Native peoples around the world have traditionally cared for their lands in ways that produce and sustain healthy, diverse, abundant landscapes. These practices have been disrupted, and the land and its inhabitants are suffering.
In Land works with local communities and Native collaborators to revive Indigenous land care practices across the region, for the land’s health, sustainable food for people, knowledge, relationships with the land and each other.
When we care for it, the land can provide for its human and non-human inhabitants over the long term and with abundance.
We all rely on the land and its inhabitants to meet our needs, so our wellbeing depends on theirs. Native peoples of this region learned over many thousands of years how to care for the land in ways that keep it healthy and meet human needs now and into the future. All of us – Native and non-Native people of today – can learn from these practices, to benefit the land and all who call it home.
In Land works to revive Indigenous land practices on sites across the Northeast, for ecological restoration, sustenance, and knowledge.
We work to restore the land’s health through reviving Indigenous land care practices on land across the region. We involve the community in restoring the land, inviting people to build relationships with the land and each other. Healthy land provides for its inhabitants, and our work includes gathering from the land’s abundance and so people can benefit from its nourishment, with emphasis on food access. We conduct research to help humans get better at caring for the land today. Our basic model is to partner with landholding groups, such as land trusts, towns, and other community groups, to engage community and restore and steward land that they hold or manage.
If you would like to chat about our work or about land you care for or about, please be in touch!
A rich set of practices helps sustain the land.
Native peoples’ myriad practices in gathering, planting, burning, and other activities maintain and even increase the landscape’s health, diversity, and abundance. In Land seeks to revive a breadth of practices and approaches, working together with Native knowledge-keepers to help extend to all who live on this land the ability to care for it.
An Indigenous landscape is a climate resilient landscape.
Many characteristics of a landscape cared for with Indigenous practices make it more resilient against the drought, pests, diseases, and wildfires that increase with climate change. Deep roots, areas of widely-spaced trees, abundance of fire- and drought- tolerant food plants, reduced fuel loads, diversity at many scales, and fire’s direct effects on pests and pathogens all contribute to Indigenous landscapes’ climate resilience. Climate resilience of the landscape means healthier, more sustaining habitats for wildlife as the climate changes. When our food comes from these landscapes, that means more climate resilient food sources for us humans, too.
We have a lot to learn.
Displacement, cultural suppression, and other tragic disruptions have separated Native people from some practices and obscured many details of the past. Further, the land has undergone many rapid and unprecedented changes in the last few centuries. But many remnants and potentials remain. At In Land we learn from Native and non-Native historians, ecologists, knowledge-keepers, gatherers, land managers, and others, as well as from the land itself through experimentation and observation, reconstructing and regaining knowledge of how to restore and care for the land.
An Indigenous landscape doesn’t end at our doorstep.
We will live better on the land and as a society when we honor perspectives and practices that have grown up with this land and kept the land and its people healthy for millennia. In Land strives to engage regional Indigenous perspectives and approaches throughout its operations, such as in research and knowledge generation, community involvement, and food access.
The land needs healing.
Species are declining and have disappeared as a direct result of the cessation of Native land care practices. The land, its species, its biodiversity and ecological diversity, and the ability of humans and other species to meet our needs now and in the future are suffering. We can restore the practices and relearn the perspectives and deep knowledge that underlie them, to bring humans and the land back into mutual, sustaining relationship.
We don’t have to choose between humans and nature.
Many of us have inherited a view that human needs are at odds with those of the natural world, that land “used” for people doesn’t also support healthy ecosystems, and that land “set aside” for ecological health doesn’t provide for most of people’s needs. With so much recent human activity being harmful, we’ve also inherited the idea that the land is healthy when we humans leave it alone. We’ve accepted the disturbing notion that our presence on the planet is a zero-sum game, that our thriving must reduce the ability of other species and future humans to do the same, and that emphasizing ecological health requires sacrificing from our own wellbeing.
Native peoples have long understood that humans have a place within the world we inhabit. We must care for the land to maintain its health and vibrance, and we must and can provide for ourselves in ways that support our fellow inhabitants’ wellbeing. Meeting our needs – including our ability to do so in the future – and a land for all creatures to flourish are one and the same.
Humans affect the landscape; we always have. In Native terms, we humans have a responsibility to care for the land and keep it healthy. In ecologists’ terms, we are a keystone species, “an organism that plays a critical role in maintaining the overall structure and function of an ecosystem.” Being a keystone species is a big responsibility.
