Land Back: Indigenous sovereignty as care through responsibility and relationship

In late spring 2021, as the global pandemic continued to wreak havoc, we gathered in a small property in central Delaware to clear trash from the land and rebuild a healthy local ecosystem. The plot of land contains four sections that span both sides of a road and are bordered by a small stream and wetland area. Two of the sections are cemeteries, holding generations of Nanticoke and Lenape relatives, including my great-grandparents. The third section, previously a school run by the community for their children, became a firing range for the police department, with decades of lead from bullets leaching into the soil and threatening the ground water sourced by many local residents. The fourth section is a lightly wooded hill that has been used for years as an unceremonious dumping ground for trash by city inhabitants. This property sits in the middle of a Lenape community that continue to live in their homelands, despite centuries of colonization and removal efforts.

Prior to the start of colonization, eastern Pennsylvania, northern Delaware, New Jersey, and southern New York were all Lenape territory, while the Nanticoke people lived further south on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Today, these areas are some of the most densely populated parts of the country, containing major cities such as New York City and Philadelphia. As some of the first to encounter Europeans, Nanticoke and Lenape people have faced over 400 years of occupation and have been pushed to the fringes of their land, or removed to Wisconsin, Oklahoma, or Ontario. The families who remained in the homelands are today part of three communities of interrelated families that span the Delaware Bay: my relatives. While their sovereignty is not directly recognized by the federal government of the United States, they do have recognition and ongoing political relationships with the states of Delaware and New Jersey. Their tenuous political power and marginalization within these now densely populated and polluted landscapes have created a critical need to protect their homelands.

As we labored together, Lenape kin, university faculty and students, and local residents, we learned about many of the Indigenous plants that still grew around us, such as the spice bush and white cedar, and we listened to plans for the future of the properties. The legal deeds to these properties remain uncertain but don't restrict our work to clear the trash and reintroduce native plants back into the land and mussels into the stream. The leaders of this endeavor explained how important it was to reclaim this land, to protect their ancestors resting in the cemeteries, and make space for native plants and animals to flourish and nurture future generations by removing problematic invasive species and trash. They are building partnerships with the state, environmental organizations, and private funders to manifest this vision (Hedgpeth, 2021). Their aspirations include protecting these tracts from housing developments and instead focusing on healing projects such as the restoration of the cemeteries and creating gathering spaces to strengthen community ties (Hedgpeth, 2021). Tiny pawpaw trees that will take 20 years to mature and bear fruit have already been planted, physical reminders of the longevity and aspiration of this project of care. This work grounds and strengthens our relationships to all living beings and to the land, while a global virus continues to demonstrate just how entangled we all really are.

This small community's demands and actions for their land back are echoed across Turtle Island. “Land Back” is much more than a statement; it is a speech act that is both a symbolic reminder of the violent history of the land we stand on and a legal call for its return. It's a demand that our sovereignty be recognized through both colonial frameworks of ownership and property as well as a return to our own orientation and relationship to land. It is not asking for permission to access our traditional territories; it accompanies our tangible actions of reclaiming land. Land Back is the action of clearing trash and planting familiar trees around our ancestors’ bones. It is a return to a relationship of care.

Land Back is also an acknowledgment and recognition of the personhood and the rights of the living world and nonhuman relatives. One way that the Nanticoke and Lenape communities have been able to put this into practice is through their commitment to the chestnut tree. The Ihkwamins (chestnut tree) used to be one of the most populous native trees across the eastern seaboard. Her nuts fed a multitude of species, including humans. However, a fungal blight, introduced from Asia in the late 19th century, decimated the Indigenous tree population to the point where they are almost completely extinct today. One of the rare survivors of the blight resides in northern Delaware, a mature tree that continues to grow and propagate despite its infection. Nanticoke and Lenape relatives from our three sister communities came together to celebrate this tree relative and renew our commitment to our collective survival and collaborative relationship. We each offered some of our water to the tree and placed a tobacco bundle nearby. We listened to a song sung by one of our relatives and spoke to the tree in our languages. We made commitments to fight for the tree and other survivors of the blight. To advocate for healthy relationships with our nonhuman relatives and fight back against exploitation.

The chestnut tree's story mirrored our own. Our people and our land have also been devastated through greed and violence. Much of Lenapehoking today is struggling with soil, water, and air pollution, extractive economies, and careless waste practices. Land Back is a demand to reestablish healthy ecologies and respectful, reciprocal systems for everyone. The global pandemic disrupted numerous global capitalist systems. Many of my interlocutors recognized the fragility of the global economy and highlighted the haste and shortsightedness of our current lifeways. “It's a throwaway generation,” one of the elders asserted. “People lost the respect for the land…they're thinking they're getting away with it but now it's catching up with us.” Another stated “but with COVID I did see…where people did do a lot of planting…people being home they had time to take care of different activities…with that it kind of slowed people down and humbled them. But now everything is starting to open back up, and they just want that fast-paced lifestyle, everybody is trying to get back into what they knew, and with that comes all the pollution.”

