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Category: Indigenous Peoples

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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Peru’s ex-president faced bigotry for impoverished past

Peru’s ex-president faced bigotry for impoverished past

The Associated Press reports: When Pedro Castillo won Peru’s presidency last year, it was celebrated as a victory by the country’s poor — the peasants and Indigenous people who live deep in the Andes and whose struggles had long been ignored. His supporters hoped Castillo, a populist outsider of humble roots, would redress their plight — or at least end their invisibility. But during 17 months in office before being ousted and detained Wednesday, supporters instead saw Castillo face the…

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Carvings on Australia’s boab trees reveal a generation’s lost history

Carvings on Australia’s boab trees reveal a generation’s lost history

Freda Kreier writes: Brenda Garstone is on the hunt for her heritage. Parts of her cultural inheritance are scattered across the Tanami desert in northwestern Australia, where dozens of ancient boab trees are engraved with Aboriginal designs. These tree carvings — called dendroglyphs — could be hundreds or even thousands of years old, yet have received almost no attention from western researchers. That is slowly starting to change. In the winter of 2021, Garstone — who is Jaru, an Aboriginal…

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Lawyers press international court to investigate a ‘network’ committing crimes against humanity in Brazil’s Amazon

Lawyers press international court to investigate a ‘network’ committing crimes against humanity in Brazil’s Amazon

Inside Climate News reports: Even as environmentalists cheer the ouster of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro as a turning point for the Amazon rainforest, new information filed Wednesday with the International Criminal Court suggest that the battle to protect the region and its inhabitants is far from over. In the filing, human rights and environmental lawyers acting on behalf of rural land users are requesting an investigation into a colossal “network” of politicians, business officials, industry lobbyists and criminal gangs for…

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Canada’s First Nations move to protect their lands

Canada’s First Nations move to protect their lands

Ed Struzik writes: On yet another unusually warm subarctic day last August, members of the Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́ First Nation in the Northwest Territories of Canada held a fire-feeding ceremony, drummed, raised their eagle-emblazoned flag, and prepared a celebratory feast for themselves and a group of scientists 30 miles south of where they live in Fort Simpson. By the close of festivities, Laurier University’s 23-year-old Scotty Creek Research Station, which is monitoring the varied impacts of climate change and permafrost thaw,…

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A thousand miles in the Amazon, to change the way the world works

A thousand miles in the Amazon, to change the way the world works

Katie Surma writes: The plan was to meet in Altamira, Brazil, and travel 1,000 miles across the northern Amazon as a kind of people’s court. The judges would take testimony over 10 days, much like a United Nations fact-finding delegation, and deliver their findings at the 10th Pan-Amazon Social Forum in the provincial city of Belém. They had come under the banner of the International Rights of Nature Tribunal, promoting a legal movement based on the premise that nature—forests and…

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An anthropologist schooled in spiritual healing offers wisdom for troubled times

An anthropologist schooled in spiritual healing offers wisdom for troubled times

Anna Badkhen writes: Once upon a time, in a thatched spirit hut in the Nigerien village of Tillaberi, the Songhay master sorcerer Adamu Jenitongo told the American anthropologist Paul Stoller that the bush was angry. “People who speak with two mouths and feel with two hearts anger the spirits of the bush,” Adamu Jenitongo said. “When the bush is angry there is not enough rain. When the bush is angry there is too much rain. When the bush is angry…

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Indigenous myths carry warning signals about natural disasters

Indigenous myths carry warning signals about natural disasters

Carrie Arnold writes: Shortly before 8am on 26 December 2004, the cicadas fell silent and the ground shook in dismay. The Moken, an isolated tribe on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, knew that the Laboon, the ‘wave that eats people’, had stirred from his ocean lair. The Moken also knew what was next: a towering wall of water washing over their island, cleansing it of all that was evil and impure. To heed the Laboon’s warning signs, elders…

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Indigenous land rights are critical to realizing goals of the Paris climate accord, a new study finds

Indigenous land rights are critical to realizing goals of the Paris climate accord, a new study finds

Inside Climate News reports: The land rights of Indigenous peoples across millions of acres of forests in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru must be protected and strengthened if the world has any hope of achieving the goals set forth in the 2015 Paris Agreement, a study released on Thursday found. The study, by the World Resources Institute and Climate Focus, two non-profit global research organizations focused on alleviating climate change, supports a growing body of research emphasizing the important role…

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