There was a minor uproar in Manitoba recently when a speaker invited to discuss “settler colonialism” at a Winnipeg School Division event announced to the assembled crowd of educators that “Resistance To Colonialism Is Not Terrorism.”
School board officials quickly and dutifully apologized for such an outrageous claim. “Our focus is on and must be on, Indigenous education, reconciliation, and equity for all. There is no equity in terrorism”, Winnipeg school board superintendent Matt Henderson said later in a public statement.
Yet Henderson’s claim that the offending statement shared nothing in common with current discussions about reconciliation or native rights is not entirely accurate. Under the catch-phrase “Land Back”, many Indigenous activists today believe they have the right to resist “colonial occupation” by any means necessary.
Originating in the United States about a decade ago, Land Back was first used as a deliberate political slogan during 2018 protests demanding the transfer of control over the world-famous U.S. Presidential Memorial at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota to local native groups. It quickly jumped the border and now flourishes in Canada as well, where it can be seen and heard in connection to various Indigenous demands and reconciliation discussions. Versions of Land Back can also be found in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Mexico.
Not quite a distinct political movement, Land Bank comprises a range of impulses and demands that combine mysticism, grievance, aspiration and ideology. At its most basic, it seeks a return of lands considered to have been possessed by North American Indigenous peoples before contact with Europeans.
As a militant iteration of aboriginal nationalism, the proponents of Land Back often disavow the fundamental legitimacy of Canada and the U.S. as nation-states. And like most expressions of ethnic and racial nationalism, it seeks to create autonomous sovereign territory by excluding “others” – in this case, the rest of us settler-colonialists.
With the growth of the Land Back concept as a populist movement, a group of Indigenous academics sought to provide it with a political manifesto. Land Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper was published in 2019 by the Yellowhead Institute at the Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). It deserves a close inspection by all Canadians for the radical and dangerous demands it contains.
The 65-page document seeks “fulsome Indigenous jurisdiction” over all of Canada. Its authors propose to dispense with the liberal-democratic norms of our country in favour of vague, supra-jurisdictional authority exercised by Indigenous communities. Such a goal might be considered “reverse assimilation”, as our non-Indigenous nation-state would be placed under the control of a native minority.
If such an outcome can’t be achieved by negotiation, Land Back adherents seem prepared to seek other means – what the manifesto calls a “more direct, type of assertion [that] revolves around physical reclamation or occupation of lands and waters.” Ronald Gamblin, an Anishinaabe Land Back activist from Manitoba, explains it this way: “Land Back is about Indigenous peoples confronting colonialism at the root. It’s about fighting for the right to our relationship with the earth. It’s about coming back to ourselves, as sovereign Indigenous Nations.”
The notion that Mother Earth has given Indigenous people her blessings as a birthright is a common belief among Indigenous peoples worldwide throughout history. This existential connection to the land is often romanticized and mythologized by other non-Indigenous societies.
Viewed unsentimentally, however, such a fixation with land can be seen as ethnocentric and exclusionary, if not explicitly racist. It isn’t all that dissimilar from the atavistic impulses expressed by Nazi Germany in its racist doctrine Blut und Boden (that is, blood and soil). Since the Nazis claimed to have come from the land, they asserted a greater right to that land than anyone who arrived from elsewhere. It is a dangerous belief if taken too far.
Equally worrisome is the sympathy some Land Back activists have shown for the Hamas terror attack last year. “Palestine is actually doing a Land Back,” U.S. Sioux activist Nick Estes said in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre. “They’re actually doing what we think we want to do but we haven’t gone there yet…and for me, that was beautiful. I just want our resistance to be so strong, our fire as a people so strong that we just take back what is ours.”
Thankfully, some courageous Indigenous voices have been calling out this twisted opportunism. “What has troubled me the most has been the frequency with which my peoples’ struggle for reconciliation has been invoked to justify the bloodshed, “Chris Sankey, a businessman and former councillor of the Lax Kw Alaams Band in B.C., wrote in the National Post last year. “This is an absurd and, frankly, offensive comparison, as Indigenous-Canadians and Palestinians stand worlds apart.”
We should all take caution. Amid the pity, reverence and mythologizing shown Indigenous peoples in Canada lies a blind spot in which a ruthless and racist ideology can grow.
Michael Melanson is a writer and tradesperson living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. A longer version of this story first appeared at C2CJournal.ca.
