Land Back, Part 2

There is a formal LANDBACK campaign, with a petition here. There's a separate petition to close Mount Rushmore and return it and the Black Hills to the Lakota Nation.

As regular readers know, I've talked before about the idea of land back and also whose land it is I am living on. For today, I wanted to look a bit further into all of the places I've lived, not just the two where I've spent most of my life that were covered in that earlier post (one specific house in central New York and the Twin Cities).

I was born in Endicott, N.Y., which is in the same Onondaga (Haudenosaunee) territory as the house I grew up in, while my family lived on the edge of a different small town in Haudenosaunee Susquehannock territory. (The Susquehannock were not part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and appear to have been driven away or killed by the 18th century.) I wonder who controlled the territory in the 18th and early 19th century when European Americans were settling the town I grew up in? Possibly the Onondaga.

Between when I was 1 and 4 years old in the early 1960s, my family moved five times before returning to that same town to a different house that was further east in Onondaga territory. Those moves took us to:

• Milwaukee, Wis., an area south of the main airport that was home to many peoples, including the Potawatomi, Peoria, Kiikaaapoi (Kickapoo), Myaamia (Miami), and Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires of the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota)
  
• Alamagordo, N.M., home of the Mescalero Apache
  
• Melbourne, Fla., land of both the Seminole and the Ais (the Ais disappear from records after 1760)
  
• Levittown, N.Y., land of the Merrick and Massapequas (no Wikipedia pages exist on either of these peoples! This is the best page I found.)
  
• Quaker Lake, Pa. (which I guess is in Brackney, Pa.), located at the very southern edge of Onondoga territory but still within the greater Haudenosaunee nation
  

When I went to college, I spent my first year in Oneonta, N.Y., which is Oneida (Haudenosaunee) land, then the rest in Binghamton, N.Y., part of the same Onondaga territory as my home town.

After college, I spent three years in Washington D.C. in a couple of different neighborhoods, all located within a larger area of the Piscataway nation, with a smaller Anacostan territory overlaid right where most of the city proper is now (and hence the name Anacostia) that was later absorbed into the Piscataway. 

I highly recommend spending some time looking at all of the places you've lived. Just comparing the "regular" Google map, with all of its cities, highways, and state boundaries, to the native lands map is a learning experiences as you try to get your bearings. I, at least, am not accustomed to looking at the land and its natural features instead of artificial landmarks. It makes it hard to find the same place to compare one map to another and is pretty disorienting: a good experience for someone like me who is descended from settler colonialists.

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I welcome any corrections to how I've described or named any of these peoples, their nations, or territories. As always, I'm working from the maps on nativeland.ca.