Latest / The Good Fight: People Fighting for Justice & Change / Why Your Donation Check Isn’t Enough: The Truth About Land Back | The Good Fight
Transcript
- You think writing a check solves the problem, but land isn’t just dirt and trees—it’s memory, it’s grief, and it’s power. And power doesn’t give itself back because you sent a PDF receipt. Let’s get practical for a moment. I want you to picture your last donation. Maybe it was for food relief during the holidays, or maybe it was medical supplies when a loved one got sick. You felt good, didn’t you? That warm, fuzzy glow of having done something right. You clicked a button, the money moved, and the problem felt slightly smaller. It’s a beautiful feeling. But today, I need to ask you to sit with a harder question. What happens when the problem isn’t a temporary crisis, but a permanent condition built on theft? When we talk about Indigenous land rights, we aren’t talking about a disaster that happened yesterday. We are talking about a wound that is seventy years old, bleeding slowly into every generation since. If you treat this like a flu season—throwing tissues at it and hoping it passes—you will fail. Not because you lack heart, but because you lack strategy. Strategic giving isn’t about being cold or calculating. It’s about respecting the reality of the situation enough to understand what actually heals it. A band-aid on a bullet hole doesn’t work. You need surgery. You need to understand the anatomy of the injury before you pick up the scalpel. Here is where most people get stuck. They try to view land through the lens of real estate. Square footage, market value, zoning laws. This is the colonizer’s brain trying to make sense of something that defies its logic. To many Indigenous nations, land is not property. It is an ancestor. It is a relative. It is the library of their history and the pharmacy of their medicine. When you strip land from a community, you don’t just take away their home; you sever their connection to their own soul. Think about that weight. Imagine if someone took away your ability to speak your native language, or burned down the church or temple that holds your family’s rituals. Now imagine they did it legally, signed in ink, enforced by guns. That is the baseline. So when we talk about 'Land Back,' we aren’t asking for charity. We are asking for restitution. We are asking for the return of something that was never ours to take in the first place. This shifts the entire moral framework of your donation. You are not a benevolent giver saving the poor. You are a participant in correcting a historical wrong. That changes everything about how you should approach this. Now, let’s look at where your money usually goes. Most of us donate to large, well-known organizations. Big logos, glossy websites, celebrity ambassadors. These groups do important work. They feed the hungry. They shelter the homeless. But here is the hard part: they rarely challenge the systems that created the hunger or the homelessness. When it comes to Indigenous sovereignty, general nonprofits often act as buffers. They stand between the government and the tribe, managing the conflict so no one gets too uncomfortable. This is safe. It is also ineffective. If you want to support Indigenous land rights strategically, you have to look past the middlemen. You have to find the groups that are led by Indigenous people themselves. Groups that are willing to say, 'No,' to federal agencies. Groups that are fighting in courtrooms, not just feeding lines. This might feel risky. Large organizations feel stable. Small, fierce grassroots groups can feel chaotic. But chaos is often just order waiting to be recognized. Stability can sometimes mean stagnation. You have to be willing to trust the voices on the ground over the voices in the boardroom. So, what does strategic giving actually look like in practice? It looks like following the legal warriors. Land defense is largely a legal battle. It involves treaty rights, water rights, and jurisdictional sovereignty. There are specific legal funds dedicated to these causes. They don’t have TV ads. They don’t have red carpets. They have lawyers who work for minimum wage and activists who sleep in tents to protect sacred sites. When you direct your dollars to these specific legal defense funds, you are buying time. You are buying expert counsel. You are keeping the lights on in the fight. This is where your empathy meets action. It’s not enough to feel sad about the injustice. You have to fund the mechanism that corrects it. Transparency matters here. Look at the breakdown of expenses. Are eighty percent of your dollars going to administrative salaries and galas? Or are they going directly to legal retainers and community bail funds? Be ruthless in your scrutiny. It’s not cynical; it’s efficient. We have limited resources. Let’s make sure they hit the target, not the wall. There is a quiet shame that comes with this work. Many of us were raised to believe that the system works, that if we follow the rules, we get rewarded. Supporting Indigenous land rights requires you to unlearn that comfort. It requires you to admit that the foundation of our current society is cracked. That can be destabilizing. You might feel angry at your government, frustrated at your neighbors, or exhausted by the scale of the problem. That exhaustion is normal. But don’t let it turn you into a cynic. Cynicism is easy. Hope is hard. Hope requires you to keep showing up even when the news is bad. Keep reading the reports. Keep listening to the podcasts hosted by Native journalists. Keep donating, even if it’s small amounts, to the local tribes near you. Every dollar is a vote for a different future. One where land is respected. One where treaties are honored. It’s not a quick fix. It’s a long game. And you are playing it now. I want to leave you with a question. Not a rhetorical one. A real one. What is one thing you can stop doing this week to make space for this kind of deep, structural work? Maybe it’s scrolling past the headlines without clicking. Maybe it’s buying from a corporation that ignores indigenous labor rights. Maybe it’s staying silent at the dinner table when someone makes a casual comment about 'discovery.' What’s next? The next step is always personal. It starts with your attention. Where you place your attention determines where your energy flows. Place it on the truth, however ugly. Place it on the solution, however difficult. And then, place your money where your values actually live. Not where they sound nice. Live them. That’s the only way we change the world. Not with noise, but with nerve. Thank you for sitting with me today. For listening, for questioning, for caring enough to look closer. I’m Judy Growney. Keep fighting the good fight. I’ll see you next time.