The Land Back movement is long-overdue justice. It’s also a climate solution.
This story is the final feature in a Vox special project, Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future. Posted in Vox.
On a freezing January morning in 1863, American soldiers attacked a Northwestern Shoshone camp along the Bear River in what is now Idaho and slaughtered hundreds of Shoshone people in what is most likely the largest massacre of Native people in the US on a single day. The massacre was horrifically brutal. “[The soldiers] would grab the small children by their braids and crush their heads and bodies into the frozen ground,” Rios Pacheco, a Shoshone tribal elder, said.
Pacheco told me that, for generations, Shoshone people passed down stories about some parents being forced to let their babies float down the river that day so that their crying would not alert the soldiers to where a group was hiding along the riverbank.
After losing their territory over the course of decades to Western expansion and violence, the tribe went generations without collectively owned land.
But in 2018, more than 150 years later, the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation bought back over 500 acres of land at the site of the Bear River Massacre.
Since European colonization, Indigenous nations across North America have lost nearly 99 percent of their land. That seizure of Native territory and the development of American industry led to a devastating loss of life, culture, and community. It also set humanity on a course that was harmful to the environment. Western development has led to habitat and biodiversity loss and fueled climate change, spurring more extreme weather, such as drought, wildfire, and floods that have grown worse and more frequent.
The Bear River land purchase was part of a growing movement, generally referred to as Land Back, that’s empowering Native people to address generational trauma and restore landscape health.
In recent years, hundreds of thousands of acres of ancestral territories have been returned to tribes. The movement is part of a larger reckoning, too: Last year, the US government concluded its Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations, a decade-long effort to acknowledge historical wrongs and return land to tribal ownership. Over the course of the program, nearly 3 million acres in 15 states were consolidated and restored to tribal trust ownership.
Land Back success stories often come with splashy announcements, but what tribes do afterward isn’t as well-publicized. And it’s in these often overlooked stories that tribes are doing work that doesn’t just help heal the injustice they suffered, but creates meaningful steps to adapt to climate change and build a more resilient environment.
The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation plans to embark on an ambitious restoration project at the massacre site, which they call Wuda Ogwa. The project will help make the area more climate resilient through the planting of native trees and the restoration of a wetland complex, which will add an estimated 10,000 acre-feet of water or more to the Great Salt Lake, which is disappearing because of extreme heat and drought.
After the Shoshone were displaced from the land, the massacre site was looted, and in the following years, the site was used by settlers for everything from cattle grazing and farming to a railroad and a failed resort. During the Great Depression, Russian olive trees were planted to help reduce soil erosion, but those trees are now considered an invasive species that sucks up water.
Over the years, this all took its toll on the land. It also reduced one of the key water sources that feeds the Great Salt Lake. Now, drought is making the situation worse.
As they work to overcome years of oppression and violence, the Northwestern Shoshone are also focused on healing the land. “We’re going to start to use that land as a place to regenerate not just the Earth, but also the people,” Pacheco said.
For Indigenous communities, land has never been about simple ownership, but instead is about building a deep, complex relationship with the land. Now, as they begin to reclaim more and more ancestral territory, tribes are demonstrating that Indigenous communities can lead the way on climate adaptation through creative partnerships and ambitious restoration projects.
All of this means that Land Back is not only an important cultural story, it could also prove to be a key part in the fight to build climate resilience.
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