Fall 2025 Happenings & Updates

Tributary Land Returns

“Wabanaki Tribes and non-native organizations are working together to return over 50,000 acres to Wabanaki communities across the place now called Maine. Eleven distinct projects, collectively referred to as the Tributary Land Returns, will result in one of the largest returns of private land in the history of the United States, but it is more than just acreage. This effort demonstrates a level of coordination across multiple conservation organizations and Tribal communities that is unprecedented in this country and offers a whole new paradigm of what land return can look like.”

One year in:
Finding, contracting, funding, and closing. These transactional steps are the well seasoned skills of the conservation community. They have helped protect hundreds of thousands of acres across our region. Very little of this protection allows for the sovereign practice of Wabanaki people and ideas. But things are changing. Land trusts and individuals make offers of return—lands, funding, information—that are reconnecting lands and waters to care and customs that have sustained both people and place for millennia.

To that end, this community has undertaken the Tributary Land Returns, the collective work of seven conservation organizations and the five federally recognized Wabanaki communities that today exist in what is called Maine. Tributary has set out to return coastal islands, riverbanks, lakeshores, sugarbushes, farm fields, and forests to Wabanaki ownership and care. To date, this effort has seen the ownership of a coastal island returned to the Penobscot Nation, economic opportunities expanded for the Mi’kmaq Nation, a doubling of the land holdings of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, and the growth and connection of the Passamaquoddy’s existing land base.

Each of these completed transactions are themselves important and transformational. They create opportunities for the present and space for future imagining. They are slowly re-charting the map of our home. But this collective work is also transforming those of us and our organizations that are doing it. New relationships and partnerships are forming as project teams work to uncover collaborative sources of funding for acquisition and assessment. Connections and understanding between members of the conservation community and Tribal Nations are being strengthened by shared work and time on the land together and through shared setbacks and successes. And though at the end of this round of returns over 50,000 acres will once again be held and cared for by Wabanaki people, it will be these relationships and new skills that will make the new course lasting.

Focus on South Branch

Following hunting seasons where Passamaquoddy Tribal citizens found posted roadways and restricted access to their Trust lands northeast of Jackman Maine, the Passamaquoddy Tribe approached First Light to help negotiate with a willing land owner to guarantee safe access between their two already owned parcels. Those conversations initially focused on improving access, but as relationships developed the landowner offered the opportunity to purchase their full land holdings that abut the Trust parcels–7,000 acres of undeveloped and unrestricted forest and wetlands. Working closely with staff, resources, and technical support from many organizations in the First Light community–including the Nature Conservancy of Maine, Maine Coast Heritage Trust, the Maine Mountain Collaborative, the Conservation Fund, and the Forest Society of Maine–the Tribe brought these conversations and the opportunity to life and acquired the parcel in June 2025.  

With this purchase the Tribe increased the land base open to hunting and fishing under the their sovereign hunting, fishing, and caretaking rights, created a unified 28,000-acre parcel along many miles of the South Branch, created new opportunities for expanded forest management and space for cultural, spiritual, and recreational activities for Tribal citizens.

Unlike many of the Tributary projects, where a conservation partner has carried many of the key transactional and financial roles, this return was led by the Passamaquoddy Tribal government and financed with the Tribe’s own funding. First Light and members of the First Light Community have played essential, supporting roles–speaking with landowners, securing option payments, and making direct contributions to the purchase cost. These roles continue even after the Tribe has purchased the parcel. We’ve committed to continued fundraising in support of this purchase and celebrate the return of Wabanaki care to the lands and waters along the South Branch.

Opportunities to support this and other projects in the Tributary returns can be found here.

Sewall gift

This summer, the Elmina B. Sewall Foundation made a generous $2,450,000 gift that supported all six of the active Tributary Land Return projects. In an early discussion about funding the Tributary Returns, we asked Gabriela Alcalde where the Sewall Foundation’s priorities were best met by this work. She answered that Sewall wanted its support to fuel the collaboration between all the different partners involved. For months, fundraisers from all the non-native organizations involved in the Tributary Returns met and talked, working together on a shared proposal and shared talking points, building trust, and getting excited about each other's projects. Sewall’s support is pivotal in the success of the Tributary Returns, but beyond that it has been transformative in supporting a collaborative culture of return that will extend beyond Tributary and sustain this work into the future.

The current First Light Confluence Learning Journey has 120 participants representing 49 organizations across what is now Massachusetts, NH, VT and Maine. This November, our 13th month, will mark the end of our monthly zoom gatherings but hopefully, it is just the start of a long relationship of working together to Relearn, Recenter and to Return. Participants entered into Confluence with very different experiences in land justice work and relationships with Wabanaki people. Some people have been immersed in this work for years and other folks had never been in a group that probed Conservation’s historic, current and future roles in land theft, hoarding and return. Each person brought rich life experience, a generous appreciation of other perspectives and an openness to being delighted by each other’s creativity and passion.

