#LandBack is an international movement of Indigenous peoples regaining ancestral homelands, but what does this have to do with religion?
 This talk engages this question by unpacking the multilayered meaning of land in Indigenous contexts. For many Indigenous peoples around the world, land is central to identity, spirituality, politics, and culture. Creation stories often recount Indigenous nations being both from a place and of a place. These stories and the related ceremonial practices situate Indigenous peoples within a web of relationships and responsibilities to land and to other-than-human beings. Today, Indigenous nations actively work to maintain these relationships and responsibilities amid ongoing threats of land dispossession, displacement, and violence.
The #LandBack movement works to combat these threats. It is “the reclamation of everything stolen from the original peoples,” according to the South Dakota-based Indigenous organization NDN Collective. This includes ceremony, language, and political sovereignty—all of which are rooted in the land itself. #LandBack is about more than just the physical return of land. It is about restoring and perpetuating the complex relations embodied in land. This talk engages how for many, the restoration of these relations is simultaneously about the continuity of spiritual practices. #LandBack also invites all of us to consider the land on which we live and the relations we have to the original peoples of that place.
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Your Instructor
Dr. Abel R. Gomez
Abel R. Gomez is Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at San José State University. His research and teaching examine the relationships between sacred sites, ceremony, gender and sexuality, Indigenous cosmologies, and (de)colonization. Dr. Gomez engages in ethnographic research about and with Ohlone tribal communities in the San Francisco Bay and Monterey Bay regions to theorize enduring meaning of homeland and coalitions to protect sacred sites. He earned a PhD in Religion with a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Women’s and Gender Studies from Syracuse University. Dr. Gomez’s scholarship is published in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, and Political Theology. His public-facing scholarship is featured in numerous online publications, podcasts, and on YouTube. A first-generation queer Latinx scholar from a Mexican and Central American immigrant family, Dr. Gomez was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Ohlone homelands.
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