A User’s Guide to Land Back

They stole it. It was literally them.

Had a great question from my last Ask Me Anything: “could you explain how non-Indigenous people can be thoughtful about approaching tribes or Indigenous organizations around land and other material reparations?”

Here are a few things to be mindful of as you navigate this landscape:

Politically-Speaking, Many Tribes are a Hot Mess

Most people with land, money, or some other resource to give want to give it to a tribe; specifically a tribal government or organization purporting to represent the people or the interests of the folks that are indigenous to some space.

The problem is… the colonization of Turtle Island wreaked absolute havoc on the political integrity on nearly every nation that was here to begin with, and the claims made by tribal organizations to “represent” tribal interests can range from dodgy to outright lies. Take my tribe, for instance, which has two competing groups of people simultaneously claiming to represent everyone, plus at least three groups (the Choptico Band, the Cedarville Band, and the Piscataway Indian Nation) that have explicitly broken off from the “main” group to pursue more traditional forms of governance and political organization. This is a common issue throughout Indian country, which I’ll delve into in a discussion of…