“We were fully thriving economies and societies and communities pre-colonization,” says Krystal Two Bulls, director of the landback campaign launched a little over a year ago by the Indigenous advocacy organization NDN Collective. Its goal is the physical return of land to Indigenous peoples - and the return of all things that depend on connection to the land. Simply put, landback is a reparations movement that has existed since colonization. As recognition of the original stewards of this continent has grown, so too has recognition of a longstanding movement to give that land back. Land acknowledgements - statements or plaques that recognize the tribes whose land we stand on - have become common practice at universities and cultural institutions like museums, as well as in cities like Denver Portland, Oregon and Tempe, Arizona. The Standing Rock movement of 20 illuminated the fact that Indigenous land and water protectors have long led resistance to fossil fuel projects. Research in 2018 revealed that Indigenous people make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population but support 80 percent of its biodiversity. That’s beginning to change amid growing awareness of Indigenous justice and the crucial role Native peoples play in protecting natural resources. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. “People didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that humans have played a role in landscape stewardship since time immemorial, and that humans and landscapes have co-evolved.” “For so long Indigenous stewardship really wasn’t recognized,” says Beth Rose Middleton, a professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. That racist legacy endures and has influenced conservation in other parts of the world. And, much like development, the conservation that they espoused often led to the seizure of Indigenous lands. But their exaltation of “pristine wilderness” is now seen by many as fundamentally racist, because it ignores, and in some cases erases, the fact that the First Peoples of this continent managed ecosystems for thousands of years before white settlers arrived. Forest Service, and many policy legacies that persist today. Their work contributed to the creation of the first national parks, the U.S. The nation’s conservation movement often gets traced back to 19th-century naturalists like John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and Henry David Thoreau - white men who favored protecting nature from human interference. This story is part of Fix’s What’s Next Issue, which looks ahead to the ideas and innovations that will shape the climate conversation in 2022, and asks what it means to have hope now.
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