One of the long-standing impacts of the last epoch, that is the epoch of ‘power-over’, has been dispossession. 

Colonialism has always been about land and the engines of imperial expansion were conquest, settlement and resource extraction.  In other words, land theft, erasure of identities, cultures and languages.

Indigenous peoples everywhere were dispossessed of their lands, their cultures erased, their languages lost, even their children taken from them for “assimilation” into colonial culture. 

The British, French, Spanish and Portuguese empires shaped the world that we inhabit today.  In settler societies like Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, Indigenous peoples were systematically dispossessed through broken treaties, forced removals and legal regimes designed to deny sovereignty.  In Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific, colonial authorities often claimed ownership of vast territories with the result that Indigenous peoples were left with fragments of their ancestral territories, their autonomy curtailed and their cultures decimated.

Phases of Decolonisation

As that epoch ends, we are seeing the process of decolonisation unfolding in phases.  The first phase was the wave of independence that swept Asia, Africa and the Caribbean after the Second World War.  Colonies gained sovereignty, and the formal structures of European empires collapsed.  But settler states, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand remained, in effect, colonial societies, even as they presented themselves as democracies and allies in the fight for freedom abroad.  Even in many postcolonial states, Indigenous peoples found themselves still marginalised within new national frameworks.

What we are witnessing now is a second phase of decolonisation.  Indigenous reclamation is challenging the very property regimes and governance structures that empires established.  

Why Is Change Happening?

As the old epoch of ‘I’m the aggressor and I can do what I want’ ends, other forces are converging to enable the reclamation ‘movement’.  The first is the slow machinery of legal redress.  For decades, Indigenous communities have pursued court cases, treaty negotiations, and political campaigns to have their rights recognised.  Some of these battles are now bearing fruit, aided by shifting legal norms and precedents.  The second is the climate crisis.  There is growing recognition that Indigenous peoples are among the most effective guardians of biodiversity.  Studies show that lands under Indigenous stewardship contain some of the world’s healthiest ecosystems and Indigenous knowledge and governance assist governments aiming to meet climate targets.

Another driver is the rise of global social movements. The Land Back movement, in North America, amplified through social media, has connected local struggles into a broader narrative of justice.  It intersects with racial justice campaigns, decolonial scholarship, climate action groups and truth and reconciliation processes that have gained traction in Canada, Australia and beyond.  The Standing Rock protest movement, led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in 2016–2017 against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the United States, became a major focal point for Indigenous rights, environmental activism, and the fight against colonial legacies.  In December 2016, the Obama administration halted construction under Lake Oahe, citing the need for further environmental review, but (predictably) the Trump administration later reversed this decision.  Despite Trump’s actions, the protest inspired other movements globally, connecting Indigenous sovereignty, environmentalism and climate justice and influenced public discourse on the importance of free, prior, and informed consent for Indigenous communities in development projects.

Together, these currents have informed and shifted public opinion, creating more space for political and legal shifts.  And we can add to this the role of international instruments, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which have set new standards for recognition.

Yet perhaps the deepest force of all is within Indigenous communities themselves.  Across the world, there has been a remarkable resurgence of culture, language, and spiritual practice.  Reclamation is not just about territory, it is about reconnecting with ways of knowing and living that empires displaced.  

Huge shifts in consciousness and compassion are emerging and Indigenous peoples themselves are reclaiming what was once stolen from them. 

Land & Governance

Across North America, the Land Back movement has given fresh visibility to Indigenous-led reclamation and powwows that were once suppressed have become gatherings of intertribal pride, drawing tens of thousands.  These are not simply cultural festivals; they are acts of sovereignty.  In California, the Yurok Tribe recently regained seventy-three square miles of ancestral land along the Klamath River.  This profound act of restoration, enables the Yurok to manage forests and rivers according to their traditions, reviving salmon habitats and practising controlled burns that reduce wildfire risks.  Hawaiian activists blocked military developments on sacred sites.  In Ontario, after one hundred and seventy years, the Saugeen First Nation successfully reclaimed a stretch of Lake Huron shoreline through the courts. 

In Colombia, Indigenous councils have been granted new authority to govern their territories autonomously, with control over budgets and public services.  In Brazil, the government has launched significant programmes to support the restoration of Indigenous lands, combining environmental priorities with the defence of rights. The Sámi of Scandinavia have carved out political space through Sámi parliaments.  And in the Arctic, Sámi communities are reasserting their rights to fish, herd reindeer and practice ceremony on their own terms.  

Fiji has reintroduced its Freehold Buy Back Scheme, giving Indigenous iTaukei communities the chance to reclaim lands alienated during colonial times.  And in New Zealand and Australia, after decades of struggle, we see landmark settlements and legal changes that empower Indigenous peoples with co-management and, in some cases, veto rights over extractive industries.

Indigenous Languages

For Indigenous peoples, language is not only a means of communication but a vessel of memory, ceremony, ecological knowledge and identity.  When colonial regimes banned Indigenous languages in schools, churches and public life, they erased the possibility of passing on knowledge systems.  Reviving language is therefore as profound an act of cultural sovereignty as is reclaiming land. 

