Is it time to move beyond land acknowledgements? Native nonprofit leaders call for moving beyond land acknowledgements and regaining tribal homelands
- nebraskansforpeace
- Jul 23
- 10 min read
This article was originally published on November 20, 2023, in ICT News, but we feel the message is still relevant and the message needs to continue to be disseminated.

Jessica Intermill knew it was time to take action.
And so the Minneapolis attorney signed up for a 2021 webinar hosted by the Native Governance Center, a nonprofit that seeks to strengthen tribal sovereignty. During the presentation, titled “Beyond Land Acknowledgement,” Lower Sioux Indian Community President Robert Larsen talked about his tribe’s efforts to regain ancestral homelands in Minnesota.
A few days later, Intermill – who has spent 15 years practicing federal Indian law – contacted Larsen to pitch an idea: a voluntary tax that would benefit his tribe.
Two years later, the Mni Sota Makoce Honor Tax was launched.
The honor tax is meant to collect payments from people who today live in, work on or visit land that once belonged to Dakota tribes in Minnesota. It is a fund established to accept voluntary payments made to the Lower Sioux Indian Community.
“We encourage folks to think about it as though it were a governmental tax and maybe do some approximations in that way to really encourage the recognition of tribal sovereignty,” Intermill said.
She said she hopes the honor tax will inspire others to consider ways to help tribes.
“I knew that there was this desire to start going beyond land acknowledgement and start finding concrete reparative paths,” she said.
An Indigenous tradition reimagined
A land acknowledgement is a traditional custom dating back centuries for many tribes. Tribes practiced this custom as a way to honor their ancestors and pay their respects to neighboring tribes they were visiting.
Today, organizations such as churches, universities and nonprofits have begun using land acknowledgements to recognize the Indigenous people who were the original inhabitants and stewards of the land on which they now reside. They are typically offered at the start of events, such as school programs, sporting events and governmental meetings.
In Minnesota alone, more than 150 organizations offer land acknowledgements, according to the Native Governance Center.
But while many organizations, including tribes and Native advocacy groups, still practice this custom, some tribes and organizations have begun questioning the value of these statements and whether they may, in fact, detract from efforts to improve the lives of Indigenous people.
Taking the next steps
The Native Governance Center, a nonprofit that seeks to strengthen tribal sovereignty, has become one of the loudest voices criticizing land acknowledgements that aren’t coupled with action steps.
The organization’s website offers a “Beyond Land Acknowledgement: A Guide” that provides a number of action steps that people and organizations can take to help tribes and Native people. Those steps include making recurring donations to tribes or Native organizations, showing up to a Native-led protest, establishing a voluntary land tax program and returning land to tribes.
The Native Governance Center also recommends that those considering reparations to tribes first research the history of Native people in their area and identify organizations that serve Native people. The center also suggests learning about tribes that may have been removed from their homelands and researching whether there are any organizations or local governments that are attempting to help Natives or tribes.
Wayne Ducheneaux, outgoing director of the Native Governance Center, said a land acknowledgement should be just the first step in supporting Native people.
“Doing a land acknowledgment can’t be the pinnacle of your support of Indian Country,” he said.
He said taking action to help Indigenous people requires humility and realization that Native people understand their own needs better than anyone.
“More often than not, tribal nations understand the issues they’re facing,” Ducheneaux said. “It’s often times just that thing about how do we gather resources and grow capacity for those community-driven solutions.”
He implored would-be benefactors to think big when it comes to helping Indian Country. He shared a story that he said exemplifies the successes people can achieve when they take the time to educate others and build relationships.
He said he was traveling by air to South Dakota and was held over in the Denver airport, where he met a woman who was headed to Oklahoma. The woman talked about how much she admired South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem.
Ducheneaux explained that Noem had done very little to help Native people in South Dakota and how tribes held little respect for the governor. The woman expressed dismay at learning what Native people thought of Noem.
“I was able to change this lady’s mind,” he said.
The woman explained she was on her way to Oklahoma to meet with an attorney to decide what to do with her father’s ranch, which had once employed Navajo people.
Two weeks later, the woman contacted Ducheneaux to let him know that their airport conversation had inspired her to give her family’s land to the Navajo Nation.
“Those are the types of things that I think, when folks are properly educated, can actually come to fruition,” he said.
