North

Land Reunion restores and re-stories cosmologies that for time immemorial have fortified Indigenous peoples’ lifeways, tethering them to earth while placing them within the vaster weave of time, Spirit, and creation. Though multi-textured and varied from people to people, Indigenous worldviews are fundamentally collective, animate, and based in mutuality that affirms sovereignty. They span time-place, rooting in history and lineage and visioning forward for multiple generations while never losing sight of timeless time. In its fullest expression, Land reunion both contributes to and affirms the warm heartbeat of these cosmologies in reasserting reciprocity between people and place, holding creation as sacred gift endowed by an ever-present Omnibeneficent animating force, and reestablishing agreements that honor sovereignty and accountability for shared respect and care. Land reunion reweaves people into place as part of and integral to life, not over and above or separate from any expression of it. Reuniting with Land and the ages-old cultural and spiritual beliefs and lifeways enlivened by First and Diasporic Peoples  begins to mend the ultimate soul-wound of  profound separation and the brutality of individualism that sustains all forms of supremacy and segregation. 

Begin with

More-than-Human Rights:  Pushing the Bounds of Legal Imagination to Reanimate the World:  Keynote address by César Rodríguez-Garavito, an Earth Rights scholar, lawyer, and founding Director of the MOTH (More-Than-Human) Rights Program at NYU School of Law, drawing on his fieldwork and participation in legal actions advancing the rights of nature around the world, in which he tells a renewed story about the living world: one in which all of nature is alive; where human and nonhuman animals, plants, fungi, rivers, forests, oceans, and other ecosystems are all animate, subjects of moral and legal consideration, and entangled in the planetary web of life.

To Survive, We Must Transform Our Values: Keynote address by Native American Rights leader, Oren R. Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, in which he offers an overview of colonizers’ mindsets and their manifestations in the present and pointing to the need to transform modern society’s core values, which are propelling existential crises. 

Matrilineal World-Making: Embracing for Impact: Drawing in five decades of work on Indigenous women’s health, in this keynote address Katsi Cook (Wolf Clan member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation) describes the Sacred Cycle of Life as upheld by Indigenous elder women, covering such topics as the regeneration of Indigenous lifeways, ancestral healing, the world-building biocultural characteristics of matrilineal descent and rematriation.

Why Land Evokes Such Deep Emotions in Africa: This article describes of how the colonial enterprise, of which land was the basis, defined and redefined African agency and reality through subjection and rejection of African personhood as Europeans strove to claim land and eliminate all that occupied it. It reveals how African cosmological conceptions allow for the holistic value of land: spiritual, ecological, social, political, material, and economic.

Black Gold: This is the dedication poem Naima Penniman wrote for "FARMING WHILE BLACK: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on Land" by Leah Penniman. This poem tells some history of food system and land justice on Turtle Island through the voice of the Soil enriched by Black and Brown Diasporic peoples’ hands for centuries.