The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians purchased back 2,000 acres of deeply historically significant land in Oregon in January.

A Wabanaki food sovereignty group secured a no-strings-attached land deal to buy 245 acres of farm and forest in Maine in January.

1,327 acres were acquired by the The Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians in Maine in February.

680 acres were returned by the US Fish and Wildlife Service to the Spirit Lake Nation in North Dakota in February.

Shabbona Lake State Recreation Area (approx. 1500 acres) was returned to the management of Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation in Illinois in March.

The Fort Wayne Burial Mound (a half-acre site) in Michigan was returned to the control of Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi in April.

312 hectares (770 acres) of Vancouver Island were returned to joint ownership of the Lyackson First Nation and Cowichan Tribes in May. A different land title transfer ruling regarding thr Cowichan Tribes is facing legal challenges from non-Indigenous Metro Vancouver area property owners.

47,000 acres of the Blue Creek watershed of the Klamath River in California was reclaimed by the Yurok Tribe in June.

351 acres of Monument Mountain in Massachusetts were reclaimed by the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation in August.

50 acres were purchased by the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band to be put into their Land Trust in California in September.

17,030 acres were reclaimed by the Tule River Indian Tribe in California in October.

53 hectares (130 acres) were purchased back by Ngāti Toa Rangatira Māori on the North Island of Aotearoa in October.

80 hectares (194 acres) were returned to the Snuneymuxw First Nation by the Canadian government due to a ruling on treaty obligations in October.

900,000 hectares (2,223,000 acres) of land and sea were formally given over to Wuthathi, Guugu Yimidhirr, and Yiithuwarra traditional owner groups in Far North Queensland in Australia in October.

900 acres were returned to the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation in California in December.

New Zealand courts and Crown government agreed that 3068 hectares (7581 acres) of land should be returned to the control of the descendants of the original Māori owners, as well as a $420 million compensation payment, in Aotearoa in December.

The Penobscot Nation is working with the Trust for Public Land in an ongoing process to reclaim 30,000 acres of land in Maine. I am not sure if this is part of the same process that involved the Appalachian Mountain Club transferring 1,700 acres of land into Penobscot Nation control in September, but that happened too. First Light is a cool and fascinating organization coordinating and fundraising for Land Back projects in Wabanaki lands.

"A tribal-led nonprofit is creating a network of native bison ranchers that are restoring ecosystems on the Great Plains, restoring native ranchers’ connections with their ancestral land, and restoring the native diet that their ancestors relied on.

Called the Tanka Fund, they coordinate donors and partners to help ranchers secure grazing land access, funds needed to install and repair fencing, increase their herd sizes, and access markets for bison meat across the country.

That’s the human part of the story. But as Dawn Sherman, executive director of the Tanka Fund, told Native Sun News, they’re “buffalo people” and these four-legged, 2,000 lbs. “cousins” are equal-part-protagonists.

The return of the bison means the return of the prairie, one of the three great grassland ecosystems on the planet, of which just 1% remains as it was when the Mayflower arrived.

“Bringing buffalo back to their ancestral homelands is essential to restoring the ecosystem. We know that the buffalo is a keystone species,” said Dawn Sherman, a member of the Lakota, Delaware, Shawnee, and Cree.

“Bringing the buffalo back to the land and to our people, helps restore the ecosystem and everything it supports from the animals to the plants to the people. It’s come full circle. That’s how we see it.”

As Sherman and the Tanka Fund help native ranchers grow their operations, everyone is well aware of the power of the bison to transform the environment: just as nations across Europe are, who are reintroducing wood bison to various ecosystems, for all the same reasons.

Sherman points out the variety of ways in which buffalo anchor the prairie ecosystem. The almost-extinct black-footed ferret, she points out, lived symbiotically with the bison, and with the latter gone, the former followed—nearly.

The long-billed curlew uses bison dung as a disguise to hide nests from predators. Deer, pronghorn antelope, and elk all rely on bison to plow through deep snows and uncover the grasses that these smaller animals can’t reach.

Everywhere the bison hurls its massive body, life springs in the beast’s wake. When bison roll about on the plains, it creates depressions known as wallows. These fill with rainwater and create enormous puddles where amphibians and insects thrive and reproduce. Certain plants evolved to grow in the wet conditions of the wallows which Native Americans harvested for food and medicine.

Native plants evolved under the trampling hooves of millions of bison, and that constant tamping down of the Earth is a key necessity in the spreading of native wildflower seed.

Indeed, Sherman says some of these native ranchers are bringing bison onto lands still visibly affected by the Dust Bowl, and already the animals are acting like a giant wooly cure-all for the land’s ills.

Since 2020, the Tanka Fund, in partnership with the Inter-Tribal Buffalo Council and the Nature Conservancy, has overseen the transfer of 2,300 bison from Nature Conservancy reserves to lands managed by ranchers within the Tanka Fund network.

“[T]he more animals that we can get the more of that prairie we can restore,” said Sherman. “We can help restore the land that has been plowed and has been leased out to cattle ranchers.”"

Using folks’ correct name and pronouns is suicide prevention

Abortion care is suicide prevention.

Accessibility is suicide prevention.

Birth control is suicide prevention.

Mutual aid is suicide prevention.

Housing is suicide prevention.

Healthcare is suicide prevention.

Climate action is suicide prevention.

Food security is suicide prevention.

Ending imperialism is suicide prevention.

Land back is suicide prevention.

Abolishing borders is suicide prevention.