In the last decade we have seen an upsurge of struggle in the land back movement, an Indigenous-led continental movement in the so-called United States and Canada that clashes against five centuries of settler colonialism. This development has found expression in the defense of land and water in 2016 at Standing Rock against the fossil fuel Dakota Access pipeline and in Anishinaabe territory in Northern Minnesota and Michigan against Enbridge’s Line 3 and Line 5. We’ve also seen uprisings among the Mashpee Wampanoag in Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island, and the Wiyot people in California’s Duluwat Island to reclaim their stolen lands, among the Haudenosaunee people from the Six Nations of the Grand River to shut down settler encroachment on unceded territory. The Indigenous nations of British Columbia have mobilized to stop the Trans Mountain pipeline and mobilized in the massive and ongoing “shut down Canada'' blockades in support of the Wet’suwet’en people against the construction of a natural gas pipeline through their territory. This upsurge is part and parcel of the fight against the economic and political crisis of a capitalist system in decay. The contamination of the waters and the land, the centuries-old dispossession of Indigenous nations, the…
Recently, we have witnessed the commodification of “LAND BACK” through nonprofit marketing campaigns. We have seen the rejection of land back and its connection to Indigenous and Black national liberation by “patriotic socialists” in the imperial core. Within Indigenous communities and among anti-communists, we have also witnessed the rejection of the science of Marxism-Leninism as the pathway to land back. In this momentous struggle for liberation, for the future of humanity and for the survival of the Earth, the fight for land back must be founded on and retain an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist orientation.