Another approach: Honor taxes
Since being launched in September, the Mni Sota Makoce Honor Tax has collected donations ranging from $10 to $1,000 from nearly 300 donors, though the tax’s founder Jessica Intermill declined to say how much money has been collected. Nearly 100 of those donors have set up recurring payments.
“It’s been overwhelming,” Intermill said. “We have contributors from California to New York.”
She said she’s been especially impressed by the number of donors who express a desire to make reparations because they realize they are still benefiting today from stolen tribal lands.
“There are folks who are recognizing I’m doing this because I’m still here,” Intermill said. “I’m still a settler. I’m still taking space here and I need to pay my way.”
Other honor taxes that have been established include an honor tax in California’s Bay Area, where residents are encouraged to make payments to the Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone peoples who once called the area home, and another honor tax collects funds for the Wiyot people of Humboldt County, California.
Another form of voluntary payment created to benefit tribes is a “real rent” payment program, such as one in the Seattle area that benefits the Duwamish tribe, whose ancestral homelands include the city. The real rent program is meant to be a fund that collects “rent” payments from Seattle area residents.
Jerilyn DeCoteau, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, said she and her husband made a payment to the Duwamish rent payment program because the couple once lived in Seattle.
“We thought we should pay some rent, too,” she said.
The topic of “land back” has become a rallying cry for tribal nations across the country and reached a zenith in June 2020 when Lakota activists protested a visit by then-President Donald Trump to Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Activists called for the return of the Black Hills to the Lakota.
Calls for “land back” have sparked contentious debate in cities and towns where activists have sought the return of tribal homelands, including in Boulder, Colorado, where a local nonprofit has been seeking the return of lands to the Northern Arapaho for nearly six years.
For the past seven years, Right Relationship Boulder, which supports Native people who live in the Boulder Valley, has worked to get the city of Boulder to honor Indigenous people and to start a discussion regarding land back. In 2016, the nonprofit succeeded in convincing Boulder leaders to begin celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the second Monday of October and to rename a city park, then named Settlers Park, to the Peoples’ Crossing.
Since then, Right Relationship Boulder has worked to get the city to return land to the Arapaho, considered the last tribe to inhabit the Boulder Valley before gold miners and settlers forced out tribal people from the Colorado Front Range.
But efforts to regain land for the Arapaho have stalled as Boulder city officials have failed to go beyond discussion of land return.
“It just doesn’t feel like it’s happening very fast, and I don’t know what would spur that,” said Paula Palmer, co-founder of Right Relationship Boulder.
As Boulder officials continue to debate returning land to the Arapaho, other nearby communities have begun forging relationships to tribes whose ancestral homelands are in the Colorado Front Range.
In Longmont, Colorado, city officials have developed a formal exchange with the Northern Arapaho Tribe of Wyoming through the Sister Cities program, a program that typically sees exchanges between U.S. cities and foreign cities. The September 2021 agreement between Longmont and the Northern Arapaho marks the first time an American city and tribe have become sister cities.
And in nearby Broomfield, city officials and the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma have begun discussing establishing a similar sister cities agreement.
“I’m so happy to see how those projects are evolving and the kinds of relationships that are developing there,” Palmer said.
“For some reason, we’ve got roadblocks that other communities don’t seem to have,” said Jerilyn DeCoteau, co-founder of Right Relationship Boulder.
But the nonprofit isn’t waiting for city leaders to bring tribes home.
In 2022, the organization began hosting Arapaho language and culture camps in the Boulder area. Northern and Southern Arapaho students learn their people’s history, language and culture.
Palmer said Arapaho leaders had long expressed a desire to see their children reconnect to their homelands.
“They wanted space here in their homeland where their children could breathe the air and learn about the plants and eat the chokecherries and learn the place names,” she said. “They want their children to have some experience of what life was like for them when they were living here as free people.”
A new approach to land restoration
A Minnesota nonprofit has taken a more direct approach to regaining tribal homelands.
The Indian Land Tenure Foundation is working to recover some of the 90 million acres of land that tribes lost through the General Allotment Act, or Dawes Act. The organization has worked with tribes to recover land primarily through purchasing property, but also through legal challenges and land donations.
Since its founding in 2002, the foundation has regained 600,000 acres of tribal homelands for tribes.
