This blog post is a guest entry by Katie Wilberding, a 2L law student enrolled in “Liberation Lawyering,” a course taught by SELC staff attorney Veryl Pow at Northeastern University School of Law this fall. Katie wrote this introspective post as a way to integrate the unit on decolonization and rematriation in the course. The unit featured a deep dive into the work of our client, the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust (and Corrina Gould, one of its cofounders). Katie weaves in her own analysis on women’s bodies and motherhood with the broader work of land rematriation. In the end, this post reminds us that rematriating land against settled notions of property is work to dismantle patriarchy.
Photo taken by the author of Lincoln Park in Chicago. The author invites us to imagine what a rematriated Chicago, as inspired by the Chi-Nations Youth Council to actualize a First Nations Garden, could look like.
Property law has a word for land that is resting: idle. It has another word for land that no one is building on: vacant. Neither word describes the land. Both describe the person looking at it and what they would rather see there. A field left fallow is restoring itself. A lot that sits unused is often holding someone else's history or someone else's harm. The vocabulary skips all of that and reports only an absence of profit.
"Improvement" works the same way, in reverse. In the language of title and appraisal, land is improved when something is added to it: a fence, a foundation, a road, a building. What counts is what a stranger can see and price. Maintenance does not count. Neither does restoration, or the slow work of keeping a place able to sustain life. A parcel tended for generations and left whole is worth less on paper than the same parcel paved. The system rewards addition and has no column for care. This is not an accident of vocabulary. It runs through the doctrine. John Locke grounded property in labor mixed with land, and the labor he had in mind was clearing, fencing, and planting. In Johnson v. M’Intosh, the Supreme Court treated Native nations as occupants rather than owners, in part because their relationship to the land did not resemble European improvement. Adverse possession still rewards use that is “open and notorious.” The law has always favored the use it can see over the stewardship it cannot.
Patriarchal societies apply the same accounting to women's bodies, and to mothers most of all. They assign the work of sustaining life to women, then refuse to count it as work. Gestation is the period of labor that produces no visible structure for months. It is maintenance at the cellular level: a body regulating, filtering, and holding conditions steady enough for something else to grow. Raising a child is more of the same, years of upkeep that build no asset anyone can appraise. So it is read as idle, natural, owed. When a woman's body is not producing what others expect of it, it is treated much like a vacant lot: available, underused, waiting for someone with authority to decide what it should become.
Gabriel Pietrorazio’s article shows what the opposite looks like. Before the First Nations Garden, the site was a city-owned lot that the article calls "an eyesore," its soil contaminated with lead. The Chi-Nations Youth Council planted tobacco and sunflowers along the fence to draw toxins out of the soil. Nothing about that is visible as an improvement. No structure goes up. The soil simply becomes able to hold life again. A womb is also an environment, first and foremost. What it can grow depends on what it has been exposed to and on whether anyone is willing to do the unseen work of making it safe.
The people who decide what counts as improvement are rarely the people who live with the result. Development is permitted, financed, and certified inside patriarchal institutions, built to secure property and authority for men and still organized around that purpose. Title itself has historically passed through fathers' names, recorded as a chain of owners. Under coverture, a married woman’s legal identity merged into her husband’s, and he controlled her property. Women were not only left out of the chain of title. The law treated them as part of what passed through it. The land never testifies. Sogorea Te' Land Trust names that inheritance directly when it describes rematriation as work "honoring our matrilineal societies, and in opposition of patriarchal violence and dynamics." In matrilineal societies, women hold the relationships to land that patriarchal title erased. Rematriation does not just change who holds the land. It challenges the idea that holding is the right relationship to land at all.
Corrina Gould makes the connection to women's bodies without softening it. The Ohlone shellmounds, village sites and burial grounds, were "destroyed in a parallel way to how women have been treated at the hands of men." One of them lies under the Bay Street shopping center in Emeryville, where ancestral remains were disturbed during construction. By the logic of improvement, a cemetery became more valuable once it became a mall. Gould's response is not a counter-development plan. "They need songs and prayers," she says. What rematriation asks of land is ongoing obligation, the kind of tending that produces nothing to sell.
That is why the Sequoia Point easement matters. When Oakland returned about five acres to Sogorea Te' and the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, the plan was to replant native species, restore habitat, and hold ceremony. Measured the usual way, nothing is improving. Measured by rematriation, the land is being returned to a relationship that keeps it alive. The same reframing would change how we see mothers. Their labor would stop looking like an absence of productivity and start looking like what it is: the reason anything grows at all.
Tuck and Yang keep this from becoming a comfortable idea. They write that "decolonization is not a metaphor." It means "the repatriation of Indigenous land and life," not a softer way of thinking about property. If I let rematriation become a general symbol for care, I would be doing exactly what they warn against: borrowing the language of a land struggle to describe something that costs me nothing. The link between land and women's bodies is real, and Gould draws it herself. But it only means something if it stays tied to specific ground: the shellmound under the mall, the lot in Albany Park, the acres at Sequoia Point.
What I take from this is a question about measurement. Law is very good at recording what has been added, built, transferred, or sold. It is poor at recording what has been sustained. Both the earth and the women who carry and raise children do most of their work in that unrecorded space. The Sequoia Point easement shows that a legal instrument can be bent to protect tending instead of development, but only when the people doing the tending control the document. Rematriation insists that the unrecorded work was the point all along, and that the people who did it have a claim to the ground they kept alive.
