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Category: Indigenous Peoples

We must not forget what happened to the world’s indigenous children

We must not forget what happened to the world’s indigenous children

Steve Minton writes: Between 1890 and 1978, at Kamloops Indian Residential School in the Canadian province of British Columbia, thousands of Indigenous children were taught to ‘forget’. Separated from their families, these children were compelled to forget their languages, their identities and their cultures. Through separation and forgetting, settler governments and teachers believed they were not only helping Indigenous children, but the nation itself. Canada would make progress, settlers hoped, if Indigenous children could just be made more like white…

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The forgotten sovereigns of the Colorado River

The forgotten sovereigns of the Colorado River

Rowan Moore Gerety writes: If it weren’t for the Colorado River, Albuquerque wouldn’t exist — at least, not as a city of half a million. Which is interesting, because the city itself is nowhere near the river: The Colorado and its tributaries flow on the opposite side of the Continental Divide from New Mexico’s largest city. The thing that joins the city to its water — the thing that allows Albuquerque to exist, it’s no exaggeration to say — is…

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Lula faces powerful opposition as he seeks to protect the Amazon and recognize Indigenous rights

Lula faces powerful opposition as he seeks to protect the Amazon and recognize Indigenous rights

Farai Shawn Matiashe writes: Surrounded by thousands of supporters, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (known simply as “Lula”) was sworn into office on Jan. 1, 2023, at a colorful inauguration ceremony held at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. It was not Lula’s first time assuming the highest office of Latin America’s largest country. He was first sworn in two decades ago and served two terms as Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010. The 67-year-old is a…

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The surprising reason Neil Gorsuch has been so good on Native rights

The surprising reason Neil Gorsuch has been so good on Native rights

Mark Joseph Stern writes: How did an archconservative justice on an archconservative bench become the best friend Native Americans have ever had at the Supreme Court? That is the question court observers are once again asking ourselves in light of Justice Neil Gorsuch’s role in Thursday’s hugely consequential decision protecting Native rights. Oddly, the answer may lie in the very judicial philosophy that pushes him so far to the right in so many other cases that do not involve the rights of a group…

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Brazilian Amazon at risk of being taken over by mafia, ex-police chief warns

Brazilian Amazon at risk of being taken over by mafia, ex-police chief warns

The Guardian reports: The rapid advance of organised crime groups in the Brazilian Amazon risks turning the region into a vast, conflict-stricken hinterland plagued by heavily armed “criminal insurgents”, a former senior federal police chief has warned. Alexandre Saraiva, who worked in the Amazon from 2011 to 2021, said he feared the growing footprint of drug-trafficking mafias in the region could spawn a situation similar to the decades-long drug conflict in Rio de Janeiro, where the police’s battle with drug…

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How to mourn a forest. A lesson from West Papua

How to mourn a forest. A lesson from West Papua

Sophie Chao writes: One torrid afternoon, I journeyed with an Indigenous Marind woman and her family to a patch of razed forest at the edge of the plantation frontier, where workers had cleared the way for oil palm trees. Her name was Circia*. A mother of three in her late 50s, Circia was imposing, but her footsteps were gentle, almost silent when she led us across the wet soils of Merauke, a district in the Indonesian-controlled western half of New…

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Forced assimilation of Native American children: ‘Our history has been hidden — the attempted genocide of our people’

Forced assimilation of Native American children: ‘Our history has been hidden — the attempted genocide of our people’

Brandi Morin writes: “The U.S. has some internal searching inside that we have to do as a collective,” says Deborah Parker. The CEO of the Native American Indian Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) — a network of Native academics, researchers, tribal leaders, boarding school survivors and their descendants working to establish a Congressional Truth Commission — Parker, 52, is at the helm of the efforts to expose the damages inflicted by the insidious 150-year program. The purpose of the commission,…

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Archaeology and genomics together with Indigenous knowledge revise the human-horse story in the American West

Archaeology and genomics together with Indigenous knowledge revise the human-horse story in the American West

Horses are an active part of life for the Lakota and many other Plains nations today. Jacquelyn Córdova/Northern Vision Productions By William Taylor, University of Colorado Boulder and Yvette Running Horse Collin, Université de Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier Few places in the world are more closely linked with horses in the popular imagination than the Great Plains of North America. Romanticized stories of cowboys and the Wild West figure prominently in popular culture, and domestic horses are embedded in…

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The toxic threat in thawing permafrost

The toxic threat in thawing permafrost

Christian Elliott writes: Covering nearly the same area as Norway, the Hudson Bay Lowlands in northern Ontario and Manitoba is home to the southernmost continuous expanse of permafrost in North America. Compared with many marine waterways this far south, Hudson Bay stays frozen late into the summer, its ice-covered surface reflecting sunlight and keeping the surrounding area cold. The influence of Hudson Bay on the weather is crazy, says Adam Kirkwood, a graduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario….

