General Meeting February 9, 2022

Daniel Heath Justice (O.C., FRSC) is a Cherokee Nation citizen raised in the Ute homelands near Pikes Peak, Colorado. He is Professor of Critical Indigenous Studies and English at UBC. His books include Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (2006), Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018), and the animal cultural histories Badger (2014) and Raccoon (2021). He is also co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literatures with James H. Cox (2014) and the forthcoming Allotment Stories with Ojibwe historian Jean M. O’Brien (March 2022).

"Land Back and the Legacies of Allotment: Settler Privatization Schemes and the Restoration of Indigenous Land Relations"

The US Supreme Court’s 2020 decision, McGirt v. Oklahoma, begins with this memorable line: “On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise.”

That was a promise that, after the US forcibly relocated them from their southeastern homeland to what is now Oklahoma in the early nineteenth century, the Muscogee (Creek) people hold those lands forever, a promise echoed in the US government’s agreements with the Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, and Chickasaw Nations. By the end of that century, the US moved to destroy tribal sovereignty and territorial autonomy through privatization legislation to accelerate assimilation and expand white access to Indigenous lands and resources. As a result of various allotment policies and the accompanying theft and corruption, Indigenous nations in what is currently the US lost roughly 2/3 of their 1880 land base (or around 100 million acres).

The 2020 McGirt decision found that Congress had not, in fact, dismantled the reservation boundaries of the Muscogee Nation, and subsequent court decisions have upheld the continuity of reservation boundaries for other tribes in Oklahoma, but conflicts with the state over its authority and resource claims continue. This presentation will offer a short history of allotment and other global settler privatization schemes and discuss the author's forthcoming co-edited collection, Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege, which grounds analysis of privatization in the wake of McGirt within Indigenous response, resistance, and resurgence.