Founded in 2012, the Native Land Conservancy, Inc. (NLC) is the first Native American-run conservation group east of the Mississippi. With its all-Native board of directors, the NLC centers Native values in all areas of its work. The NLC’s mission is to preserve and restore healthy landscapes for all living things wherever possible. We draw upon our collective traditional cultural knowledge with generations of direct experience in the woodlands, coastlines, and waterways of our ancestral homelands.
The NLC’s programs focus on land rescue and Indigenous cultural preservation. The NLC rescues land by acquisition, monitoring conservation easements, and by restoring and maintaining habitat using traditional knowledge and the best practices in science. The NLC supports Native American cultural preservation by hosting programs that pass down skills and traditions, and by increasing access to ancestral homelands. The NLC trailblazed a legal framework for protecting Native access to privately held lands by signing the first cultural respect agreement on the east coast in 2016. The NLC develops videos, presentations, and hosts events to share its lens on an ever-changing world with audiences of the public, conservation groups, and higher education institutions. The NLC also trains rising Native ecological conservationists through its summer fellowship program.
