Kevin Abourezk
ICT
EFFIGY MOUNDS, Harpers Ferry, Iowa – Clayton Lyons sat before a burial mound atop a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. The 30-year-old man contemplated his work as a community organizer supporting Black and Indigenous people in Rochester, New York, and what he should do next.
As he did, he heard a voice: “Go with the wind at your back.” Just then a gust of wind blew from behind him – affirmation of his path.
Descended from European settlers, Lyons visited the mounds July 13 as part of a gathering of the Decolonial Repair Network, a national organization made up of primarily non-Indigenous people who are focused on helping Native people regain their lands. Lyons said he attended the gathering to learn more about how to support the work of Indigenous people in the Midwest seeking land and to grapple with his own family’s history of colonization.
“For me, it seemed really important to reckon with my own family’s history as settlers,” he said. “Through this network, I’ve been able to know how to ask the right questions a little better and turn white guilt into reconnection to my family’s white roots.”
Nearly a dozen people attended a weekend retreat held at the Saint Isidore Catholic Worker Farm near Cuba City, Wisconsin. Two founding members of the Decolonial Repair Network, Eric Anglada and Brenna Cussen, hosted the first-ever event, which focused on two land-back projects in the Midwest.
“This gathering helped to give a sense to everyone that this is about real relationships,” Anglada said.
Anglada said he got involved in supporting Indigenous people after taking part in a tour of sacred sites near Minneapolis nearly a decade ago. He said it’s important for descendants of settlers to understand the many ways they continue to benefit from land theft and oppressive systems and laws designed to subjugate Indigenous and other people of color.
He said those racist systems also have hurt settlers by preventing them from addressing the guilt and shame many of them experience when considering the impact of colonization on Native people.
“Decolonization is a way of trying to undo, repair and heal the primary injustice on this continent,” he said. “All of us, Native and non-Native, are haunted in a way and damaged in a way over these five-plus centuries.”
He said the network launched the Honor Native Land Fund in 2023, initially focusing on working with the Great Plains Action Society, an Indigenous-led social justice organization based in Iowa City.
“We wanted to move beyond land acknowledgments and teach the real history,” he said. “It’s also important to engage in practical acts of repair. Launching the Honor Native Land Fund was a very small way of stepping into a practical act of repair.”
The network hosts monthly meetings in which participants discuss ways to support land return efforts. The group encourages its members to support those efforts through monthly donations and by growing the network, as well as to focus on their own efforts to address their own families’ colonial histories.
“This isn’t an organization but an organism, and we want to be growing and taking shape as the work unfolds,” he said.
Several of those who attended the July 11-13 gathering said they learned a lot about how to be better allies of Indigenous people and gained greater connection to some of those organizers.
Emeshe Amade traveled to the gathering from an eco-village called Dancing Rabbit in northeast Missouri.
“I’m living in a community that’s very focused around healing relationship to land and growing relationship to place,” she said. “I hold pretty deeply that we can’t as White folks, we can’t do that without bringing in this history of genocide and land theft that is the reality for any land here.”
Kristin Peters, a member of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, said she began her work supporting Indigenous causes by working with an organization called Land Justice Futures, which works with Catholic sister communities to educate them about the history of land theft in order to encourage them to return land to Native people. She said she also has worked to help Indigenous people fight to protect their water.
“I woke up to the voice or the call of water and Indigenous people, just to stand in solidarity and more of a stand of reciprocity with them,” she said. “I realized my life is intertwined with their lives and well-being.”
She said the Decolonial Repair Network gathering helped her understand the importance of using her own voice to create platforms for Indigenous people to speak. The gathering included talking circles, presentations and a sweat lodge ceremony.
Doe Hoyer said she has worked with Dakota people in Minnesota to regain land by creating networks of non-Native allies to support them, including organizing to protect wild rice through state legislative changes. She now serves as an organizer for the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, which formed in 2014 to educate people about international laws that grant land rights to “explorers” who discover lands not inhabited by Christians.
Much of the organizing work Hoyers does involves working with religious communities to support Native people by connecting them to local Indigenous people and educating them on what it means to be part of the dominant culture.
She said the Decolonial Repair Network is one of several organizations seeking to create pathways for Indigenous land return. She defined decolonization as the process of educating ourselves about dominant culture systems that subjugate people and then working to dismantle those systems. That process, she said, often involves non-Natives addressing feelings of grief and shame over how their ancestors have mistreated Indigenous people.
Hoyer said she was raised Lutheran but experienced a spiritual realization after her cousin died and she struggled to learn how to grieve. She began exploring Earth-based spiritual communities, including Indigenous communities. Eventually, she began working with Anishinaabe women who were fighting the Line 3 oil pipeline.
“I still feel changed by them,” she said.
However, she began to realize how little she knew about the history of systemic injustice in America against Native people.
“I just feel like I’ve found where I’d like to organize for the rest of my life,” Hoyer said.
Attendees also got to meet representatives from organizations whose work the network supports, including the Great Plains Action Society. Sikowis Nobiss, the organization’s founder and executive director, spoke to attendees about its efforts to establish the Indigenous-led Resilience and Innovation Hub in Iowa City, a project that would create space for food sovereignty and cultural programs near the city’s downtown.
Nobiss, Cree and Saulteaux of the George Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, said the hub would include space for Indigenous businesses, a holistic healing house, a large kitchen, a large gathering room, and gardens, as well as an earthlodge. Much of the hub’s focus would be on growing foods and teaching people how to prepare healthy meals.
The Great Plains Action Society initially sought donated land, but after reaching out to and speaking to thousands of people, including farmers, religious organizations and university leaders, over the course of nearly a decade, Nobiss realized it would be up to her organization to purchase land for the hub.
“The folks that have taken (land), that have stolen it, they know how lucrative it is,” she said. “They know because they’ve gained so much historical wealth, generational wealth, by this land.”
She said she has been able to gather enough donations to finally purchase the land, but still needs financial support to renovate buildings and maintain the property.
She said land return is important to Natives living in urban areas who don’t have easy access to land unlike many of their reservation-based relatives.
“The majority of us don’t even live on the reservation, and what’s happening in our urban centers is not good,” she said. “There’s just a lot of violence, oppression. It’s very sad, and I know this because I grew up in an urban and largely Native urban center.”
She said she’s hopeful the resilience hub will entice other Native people to come and live in Iowa City, a place from which Native people were supposed to have been removed.
She said the Decolonial Repair Network has helped connect her organization to donors across the country, including many religious people and organizations. She said receiving donations from churches seems fitting considering the role that churches, especially the Catholic Church, played in supporting and operating boarding schools.
She said the resilience hub will be the culmination of her life’s work seeking justice for Indigenous people.
“Could you imagine if everybody did something like this? We would be okay,” she said. “I don’t want to do anything else with my life. Like, I don’t want to be rich living on a yacht. That sounds boring.”