examples: A New Conversation about Religion, vol. 3 (University of Alabama Press, 2024).
Recommended Citation
Lloyd, Dana. “Land is Kin.” Canopy Forum, December 2, 2024. https://canopyforum.org/2024/12/02/land-is-kin-by-dana-lloyd/.
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