Contemporary conservation work continues to be bounded by capitalist, colonial frameworks and therefore also speaks of land and water in capitalist terms of commodities and resources (Strang, 2014). Many conservation projects embrace an ideology of separation that seeks to conserve resources and ecosystems by restricting or eliminating human access, unable to envision healthy entanglements between humans and the rest of the living world (Dove, 2006). The speculations of the COVID-19 pandemic possibly originating in wildlife displaced by human economic production only fuel this ideology. Land Back is an act of resistance to these colonial ideologies and framings and seeks to create space for healthy interspecies relationships that include humans as active participants. Land Back is Indigenous sovereignty. This demand for the return of land communicates a vision of sovereignty that both projects Indigenous framings and addresses colonial framings of sovereignty. Settler-colonial models of sovereignty invoke land as a resource, a tool of capitalism, and a necessary commodity for citizenship, power, and control (Pasternak, 2017). Settler colonialism requires control over Indigenous lands to create its nations, using land as a tool to extend its power and jurisdiction (Coulthard, 2014).

Indigenous mobilizations of responsibility communicate a responsibility to the land, acknowledging the animacy of the land and other beings, decentering humanity and reorienting our place in and relationship to the universe. “Self-preservation, political autonomy, and the collective rewards of territorial stewardship characterize the authority of Indigenous law…an ontology of care” (Pasternak, 2017, 6; emphasis in original). The entanglements of reciprocity and acknowledgment of animacy are practices of care that are embedded in and reinforced through many Native American languages (Kimmerer, 2013). Animals, plants, celestial bodies, and weather patterns are all acknowledged with animate pronouns, reinforcing reciprocal and respectful relationships to them. Thus, care foregrounds an embodied and relational sovereignty and solidifies its entanglements with land. Indigenous “resistance and refusal to dispossession and encroachment are practices of care in addition to pronouncements of trespass and theft” (Simpson, 2020, 689). Land Back argues for a sovereignty that centers the importance of healthy, thriving ecosystems supported by clean water. It enables Indigenous communities to gather and maintain their languages and cultural practices, encourage reciprocal relationships with the land, and model healthy lifeways.

In New York City, on Randall's Island Park, an annual celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day is held. Indigenous people from all over come together in the heart of Lenapehoking to join the celebration. “Water is life, water is alive, water has memory.” These are some of the phrases voiced by participants during the morning water ceremony. We each had brought water from our homelands, from as nearby as Long Island and as far away as Hawaii. As we slowly poured our water into the East River, we were reminded that water is all connected. Water provides life and connects everything and everyone on this planet. The East River itself is quite polluted, due to its proximity to New York City, and as we stood there, the sounds and smells of the city all around us with the murky gray water lapping against our feet, we were reminded of the importance of water protection. Water is not merely a resource to be used; it is alive and has its own spirit. We as humans depend on clean water, as do all other living beings. We greeted the water as an old relative and asked her to remember us. This perspective, of recognizing the personhood of the water, changes how we orient ourselves to it.

Water protection is not limited to cleaning up or safeguarding specific waterways for clean drinking water. It argues for the global interconnectivity of all water, and the need for respect and care extended to all waterways and all living beings who rely on water. One Lenape interlocutor discussed with me how the global pandemic highlighted some of the flaws in today's conservation practices. “They've been trying to get rid of plastic bags and plastic straws to protect the turtles and protect the beaches but then COVID happened and now there are masks just blowing around the beaches. If we don't do everything we can to help clean up Earth, including the water, then it's not going to take care of us, you have to take care of those things in order for them to take care of you.” Water is not a commodity; water is alive and passes that gift of life to us. Land Back, Water Back are not selfish claims for control and power, but rather a demand for life for all.

Land Back is a sovereignty debate, a demand to honor the treaty agreements that should be considered law under both Indigenous and colonial governments. It encompasses a textual modality that works through jurisdiction and law to return land that was never ceded or ceded through dubious transactions. These treaties protect tribal nations’ authority over and access to land and water. It enables them to protect the health and wellbeing of their communities and model methods of healthy land and water use. Land and water, under the framework of settler–colonial global capitalism, have become tools of power and economic commodities. Land Back is thus framed and navigated through the language of settler colonialism as a tool of survival. It is a way to regain control over land and water in order to reestablish reciprocal relationships and heal the land and the people.

As evidenced by these examples, Indigenous nations’ demands for Land Back are an integral part of sovereignty work. “The significance of ‘sovereignty’ to protect land and relationships is not limited to territory, but to bodily integrity and safety as well” (Simpson, 2020, 688). Land Back is not just a statement about sovereignty, but a sovereignty act within itself. A voicing of commitment to community, planetary health, and justice, one that extends beyond the political borders of the tribal nation to engage a broad network of communication and reciprocity. As one interlocutor fittingly expressed, “If you take care of your community, your community will take care of your family, your family will take care of you.” Land Back is care, an embodied practice of relationality and responsibility.