We envision a widespread return of land to Indigenous stewardship, offering all people a liberatory vision for more nurturing and just ways of living with land and each other. 

People everywhere are recognizing our immense loss from having severed the roots of humans’ caring relationships with land, homes, and neighborhoods. Colonization has violently severed Indigenous land relationships, and capitalism has turned land into a commodity to be exploited and made most people landless as a way to exploit their labor. Now, people are seeing the healing that will come from returning land to the landless, to Indigenous people, and to itself. Land justice organizations are emerging, land trusts are forming, and private landowners are coming forth, moved by beautiful visions that are taking shape.

Our Partners and Clients

One of our key programs is our Sacred Legal Circles, where we provide legal support to land-based organizations whose work is rooted in spirituality and/or non-dominant worldview systems. 

Our current work also includes:

• Providing legal support to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an Indigenous women-led land trust facilitating return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people in the Bay Area.
• Supporting return of land to the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, including the development of a new land trust called Sawalmem, developing a tribal ecovillage at Tuiimyali, and land acquisitions for salmon and ecosystem restoration. 
• Check out a list of our other land return clients and partners here.

Inspired by work we’ve done with our partners and clients, we have created resources to bring ease to the process of land return. Check out our user friendly resources like Seeds of Land Return and the Rematriation Easement. 

Policy Advocacy

We advocate for policies that promote more just, sustainable, and cooperative land and housing models. Check out our past and present policy campaigns. 

In this blog post, Law Center staff shared how we’ve witnessed the impacts of settler colonialism in our work to help make sense of the ecological violence and genocide happening to the people of Palestine. We shared resources on how to be in solidarity with the people of Palestine. Our statement pushed back against professionalism and liberalism, which often has people afraid of speaking out, sharing individual experiences, and connecting with one another. Continuing in that vein, team members recently shared how they approach the relationship between Decolonization and the Law.

Resources

We're building a comprehensive library of resources and tools to spread a transformative vision for humanity's relationship to land. Check out our videos, toolkits, templates, handouts, blog posts, books, and more here! 

We are also co-creating a film on Indigenous and Black land justice.