Give The Land Back?

November 10, 2020

Today we travel to a future where the US and Canada give stolen land back to tribes & bands.

Guests:

Molly Swain — co-host of Métis in Space, studying in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta & co-organizer of 2Land 2Furious.
Chelsea Vowel — co-host of Métis in Space, author of Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit Issues in Canada & co-organizer of 2Land 2Furious.
Matthew Fletcher — law professor at Michigan State University
Graham Lee Brewer — associate editor at High Country News
Mike Gouldehawke — writer & activist

The intro scene was written & performed by Molly Swain and Chelsea Vowel, along with Johnnie Jae.

You can donate to Molly & Chelsea’s landback project here.

Further Reading:

Cree terms glossary

kihci-tapwêwin – the great truth
tânisi – hello, how are you
namoya nânitaw – not bad
kiya mâka – and you?
wâhkôhtowin – expanded kinship
ostêsimâwasinahikêwin – writing or negotiating a treaty
kinohteminihkwân cî maskihkîwâpoy – would you like some tea?
wahwâ – a positive exclamation (like “great!” or “awesome!”)
miyo-wîcêhtowin – the act of being in good relation
wîtaskêwin – living together on the land
kokum – grandmother
mooshum – grandfather
kâ-wêwêkisit – (name for someone) she who is laying down wrapped in a blanket

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Flash Forward is hosted by Rose Eveleth and produced by Julia Llinas Goodman. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. The voices from the future this episode were provided by

If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at info@flashforwardpod.com. We love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool.

And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! Head to www.flashforwardpod.com/support for more about how to give. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help.

That’s all for this future, come back next time and we’ll travel to a new one.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Transcript by Emily White @ The Wordary

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FLASH FORWARD

S6E16 – “Give the Land Back?”

[Flash Forward intro music – “Whispering Through” by Asura, an electronic, rhythm-heavy piece]

ROSE EVELETH:
Hello and welcome to Flash Forward! I’m Rose and I am your host. Flash Forward is a show about the future. Every episode we take on a specific possible… or sometimes not so possible future scenario. We always start with a little field trip into the future to check out what’s going on, and then we teleport back to today to talk to experts about how that world we just heard might really go down. Got it? Great!

This episode we are starting in the year 2320.

FICTION SKETCH BEGINS

[spooky space-theme marimba & percussive music]

NARRATOR (space-age celestial voice):
Gather ‘round friends and frenemies as we travel to the not-so-distant future. The year: 2320. The world has been as radically transformed by the ravages of early 21st-century capitalism, colonialism, climate change, and white supremacy as it has been transformed by the courage and determination of the mighty land and water defenders who came together to restore good relations between humans, the animal and plant nations, and the land in the spirit of love and solidarity.

These brave warriors fought on two fronts: external forces of industry and the state, and the internalized sicknesses of capital accumulation and disconnection from the land. The kihci-tapwêwin, or Great Truth-Telling, also known as DECOLONIZATION, has been playing out for nigh on 200 years. Today we’ll look in on two friends visiting and catching up, the most traditional of Indigenous customs…

MOLLY:
Tânisi?

CHELSEA:
Namoya nânitaw, kiya mâka?

MOLLY:
I’m great. I am pumped. It’s been ages since we’ve had a chance for a visit! Sorry I’m late, I was just dropping off firewood to some of the kokums and mooshums, you know how it is. How’re you?

CHELSEA:
I’m doing great, our wâhkôhtowin-ostêsimâw-asinahikêwin project is barreling ahead. Kinohteminihkwân cî maskihkîwâpoy?

MOLLY:
Always!

CHELSEA:
Ah-ha, this is raspberry leaf tea with dried saskatoons from last season, Axmed and I made a huge batch. The saskatoon bushes were in their seven-year peak. We could hardly keep up with canning and drying. There’s not going to be as many next year though so I’m enjoying the overabundance while I can.

MOLLY:
Axmed? I don’t remember meeting that person. Who are they?

CHELSEA:
Axmed’s Somali, he’s on a scoping visit to see if his family wants to settle in this area. He’s been really awesome at helping us in our relationship building with the Coati Nation. He’s been a massive help with harvesting for this winter. He’s out gathering rat root with the Aunties right now.

MOLLY:
Oh cool, I’m sorry my visit has to be so short today, I can’t wait to meet him! Speaking of the Coati Nation, when I was down the river at the Inter-Nation Convergence, I got to chat with some Dakota about them. Turns out they’ve been in Dakota territory for decades now and it seems like everyone is adjusting nicely. It looks like they take up similar kinds of roles and space to raccoons, magpies, and coyotes; a lot of scavenging, foraging, and the like. I didn’t realize they were so cute! That reminds me, I brought you an archive about them!

CHELSEA:
Oooh, is this a Dakota Intercommunal Regional Archive?

MOLLY:
Not just Dakota, this archive has information from all the way down to the Coati Nation’s original territory! This knowledge has been shared and added to all the way up to Dakota territory, and I know that the delegates were hoping we could bring more knowledge about the Coati back down to them at the next convergence.

CHELSEA:
Wahwâ. This is going to help us big time with the treaty process! We haven’t been sure yet how much territory to share without negatively impacting all the other plant and animal Nations. We’ll review this archive and send you what information we gather next time you visit.

MOLLY:
How’s treaty-making going by the way? You were still doing the preliminary relationship-building and learning work when I left.

