I’m here today as a guest
on land that was stolen from the Ute, Cheyenne and Arapaho Nations.
Land that many other tribal nations thought of as home
before those relationships were written over by settler colonialism.
So land acknowledgments like this have become pretty commonplace --
at the beginning of events, at universities,
sometimes in our email signatures.
But I've always found them to be kind of confusing.
Once you admit something is stolen, aren’t you supposed to give it back?
(Laughter)
So if there’s anyone listening,
who has a couple of hundred spare acres that you’re feeling guilty about,
just contact your local tribal government.
We would be happy to relieve you of that burden.
(Laughter)
That’s probably not you, right?
Maybe you’ve heard of this movement to return land to Indigenous people.
But you're thinking, "I can barely afford rent.
What is it I'm supposed to be giving back?"
That's what I want to clarify today.
Because not only is getting land back in Indigenous hands in your best interests
and the best interest of the land itself,
there's ways anyone can help make it happen.
I'm a descendant of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians,
which is part of the Anishinaabe Nation of the Great Lakes region.
Home for me is also the Pacific Northwest.
I grew up on Kalapuya and Molalla territory,
and now I'm a professor of Indigenous studies at CSU.
My ancestors worked very hard to navigate a complex and changing world
that was ravaged by settler colonialism.
My grandma and both of her parents
survived the trauma and abuse of the Indian boarding school system.
The generation before them
fought to keep our tribe from being terminated
by the federal government.
Going even further back,
my six times great grandfather's signature
is on the 1863 Treaty of Old Crossing,
which forced the Anishinaabe to give up 11 million acres of what’s now Minnesota
in exchange for a little over 400,000 dollars
and a 640-acre reservation.
That works out to about five cents an acre,
which has to be one of the worst land deals in US history.
Or maybe the best, depending on who you ask.
This sort of thing happened all over the US and Canada.
The problem isn't just that settlers showed up
and took the land,
it's how they've treated it ever since.
That land we lost in Minnesota,
the Enbridge's Line 3 pipeline goes right through the middle of it.
That freaking pipeline is responsible for the largest inland oil spill
ever recorded in the US.
And now they're trying to expand it.
Whether we're talking pipelines or some other industry,
the colonial mindset has been about extracting resources,
mostly with the goal of making the rich richer.
But that's why Landback is not about Indigenous people
trying to run a real estate scam.
We're doing this
because the land itself is in crisis.
Every Indigenous culture is unique,
but our shared philosophy is that we come from the land
and the land is what sustains us.
And therefore we have a responsibility to care for it.
(Applause)
Landback is about reasserting Indigenous relationships with the land.
Relationships that are based on tens of thousands of years
of hands-on experience taking care of our homelands.
If you've ever tried your hand at farming or gardening,
you know that land management takes more than just showing up with good intentions.
Globally, Indigenous people are really good at managing for biodiversity
and resilient ecosystems.
That's because we've had generation upon generation
to test out what works and what doesn't.
There's tons of evidence and examples to back this up.
One recent study shows that Indigenous people
make up just five percent of the global population,
but we’re managing nearly half the areas on Earth
that are protected for conservation
or still support intact ecosystems.
In the United States, tribal nations have reintroduced endangered species
even when the government said it wouldn't work.
So in the northwest where I grew up,
most of the big rivers have been dammed,
which makes it super hard for salmon to survive
and many runs have gone extinct.
So back in the '90s,
the Nimiipuu people told the state of Idaho,
"Hey, we'd like to bring Coho salmon back to the Snake River."
The state Fish and Wildlife guys were like, "I don't think so."
But the tribe did it anyway.
They got eggs that one of the hatcheries was going to throw away,
incubated them and basically snuck the fish back into the river.
And now they're doing so well,
that the state has reopened the sport fishery.
And the tribe is reintroducing Coho to a bunch of other rivers.
Same thing with buffalo.
Back in the 1800s, when the railroads were going in
and native people were literally being kicked off the land at gunpoint,
buffalo were nearly exterminated
because they thought that would make it easier to subdue the tribes
who depended on them.
So get this.
Most of the buffalo that you see today in zoos
or wildlife reserves
are actually descended from conservation herds
that native people protected back then.
And now the Blackfeet Nation is bringing free-ranging buffalo
back to their homeland in Montana.
We're also pretty good at cleaning up the ecological messes
caused by colonialism.
The town of Eureka, California,
was like, "OK, we're ready to give some land back.
We know it's culturally really important place to you.
Oh, and by the way, it's a Superfund site, so it's hella polluted.
Good luck with that."
(Laughter)
And the Wiyot tribe said, "Great, we'll take it."
And now, they're in the process of successfully remediating the site.
They've removed tons of trash and contaminated soil.
(Applause)
They're working on erosion control and wildlife habitat
and making it a place where they can hold ceremonies again.
The land is better off in Indigenous hands
because we treat the land like it's a relative.
(Applause)
Even our youth know how this works.
So I run a summer camp for native kids
where we talk about Indigenous science and how we relate to the land.
So last summer, after the camp wraps up, Henry's mom calls me.
He's one of the campers, he's six.
And she says he's had a falling out with his best friend.
They were playing outside,
and the friend, who's not native, was squishing grasshoppers for fun.
Henry tried to stop him, and the friend said,
"They're just bugs. It doesn't matter."
But Henry told him, "They're not just bugs.
There are our relatives and you can't kill them."
So that was the summer I had to learn
how to keep grasshoppers from eating my garden
with garlic spray,
because every time I went to use pesticides,
or something that would kill them, I thought of Henry
and what kind of future we might have
if we actually lived like that.
Landback is about radically rethinking how we relate to the land
and other living beings.
So look up whose land you're on.
Some tribes, like the Ohlone and Duwamish,
have a way for you to pay a voluntary land tax on their website
as a way to recognize that you're a guest on their homeland.
Way easier than dealing with the IRS.
Or maybe you do own land, but you need to live there for now.
You can set up a bequest in your will
so that your estate goes back to the tribe.
I'm not saying that any of this is easy.
Unsettling is hard work,
especially in places where Indigenous people were removed or erased.
That absence tends to be papered over with the myth that colonialism worked.
Native people disappeared,
so there's nothing to worry about.
But when I look at my own family's history,
the government that took our land and outlawed our ceremonies,
the boarding schools that took our language,
the epidemic of sexual violence
that has touched nearly every native woman in my family --
all of these concerted efforts to end the story of us as Anishinaabe people.
And yet despite all that, we're still here.
Our survival as Indigenous people is a miracle.
And the point of miracles is that they inspire action.
I think if we're honest as human beings,
we know that this path we're on
is both morally untenable
and ecologically unsustainable.
Landback is a call to action.
To get real that the current system
is only really working for an increasingly smaller group of folks.
But when the people who are benefiting from this legacy of stolen land
step forward,
real change can happen.
This isn't just an opportunity to right a past injustice.
It's the only way to heal the land itself.
And that means a better future for everyone.
Thank you.
(Applause)