Above photo: Tiffany Pyette, Jane Branham, and Taysha DeVaughn pose on the land that Jane gave to the Appalachian Rekindling Project. Anna Mullins.
This Appalachian Indigenous community is using a voluntary land tax to reclaim land for ecological restoration.
Last year, the Appalachian Rekindling Project made a big move. We bought 63 acres of former strip mine land in Letcher County, Kentucky. Our $169,000 investment disrupted plans for a $505 million federal prison complex that would have caged over 1,300 people, stopping a cycle of harm that has defined Appalachia for too long. This would have become the fifth federal prison in eastern Kentucky, part of a pattern that treats incarceration as economic development. Data collected in 2021 by The Sentencing Project illustrates that Black and Indigenous people are incarcerated at four to five times the rate of white people for similar offenses.
As co-executive director of the Appalachian Rekindling Project, I’m proud that we saw a different future – one where this land could heal and Indigenous peoples could come home. We acknowledge historical harm, center Indigenous sovereignty, and build true community safety through ecological restoration rather than allow another prison to be built on land that has already been stripped, scarred, and exploited.
Appalachia has always been treated as expendable by those in power – through Indigenous removal, extractive coal mining, a dumping ground for environmental hazards, and now through prison construction. Fighting back against the prison means demanding that Appalachia be seen as a place of value, beauty, and home.
Our immediate plans center on ecological restoration – bringing back native species to land that has been strip-mined and degraded. This isn’t just about conservation; it’s about reversing extraction and returning life to places that have been treated as sacrifice zones. Reintroducing bison, animals that are relatives to many Indigenous peoples and integral to pre-colonial ecosystems, is both practically restorative and symbolically powerful.
Our larger vision: establishing an intertribal Indigenous center on our other piece of land in central Appalachia where Native peoples can physically return to their homelands.
This center will provide space for our Indigenous communities to gather, practice traditional ways of life, and care for our land collectively. This intertribal center will be a free space available to Indigenous people from any tribal community, not a museum or tourist site, but a living place of Indigenous presence and practice. We particularly look forward to welcoming Indigenous peoples who have been forcibly removed from this region back to their ancestral homelands, land that holds their history, culture, and ceremonial sites. Creating these pathways for return allow healing through acknowledging that Indigenous peoples have every right to be here, that this is our home.
We’ve established a voluntary land tax system that creates a meaningful pathway for anyone living in Appalachia to support Indigenous justice and land restoration. Voluntary land taxes recognize access to stolen Indigenous land, in the same way that rent or mortgage payments recognize access to living space. If you want to see Appalachian land be cared for, believe in climate justice, want to prevent further exploitation, or seek reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, this is a concrete way to contribute.
Mitch Whitaker, a neighboring property owner, told reporters that our purchase gives “folks an alternative choice” and is “a much better solution.” His support shows that community members recognize the false choice between prison jobs and poverty.
Our vision is for Appalachia to become known as a place of return. A place where Indigenous peoples return home, where ecosystems return to health, where people return to a right relationship with land. Rural communities have been told to be grateful for prisons because we don’t deserve better economic opportunities. We reject that. We deserve investment in restoration, in Indigenous justice, in healing land and relationships, in meaningful work that doesn’t require us to profit from others’ suffering. Real reconciliation, beyond just words, looks like this – the land, resources, and the material conditions for Indigenous peoples to come home and thrive.
