Land as Method: Grounding the Study of Religion

This paper asks how scholars of religion might approach Land as method. It considers what new insights and questions emerge when community situated theories of religion informed by long standing relationships to particular land bases are permitted entry into the critical study of religion? It attempts to participate in an Indigenous epistemology that labors to listen to the Land on the question of religion and considers what religious studies scholars might learn from the field of Indigenous studies that has long insisted Land and nonhuman beings also generate knowledge. Focusing in on Iiyiyiu histories of land-based activism it suggests that Indigenous appeals to religion that enunciate sustained resistance to the colonial project are acts of resignification and theories of religion in their own right born from a methodology of sustained relationships to place and histories of survivance.