Movement Is Justice

Editors’ Note: This article was originally written for the Summer 2025 issue of Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine, “Land Justice: From Private Ownership to Community Stewardship.”

The Kiowa people followed the buffalo. These migration patterns took our community from what is now known as northern Montana to southern Texas. Our physical health and economy were based on this movement that was tied to communal cooperation, weather, season, plant blooms, and the health of the buffalo.

Our epic context for land justice is this—to restore our communal movement over and around these ancestral homelands and everything that has limited that access since.

What Is Land Justice and for Whom?

Unfortunately, the word justice most often shifts and redirects conversations toward legal frameworks and institutions, rather than the health and wellbeing of the people the institutions affect.

Our epic context for land justice is this—to restore our communal movement over and around these ancestral homelands.

Legal frameworks and institutions, in short, often struggle to capture some of the most important relationships of community—of people and land, people and animals, animals and land. Conversations around land justice too often continue without explicit recognition that there is always this missing peace (piece) that is much harder to articulate.

The conversation for land justice often begins with the framing of Injustice. Many of us are all too familiar with the Invasion of America map by researchers Claudio Saunt and Sergio Bernardes, documenting the loss of Tribal land. The extent of land loss is staggering, jolting, and reflects the cultural, social, and political havoc that has been suffered by all Tribal Nations.

In his book Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, Saunt states that “between 1776 and 1887, the United States seized over 1.5 billion acres from America’s Indigenous people by treaty and executive order.” That works out to be over 2.3 million square miles or roughly two-thirds of all US territory. What is harder to demonstrate on the map is the US institutional adoption of Tribal land loss and land access loss into the foundations of our legal and governmental systems.

Legal frameworks and institutions, in short, often struggle to capture some of the most important relationships of community.

How do Tribal Nations address that the very foundation of our US Institutions and legal systems was built on Tribal land injustice? The short answer is that it’s not just a Tribal Nation issue, but an issue that affects everyone who is in proximity to US institutions.

Injustice creates instability. Instability within the foundations of US institutions continues to breed instability. Undoing injustice seems as elusive as identifying its institutional roots. Despite the difficulties, there are ongoing efforts to do just that.

In their groundbreaking and award-winning investigative series published in High Country News entitled Land-Grab Universities, the authors wrote:

To fund land-grant universities…the United States took nearly 11 million acres of land from approximately 250 tribes, bands, and communities through over 160 violence-backed treaties and land cessions. The Morrill Act of 1862 granted that land to states to be sold for the benefit of fledgling universities; altogether, it would raise nearly $18 million for 52 institutions by the early 20th century.

The study ties land theft directly to present benefits for some of the largest educational institutions in our country. Benefits from land theft are still occurring, and likewise, the pain of those benefits is still very much felt in the communities from whom the land was extracted. The authors stated, “Our data challenges universities to re-evaluate the foundations of their success by identifying nearly every acre obtained and sold, every land seizure or treaty made with the land’s Indigenous caretakers, and every dollar endowed with profits from dispossession.”

Elevating Native Voices

First Nations Development Institute, where I work, embarked on a project to understand, describe, and advance “Native justice.” To do this, we commissioned comprehensive research to explore Native and non-Native views on justice itself and on how to transform policies, institutions, and society in ways that elevate Native values, counter invisibility and misinformation, and address the root causes of injustice.

The resulting report, Elevating Native Voices of Justice Across Indian Country, is a call for change. It calls for new socioeconomic systems and practices across other sectors, based on Indigenous values of balance and reciprocity that bridge inequalities and create sustainable conditions for change. Land, specifically, was centralized in the findings and solutions.

One important finding of the report: There is public will for returning land and management of lands to Native Tribes and peoples.

In a national survey of non-Native Americans, 74 percent said they believed that Tribes should “have the final say in negotiating with the federal government or states in matters that could affect their water, land, or other natural resources.” And despite having concerns about droughts in their states due to depletion of the Colorado River, 68 percent of non-Native Americans in Arizona, California, Colorado, and New Mexico said Tribes’ water rights should be respected and that Native Tribes should have a say in water negotiations. Simply put, land justice is not just a Tribal Nation issue, but a larger national issue.

