Native American tribes in the West are trying — and succeeding — in getting ancestral lands back

Native American tribes across the West are trying — and in more and more cases succeeding — in getting ancestral lands back.

It’s called the LandBack movement, and Chad Bradley describes it as tribal communities and activists trying to reclaim and reacquire land that was historically and culturally theirs.

Bradley is a freelance journalist and former Indigenous affairs fellow at High Country News; he and a colleague recently chronicled this effort.

Bradley talked to The Show about what they found, including whether tribes are having more success getting their land back in the past few years than they have in the years prior.

Full conversation

CHAD BRADLEY: I would say that there's been more progress. Yeah, for sure. Especially with the — I would say that there's more persistence, both on the activist side, so on the lower grassroots community level. But also definitely on the larger federal side, especially for tribal communities and stuff. Who over time have been able to acquire, I guess, more influence and more say-so in their matters. ... I think it has grown.

MARK BRODIE: Any sense as why that is or how that's happened?

BRADLEY: I think the reason why it just feels so — I'm Native American myself. I'm a member of the Navajo Nation. And I think just from decades of trying to kind of ... reclaim a lot of our own Indigenous ways of life and ways of thinking, especially after being, you know, subjected to what contemporary modern American society has been for centuries now.

They're just continuing to work and move back toward the way that we used to live. So I think they've just ... become more educated, more empowered and continue to move toward that.

Chad Bradley

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BRODIE: What are some of the ways that tribes are going about doing this, like trying to get land back that had been theirs, that at some point in the past became not theirs?

BRADLEY: I think the most substantial way is going through sort of like a government-to-government interaction where a federally recognized tribal nation is in a negotiation with either a state or the federal government to try to actually straight up buy it, to buy these lands back. And they've seen success in that. And I think also there's been several pieces of federal legislation over the decades that kind of work toward that, particularly in Alaska ...

MARK BRODIE: Like facilitate a tribe being able to buy back its land.

BRADLEY: Yeah, yeah. And not just straight up buy, but just kind of over time, give that. Just essentially give that back.

BRODIE: I suppose, though, that if a tribe is going to buy that land back, it has to have the money to do that. ... Are there tribes that are not in the financial position to be able to do that?

BRADLEY: Yeah, certainly. There's nearly 600 fairly recognized tribal nations here in the U.S. that are, you know, able to. But by and large, there's maybe barely a handful that have the influence and have the capital or the funds to be able to do that. So I think there's a lot of tribal nations, most of them, that aren't able to do that.

So, perhaps they have to rely on other ventures. Maybe straight up people donating to their cause, or maybe even some of the land that was in possession by federal government or from even private landowners will basically just give it back to them. So, it varies. But by and large, most tribes don't have the size, enrollment size, land-based size, or even the money to be able to do that.

BRODIE: You mentioned that this was something that happened in Alaska. You wrote about how some tribes in California have had some success with getting land back that had historically and traditionally been theirs. How about Arizona tribes? How is it going for them here?

BRADLEY: For that particular story, I think in the examples that we looked at, there was ... more straightforward examples in California, in Nevada, in the Dakotas, for here in Arizona, what I wanted to look at was efforts to try to protect and preserve. Because that's also the other portion of LandBack.

It's not just the goal is to get the actual physical pieces of land back, but it's more to also protect and preserve what might not actually physically, technically belong to a community or a tribe. That's the case with a lot of reservations. That land doesn't belong to the tribe, it belongs to the federal government. In the end, it's trust land.

And so the extension to where they're trying to protect and preserve lands is also a part of land banking. So over here in Arizona, a prominent example is Oak Flat, which is in jeopardy of being turned into a copper mine. And so they've been advocating for years to try to preserve that, because that land is important to the San Carlos Apache and the Apache people.

BRODIE: And that's a pretty high-profile example of where the tribe so far at least has not been able to get its land back. Or, as you just referenced, even stop something from happening on it that they don't want to happen on it.

BRADLEY: Yeah, that's been a long-standing fight. And especially with the current federal administration, with Trump wanting to ramp up the domestic energy and resource development here in the country. A lot of those, it's just another hurdle that has come up in this long, yearslong battle that the tribes have been going through.

BRODIE: Is there an expectation that tribes will continue to push for getting this land back. ... This is a movement that's not going anywhere for a while?

BRADLEY: Yeah, I think, yeah, they will. They will continue to, you know, be resilient and showcase their courage and keep advocating for themselves and their community. So, I don't think that's going to go away as long as there are, you know, Indigenous people.

BRODIE: What is the significance of tribes getting this land back?

BRADLEY: It's definitely — because I've thought about this so much, because me being not just a journalist who covers Indigenous communities, but being an Indigenous person myself. When I think about the significance of all this, it has to do with continue to live and persevere despite what has happened before us. Not so much remaining in the circumstances of our upbringing ... of the history of assimilation and colonization and things like, that that have ultimately changed the change the trajectory of my people in so many other communities — for the worse, but if not for the better as well.

So I think the significance is just to keep reminding people that, "Oh, we're still here." That's a big mantra from Indigenous people, is to say that, "Oh, we're still here. We still remember our language. We still remember where we come from, we still are still in charge of our destiny." And to try to reclaim, relearn and keep going as who they originally were.

BRODIE: It kind of sounds like what you're saying is you're using the past, and these lands help you use the past to maybe look to the future and help write the future a little bit.

BRADLEY: Yeah. Yes. That's a good way to put it. There's a sort of continuity with the past and with where they're from, where they happen to come up from. A lot of communities where they happen to reside, it's like we emerge from here. We emerged for Navajo people, it's that we emerge from a couple previous worlds, and we emerged up in this area. So it's like this is integral to who we are.

And a lot of Indigenous mantra, too, is like, we have to be good stewards and good managers of the land, and we have to protect it and care for it. So, again, it's just to keep trying to do that.