Queer Projects on Indigenous Land

Resharing this amazing emergent conversation “Queer Projects on Indigenous Land” and related resources for Pride month!

How do we create liberatory spaces on stolen Indigenous land?

Where do queering and decolonizing and unsettling land intersect and support each other and miss or collide?

How are queer led land projects and intentional spaces navigating collective approaches to healing historic harms, land access, landback, and rematriation?

These are some of the questions a loose network of queer spaces, and intentional land project organizers are beginning to ask ourselves. You are invited to our emerging conversation.

Hosted by Sogorea Te’ Land Trust as part of our ongoing online political education, art and community learning engagements.

Participants:

Inés Ixierda & Vick Montaño
Sogorea Te’ Land Trust

Deseree Fontenot & Hasmik Geghamyan
Mugworts Queer Cabin

Sacha Marini
Fancyland

Layel Camargo
Shelterwood Collective

Jasmine & Loma Unsettling the Klamath River

Queer Project on Indigenous Land Resources

• Sogorea Te’s Recommended Readings A developing list of reading recommendations
• Sogorea Te’s Rematriation Resource Guide An intro to some rematriation resources
• How To Rematriate the Land Radical Real Estate webinar with Sustainable Economies Law Center
• Unsettling Questions A planning, reflection and accountability tool for land return and rematriation
• Unsettling Minnesota/ Unsettling Ourselves  A project and collection of readings around unsettling.
• Unsettling America Decolonization in Theory & Practice readings and resources
• Unsettling the Klamath River  Resources from a group of settlers, living on the Klamath and Salmon Rivers
• Turtle Island Indigenous Reparations and Land Rematriation Support Collectively created, crowd sourced land reparations document and tracking list
• Encountering Queerness/ Encontrando Lo Cuir Spanish + English piece reflecting on queerness and complex encounters on Indigenous land at the Zapatista Encuentro for Women in Struggle, from Corazones Diasporicos

How do we create liberatory spaces on stolen Indigenous land?   

Notes from our participants

• Center Indigenous leadership
• Name it, engage it, reckon with it
• Always assume structural inequality and privilege will replicate itself unless we intervene
• Learn about, connect and be real about the histories of the places we are, our own lineages, our current relationship to stolen Indigenous land.
• Make an action plan for your part in shifting the settler colonial present. Don’t fall into saviorism, apathy, guilt, or shame
• Move towards queer settler accountability 
• Create justice frameworks and expectations for spaces and projects you create that support liberatory experience for impacted peoples like orientation naming of indigenous place and people, settler colonialism,  basic communication expectations, offer orientation information about white privilege, racism, inequality
• Reflect, get feedback, adjust, reorient, change, grown evolve, transform
• You cant create liberation for some people without liberation for all people

How are queer-led land projects and intentional spaces navigating collective approaches to healing historic harms, land access, landback, and rematriation?

• Creating deep reciprocal relationships with the places we are and its original people
• Supporting local Indigenous led struggles, efforts, activists and organizers, People of Color communities
• Disrupting hetero-patriachal structures like nuclear family and generational wealth to redistribute land and resources  peoples impacted by historic harms 
• Leveraging privilege to dismantle privilege 
• Leveraging  generational wealth to dismantle generational wealth 
• Restoring ecologies and the environment where we are with Indigenous leadership
• Supporting local Indigenous led struggles, efforts, activists and organizers
• Talking to our families, our neighbors, our work,  our collaborators about privilege, history, the land we are on, historic harm, unsettling, creating something different for the future 
• Creating cultural easements for tribal access and rights to lands that last in perpetuity
• Creating trusts with Indigenous people and tribes that shift land ownership benefits like equity to Indigenous people  
• Supporting efforts to return public and city controlled  “surplus” lands back to tribes 
• Supporting Initiatives to return state and federal land to tribes
• Supporting  Indigenous land, water, air, and sacred sites protectors 
• Rematriating land, sharing land, returning land, unsettling land, giving back land

Contribute 

If you would like to contribute to the pilot Queer and two spirit, Indigenous, Black and People of Color artist and activist residency at Mugworts Queer Cabin you can donate here.

Rematriate the Land!

If you would like to contribute to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust’s Rematriate the Land Fund you can donate here.

Connect

info ( at ) rematriatetheland.org