Indigenous identity and land

For many Indigenous peoples, identity is not separable from land — not as metaphor but as ontology: the territory is not where you are from but what you are made of, the source of language, story, ceremony, and personhood. To be removed from the land is therefore a wound to the self at its deepest register, one that colonialism understood and exploited deliberately. The recovery of identity and the recovery of relationship to land are, in this frame, the same project.