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Indigenous knowledge is key to sustainable food systems

Indigenous knowledge is key to sustainable food systems

Alexandre Antonelli writes: I grew up in Campinas, a city in southeast Brazil. The apples there, cultivated from European varieties since the 1960s, tasted sweet. But, given the choice, I would always pick papayas grown in our garden. My father, who knew that growing a temperate fruit tree in a tropical country seldom worked, instead filled our garden with tropical ones, including two varieties of papaya. Meanwhile, drawing on knowledge from her Indigenous roots, my mother grew all sorts of…

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What hunter-gatherers demonstrate about work and satisfaction

What hunter-gatherers demonstrate about work and satisfaction

Vivek V Venkataraman writes: I once drove through Peninsular Malaysia with an economist friend to visit the Batek [a small group of hunter-gatherers]. Along the way, we travelled through endless plantations of palm oil. Now and then, we came across gigantic tree stumps, poignant reminders of a former world. Palm oil plantations contain living and breathing trees but, in fact, they are just deserts of green, virtually devoid of life. I bemoaned the staggering loss of biodiversity. Then, to my…

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Investigate Bolsonaro for genocide, says Brazil’s environment minister

Investigate Bolsonaro for genocide, says Brazil’s environment minister

The Guardian reports: Former president Jair Bolsonaro should be investigated for genocide, Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, has said, as she prepares an operation to drive illegal goldminers from the site of a humanitarian disaster on Indigenous land. In the coming days, armed police and environmental protection agents will launch the first of a series of operations by plane and helicopter to expel thousands of miners, who proliferated in Brazil’s Yanomami Indigenous territory during Bolsonaro’s administration, contaminating Amazonian rivers, wrecking…

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Protecting endangered species necessitates protecting threatened cultures

Protecting endangered species necessitates protecting threatened cultures

Science News reports: In shallow coastal waters of the Indian and Pacific oceans, a seagrass-scrounging cousin of the manatee is in trouble. Environmental strains like pollution and habitat loss pose a major threat to dugong (Dugong dugon) survival, so much so that in December, the International Union for Conservation of Nature upgraded the species’ extinction risk status to vulnerable. Some populations are now classified as endangered or critically endangered. If that weren’t bad enough, the sea cows are at risk…

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Forests managed by Indigenous peoples are some of the Amazon’s last remaining carbon sinks

Forests managed by Indigenous peoples are some of the Amazon’s last remaining carbon sinks

Inside Climate News reports: Forests managed by Indigenous peoples and other local communities in the Amazon region draw vast amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere while the rest of the rainforest has become a net source of the greenhouse gas, a new report has found. The discrepancy results from differences in deforestation rates between the two types of land. The study from the World Resources Institute, a nonprofit global research organization focused on solving environmental challenges, adds…

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Brazil’s Lula picks Amazon defender for environment minister

Brazil’s Lula picks Amazon defender for environment minister

The Associated Press reports: Brazil´s President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced Thursday that Amazon activist Marina Silva will be the country´s next minister of environment. The announcement indicates the new administration will prioritize cracking down on illegal deforestation even if it means running afoul of powerful agribusiness interests. Both attended the recent U.N. climate conference in Egypt, where Lula promised cheering crowds “zero deforestation” in the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest and a key to fighting climate change, by…

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An ancient ‘horizon calendar’ comes into view over Mexico City

An ancient ‘horizon calendar’ comes into view over Mexico City

The New York Times reports: Long before Europeans colonized North America, the Indigenous peoples in the valley where Mexico City would later arise may have followed a natural solar calendar that was so accurate it accounted for leap years. The “horizon calendar,” proposed in a new study, relied on natural landmarks in the valley’s rugged eastern mountains, and was kept in sync with the astronomical year by a temple atop a sacred volcano. The system may have been used by…

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