Tribal lands were stolen. What happens when those ancestral territories are returned?

This story is the final feature in a Vox special project, Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future.

On a freezing January morning in 1863, American soldiers attacked a Northwestern Shoshone camp along the Bear River in what is now Idaho and slaughtered hundreds of Shoshone people in what is most likely the largest massacre of Native people in the US on a single day. The massacre was horrifically brutal. “[The soldiers] would grab the small children by their braids and crush their heads and bodies into the frozen ground,” Rios Pacheco, a Shoshone tribal elder, said.

Pacheco told me that, for generations, Shoshone people passed down stories about some parents being forced to let their babies float down the river that day so that their crying would not alert the soldiers to where a group was hiding along the riverbank. 

After losing their territory over the course of decades to Western expansion and violence, the tribe went generations without collectively owned land. 

But in 2018, more than 150 years later, the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation bought back over 500 acres of land at the site of the Bear River Massacre. 

Since European colonization, Indigenous nations across North America have lost nearly 99 percent of their land. That seizure of Native territory and the development of American industry led to a devastating loss of life, culture, and community. It also set humanity on a course that was harmful to the environment. Western development has led to habitat and biodiversity loss and fueled climate change, spurring more extreme weather, such as drought, wildfire, and floods that have grown worse and more frequent. 

The Bear River land purchase was part of a growing movement, generally referred to as Land Back, that’s empowering Native people to address generational trauma and restore landscape health.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of acres of ancestral territories have been returned to tribes. The movement is part of a larger reckoning, too: Last year, the US government concluded its Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations, a decade-long effort to acknowledge historical wrongs and return land to tribal ownership. Over the course of the program, nearly 3 million acres in 15 states were consolidated and restored to tribal trust ownership. 

Land Back success stories often come with splashy announcements, but what tribes do afterward isn’t as well-publicized. And it’s in these often overlooked stories that tribes are doing work that doesn’t just help heal the injustice they suffered, but creates meaningful steps to adapt to climate change and build a more resilient environment.  

The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation plans to embark on an ambitious restoration project at the massacre site, which they call Wuda Ogwa. The project will help make the area more climate resilient through the planting of native trees and the restoration of a wetland complex, which will add an estimated 10,000 acre-feet of water or more to the Great Salt Lake, which is disappearing because of extreme heat and drought.

After the Shoshone were displaced from the land, the massacre site was looted, and in the following years, the site was used by settlers for everything from cattle grazing and farming to a railroad and a failed resort. During the Great Depression, Russian olive trees were planted to help reduce soil erosion, but those trees are now considered an invasive species that sucks up water. 

Over the years, this all took its toll on the land. It also reduced one of the key water sources that feeds the Great Salt Lake. Now, drought is making the situation worse. 

As they work to overcome years of oppression and violence, the Northwestern Shoshone are also focused on healing the land. “We’re going to start to use that land as a place to regenerate not just the Earth, but also the people,” Pacheco said.   

For Indigenous communities, land has never been about simple ownership, but instead is about building a deep, complex relationship with the land. Now, as they begin to reclaim more and more ancestral territory, tribes are demonstrating that Indigenous communities can lead the way on climate adaptation through creative partnerships and ambitious restoration projects. 

All of this means that Land Back is not only an important cultural story, it could also prove to be a key part in the fight to build climate resilience. 

What is the Land Back movement? 

Although Indigenous people have been fighting for and regaining their seized land for hundreds of years, the modern concept of Land Back, sometimes backed by social media campaigns and well-heeled nonprofit groups, has only emerged more recently. The #LandBack hashtag, in particular, has found its own cultural niche thanks to moments like the viral social media posts shared by groups like the NDN Collective or influencers like Blackfoot meme creator Arnell Tailfeathers from Manitoba.  

Throughout the 20th century, many tribes steadily built up the funds to buy back their land. In the 21st century alone, dozens of tribes and Indigenous organizations have reclaimed tracts of land that total hundreds of thousands of acres across the country. 

Increasingly, tribes are finding new allies in conservation and environmental spaces, who recognize the positive impact that tribal land stewardship can have on the environment. 

Land Back can come about in different ways. Sometimes, tribes are able to directly buy back land with their own funds, as the Winnebago Tribe in Nebraska did. A nonprofit group can buy land for a tribe before donating it back to them, as the Trust for Public Land is doing with 30,000 acres it is returning to the Penobscot Nation in Maine. In 2018, an individual gave a couple acres of land back to the Ute Tribe just a few years after buying it. 

Then there are more nuanced co-management situations, such as Canyon de Chelly, which is a National Monument under the purview of the federal government, with the Navajo Nation maintaining some land and mineral rights. Most tribes, however, say that full ownership with no strings attached is the best way to uphold tribal sovereignty. 

Jan Michael Looking Wolf Reibach is the tribal lands department manager for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. “I think the most complete answer for a tribe is when they can recover the lands and have sovereignty over their lands and exercise our sovereignty,” he said. “The strongest and most powerful way for the tribe to restore our connection and bring healing to the land is when it comes back into tribal ownership.”

