Browsed by
Category: Indigenous Peoples

How regenerative agriculture can foster peacebuilding in conflict areas

How regenerative agriculture can foster peacebuilding in conflict areas

Drew Marcantonio writes: In the dry valley between the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Serranía del Perijá mountain ranges, in northern Colombia, former combatants in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia guerilla group, or FARC, are leading a surprising new revolution: regenerative agriculture. The region was once plagued by violence between antagonistic groups, including FARC, and is currently under pressure from both climate crisis and deforestation. But through an agricultural cooperative called COOMPAZCOL, former FARC members are forming…

Read More Read More

How Native Americans guarded their societies against tyranny

How Native Americans guarded their societies against tyranny

A purple and white flag representing the world’s oldest democracy, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, flies above a Mohawk flag at a Native American gathering. Giordanno Brumas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images By Kathleen DuVal, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill When the founders of the United States designed the Constitution, they were learning from history that democracy was likely to fail – to find someone who would fool the people into giving him complete power and then end the democracy. They…

Read More Read More

The alchemy that powers the modern world

The alchemy that powers the modern world

December 13, 2024 by Sarah Scoles The astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” That universe must then invent the first atoms, which will make up the first stars, which will fuse those initial elements into larger ones. Stars will explode and die and crash into each other, those cataclysms building heavier elements. Eventually, billions of years later, the universe will produce an Earth whose insides…

Read More Read More

New set of human rights principles aims to end displacement and abuse of Indigenous people through ‘fortress conservation’

New set of human rights principles aims to end displacement and abuse of Indigenous people through ‘fortress conservation’

Many protected areas, including California’s Yosemite National Park, displaced Indigenous people in the name of protecting wildlands. Matthew Dillon/Flickr By John H. Knox, Wake Forest University For more than a century, conservationists have worked to preserve natural ecosystems by creating national parks and protected areas. Today the Earth faces a global biodiversity crisis, with more than 1 million species at risk of extinction. This makes it even more important to conserve places where at-risk species can thrive. In 2022, governments…

Read More Read More

How Native Americans guarded their societies against tyranny

How Native Americans guarded their societies against tyranny

A purple and white flag representing the world’s oldest democracy, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, flies above a Mohawk flag at a Native American gathering. Giordanno Brumas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images By Kathleen DuVal, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill When the founders of the United States designed the Constitution, they were learning from history that democracy was likely to fail – to find someone who would fool the people into giving him complete power and then end the democracy. They…

Read More Read More

In California’s Park Fire, an indigenous cultural fire practitioner sees beyond destruction

In California’s Park Fire, an indigenous cultural fire practitioner sees beyond destruction

Sarah Hopkins writes: Where others might see only catastrophe, Don Hankins scans fire-singed landscapes for signs of renewal. Hankins, a renowned Miwkoʔ (Plains Miwok) cultural fire practitioner and scholar, has kept an eye on the Park Fire’s footprint as it sweeps through more than 429,000 acres across four Northern California counties. It started late last month and became one of the largest fires in state history in a matter of days, fueled by dry grasslands. The fire has since risen…

Read More Read More

What hunter-gatherer societies can teach us about group decision-making

What hunter-gatherer societies can teach us about group decision-making

Vivek V Venkataraman writes: The Dilemma of the Deserted Husband unfolded in the late 1950s amid a band of G/wi hunter-gatherers, a subgroup of Ju/’hoansi (often known as !Kung San), dwelling in the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa. According to the South African-born anthropologist and Bushman Survey Officer George Silberbauer, a woman named N!onag//ei had left her husband, /wikhwema, for his best friend. Few were surprised. After all, /wikhwema was a temperamental and pompous man, and a bit of a…

Read More Read More

‘If the land is sick, so are we’: Australian First Nations spirituality explained

‘If the land is sick, so are we’: Australian First Nations spirituality explained

By Joshua Waters, Deakin University First Nations peoples have been present on the Australian continent for more than 65,000 years. During this time, they have managed to develop and maintain continuous, unbroken connections with the land, water and sky. Understanding the deep interrelatedness between humans and their (human and nonhuman) kin and ancestors instilled a sense of responsibility, through custodianship of their environment. The aim of this was to survive, and to promote a sense of ecological and cosmological balance….

