Ok, so let’s talk a little more about the Land Back movement. I saw a ton of white nonsense in the notes comparing the call to return indigenous land to indigenous people to—I shit you not—Nazi Germany and ethnonationalism. We’re not even going to give those clowns a debate platform. We’re just here to laugh at them. That said, I also saw legitimately good points asking where this movement would leave Black people who, while not Native, are certainly not colonizers. Land Back is inherently a movement for Indigenous people and descendants of slaves. It should and does include reparations for the land loss and theft experienced by slaves post-emancipation (the effects of which are still seen and felt today).
All this said, Land Back means different things to different indigenous people and their tribes.
Some really do literally mean the return of U.S. land to tribal nations and ADOS is something that SHOULD happen, but we’re not a bunch of idiots. We understand that’s not a pragmatic or achievable solution (currently) and return of land =/= forcibly removing or committing mass genocide of people that don’t look like us. That’s something only savages do, and we have never been savages.
Other times it means protecting Turtle Island, all of us who live here, as a collective. Love the land and the land will love us back. Land back = the key to restoring ecosystems. Listen to indigenous people. We have always known these lands better than y’all.
It is also an empowering political statement from indigenous leaders to their people, to keep fighting for our treaties, for the right to self-govern, to continue the long process of de-colonizing ourselves, to harness our own power, to restore our cultures.
As far as literal repatriation of land goes, it’s not a far fetched or impossible idea. It has been done and is being done. It’s far from simple, but land stewardships, land trusts, and land transfers are all legal mechanisms to achieve this. And it doesn’t mean you (the donor) must leave the land. Oftentimes it means paying taxes to the tribe itself but still being able to live on/use the land; it just makes it so that the land has been returned to the tribe. In theory this would be the solution for indigenous people getting our land back without this big dramatic forced exodus of white people that racists pretend to be so worried about. It’s too complicated to really delve into here but this is a good link for a brief overview of the idea behind it.
And remember, today is a good day to stop being a low life piece of fucking garbage in the ✨ notes ✨
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