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Category: Indigenous Peoples

As Trump’s wall closes in, DHS intimidates a border tribe with surveillance, masked agents and drones

As Trump’s wall closes in, DHS intimidates a border tribe with surveillance, masked agents and drones

ProPublica reports: At 4:59 a.m. on Aug. 25, Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Southern Arizona, received an email from the head of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. Government contractors were en route to conduct soil tests for construction of a 62-mile wall along the Nation’s southern boundary, wrote acting chief patrol agent Henry N. Laxdal. If the tribe wished to have cultural monitors observe the work, they were welcome to, but they could not…

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Why the Andoque people of the Amazon fear the seductive dolphin

Why the Andoque people of the Amazon fear the seductive dolphin

Eliran Arazi writes: ‘A nasty one, the dolphin,’ Derode grumbled when he returned home, trading the humid heat of an Amazonian afternoon for the cool, sheltered interior. Inside, his wife Rosa and I shot hungry looks at his empty hands. Once again, the Caquetá River surrendered no fish. I was only two weeks into my fieldwork with the Andoque people in southern Colombia, and my eyes zigzagged in confusion between the two septuagenarian spouses. What did a dolphin have to…

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What happens when a language goes extinct?

What happens when a language goes extinct?

Sophia Smith Galer writes: We are lucky to know anything at all about the Ubykh language. In the 1800s, tens of thousands of people spoke it on the Black Sea coast. When Russia conquered the region, the Ubykhs resisted until they were forced into exile in the Ottoman empire. Transported thousands of miles by a traumatised community now scattered across Turkey, Ubykh survived until 1992 when its last fluent speaker died. It was one of at least 244 languages that…

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Lessons from the fairness of African fractal societies

Lessons from the fairness of African fractal societies

Likam Kyanzaire writes: Ron Eglash was not looking for a revolution when he stumbled across one. The American ethnomathematician, who tracks mathematics embedded in culture, was studying African settlement patterns in the 1980s when he noticed something strange in aerial photographs and village layouts. The settlements weren’t laid out randomly. They had a pattern – and not just any pattern. The same shape seemed to repeat at every scale: a cluster of homes that echoed the arrangement of a larger…

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ICE against indigenous peoples: The new erasure of Native Americans through immigration

ICE against indigenous peoples: The new erasure of Native Americans through immigration

IC Magazine reports: Leticia Jacobo was scheduled to be released from Polk County Jail in Des Moines, Iowa, after being booked in for a traffic violation. Instead, the 24-year-old Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community citizen was scheduled for deportation. Last week, ICE raided Little Earth, a Native community of South Minneapolis, Minnesota, detaining at least 5 Native American men. ICE agents even tried to forcibly detain Rachel Dionne-Thunder, who is Plains Cree and the co-founder of Indigenous Protectors Movement, out…

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Decolonise political thought. Africa’s alternatives to liberalism

Decolonise political thought. Africa’s alternatives to liberalism

Gabriel Asuquo writes: When African nations such as Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Cameroon claimed independence in the mid-20th century, they inherited more than borders and fragile institutions; they also inherited a political philosophy. Liberalism, born of Europe’s Enlightenment, was presented as the universal grammar of progress. It came clothed in the language of democracy, development and human rights, promising that multiparty elections, private property, free markets and individual rights would secure for Africa a swift entry into modernity. Yet, decades…

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How tribal radio stations are preparing for a future without the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

How tribal radio stations are preparing for a future without the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

Nieman Lab reports: In the most remote parts of Alaska, staying in touch can involve a bit more effort than sending a text. Cell service is spotty, highways are nonexistent, and the postal service remains a vital lifeline, delivering supplies and mail by plane. But for anyone who wants to broadcast a different kind of message — a reminder to pick up milk, for example, or birthday wishes — there’s always the Muktuk Telegram. Named for a traditional food of…

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On controlling fire, new lessons from a deep indigenous past

On controlling fire, new lessons from a deep indigenous past

Yale Environment 360 reports: Climate change is extending the season during which hot and dry weather encourages fire across North America. At the same time, a long post-settlement history of stamping out wildfires has changed much of the continent’s landscape: Forests are thicker, which allows fires to spread up into the canopy, and more uniform, with fewer bare patches that might otherwise slow a fire’s progress. As a result, wildfires now tend to grow hotter and bigger: Some say we…

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Trump wants to cut tribal college funding by nearly 90%, putting them at risk of closing

Trump wants to cut tribal college funding by nearly 90%, putting them at risk of closing

By Matt Krupnick for ProPublica This story was originally published by ProPublica The Trump administration has proposed cutting funding for tribal colleges and universities by nearly 90%, a move that would likely shut down most or all of the institutions created to serve students disadvantaged by the nation’s historic mistreatment of Indigenous communities. The proposal is included in the budget request from the Department of the Interior to Congress, which was released publicly on Monday. The document mentions only the…

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Greenpeace must pay at least $660m over Dakota pipeline protests, says jury

Greenpeace must pay at least $660m over Dakota pipeline protests, says jury

The Guardian reports: A jury in North Dakota has decided that the environmental group Greenpeace must pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the pipeline company Energy Transfer and is liable for defamation and other claims over protests in the state nearly a decade ago. Energy Transfer Partners, a Dallas-based oil and gas company worth almost $70bn, had sued Greenpeace, alleging defamation and orchestrating criminal behavior by protesters at the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017, claiming the organization…

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What Amazonian lives tell us about heart health and longevity

What Amazonian lives tell us about heart health and longevity

Ben Daitz writes: The Horus Group, named after the Egyptian god of healing, is an international team of cardiologists, archaeologists and radiologists who have studied more than 200 mummies in Egypt, Peru, the Aleutian Islands and Italy with computer tomography (CT) scans and genetic analyses. They wanted to see if atherosclerosis, one of the leading causes of death in the world, is a disease of modernity, our high stress, cholesterol-laden lifestyle, or if it had been there all along. Are…

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Reports of Navajo people being detained in immigration sweeps sparks concern from tribal leaders

Reports of Navajo people being detained in immigration sweeps sparks concern from tribal leaders

Arizona Mirror reports: As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement intensifies its efforts to apprehend and deport undocumented immigrants throughout the country, concern is rising among Indigenous communities residing in urban areas about reports of Indigenous people being detained in the Valley. Since President Donald Trump issued his executive order for an increase in ICE raids, Navajo tribal leaders have received alarming reports that their tribal members are being detained, heightening uncertainties over the implications these actions have for their communities…

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On being Indigenous in America

On being Indigenous in America

USA TODAY reports: Wes Martel, of Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho heritage, sits with a plate of hash browns and fried eggs in front of him. At 74, he’s been active in tribal politics, buffalo restoration, environmental protection, and the fight for water rights. He thinks that Native Americans still live under the same legal constraints as they did a century ago. He points to the Doctrine of Discovery, enacted by the Pope in the 15th century, which gave control…

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A nickel rush threatens Indonesia’s last nomadic tribes and its forests, fishermen and farmers

A nickel rush threatens Indonesia’s last nomadic tribes and its forests, fishermen and farmers

Garry Lotulung writes: Deep in the backcountry here, Sumean Gebe, 42, lives with Bede Yuli, 39, and his two children in the forest around Dodaga Village, about four hours by road from the capital of North Maluku Province. Every so often, they’ll move to a different forest. “We have been like this since we were little,” he said. “Usually we will make a bivouac [a temporary shelter] with a roof of palm leaves and tarpaulin. We are comfortable living there.”…

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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…

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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…

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