Catholic Sisters sell Wisconsin land to tribal nation for 1966 price

The Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration made a quiet choice that speaks louder than most institutional gestures: they sold a two-acre lakefront property in northern Wisconsin to the Lac Du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa for $30,000. That's the price they paid for it in 1966. The property's current market value is $2.6 million.

The gap between those numbers tells a story about what happens when an institution decides to step back rather than profit from the present.

For nearly three decades, the Franciscan Sisters have been threading through Land Back and Land Justice movements — work that asks a difficult question of religious organizations: What does it mean to be in right relationship with Indigenous peoples and their land, especially when your own history includes participation in boarding schools that stripped Indigenous children of their language, culture, and identity.

There's no way to undo that damage. The sisters know this. But there are ways to move differently going forward, and returning land at its original cost is one of them.

What This Means

When Lac Du Flambeau Tribal President expressed that "this return represents more than the restoration of land — it is the restoration of balance, dignity, and our sacred connection to the places our ancestors once walked," they were naming something that land transactions usually miss. This isn't about property values or tax deductions. It's about a nation reclaiming ground that was never theirs to lose in the first place.

The Sisters' decision matters partly because institutions rarely do this. They hold property. They accumulate it. They rationalize it. When a religious order — one that explicitly committed to living in right relationship with all creation — chooses to divest at a loss, it creates a small but real crack in how we typically think about ownership and obligation.

It's also significant because it's not alone. The Land Back movement has grown from a fringe conversation to something that's shifting how universities, nonprofits, and religious institutions think about their holdings. More organizations are recognizing that historical injustice isn't something you acknowledge and move past — it's something you actively repair, sometimes at real cost.

The Franciscan Sisters' gesture won't reverse centuries of dispossession. But it does something smaller and more concrete: it returns a piece of home to people whose home was taken, and it does so without extracting profit from that return. In a world where land is treated as an investment vehicle first and a living place second, that choice — however modest it might seem — is the kind of small shift that actually changes what becomes possible next.