Continental Land Back: Managing Mobilities and Enacting Relationalities in Indigenous Landscapes

ABSTRACT

This article examines differences between settler connectivity and Indigenous relationality by contrasting the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y) and the confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes of the Flathead Nation (CSKT). The first half of the article focuses on Y2Y and the politics of settler connectivity within the landscape-scale conservation movement. Using slogans like ‘Freedom to Roam’ and ‘Making Connections, Naturally,’ Y2Y forges new conservation geographies and movement corridors that allow endangered species to travel widely and adapt to a warming world. By denaturalizing connectivity, this article considers how the landscape-scale conservation movement might cease stewarding settler colonialism. The second half of the article explores the Flathead Nation’s long tradition of cultivating expansive relationality through the management of mobilities, including pipelines, railroads, and highways. The article concludes with a story about the National Bison Range, which was returned to the Flathead Nation in January 2021. Drawing on CSKT’s longstanding management of bison mobilities and unbreakable bison relations, this story 1) demonstrates that Indigenous peoples are already practicing landscape-scale conservation and 2) offers clues about how the landscape-scale conservation movement might learn from Indigenous relationality and serve as a powerful tool to return Indigenous land – continental land back – by amplifying land relations that have never been lost.

KEYWORDS:

• Settler colonialism
• mobility
• relationality
• connectivity
• landscape-scale conservation
• Yellowstone to Yukon conservation initiative
• confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes of the Flathead Nation
• land back
• Montana

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Nick Estes writes, ‘This is a huge word in Indigenous studies right now – relationality – that I think has become mystified’ (Serpe 2019). For Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2017), relationality is ‘the core presupposition of the Indigenous social research paradigm’ (71).

2. According to the report, the establishment of the public land system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constitutes the first stage of American conservation. The second stage is associated with the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s and key legislation such as the Wilderness Act and Endangered Species Act.

3. For more about Salish and Pend d’Oreille place-names, see: Séliš-Qlispé Ethnogeography Project, Séliš-Qlispé Culture Committee. http://csktsalish.org/.

4. In her more recent book, A Short History of the Blockade, Simpson further develops the theory of ‘affirmative refusal’ through stories about beavers. The ‘life-giving possibilities of dams and the world-building possibilities of blockades,’ she argues, deepen ‘our understanding of Indigenous resistance as both a negation and an affirmation’ (L Simpson 2021).

5. The Séliš-Qlispé Culture Committee produced an audio CD and brochure that features additional narration by SQCC Director Tony Incashola along with a pronunciation and translation guide for all the place-names.

6. For a detailed history of the Bison Range, see ‘Bison Range Restoration’ (CSKT 2021), which features a short documentary film, ‘In the Spirit of ?Atatíce?: The Untold Story of the National Bison Range’ (2021).