Learning from Land Return

There’s a lot to be learned through the ability to give up what has been stolen.

Easements impact generations beyond us. We're struggling against them right now. So if you're in the middle of establishing new easements, please rethink that, and don't.

The reality is that the paradigm of buying and selling land and treating it as an object is one of the root causes of of all of the ecological devastation and social injustice that we're experiencing...So it is necessary for all of us to undo colonialism. It's not somebody else's problem.

We're going into these land return situations with more in our tool belt than what we have had in the past...it adds to the sovereignty of making these decisions on a level that we wouldn't have had ten years ago, twenty years ago.

There's a quote from one of my ancestors: "The British want to pen us up in a small place." Joseph Orono, Penobscot Chief, 1776. That has been a theme that runs through following generations. It's invigorating to be having this conversation where we are answering our ancestors and answering the future.

[Easements] are something we created.  The US government created these tools and the conservation community supported them and advocated for them. That can be a reverse process, too.