Read More Read More

In Australia, song has power

In Australia, song has power

Lydia Wilson writes: Deep in Australia’s Northern Territory, there is scant light pollution and the skies are full of stars. I asked my companion, David, to teach me the unfamiliar constellations, so different from those I see in my home in the Northern Hemisphere. An Indigenous Australian from the Central Desert Region of the continent, he was quick to comply. “Up there,” he pointed, “is the head of the emu, see?” I didn’t. He traced a swirl with his finger,…

Read More Read More

Indigenous peoples deserve as much protection as the threatened environments they inhabit

Indigenous peoples deserve as much protection as the threatened environments they inhabit

Robert Williams writes: Over 600,000 tourists travel to Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area each year, and many will catch a glimpse of the Great Migration: the famed trek of more than one million wildebeests and thousands of zebras, gazelles and other animals crossing over the Mara River into Kenya and back. Yet the Tanzanian government believes it can attract many more tourists seeking the safari adventure of a lifetime: five million by 2025, bringing $6 billion with them per year, according…

Read More Read More

Study of Indigenous and local communities finds happiness doesn’t cost much

Study of Indigenous and local communities finds happiness doesn’t cost much

Autonomous University of Barcelona: Many Indigenous peoples and local communities around the world are leading very satisfying lives despite having very little money. This is the conclusion of a study by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), which shows that many societies with very low monetary income have remarkably high levels of life satisfaction, comparable to those in wealthy countries. Economic growth is often prescribed as a sure way of increasing the…

Read More Read More

Amazon drought: ‘We’ve never seen anything like this’

Amazon drought: ‘We’ve never seen anything like this’

BBC World Service reports: The Amazon rainforest experienced its worst drought on record in 2023. Many villages became unreachable by river, wildfires raged and wildlife died. Some scientists worry events like these are a sign that the world’s biggest forest is fast approaching a point of no return. As the cracked and baking river bank towers up on either side of us, Oliveira Tikuna is starting to have doubts about this journey. He’s trying to get to his village, in…

Read More Read More

Climate change imperils Indigenous ecosystems, food security, knowledge bases and ways of life

Climate change imperils Indigenous ecosystems, food security, knowledge bases and ways of life

Inside Climate News reports: As world leaders gather in Dubai for the 28th United Nations climate talks, Indigenous representatives from seven socio-cultural regions are calling for a moratorium on “false solutions” that ignore the roots of the climate crisis and urging a drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The Indigenous peoples’ caucus, called the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change, or IIPFCC, had two minutes during COP28’s opening plenary Thursday to lay out their core concerns and assert their…

Read More Read More

Language is at the heart of indigenous community health

Language is at the heart of indigenous community health

Erica X Eisen writes: Roughly 250 kilometres northeast of Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory is a place called Utopia. Composed of a loose collection of sparsely populated clan sites in the inland desert, the area is the traditional homeland of the Alyawarr and Anmatyerr peoples, roughly 500 of whom still live in Utopia today. The area wasn’t settled by white colonisers until the 1920s, when a group of German pastoralists – ‘demented by the ferocity of the heat and…

Read More Read More

As men told hunting stories, women hunted

As men told hunting stories, women hunted

The New York Times reports: It’s often viewed as a given: Men hunted, women gathered. After all, the anthropological reasoning went, men were naturally more aggressive, whereas the slower pace of gathering was ideal for women, who were mainly focused on caretaking. “It’s not something I questioned,” said Sophia Chilczuk, a recent graduate of Seattle Pacific University, where she studied applied human biology. “And I think the majority of the public has that assumption.” At times, the notion has proved…

Read More Read More

Tree keepers: Where sustaining the forest is a tribal tradition

Tree keepers: Where sustaining the forest is a tribal tradition

Fred Pearce writes: Mike Lohrengel looks up in awe at trees he has known for 30 years. “This is one of the most beautiful places I know. This forest has it all: the most species, the most diversity. Many trees I know individually. Look at this one behind us. It’s got a split way up there. I’ll never forget that tree till I die.” It is a love affair, for sure. But Lohrengel is no tree-hugger, out to preserve a…

Read More Read More