Land Back

For the past couple of days, as I’ve known this topic was coming on my essay project calendar, I’ve been getting progressively more nervous.

I’m not entirely sure who my audience is – who reads these essays. So, imagining what needs to be said -what would be additive - is something I feel myself tripping over a bit. I can feel the desire to be “right” and “helpful” and “good” rise up in me. But those don’t feel like useful goals.

Telling the truth – as I’ve come to understand it. That could be a useful goal.

Sharing where I’m at – could be illustrative for others who are also committed to learning and growing. That could be a useful goal.

Making an offering – not just sitting in shame and silence and defensiveness, but moving through the complex web of emotions that comes with being alive, alert, and awake at this exact moment on the planet. Imagining something better, something different, perhaps even something revolutionary. Offering ideas that would help us live in greater alignment with our values, our relationships, and our lives alongside one another. Making an offering could be a useful goal.

Alright, enough stalling.

Years ago, particularly in white progressive circles, you may have noticed land acknowledgements making their way into community space. At the top of a conference, or a workshop, or a meeting, non-Native people started bringing voice to whose land they are on.

For example, I have said, “I currently make home in Minnesota, which is Dakota and Anishinaabe land.”

Of course, for millennia, Indigenous peoples have introduced themselves in relationship to land and community. Land acknowledgements weren’t new. They were just new to some people.

As the practice of land acknowledgements grew and deepened in certain industries, a related question also started to pop up with increasing regularity:

What comes after a land acknowledgement?

The material practice of acknowledging stolen land and broken treaties is one thing. Then what? What happens after we name what is true?

As a white adult who grew up as a white kid in the U.S., there was very little practice modeled to me about how to reckon with, and potentially even accept responsibility for what to do now given abhorrent behavior in the colonial U.S. origin story.

“GIVE US OUR LAND BACK.”

Each time I hear this from a living Indigenous person it feels bracing. Arresting. So simple, so serious, and so clear.

What is the Land Back movement?

Landback is a movement that has existed for generations with a long legacy of organizing and sacrifice to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands. Currently, there are Landback battles being fought all across Turtle Island, to the north and the South…Landback is more than just a campaign. It is a political framework that allows us to deepen our relationships across the field of organizing movements working towards true collective liberation. It allows us to envision a world where Black, Indigenous & POC liberation co-exists. It is our political, organizing and narrative framework from which we do the work (www.landback.org)

Land back is not a pie-in-the-sky marketing campaign. It is a legitimate, multi-faceted movement, complete with nuts and bolts “how tos” in the face of “that could never happen” critique.

Akin to organizers who are offering viable alternatives to the police, land back organizers have thought through the political, legal, and logistical actions of land back.

This is the point where I have suffered from a limited imagination. But how? How, really?

Then I re-situate myself into my current reality. I currently “own” a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom, 1,000 square foot house in South Minneapolis. But I certainly don’t own it. The bank does. Or to be more accurate, my mortgage has been sold from one lender to the next, so currently it’s some random financial institution based in Texas that auto withdraws from my checking account every month.

Why do I share this?

Because it’s important to remember that how land and property and resources are distributed currently are through a complex web of rules, regulations, contracts, and entities making enormous profits.

“The Big Short” is a film about the housing bubble and bank behavior that led to the 2008 recession. It stars Steve Carrell, Ryan Gosling, and Christian Bale. I watch it a few times per year. Although a dramatization, it helps me ground in what the hell goes on around here when it comes to how money is set up. I still find the market totally impossible to comprehend.

Why do I bring this up?

Because the most visceral response to the land back proposition is most often fear. But where will I live? Where will I go? What will happen to me and my family?

Understandable question. If how land is divvied up and apportioned in our future changes entirely what does that mean?

Taking all the air out of that fear, Indigenous people in my life have posed the following question as a genuine retort, “Why on earth do you think we’d do to you what you did to us?”

I take a deep breath.

And I remember the self-awareness work I must revisit in order to be an advocate for land back:

- What does land back do to my sense of my own story and identity? How my ancestors got here and what that has meant in the story we tell ourselves about bravery, and scrappiness, and pride?

- Why do I struggle to hold the co-occurring realities of the American version of chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide? Why is it hard for me and others to prioritize and pay attention to both Black and Indigenous calls for reparations and repair?

- How can I get to a place of peace and trust that I will not be brutalized or made to suffer as I have never once been spoken to by an Indigenous person as though I am less than?

I, of course, don’t know what it will (I’m manifesting) feel like to live through an era when state boundaries, our hyper literal flag, and our financial systems fundamentally shift. But I’m curious.

What we are and have been doing is certainly not working. The wealth gap is widening, with our young people and our old people bearing the brunt of abject poverty in the most prosperous country on the planet. It’s preposterous.

In this election year, young voters are crystal clear that the environment and future of the planet is their number one concern. Understandably, since the earth kicking humans off would render the rest of our fixations moot.

Indigenous water protectors are so powerful. Land stewardship and living harmoniously rather than being extractive certainly gives us a better shot at breathing clean air, preserving our coastlines, and respecting the animals and other living things that are here, too.

I don’t have a crystal ball so cannot see clearly what a better, freer, more just future will feel like. But I’m into it. I’m for it. I’m hopeful about it.

It’s a little corny, but apt so I’m going to say it, one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. Let’s not keep doing the same thing over and over again. Let’s, instead, live into our interdependence, and take movements like land back seriously. Let’s not suffer because of our own stubbornness or failure of imagination. If we don’t know what to do, we can listen to those who are making real, genuine offerings.

What are you planning to do to learn more about land back efforts where you live? Let me know.

My commitment to you, on this journey of 52 essays in 52 weeks, is that next week I will complete and share an essay about dress codes.

Yours,