happy PRIDE i’m here i’m queer and i believe the land should be given back to the proper indigenous stewards.
Non-Natives reblogging this are great and wonderful
Please remember that "land back" does not mean "indigenous people are mystical elves with innate epigenetic wisdom of land stewardship and they don't belong in big cities," nor does it mean "non-indigenous people can't be farmers." What it DOES mean is that "non-indigenous farmers should be paying the equivalent of property taxes to the native governments their land was stolen from." It means, "there's a great deal of indigenous scholarship on sustainable agricultural practices that farmers should be taking into account, because indigenous agriculture was more advanced than European agriculture at the time Europe invaded the Americas and western agriculture *still* hasn't caught up in terms of figuring out how to produce equivalently high crop yields without compromising the ecosystem." It means, "non-indigenous farmers should be in an intellectual discourse with indigenous agricultural scientists and indigenous peoples that still do traditional farming, figuring how to repair the damage western farming practices have done to the ecosystem."
It also means that indigenous peoples should regain the right to sustain themselves on the land according to the practices they want, and they should have free reign to perform their cultural practices and protect their holy sites, as opposed to the current model where if they try to honor their dead on public lands they get violently removed.
People also get angry at this concept thinking it'd mean non-native people getting mass evicted from their homes but 1) your home is already owned by a bank or big business or government, the difference would mainly be who you're now paying rent to and 2) most of the land in America isn't residential anyway.
This topic isn't about your house that you're already struggling to pay for, it's about thousands of miles of the planet rotting away under the monopoly of big agriculture and oil, but hypothetically speaking I think a local tribe would treat you a shitload better than whatever inhuman real estate brand you're already at the mercy of.
Speaking of land back, I wanna highlight red-dead-revival’s comment here. I honestly have mixed feelings about the other comments, because I do think land back may involve more uncomfortable things than just “white people pay taxes to Native nations rather than their settler govt” or whatever. I like RDR’s comment because they actually center Indigenous people and what land back would mean for us.
When I have asked other people in my community what Land Back means to them, they almost always talk about being able to actually harvest food, to access sacred sites, to have a say over what people do to our homelands so that we can keep doing those things. Yet when white people talk about Land Back they are sooooo concerned with “what will happen to the white people / everybody else.”
I also think this is a symptom of white people being unaware of the ways we are impacted by colonization Right Now. They don’t know how we’re forced off sacred sites and can’t practice subsistence traditions due to land theft and things like pollution and climate change caused by colonial powers. So they think the only thing that could possibly be desired by Native people is evicting all settlers.
