Panels

PANEL

Returning Land, Restoring Relations: Rematriation Stories from Haudenosaunee and Wabanaki Territories

Across the Northeast, Indigenous peoples are rematriating land in ways that restore ceremony, governance, and responsibility. Returning Land, Restoring Relations brings together Haudenosaunee and Wabanaki land stewards to share oral histories of three rematriation journeys.

The conversation will highlight how "rematriation" differs from conventional conservation or donation models, how women and Two-Spirit leaders are centered, and how rematriated lands become sites for youth education, inter-nation solidarity, and long-term care.

Participants will leave with insight into legal tools, relationship practices, and community strategies that make rematriation possible in heavily privatized and conserved regions. This panel sets the stage for understanding what land justice looks like when it is led by Indigenous peoples and grounded in Indigenous law and relationality.

  • How the Onondaga Nation secured the rematriation of over a thousand acres in Tully Valley from New York State and partners, and how Nation leaders envision a "wild future" of restored wetlands, medicines, and land-based education for youth and future generations.

  • How rematriation of Oneida territory to Michelle Schenandoah helped seed the Rematriation organization, digital magazine, and gathering space centering Haudenosaunee women's leadership, Land Back praxis, and storytelling as political practice.

  • How the Niweskok Collective and/or the Land Peace Foundation have worked to secure and steward land in Wabanaki territory for food sovereignty, ceremony, and cultural resurgence, navigating both opportunities and constraints created by land trusts and philanthropy.

  • This panel opens the pathway by establishing rematriation as story, practice, and relationship. It grounds participants in lived examples where land returns are tied to ceremony, governance, women's leadership, and long-term stewardship, setting the foundation for understanding solidarity (Panel 2) and accountability (Panel 3).

PANEL

Faces in the Ground/Faces Yet to Come: Soil Stories of Black–Indigenous Kinship

This panel takes seriously the idea that soil is both a dividing line and a meeting place- it marks where harms have occurred and where Black and Indigenous peoples can choose to heal together. Soil is treated not as an object or “resource,” but as a living relative that remembers enslavement, dispossession, farming, and ceremony, and that holds clues about how we might repair our relationships going forward.

Throughout, soil is described as a portal for decolonial healing: a place where we can notice what has been buried or ignored, listen for what the land asks of us now, and practice accountability that is grounded (literally) in a shared place rather than in abstract ideas.

As part of the broader From Land Back to Right Relationship pathway, this panel shows land justice activists how to root Black–Indigenous solidarity in specific soil stories—so they can design rematriation, reparations, and climate work that honors both stolen land and stolen labor, and understands healing the land and healing our relations as the same project.

Building from the “Faces in the Ground/Faces Yet to Come” Soil Stories framework, panelists will explore how Black and Indigenous kinship is braided through soil across the Northeast. They will share stories of:

  • Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous lands where clay, river sediment, and farm fields still carry treaties, wampum teachings, and environmental restoration efforts, even as they are bordered by fences, toxins, and zoning lines.

  • contaminated ground, compacted farm soils, and places where both Black and Indigenous communities confront environmental racism, industrial pollution, and extractive agriculture.

  • Soils that have been heavily worked: Black agrarian and Afro-Indigenous traditions of growing food on land shaped by enslavement, tenant farming, and sharecropping, and the transformation of those histories into freedom gardens, sovereignty plots, and reparations-based land access.

  • rematriation projects, community farms, Three Sisters gardens, cover cropping, and ceremonies that rebuild relationships with land while also mending relationships between Black and Indigenous peoples.

  • Within the From Land Back to Right Relationship pathway, Faces in the Ground/Faces Yet to Come is the relational bridge between rematriation (Panel 1) and accountability around identity and land (Panel 3).

    After Panel 1 shows where land is being returned and to whom, this session focuses on how Black and Indigenous peoples actually share that land in practice- by tending soil together, remembering layered harms, and cultivating new relations rooted in specific places.

    Before Panel 3 asks participants to guard their work against pretendianism and other distortions, this session offers a positive, grounded model of right relationship, where soil is treated as a relative and teacher and where solidarity is measured by how we show up to heal land and each other, not only by policy positions.

    For land justice activists following the full pathway, this panel:

    • Provides a shared, accessible language (“soil that divides,” “soil that heals”) to talk about Black–Indigenous histories and futures in their own territories.

    • Helps them see rematriation and reparations not as separate tracks but as interwoven practices rooted in the same ground, preparing them to design partnerships and campaigns that honor both stolen land and stolen labor.

PANEL

False Claims, Stolen Futures: Pretendians, Identity Fraud, and Land Justice

Pretendianism has rightly been called out in academia, media, and politics, yet its most profound impact- on land, access, and decision‑making- remains largely overlooked and overshadowed by those other debates. False Claims, Stolen Futures brings together an Indigenous identity scholar, a race-shifting expert, and a land-justice practitioner to explore how fraudulent claims to Indigeneity divert land, grants, and leadership roles away from actual Indigenous nations and communities.

The panel will also offer practical guardrails: community- and nation-based identity validation practices, due‑diligence questions for funders and allies, and structural safeguards in land trust and Land Back work that require the consent of Indigenous nations before transferring land, easements, or major resources.

Participants will leave with an Indigenous-informed lens for recognizing red flags and a toolkit of questions and strategies to keep their land justice work accountable to real Indigenous governance rather than self-appointed intermediaries. This panel completes ythe pathway by ensuring activists can guard the ground they've learned to honor in Panels 1 and 2.

Using narrative and case study, panelists will:

  • Examine the Abenaki state-recognition controversy in Vermont and related race-shifting, showing how self‑indigenizing white families constructed "tribes," secured state recognition, and gained access to programs and decision-making that shape land and resource governance.

  • Connect pretendianism to broader institutional patterns- universities, governments, and NGOs using self-identification and paperwork to legitimize false claims, with impacts on land-related funding, conservation partnerships, and academic positions.

  • Share stories from land trusts and land return work where questions of identity and representation have altered, slowed, or redirected projects to better align with actual Indigenous nations' guidance.

  • This closing panel equips pathway participants with guardrails and accountability practices to recognize how false identity claims distort land work and to design partnerships and projects accountable to actual Indigenous nations and communities. After grounding in rematriation (Panel 1) and solidarity (Panel 2), participants now learn how to protect the integrity of land justice work from race-shifting and pretendian capture.