For 117 years, the University of Minnesota operated a research forest on land it had no rightful claim to. The Cloquet Forestry Center sits entirely within the Fond du Lac Reservation and was taken from the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa through a series of treaty-busting acts in the late 1800s, used to seize control of valuable timberland.
Last month, Governor Tim Walz signed a bonding bill that set it right. All 3,400 acres are being returned to the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, with the University of Minnesota retaining access for research and education during a transition period.
Fond du Lac Tribal Chairman Bruce M. Savage called the transfer far more than a land transaction: “This is not only the return of land. It is the return of even more responsibility. It is the return of a relative.”
When Indigenous peoples talk about land, they are rarely talking about property. They are talking about kinship, a web of responsibilities that run in both directions between people and place.
The dominant culture spent a century running research programs on land it called its own, producing knowledge about northern forest ecosystems while the people with the deepest knowledge of those ecosystems were shut out.
Now those people are coming home.
The Minnesota agreement is a data point in a larger pattern that conservation science keeps confirming and policy keeps ignoring. Research published in January 2023 found that forests managed by Indigenous peoples between 2001 and 2021 were carbon sinks, while forests not managed by Indigenous peoples were on average net carbon sources.
The forests do not behave this way by accident but by design and stewardship.
They behave this way because the people tending them carry multi-generational knowledge of how those ecosystems function, and because they have a stake in the outcome that extends beyond quarterly reporting cycles.
The evidence comes in everywhere.
In British Columbia, the Syilx Okanagan, Secwépemc, and Ktunaxa nations launched the Bringing the Salmon Home project to reintroduce sockeye salmon to the Columbia River, which had been blocked from migrating for decades by downstream dams.
In October 2025, the initiative celebrated the return of two adult sockeye that had been released as juvenile fry two years earlier, detected nearly 800 river kilometers upstream from the mouth of the Columbia.
Two fish out of 10,000 sounds modest until you remember that those fish had to navigate a 2,000-kilometer river system and two major dams to get home. Mark Thomas, a Shuswap Band councilor, described the return as having monumental significance.
In the Amazon, the numbers are starker. About 385 Indigenous groups reside on approximately 2.4 million square kilometers of Amazonia, and a growing body of research confirms they are its most effective defenders.
Data spanning 36 years shows that 86% of deforestation in the Amazon has occurred in areas without territorial management regimes aimed at conservation.
Indigenous-held land is the difference.
A 2021 analysis found that after 36 Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon used satellite-based deforestation alerts, deforestation rates declined by 52 percent in a single year.
Armed with technology and ancestral knowledge in equal measure, Indigenous guards across Ecuador and Colombia are organizing to permanently protect more than twenty million acres of the most biodiverse rainforest in the world.
The pattern holds. Where Indigenous peoples hold land tenure, forests survive. Where they don’t, the chainsaw arrives.
New research from the Environmental Defense Fund found that designating 63.4 million additional hectares of unprotected Brazilian Amazon forests as either Indigenous lands or protected areas would reduce deforestation across the entire Brazilian Amazon by up to 20 percent by 2030.
The science is not ambiguous about this anymore. The political will is the variable.
Minnesota moved that variable. The Fond du Lac Band will now steward the Cloquet forest under an agreement that keeps the University’s research partnership intact while returning management authority to the people the land belongs to.
The Band described the future partnership as encompassing culturally grounded research, fire stewardship and Ishkode teachings, youth engagement, and long-term forest health and climate resilience. That is a full program, held by people who have been ready to lead it for generations.
The land kept its memory through all of it. It was always going to be returned. It just took 117 years to find people in positions of power willing to do the obvious thing.
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Until Next Time.
Your Neighbor,
Benji Faun
Sources:
Minnesota land return:
1. Minnesota Star Tribune — Minnesota is returning thousands of acres of forest to the Fond du Lac Band
2. Tribal Business News — Fond du Lac Band set to reclaim 3,400 acres after Minnesota lawmakers approve land transfer
BC salmon restoration:
3. CBC News — Salmon released as fry in B.C. return up Columbia River (October 2025)
4. Pacific Salmon Foundation — A year in review: taking action for salmon in 2024
Amazon / Indigenous guardians:
5. One Earth — New report reaffirms the critical role of Indigenous-led efforts in protecting the Amazon rainforest
6. Amazon Frontlines — The First Line of Defense: Indigenous Guards of the Amazon
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