How do you define Land?  What meaning does Land have for you? What if your Land was stolen from you?

 The above questions came to mind as I listened to Winona Wheeler's presentation, "Land Back! The Importance of Oral History in First Nation Land Claims Cases", which focused on using oral histories by Canada's First Nations peoples to substantiate their rights to the Land as its first stewards. Court rulings have at times validated Indigenous land claims by accepting their oral tradition as evidence to agreements, treaties, and rights but remuneration and restoration efforts remain limited.  Indigenous American history as a whole is not so different. The effects of European colonization on all of North America are well documented. Native Americans like the First Nations faced centuries of persecution and discrimination, losing their Land and resources, and forced exile to reservations where they are largely unable to sustain their communities.

To someone like me, steeped in settler-colonial codified definitions for Land, the above questions prompted me to reconsider my assumptions.  I was drawn into the realm of the cry for "Land Back," where Land is viewed in a different and valuable way by Indigenous people. To make room for new learning, I began my exploration by understanding how non-indigenous people view the concept of Land.

How do Non-indigenous People Think of Land?

There are codified legal and real-estate definitions for Land and specific economic, business, and agricultural perspectives on how Land is interpreted in the United States and other industrialized nations.  I was interested in how non-indigenous individuals view "land" outside these legal/organizational frameworks, how their views are synonymous or not with Indigenous views, and whether these views might be influenced, as mine were, by a "settler" perspective and socialization.

I asked twenty non-indigenous people representing different land origins (China, Malaysia, India, Australia, Canada, and the United States) to define Land and its significance. Respondents used over one hundred words to depict their definition of Land and their relationship to it. As you can see from the word cloud above, the most commonly used word was "ownership." The underlying philosophical difference between ownership, a western construct, and stewardship, the Indigenous counterpart that Professor Wheeler had described in her Land Back! presentation is vast.

As I suspected, the views expressed were similar to how I viewed Land – generally as something to possess and perhaps nurture, but also something that is owned. Responses also evoked feelings of identity, belonging, value, and community. Click on each clip below to hear the range of individuals' definitions of Land and its significance to them. Check for similarities to your own beliefs about Land and its meaning to you.

Land as a life source, identity, belonging: “I define land as a place of one's origin, where a person comes from, where humanity and history begin. To me, land signifies a sense of belonging, a home and a place where my identity is shaped."

Land as transactional, limited, and increasing in value: "I think of land as an asset that has value and is a great hedge against market volatility. In most instances, over time, it also appreciates in value. As the world population continues to grow and factors such as climate change make some areas of the world uninhabitable, supply of usable land will become more scarce."

Land as community, abstract and real: "On the individual level, to me, that's where the individual can live and could also own lots of property, but from a collective point of view, I see that land as a dwelling place or even a symbol of a community. The land can be just territorially abstract or even vague. I think the best example of that is a line from a poem by the modern Chinese poet Ai Qing. So in this poem, she says, "Why do I always have tears in my eyes? Because of my deep love of my land." My land here, of course, is, it's a collective land referring to China. So, as you can see here, the land doesn't really fully coincide with the territory of PRC or Republic of China necessarily, but the more abstract community idea of China."

What Right to Land Ownership?

When my husband and I wrote our wedding vows, we selected three words that were symbolic of our commitment. One of these was "Land," which represented independence and permanence.  One year after our wedding, we purchased one hundred acres, called Red Gate Farm in Troy, Virginia. Its boundaries were documented by an 1846 survey for "Wm. Bowels by Will Tompkins," traceable to an "original" land grant by King George III.

What did it mean to us when we became owners of Red Gate Farm?

It meant taking on the responsibility of protecting the wildlife from being hunted, restoring the Land's nutrients and natural landscape, harvesting our plantings, and generally taking great satisfaction in ownership, never entertaining the thought that others' land rights superseded our own.  It was only some thirty years later that I learned that Native Americans, the Monacan and Siouan, had not ceded the Land we were so proud to call our own.

In his article, "Aboriginal Oral History Evidence and Canadian Law," Adam Daniel Etinson addresses the land claim cases of First Nations before the Canadian government. Like Wheeler in her "Land Back!" presentation, Etinson argues that oral history is a "practical necessity" for aboriginal claimants. "Not only does oral history contain the aboriginal understanding of the past, but it also refers to distant historical events for which little or no documentary evidence exists." [1]   Etinson attributes the ignorance of those who do not credit the evidentiary validity of oral history in land back cases to being "prisoners" of their own culture. I believe an education dominated by settler colonialism is no longer, if it ever was, a defense of ignorance, and it is time to escape that prison.

What Does Land Back Mean?

For Indigenous peoples, the relationship to Land goes much deeper than ownership. While there are variations in interpretation among Indigenous peoples worldwide, some standard features surround how they view their relationship with the Land. The following statement by Bishop Krystyna, author of "This Land Knows Me: Indigenous Land Rights," provides a good summary of the relationship many Indigenous peoples share with the Land:

In North America, the rhetoric of indigenous peoples is the same: we were put on this Land by the creator and we, are responsible for its stewardship. Many indigenous groups refer to their unique relationship with their particular traditional territory as 'I belong to this land,' instead of the classic Western articulation, 'this land belongs to me' The statement is political and emotional, and philosophical. It is the foundation of the indigenous worldview and informs the traditional way of life in its entirety.[2]

Nickita Longman, a community organizer from First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, sees the return of Land to the stewardship of Indigenous peoples as a process that has been ongoing since colonial governments seized it in the first place. "Any time an Indigenous person or nation has pushed back against the oppressive state, they are exercising some form of Land Back."[3]

The Land Back movement objectives go beyond the transfer of deeds to include respecting Indigenous rights, preserving languages and traditions, and ensuring food sovereignty, housing, and clean air and water.

