Land Back
Land is an essential theme in our plays this season at EST: Ben Franklin dreams of founding a utopia in Nova Scotia, and eventually aims instead for an experiment known as the United States. Young Jane Goodall arrives in Africa for the first time as Tanzania is emerging as a democracy from under the thumb of British imperialism. Both these plays raise the question of who gets to steward the land under their characters' feet – a question that is no less present in our reality today.
For the past few years, this space in our program has been dedicated to a land acknowledgement: underscoring the continued exploitation of Indigenous, Black, and other historically marginalized communities across the US. Particularly here in New York, that means recognizing that the city is located on Lenapehoking, the unceded traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people who are also known by the colonial government as the Delaware Nation.
As we've learned more about reconciliation efforts with Indigenous tribes here and abroad, we wanted to highlight the Land Back movement. Land Back seeks to restore Indigenous sovereignty, as well as political and economic control of ancestral lands - specifically political authority over territories that Indigenous tribes claim by treaty.
That doesn't mean the displacement of non-Indigenous folks, but it does mean restoring power and wealth back to Indigenous people, including the water, natural resources, and infrastructure on those lands. It means ensuring tribal communities have a seat at the table of government where they've been historically denied. Alongside its appeal as a means of reconciliation, Land Back is considered a path toward better management of natural resources, rooted as it is in reverence and respect for the land.
The US government has begun piloting tribal co-management of certain federal lands, a step in the direction of Land Back. There have been significant restorations of tribal lands in Oklahoma, Utah, and California. One of the great early successes of the Land Back movement happened here in New York, when in 2022, more than 1,000 acres in central New York's Tully Valley were returned to the Onondaga Nation to create a wildlife and brook trout sanctuary.