CHELSEA:
It’s been going pretty quickly, we think. Once the Coati made it clear they were settling in this region a few years back and their population began to rise, they had a little bit of a conflict with the Badger clans, but they seemed to work that out between them. The hardest part is always developing miyo-wîcêhtowin, becoming good relations, so that we can organize wîtaskêwin and learn to live together on the land. Axmed’s been a really quick study of Coati protocol actually. I’m almost certain his community will decide to neighbor us in the next few years. Maybe the Coati will even decide to share their territory with Axmed’s community.

MOLLY:
Glad to hear it’s been going relatively smoothly! It’s great that we’re able to do so much more knowledge-sharing and communicating with other human and non-human nations than our pre-kihci-tapwêwin ancestors did. I know a lot of those so-called “settler” people in the past weren’t really thinking of it this way, but climate change led to some real diplomatic challenges for us now!

CHELSEA:
Having to remain in deep relation with a landscape, and human, and non-human population in such rapid flux and movement has sort of forced us to be super-neechies, hey?

MOLLY:
We’ve always been super! (laughs)

CHELSEA:
Ha! Well, you always come back from your trips super buff from all that paddling, I bet you could do a long haul on the Dehcho river and zip back here with some caribou jerky in a weekend! Anyway, did you deliver the bear grease I sent to our Ojibwe friends in Detroit?

MOLLY:
I sure did, and they loved it! It still gets pretty cold and windy down there, so that hardcore moisturizer really comes in handy. They gave me some corn pollen in exchange, actually, which came all the way from Diné territory, which they got by trading a Mi’kmaq quill box for some oolichan oil from the Tsleil-Waututh, and they had the quill box from trading an Inuk ulu for one of their Combined Virtual Relationality Matrices!

CHELSEA:
Oooh, which one? We’ve run through all the Matrices we have so many times, it’d be nice to get to know some people we haven’t met yet. We’re always looking for more stories to get us through the winter, even as short as it is.

MOLLY:
Have you heard the one about the Upsettlers and the corn syrup spill? That would be a great one for the community to get together and play! I’ve got a copy at my place. I’ll bring it up at kokum kâ-wêwêkisit’s the next time I’m there.

CHELSEA:
Better not tell her unless you’ve got it with you, or she’ll have the whole community gathered to play before you’ve finished blinking. Speaking of, did you bring her a new blanket?

MOLLY:
Of course, I know enough not to bother showing up without one at this point! Actually, I better get a move on to go deliver it to her. It’s October and the weather’s not getting any warmer!

CHELSEA:
Yeah of course. Thanks again for the archive and the pollen, and make sure to take some of this tea with you!

MOLLY:
You know I can’t say no to a good tea blend!

NARRATOR:
As we leave our two friends to their work of being in good relation, let’s reflect on how a future society that is driven by Indigenous values of building and maintaining harmonious, mutually beneficial relationships among human and other-than-human beings from throughout the world can help to restore balance and protect our lifeways for future generations.

[music fades out]

FICTION SKETCH END

ROSE:
Okay! Today we are talking about the future of land, and specifically about an idea called Landback.

MOLLY SWAIN:
Landback is basically what’s on the box: the return of land that’s been appropriated by settler-colonizers and settler-colonizing systems, returning that land to its original inhabitants. You know, that’s not a metaphor; it’s not analogous for anything. It’s literally returning the land, the re-establishment of Indigenous sovereignty.

(greets introduces self in Cree) My name is Molly Swain. I am a Métis PhD student and podcast co-host, I guess? With Chelsea

CHELSEA VOWEL:
(greets introduces self in Cree) My name is Chelsea Vowel. I’m Métis from Lac Ste. Anne. I’m a writer and educator.

ROSE:
Molly and Chelsea are the cohosts of a podcast called Métis in Space, which you should definitely listen to if you do not already. They actually wrote and performed the intro scene you just heard, and we are going to hear more from them in a little bit about their own landback project. But the idea here is, indeed, simple. Give the land back; because, and of course you probably know this, the founders of the United States and Canada did not just find this land sitting here empty. There were very much people living here already, and colonists quickly started to encroach on and take over their land.

Now, before we get into more about landback, and the history, and the future of this idea, I do want to take a quick second just to say that this episode is really just going to cover the US and Canada. But that does not mean that there aren’t really interesting landback movements and examples elsewhere. Australia, for example, has a really fascinating process for evaluating and returning land to Indigenous folks there. And maybe we will do a follow-up episode about that in the future! But for today, just for the sake of having enough time to really dive in and understand what’s at play in these places, we are going to focus on just the US and Canada.

Now, these two countries, the US and Canada, don’t have exactly the same factors involved. The exact treaties and timelines of colonization aren’t the same. But the basic gist is that settlers arrived on this land and took it over by unfair means. That looks like a lot of things; everything from literal genocide to federal governments simply ignoring the well-negotiated treaties that they made with these tribal councils. And today, it culminates in both colonial governments having some serious reckoning to do with this history and its fallout.

So let’s start in the United States, and then we will travel north to Canada.

The first European settlers arrived in the US in the 1500s, and there is a ton to say about what happens between then and the foundation of the United States as a country, but we only have about an hour so we’re just going to skip ahead a little bit.

MATTHEW FLETCHER:
The very first treaty between the United States and an Indian tribe was in 1778 during the American Revolution.

My name is Matthew Fletcher. I’m a law professor at Michigan State University and I’m a citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.