Who is the Land Back cry coming from? If from Indigenous youth, it might be interpreted literally; if from elders and knowledge keepers, it is likely to mean stewardship; if from Indigenous leaders, it may include other aspects of self-government. [4]

This description of Land Back by Marcus Briggs – Cloud (Maskoke) distinguishes between land stewardship and ownership from Indigenous people's perspective:

The grammar of our Maskoke language constrains our ability to articulate ownership of and extract economic relationships to Land. We have to code-switch to English to speak of those ways. So if we didn't own it in the first place, it's hard to talk about getting Land back. I think it's better to put it in terms of returning Land to the traditional stewards to fulfill their inherent covenants to be caretakers of a particular place, per their canon of stories.3

Recent Land Back successes in the United States are limited but encouraging, including removing dams along the Klamath River in Oregon and 1,200 acres in Big Sur to the Esselen Tribe.

Indicators of Struggle and Hope

In North Carolina, where I now live, it appears that the debate continues on the historical framing of our nations' history concerning Indigenous people and colonization. Efforts to reshape the curriculum, such as telling an expanded Thanksgiving accounting, are met with resistance.  However, indicators of righting the scale include initiatives taken toward achieving a balanced perspective on Colonialism and Indigenous history. An example is the online curriculum guide for K-12 teachers, "Teaching About American Indians in North Carolina," created at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partnership with UNC's American Indian Center and LEARN NC in the School of Education. The guide consists of culturally appropriate, tribally submitted information on all eight state-recognized Indian tribes among the fifteen tribal nations thought to have initially inhabited North Carolina. The state-recognized Indigenous tribes include the Coharie, Haleiwa-Saponi, Meherrin, Sappony, Waccamaw Siouan, Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. Notably, only one of North Carolina's eight tribes is recognized by the Federal government. This raises the question of what right does a settler government have to grant status to those who were the Land's first occupants and deprived of their Land and identity?

Where Do We Go from Here?

If you are, like me, not Indigenous, what do you experience when you read the following quote by Kris Archie, Executive Director of the Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples?

When you hear the words decolonization, white supremacy, patriarchy, or even racism, do you feel something? Do you get a chill down your back, randomly start crossing your arms, get tense all over your body, or even just feel an urge to resist? Well good! When your body is cold, it shivers; when it's hungry, it growls; when it's in fear, it shakes; and when it's sad, it cries. Your body is meant to respond, whether that be physical or emotional, and it's the same when deconstructing what you've been taught. It tells you that something is there and that you must go through it and find ways to process it. 3

I think Archie is alerting settler descendants to the uncomfortableness of decolonization work and the emotional labor in finding release from a cultural prison. Recognizing these feelings in oneself is a start.

Danny Belle (Lumbee/Coharie) and immediate past president of the Triangle Native American Society shares a short conversation he had with another member of the Lumbee Tribe in North Carolina:

"But the Land is something that we've always had a connection to, and one elderly lady that died last year was in her nineties, asked me one time, Danny, what happened that we don't have any land anymore? I was thinking, have you not had this conversation with anyone"?

Have the conversation! Even and especially if you are not Indigenous! This is the hard work and discomfort of decolonization. Start first with understanding whose Land you're on. If you live in the Americas, you live on someone else's Land.  The app "Whose Land" and the website Native -Land ca. can help you identify the Indigenous people who first occupied the Land and where you now live.

A Land Acknowledgment is a formal statement that recognizes and respects Indigenous Peoples as traditional stewards of the Land and the enduring relationship between Indigenous Peoples and their traditional territories. I first learned of this practice as a student in the Oral History Master's program at Columbia University, where acknowledgment of the University's occupation of the unceded Land of the Lenape often precedes the start of a class or program. I recently modeled this practice in introducing a panel discussion, "10,000 Years, a Park and Oral History - Memory To Action", among key internal planners involved in developing an urban park encompassing the legacies of Indigenous people, plantation descendants, and the mentally ill. For many panel participants, it was an initiation into the practice of Land Acknowledgment. It was gratifying to hear the Park's CEO announce that the practice would be used to introduce future Park planning meetings – a small but perhaps significant decolonization step.

 [1] Etinson, Adam Daniel, Aboriginal Oral History Evidence and Canadian Law, The Central European Journal of Canadian studies. 2008, vol. 6, iss. [1], pp. 97-104.

[2] “This Land Knows Me: Indigenous Land Rights | Cultural Survival.” https://www.culturalsurvival.org, 200, Kristyna, Bishop.

[3] “Returning the Land”, www.grist.org, 11.25.20,Thompson, Claire Elise.

[4] LAND BACK! What do we mean? 4Rs Youth Movement, N.B., accessed 4.20.21, Gamblin, Ronald.

Susan Garrity is a current OHMA student and a volunteer and supporter of issues and opportunities affecting her Raleigh, NC community. Her current focus is on activating the oral histories of the diverse legacies reflected in the history of a centuries-old 300 + acre site under development as an urban park. By memorializing the lives of those who intersected with the site, including Indigenous Americans, enslaved people, and the mentally ill, she hopes to contribute to successfully bringing "Memory to Action." Her website, "Every Path Speaks," explores these topics.