About

A free, public record of United States treaty law with Native nations, built to point attention and support toward Land Back.

Why I made this

The Constitution names treaties, along with itself and federal law, as “the supreme Law of the Land.” The treaties the United States made with Native nations are a contract, and the record of how that contract was broken is public. The Doctrine of Discovery, the end of treaty-making in 1871, Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock and the long fight over the Black Hills are all part of it. I wrote about this in an essay, The Law of the Land.

Its argument is that any honest politics of land on this continent begins with that record: truth before terms. That means a public reckoning, treaty by treaty and case by case, not as a ritual of guilt but as the truth and reconciliation this country has never had the courage to attempt. There is no clean place to begin. We can only start in the middle.

This site is one small piece of that middle. It is meant to make the contract readable, and to route attention and resources to the people doing the repair. If you take one thing from it, take a moment to be with the broken treaty for the ground under your feet, and then support a Native-led land back organization working to heal the wounds of broken promises that are still open.

Benjamin Life (@omniharmonic)

Who made this

Living Law, Living Land was created by Benjamin Life (@omniharmonic). It is not Indigenous-led. It does not speak for any nation, and it is not a substitute for what nations say about themselves. It is an attempt to make the public record easy to see and hard to ignore, and to hand that record back to the nations it concerns.

Where things stand

• Pages reviewed by a Native nation: 0. Every nation’s page can be claimed.
• Links suggested by matching names or dates and not yet reviewed by a person: 8,239. Each is labeled.
• Legal review: not yet. Nothing here is legal advice.

How sure we are

Every record carries a confidence level and its sources. Details that were not yet checked against a source are marked where they appear. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than choosing. See methods.

Open data

The code is MIT licensed and the project’s own text and data are CC BY 4.0, credited to Benjamin Life (@omniharmonic). The complete data, the build, and every change are public atgithub.com/omniharmonic/treaty-land-atlas. Text a nation contributes stays under the terms that nation sets.

Support

This site takes no money. To support land return, see how to help.