Overview
All people have a right to permanent and secure land tenure as the source for many of our most basic needs. Through tools such as reparations, rematriation, easements, and land trusts, we can share the land fairly among the human and non-human citizens of planet Earth.
Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.
— Malcolm X
The theft and private hoarding of land is part of the DNA of racial capitalism. Around 60 million hectares of the Global South is gobbled up by transnational corporations annually. In the United States alone, over 95 percent of the farmland is white-owned and increasingly corporate-controlled. This is the result of the violent expulsion of Indigenous people from their homelands, as well as the systematic exile of Black and Brown people from their land through government discrimination, lynching, redlining, and corporate land grabs. Colonial powers have imposed private property throughout much of the world, changing people’s relationship to land to one of property, as opposed to Indigenous understandings of land as a family member and a shared commons.
“To us in Africa, land was always recognized as belonging to the community,” said Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania. “Each individual within our society had a right to use the land, because otherwise he could not earn his living and one cannot have the right to life without also having a right to some means of maintaining life. But the African’s right to land was simply the right to use it; he had no other right to it, nor did it occur to him to try and claim one.”
Millenia-old Indigenous land sharing tools like the huza cooperative system of the Krobo in Ghana and the matrilineal clan-based collective land ownership outlined in the Kayanerehkowa (Great Law of Peace) of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy demonstrate that private enclosure is not an inevitable phenomena. This essay discusses five legal tools that build on Indigenous wisdom and can support the work of land justice.
A land trust is an organization that holds land or conservation easements to protect properties for a public or environmental purpose. The first community land trust, New Communities Inc., was founded in 1969 by Black civil rights activists who had been violently attacked for their voter registration work. They purchased 5,700 acres of land shared among 500 families and established residences, cooperative farms, and a community center.
Building on this legacy, the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, established in 2017, has been working to purchase 2,000 acres of land over the next five years to return to Indigenous, Black, and Brown farmers and land stewards. This land will be permanently protected through the legal mechanism of agricultural and cultural easements.
A property easement is a legal agreement where the title to a parcel of land remains with the landowner, but another person or organization is given use rights for a distinct purpose. While easements for conservation, agriculture, and utilities are most commonly known, the Native Land Conservancy (NLC) of the Mashpee Wampanoag is pushing forward the newer idea of cultural easements. Indigenous peoples’ rights to use their homelands for gathering, ceremony, burial, fishing, and wildcrafting can be restored using a cultural respect easement, which guarantees permanent access to the land even if ownership changes hands.
After recognizing where land has been stolen, rematriation is profoundly and simply an act of giving the land title back, with particular attention to the leadership of Indigenous women and trans people. The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust rematriated its first property in Huchiun territory, Bay Area, California, a traditional village site named Lisjan, which is now home to ceremonial grounds, gardens, emergency water catchment, and youth programs. Settlers can give their property deeds to native land trusts or directly to tribal entities, as in the case of the Ponca tribe accepting the return of their land along the Trail of Tears in 2018.
Near the end of the US Civil War, Rev. Garrison Frazier and 20 other Black Baptist and Methodist ministers met with Union General William T. Sherman to request allotments of 40 acres of land for each freed Black family in an area independent from whites. Fazier and the ministers explained, “We feel it very important that we obtain HOMES, owning our own shelters, and the ground, that we may raise fruit trees, concerning which our children can say, ‘These are ours.’” The Union agreed to give these allotments, but the famous promise of “forty acres and a mule” as reparations to former slaves was broken, and reparations were instead given to the plantation owners for their lost “property.”
The call for reparations continues today, through the work of the Movement for Black Lives and the Truth and Reparations project. Reparations has the potential to return 36 million acres of land to dispossessed Black people via public trust, and would guarantee cessations of harm, compensation of damages, and the restitution of livelihood and dignity.
Land justice, however, is not just a matter of changing who owns the land—it means recognizing that the earth cannot be owned by humans. We are guests on this planet, the younger siblings of creation, and we need to infuse our relationship to land with commensurate humility.
