Accountability matters, and I want you to be assured that these proceeds are going where I commit to sending them. I started returning revenue in January 2023.

April 1-June 30, 2026, The Salish Institute (forthcoming)

January 1-March 31, 2026, The James Welch Native Lit Festival

October 1-December 31, 2025, Firekeeper Alliance

July 1-September 30, 2025, Watch Duty

April 1-June 30, 2025, Messengers for Health

January 1-March 31, 2025, Blackfeet ECO Knowledge

October 1-December 31, 2024, Oglala Lakota Artspace

July 1-September 30, 2024, Ríos to Rivers

April 1-June 30, 2024, Flathead Warming Center

January 1-March 31, 2023, Piikani Lodge Health Institute

October 1-December 31, 2023, Messengers for Health

July 1-September 30, 2023, People’s Food Sovereignty Program

April 1-June 30, 2023, All Nations Health Center

January 1-March 31, 2023, FAST Blackfeet

1. “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience,” by Rebecca Roanhorse

2. “Folding Beijing” and accompanying essay “I Want to Write a History of Inequality,” by Hao Jingfang

3. “Bloodchild,” by Octavia Butler in her short story collection Bloodchild

4. “The Book of Phoenix,” by Nnedi Okorafor

5. “Cloud Dragon Skies,” by N.K. Jemisin in her short story collection How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?

6. “The Heart of the Museum,” by Tang Fei, in the anthology Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction

7. “Robert Greenman and the Mermaid,” by Anjali Sachdeva in her short story collection All the Names They Used for God

8. “The Red Thread,” by Sofia Samatar in her short story collection Tender

9. “How to Survive the Apocalypse for Native Girls,” by Kai Minosh Pyle, in the anthology Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction

*Threadable is a social reading platform where people can read and comment on books and stories together. This is a continuation of a previous reading circle I led for Threadable on the topic of land ownership.

This is, as I mentioned there, not something I’m an expert in. I do think it’s incredibly important. Even so, “barely informed” would be a more accurate description of my knowledge. But the question also came up in the Threadable app itself, so this list is devoted to starting points for anyone wanting to learn more about that subject. It is not at all comprehensive; I just want to point people to voices and groups and thoughts other than mine to learn more about land repatriation—or rematriation, which autocorrect refuses to admit is a word but I love as a way of thinking about this. I’ll add to it whenever I find something new. Please feel free to make suggestions!

• This webinar from the David Suzuki Foundation is long—about an hour and a half—but gives an overview of Land Back ideas from a variety of perspectives. Which is, as is pointed out early in the webinar, one of the commonly misunderstood points: there is no one way this looks.
  Nor should there be. In the U.S. alone there are 574 recognized Native Nations and many more the federal government doesn’t recognize (a problem all on its own). If this seems like too many different nations to make Land Back attempts tenable, a reminder that Scotland is geographically not even the size of South Carolina and was ruled by hundreds of distinct clans—there are 500 listed today—until the unfortunate Jacobite Rebellion in the mid-1700s.

• Nihizhí: Our Voices podcast has a couple of episodes (episodes 2 and 8) related to Land Back.

• Estes’s own Red Nation podcast. I can’t seem to link to individual episodes, but there are several related to Land Back, including from October 4, 2020; June 28, 2021; and July 4, 2021. This last is titled “No Apologies, Land Back” and most of the episode is frank discussion of boarding schools and the Catholic Church: “The only thing that we need from the Catholic Church is the shit that they stole from us. . . . Give us our land back. All that land you took? Give that back. That’s it. No questions asked. Just give it back.”

• David Treuer’s article in The Atlantic making the case for returning U.S. National Parks to a consortium of Native Nations: “There is precedent for this kind of transfer. The indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand now control some of those countries’ most significant natural landmarks.”

• A 2020 issue of the Canadian magazine Briar Patch was devoted to Land Back. It delves into many of the iterations and issues facing the movement. One article, for example, covers four case studies of “Land Back in action.”

