LAWRENCE — Land acknowledgements, or statements where planners, residents or organizations recognize that the land they exist and operate on originally belonged to Indigenous nations, have become increasingly common in recent years. New research from the University of Kansas has found that the landback movement, in which land is returned to its original occupants, has grown rapidly as well across the country.
The findings show that land is being returned in rapidly increasing rates in many states. The study both helps understand where and how such land returns are happening and sets the stage for discussion in how land use and environmental planners can move beyond land acknowledgements as the movement grows.
Ward Lyles, professor of public affairs & administration and Indigenous studies, and Sarah Deer, University Distinguished Professor in Indigenous studies; women, gender & sexuality studies; and law at KU, launched a project in 2023 to collect news of landback returns. Along with several colleagues, they recently conducted a study in which they analyzed more than 100 news articles documenting landback returns contained at their StoryMaps site buit with ArcGIS technology.
"People, individuals, families, churches, city, county and state governments, nonprofits are all engaged in returning land to Native tribes with centuries and millennia of being connected to that land. It's centering 500 years of Native efforts to reclaim the land. It's a story of healing and restoration," Lyles said of the findings.
The researchers collected data from 1972 to the end of 2023 of documented landback returns. The findings show such returns have increased since 2010. Returns averaged less than one per year from 1972 to 2010, then more than doubled from 2010 to 2023. More than 80% of the documented returns occurred in the latter two decades.
The authors point out the increase in returns has coincided with increased coverage of high-profile, Indigenous-led resistance movements, such as protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline and Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock.
But the returns have not been centralized or contained to any given area or happened more frequently in locations tied to highly publicized protests. California and Washington are the two states that have seen the most returns, but the Upper Midwest, Central Plains, New England and Mid-Atlantic have all also seen numerous documented returns. The authors point out that their methodology is not exhaustive, so even states and areas that have not had landback returns documented in this research or by media likely still have had land returned.
Data indicates that more than 75 distinct tribal nations, about 1 in 8 federally recognized tribes and eight Native-led nongovernmental organizations have received lands. Both large and small nations with varying levels of national familiarity have seen returns as well, according to the researchers. Private landowners have been the most frequent returners of land, constituting about one-third of returns, while nonprofits, religious institutions, corporations and state and local governments follow. The reasons for the returns vary from families having a desire to return land to corporations engaged in resource extraction returning land by court order.
"This is a distributed, organically occurring movement," Lyles said. "It's not because of federal policy or law. In nearly all the cases we've seen, it's something people are deciding is the right thing to do."
The study, written with Shanasia Sylman of Cornell University, McKalee Steen of the University of California-Berkeley and Lois Stevens of the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, was published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Resource Management.
Alongside the survey work of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, the authors state that this is one of few studies to document landback in an empirical manner and to provide a baseline charting of the movement. The findings also provide a means for public planning to begin discussions and rethink how the discipline approaches land use.
In a world of property rights and law, the field commonly views land as a resource that is owned, instead of something that humans co-exist with, as in Indigenous worldviews, the authors wrote. Planners can begin to focus on humans' relationship to land as well as practical questions within landback such as how land is returned, who it is returned to and who should have a stake in such conversations.
"Land acknowledgements have helped raise public awareness, but this research shows that many communities are moving beyond symbolic recognition toward concrete action," Deer said. "Landback is emerging as a broad, grassroots movement that reflects the enduring relationships Indigenous nations have with their lands and offers important opportunities for planners and public institutions to rethink how they engage with Indigenous communities."
