Struggle for the Land


Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Colonization is a book by Ward Churchill. It is a collection of essays on the efforts of Native Americans in the United States and in Canada to maintain their land tenure claims against government and corporate infringement. Equating colonization with genocide and ecocide, the author provides examples of resistance.
Beginning with an overview of the impact of legal doctrines established by the United States and Canada on Native people, and moving on to explore a series of case studies indicative of the effects of domination "by North America's settler-states," the book concludes with a discussion paper offering a scenario for an alternate future.

Publishing information

It was first published with the subtitle Indigenous Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Expropriation in Contemporary North America by Common Courage Press in 1993. In 1999, it was resubtitled and released in a revised and expanded edition by Arbeiter Ring Publishing. City Lights Publishers published it in 2002 as a 460-page hardcover and paperback.

Synopsis

As its foreword, the book features a poem by Jimmie Durham. The preface is by Winona LaDuke and poems from John Trudell's Living in Reality appear as preludes to each section. Russell Means' 1982 platform for president of the Oglala people is included as an appendix. Maps of Indian land claims/treaty areas are included. The book is dedicated "for my mother."
The collected essays, mostly previously published, provide a history of Native American struggle for decolonization provided through the examples of the Haudenosaunee in upstate New York, the Lakotas on the northern Plains, the Lubicon Cree in northern Alberta, and the Navajo and Newe in the upper Sonoran. The case is made that uranium mining, coal stripping, hydropower generation, and water diversion are ecocidal as well as genocidal, and that the ecological damage poses a threat to all North Americans.
Churchill also discusses the Native North American diaspora caused by their displacement.

Awards

The book won the Gustavus Myers Award for Literature on Human Rights.

Contents (to the revised edition)

Foreword by Jimmie Durham
Preface by Winona LaDuke
Introduction by Ward Churchill