Before European colonization, the Native peoples of this continent actively cared for forests and other lands in ways that produced healthy, resilient landscapes and abundant, sustainable food over millennia. These practices resulted in the beauty, abundance, and biodiversity that so impressed early European explorers and colonists, and that inspire environmental conservationists today.

The loss of Indigenous stewardship is making our forests less healthy, safe, and sustaining. Cessation of these practices is causing important habitat types and species to become rare, and worse. Further, most food now comes from land stripped of healthy ecology, creating the harmful impression that ecological health and human thriving are at odds, while people’s separation from food sources and from the land reduces interest in caring for the land for future generations.

The Indigenous Landscape Initiative (In Land) is working to help address these problems by involving Native and non-Native communities in reviving Indigenous land stewardship practices across the Northeast. Our goal is to restore land to ecological health while producing healthy, accessible food, and to help people connect and care for the land.

Native land stewardship includes myriad practices in gathering, planting, burning, and other activities. In addition to working, together with Native knowledge-keepers, to revive these practices for restoration, stewardship, and abundance, we will conduct research to learn more about how these practices may best be employed on today’s changed landscape.