Audience: Indigenous Peoples

Land Justice can only be achieved through three goals: Reparations, Regenerate the Commons, and Landback. The organization Nuns & Nones has created three creative guides—on each of these themes—to imagining land justice. Our nation was built on stolen lands, with stolen labor, carrying a legacy of violence that continues to this day, so Reparations calls for those who have profited from this injustice to repair past and ongoing harms. The climate crisis is unfolding in our daily lives, so the Regenerate the Commons (“solidarity economy”) movement is building real alternatives to capitalism, seeking to shift wealth into shared ownership and governance, and to prioritize planet and people over profits. Through the process of colonization, Indigenous people were forcibly removed from billions of acres of land that they depended upon and belonged to, so the Landback movement can heal the harms of colonization, support regenerative stewardship of the land, and help us evolve into a new era of right relationship. These guides provide thorough arguments for each of these themes.

There are major gaps in the Environmental Impact Statement issued by the Army Corps of Engineers about the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) impacts. The NDN collective has produced a special report on the impacts of the DAPL in light of the D.C. District Court decision on June 22, 2021 dismissing tribe’s case against the Army Corps of Engineers. The purpose of this report is to provide a comprehensive summary of the DAPL project in the context of critical environmental, engineering, social, economic, and climate justice issues that continue to plague the construction and operation of the pipeline.             

Integrated, year-round community organizing is necessary to create people-powered political representation in the Midwest. Midwestern state economies have destabilized, and this has caused shifting politics, such as formerly Democratic or swing states now voting mostly for Republicans. This report dispels multiple myths about Midwestern politics, such as: some states swung irreversibly to the right; Midwest states can be won either by engaging only people of color, or by frantically chasing white Obama/Trump voters; retail politics can work in the Midwest by “treating” white voters with messages about the economy and Black voters with messages about race, while ignoring Native, Latino, AAPI, and other voters; and we can win Presidential, US Senate, or Gubernatorial races by dumping billions of dollars into paid advertisements each cycle, rather than building the human capacity to lead and govern. This report argues for intentionally, consistently organizing people into membership organizations, unions, and community institutions in order to move constituencies of people into political action and create political homes. Overall, this report argues for “state ecosystems” of democratically accountable movement groups to engage in electoral politics.