Land Back is a decentralised campaign that began in the 20th century among Indigenous peoples worldwide who seek to reestablish Indigenous sovereignty, with political and economic control of their ancestral lands. Land Back is part of a broader Indigenous movement for decolonization.
The United States federal government's return of land to the Navajo Nation in the 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo was the first major instance of Land Back in the history of the United States. The United States Congress aimed to compensate Tribal governments for their land with money damages rather than returning land when it established the Indian Claims Commission, active from 1946 to 1978. However, Taos Pueblo refused to accept this and launched a nationwide campaign for the return of their sacred Blue Lake. In 1970 the United States federal government returned Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo in the first successful contemporary instance of Land Back and a major success of the American Indian Movement.
The return of Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo coincided with a new, contemporary Native Self-Determination Era amongst the Native Americans in the United States. The 1980 United States Supreme Court case United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians was seen as a setback for the movement, as the Court recognized the federal government had taken land from the Sioux Nation but offered monetary compensation, which was declined. Since the 1960s, the Land Back movement has spread to other Native American federally recognized tribal governments, Indigenous peoples of Mexico, Indigenous peoples in Canada, Indigenous Australians, Māori people, Fijians, and many other indigenous peoples in different countries.
Land Back's prominence has increased in the 21st century. In the 2010s the Land Back movement was often marked with the hashtag #LandBack. The pace of successful instances of Land Back has accelerated in the 2020s in several different countries.
Description
The Land Back movement seeks to restore Indigenous political authority over unceded ancestral lands. Scholars from the Indigenous-run Yellowhead Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University describe it as a process of reclaiming Indigenous jurisdiction. The NDN Collective describes it as synonymous with decolonization and dismantling white supremacy. Land Back advocates for Indigenous rights, preserves languages and traditions, and works toward food sovereignty, decent housing, and a clean environment.
Activists have also used the Land Back framework in Mexico, and scholars have applied it in New Zealand and Fiji. Land Back is part of a broader Indigenous movement for decolonization.
Philosophy The NDN Collective describes the Land Back campaign as a metanarrative that ties together many different Indigenous organizations similar to the Black Lives Matter campaign. They say that the campaign enables decentralised Indigenous leadership and addresses structural racism faced by Indigenous people that is rooted in theft of their land. Land Back emphasizes Indigenous groups’ physical and spiritual connection to their ancestral lands, and the importance of reviving the knowledge and practices that have sustained their people for generations.
Land Back is a movement that advocates for the restoration of communal ownership of traditional and unceded Indigenous lands, while rejecting colonial concepts of real estate and private property. Seeking the return of land is not solely driven by economic interest. The intent is to reestablish important cultural ties between people and place, revitalize ancient cultural practices connected with the land, and restore Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty. When Indigenous communities regain access to ancestral lands, they are empowered to re-engage with traditional foods, medicines, languages and cultural practices, and these activities promote community well-being and cultural continuity.
In some cases Land Back promotes a land tax that seeks to collect revenue on people who are of non-indigenous origins.
Methods In the United States, Tribal governments and activists point to the Supremacy Clause to enforce Tribal sovereingty according to treaties between federally recognized tribes and the United States federal government, as they "shall be the supreme Law of the Land." The full clause reads:
In some cases, land is directly returned to Indigenous people when private landowners, municipalities, or governments give the land back to Indigenous tribes. This may take the form of a real estate transaction. In other cases, the transfer of ownership of the land may not be feasible. Co-management of public lands has emerged as a means for Indigenous voices to be consulted concerning the stewardship and use of ancestral lands.
Indigenous-led projects may also use community land trusts to reserve lands for their group.
History The Land Back movement has witnessed numerous campaigns, often culminating in the return of land to Indigenous stewardship. The following are a number of notable cases listed in chronological order, but this list is not comprehensive.
Navajo Nation The Long Walk of the Navajo was the deportation and forced relocationAnderson, Gary C. Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime that Should Haunt America. The University of Oklahoma Press. Oklahoma City, 2014.Lee, Lloyd ed. Navajo Sovereignty. Understandings and visions of the Diné People. University of Arizona Press: Tucson, 2017. of the Navajo people by the United States federal government and the United States army. Navajos were forced to walk from their land in western New Mexico Territory (modern-day Arizona and New Mexico) to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. Some 53 different forced marches occurred between August 1864 and the end of 1866. In total, 10,000 Navajos and 500 Mescalero Apache were forced to the internment camp in Bosque Redondo. During the forced march and internment, up to 3,500 people died from starvation and disease over a four-year period. In 1868, the Navajo were allowed to return to their ancestral homeland following the Treaty of Bosque Redondo.M. Annette Jaimes (1992). The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance. p. 34. South End Press Some anthropologists state that the "collective trauma of the Long Walk ... is critical to contemporary Navajos' sense of identity as a people".
