Reunion

Reuniting with land - in the sense of holding title and assuming stewardship rights and privileges - simultaneously holds profound simplicity and centuries-deep and raw complexities for descendants of First Nations and Enslaved Peoples. The colonial project and its reverberations linger in soil, psyche, and flesh, pricked freshly daily. 

And yet . . Between 2012 and 2023, iImplementation of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Land Buy-Back Program resulted in the return of three million acres to the more than 570 federally-recognized Tribes while generating a model for land return to unrecognized Tribal nations. Though concluded in 2023, the energetics and practical Land reunion impact of the Land Buy-Back Program remain. Since ~2015 there has also been a steady rise in municipal, state, nonprofit, and private transfers back to tribes, including the restoration of the shellmounds in current-day Berkeley to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Onondaga Nation’s recovery of ~1,000 acres, and many smaller case-by-case practices of rematriation. 

Notwithstanding this momentum, large-scale land return to African Americans descended from enslaved people is far less frequent, occurring in mostly small transfers made in city/state restitutions, negotiated purchases, or community land-trust initiatives. Contemporary “returns” are operating against a very large historic deficit. Heirs property contestations have yielded a searing and continuing structural loss of Black land. Estimates commonly cite a ~90% decline in Black-owned farmland from its peak, leaving only a small fraction of land in Black ownership today.  Relational healing catalyzed by the Racial Uprisings of 2020 undoubtedly contributed to the highly visible return of Bruce’s Beach to descendants of Charles and Willa Bruce, a 100-year journey to reparative justice. Growing acknowledgement of the benefits to people, planet, and livelihood of agroecological practices used by Black farmer and Indigenous land and water stewardship practices - huge mitigators to climate change - are among the significant factors catalyzing recent and prospective land reunions by private organizations and individual title holders. Even as mainstream public discourse gravitates dangerously toward beforetimes characterized by White supremacy and present times driven by unprecedented dynamics of wealth concentration in the hands of a few White men, the #LandBack movement and grassroots movement for reparative land returns to African American peoples have grown in strength and impact.