Anne Richardson is the chief of the Rappahannock Indian Tribe, whose ancestral territory is located in what is now Eastern Virginia. Richardson, who can remember her father and grandfather fighting with the state for recognition of their sovereign rights, believes that tribes are proving across the country that everyone else should have been listening to them all along. Traditional knowledge, passed down through generations, was once derided as primitive by Western scientists, but Richardson believes acceptance of that type of knowledge is finally beginning to happen. “Scientists are amazed that we had this knowledge and we never had a degree in science,” she said. “They need that traditional knowledge because our people flourished on these lands for thousands of years.”

Land Back projects are a chance for the tribes to build stronger relationships with each other and the land. Along the way, water is getting cleaner and land is becoming more climate resilient, even as the political outlook in the United States looks grim for the climate. 

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to withdraw (again) from the Paris climate agreement, among other actions that experts say could prove disastrous for the environment. These include opening public lands for oil drilling and resource extraction, as well as rolling back environmental regulations and undoing climate-friendly federal programs like tax credits for home energy improvements. 

Under these circumstances, any climate adaptation projects could prove to be invaluable mitigation against an administration that could add an estimated 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. 

Jason Brough, a Shoshone PhD student in anthropology and environmental policy at the University of Maine who has helped to map the Wuda Ogwa site, said that tribal Land Back projects could serve as a kind of safety net against potentially harmful federal climate policies. “If Indigenous communities and their partners can have these little niches where animals and plants are safe, that could be really important to get us through these next few years [under Trump],” Brough said. 

Of course, tribal sovereignty also means that tribes could decide to use the land they regain for something other than climate projects, per se, including for housing or economic development. But although there are many different Land Back projects with a variety of goals and processes, Reibach says the ultimate goal is the same: rebuilding a healthy relationship with the land and each other based on reciprocity rather than extraction. 

“Regardless of the project or the reason to acquire land back into tribal ownership, the process is very healing for us because it restores our connection to the land,” he said. “We view these lands as being part of us.”

Why Land Back can be a climate solution 

Across the country, tribal Land Back projects are proving, acre by acre and tree by tree, that their work is benefiting the climate. 

In Virginia, the member tribes of the Indigenous Conservation Council for the Chesapeake Bay are engaged in Land Back and restoration projects to help blunt the impact of climate change on the Chesapeake Bay, which could see more than 5 feet of sea level rise in the next century. In 2022, for example, the Rappahannock Tribe reclaimed 465 acres of land on what is called Fones Cliffs in Eastern Virginia. The tribe’s work on the land includes herring restoration, oyster restoration, and native tree planting. Much of the land was previously a large cornfield, and chemicals like phosphorus from fertilizer have degraded the water quality in the river. 

Two hours south, the Nansemond Indian Nation is working to reduce invasive species, protect against erosion, and restore water quality on a piece of land they acquired earlier this year that was once the site of a cement factory. Cameron Bruce, the Environmental Program Coordinator for the Nansemond Indian Nation, says he has noticed more birds and larger herds of deer on the property since the tribe began restoring it. 

In Oregon, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde is working to restore the Willamette Falls area, which was recently the site of a paper mill. Lindsay McClary, restoration ecologist for the tribe, is working with her team to restore stream flow, replace culverts to create fish habitats, remove invasive species, and bring back fire to the landscape. Last year, the tribe conducted a prescribed burn on one piece of land for the first time in 100 years. McClary says that the impact of Indigenous land management is particularly clear in places like the Willamette Falls site, which was previously home to a Blue Heron Paper Company mill. “We’re helping restore some areas that were flooded by someone else’s maybe less than thoughtful decisions,” she said. 

“We see time and time again, those places become productive ecologically,” Jason Brough said of Indigenous projects on reclaimed land — meaning those lands “start having benefits for not just our own communities, but for everybody.” 

For Brough, Wuda Ogwa carries extra personal significance. One of Brough’s ancestors was shot in the chest at the Bear River Massacre but survived.

Rios Pacheco says that only one or two people from most family groups survived, but the fact that those people now have many descendants is a mark of the tribe’s resilience. Despite the pain and trauma that Brough still says exists at the site, he and the tribe are looking toward making it better for the future. Brian Andrew, the project engineer, said their approach to restoration is not simply returning the site to the way it was before the massacre. “We don’t want to put exactly what was there because we want things to flourish and can survive in today’s climate and future climate scenarios,” Andrew said.

In some ways, it is remarkable that just a few years after regaining such a culturally significant piece of land, the tribe is already working on a project that could benefit the entire region by adding desperately needed water to the Great Salt Lake. “That’s what’s beautiful about it,” said Maria Moncur, the tribe’s communications and public relations director. “We did it for our people, and it just so happens to help the watershed.”

“I know it’s a struggle,” Brough said. “I know we’ve been trying for over 500 years. But we’re at a junction right now where they get to make that choice again … between a path of living with Earth or a path of living against Earth.”

In early November, the Northwestern Shoshone organized a community planting event at the Wuda Ogwa site. Over two days, hundreds of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous volunteers came to plant thousands of new trees. Tribal leaders say that this work strengthens the tribal community and the environment, but also works to improve their ties with non-Native neighbors and community members. 

“What we’re doing at that massacre site is we’re paying tribute back to those victims,” George Gover, the executive director of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, said. “We’re honoring them by putting water and life back into the Great Salt Lake. That’s what this project is all about: life.”