Indian Claims Commission
The Indian Claims Commission was a judicial relations arbiter between the United States federal government and Native American tribes. It was established under the Indian Claims Act of 1946 by the United States Congress to hear any longstanding claims of Indigenous tribes against the United States.Act of August 13, 1946, ch. 959, 60 Stat. 1049 The Commission created a process for tribes to address their grievances against the United States, and offered monetary compensation for territory lost as a result of broken federal treaties. Its purpose was to serve as a tribunal for hearing claims against the United States arising prior to that date by any Native American tribe or other identifiable group of Indigenous people living in the United States.
The Commission was created on August 13, 1946, after nearly 20 years of Congressional debates. In this it exercised primary jurisdiction that formerly rested with the United States Court of Claims. The Court of Claims had jurisdiction over claims arising after August 13, 1946 and subsequently after the ICC ended its operations on April 10, 1977 on any claims filed with the ICC and not yet fully resolved. The Commission was conceived as way to thank Native Americans for their unprecedented service in World War II and as a way to relieve the anxiety and resentment caused by the United States' history of colonization of indigenous peoples. The 1946 act allowed any "identifiable" group of native descendants to bring a cause of action, without regard to their federal recognition status. This led to many neglected Indian groups in the Southeast, the Northeast, and California organized tribal governments in order to pursue their claims, particularly for land. However, by accepting the government's monetary offer, the aggrieved tribe abdicated any right to raise their claim again in the future. On occasion, a tribe gave up federal recognition as part of the settlement of a claim.
The Commission was adjourned in 1978 by Public Law 94-465,90 Stat. 1990 which terminated the Commission and transferred its pending docket of 170 cases to the United States Court of Claims on September 30, 1978. It took until the late 1970s to complete most of them, with the last case finished in the early 21st century. By the time of the Commission's final report in 1979, it had awarded $818,172,606.64 in judgments and had completed 546 dockets.
Land was the dominant concern of the litigation by tribes before the Commission. The statutory authority did not permit this tribunal to grant or restore land to the tribes, but only to award money based upon a net acreage figure of lost lands times the monetary market value of an acre at the time of taking. This limitation on the authority of the ICC was resented by many tribal peoples, who wanted the return of their lands more than money—e.g., the Pit River Indians of northern California, and the Teton and Lakota of the Black Hills, South Dakota. In a few instances, by way of settlement acts, tribes gained some monetary funds to buy acreage when they had no communal land (as with the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy of Maine and the Catawba of the Carolinas). Special congressional acts on occasion did restore some acreage, as with the Havasupai at the Grand Canyon.Martin, 1985
The methodology and theory of ethnohistorical research in general traces back to the work done by anthropologists and other scholars on claims before the Commission.See "Introduction" to Shoemaker (2002), vii–ix.Anthropologists, ethnologists, historians, and legalists were the dominant researchers and advocates for the plaintiff tribes and the defendant federal government. This expanded the amount of anthropological research on these tribes and led to the foundation of the Ohio Valley Historic Indian Conference, later the American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE). The research and historical reports compiled in evidence for Native American claims was first amassed in 1954 at the inaugural conference. A collection of the studies was published in the series American Indian Ethnohistory by Garland Publishing in 1974.
In preparing expert testimony for litigation brought by the tribes as plaintiffs or for the defense by the U.S. government, researchers explored all forms of data, including the earliest possible maps of original title—i.e., native or indigenous—territory and the cartographic presentations based upon treaties, statutes, and executive orders—generally identified as recognized title. In most cases, recognized title lands could be more easily demonstrated in litigation, while native territory depended upon Indian informants, explorers, trappers, military personnel, missionaries and early field ethnographers. Scholars sought to reconstruct native ecology in terms of food supply and other resources of the environment. In this way, some concept of original territory could be gained that could be mapped. As the Final Report of the ICC revealed, compromises over territorial parcels led to rejecting some acreage which had been used by more than one tribe over time.ICC, 1978; visit online map, see link below
The briefs, testimonies, quantum data, findings, and decisions were published in the 1970s in multiple series of microfiche by Clearwater Publishing Co., now owned by LexisNexis. Garland Publishing, NY, also in the 1970s, published some two hundred books containing some but not all of the materials pertaining to the claims cases.Sutton, ed., 1985: 399–401
Taos Pueblo