“Colonialism is a structure, not an event,” Onika Abraham, Blue Sky Funders Forum’s Executive Director, reminded attendees during the recent Tributary Project Land Justice webinar, referencing the work of historian, scholar, and key figure in the field of settler-colonial studies, Patrick Wolfe. “And structural harm requires structural solutions.”
This webinar, hosted by Blue Sky Funders Forum, the Highstead Foundation, the Maine Philanthropy Center, Resist!, and the Sewall Foundation, brought together funders to explore how land return, long-term relationship building, and risk-taking philanthropy can move us toward land justice. The conversation offered both a powerful case study through the Tributary Project and a set of invitations to philanthropy.
The Tributary Project and Wabanaki Land Returns
The webinar opened with an overview of the Tributary Project, a collaboration between the Wabanaki Commission on Land and Stewardship, First Light, and multiple conservation organizations and funders.
Otto Muller, Core Staff Member on Resourcing at First Light, described how the work is grounded in Wabanaki cultural access and land relationships as well as land return. The projects ensure Wabanaki citizens can practice cultural lifeways on the land, and help non-Native organizations learn how to respectfully support Wabanaki cultural access and avoid making harvesters feel unwelcome on all lands they hold, not just lands that are being returned. Otto walked us through a series of land returns already completed:
- Medicine Wheel – a return of waterfront, sugarbush, and agricultural land to the Mi’kmaq Nation
- 1300 acres on the North Branch of the Meduxnekeag River – now held by the Houlton Band of Maliseet, where they now own several miles of the river and are already doing in-stream river restoration work
- A Passamaquoddy return on Patent Pond
- A saltwater island return to the Penobscot Nation – the first held since colonization
- Barnard Woods – a parcel that not only connected existing Penobscot trust lands, but restored an access road that had been inaccessible for many years.
The active returns now underway are larger and more complex, including:
- A historic return in Bridgewater that will double the Mi’kmaq Nation’s land holdings,
- Wahsehtek, a historic and enormous return between the Trust for Public Land and the Penobscot Nation to return 30,000 acres
- A project on the South Branch of the Penobscot that will create a 28,000-acre contiguous parcel of trust land for the Passamaquoddy tribe by adding a 7,700-acre parcel to connect existing trust lands
- Rocky Lake – a return that will help meet urgent needs around drinking water and housing for the Passamaquoddy tribe at Sipayik.
Otto also highlighted that the Tributary Project not only enables land returns, but it also supports Wabanaki citizens, nonprofits, and tribal programs that are rekindling the Wabanaki relationship with their land through the Wolankeyutomone Kisi Apaciyewik Fund. The fund has backed projects like connecting tribal youth and elders hunting and fishing together, building an outdoor kitchen focused on Wabanaki foodways, and creating community caches of materials. The fund made a first round of 14 grants and is now reviewing applications for a second round of grants for 2026.
Fundraising for all of The Tributary Project’s efforts is well underway: “We’ve got 60% raised,” Otto shared, with a mix of jointly raised funds and funds coming through specific partner organizations.
“These structural solutions, those relational solutions,” Otto concluded, “are what we are committed to building through the Tributary Project.”
A Funder’s Pause That Catalyzed Collaboration
Gabriela Alcalde of the Elmina B. Sewall Foundation shared her foundation’s evolution of land justice integration and their journey toward collaboration on this project. Gabriela grounded her remarks in Sewall’s long-term relationship with Wabanaki partners, which predates her tenure at the foundation. As a new Executive Director, Gabriela stewarded and expanded the existing grant program for Wabanaki communities herself, in part to convey her respect for tribal communities and the importance of these relationships to Sewall’s values and vision. Over time, she and her colleagues noticed that requests related to land justice and land return increased, and they realized they needed to pause and reflect. The pause was not a halt to their grantmaking, but a stop to their internal default responses: “We said, let’s take a beat here… are we reacting rather than responding?” Were they aligning with their values, or reproducing harmful philanthropic patterns—like pitting vital projects against each other?
In conversation with Wabanaki grantee partners and conservation groups, the foundation clarified criteria that would guide their support. Gabriela shared the new criteria that they circulated in 2020:
“Support is prioritized for efforts that focus on moving decision making closer to community, projects that aim to repair historical inequities and harms, and…contribute to Sewall’s long-term impact of having organizations and efforts that are led by Black, Indigenous, people of color, women, and rural Mainers be well-resourced to advance their mission.”
Crucially, when it came to the Tributary Project, Sewall chose not to decide which pieces to fund on their own, but rather turned with trust to movement leaders:
“We said, we would invite you all to meet and decide, with the guidance and leadership of the Wabanaki Commission, what requests you want to bring to us so that we can consider it as a whole, instead of inadvertently pinning one project against the other and having them compete for limited resources.”
Sewall backed this shift not only with new capital, but also with structural change within the foundation:
- A new, board-pre-approved, five-year funding mechanism to grant $5 million over five years, above and beyond their multi-year grants budget.
- A transformational grant of $2.45 million for the Tributary Project—far above Sewall’s typical grant size, in recognition of the transformative nature of the work and the strength of the partnership.