ROSE:
So during the American Revolution, the US soldiers needed access to some travel routes in what is now western Pennsylvania.

MATTHEW:
So it entered into a treaty with the Delaware nation of western Pennsylvania called the Treaty of Fort Pitt. Fort Pitt is Pittsburgh of course, and that was the very first treaty.

ROSE:
In the next hundred years or so, the US entered into nearly 400 treaties with tribal nations all over the United States. Each of these are different, but they usually have some common elements.

MATTHEW:
The United States often included language in the treaty that said the tribe that signs the treaty is under the protection of the United States. A lot of the treaties were agreements where the tribe would agree to sell its land to the United States in exchange for… well, exchange for protection and a bunch of other things; cash sometimes, lands, that sort of thing.

ROSE:
So basically, the US wants resources, or access to some land, or something like that, and to get it they would say, “Okay, Tribal Nation, if you give us this thing we want, we will protect you.”

One big misconception about these treaties is this idea that the tribes were foolish, or operating from a place of extreme weakness, that the US came in and just totally out-negotiated them. But that’s not true.

MATTHEW:
Tribes were pretty decent treaty negotiators. In the early treaties, the tribes often negotiated for education rights, economic rights, land rights, political rights. You know, the Cherokee Nation, for a time, was actually promised a delegate in Congress. The Delaware Nation in that first treaty I mentioned was promised statehood. So early on, the treaties were, sort of, relatively even-handed.

ROSE:
But over time, the United States got more and more powerful and stopped honoring the terms of most of these treaties. In some cases, the US explicitly, intentionally violated these treaties and invaded the land that they had agreed belonged to Indigenous tribes.

In other cases, the US started treating the duties that were outlined in these treaties not as a way to provide support or protection to the tribe, but as a way to control Indigenous folks. For instance, they had promised certain tribes schools that employed Indigenous teachers. But instead, they handed over control of many of these schools to the Catholic church, which then created boarding schools focused on conversion. And the schools that were run by the government itself weren’t so great either.

MATTHEW:
A lot of the other schools were turned over, under President Grant, to ex-military guys, so some boarding schools then became bootcamps, kind of in a military tradition.

ROSE:
And then there was the land itself.

MATTHEW:
They would chop up Indian reservations into smaller parcels, give some of those parcels, called allotments, to individual Indians and sell off the rest of the land, often the best land on the reservation, to the highest bidder on the federal public market. And that had the effect of chopping up the reservations, reducing the land base.

ROSE:
Today, these treaties still technically exist. They are, in theory, supposed to dictate how the US and various tribal nations interact; the give and take between the two. But in practice, that’s not really happening.

ROSE (on call):
Maybe this is a silly question, but if it’s very clear, as you say, that the US has not fulfilled its side of a treaty, at what point do these treaties just, like, not make sense anymore? Like, if one party is clearly not holding up their end of the bargain, doesn’t that at some point invalidate a treaty? How does this work?

MATTHEW:
Some people talk about: the United States has violated the treaty, the United States has failed to fulfill its promises, therefore, under a simple contract interpretation of a treaty, the treaty is invalid and everybody basically starts at the beginning. So all of the land that the United States received in exchange through a treaty process should then be restored to Indian people or Indian tribes.

As a practical matter, you’re talking about everything outside of the original 13 colonies. And that’s not going to happen. But the reality is, the treaties still have viable terms. We may not have received a good deal in exchange here in Michigan, for example, for the land that we sold to the United States, but we did receive something. So the treaty provides that, you know, the Indian tribes here in Michigan, elsewhere in the Great Lakes, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Pacific Northwest, the Puget Sound tribes have the right to hunt and fish, really outside of the regulatory scheme of the states.

That’s provided a great boon to those tribes, really starting in the 1970s and ‘80s. And it’s created a lot of cooperative arrangements between the tribes and the states, local governments, even the United States as a part of this, and try to maintain the environment, maintain the fishery and the habitat for the fishery. And so it’s hard to just say, “Let’s just start over and give up. Cut our losses.” We’d have to give up things like treaty fishing, subsistence hunting and fishing. And that is something a lot of tribes are not willing to do.

ROSE (Mono):
That said, Matthew says that there are some very big areas of land that the US could totally give back, right now. And that they should.

MATTHEW:
So you’ve heard of the Black Hills in western South Dakota. That’s where Mount Rushmore is. Now, the Black Hills is actually the subject of a super famous US Supreme Court case called United States versus Sioux Nation. The United States, in the 1870s, confiscated, without any kind of due process or just compensation, the Black Hills from those tribes. George Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills and inundated the area with non-Indians. Ultimately, the United States, rather than forcing the non-Indians to leave and preserve the treaty right, just confiscated the Black Hills and gave it away. Or actually, kept most of it, but the advocate abrogated the tribe’s treaty.

ROSE:
In 1980 the Supreme Court looked at this case and basically said, “Yeah, the US is in the wrong here.” And they decided that the United States owed the Sioux tribes over $100 million. But when the country tried to pay them, the Sioux tribe said… Nope.

MATTHEW:
They refused to accept the money. They want the land back instead.

ROSE:
But this money exists. It’s been set aside, and it can’t be used for anything else.

MATTHEW:
And what that means is there’s a huge $1.5-something billion trust fund in the Department of Treasury that is held by the United States for the benefit of those Sioux tribes.

