Land Back to Whom? How Relationships Bridge Spatial and Temporal Distance in Indigenous Land Justice

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Geographies

Abstract

When sympathetic listeners hear calls for “Land Back,” they often respond that land should be returned to Indigenous peoples who were removed. However, the social structures and processes involved in initiating and maintaining land dispossession—such as racialization, capitalist property frameworks, and hierarchical and patriarchal governance models—complicate how Land Back unfolds in practice. Drawing on five years of participant observation, 60 interviews, and document analysis of Land Back projects and conversations, my analysis suggests that Land Back projects encounter barriers rooted in the temporal and spatial distance between peoples and lands. These barriers include spatial distance between the original inhabitants and their original territories, generational distance between past and present communities, boundary distances in how past and present groups understand their groupness, and epistemological distance between how contemporary and past groups understand and interact with the land. Converging with Indigenous feminist scholarship on relationality, I argue that Land Back both requires and is already working to revitalize and construct non-extractive relational geographies, between people, places, and ways of knowing, to challenge colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. This dissertation chapter focuses on the formation of interpersonal relationships, the calcification of informal relationships into organizational and institutional structures, and the articulation of structures, each of which reshapes spatial relations and enables land-based justice to move from abstract principle to material transformation. By theorizing relational processes that bridge social and spatial distance, this research contributes to sociological understandings of the geographies of dispossession, resistance, and Indigenous futurity.

Author

• Brigid Mark, University of Colorado-Boulder