“We’d like to see that number go up a lot more and a lot faster,” said Cris Stainbrook, the foundation’s president.
The foundation has established a subsidiary, the Indian Land Capital company, which lends funds to tribes for land purchases.
Land donations to tribes by local governments are rare and typically involve small parcels of land, Stainbrook said.
“Usually there’s some reason for why they are disposing of it,” he said.
He cited the example of one country that could no longer maintain a three-acre park and donated it to a tribe. The Indian Land Tenure Foundation helped finance a pickup truck and lawn mower for the tribe to maintain the park.
He said land donations also often come with conditions, such as conservation easements that prevent tribes from developing the land for commercial purposes.
“If you get land back and you’re told this is how you’re supposed to use it, where’s the tribal sovereignty in that?” Stainbrook said. “We take a pretty hard line on tribal sovereignty.”
But even tribal land purchases can come with challenges.
Stainbrook said tribes often are forced to pay higher prices for land than other private buyers. Land speculators will even purchase land that tribes have expressed an interest in buying and resell those lands to tribes for highly inflated prices.
In Minnesota, a timber company, the PotlatchDeltic Corporation, proposed selling 72,000 acres of land – including 28,000 acres within the Bois Forte Reservation – to the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa for $1,000 an acre. The tribe declined the offer.
In 2020, the timber company sold the 72,000 acres to the Conservation Fund. The selling price? About $270 an acre. But the Conservation Fund then sold the 28,000 acres within the reservation back to the tribe for $360 an acre, after accounting for its own costs.
The Indian Land Tenure Foundation financed the Bois Forte Band’s purchase through the Indian Land Capital Company. The foundation helped enroll the tribe in a carbon sequestration program called the National Indian Carbon Coalition.
The program will allow the tribe to generate revenue from carbon credits that it can sell on environmental commodities markets. However, it will require the tribe to not develop the land for at least 40 years while it is being used for carbon sequestration.
The tribe will be able to repay its loan to the Indian Land Capital Company using the proceeds from its carbon sequestration program, Stainbrook said.
“Ultimately, the band really won’t have to pay any money out of their own pocket for it,” he said. “That’s an ideal situation.”
As for land acknowledgements, Stainbrook said he tries to avoid them as he believes they give organizations a free pass to avoid taking any real action to help Native people. He said he once challenged an organization to go beyond its land acknowledgement.
“I said it’s a fine statement but what are you going to do about it?” he said.
Three years later, the organization donated $250,000 to the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, money that the organization used to develop a “Beyond Land Acknowledgements” fund. The foundation plans to use the fund, which has now reached about $450,000, to help pay for land purchases that must be acted on quickly.
Stainbrook said the foundation’s efforts to regain tribal homelands can sometimes seem ponderous.
“There are days that I think we can do it faster than that, then there are other days I think how arrogant can you be Cris?”
A future without land acknowledgements?
For many years, Rick Williams, president of People of the Sacred Land, a Colorado nonprofit that seeks to preserve Native culture, language and history, has worked to bring to light the true history of tribal land dispossession in eastern Colorado.
“I’ve lived here most of my life and I had no clue why there were no reservations on the eastern part of it and It comes down to one word: genocide,” he said.
Williams established a Truth Restoration and Education Commission to uncover the history of land theft and forced removal of Native people from Colorado. His efforts led Colorado state leaders to rescind a 19th Century proclamation by John Evans – who served as governor of Colorado Territory from 1862-1865 – that called on state residents to kill Indians who refused to move to reservations.
“We found out these laws were still the law in Colorado,” he said.
He said he fears land acknowledgements allow non-Native people to “whitewash” painful history. He said it’s time to talk about land restoration.
“Maybe it eases their guilt a little bit to think we said we’re sorry, but sorry is not enough anymore,” he said.
However, Jerilyn DeCoteau of Right Relationship Boulder said she’s not yet ready to give up on land acknowledgements.
“While I agree with him that we need to get beyond land acknowledgments, I think that they serve an educative function,” she said. “We still have so much of the populace who doesn’t understand anything about the land that they’re on.”
She said a land acknowledgement can spur further action by non-Natives.
“I still think they serve a purpose and I do think they’re helping people get past that point of just acknowledging,” DeCoteau said.
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