ROSE:
If the US did what the Sioux are asking and gave the land back, that would free up all of that money to use on… oh, I don’t know, maybe pandemic relief?

MATTHEW:
If you turn over the Black Hills back to the Sioux nations collectively, what they want, it’s about a billion-and-a-half dollars’ worth of lands.

ROSE:
And if the Sioux get that land back, it also opens the door for other conversations about federally managed land in other parts of the United States as well.

MATTHEW:
And you will find in states like Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho, that the United States owns most of the land in those states. They don’t do a whole lot with it. They often open it up for leasing to private interests; oil, gas, mining, minerals, timber, forestry, grazing, all sorts of things that don’t really make the world turn, you know, in any meaningful way. But they could turn a lot of that land over back to the tribes. And that would significantly restore the land base that was lost through the allotment process.

ROSE:
And in fact, in most of these places, it’s pretty easy to figure out which tribe that land once belonged to.

MATTHEW:
What I was told by students is, the great thing about colonization by the United States is that they documented everything. So we can go into the archives and find out how they stole our land.

ROSE:
This proposal to give this federally managed land back has support, obviously, among tribes. But it has support in other places too that might surprise you. Rural, small-C conservatives also advocate for this idea. They don’t like the idea of the federal and even state government owning and managing all this land. Of course, there are also lots of powerful politicians and lobbyists who hate this idea.

MATTHEW:
And you would have to upset a lot of those very powerful private interests; timber, oil, gas, coal, grazing interests, agricultural interests.

ROSE:
In the United States, there have been cases where tribal nations have gotten their land back. And that can look like a bunch of different things.

GRAHAM BREWER:
One of the real first, like, big examples of repatriating land was in 1970 and it was the Taos Pueblo and they fought to get access to Blue Lake.

ROSE:
This is Graham Brewer.

GRAHAM:
I’m an associate editor at High Country News on the Indigenous affairs desk, and I’m a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

ROSE:
In 1970, the Taos Pueblo Indians of New Mexico won the right to 48,000 acres of land. For 64 years before that, the tribe had been trying to regain the rights to Blue Lake and the mountains around it, arguing that the lake and surrounding area was a crucial piece of land. The lake was the primary water supply for the pueblo and really important in agriculture for them. But even beyond that, the lake and land are sacred.

GRAHAM:
The real argument that the Pueblo made was that their religious practices were private, and by giving people access to these lands, they could stumble upon a ceremony, and then by extension, ruin it.

ROSE:
In 1946, the US Government established what was called the Indian Claims Commission.

GRAHAM:
It wasn’t really like the government was trying to help Native people. It was just trying to say once and for all, “We finished the Indian problem.”

ROSE:
Most of the time, what would happen was that tribes would make a complaint to the commission, and if the commission decided that they had some kind of right or claim, the tribe would be offered money. But in this case, much like the Sioux in the Black Hills, the Taos Pueblo did not want money.

GRAHAM:
They appealed to that commission and basically said, “We don’t want monetary compensation, we want the land and we want to keep people who aren’t from this place out of it.”

ROSE:
And eventually, in December of 1970, they prevailed.

GRAHAM:
And it was a really interesting case, too, because it kind of shows you just how much of this, like, teeters on who’s in charge. This was when Nixon was president. And Nixon isn’t someone that you would traditionally align with Indian country. But, you know, reading things that his former cabinet members said about, like, how helping the Taos Pueblo stay on their land and keep other people out of it, it aligned with Nixon’s viewpoint that the races should be divided. And so when he was like, “Well, they don’t want to be assimilated. They want to stay where they are and they don’t want to mix with white people. Let’s let them do that.”

ROSE:
And even though it was based on racist logic, that decision and law paved the way for other tribes to get land back, too.

GRAHAM:
It’s opened the door for countless other lawsuits that many of are successful for tribes. And because it basically made the assertion that their claim to the land wasn’t just that they needed the space, it was that it was an integral part of who they were, their culture and their religious beliefs, and the only way that could be protected was by keeping it away from other people.

ROSE:
Not all landback cases come from the same process or look the same, but over the years there have been plenty of examples of what landback can look like.

In 2015, Sonoma County returned land to the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians. In 2018, after PG&E went bankrupt, a group of Maidu tribes were given land back. In 2019, the city of Eureka in California returned Duluwat Island to the Wiyot tribe.

In other cases, the tribes have bought land back themselves. In 2009, three Kumeyaay bands bought back tribal lands near the California-Mexico border. Just this year, the Esselen Tribe bought over 1,000 acres in Big Sur in a $4.5 million deal.

In still other cases, private citizens give land back to tribal nations. In 2019, a church in Oklahoma gave land back to the Wyandotte Nation. In Cape Cod, in 2015, a landowner gave 1.4 acres of land to the Native Land Conservancy. In 2018, a farmer returned a chunk of land along the Trail of Tears to the Ponca Tribe.

There are also land taxes that you can participate in. Here where I am in the Bay Area, the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust operates a land tax, where you can pay into a fund that goes directly to the Indigenous community here. In your area, there might be some other way that you can get involved in this.

One landback case you might notice I have not mentioned, that you might have heard about, is the recent Supreme Court case, McGirt v. Oklahoma. Some of you may have seen that reported in the news with headlines like, “US Supreme Court Rules Half of Oklahoma is Native American land“ or something along those lines.

GRAHAM:
I think the craziest one I saw said, “SCOTUS gives half of Oklahoma back to the Indians.”

