About Us

Kì:li (a Tutelo/Yésa:sahį: word meaning “come back home”), a program of Indigenous East, is an Indigenous-led effort to gather stories, concerns, and priorities about the land and waters that continue to guide us in our relationships with land, particularly across the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic & Ohio River Basin.

Kì:li is a regional movement to create a shared vision for returning Indigenous land, restoring relationships, and rebuilding Indigenous presence east of the Mississippi River. We are building a shared path for bringing land back, restoring right relationship, and strengthening Indigenous presence east of the Mississippi. These are our homelands—places that have carried us through invasion, removal, and generations of being pushed away, and places that are still calling us back.

The word Kìli speaks to return, renewal, and continuity. It reflects a belief that land is not a commodity, but a living relative—one that carries memory, responsibility, and future possibility.

Indigenous East is the flagship program of the Landberry Foundation. It is an ambitious, landscape-scale program that aims to create a connected network of Indigenous -owned, -managed, and -stewarded protected lands east of the Mississippi River, and to establish a strong network of Indigenous land rematriation leaders in the East. 

Indigenous East works in partnership with Tribal Nations of all recognition statuses, Afro-Indigenous communities, and trusted partners to move land out of extractive and speculative systems and back into long-term Indigenous stewardship. Our work centers homelands that were fractured by colonization, forced removal, racialized land loss, and environmental harm—and supports pathways for those lands to be cared for again, in ways that honor cultural law, ecological balance, and community well-being. We are guided by an advisory committee of Indigenous women of various nations, and by the Board of Directors of Landberry, 100% of whom are Afro-descendant or Indigenous. This work is led by Dr. Alexandra Sutton (Saponi Nation of Ohio), Executive Director of Landberry.