this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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Explain Land Back to me (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 3 weeks ago by LostAkkadian@lemmygrad.ml to c/asklemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml
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Heyo, new Member on Lemmy, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the past threads and information contained on this site, and feel confident in the knowledge of my fellow comrades here, so I wanted to create a thread to talk about the Land Back movement in the US.

I am not from the US, and have never had a long conversation with Native-Americans. I am mostly ignorant of their conditions and demands, and as such on what Land Back entails as a whole. I was hoping someone more informed could share some resources on what Land Back is, what it looks like in concrete terms, why it is not only necessary but useful, and whatever else may be relevant.

What I already know is the following: The US was founded as a settler colony, and and that history manifests itself in multiple ways in the country today, from its national mythology, its flavour of individualism, Racism, etc. The Native population has been subjected to genocide and cultural assimilation, largely destroying it.

My questions then would be: Is there a significant self identifying native population left to redistribute land to? What does redistribution look like? What use is Land Back from a short term revolutionary perspective?

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[–] frisbird@lemmy.ml 23 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Check out the following:

AIM, the American Indian Movement

TRN, The Red Nation

Learn directly from them, not from colonizers and outsiders.

I can share some of what I have learned from them.

The original inhabitants of this land were, and still are, sovereign nations (according to the meanings of those words that we made up as Europeans). Those sovereign nations were sovereign long before the Europeans landed here. The Europeans violated their sovereignty, using violence to illegitimately lay claim to the land.

Those colonizers then formed treaties with those nations, and then broke them. I believe the US has broken 350 treaties with the sovereign nations of this land.

That violence and those broken treaties constitute two different ways that the claims of sovereignty over the land by European settlers are illegitimate.

[–] LostAkkadian@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Would I be correct to assume one of the primary demands would be the recognition of these treaties, which would legally reinstate control or sovereignty over land stolen by the Federal government to the native signatories? Would this qualify as native sovereignty? Then again, I don’t assume to know better than those directly involved

Will check out the sources once I have some time, since they probably have direct answers to give. I have heard positive things about The Red Nation in the past.

[–] freagle@lemmygrad.ml 13 points 3 weeks ago

Some are demanding the reinstatement of all treaties. Some say that most treaties were signed under duress after the illegitimate use of violence created conditions of dispossession and displacement. There are other positions. They are not all mutually exclusive.

Would respecting the treaties be sufficient for sovereignty? I don't know, but my limited understanding is that it is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition.

[–] verygoodtrailer@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 3 weeks ago

i can also vouch for TRN, their manifesto The Red Deal was quite illuminating for me :)

[–] pyromaiden@lemmygrad.ml 16 points 3 weeks ago

So first Land Back is an international movement; not exclusively US-based. It's a very simple premise: restore indigenous land stolen through colonialism to its rightful owners (indigenous people).

As for what this looks like in practice that will vary wildly as it will depend on what each tribe considers sufficient recompense for the injustices done to them.

This process is necessary for proper decolonization and as socialists it will be required of us to coordinate with indigenous groups on this issue, giving them the expected deference in resolving the matter to whatever extent they find agreeable and is within feasibility.

[–] Loki@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I’m not the best person to explain landback so I’ll just share my perspective and how I might approach it:

I think the main priority should always be first and foremost the improvement of material conditions and the establishment of a DOTP. But after the DOTP is this is how I think it should be done:

Ideal solution: I think the US should be completely dismantled and replaced with a EU style mutual protection mechanism, something of a confederation, and it would be made up of fully sovereign bioregional federations.

The borders of these countries would be purely geographical, and the subdivisions would be based on the territories of the countries that were here prior. The boundaries would be drawn in whole or with great collaboration with indigenous people.

The main priority of landback from what I’ve picked up talking to indigenous people is for the land to be respected, the land should not be seen as a resource to be exploited.