ROSE:
That court case did not give half of Oklahoma back to anybody. It’s not really a landback example at all really. We don’t really have time to get into it on this episode, but it is a super interesting case, and on the bonus Podcast this week we’re going to talk all about it. You’re going to hear Graham and Matthew talk about it, so if you do want that you can become a supporter and get the bonus podcast. Go to FlashForwardPod.com/Support for more about that.

The big thing to know about landback is that, while it might seem like this big, possibly intimidating idea, it is actually totally possible. Right now. The US could do this in a meaningful way if it wanted to.

Going
Doing that is completely within our bounds if we just agree that it’s the right thing to do and we do it. And so I think that, like, we should be thinking about that in our coverage of it, that these ideas might sound scary to some people, and again, they might be very challenging, but I don’t think they’re by any means outside of the realm of possibility. In fact, I think there is an ethical and responsible way to do it that benefits everybody.

ROSE:
The key to success on these projects is that they actually empower the tribal people themselves. And sometimes that might mean that the tribe does not do what you might expect with the land.

MATTHEW:
When I worked in-house at Grand Traverse band, every couple of years somebody would do that. They would say, “I’m going to turn over my farm or my house to the tribe. You can do whatever you want with it.” And you know, what we would do on a practical level is, you know, talk to our land-use planner and say, “What good is this land to us?” And almost all the time we would just sell it for cash and try to use that money to buy lands that were within our plan for how to develop our reservation and that sort of thing.

GRAHAM:
I think what’s important is if you are in a position to give land back, or give money back, or funds back, you can’t just do it. You have to conference with the tribe that you’re wanting to benefit and ask them, “What is the best way for me to do this?”

ROSE:
And that idea translates no matter where you are. So on that note, we are going to take a quick break and then take a little field trip up into Canada and hear about landback projects and the history there. But first, a word from our sponsors.

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ROSE:
So we’ve talked about the US, now let’s talk about Canada. The history is similar, but with some key differences.

MIKE GOULDEHAWKE:
Canada was a British colony even until 1982 we were still basically a British colony.

ROSE:
This is Mike Gouldehawke, a Métis writer and activist based in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is Coast Salish territory. And Mike points out that unlike the United States, which was a new nation, the British had a whole lot of experience invading new territories and ruling people.

MIKE:
They were also experienced… I don’t want to say diplomacy, but kind of like false diplomacy, like how to make these legal maneuvers and how to get the people to control themselves, in a way.

ROSE:
So for example, the United States moved many Native Americans into the center of the country and set up consolidated reservations. But in Canada, they did the opposite.

MIKE:
They were kind of smart or… I mean, it’s sad to say in a way. They’re kind of smarter, they’re kind of strategic about. They’re like, “Let’s make lots of really small reserves and let’s break up all the bands and try to keep them from uniting so that they can’t resist what we’re doing to them.” And then they made a thing called the ‘pass system’ too, where you weren’t allowed to leave the reserve unless the Indian agent said that you could.

ROSE:
The other key difference between the US and Canada is that most of the treaties that exist in Canada with the bands – in Canada they call them bands rather than tribes – are with the British Government, not the Canadian government.

So, for example, in the 90s, a Mi’kmaq man was arrested for catching eels without a license. He argued that his tribe’s treaty was with the British – from the 1700s – and it allowed him to fish this way. The Canadian government eventually agreed with him, but it took years.

MIKE:
Canada didn’t even exist yet, so how could the treaties say that Canada has a right to tell the Mi’kmaq people what to do with their fishery? It’s completely nonsensical.

ROSE:
And this makes certain Canadian conversations about Landback a little bit more complicated. For example, in 2018, the city of Vancouver returned land to the Musqueam people after years of Musqueam leadership petitioning the city and setting up camp in the area to claim the land back and prevent a big development from going in.

MIKE:
And they would have lots of protest marches, and demonstrations, and stuff, so eventually they managed to secure that land in a certain sense, like stop the development and have it returned to the band council. So that’s positive in a certain way, but then on the other hand, if you think about it, it’s kind of ridiculous for the city of Vancouver. They never bought the land. There’s never any treaty in the city.

And in most of British Columbia, there’s no treaties. So to me, it was kind of preposterous, like in the city of Vancouver, in their own words, they’re like, “We’re going to donate the land back to Musqueam.” But at the same time, even in their press release, they were like, “That means you have to pay taxes on it.”

ROSE:
And for Mike, a lot of this complicates what actually counts as landback.

MIKE:
Does that mean people giving us private property? Does that mean them giving us a reserve land? Does that mean them just giving us the land with no strings attached? Or does that mean us taking the land back ourselves? You know, there’s a variety of different… not just different ways you can look at it, but actually these things have already happened in real life.

MOLLY:
You know, whatever form landback takes… I’ve never seen a form that I’ve been like, “You know, this is not a good way of doing this.”

ROSE:
That’s Molly again from Métis in Space and from the intro you heard. And not only are Chelsea and Molly amazing podcast hosts and writers, they also have their own landback project called 2Land 2Furious.

CHELSEA:
Molly is the expert of naming things.

MOLLY:
Okay, no. This is a joint thing because Chelsea and her husband absolutely love the Fast & Furious franchise. Loved it. It’s their favorite.

