Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Current Situation of the #Landback Movement and Indigenous-Imagined Futures

Abstract

This Note will review the long and complex history of Indigenous resistance to the United States settler colonial project through a #LandBack lens and will discuss the different legal and political routes Tribes have taken in their attempts to reclaim and exercise sovereignty over their lands by working with the current American legal and property system. This reveals that the most recent Indigenous calls for land return signal the imminent exhaustion of existing legal and property routes for the #LandBack movement. Tribes working within the United States legal and property system have found themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place: submit to state jurisdiction for land owned in fee simple or grapple with the disadvantages of land held in trust by the federal government. Under this current system, #LandBack is conditioned on the consent of the United States. This note concludes with the idea that the most recent iteration of #LandBack is positioned to continue exploring Indigenous-imagined alternatives to the current regimes of property and federal Indian law.