What does this look like on the ground, and what are people doing about it now?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
The single most useful fact in this theme is that land is being returned, right now, in amounts that are small and real. Not as a thought experiment. The Wiyot Tribe got Duluwat Island back from the Eureka city council with no lawsuit and no conditions. Sogorea Te’ is returning Lisjan Ohlone land in one of the most expensive real estate markets on earth, funded partly by non-Native neighbors paying a voluntary land tax. Meanwhile the Wet’suwet’en meet the RCMP on their own unceded territory, and Oak Flat is still in court. This lens is where the theme stops being a way of reading history and becomes a live political situation with addresses.
Anchor questions
- Whose land is the room on? Look it up before you discuss it. What treaty, if any, covers it, and what does that treaty say?
- Eureka gave Duluwat Island back and nothing bad happened to Eureka. So what exactly is the objection to doing it again?
- What would it take for the land under this building to be returned? Who would have to agree, and what would you lose?
- Is a land acknowledgement the first step or the last one? How would you tell the difference from the outside?
- The Wet’suwet’en never signed a treaty. What does Canada’s claim to that ground rest on?
- Who counts the missing women, and what does it mean that a nonprofit had to build the database?
Materials
All free. This lens is unusually well served because the movements publish their own material.
Start here
- Native Land Digital. Put it on a screen, find the room, and let people sit with it before anyone reads anything. Native-led, and honest that it is a starting point rather than an authority. Free: native-land.ca
Land Back, as a demand and as acres
- LANDBACK Action Network Manifesto and the NDN Collective LANDBACK hub. The movement saying what the demand is: land and jurisdiction returned, not an apology and not a metaphor. Free: landback.org and ndncollective.org
- Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. Urban, women-led, Lisjan Ohlone land in the Bay Area, part-funded by the Shuumi Land Tax that non-Native residents pay voluntarily. The most imitable thing in this theme: a room could work out what its own version would be by the end of a session. Free: sogoreate-landtrust.org
- Wiyot Tribe, Landback. Duluwat Island returned by a city council, freely, in full. The counterexample to every claim that this cannot happen. Free: wiyot.us
The live fights
- Yintah Access (Gidimt’en Checkpoint, Wet’suwet’en). Hereditary chiefs asserting jurisdiction on territory that was never ceded or treatied, and the pipeline and the police that arrived anyway. Free: yintahaccess.com
- Apache Stronghold. Oak Flat, a sacred site handed to a copper company through a clause in a defense authorization bill, and the years of litigation since. Free: apache-stronghold.com
- Maile Arvin (Kanaka Maoli), For Mauna Kea to Live, TMT Must Leave (2019). The telescope, the kia’i who blocked the road, and why framing it as science against superstition misses that the question is jurisdiction. Free: abusablepast.org
- Sovereign Bodies Institute, MMIP Database. Indigenous-led, and it exists because the states that should have been counting were not. Building the record is itself the organizing. Free: sovereign-bodies.org
The land acknowledgement argument
Do not run one without the other.
- Native Governance Center, Beyond Land Acknowledgment: A Guide (2021). Ten Native-led pages: how to do it, and what has to follow it. Free: nativegov.org
- Chelsea Vowel (Metis), Beyond Territorial Acknowledgments (2016). What is the acknowledgement for, and has it become a way to perform discomfort instead of acting? This is the piece that starts the argument, and the argument is the point. Free: apihtawikosisan.com
To run in a session
- Zinn Education Project, Standing with Standing Rock: A Role Play on the Dakota Access Pipeline. Fifteen pages, participants take the roles of the actual parties. Built for classrooms and easily adapted. Free: zinnedproject.org
A note on method
Do the acknowledgement argument before the room does an acknowledgement. A group that opens with a land acknowledgement it has not thought about has already performed the move Tuck and Yang and Vowel are warning against, and will spend the rest of the theme defending it. Read Vowel first, then decide.
Give the returns their weight. A room that leaves knowing only about pipelines and databases has learned that this is sad and hard. A room that leaves knowing Eureka handed back an island has learned that it is possible, which is a different thing to do on a Tuesday.
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. It is carried by the movements’ own material. Named gaps. Treaty rights in practice is missing: the Boldt decision and the Fish Wars are the great legal victory of the modern era and there is no verified entry here, because the Smithsonian’s module could not be opened by any automated check and this school does not link what it has not seen. Someone should open it in a browser and add it. Alaska Native land claims, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty beyond Mauna Kea, are absent. Contributions welcome, especially from people who have run a session on this or who are doing the work.