CHELSEA:
I want to do a thesis on wâhkôhtowin, or kinship, throughout the Fast & Furious franchise. It’s not that they’re good movies. They’re not good movies; let me just stress that. But the concept of family embedded within the movies…

MOLLY:
Yeah, we rewrote this blog post, I think, like three years ago, four years ago, about our intention to return to the land. And you know, I thought it’d be really funny if it was fast and the Fast & Furious style because of, you know, Chelsea telling me about how wâhkôhtowin it was. Also, we thought it would be hilarious if, you know, we just authored this blog post under Vin Chiesel and Moll Walker. (laughs) There was no, like, big…

CHELSEA:
(laughs) We’re funny to us! It’s funny to us!

MOLLY:
Is it funny to us? Yes. (laughs) And some of those jokes, like, clearly do not land with anybody else but I’m really happy 2Land 2Furious did.

ROSE:
Molly and Chelsea had been talking about doing a landback project for a while, and when they both moved back to Edmonton they thought maybe it was finally time to take that thinking to the next level.

MOLLY:
And I was like, “Chelsea, I’m so busy.”

CHELSEA:
And I was avoiding writing my thesis for my master’s.

MOLLY:
Yeah. So I was like… and she assured me. She’s like, “I’m really busy too. This is going to take, like, probably at least two or three years to get these funds. But let’s just put it out in the world and see what happens.” And then, what was it?

CHELSEA:
Three weeks.

MOLLY:
Yeah. Weeks later, this person got in touch with us and was like, “I would like to give you a quarter-million dollars to buy land.” And we’re like, “Haha! Tell us another one, bud!” (laughs) But, you know…

ROSE:
It turns out this person was not joking, and in fact gave them a big chunk of money to make this happen. And then they were off to the races; looking at land, trying to explain to real estate agents what they wanted to do.

CHELSEA:
Once we realized this… sugar settlor, we call him, was not… like, it was not some sort of weird, complicated scam, we had to kick it into high gear. We did get a real estate agent. We went out, we looked at a bunch of different properties, learned some of the weasel words that, you know, rural properties use. So, you know, instead of like a ‘fixer-upper’, it’s a moldy basement suite. Apparently, ‘wooded’ means that it’s all marsh.

So yeah, we’ve got a piece of land that is partially wooded, partially cleared, and has most of a small lake.

ROSE:
And they set up this project in a really intentional way; as a land trust non-profit, specifically to try and avoid some of the challenges that the Métis people have had with private property and the Canadian government.

MOLLY:
So that no matter how personally broke we are, because we are generally very personally broke, we can’t lose the land because we have to sell it. We took that out of our options. Like, we cannot sell the land because it is held in trust now, which is sort of a safety mechanism for us as well.

ROSE:
Now they are working on the next big steps.

CHELSEA:
We need road access. Right now, there’s no way onto the land from the road. That’s going to be a big thing because without that we can’t bring people on land or any materials. We also need to dig a freshwater well so that we’re not having people haul in water. And simple things, like we’re going to need some sort of, like, sewage solution, right? And we want to do this in ways that also, like, trigger research opportunities and uses, you know, technology… all sorts of sustainable technologies on the land.

And we want to stress… Because people keep asking us, “Oh, what are you planning? What are you going to do?” But the thing is, it’s like, you know, we’re not going to suddenly become the designers of programs necessarily. What we want to do is make this space available to people who are already doing that kind of work. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We’ve got people who’ve been doing hide workshops for years and years, so let’s get them out in the land. Let’s get some inner-city folks out there learning from them. Let’s work with the Indigenous urban organizations that are already working with, like, kids in care and stuff like that. Have them bring people out to the land. And we’re hoping by doing this relationship building, we’ll know what we need to build to make their experiences better. That’s really what we’re trying to do.

ROSE:
And this project is a little bit different from the last couple that we’ve talked about, where a tribal nation worked to get their land back officially from the government or from a private landowner. And Chelsea and Molly both recognize that there is a tension here: buying land from a government that took it in the first place.

CHELSEA:
Yeah, it’s a massive contradiction because, you know, Indigenous… There’s this, sort of, misconception that Indigenous peoples had no property rights because they didn’t exactly look like what Europeans conceived them to be. But of course, Indigenous peoples do have property rights and ways of relating to the land that exclude some people and include others. So obviously, owning land under a property regime, under a settler-colonial property regime, is really against everything we believe in. But on the other hand, it also affords the greatest rights and their greatest amount of security.

We just wanted to have something that we could at least hold on to for a couple generations. And in a way, we’re using settler laws against settlerdom by being like, “All right, well, you can’t come on this land. Sorry.”

ROSE:
And this is the thing to know about landback. Even though it is kind of a simple idea, it can really look a lot of different ways.

MOLLY:
I think one of the things that I’d like to leave folks with is: look into what landback projects might be happening in your area and figure out how you can support them. And honestly, the absolute best thing that you can do if you’re a non-Indigenous person who’s interested in landback is give money to landback projects. It’s material. It’s a form of aid that goes directly to the source. And it de-centers settlers from Indigenous people doing the work that we need to do, which I think at this stage in particular is incredibly important.

We’re seeing a lot more acknowledgment and recognition by settlers that Indigenous people still exist, that we have claim to our territories, that colonialism is an ongoing process that is incredibly violent and unjust. And that’s all really, really important work. But where we’re at now, the main thing, as Chelsea has said, that we need folks to do is de-center themselves and get out of the way.

ROSE:
And that leads us to this big question: What would it be like if a large portion of this land was actually returned to Indigenous folks? What would that look like?

