Here are 3 places to watch the Land Back movement unfold in 2023

It was a hot, muggy July day when Nick Tilsen and about 200 other Lakotas blocked the way to a sacred mountain. The mountain is part of the He Sapa and is the centre of the Land Back movement in South Dakota. 

He Sapa is the name of the territory in Lakota, but most will recognize it as the Black Hills. Within these hills is Mount Rushmore, on the side of which the heads of four U.S. presidents are carved.

"To us, it's an international symbol of white supremacy because each one of those men on there were responsible for the persecution, the murder, the genocide of Indigenous people and ultimately the stealing of our lands," said Nick Tilsen in an interview with Unreserved's Rosanna Deerchild in which she spoke with four leaders within the Indigenous-led Land Back movement — from northern Manitoba to Hawaii to the Black Hills of South Dakota.

The movement, which has gained momentum in recent years, calls for the acknowledgement and return of Indigenous sovereignty over traditional territories. 

The land Tilsen wants back in Indigenous hands was promised to the Lakota people in the Treaty of 1868, an agreement between the United States government that recognized the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation. Today, it is the longest existing land struggle between the U.S. government and Indigenous people in America.

And so on July 3, 2020, a large crowd of Lakota people gathered at Mount Rushmore to shine a light on the long-standing battle for the Black Hills. Former U.S. President Donald Trump was set to lead a rally there; Tilsen and others blocked entrance to the park.

Tilsen is the CEO of NDN Collective, an organization that supports the self-determination of Indigenous people and uses the motto "defend, develop and decolonize."

The He Sapa is one of a number of sites on Turtle Island, or North America, where the Land Back movement is gaining momentum. Despite many of these battles being decades in the making, Indigenous communities are displaying new ways of ensuring their rights to the land are not ignored.

That day on Mount Rushmore, said Tilsen, "there might have only been a couple hundred of us, but it felt like there was thousands of us because you could feel the spirits, you could feel the ancestors." 

Tilsen and 21 others were arrested that day at Mount Rushmore, to make way for the rally. This past December, all charges were dropped after more than two years dragging through the state and federal court systems.

"The government has tried to turn this into a bureaucracy when it's actually not that complicated to return the land, and the title to the land, to the people."

In Hawaii stands another sacred mountain, Mauna Kea. It's Hawaii's highest peak, 4,207 metres above sea level, and together with Mauna Loa, the state's biggest mountain by volume, is seen as the source of all life for native Hawaiians, or Kanaka Maoli.

"We revere these areas not only because they hold the stories of our origin, but also because of their very height," said Noe Noe Wong-Wilson, who was born and raised on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. 

Beginning in the '60s, Mauna Kea was used for its great height by a group of independent astronomical research facilities. It is now the site of 13 telescopes commissioned by the University of Hawai'i, which had authority over the mountain at that time.