Gabriela invited other funders to understand that when working with Indigenous nations:
“You need to think of this as international work, because it is—you’re working with sovereign nations… If we go to an Indigenous partner and tell them, ‘These are our outcomes, will you do this?’ That’s imperialism. We don’t do that.”
She also urged funders, who are accustomed to analyzing the risk of potential investments, to recognize “the risk of not acting.” When land is involved, the risk of inaction may lead to irreversible ecological degradation, further dispossession, and land loss.
“A Game Changer”: Impacts on the Ground
Perhaps the most evocative picture of what land return makes possible came from Shannon Hill, Environmental Director of the Mi’kmaq Nation, and representative on the Wabanaki Commission on Land and Stewardship.
In Maine, the Mi’kmaq Nation has fewer members than most tribes in the state. The Mi’kmaq Nation is federally recognized, but due to the controversial Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act, it does not have its full sovereignty recognized by the State of Maine. Before the land returns, her community held about 2,000 acres, a patchwork of parcels all over Aroostook County, some as small as 20 acres. That fragmented land base made it nearly impossible to practice cultural lifeways—hunting, fishing, gathering medicines, and passing knowledge to children. Access to waterways was challenging, and even where there was access, there were fish consumption warnings due to pollution and other health concerns.
The Medicine Wheel land return as part of the Tributary Project changed everything: “It was 103 acres. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but to us, that’s huge… we just doubled our land mass in that one area.”
That parcel provides access to a sugar bush, allowing the tribe to tap maple trees for the first time and expand a strong food sovereignty program. To feed their community safely, they started their own fish hatchery, a land-based aquaculture initiative where they are “raising our own brook trout so we can feed our community,” Shannon shared. It also offered their first access to water on any of their properties: “We have canoes that have sat in a rack for a decade with nowhere to go,” she recalled. “That 100 acres alone right there really just changed the lives of our little tribe.”
Looking ahead to another 3,300-acre return, Shannon described the opportunity to finally have a large enough contiguous land base to conduct wildlife and ecosystem monitoring, manage moose and other species responsibly, and secure long-term cultural and food practices.
She called the Tributary Project “a game changer for our tribe,” adding, “I’m hoping one day this is going to go down in a history book somewhere, and I have grandchildren that are going to read about the work that we’re doing right now.”
Confederacy, Collective Action, and Rethinking Leadership
Darren Ranco, a Penobscot citizen and leader within the Wabanaki Commission, framed the Tributary Project within longstanding Indigenous governance and diplomacy.
He noted that the Commission itself emerged from Wabanaki Confederacy’s generations-long traditions of interdependence, consensus decision-making, and diplomatic frameworks that recognize both autonomy and collective movement.
“We are part of a confederacy… [this is] the framework in which we have worked for thousands of years and continue to work in collaboration through the modern day as different nations.”
Darren emphasized that collective action is happening on both sides:
“Our ability to have collective action as tribal nations makes this work really special. But I would say that equally of First Light… the way they are bringing together multiple land trusts and conservation groups… that’s unheard of.”
Reflecting on how this collective alignment is crucial, Darren pushed back on funder expectations for singular leaders:
“We resist…this idea of ‘take me to your leader’… we are not organized that way. We are interdependently moving forward in a journey together. And even the idea that I’m an executive director of a nonprofit that represents all these tribes is really sort of silly. I’m a convener.”
For funders, that means learning to build relationships with networks and councils, not just institutions and CEOs.
What Funders Can Do Now
The goal of this webinar series is to catalyze the will, build peer relationships, and support the capacity of funders to invest in land justice. The small breakout groups that followed the panel discussion helped funders in attendance learn about each other’s work and reflect on how their current grant portfolios intersect with land return or Indigenous sovereignty. In closing, the speakers offered a set of clear invitations for philanthropy:
- Center Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination
- Treat this as international work with sovereign nations, not as a typical domestic grant program.
- Invest in long-term, multi-year support
- Avoid “flavor of the month” funding cycles; justice and land return require time, depth, and staying power.
- Fund coalition building and convening, not just projects
- As Otto reflected, funding that explicitly prioritized coalition-building helped transform relationships among Native and non-Native organizations and unlock a new culture of collaboration.
- Take risks—and also account for the risk of not acting
- Especially when land is involved, inaction entrenches harm.
- Use positional power to shift narratives
- As Shannon urged, funders can help “change minds and attitudes and biases” toward Indigenous communities.
The Tributary Project shows that when Indigenous leadership, bold organizing, and courageous philanthropy come together, land justice can move from aspiration to reality—one return, one relationship, one watershed at a time.
As Gabriela reminded us near the end of the session, this is not a theoretical exercise:
“This is now possible. Funder groups—we talk about what is possible. It’s already happening. It is the largest land return of its kind that we’re aware of… I don’t think the question is whether this will continue. The question is, which funders will be stepping in to be part of this practice?”
Would you like to join our next Land Justice Webinar? Interested in joining the Land Justice Funder Organizing Group? Sign up for Blue Sky’s newsletter, or contact Onika Abraham at Blue Sky Funders Forum, onika@blueskyfundersforum.org.