Land Back is the demand for the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous peoples and nations. It is a material demand — about jurisdiction, governance, and physical territory — not a symbolic gesture, a curriculum initiative, or a co-management arrangement in which settler sovereignty remains the default.
The demand has historical depth: Indigenous peoples have demanded the return of their lands since those lands were taken. The contemporary LandBack movement articulates this demand in terms that refuse the compromises settler institutions offer — land acknowledgments, conservation easements, co-management agreements, and financial settlements that convert land theft into a debt that can be paid in currency. These arrangements treat land as a commodity that can be compensated for; Land Back insists that land is a relationship, not a transaction, and that the relationship has been severed by force and must be restored, not priced.
Land Back connects to settler colonialism’s structural analysis: if settler colonialism is an ongoing structure organized around the occupation of Indigenous land, then decolonization requires the return of that land, not merely the reform of how it is administered. The demand is incommensurable with settler property law, which is precisely the point — settler property law is itself the legal technology of dispossession. Land Back does not ask to be incorporated into that system; it asks for the system to end.