Makoce Ikikcupi

This is your opportunity to contribute to social justice for Dakota people through a land buy-back project!

Han Mitakuyapi (Hello My Relatives),

As Dakota people, we consider Minisota Makoce (Land Where the Waters Reflect the Skies) to be our ancient homeland and we were the first human beings to call this place home. Yet, in the last two centuries, Dakota people have been systematically dispossessed of our homeland and we currently reside on about .012 % (about twelve thousandths of one percent) of our original land base within the borders of what is now the State of Minnesota. As a consequence, the vast majority of our people still live in exile.

Makoce Ikikcupi is committed to restoring a land base for Oceti Sakowin (Seven Campfires including the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota) people so that we may begin to bring some of our relatives home, re-establish our spiritual and physical relationship with our homeland, and ensure the ongoing existence of our People. Our cultural survival depends on it.

We live in an age when our language sits on the brink of extinction. Our last fluent speakers of Dakota language in Minnesota number less than ten and are now all over the age of 70. The link to our knowledge about our cultural traditions is quickly fading. If we do not implement a way of living in which our language is tied to our daily activities, our language will die and we will lose valuable survival knowledge.

Further, in the coming months and years, as the globe continues to warm, the environment continues to be desecrated by industrial civilization, and cheap oil becomes more and more scarce, all populations must consider their future food security. Our physical survival depends on it.

Our dream, then, is to recover land bases in which Dakota people may establish new communities within our homeland based on sustainability and adherence to our ancient ways of being. In 2019 we purchased our first parcel of land in Granite Falls, Minnesota where we currently have three Dakota earthlodges under construction and the beginnings of a village we are calling Zani Otunwe (Village of Wellness). Eventually we hope to have lands throughout Minnesota on which we can resume traditional practices of wild-ricing, sugar-bushing, hunting, and foraging, where we can grow our traditional gardens, bring back the bison, reconstitute our traditional forms of governance, practice our spirituality, protect our burials and sacred sites, educate our children, and throughout all these activities, speak our language.

You, too, can demonstrate your commitment to reparative justice with a donation to our Dakota land project!