Centering Reciprocity in Land Trust and Indigenous Community Relationships
Mount Grace and several Nipmuc collaborators were selected to present a half day seminar at the annual Land Trust Alliance’s Rally Conference this past September titled “Centering Reciprocity in Land Trust & Indigenous Community Relationships”. Our seminar was well received by the national land trust community and was ‘sold out’ well before the start of the conference.
Climate and Land Justice Director, Jenn Albertine, presented alongside Nipmuc partners, Andre Strongbearheart Gaines, Jr., Kimberly Toney, and Pam Ellis. Kim is the Inaugural Coordinating Curator of Native American and Indigenous Collections at the John Carter Brown and the John Hay libraries at Brown University. Pam is retired from the practice of law in Massachusetts and now serves as the Principal/Owner of Chagwás Cultural Resource Consultants, LLC. Andre, is the Creative Director of No Loose Braids, a Nipmuc-led organization working to bring Eastern Woodland Tribal communities together through cultural revitalization of traditional practices to revive community and culture. Pam, Kim, and Andre have been consulting with land trusts and conservation organizations across Massachusetts for many years. Mount Grace and No Loose Braids have been working together for more than three years and we used this relationship as a case study to teach about the challenges, successes, and outcomes of this kind of collaborative work between a Native and non-Native organization focused on land justice issues.
Kim, Pam, and Andre spoke on their experiences as Nipmuc people, their Northeastern Woodland homelands, and the impacts that settler colonialism, land dispossession, and forced assimilation has had on their community. They spoke to the importance of Aboriginal rights and their centrality to Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Presenters also identified best practices for land trusts to support these rights such as affirmative easements (e.g., cultural easements, cultural respect agreements), educational signage and programming, and website content.
Participants learned strategies to work in a respectful and reciprocal manner and to move in solidarity with individual Tribal members, Tribes, Tribal or Indigenous NGOs to create place-based healing and cultural revitalization, and to restore land access.
It was our hopes that by sharing our experiences with the broader land trust community, we could inspire and empower more land trusts to enter this work of land justice, through indigenizing their land stewardship processes and developing community- engaged partnerships.