Practical Suggestions

Short of returning all land back to Tribal Nations, there are a number of steps that governments and private owners can take to return large parcels of land to the Tribal caretakers. Tribal Nations, too, should be preparing their own Tribal institutions to accept and care for those lands. There are, in short, many active steps that all can take toward Tribal land justice.

First, landowners should do title searches that go as far back as possible to understand how and when the land was parceled and ownership granted in particular regions.

Second, Tribal Nations should create Tribal realty offices that maintain their own realty records of all ancestral homelands, regardless of present ownership. These offices could hold legal documentation for land transactions within ancestral boundaries, but they could also find ways to capture important Tribal histories attached to those lands (written or oral). Limiting documentation to legal documents does a disservice to Tribal relationships to land.

Third, philanthropy, Tribal nations, and policymakers can create systems of capital access so that Tribal entities and members can purchase parcels within ancestral boundaries when they come up for sale or maintain them when they are within Tribal ownership. This is critically important considering that many Tribes choose not to extract and exploit resources on land for capital profit, so they have to find other ways to maintain their land bases. People unable to invest directly in communities can invest in and/or learn from projects like the  #NoRegrets Initiative and the Manzanita Capital Collective.

These two organizations collaborate with each other regularly and there are lessons in their partnership for land justice work more broadly. The partnership was born out of years of relationships and a shared vision and goal of moving integrated capital to Black-led, Indigenous-led, people-of-color-led, and community-controlled funds and intermediaries focused on sustainable food and agriculture, community ownership, and racial and economic justice.

Land as Relation, Not Property

While a clearer picture of land injustice is emerging and there have even been some actions to return land back to Native communities in meaningful ways, there is still much to change within our institutions to adjust to a more just land tenure. One of the most critical conversations within Tribal communities is the controversial idea of purchasing unceded homelands. Many Tribal communities and people feel that participating in purchasing stolen ancestral land further alienates and encourages exploitation and capitalist profit from it.

For example, Rebecca Tortes, director of the California Tribal Fund, told me that “the amount of wealth generated from the land that was taken away from California Tribal people will probably never be properly calculated. Our ancestors lived and thrived through waves of colonization, continuing to tend and care for land that they did not legally own. I believe it is ludicrous, if not just clearly insulting, to ask Tribal people to engage in a system that continues to perpetuate the idea that land is a financial transaction. Land is our relative.” Some Tribes are focused on gaining control and thereby protecting lands, purchased or not.

While the means of land transfer and transaction are critical initial considerations, one of the most important institutional processes occurs after a Tribe gains ownership. In most cases, the Tribal government and Tribal citizens can begin the process of Tribal trust ownership that, in the past, served as a legal protection against county and state imposition for Tribal land ownership.

But the status of Tribal trust land itself is questioned in the present political climate. To reach a just land ownership tenure, Tribes should be fully secure in their ownership and control and protection regardless of the support or hostility of any and every US political administration. Tribal lands should be Tribal lands.

Lastly, Tribal land ownership can mean many different things to the over 573 federally recognized Tribal communities. Yet Tribal land ownership is in itself an oxymoron, as Tortes makes clear.

For Tribal communities and Tribal landowners who choose not to participate in capitalist land ownership, however, there are still costs of owning land. Capitalism has created “built-in” mechanisms for covering the cost of land ownership such as income from fruits of the land or, more directly, extractive practices that bring income to the owners.

For landowners, Tribal or not, who choose not to participate in extractive land practices, alternative capital flows are needed. Projects like #NoRegrets and Manzanita focus on creating capital investments that seek to improve the soils and land, while improving accountability and community relationships. These projects and efforts that are testing the boundaries of capital flow and investment are part of the critical change in infrastructure that leads us closer to a land just world.

There are so many efforts moving all at the same time to help our society recognize and map injustice, change the profile of land ownership, create new systems of capital investment, and find new paths to land justice. But these processes must all happen at once, with many different people and organizations.

It’s like moving an entire community across large expanses of land. It’s in movement that we can find justice. As individuals, we must all ask how we contribute to that.