And that is what we are going to talk about when we come back.

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ROSE:
So let’s talk about the future now, shall we? What would happen if tribal nations on both sides of the border were in fact given their land back? Well, for one thing, we would have to have a conversation about that border.

MIKE:
Because a lot of our nations are divided on both sides of the border, like the Métis nation, the Cree nation, dozens of nations. All along the border, pretty much, there’s an Indigenous nation whose territory is divided. And even now we have the Sinixt who, they moved to Washington state but now they’re coming back up to Canada. They’re coming across the border and starting to hunt on their traditional territory in Canada again. They have this big court case right now where they’re fighting for that.

ROSE:
Another thing that everybody I talked to emphasized was that if Indigenous people get control of the land again, they are not going to turn around and subjugate settlers like me.

MIKE:
Like, “Oh, they’re just going to do to us what we did to them,” but that’s just them projecting onto us, right?

GRAHAM:
That’s such a constant perception, I think. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me that people who’ve benefited from oppression for centuries fear that the people who didn’t benefit from that oppression would treat them the same way if the shoe was on the other foot.

CHELSEA:
They’re like, “Oh, you’re going to kick us off because we live here. We’re not native. You’re gonna kick us out.” No, it’s not going to be a situation… and I’m saying this ‘not going to be’ because it’s going to happen. It’s not going to be a situation where we’re just going to turn around and become the new colonizers. That’s not the goal whatsoever. It’s a completely different way of living. It’s a completely different world view. And it has to include the people that are already on those lands.

ROSE:
Another important thing to note about how this might look is that Indigenous people are not a monolith. Different tribal nations are going to do things differently.

MOLLY:
I mean, it’s impossible to say what it would look like because there are hundreds of Indigenous nations on these lands. And while there are a lot of overlapping ways that we look at the world, we’re also all unique.

ROSE:
Okay, so if they’re not going to kick colonizers off the land, what are they going to do? Well, for one thing, they will probably do a better job of addressing environmental degradation and climate change than colonial governments currently are.

MATTHEW:
If a treaty protects a tribe’s access to water and protects its access or the establishment of a homeland, then tribes really have the potential to make some serious impacts.

ROSE:
That’s Matthew Fletcher again.

MATTHEW:
And you started seeing that in the last few years with the Standing Rock controversy with the Dakota Access Pipeline. I think that was the first time in national politics where Indian treaty rights were talked about as, effectively, the saviors of an entire region of people, not just tribes. I mean, everybody is a beneficiary of the tribe’s treaty right to clean water and access to Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. Everybody that lives around here; it’s not just Indian tribes. And I think that when I say we’re on the verge of a dramatic shift, I think you start to see that with Standing Rock where, environmental groups in particular, but lots of non-Indians are starting to see the benefit of joining up with tribes and trying to protect limited resources and ultimately fight against things like climate change.

GRAHAM:
I don’t expect tribes to just, like, have all the answers to climate change, but I would expect them to be more mindful.

ROSE:
That’s Graham Brewer again.

GRAHAM:
You know, I think, we see all the coverage lately of the wildfires and how a lot of news organizations are acknowledging that Indigenous people took care of these lands through prescribed burns and now they’re involving those tribal nations in some of those decisions. Those wildfires aren’t just a product of climate change, they’re a product of colonialism. And so when you couple… Two ideas that I think most tribal nations would likely hold are that they don’t like colonialism and they don’t like climate change, and they have answers to both of those things and alternatives. I would expect that those places would be better managed in a certain regard.

MATTHEW:
I think that if tribes had access to those lands, they would have a lot more political power. There’s no reason that you couldn’t have multiple states in the union that are controlled by Indian tribes. But I think on serious levels, they would really push for national controls in terms of greenhouse gases, and pollution, conservation, and environmental protections. I think you’d also see some pretty dramatic changes in how governments operate in the US.

It’s always fair to say that the relationship between the United States and Indian tribes is always subject at any moment to huge disruptions.

ROSE (on call):
Is it terrifying or exciting to constantly be living on that edge of “things could go really badly or really well, quickly”?

MATTHEW:
That’s a great question. It’s both. I mean, life in 2020 is terrifying all the time anyway. It’s also… It is very exciting. You know, I’ve taught federal Indian law now since 2004. I practiced for seven years before that. And the first 10 years that I was working and teaching, you know, my generation… I wasn’t one of these people… Some people in my generation would say, you know, “Things are so boring, everything’s settled. It’s just bureaucratic now. There’s not going to be any really huge shifts in how Indian law is practiced.”

And now we know that tribes are really doing some remarkable things in terms of their ability to govern at a time when, you know, climate change… there’s really no uniform response to climate change from the United States or many of the nations in the world. So it is terrifying. Everything in 2020 is terrifying. But I really love that if Indian tribes are going to go down with the rest of the world, we’re going to go down on the right side of history. We’re going to go down with a fight.

ROSE (Mono):
For a lot of native thinkers and writers, having land, and space, and sovereignty, and power again is really exciting because it means that their people can get back to doing all of the really progressive and interesting things they were doing before colonization. For example, Canada has had universal healthcare since the 1960s, but you probably didn’t know that in fact, some tribal nations proposed a similar system in their treaties with the British Government way back in the 1800s.

