Land Back

The phrase Land Back, sometimes hashtagged as #LandBack, names a continuing indigenous-led movement for the restoration of land to indigenous peoples. The contemporary articulation crystallized around the [[ndn-collective|NDN Collective]] (founded 2018 in Rapid City, South Dakota, by Nick Tilsen and others) and spread widely through indigenous organizing networks in North America from roughly 2018 onward. The underlying movement, however, is far older.

Why land

The argument the Land Back movement makes is simple to state and substantial in its implications. The argument runs roughly:

• Dispossession was the foundation. The construction of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many other nation-states rested on the violent dispossession of indigenous peoples from their lands. The dispossession is not an unfortunate background feature of these societies; it is the foundation on which they were built.
• Sovereignty depends on land. Indigenous self-government, language transmission, ceremony, education, food systems, and the continuing practice of indigenous traditional knowledge all require land — specific lands, the lands the traditions are bound to. Without land, cultural survival programs are gestures.
• Ecological care depends on land. Indigenous-managed lands consistently show better ecological outcomes than alternative management regimes. (The 2018 IPBES report and a substantial subsequent literature have documented this; indigenous peoples manage about 25% of the world’s land surface and steward about 80% of its remaining biodiversity.) The continuing destruction of biodiversity is, in substantial part, a consequence of the dispossession.
• Restitution is the response. Apologies, formal recognition, cultural programs, and economic transfers do not address what was taken. Land was taken; land must be returned, to the extent possible.

The movement is clear that Land Back does not generally mean every non-indigenous resident packing up and leaving. It means the systematic transfer of public lands to indigenous management; the establishment of co-management of national parks, forests, and waterways; the recognition of indigenous title to lands never ceded; and the practical conditions under which indigenous nations can actually govern, steward, and thrive on land.

Some forms it has taken

A few ways the movement has produced concrete results:

• Formal land transfers. The 2020 transfer of the National Bison Range (~18,000 acres in Montana) to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, the first major federal-to-tribal transfer of a national wildlife refuge. The gradual return of various smaller land parcels through state, municipal, and private transfers.
• Co-management agreements. Increasingly common arrangements in which national parks, monuments, and forests are co-managed by federal/state agencies and the relevant tribal nations. Bears Ears National Monument (Utah; co-managed with the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe, and Pueblo of Zuni since 2022) is the most prominent recent example.
• Indigenous-led conservation. Programs like the Indigenous Guardians initiative in Canada, paying indigenous communities to monitor and steward their traditional territories; Indigenous Protected Areas in Australia.
• Treaty rights enforcement. Continuing legal-political work to enforce historical treaties that were signed and never honored. The Standing Rock #NoDAPL movement of 2016–17 was, at base, an enforcement of the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties.
• The #LandBack hashtag and the broader cultural-political work. The movement has substantially shifted public conversation about indigenous-settler relations in North America in the late 2010s and early 2020s.
• Direct land buying. Indigenous-led land trusts (the [[sogorea-te-land-trust|Sogorea Te’ Land Trust]] in the [[san-francisco-bay-area|San Francisco Bay]] Area; the Native Land Conservancy in Massachusetts; the Indigenous Land Conservancy in BC) buy land directly using donated funds and return it to indigenous management.
• Honor Tax and Real Rent programs. Voluntary payment programs in which non-indigenous residents on indigenous land make ongoing payments to the relevant tribal nation. The Real Rent Duwamish program (Seattle) is the best-known.

Honest about complexity

The movement is not without complications and contestations:

• Tribal sovereignty does not mean tribal liberalism. Different tribal nations have different governance structures and different positions on questions of internal politics, environment, and economic development. Land Back hands authority over land to indigenous nations; it does not specify what those nations must do with it. Some tribal governments have substantial fossil-fuel revenues, for example, and the conflict between Land Back solidarity and other progressive priorities is real.
• Which indigenous nation? Many lands have been claimed by multiple peoples across history; resolution of competing claims is genuinely difficult and is generally something [[0mn1one|the platform]] recognizes the indigenous nations themselves are best placed to work out.
• Land Back and non-indigenous descendants of immigrants. The movement is not centrally a movement to expel anyone; but the practical implications of substantial land transfer for non-indigenous residents and their descendants are real and the movement has been clearer about the principle than about the details.
• Land Back and African American struggles. Black Americans, especially descendants of enslaved people, have their own substantial claims on the American land — many of which are intertwined with indigenous histories (the Black-Indigenous communities of the Southeast and elsewhere; the Freedmen of Oklahoma) and many of which are distinct. The relationship between Land Back and Black liberation movements is genuinely complex.

[[0mn1one|The platform]]‘s posture: support the principle, learn from the indigenous organizations leading the work, and recognize that the details of how Land Back is implemented in any given place are properly the work of the indigenous nations and their non-indigenous interlocutors, not of outside observers.

What this gives the platform

Two contributions:

1. A test case for [[0mn1one|the platform]]‘s commitments. The platform’s [[mission-district-sf|mission]] of abundance for every form of life and its bioregional methodology are not abstract; they are tested by the question of whose land each bioregion actually is, and what the platform’s relationship to indigenous land claims should be. The platform’s bioregional pages should — and increasingly do — name the indigenous peoples whose territory each bioregion lies within and link to relevant Land Back work.
2. A continuing teacher. The Land Back movement is making, in real time, the political and ethical case for what reciprocity with land actually looks like at scale. [[0mn1one|The platform]] learns from the work in progress.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[spirituality]]

Sources

1. [[ndn-collective|NDN Collective]]. Land Back: A Manifesto. https://landback.org. Source class: institutional / movement document.
2. Nick Estes. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. Verso, 2019. Source class: book / political-historical study.
3. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Beacon, 2014. Source class: book / historical survey.
4. [[sogorea-te-land-trust|Sogorea Te’ Land Trust]]. https://sogoreate-landtrust.org. Source class: institutional.
5. Mishuana Goeman. Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. University of [[duluth|Minnesota]] Press, 2013. Source class: book / scholarly study.
6. Whose Land? mapping resource. https://native-land.ca. Source class: educational mapping tool.

Lenses still to grow

• Specific tribal Land Back successes — Bears Ears, Bison Range, Sogorea Te’ acquisitions, etc., each deserving substantive treatment.
• The Standing Rock movement as a piece of recent history.
• Indigenous-led land trusts as continuing institutions.
• Land Back globally — the parallel movements in Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Americas more broadly, Africa.
• The relation to ecological restoration — how Land Back and large-scale ecological recovery projects (rewilding, etc.) interact.
• #NoDAPL in detail.