For Tall Oak and other Indigenous peoples, home means land. What does this mean for tribes like the Narragansett? Without land, will they ever have a home?

Tall Oak says there is hope—if values systems are changed and native relationships to land are restored, the Narragansett can return home. 

All over the world, Indigenous communities are acting on this hope—organizing, occupying land, and winning legal battles for communal rights and land sovereignty.

The fight extends to Canada. Here, the Canadian government had been allowing mining companies to extract resources from tribal lands. Furthermore, they refused to address the rising social and economic concerns of Canadian tribal communities. In response, indigenous and environmental activists started the movement Idle No More in 2013. They staged mass protests and a hunger strike, in an effort to force policy makers to confront the Canadian history of colonialism and its contemporary effect of infringing on tribal lands.

The fight has even made its way to the United Nations. In 2007, the United Nations ratified the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People—which, in part, requires that States "provide effective mechanism for the prevention and redress of any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources." 

There is clearly much work to still be done. However, armed with hope, indigenous peoples around the world are gaining momentum through organized resistance.