Reunion

Western overculture, shaped implicitly and explicitly by binary thinking and fragmenting wholes into parts, has yielded polarized and hierarchical conceptions of power, control, materiality, and knowledge. Little wonder current legal, real estate, and contractual processes feel sharply linear and rigidly bounded. Land reunion invites disruption and expansion of current processes, a creative  stretch of current tools and innovation of new ones. Specifically, tools and guides supportive of Land reunion seek to evolve commodification and the notion of individual ownership toward an understanding of whole and thriving ecologies comprised of living, rights-bearing entities with histories both timebound and timeless. New approaches to Land reunion affirm debt-free land transitions and reparative relational engagements that gesture toward restitution. They make possible not only repair, but also human practices of long-term collective stewardship that meet the needs of people and place, and that invite the renewal of spiritual, cultural, and agricultural lifeways that have sustained humans for millennia.

Land is understood as embracing the ecological, cultural, cosmological, social and the spiritual… (Indigenous) African land laws debunk the idea of ownership. Instead, land is a natural endowment that can neither be bought nor sold. African land tenure is not based on ownership but on use and access. Since Africans have common rights to land, communal rights override individual rights, which are subsumed to the overall communal good. Tenure rights are built through reciprocal obligations and mutuality. Land belongs to the living, the dead and the unborn, making it inalienable. … Depriving one of land means robbing them of their personhood, being and identity – in other words their full humanity.

~ Kenneth Tafira, quoted in an article for The Conversation

Begin With

Let’s Get the Land Back: A Toolkit to Restore Our Relations - A research and storytelling roadmap, source of inspiration, and wayfinding guide that includes practical considerations on how to give and receive Land Back, with stories and resources.

How to Give the Land Back:  This brief article describes how Indigenous-led community land trusts can provide a vehicle for decommodifying land and transitioning it to Indigenous stewardship. 

Landback:  A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper:  This report describes the current status of Indigenous land dispossession in Canada that examines various forms of redress and suggests meaningful Indigenous-centered pathways to land reclamation inclusive of legislative and policy pathways.

Grounding Justice: Toward Reparative Spacial Futures in Land and Housing:  This research report highlights the critical need for a reparative spatial justice framework in land and housing policy and uplifts key concepts, research findings, and perspectives from the field shedding light on the multifaceted nature of reparative spatial justice. For audio/visual presentation, watch this companion webinar.