What's the Land Back movement?
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For centuries, indigenous people around the world have been fighting to reclaim lost land. Indigenous people are the first people to be living somewhere, mostly before colonizers and settlers arrived. In North America, for example, nearly 99% of land owned by indigenous people has been taken from them since European colonizers arrived.

But in recent years, hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of ancestral land have been returned to tribal nations. So today, we're going to explain what the land-back movement is, the challenges it's facing, and the impact it could have on the environment. I'm Hannah Gelbart, and this is What in the World from the BBC World Service.

Well, here to tell us more in the studio with me is Vanessa Igoe, a BBC journalist. Hello. Hi, thanks for having me. So Vanessa, can you tell me what exactly is the Land Back movement? So it's an indigenous-led movement that's across the world, which essentially advocates for land to be returned back to them. Marie Cacilla is a content creator and activist that I spoke to, and she is a Western Canadian Inuit. And I asked her kind of what it means to her to have the Land Back movement.

It is about restoring our inherent rights to govern, protect and sustain our territories as we have for generations. Land Back recognizes that land theft was and remains central to the ongoing impacts of colonization and that true justice requires returning the land itself and not just offering acknowledgements or reconciliation in words alone.

Land Back is about reclaiming our place as stewards and decision makers over the land. It is about restoring the physical, legal, and spiritual connections between the Indigenous peoples and our territories.

It's a movement of revitalising our ceremonies, languages and cultural practices and ensuring they're carried forward for future generations. And where did it come from? So there were so many countries across the world that were colonised. The UK colonised places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Brazil was colonised by the Portuguese and Chile by Spain. So we're seeing indigenous people across these different countries that are now essentially claiming back the land. And the land was colonised.

you know, taken from them through forceful means, you know, military violence. And even today, we're starting to unearth documents of indigenous people that they're being bounties on them to get the move off the land. There was fraudulent treaties in Canada, for instance, indigenous people were promised health care, education if they were to move off the land. And these promises were rarely kept.

Another way is that they outlawed a lot of spiritual and cultural practices and, you know, indigenous children were taken to boarding schools and essentially banned from speaking their languages or, you know, engaging with any of their cultural practices. So a lot of this really informs a lot of the demands that the land back movement has today is about not only just physically being able to occupy that land back, but also physically.

shifting the decision making powers back to indigenous people. It sounds to me like there's a number of different land back movements in different parts of the world. What are some of the tactics that they use to achieve their goals? One of the top ways that we're seeing is direct kind of like political or legal processes. So you have, for example, the Maori tribe in New Zealand, they want a legal process to have a national park given back to them.

Another way is literally by buying back the land, so purchasing it back, which is kind of not always seen as a good thing within the movement because they kind of describe almost as if, you know, if somebody stole your car, would you then pay the person who stole your car to give it back to you? But ultimately, this is a way that they can get around kind of legal and political barriers. The Yurok tribe is a really good example. So they're in California. They ended up buying 70,000 acres of land back.

And then another way that's getting quite popular is that some indigenous people are asking non-indigenous people to voluntarily pay a fee to live on the land that was their ancestral land. The Duwamish tribe in Seattle, non-indigenous people pay rent to the tribe. So there are lots of different examples. What kind of resistance do these movements face?

Yeah, so there's a few ways that there's challenges. So law being one of them, it's a long, arduous process just to get their land reclaims, you know, processed, it can take up to decades. And even if their claims are accepted, it doesn't necessarily mean that it'll happen instantly, still takes a long time. So the Maori tribe in New Zealand are a perfect example of that, even though they had their claims accepted, they still had to wait years before they could even access some of the land that they'd won back.

Another is big businesses don't always want to actually give back the land to indigenous people because it might not be within financial interests. You know, these areas that indigenous people want to go back to, they're used for things like farming, mining and logging. So take, for example, in Brazil, farming companies have very much opposed indigenous people trying to reclaim their land back. And governments have often supported businesses in not giving it back back.

There's also people not agreeing with the land back movement. So some people think that it's maybe infringing on their property rights if they've already settled there. Some non-Indigenous people think that it means you have to just get up and leave, which Indigenous people say is not the case. It's that they want to shift the decision making power so they have a bit more control.

freedom and governance over what happens to the land. One person that's actually still campaigning that I spoke to is Ailsa Roy, and she's an elder of the Wununupali people in Western Australia. And she brought a case to the UN after her community was essentially excluded from a native title claim. And the UN actually ruled that Australia violated their rights to essentially reclaim their land. Hi, Vanessa. We have tried to get our rights recognised through the courts, and that hasn't happened.

