land rights

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the legal, moral, and political claims of indigenous and other peoples to own, use, manage, and make decisions about their traditional territories; encompass rights to surface use, subsistence resources, mineral and subsoil resources, and the spiritual and cultural dimensions of ancestral landscapes; contested through colonial dispossession in virtually every settler nation and progressively recognised through mechanisms including the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, treaty negotiations, native title legislation, and land restitution programmes; inseparably linked to cultural survival, economic self-determination, and the maintenance of traditional ecological knowledge