Madonna Thunder Hawk on LANDBACK
“Welcome to the Club”: Madonna Thunder Hawk and the Living History of LANDBACK
From intergenerational memories of Little Bighorn to the 1971 Mount Rushmore liberation, a look at how her words in December 2025 Nonprofit Quarterly echo the history preserved in the Warrior Women Project archive.
In a new Nonprofit Quarterly article, Martell Hesketh reflects on NDN Collective's first LANDBACK for the People podcast episode, an interview with Madonna Thunder Hawk. In it, Madonna traces the long arc of the LANDBACK movement, speaking with the clarity of someone who has carried this history not as theory, but as lived experience and memory.
Madonna Thunder Hawk and her granddaughter march toward downtown Rapid City, SD during the Rise Up Against Authoritarianism march on Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Photo by Angel White Eyes, courtesy of NDN Collective, via NonprofitQuarterly.org
“We sure weren’t learning [Landback] in school,” she says. “But we were learning from our elders,” many raised by people who still held stories of Little Bighorn. That closeness—to land, to lineage, to resistance—is the throughline.
When asked what she thought the first time she heard young people chanting LANDBACK, Madonna didn’t pause:
“There they are… Welcome to the club.”
For those following the conversation, there are two essential companion pieces that deepen the moment:
• The LANDBACK for the People podcast (April 2023):
In conversation with NDN Collective founder and CEO Nick Tilsen, Madonna speaks on intergenerational land defense and the continuity of movement work.
• The Warrior Women Project archive (2008 interview):
Speaking in front of Mount Rushmore, Madonna reflects on the 1971 occupation of the sacred Paha Sapa (Black Hills), with characteristic directness:
“Our history is right here, arm’s length… We still know our value, and we still know we are evidence of this land.”
Warrior Women Project exists to ensure these stories—and the women who carried them—remain visible and accessible, especially in moments when national attention turns toward Native resistance. Our website holds a growing collection of exclusive videos, interviews, and archival images—world-making history shared by matriarchs..
Our community-archive is a living project, built slowly, carefully and collectively alongside the families and women who lived these histories. And we can’t build it without the people who care about this work.
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Your support helps keep these stories—still so close, still so necessary—in the hands of the people who need them.
Read Martell Hesketh’s full NPQ article here:
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/a-lakota-matriarch-offers-perspective-on-the-long-struggle-for-landback/