• Interviews and videos like Hesapa—A Landback Film from Landback via NDN Collective; and videos and papers from Yellowhead Institute: “The doctrine of discovery is fundamental to the existence of Crown Land in Canada. And Crown Land stands as a foundational roadblock to the possibility of land restitution. Even where Indigenous nations have proven in court the continuity of their occupation, use, and unceded title from pre-contact to the present, according to Canadian law, there is no legal pathway to resume full jurisdiction and governance authority over Indigenous lands.”

• A short one from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about a teacher planning to return part of the 100 acres she owns (it doesn’t explain why not all of it) to the Alderville First Nation: “For me the question isn’t why, the question is how can I not do this? How can you not do everything in your power to bring about reconciliation in the best way that you can in your tiny corner of Turtle Island?”

• High Country News has had a few stories related to LandBack, including this one from Wenatchee, Washington, by Manola Secaira, and B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster’s six questions about LandBack answered: “The LandBack movement is less about a mass real estate transaction than it is about sovereignty, recognition of treaties, and, ultimately, the abolition of the United States’ concept of real estate altogether. From many traditional Indigenous points of view, land ownership is an illusion, no more possible than ownership of a rainbow. Land ‘ownership’ is simply a legal concept — one that keeps wealth and power in white families.”

• A podcast episode from Montana Free Press covering discussion and disagreements around Land Back specifically related to the Badger-Two Medicine area in Montana, sacred land to the Blackfeet Nation and currently “owned” by the U.S. government in the form of a national forest. (Link also goes to a transcript if you prefer to read.)

• Original Free Nations, founded by Steve Newcomb, author of Pagans in the Promised Land, to forward work protecting ancestral homelands and sacred places, and further work to dismantle the 500-year-old Doctrine of Discovery precepts that granted European Christian monarchs the right to claim ownership of any lands they came across inhabited by non-Christian people.

These are all of the posts related to the Threadable land ownership reading circle in one place. If you’re interested in exploring these readings, they’re all open and free to share. They run from questions about the legal rights actually attained when owning private property, to enclosures of the commons in 1500s England, to the Doctrine of Discovery articulated in the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh and the destruction it spread across the world.

This is a living resource, and I will leave it open to share and read.

Threadable reading circle selections:

1. Owning the Earth, by Andro Linklater
   (enclosures of the commons and resistance in 1500s England)

2. The Land We Share, by Erik. T. Freyfogle
   (law is a story that evolves; private property rights can’t be and have never been absolute)

3. The Charter of the Forest (signed in 1217) and “The Charter of the Forest: Evolving Human Rights in Nature” law article
   (commons rights to land, food, water, etc., that were once known and defended throughout Britain)

4. Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, by Simon Winchester
   (how is “reclaimed” or “new” land managed, as in the Netherlands?)

5. BONUS: Book review of Simon Winchester’s Land because I hated it so much

6. In the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided, by Walter R. Echo-Hawk
   (deep dive into the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh and how it enshrined the Doctrine of Discovery into U.S. law)

7. The three 15th-century papal bulls that comprise the Doctrine of Discovery
   (the documents showing how the Catholic Church and the 15th-century monarchs of Spain and Portugal justified theft of land, resources, and enslavement of non-Christian people across the world)

8. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, by Nick Estes
   (the theft of the Black Hills, and how the hunger for private property and commodification destroy both rights and relationships)

9. Progress & Poverty, by Henry George (1879)
   (private land ownership is unjust, and that injustice compounds over time)

10. Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books, by William Blackstone (1753)
    (one of the foundational texts justifying private property rights, but he still can’t find the basis of private ownership in land)

11. Second Treatise of Government, by John Locke (1690)
    (pretty much the same as Blackstone—doesn’t really know why we have private land ownership but is going to defend it anyway!)

12. The Book of Trespass, by Nick Hayes
    (documenting the injustices behind privately owned estates in England)

13. Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age, by Mary Christina Wood
    (treating land as a commodity is unsustainable in the long run; seeing it as a commonwealth and reinvigorating the idea of the public trust might be a better way forward)