The essay below is excerpted from “Profaned Existence,” the sixth chapter of Klee Benally's book No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred. (This section is on pages 145-148 of the first edition.) Hyperlinks have been added to contextualize some references.
The slogan “Land Back” became popularized during direct actions against resource colonial violence in so-called Canada during the Caledonia “land dispute” uprisings in 2020. Vehicles (including a bus that had a car placed on top of it) were used to blockade a liberated roadway renamed 1492 Land Back Lane. The slogan wasn’t conceived there, as it has been a rallying cry of dispossessed communities for generations, but grew to viral ubiquity due to the social media savvy of those on the ground. The assertion of Land Back requires no elaboration: End colonial occupation, restore ancestral relationships with the land.
As a slogan, “Land Back” has been oriented and claimed by those with differing political, economic, and social aims. Indigenous liberals apply reform-based approaches which include: purchasing land and placing it in trust, donations of land by existing property owners, or through negotiations with State authorities for co-management and preservation (as a practice that mirrors liberal practices of land conservation, which have been historically a racist recreational enterprise). The latter generally includes an administrative arrangement of public lands (as with the Bears Ears) or establishing trust status for the land. Indigenous communities that are not federally recognized, such as the Ohlone in so-called San Francisco, tend to employ these strategies with varying effect depending on the sympathies of local authorities. In 2022, the city of Oakland created a cultural conservation easement that gives the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust stewardship over a 5-acre park, now named Rinihmu Pulte’irekne, “in perpetuity.” The city of Oakland remains the official property owner, so the designation is more managerial and symbolic.
The slogan Land Back was readily coopted by non-profits who cashed in on the trend and turned it into branding for real estate driven campaigns. Non-profits were motivated by an Indigenous capitalist manifesto written by Edgar Villanueva, a Lumbee who is a self-described “southern Christian boy.” Villanueva‘s first philanthropic job in his early 20s was to distribute $25 million from a tobacco industry tax shelter foundation to whomever he thought needed it. In his book Decolonizing Wealth, Villanueva absurdly states, “Money, used as medicine, can help us decolonize.” The author is plainly cashing in on “decolonialism” to preserve and further capitalism. As stated in his book he took his first philanthropic job because he believed it was a good place for him to “do god’s work.” The author, a graduate from Jackson College of Ministries with a Pentecostal upbringing is more comfortable quoting the Bible than his elders in a book invoking “decolonization.”
At 28, the author was working for the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust making a six-figure salary.
Villanueva considers himself a “healer” through preaching capitalism and oddly states that it was at an Indian Health Service conference where he received an “Indian name” from an Ojibwe medicine man. He states, “When I got into philanthropy, it felt like I gained access to a significant power to heal people.” He then sold “#decolonizer” shirts at his ticketed book launch.
The Non-profit Industrial Complex (NPIC) is a system of relationships designed by colonial and capitalist forces to manage and neutralize effective radical organizing. The NPIC was established to manage social and environmental groups with the same structure as corporations.
Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs) co-opt movement momentum into campaigns they manage to control and capitalize off of. Based on a charity model, NPOs focus their resources on building organizational power and not community power thereby stripping essential resources from frontline radical liberatory organizing, while reproducing or prolonging inequality and social hierarchies. Wealthy families, individuals, foundations, owning classes, and corporations use the NPIC to shelter their wealth from having to pay taxes. These capitalists grant millions but save many millions more by profiting off of tax breaks. They have no sincere motivation to end the injustices that they often perpetuate and benefit from.
Non-profit managers and staff are milking philanthropists and massive foundations (such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos that granted a group called the NDN “Collective” over $10 million) to get their salaries paid from profiteering off of “Land Back.” It’s not a “steal from the rich give to the poor” strategy either; the non-profit industry is established to keep wealth inequality intact, and undermine social unrest.
Land Back political and economic strategies are further complicated and undermined due to the Marshall Doctrine which established that Indigenous People’s lands (particularly reservations) are held in federal trust. Under the doctrine, Tribal sovereignty is non-existent as Indigenous Nations are “domestic dependent nations.” So any land that is negotiated “back” by Tribal entities remain a state resource managed by its wards.
Rearranging state or private property through real estate transactions or state grants in the form of trusts, monuments, and protected areas, are economic and bureaucratic maneuvers that subjugate Mother Earth to the realm of social and economic regulations, someone somewhere holds “title” to the land.
If we interrogate the promises of Land Back, we are brought back to an ancestral perspective that the land belongs to no-one but itself. Land Back then becomes a question of unmapping “legal” terrain, tearing down walls, and cutting through fences. It becomes an undoing of the forceful imposition of the capitalist idea of private property and the colonial/capitalist impulse to declare dominion or domination over Mother Earth and existence. To realize Land Back means to end the ways humans have profaned all of existence and imposed their will upon the land and reasserting that the land belongs to no one.
From 1492 Land Back Lane to Big Mountain on Black Mesa and beyond, Indigenous resistance has held autonomous regions free from State authority. In some moments these acts of liberation have lasted longer than others, and in the case of Big Mountain for over forty years as the Sovereign Diné Nation.