The Case for Returning U.S. Public Lands to Indigenous People

Since the start of Trump’s second term, his administration has fired thousands of federal workers across multiple public lands agencies, including the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The effects of this are vast: It’s going to have a profoundly negative impact on the environment and the way millions of Americans enjoy public lands, cause immeasurable harm to America’s wildest places, and devastate the economies built around them.

After serving 12 years as a backcountry wilderness ranger for the U.S. Forest Service, I'm convinced there is an alternative: the U.S. needs to return its public lands to Native Americans. In fact, I believe that might be the only way to save our parks and forests from corporate privatization and destruction, as well as preserve public access to them. If the U.S. won’t properly care for its public lands, why not return them to their original caretakers?

This isn’t a new idea. Native Americans argued that treaty law required “abandoned” federal land to be returned to tribes during the occupation of Alcatraz Island by the American Indian Movement in the 1960s. In more recent years, the Landback Movement has given rise to increased calls for the return of territorial land to Indigenous Nations, and the return of land management based in Traditional Ecological Knowledge—expertise gathered from thousands of years of having deep relationships with specific environments. There’s a strong legal argument that land return is constitutionally required as damages due for hundreds of treaty violations. However, there’s also a lot of data showing Indigenous land management is more ecologically sound than government or industrially managed land. For instance, Project Drawdown, a global leader in science-based climate change solutions, estimates that returning 1,000 million hectares of land to Indigenous tenureship by 2050 would sequester over 12 gigatons of carbon dioxide.

Public lands are responsible for over 20% of U.S. annual carbon emissions thanks to countless oil and gas leases across millions of acres of land and waterways, in addition to many other kinds of industrial leases. Returning those lands to Indigenous Peoples could eventually return them to being a net carbon sink—ecosystems that absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than they release—by massively reducing industrial extraction and increasing protection and restoration. This can be done while preserving the ability of all people to have access to healthy relationships with the land.

Nobody proposes that Indigenous management will always be perfect, or that every extractive practice will automatically cease. However, there is more than sufficient evidence that the land, and all those who value and depend on its well-being, would benefit immensely from its return. I’ve seen it personally, as an enrolled tribal member of the Caddo Nation and a descendant of the Delaware Nation, and in my work as a wilderness ranger. Year after year, I’ve been frustrated watching the government deny our department the funds we need to fully serve our duties to the land and public because it’s at the bottom of their priority list. I was taught by my Indigenous elders that nothing is more important than caring for the land; not just because the land also cares for us, but because we are part of the land and our identities are rooted within it.

Sustainability begins by following what many Indigenous communities refer to as the Natural Laws. They include principles such as: never take more than you need; always leave something for those who come behind; and always give back for what you receive. The laws teach us that nature builds order into the ecologies we are a part of, and it’s our job to follow it no matter how we utilize nature’s gifts. They also teach us the difference between taking from nature and receiving from nature. Taking something without reciprocity is an act of violence. To receive and give a gift is an act of love and respect. Indigenous People seek to emulate that in our relationships with nature. Our cultures view the natural world as our relatives rather than our “resources.” This creates reciprocity and sustainability with nature and each other.

Indigenous civilizations have proven that societies can thrive sustainably for thousands of years through application of the Natural Laws. Those principles can even be applied to large-scale endeavors such as agriculture and trade. Native American agricultural technologies provide over 60% of the world's food supply today. Imagine a world without potatoes, tomatoes, or corn, for instance. Indigenous societies developed thriving civilizations around our relationships with plants and animals, working with nature to support human communities while following the Natural Laws.

Many of those practices are becoming more widely known today as "regenerative agriculture." Better yet, they can still be used on public lands to sustain local communities in place of harmful industrial extraction. Localizing food production can not only replace fossil fuel extraction on public lands, it can also reduce dependence on it for shipping.

The climate benefits of Landback go beyond reducing our use of fossil fuels. Indigenous history shows us that the Natural Laws can be applied to the way our communities trade resources with each other to build economies of reciprocity. For example, the Wampum Economy built a process of trade and exchange that facilitated living in sustainable abundance with nature in the Eastern Woodlands. Wampum (a quahog shell bead) is not a monetary currency, though it’s often been mischaracterized as such. Rather, it is representative of a familial bond formed in the exchange between communities, be they human or otherwise.

Wampum built an economy modeled after the ecology itself and the reciprocal relationships woven into it. Returning economic use of the land to a model of engagement that follows the Natural Laws can rectify the harm that extraction and consumption have done to our climate. Indigenous people learned from the land and its older communities of life that the land manages us—we do not manage the land. The impacts of climate change are showing everyone that now.

That’s why I think tribal members from all nations should enjoin a class action lawsuit for damages due for treaty violations—and settle for the return of federal lands. Not just because justice and Constitutional law demand it, but because Natural Law does, too.

Landback will be good for every American, regardless of their race, politics, or religion. For instance, many tribes already offer areas for public recreation. Not only that, there’s a long history of Natives leasing land to non-Native families. The public land leasing system is set up to benefit big corporations over the working class families who also utilize it. Tribal entities are more likely to level the playing field by preferencing smaller family operations who are not seeking to take more than they need from the land, but simply to provide for themselves.

Trump’s attacks on America’s public land management agencies are simply the culmination of a decades-long political assault on the ability of federal land managers to properly care for the land sustainably. There’s good reason to believe they are setting land management agencies up to fail so they can justify privatizing America’s public lands. The Republican Party platform says they will, “open limited portions of Federal Lands to allow for new home construction.” One can imagine what real estate development on federal land might look like under Trump.

The many hardworking civil servants who’ve lost their livelihoods to politics do apolitical things like clean bathrooms and maintain facilities in campgrounds, enforce regulations, fight fires, clear trails, issue grazing permits and timber leases, conduct ecological research, remove litter and refuse, restore environmental damage, protect archeological sites and Indigenous treaty rights, educate and inform visitors, and a long list of other important land management duties.

Who’s going to do all that now?

I have never seen the government come close to providing the care and protection the land needs in over a decade of service as a federal ranger. Not just because of the constant budget shortfalls, but because of the constant political pressures on policy making, as well. It’s not the fault of the people on the ground who are passionate about their jobs and who care for the land, but rather that of a system, which will never let them do what is best for it.

So why not return the land to those who’ve demonstrated over thousands of years they will care for it sustainably? Why not return the land to those whose identities are defined by it?