It’s common to feel a deep sense of injustice for what happened in history and to hunger to create a better future by doing good work today. But what does that good work look like? In an economy and legal system filled with structural injustice, how do groups of people build a better world?

In the lands commonly called Humboldt, Calif., the Wiyot tribe and settler-colonizer organizations are working together to do this. At the intersection of land justice, language justice, and ecological restoration they are creating a legal framework for how to give the land back to First Nations so that healing of, and on, the land can both happen.

To do this, the Wiyot Tribe and Cooperation Humboldt are working together to form a type of Community Land Trust (CLT), Dishgamu Humboldt, the first of its kind, to structurally ensure that the Wiyot tribe will maintain decision-making power in this land trust, forever.

Property is often considered to be a ‘bundle of rights’ that defines who gets to use or alter a space. A CLT legally and financially separates the two bundles of property rights we usually think about together: the ownership of buildings and the ownership of the land that those buildings are on.

Under a CLT, buildings can be bought and sold based on their value. The difference is that the land beneath those buildings gets held by a type of nonprofit in perpetuity—which is as close to “forever” in legal terms as you can get. In this way, the financial value of the land gets separated from the buildings, effectively de-commodifying the land and preventing it from being bought up by those who only see it as a financial asset.

Read the full article about Indigenous-led community land trusts by Aaron Fernando at Shareable.