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.

Each one of these projects is deeply meaningful: the Wáhsehtək^w project alone is larger than any previous land return between a non-profit and a Tribe. Returns in Aroostook County will nearly double the land holdings of the Mi’kmaq and Maliseet, and projects across the state will connect Tribal trust land held by the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy creating large woodland tracts for hunting and cultural use.  The Tributary Land Returns will return stewardship to lakes, rivers, wetlands, and coastal islands, provide space for economic growth and development, support Wabanaki land care without restriction, and give room for communities and dreams to grow.

This set of land returns did not come from a legislative act or an executive action.  It emerged from a grassroots effort involving dozens of committed organizations. For seven years, a community of organizations focused on Indigenous land return in Maine and nationwide,  have been working in close collaboration with Wabanaki leaders focused on restoring Wabanaki land relations and diplomacy.  These efforts, which resulted in the partnership between First Light and the Wabanaki Commission on Land and Stewardship, have transformed the field of conservation in the state and built the foundation of trust and cooperation that supports these historic returns and reclamations of land.

Colonization is a structure, not an event.  Repairing the ongoing harms of centuries of dispossession and extraction requires structural solutions.  It requires us to work together in new ways, to organize land return in ways that center and build Indigenous sovereignty and power.  Each project in Tributary emerged through thoughtful dialogue between Wabanaki and non-native partners, and the group of projects was affirmed by the Wabanaki Commission, a representative intertribal body that speaks to the critical needs of the individual Tribes as well as the vision of Wabanaki well-being at large.  Like tributaries flowing into a river basin, the collective impact of this work will reshape the terrain.

The Tributary Land Returns are ambitious. Land return at this scale, with this degree of cooperation and coordination across different Tribes and organizations has not happened before, in Maine or anywhere in the US.  But it is happening now, and it will happen again.  These projects are the outcome of relationships and structures that were built to last, and built to sustain Wabanaki land relations that have existed since time immemorial and are at work repairing the landscape.

Tributary is flowing forward and land is already being returned.