MIKE:
Our ancestors were thinking about the future. They’re like, “We’re going to need health care. This system that non-natives are bringing is not…” They could already kind of tell it’s not the healthiest system. You know, they’re killing the buffalo, and running out of food, and things like this. So our elders were future-thinking. And Canada has not implemented that, like, equally. There’s kind of a two-tiered medical system that’s actually really oppressive in a lot of ways. But at the same time, I think that that medicine chest clause in those treaties and our resistance did cause Canada to provide healthcare to Indigenous people in some ways earlier than it did to non-native people.

Colonization is, like, interfering with our futurism in a way, you know, interfering with us developing in new ways. If we can decolonize then our culture can start moving again.

GRAHAM:
Now that you’ve asked me that question, I’ve got all these really interesting sci-fi novel ideas going through my head.

CHELSEA:
When we think about the future and we are being hopeful, that’s deliberate because we’re really rejecting the notion that things have to be terrible for anything to change. The fact is, Indigenous peoples are incredibly resilient, and able to change, and able to come up with new ideas and things like that, that are based in ancient ways of knowing and relating that are useful still because they keep us alive, and they keep other… you know, our non-human kin alive.

So for us, in order to be hopeful, we both have to acknowledge what has been done continues to be done to prevent Indigenous peoples from exercising self-determination. And we have to imagine what it could be like for us if we were free again to just do and decide how we choose.

ROSE:
Molly and Chelsea wrote the intro scene you heard, so I think it’s fitting for us to end with a little bit more about that scene. You can find a Cree word glossary on the website for the terms you might not have recognized.

MOLLY:
That was a really, really fun process for us. I think one of our favorite things, one of the things that really pumps our tires is thinking through, you know, the mechanics of what this future is going to look like. What I hope comes out of it is that people look at a scene like this as a really small instance in a larger world. So think about, you know, the context. It’s about Chelsea and I meeting up and visiting after I’ve gone on a trip and she’s taken on a new project. So, we talked for a really long time about how we would travel in the future. What forms of travel do we use now? What are some obstacles that might come up that don’t come up now, but come up once we’ve reestablished a really good sense of wâhkôhtowin and miyo-wîcêhtowin, which is being in good relation, not only with other people, but also with the Earth?

How might that impact how we go about both, you know, talking to one another as human beings, but then also establishing and maintaining good relations with the water, with the land, with the animals and plants? And then how does that impact… I think there’s an assumption that a lot of settlers make with decolonization that, like, our lives are going to become more restricted or whatever; “Capitalism is the thing that frees us!” etc. So, what are the things that come up that are expansive rather than limiting? What things can people think about that expand our lives and expand our ways of understanding?

CHELSEA:
Yeah. Some of the things that we thought about for this was, you know, the fact of climate change. We can’t stop it. We’re not going to invent some sort of technology that’s going to fix it, right? Certain things are inevitable; ongoing climatic catastrophe, mass human migration at rates that we have never seen before in human history. We just, sort of like, assume that these things are going to happen. How do we plan for them? So, part of the things that you might notice in this is, you know, we talk about, you know, the Coati suddenly taking up space in our territories, and rather than trying to root them out and be like, “No, you’re a pest,” how do we learn to live with the changing geography, and climate, you know, and not non-human kin that move in?

And also that idea of a human migration, we really think about, like, what does it mean not to have borders and not to have the restrictions that we do? So we threw in Axmed as a character, you know, thinking about the fluidity of human migration. Maybe if people could choose where they want to go, they go check it out, they scope it out, they see, “is this a place I want to be in relationship with?” Rather than being like, “We’re going to really control who comes in and decide who has rights and who doesn’t.”

MOLLY:
And so, to a certain extent, that’s a lot of how we do this world-building and that leads to these action points like landback, like wanting to form these relationships, looking to build and be in good relation, because that’s how we quilt the future together.

[Flash Forward closing music begins – a snapping, synthy piece]

Flash Forward is hosted by me, Rose Eveleth, and produced by Julia Llinas Goodman. The intro music is by Asura and the outro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky. The intro scene was written by Molly Swain and Chelsea Vowel, of Métis in Space. Molly and Chelsea also played themselves in the future, in that scene. The “Twilight Zone” narrator from the intro was played by Johnnie Jae, who’s the founder of A Tribe Called Geek. You can find her work you can find at JohnnieJae.com, I will link to it in the show notes.

If you want to suggest a future that we should take on – this one has actually been suggested or requested a bunch of times – send me a note on Twitter, Facebook, or by email at Info@FlashForwardPod.com. We love hearing your ideas!

If you want to discuss this episode, some other episode, or just the future in general, you can join the Facebook group! Just search ‘Flash Forward Podcast’ and ask to join. And if you want to support the show, there are a couple of ways you can do that as well. Head to FlashForwardPod.com/support for more about how to give.

And if you do join at the bonus podcast level, this week, again, we are going to talk about the McGirt v. Oklahoma decision, which is absolutely fascinating. You will also learn about why one of Trump’s SCOTUS appointees is actually, kind of like, beloved in Indian country, which I did not know. So if you want to hear about that, again, FlashForwardPod.com/Support for more about all of those things.

But if financial support is not in the cards for you, you can head to Apple Podcasts and leave the show a nice review, that really, really does help. Or just tell your friend about the show. Send it to somebody who might be interested in this stuff. Tell people to listen. That really does help. Most podcast listening is, kind of, by word of mouth at this point, so anything you can do to help; just tell people this show exists.

That’s all for this future. Come back next time and we’ll travel to a new one.

[music fades out]

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