We've also been unsuccessful in getting any legal representation to represent us in our rights and the biggest issue is we don't have the backing of anybody else in the community and the biggest win that we did have was in the United Nations. However, that has not done anything to help us in our struggle to achieve our land back. We are still seeking to be recognised and if that means going back on country and asserting our rights then we will

we will go back out on country. When we did get charged with trespass, they dropped the trespass at the door. And the biggest thing is the lack of recognition, the lack of respect for our rights. We don't have that in this Australian law. It's only recognised on paper.

So what are the challenges when they do get their land back? For indigenous people that try to move back, there's still limited resources that they have to build infrastructure when they go back. And a lot of the times there's a lot of environmental degradation that they have to fix. There's a lot of waste that they have to clean up and they don't always have the money for that. Another is that they don't really fully have total control over the areas.

And then for non-Indigenous people, they often talk about how the main issues they have tend to come from when Indigenous people protest.

So in 2020, for instance, there are First Nations people, so indigenous people to Ontario in Canada that essentially tried to reclaim their land. And they tried going through political and legal processes, but they couldn't. So they physically occupy the land, which some non-indigenous people didn't like because there was property developments that were going to be built there, which they argued would bring in kind of more, you know, local economy initiatives and things like that.

We should say here that in a lot of cases, the land did change hands hundreds of years ago. And some people might ask why a land-backed campaigner has the right to land that their ancestors lived on. And in some cases, they were paid to move on from centuries ago. What other criticisms are there? There are critics that argue that

ultimately people on these lands shouldn't have to move or should just be able to stay there. And some people kind of disagree with indigenous people having more say over government. So

In Australia, for example, in 2023, they actually tried to vote to have indigenous people become kind of an advisory body in government so that they could decide what happens to the land and also have a say. And a lot of Australians, it actually didn't end up going through because a lot of Australians thought that it might be divisive or they thought that the way that the government is now already represents indigenous people. Indigenous peoples are known for having a very special relationship with nature, with their land.

What are some of the environmental benefits of the Land Back movement? There's land management practices that are indigenous that are really deeply rooted in sustainability. So they've been kind of created over generations like these have been existing for a long, long time. So, for example, some of them like cultural burning. So that's where indigenous people kind of isolate a small controlled area and they just burn it.

And that can actually prevent wildfires, it can help plant growth, or even controlled fishing and controlled hunting, where they kind of use different areas to make sure that one area isn't completely destroyed by overhunting or overfishing. Another person that I spoke to was Vanessa Racehorse, and she studies the climate benefits of what happens when land back movements are successful and indigenous people can move back onto their lands.

She's an associate professor at the American Indian Law Program at Colorado Law. Indigenous peoples are only about 5% of the world's population, but studies have shown that they're stewarding approximately 80% of what remains of the world's biodiversity. And when it comes to specific examples, Blue Lake is an ancient sacred site with deep religious significance for Taos Pueblo.

and when it was returned, it went from being an area that the United States Forest Service had opened up to multiple uses, including grazing and timber harvesting,

to being now a highly protected area that's been restored to its original state because Taos Pueblo cares for it as a highly sacred site. So we're seeing many undeniable environmental benefits of land back to indigenous peoples because many indigenous communities have developed deep expertise in

And it's been honed from living symbiotically with nature in certain regions for hundreds or thousands of years, or in some instances since time immemorial. Vanessa, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Thank you.

In case you're wondering how governments have responded to these claims, it's a varied picture. I'm going to go through some examples. In the US, there is a scheme which ended two years ago. It's called the Land Buyback Programme for Tribal Nations. And as part of that, more than 12,000 square kilometres in 15 states were restored to tribal trust ownership.

The Canadian government has also given land back. In 2024, it returned over 2 million square kilometres of land and water to the indigenous territory of Nunavut near the Arctic. That was its largest land transfer. And in Australia in 1976, its Northern Territory first recognised that Aboriginal people could claim land back if they could prove a traditional association with it. And since then, around 50% of that land has been recognised as being owned by indigenous groups.

That's it for today. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Hannah Gelbart and this is What In The World from the BBC World Service.