Kì:li (Yésa:sahį: “come home”) 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. This eastern region of Turtle Island/North America sustained the first impacts from European contact in the 16th century enduring land, water, and resource exploitation, wars, and invasion by the European nations, and then what would become the United States.  Our Nations and Communities endured further attacks, encroachments on our homelands, forced removals, and disestablishment of trust lands in the 19th,  and 20th, and 21st centuries. 

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.

Kìli works alongside Indigenous Nations, 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.

Kì:li is a program of Indigenous East, grounded in relationships, not transactions.