- Details
- By Chez Oxendine
- Real Estate
After years of building relationships across Indian Country, NDN Collective is formalizing a network it says has already been operating in practice.
The Rapid City, S.D.-based nonprofit has launched the LandBack Action Network, a platform designed to connect tribal nations and organizations, match funders with projects and provide shared strategy and support.
The network, also known as LAN, launches with a redesigned landback.org as its public-facing platform. The LAN platform is intended to coordinate existing partnerships and expand participation, building on relationships developed over the past seven years.
Membership manager Nicole Yanes said the network builds on roughly seven years of work with grantees, borrowers and partner organizations.
“We already have the network … we’re building the infrastructure to do that,” Yanes told Tribal Business News.
“As Indigenous people, as tribal citizens, land is foundational to our very existence,” said Gaby Strong, managing director of NDN Foundation and NDN Collective vice president.
NDN Collective Founder and CEO Nick Tilsen said the network is intended to connect Indigenous communities working on land return across regions.
“It includes building infrastructure for land-based practices like food sovereignty, language restoration and ecological restoration,” Tilsen said.
Yanes said the network creates a more structured way to provide strategy, resources and coordination to organizers already working in the space.
The network opened with 50 partners through a soft rollout, including tribes, Native-serving organizations and individual citizens. Applications have increased as outreach expands, Yanes said.
The network is open to tribal nations, organizations and individuals already engaged in landback and related work, including community members without formal roles.
Strong said organizers have consistently asked for support on power‑building strategies, not just funding. She said LAN is meant to help people think through how to organize in their communities, how to plan and how to bring their voices together in a coordinated way.
“Our ability to mobilize, organize and collaborate in a way that protects and defends who we are, and what’s most important to us, is critically important right now,” said Strong. “We need to be able to plan our own agenda and work toward a future where our children and grandchildren can live safely and peacefully.”
Ahead of the launch, NDN Collective surveyed partners and found strong interest in food sovereignty. Many respondents were working on land‑based food systems and looking for ways to connect with others doing similar work.
The network is intended to help connect those efforts and align them with funding and technical support. Yanes said the network is designed to support both rapid response and long-term planning, with an emphasis on coordinating work across communities.
Strong said the effort reflects a broader focus on collective action, bringing together organizers working across regions and issues.
“It takes work, it takes advocacy, it takes building the voice of the people,” Strong said. “And there’s many ways to do that.”
