This Land Is Their Land: The Rise of Land Acknowledgements in the PNW seattlemet.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from seattlemet.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Co-founder of R Digital Design and Wenatchi Wear, Mary Big Bull-Lewis outside of her warehouse in Wenatchee on March 2, 2021. She started her companies with her husband, Rob Lewis, and aims to educate people about Wenatchi history through their designs and apparel.
Dorothy Edwards/Crosscut
and is republished here with permission.
Just outside her shop in Wenatchee, Mary Big Bull-Lewis can see the
Cascade foothills on the western edge of her hometown. Along
the crest, only a little bigger than the size of a thumbnail from
this distance, she can see Two Bears.
Once you spot it, it’s impossible to miss: The craggy rock
For Native communities, the reclamation of land goes hand in hand with the reclamation of identity.
by
In Washington, the Native-led land reclamation movement is thriving, from Indigenous farming projects within cities to fundraisers meant to buy back ancestral homelands. (Clockwise from top left: Dorothy Edwards/Crosscut and Taylor Hensel for Crosscut)
As a non-Native person, I thought the idea behind the “Land Back” movement seemed fairly simple. After all, the goal is in the name: Native communities want their ancestral homelands back under their ownership.
I’d heard of efforts in the Black Hills, for example, where activists have demanded the closure of Mount Rushmore, and I had seen fundraisers Real Rent Duwamish is one that remind people in the Seattle area whose ancestral lands they live on. I understood the first part of these efforts, aimed at both raising awareness of the Native history behind the land all people in the Americas live on and fighting for th