BOOK REVIEW
Some Optimism About Protecting Sacred Sites
LAND IS KIN: SOVEREIGNTY, RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, AND INDIGENOUS SACRED SITES. By Dana Lloyd. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. 2024. Pp. 224. $39.95.
Reviewed by John Greil
Abstract
This Review examines Dana Lloyd’s Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites (2024), a major intervention in Indigenous sacred-sites scholarship. In Lyng v. Nw. Indian Cemetery Ass’n, the Supreme Court effectively held that government destruction of indigenous religious practices at a sacred site does not implicate the Free Exercise Clause if the government owns the land. Through a close reading of the Lyng litigation, including the trial transcripts, Lloyd analyzes the High Country at issue in Lyng as “home,” “property,” “sacred,” “wild,” and “kin,” and highlights the Yurok Tribal Council’s recent recognition of the Klamath River as a rights-bearing person with remedies in tribal court. This review (1) presents and reconstructs the book’s argument on its own terms; (2) locates Land Is Kin as a first-of-its-kind settler-colonial intervention in a field recently dominated by postcolonial theory; (3) connects Lloyd’s critiques to Catholic social thought; and (4) advances a doctrinal case for optimism grounded in the Free Exercise Clause’s original public meaning and recent developments in the Supreme Court.
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Author information:
John Greil
Clinical Professor, University of Texas at Austin School of Law
More information available here
Recommended citation:
John Greil, Some Optimism About Protecting Sacred Sites, 1 Indep. L.J. 126 (2025)