As for what to do with the settlers I personally hold a more radical perspective; ALL settlers must assimilate into the culture and customs of the land they occupy to a reasonable extent, it should be similar to if you as an American moved to Asia or Africa, I believe the only way for true reconciliation to be archived is for indigenous countries to be seen as what they are, countries. Nation states formed around common ethnicity, culture, and language. And I don’t think assimilation would be that difficult as it has happened many times in the past, including Cascadia, some initial eastern settlements, Cajun culture, Mexico, and to a lesser extent African Americans as even though they aren’t assimilated to any native cultures they were brought here against their will so I think they also deserve special consideration.

But at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter what I think, this should be up to the people who actually have thousands of years of history with this land to decide how it functions, maybe that won’t even be necessary and a superintelligent AI could create some perfect solution, idk. But as settlers I think the first step is just recognizing that we are indeed settlers, that this is not our home, and if we want to still call this place home we should be invited as equals. And the material conditions and liberation of the proletariat will always remain the absolute most important initial goal of a revolution, I’d prefer natives be comfortable and equal members of society even if they are stateless then to have a state but be neglected by their leaders and exploited by foreign capital, our goal is not to create another situation like “post colonization” Africa (it’s not really post colonial).

Here’s some of my favorite resources:

https://native-land.ca/

https://tenochtitlan.thomaskole.nl/

https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701e.ct008649/

https://www.oneearth.org/navigator/

https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2017/10/25/bioregions-of-north-america/

Here’s a map of my bioregion Cascadia

[–] mao_dun@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

This is only a partial summary of the entire discourse that descendants of trans-atlantic slave trade are an "indigenous" group, and specifically indigenous to the areas they were forced to labor and toil, but here is a snippet. Think, BIPOC as an acronym (as opposed to the modern generalization of POC - it used to (~1960s & prior) primarily only refer to black people). The argument relies on defining settler-colonialism, or more specifically, that it creates a class relationship of settler and indigenous -- without this force there is no indigeneity. While black slaves were the labor force used to do the "settling" they were treated as tools and not the settling agent themselves. That's the more ancient history of it, but regarding modern post-reconstruction there's also analysis of black communities being the target of settlement(effectively colonization) by whites in the same patterns used to control and eliminate native americans but adapted to new eras with new technologies - think jim crow, deception regarding health/forced sterilization, redlining, Tulsa massacre, MOVE bombing. And even today it's directly paralleled in policing, school-to-prison pipeline, underdeveloped and underserved communities, missing women&children.

To be clear this (victims of transatlantic slave trade and their descendants are indigenous to where they were eventually taken) is in opposition to the idea that they are indigenous to Africa. Back to more antiquated history, "back to africa" at a very early iteration: American Colonization Society which was founded by white slaveowners that wanted to deport freeborn black people to protect the institution of slavery. The ACS did end up reproducing settler-colonial structures in Liberia, but not without heavy opposition from freed black folk who saw through the dressings of philanthropy for the underlying motives of exclusion and expulsion. Many of the "colonizers" for the ACS were coerced to participation, their freedom from slavery but in exchange you must get on that boat and go to a land you have never seen or known and you don't know a lick of local language or customs (the latter less important because you're there to colonize). For those outside of reach of coercion to join -- can you just imagine being a newly freed slave, seeing a white abolitionist (who found common ground with a slaveowner) tout that they wanted to find "your kind" a designated place free of racism, but it's not here, they didn't want to create that space, didn't think they could be actionable actors to affect racist attitudes in white society. The extent of the opposition to ACS was such that freedpeoples self-referential literature/social groups even dropped "African Americans" to "Colored Americans" to indicate that they belong on this land.

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the more finnicky details about specific land repatriation (specifically in north america anyway) aside I also think it's important that landback movements also take into account progression and not regression, and on that front I agree that establishment of DOTP is crucial. Unfortunately a lot of the "landback" ""activism" (instagram infographic-derivative variety) tends to not have this milestone anywhere near their goals. Liberalism(includes anarchists) reigns in this clade, which is how you might see an online "landback activist" who doesn't know a single name of an indigenous ethnic group or tribe, at least outside of North America or Europe, but loves to say such strange and uncritical things like "landback for Ukraine (pro-NATO)" or "landback for Tibet/Xinjiang/Taiwan (anti-PRC)"