Is Land Back Going Mainstream? Your Year-End Land Back News Roundup
From timber companies to churches, all kinds of institutions are returning land to Indigenous hands
I thought I’d send out one final Land Back News Roundup to keep us occupied as we all wait to usher in a new year tonight. If you need even more reading material for a quiet evening at home away from the Omicron-spreading crowds, might I also recommend last week’s recap of the first year here at Unsettling?
As we’ve said before, “Land Back” is not a pipe dream, or some distant objective in a far-off future. Land Back is not only possible, it’s happening now. I come across news of land return often enough to wonder: has Land Back already gone mainstream? Maybe not yet, but be it the groundbreaking of work on Willamette Falls as it is reclaimed by the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde or the return of 9,200 acres of Okanogan homelands to the Confederated Tribes of Colville, the stories do keep rolling in.
These celebratory news stories can make the process seem quick and easy, but oftentimes decades or more of long, slow effort are behind the reclamation of even rather small parcels. For instance, the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation (PBP Nation) have been navigating a bureaucratic labyrinth to reclaim lands in Dekalb County, IL. At the end of November, PBP Nation Chairman Joseph Rupnick gave a quick recounting of this effort and the filing of a bill with Congress to settle the matter. The bill has been referred to the Committee on Indian Affairs but has yet to advance further.
But then, sometimes the action is quick—or at least, once the idea is finally proposed, as was the case with the return of 125 acres on Puget Sound to the Squaxin Island Tribe. From The Seattle Times coverage of the story:
In the social justice reckoning after the murder of George Floyd, it was obvious giving the shoreline back was the right thing to do, said Mike Warjone, president of Port Blakely, U.S. Forestry.
A mere spoken “land acknowledgment,” recognizing tribal presence and stewardship, is not enough, Warjone said.
“Just an acknowledgment about the place would ring hollow if the only owner of record was still around, and the people it was stolen from were alive and well, and right up the street. The obvious thing to do was simply give it back.
“Frankly I feel a little like, why didn’t we think of this earlier? … It’s about time.”
While basic altruism seems at play for Warjone and Port Blakely Companies (at least in their public statements), more than one story from this past year suggests other motives might also come to play in decisions to participate in land return. Take, for instance, the simple inconvenience of taking care of a portion of land, which seems be driving the Minnesota Department of Transportation to consider returning a segment of Lake Superior coastline to the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. MNDOT once used the land as a gravel pit, but has left it vacant in recent years, and hasn’t found a way to deal with complaints from neighbors about “poor behavior” by public visitors. (Subtext: MNDOT doesn’t want to clean up beer cans or interfere with drunk teens and twenty-somethings holding bonfires on the beach). They thought about selling it, but had yet to make much headway when others stepped in.
Similarly, 200 acres once featuring a Christian camp and conference center (owned by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), the largest North American Presbyterian denomination) was returned to Cherokee Nation over the summer. Why? Because the camp went broke. Or, as The Presbyterian Outlook put it (a little more delicately), “the economic challenges of keeping a church-related camp financially solvent” were great enough to be a “key driver” in conversations on returning the land.
(Just so we’re clear, the timber company thinks it the morally “obvious thing” to give back the land. It’s the church leaders who are worried about the bottom line. Of course, there’s more to the story than that; you can read a longer history of this former mission and its connection to the Cherokee here.)
When Land Back becomes the default for folks who don’t otherwise know what to do, you know the idea has gotten around.
The above stories aren’t exactly irreproachable models for those of you interested in growing the Land Back movement. So let’s talk about something more exemplary. Indeed, if you’ve skimmed by most of the links included above (as surely most of you have), I would like to suggest that you consider not skipping this next one, and actually reading more in detail about the Wiyot Tribe’s successful reclamation of Tuluwat Island in northern California. YES! Magazine documents both the intergenerational resolve of Wiyot tribal members in advocating for its return, as well as the formation of a new organization, Dishgamu Humboldt, to further local Land Back efforts. Dishgamu Humboldt is a partnership with local solidarity economy group Cooperation Humboldt. The partnership has involved the creation of both an Indigenous-led community land trust and a mechanism by which residents of Humboldt County can more easily return land to the Wiyot.
The story is important in part because it captures the long process of relationship-building that set the groundwork for a success of this scope. As YES! notes, Humboldt County was already home to a project called the “Honor Tax,” which encouraged residents to make voluntary payments to the Wiyot in recognition that they were living in Wiyot land.1 I happened to be on staff at Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County (DUHC)—who partnered with the Seventh Generation Fund on the Honor Tax—around the time of the project’s launch. (YES! says 2009, but I feel pretty sure the project was already underway in 2008). While I and other core members of DUHC are no longer in Eureka2, some of our former collaborators are now part of the Cooperation Humboldt group, both helping organize and promote the Dishgamu Humboldt work.
I highlight all this because this type of organizing work can often feel messy, or “too small” in its initial stages, but if done with persistence over time—even as the individuals or groups involved change and shift—it can lead to exciting results that just might prove to be a model other communities pick up and use later down the line. The Honor Tax began more than a decade ago. The pressure for the Eureka City Council to give back Tuluwat Island had been ongoing since the 1970s. That the Wiyot might succeed was dismissed by many in the community for years (for more discussion of what the Wiyot faced, and the importance of Tuluwat, I recommend this podcast episode). And yet? Here were are—finally seeing what the Wiyot envisioned all along, made reality.
“Mainstream” may be overselling it. But Land Back is certainly having a moment, it’s certainly going global, and it’s very likely to keep accelerating in the coming year. Whatever your trepidations about 2022, may this be a little bit of good news to celebrate over as the clock strikes twelve tonight.
Happy New Year to all of you,
Meg
PS. Have a story on land return we can feature in our next news roundup? Send it to unsettling@substack.com.
PPS. Thanks to those of you who subscribed after our last newsletter! We’ll be making a donation to Native News Online to round out our year of giving and to keep up with our pledge for 10% of net from Unsettling subscriptions to support other good work out in the world.
Readers may be familiar with more recent projects such as Real Rent Duwamish, which operates on a similar model: https://www.realrentduwamish.org
Just to be clear, while I did community outreach for the Honor Tax, I was not in any way part of the core team for the effort; credit on that front belongs to other DUHC staff members like Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap (now of Move to Amend), and most obviously to the Seventh Generation Fund.