The city’s largest land holder on Wednesday approved a 50% discount for Indigenous people on the more than 62,000 properties in its inventory.

The initiative, approved by the Detroit Land Bank Authority Board of Directors, was proposed by District 6 Council Member Gabriela Santiago-Romero’s office following a BridgeDetroit article in June about an Indigenous collective’s efforts to buy land. The group wanted to create a cultural and healing center for Natives in the district, which would be the only center of its kind in Detroit proper. 

Some months after the Thečhíȟila Collective inquired about buying the long-vacant property, which included seven parcels, for the listed price of $7,000, the land bank raised the price to $136,500, putting it out of the budget. Although the land bank said the price jump was due to market conditions in the surrounding neighborhood and unconnected to the collective’s inquiry, the struggle echoed the experience of many Detroiters over the years who have tried to buy from the land bank and felt the process difficult, murky and skewed toward developers. 

The collective connected with Santiago-Romero’s office and then worked with the land bank to secure nine alternative lots across the street on Tillman. Sale of the lots was approved by the DLBA board at Wednesday’s meeting, and the new discount will be used for the first time for the collective, bringing the price down to $7,702.50.

Santiago-Romero said after helping secure the nine lots for the Thečhíȟila Collective, she wanted to pursue a policy that would do more.

“With this momentum, I wanted to go a step further,” Santiago-Romero said by email. “The land we call Detroit is the ancestral and contemporary homeland of the Anishinaabe, or the Three Fires Confederacy. In acknowledging that truth, I proposed that the Indigenous community be added as eligible parties for DLBA discounts to ensure they have equitable access to land they stewarded before colonialization.”

Discounts added

The DLBA is the largest land bank in the country. It already offers several discounts for school and city employees, participants of the Skilled Trade Employment Program, people who take a homebuyer counselling course and for veterans, offering up to 50% off DLBA properties. 

Per the new policy, “a 50% discount will be given on auction properties sold by the Detroit Land Bank Authority (the “DLBA”) to eligible members (each, a “Discount Purchaser”) of any federally recognized American Indian Tribe or Alaska Native Entity (collectively, a “Tribal Entity”).” Membership is certified through submission of a photo ID card issued by such authority. 

To receive the full discount, the buyer must hold the property for three years after the sale, and all the same land bank rules apply – including rehabilitation timelines and requirements that taxes be paid and blight violations are resolved before purchasing.

Jaike SpottedWolf, founder of the Thečhíȟila Collective, said the discount is “a step in the right direction.” 

Although the lots aren’t the ones the group originally wanted, which had a housing foundation and water hook-up, SpottedWolf said the collective still plans to create the community gathering place on Tillman. After a year of ownership of its initial nine lots, the group will be eligible to purchase an additional 11 adjacent lots.

“We have a spot for a sweat lodge, a spot for a sacred fire, a stage for Native artists and teens, and a birthing lodge,” said SpottedWolf. “And a place for pow wow, not for prize winnings, but for prayer and for a place for people to come dance and connect to the ancestors.” 

Ben Newman, DLBA program manager, said the land bank is excited to work with the Thechihila Collective.

“The Land Bank has always been interested in supporting Native communities’ ability to purchase property for projects,” Newman said by email. “The discount is a newer element we’ve added to support such purchases. We’re excited to work with Thechihila Collective…so that their project can proceed as expeditiously and cost-effectively as possible.”

To use the discount SpottedWolf had to provide documentation that she is a part of a federally recognized tribe, which she is. But, she said, it’s complicated to require that of people. 

“A lot of folks outside of tribal spaces don’t understand how hard it is to get federal recognition if you’re a Native American person,” she said, for a number of reasons like the deliberate historical destruction of Native documents at boarding schools, such as the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School in Michigan, one of more than 350 Native American boarding schools that existed across the country. Another challenge is a preference toward oral tradition.

Santiago-Romero’s office has good intentions, said SpottedWolf. 

“They’re trying to keep other populations, i.e. settler descendants, white people, out of trying to exploit that system to get that 50% off. But it also means that many of our own people won’t be able to access that land because they’re not themselves recognized. They’re not enrolled in a tribe,” she said. 

Instead, she proposes a vetting process where applicants provide information about their language and cultural background, or have a relative vouch for them. 

“I’m not trying to be unrealistic about it,” said SpottedWolf. “But that’s something that other bands have used as a means of trying to still give their people access, while also limiting the predatory nature of people who are trying to exploit it.”

SpottedWolf said BridgeDetroit’s reporting “started a whole new relationship with the land bank” including getting connected with Santiago-Romero, who was an advocate, providing clear and more direct communication with the land bank. 

The Wayne County Land Bank, which has more than 1,000 properties, doesn’t currently offer any discounts, said Kelly Beals, executive assistant at the land bank.

“However, we are looking into seeing how we can make them available,” she said by email. 

Land back movement

Nationally, there is an ongoing “land back” movement to return stolen land to Native people, and in Detroit, several steps have been made toward that over the past year.

Earlier this year, environmental justice organization Arboretum Detroit purchased land bank property in Poletown and gifted it to a group of Indigenous people.

“Why are we holding land in a bank when we can be giving land back?” Andrew “Birch” Kemp, co-director of Arboretum Detroit asked in a January op-ed for Riverwise Magazine. “Until there is a Detroit Land Back Authority perhaps it is up to us. This is Detroit; If we want to see it, we have to do it ourselves.”

There are more than 300 land banks nationally according to the Center for Community Progress. 

In the spring, Arboretum Detroit and community members began holding workdays to clean up the lots and seed a native plant meadow. They have been hosting regular gatherings on the land since. 

Separately, in April, Detroit’s city council approved the transfer of a sacred burial mound at Fort Wayne in Detroit to the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi (NHBP) for $1. The agreement transferred .58 acres out of the 83 acres the city of Detroit controls at Fort Wayne.

SpottedWolf said she’s feeling relieved and “absolute joy” about the Wednesday votes. 

“It’s been such a long, arduous battle with the land bank,” she said. 

“We’re coming up on having liberated this land very soon. So I would invite anybody who is an accomplice, an ally, a settler-descendant who believes in land back to celebrate that with us,” said Spotted Wolf. “And if there are people who want to help establish… Indian village in the center of Detroit, we are open and welcome those relationships, as long as people can come in a good way and honor those relationships with a very sincere spirit of land back and honoring the first peoples of this land.”