i’m seeing a lot of people struggle to explain what it means concisely, but 1) i don’t think you can and 2) if you take the time to look into movements and legal battles various native americans have been working on for a long time it’s all already out there, yknow? so let’s try to dissect that.
landback is a catchy slogan for the work native americans have already been doing and the goals they’ve already had for decades and decades including:
improving reservation conditions
attempting to correct treaty violations
furthering conservation & environmental protection
with some more modern ideals like actively pushing for the US government to cede the entirety of the stolen landmass back to appropriate tribes thrown in (this does not mean evicting white people back to europe). this was already a concept in native political struggle, it’s just being pushed to the forefront more as conditions in america lead to more openly progressive ideals. this is pretty common with a lot of left-wing politics since we’re tired of watching centrism and ‘slow progress’ fail us
a decent primer if you care to learn more (just reading a post on tumblr isn’t gonna do it!) is looking into various movements like the American Indian Movement, the demands and underlying principles beneath the alcatraz occupation, etc all the way up through history to the ideals behind NoDAPL. don’t stick to just one resistance group or just one era in time since there’s a LOT of us with different cultures and different needs but it is not very difficult to find decent summations as long as you’re searching for native-written material & recognize that no one author is an imperfect authority. books are long. some of it may be good and some of it may be bad and you just have to parse which is which. take what works, leave what doesn’t, etc.
i recommend picking a particular thing you’re interested in (environmentalism, perhaps? religious rights? treaties?) and looking into political books and articles on the subject written by native authors and academics. oftentimes due to the way all of our issues are interconnected, you’ll hear a bit about everything. i know a lot of people say ‘just do your research!’ but don’t give any direction, so this should be a decent start for you. the same principles can be applied to learning more about any form of politics.
all this is to say, the general use of the term #landback is just a slogan that applies to the most modern iteration of a struggle that’s been happening since colonists first landed. you won’t be able to understand it by reading a single post on it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t understand it. a lot of natives will say they understand what it means through their lived experiences, but you can gain similar knowledge through some old fashioned political research.
there is a more public/pointed campaign @ landback dot org with a written manifesto, but the slogan ‘landback’ itself can be a bit more nebulous in common usage, as slogan-y words often are, which is what i’m trying to cover here. it is still very good to read if you like! i think the end is most useful to anyone who isn’t native american and wants to try to understand the fundamentals before continuing into further research:
[ LANDBACK Campaign Demands —
1. Dismantle - white supremacy structures that forcefully removed us from our Lands and continue to keep our Peoples in oppression.
a. Bureau of Land Management, National Parks Service
2. Defund - white supremacy and the mechanisms and systems that enforce it and disconnect us from stewardship of the Land.
a. Police, military industrial complex, Border Patrol, ICE
3. Return - All public lands back into indigenous hands.
4. Consent - Moving us out of an era of consultation and into a new era of policy around Free and Prior Informed Consent. ]
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