Across Canada and the United States, immersion schools are teaching children Cree, Ojibwe, Mohawk and Navajo with First Nations in Canada leading education revivals and decolonisation initiatives with Indigenous literature, music and art.  In Aotearoa New Zealand, te reo Māori, once endangered, has flourished through Kōhanga Reo language nests, immersion schools and vibrant media and forcing the state to recognise it as an official language.  In Hawai‘i, the Pūnana Leo immersion schools (originally illegal when launched in 1984) teach through the Indigenous language ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi.  In Australia, Yolŋu Matha, Kaurna and other Aboriginal languages are being taught again in classrooms and community hubs.  The Sámi of Scandinavia have reclaimed joik singing and traditions. 

Irish Language Resurgence

This resurgence is not only happening in traditionally defined Indigenous contexts.  In Ireland, the revival of the Irish language is an innate part of the global Indigenous reclamation movement.  For centuries, the Irish language (Gaelic) was suppressed under colonial rule, banned by British penal law, punished in classrooms, mocked in parliament and stigmatised as the language of the poor.  During the English-enforced starvation that killed a million Irish people and drove another million out of the country seeking survival in the 1840’s, starving families were given money not to teach their children Irish.  Yet today Irish is being reclaimed with fresh energy, not only through Gaelscoileanna and official supports, but through popular culture.  

One example of this is the Belfast rap trio Kneecap, who blend Irish and English in their lyrics, making Irish edgy, relevant and unapologetically political.  They sample hip hop beats from America, rap in Belfast slang, and slip between Irish and English with irreverence.  They mock authority, ridicule British rule, and lampoon the hypocrisies of modern Ireland. Yet behind the humour lies a deeper politics: the insistence that the Irish language will not die, that colonialism will not define identity and that Indigenous people around the world share commonality with each other and can stand together in an act of resistance. 

As Kneecap’s Mo Chara says, “We use the language they tried to kill to say the things they don’t want to hear.”  

“When we speak Irish on stage, we speak for every people whose language was tried to be beaten out of them.”

In their Instagram manifesto, “10 Rules To Live By”, Rule 8 reads: “Be outspoken, leave your mark and stand up for your people. Stand up for Palestine, and stand up for oppressed people around the world.”

They are heirs to a long line of Irish musicians who saw no separation between song and struggle. Their music has electrified younger generations, recasting Irish not as a dying language but as a living, breathing, rebellious, joyful identity.   And that speaking Irish is an act of defiance against the oppressor.

Kneecap’s success embodies how indigenous language reclamation is as much about taking back power as it is about identity.

The group stands as an unlikely but powerful witness to this historical shift.  Their art is entertainment but also resistance, testimony and prophecy that those who cling to power by dispossession will find themselves, as Mo Chara says, on the “wrong side of history”.

Undoing the Legacies of Empires 

To speak of the end of empire, then, is to recognise that it is not a singular event but a long, uneven process. The empires of flags and colonies may be gone, but the empires of law, economy and governance persist.  Indigenous reclamation is one of the most powerful forces undoing those legacies today.  It is not tidy, nor is it uniform.  Victories are partial, often hard-won, and sometimes symbolic.  But taken together, they amount to a profound shift in the moral and political landscape.

This is why the rise of Indigenous reclamation matters beyond the communities directly involved.  It forces us to confront the unfinished business of our histories, especially for those of us with privilege.  And for those of us with privilege in the West, this can be an uncomfortable reflection.  Much of the wealth of our societies was built on the dispossession of others.  

I find in this moment a call to humility and responsibility.  Humility, to acknowledge that the systems we inherited cost the lives and cultures of others and that they are encoded with imperial logics that create inequality and require us to challenge them.  (I have written in other blogs about ‘Equality Proofing’ the systems to address this issue.)  But we are also called to have responsibility to listen to Indigenous voices and to support reclamation where we can..

We are living through an era that asks us to imagine political orders that are not built on extraction and dispossession, but on reciprocity, stewardship and respect for plurality.  

Empires of the past sought to erase Indigenous presence and reclamation movements today seek to restore it.  Empires imposed hierarchies; reclamation reopens the possibility of shared stewardship.  Empires extracted; reclamation restores.  This movement is undoing the work of centuries of oppression, and it is happening now.

What is joyful about this movement is that it is not only about restoring what was lost from the past, but it is also about hope.  To speak a suppressed language today is to reclaim ownership of identity after centuries of oppression; it is to deny the oppressor power over who you are.  To restore a forest is to declare that there is still time to heal.  To dance a powwow is to teach children that their culture is alive.  These are acts of hope disguised as acts of tradition.

But what is truly joyous for all of us, including those not directly impacted by this movement, is that it speaks to visions of a future where many worlds fit, where diversity is not erased and we get to live side by side, all different, all belonging to this wonderfully diverse ecosystem.  

And that inclusive future is not the objective of the people within the systems that created and sustained the dispossession and deprivation.  Why would they?  It would mean surrendering power and leverage from which they profit and rare is the altruistic politician. 

Instead, it is the tide of public opinion, more informed and engaged than ever and demanding change, that is deciding what is and is not on the ‘wrong side of history’.