Winter 2026 Happenings & Updates

Below you'll hear all about the latest happenings and events taking place in the First Light community. If you enjoy reading and want to stay abreast of the latest news, consider subscribing to our seasonal newsletter.

This winter, ICE arrived with the ice, in a horrible irony of federal acronyms. Last winter, in Confluence, we studied Donna Loring’s work One Nation Under Fraud: A Remonstrance, and saw how state power long attempted to Isolate, Control, and Eliminate – to ICE – Wabanaki people. The perils of ICE and ICE – harassment and division and snatching and murder – are enactments of fear and hatred. The violence of the present occupation is making visible and unambiguous the fabric underlying our colonial nation-state.

Unambiguous, but not unchallenged. As federal agents moved in, community members across Maine and Minneapolis formed networks to share information and resources, to help those targeted stay a bit more safe. Nishnaabeg scholar/skier/snowmobiler Leanne Betasamosake Simpson might call this network a sintering.

Sintering is the English word for what happens when snowflakes, having fallen from the sky, settle together into a snowpack. Sintering is not melting, but staying frozen, and forming strong, dense bonds across many individual flakes. One snowflake, alone, melts quickly in the sun. Many snowflakes, sintered together, become a snowpack sturdy enough to bear skis and snowmobiles, strong enough to linger long into spring. 

Simpson grooms the ski track in her home and asks how sintering can connect anticolonial efforts across the globe. And today, in the cold winter marked by ICE, I see networks of care and think about sintering, about individuals connected in coalition. Water is unstoppable. When the time is right, may we melt and flow. When the time is right, may we bond with one another against attempts at isolation, control, and elimination.

Below are some of the voices that help offer a guide through these histories/present – consider taking some time with these and share them with a colleague or board member:

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s 2025 book, Theory of Water (or check out this recent interview with Leanne, which features sintering in a time of ICE).

Donna Loring, Eric Mehnert, and Joseph Gousse’s 2022 report, One Nation Under Fraud: A Remonstrance

Indigenous organizers report from Minneapolis, in a series of recent episodes of Red Power Hour.

Tributary Land Returns

Just over a year ago, the idea for the Tributary Land Returns – a set of land returns affirmed by the Wabanaki Commission – was born. Wabanaki Tribes and many non-native organizations were already working individually on multiple land returns. The idea that transformed all of us was, what if we all work together? 

The past year has been a testament to the power of working as a movement. Through intertribal diplomacy, inter-organizational partnerships, and cross-cultural collaboration, the five Wabanaki communities in Maine and a committed group of non-native land trust partners are working together to return over 50,000 acres to Wabanaki ownership and care, in the largest return of private land in the history of the United States. For some of us, these are old ways of working, for some of us, this is new. For all of us, this collaboration is a gift, one that has strengthened relationships and made possible work that none of us could have accomplished alone.

Tributary Partners Gathering

At the start of 2026, the people of Tributary – Tribal leadership, Commission members, and land trust partners – gathered together for a day to share our learnings, support each other, and plan for the future. It was a day of celebration too. We’ve reached a half-way point in our journey, with half the funds raised for the entirety of Tributary, and five of the eleven projects fully returned.

Here, you can learn more about what we learned that day, and read detailed project updates from five of the returns still in process. 

Tributary in 2026

As of this winter, five of the eleven Tributary land returns are complete.  This interactive map shows land that has returned, and the land in the process of returning.  

As we celebrate the returns that have been completed, much work still remains ahead of us. First Light is in the final stages of fundraising for the Bridgewater return to Mi’kmaq nation, a 3,400 acre forested parcel with extensive wetlands and waterways, with a planned return date in June 2026.  The return of Wáhsehtəkʷ to Penobscot nation is deep in process; Trust for Public land has raised half of the funds for this ambitious return of 30,000 acres of forests and wetlands. Maine Coast Heritage Trust is actively raising funds for the return of 6,300 acres on Rocky Lake in Edmunds to the Passamaquoddy Tribe, and for the return of a coastal island at the mouth of the Kennebec River. First Light continues to raise funds to reimburse the Passamaquoddy Tribe for their purchase of 7,800 acres on the South Branch of the Penobscot, to make this acquisition a fully funded land return.

In November, the participants of the Confluence Learning Journey came together for their final session. These 120 participants represent 49 organizations, hailing from across Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. They spent the last 13 months together delving into the mainstream conservation movement’s role in historic and current land theft, learning about the much longer and deeper history of Wabanaki land relationships, culture, and sciences, and reimagining a conservation movement that centers Wabanaki land relationships and sovereignty. Members of Confluence created an audio reflection of their time together, which you can listen to here.

The 120 Confluence alumni now join the First Light community, carrying forward the work of relearning, recentering, and returning in their own ways and in their organizations and communities. Confluence participants and alumni from previous learning journeys met each other in a joyous day in person at Walking Together, a convening of the First Light community focused on relationship building and learning from each other. In the coming year, First Light will continue to offer spaces for the First Light community to come together, including monthly Community Conversations on zoom, and in-person regional gatherings. 

First Light will not be offering a Learning Journey in 2026. But we are working on an exciting relearning project. For many years, we’ve heard from the land trust community that there is a need for people to learn at their own pace, and a need for resources to help educate new staff as they join organizations. In response, we are spending the next year distilling the learnings of Confluence into a revamped self-guided curriculum, complete with videos, readings, and reflection and discussion prompts. Our goal is to create a lasting offering that can support a broad community of learners, in Wabanakik and beyond.

First Light is many things. We are a coalition of organizations and individuals who have come together to breathe life into a conservation movement based in right relationships with Wabanaki people and land. We are a very small team of staff. We are non-native partners working with the Wabanaki Commission on Land and Stewardship, towards healing relationships with land and each other. We are a program of New Learning Journey, an organization based in Vermont, dedicated to growing a conservation movement grounded in solidarity with Indigenous people. 

Over the next two years, First Light is undergoing a thoughtful and strategic organizational transition, through which we will separate organizationally from New Learning Journey, to become an independent entity. As we look towards the future and the journey ahead, we look to the past too, in deep gratitude to the people whose struggles and lifelong work have made it possible for us to do the work we do today. Here, we share a history of where we came from.

Wolankeyutomone kisi apaciyewik ("let us take good care of what has been returned" ), is a grant making program created by the Wabanaki Commission on Land & Stewardship. The fund provides unrestricted, general operating support to Wabanaki tribal governments, Wabanaki NGOs, and Wabanaki citizens to fulfill their care-taking responsibilities of lands and waters across Wabanaki Traditional Territory in what is now known as Maine. 

Wolankeyutomone kisi apaciyewik’s second round of grant applications were received this January.  Grant decisions will be made through a Wabanaki-led participatory grantmaking process. 

Learn more about Wolankeyutomone kisi apaciyewik, and the inspiring work being undertaken by the 2025 grantees.