Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
41. What is a Land-based religious tradition?
Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
Dana Lloyd [+]
Villanova University
Dana Lloyd is Assistant Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University. She holds a PhD in Religion from Syracuse University, and LLB and LLM degrees from Tel Aviv Law School. Her book manuscript, Arguing for This Land: Rethinking Indigenous Sacred Sites, is under contract with University Press of Kansas.
Description
What does it mean for land, or a specific site, to be considered sacred? What does it mean to base a whole religious tradition on the sacredness of a place? I explore these questions in this chapter, but instead of turning to the usual suspects of religious studies (e.g., Mircea Eliade), or to my own religious tradition (Judaism), for answers, I turn to Native scholars (e.g., Vine Deloria, Jr.), who explain their religiosity while connecting the sacredness of the land with land dispossession.