History & Theory
The History of
The History of
Indigenous Land Dispossession
Looking at how this land was taken and why giving it back makes sense.
Looking at how this land was taken and why giving it back makes sense.
Long before Europeans showed up, Indigenous peoples had been living across what we now call North America for thousands and thousands of years. Estimates suggest there were somewhere between 10 and 100 million Indigenous people in the Americas before colonization got underway. Then disease, violence, and displacement wiped out huge portions of these communities within just a few centuries.
When settlers got here, they brought this idea called terra nullius, which is Latin for "empty land." Basically, they decided that any land not owned by Christians or Europeans was legally vacant and up for grabs. This was a total fiction, of course. There were millions of people already there, with deep roots in these places.
Through the 1700s and 1800s, the U.S. government worked hard to push Indigenous peoples off their ancestral lands. They used treaties, forced relocations, and just plain theft. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 gave the government the power to move thousands of Native Americans from their homes east of the Mississippi to "Indian Territory" (now Oklahoma). We know this as the Trail of Tears, and thousands of people died on that journey.
By the early 1900s, the government switched tactics from removal to assimilation. The Dawes Act of 1887 broke up tribal lands into individual plots, trying to break up tribal governments and cultures in the process. By 1934, Native Americans had lost something like 90 million acres of land because of these policies.
Indigenous sovereignty basically means Indigenous peoples have the right to govern themselves, make decisions about their own land and resources, and keep their own laws, cultures, and identities intact. This isn't the same as the idea of nationhood that came out of European politics. Indigenous sovereignty is rooted in the original relationships between peoples and their territories, way before colonizers showed up.
The U.S. Constitution kind of acknowledges tribal sovereignty through the "Indian Commerce Clause" and all those treaties that were signed over the years. But honestly, this recognition has been all over the place. Federal policies have swung back and forth between pretending to respect tribal independence and trying to wipe it out.
These days, there are 574 federally recognized tribal nations in the United States. Each one has its own government, its own laws, its own relationship with the federal government. But those relationships are still shaped by colonial power dynamics that Indigenous scholars and activists keep pushing back against.
"Tribal sovereignty is not a grant from the United States. It is an inherent right that predates the existence of the United States." This matters because LandBack isn't really asking for something. It's about getting back rights that were never legitimately taken in the first place.
Patrick Wolfe argues that settler colonialism should not be understood as one single historical event. It is a structure that continues over time. This matters for #LandBack because Indigenous land dispossession did not end when land was first taken. Its effects continue through land ownership, government control, resource extraction, and limits placed on tribal sovereignty.
Wolfe's big insight is what he calls "the logic of elimination." This doesn't just mean physical violence (though that definitely happened), but a whole process of removing Indigenous peoples in different ways: culturally, legally, geographically. All so settler populations can come in and claim the land as their own.
From this perspective, #LandBack is not only about correcting the past. It challenges the systems that still decide who owns land, who controls resources, and whose authority is respected.
Indigenous peoples have never just sat back and accepted losing their land. They've resisted in all kinds of ways over the years, from armed uprisings to courtroom battles to grassroots organizing. And that resistance is still going strong today.
LaNada WarJack is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Nation and used to chair the Fort Hall Business Council. She's become a really important voice in Indigenous activism today. Her work centers on pushing back against the ongoing effects of settler colonialism and fighting for tribal sovereignty and land rights.
WarJack makes the point that Indigenous activism has to go beyond symbolic stuff and surface-level acknowledgments. She talks about what she calls "meaningful reclamation." It's not just asking nicely for recognition. It's about actually getting Indigenous control back over ancestral territories, resources, and governance.
Some key ideas behind Indigenous resistance today:
All that historical context and the theoretical stuff we just went through helps explain why the LandBack movement came about and why it really matters.
Since settler colonialism is an ongoing structure and not just something that happened and ended, the fight against it has to be ongoing too. Colonialism didn't end when the Civil War ended, or when Indian boarding schools closed down, or when the Indian Civil Rights Act passed. It's still going, through laws, economic systems, and cultural ideas that treat Indigenous presence as something to be managed rather than as a legitimate claim to be taken seriously.
LandBack is how people are responding to all this. It's not some nostalgic thing or just for show. It's a real demand based on:
LandBack also pushes us to think about what "decolonization" really means. It's not just about changing how we think about history. It has to involve real change: giving land, power, and resources back to Indigenous peoples.
Patrick Wolfe's "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native" supports this page because it explains settler colonialism as an ongoing structure. I use Wolfe to show why land dispossession is both a historical issue and a current structural issue connected to #LandBack.
See how this history and theory connects to real examples of LandBack in action.
AIS 10 (04) - Ryan Osier | Fresno State