Beyond #LandBack: The Osage Nation’s Strategic Relations

2024/07/10 by Jean Dennison · 1 voice
Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #American Environmental and Regional History #Asian American and Pacific Histories #Race, History, and American Society

paper · pdf · doi:10.17953/a3.6617

openalex publication_date 2024/07/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21

Abstract

While the #LandBack movement has captured popular imagination, it remains unconvincing to many settlers who are the primary landowners in settler states. This article seeks to expand Indigenous studies understandings of the LandBack movement by looking at the strategic relations the Osage Nation used to get back 43,000 acres of land in 2016. Such strategic relations are mired in colonial and capitalist systems, but they are also how many Native nations, such as the Osage, are rebuilding their homelands. This article thus seeks to tell fuller stories of Indigenous strategies for survival and, ultimately, relationality.

Discussions

• “… relationality must be a commitment to being uncomfortable and working through the current realities as much as envisioning a future fundamentally different from the present.” - Jean Dennison (Osage [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]

Related

• Being Indigenous: Resurgences against Contemporary Colonialism
• Good Intentions are Not Good Relations
• Reconciling the Ledger: The Rupert’s Land Purchase, Settler Capitalism, and Indigenous Dispossession on the Prairies
• New frontiers of land control: Introduction
• Contested Frontiers: Indigenous Power, Settler Rights and the Re-Constitution of Federal Territories