Each Learning Journey has to respond to the moment of the movement and the requests of our Wabanaki partners. We’re grateful for the commitment and engagement of each guest and participant. Confluence organizations and individuals who share a public expression of commitment will reunite in November 2026. We all have more people to lean on and learn with as this community of individuals and organizations dedicated to land return and Wabanaki sovereignty grows into a larger network with increased capacity and more diverse skillsets.

In 2024, the Wabanaki Commission accepted a $1.7 million dollar Solidarity Deposit, from organizations and foundations across the First Light community to seed the land relations fund, Wolankeyutomone Kisi Apaciyewik “Let us take good care of what has returned.” That fall, the Commission hired Frances Soctomah as the fund manager, and she has done incredible work to create a community-based process to solicit and review proposals. In May, the Fund distributed its first round of 14 grants to Wabanaki Tribal governments, NGOs, and citizens, doing work to support Wabanaki access, kinship, and relationship to place. These grantees are already doing powerful work across Wabanaki homelands.

We are working closely with the Commission to build the long-term sustainability that will allow Wolankeyutomone Kisi Apaciyewik to support Wabanaki land relations for generations into the future. In the meantime we are asking members of our community to join the Solidarity Commitment, an annual commitment of $855,000 to provide the ongoing support that allows the Fund to keep distributing grants to Wabanaki people doing this essential work.

Knoll Farm Land Return Gathering 

Land return is a growing movement, with projects and partnerships sprouting across Turtle Island. What is there to learn and understand from our relatives doing this work in other homelands across the continent? In August, partners from First Light and the Wabanaki Commission gathered with 24 other Indigenous and non-native land return practitioners. Folks convened on the grassy hill of Knoll Farm to share work from the lands now known as New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, California, Washington, Utah, New York, and Massachusetts. Over three days, we heard and offered stories of how we work in each of our homes to shift land back into Indigenous holding and care. Much like a plant that’s exquisitely adapted to its own ecosystem, each land return effort is distinct to the landscape it is growing in. Every project is responding, learning from, and creating unique conditions; what works here in Wabanakik is different from efforts on the shores of San Francisco Bay or the buttes of the desert southwest. And yet we’re all related, and after three days of good stories, good food, and good night skies, we left feeling nourished and connected to the growing movement to return.

You can read some reflections from partners at Redbud Resource Group, a relearning and return effort led by Indigenous women in what’s now California, here. 

Mihqitahatom: The “I Remember” Walk

In August, the Passamaquoddy Tribal community at Motahkomikuk (Indian Township), The Walks for Historical & Ecological Recovery (WHERE), and First Light put on an event at Motahkomikuk, to respect, honor, and uplift historical and ongoing Passamaquoddy resistance in the face of centuries of taking.

We walked down the section of Route 1 that runs through the reservation, stopping at many places to hear stories from elders and community members – stories took place right on the ground where we stood. Many stories centered on the “Roadblock Era,” a time of protest, direct action, and transformation. The events of the Roadblock Era led to the 1970’s Land Claims – where due to illegal treaties, the Wabanaki nations had a legitimate legal claim to two thirds of the state of Maine. Hearing these stories of bravery, love, and resistance was a powerful reminder that this movement has been strong for generations before us, and will continue for generations to come.

Peter Forbes called together Wabanaki people and non-native conservation people to this work of repair and return. His efforts allowed relationships to spark and proliferate. Where there once was division and lack of relationship, Peter’s efforts planted the seeds for a community of people growing and rowing in the same direction. First Light, today, carries forward many practices modeled by Peter and honed through his work with the Center for Whole Communities, the Refuge at Knoll Farm and the Better Selves Fellowship. Some of those include: extended Learning Journeys that offer the time and deep engagement needed to understand how to transform; asking one another to make heart-centered and courageous statements that counter business-as-usual: convening across cultures, caucusing within communities, challenging deeply-held conservation practices. And coursing through these practices is Peter’s conviction and willingness to voice what’s true. Peter has an ability to see the harms wrought by dominant conservation culture and call for change, and an ability to speak these harms to Wabanaki partners as a starting point for making amends. These efforts opened the way for the relationships that First Light, today, seeks to tend and grow.

As one conservation leader reflected– before First Light, it’s not that conservation was blind to Wabanaki communities, it’s that “we looked the other way”. How long could that have continued? Peter’s conviction, vulnerability, skill, and energies led the conservation community to look towards Wabanaki people. We were fortunate to see Wabanaki partners who agreed to look forward together. Everything else is possible because of that.

Peter is still present in this work but his role has changed, stepping from the role of leader to that of elder and advisor. Dominant culture does not have clearly marked paths that show us how to honor the elders in our work and in our lives and acknowledge the evolving lineage that we benefit from and share in. As bearers and sharers of the tools and traditions that have brought us together in this work, whether we are planting a tree together or facing the most difficult parts of our past, we move forward in gratitude and appreciation of the vision, effort, and gifts that Peter has brought to this work.

Penobscot Nation to reclaim 1,700 acres in rural Maine as tribe grows land holdings

The case for Wabanaki land return in Maine outlined in new report