NDN Collective launches ‘Land Back’ podcast

Bringing stories from the front lines to earbuds near you, the first episode, hosted by Nick Tilsen, the founder, president and CEO of the NDN Collective, dropped Monday.

Tilsen grew up in the American Indian Movement and feels there is a strong through line from that movement to his work at NDN, an Indigenous-led organization in Rapid City dedicated to building Indigenous power through organizing, activism, philanthropy, grantmaking, capacity-building and narrative change.

“We decided to launch the ‘Land Back for the People’ podcast because it was a recognition that the land back movement is the Red Power movement of our generation,” said Tilsen, Oglala Lakota. “And we have to continue when we’re in these movements in the time of rapid change, we have to continue to articulate what this movement’s about. We’re in a time where this, some landback victory, is going down and happening for Indigenous people and we need to highlight those.”

Tilsen pointed to the 12 acres of land recently returned to the Gabrielino Shoshone Tribal Nation of Southern California. In August 2022, the Anahuacalmecac International University Preparatory of North America arranged the funding to purchase the land for $800,000. The K-12 charter school in the El Sereno neighborhood of Los Angeles, plans to operate an Indigenous learning village on the site.

But there are not only victories on the horizon.

“Equally, there are massive land back fights happening with threat to our ability to get our land returned,” said Tilsen. “So we have to continue to bring those to light and all of the land back struggles that are happening.”

Future topics of the podcast will include reclaiming Indigenous lifeways, rebuilding Indigenous economies, and, or course, getting Native land back. But for the first episode? It had to be Madonna Thunder Hawk.

“Madonna has been at almost every single Indigenous resistance struggle for Indigenous people in this part of the world for the past 50, 60 years. And, uh, and she’s one of the matriarchs of the movement,” said Tilsen.

And she’s happy to spread the word.

“I’m just what my elders did when I was young,” said Thunder Hawk, Oohenumpa Lakota. “They showed up, they had our back. They let us know that what we were doing was right. That’s what I do now as an elder. I support the young people that are continuing this struggle.”

The episodes will be recorded in studios at NDN’s headquarters in the sacred Paha Sapa (Black Hills) of western South Dakota.

“This is an intergenerational movement that has been passed down from generation to generation,” said Tilsen. “We didn’t discover this (movement). In fact, quite frankly, it was instilled in us. And so having a podcast that can weave in and out of the generations and include stories from different generations is something whose time has come.”

The “Land Back for the People” podcast can be found wherever you get your podcasts.