Land as Method: Grounding the Study of Religion

This article brings the field of religious studies into closer conversation with critical Indigenous theory to ask how scholars of religion might approach Land as method. It discusses how Indigenous activists who are engaged in Land-based, Land protector, and Land back movements theorize the significance of religious terms in their ongoing efforts to attain socially just and environmentally prosperous futures. It suggests that religious studies scholars could benefit from “making kin” with these grounded theories of religion. Ultimately, it argues that this entails relating to Indigenous Peoples, their knowledges, and the Land itself as self-determining living relations rather than objects that can be possessed and dispossessed.