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Category: Indigenous Peoples

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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Weaving Indigenous knowledge into the scientific method

Weaving Indigenous knowledge into the scientific method

Nature reports: Many scientists rely on Indigenous people to guide their work — by helping them to find wildlife, navigate rugged terrain or understand changing weather trends, for example. But these relationships have often felt colonial, extractive and unequal. Researchers drop into communities, gather data and leave — never contacting the locals again, and excluding them from the publication process. Today, many scientists acknowledge the troubling attitudes that have long plagued research projects in Indigenous communities. But finding a path…

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Belonging among the beasts and the gods in Mayan cosmology

Belonging among the beasts and the gods in Mayan cosmology

Jessica Sequeira writes: Animals are everywhere in the Popol Vuh. They leap and lick and crawl and bite and squawk and hoot and screech and howl. They are considered sacred, not as disembodied beings in some faraway place, but in their coexistence with humans, day by day in the forests. The Sovereign and Quetzal Serpent, with its gorgeous blue-green plumage, birthed the world from a vast and placid ocean. The Popol Vuh provides the narrative of this creation of humankind…

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China is financing infrastructure projects around the world – many could harm nature and Indigenous communities

China is financing infrastructure projects around the world – many could harm nature and Indigenous communities

Chinese engineers pose after welding the first seamless rails for the China-Laos railway in Vientiane, Laos, June 18, 2020. Kaikeo Saiyasane/Xinhua via Getty Images By Blake Alexander Simmons, Boston University; Kevin P. Gallagher, Boston University, and Rebecca Ray, Boston University China is shaping the future of economic development through its Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious multi-billion-dollar international push to better connect itself to the rest of the world through trade and infrastructure. Through this venture, China is providing over…

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For most of human history, equality was the norm. What happened?

For most of human history, equality was the norm. What happened?

Kim Sterelny writes: Most of us live in social worlds that are profoundly unequal, where small elites have vastly more power and wealth than everyone else. Very few of the have-nots find this congenial. As experimental economists have shown, we tend to enter social situations prepared to take a chance and cooperate in collective activities. But if others take more than their share, we resent being played for a sucker. We live in unequal worlds, and few of us are…

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The war on Indigenous rights in Brazil is intensifying

The war on Indigenous rights in Brazil is intensifying

Mark Harris and Denise Ferreira Da Silva write: Indigenous peoples in Brazil are under siege by the Brazilian government, which is waging war on two fronts. New legislation in the form of a bill known as PL 490/2007 threatens to cancel legal protections for Indigenous territories, while a landmark Supreme Court case over the so-called marco temporal, a 1988 cut-off date that threatens to strip the Indigenous peoples of existing land rights. Though not as visible as the effects of…

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Incursions into indigenous lands not only threaten tribal food systems, but the planet’s well-being

Incursions into indigenous lands not only threaten tribal food systems, but the planet’s well-being

Georgina Gustin writes: For thousands of years Indigenous people have survived by hunting, fishing, foraging and harvesting in ways that sustain them while maintaining an equilibrium with nature. But a major report from the United Nations warns that this balance is being severely tested by climate change and by incursions into Indigenous lands—many of them illegal. And as these food systems come under threat, the world risks losing not only the tribes, but their service as crucial protectors of biodiversity…

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New evidence that sedentary lifestyles result in shrinking brains

New evidence that sedentary lifestyles result in shrinking brains

Science Alert reports:The Tsimane, an indigenous people who live in the Bolivian peripheries of the Amazon rainforest, lead lives that are very different to ours. They seem to be much healthier for it. This tribal and largely isolated population of forager-horticulturalists still lives today by traditional ways of farming, hunting, gathering, and fishing – continuing the practices of their ancestors, established in a time long before industrialization and urbanization transformed most of the world. For the Tsimane, the advantages are…

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The jewels of America’s landscape should be returned to America’s original peoples

The jewels of America’s landscape should be returned to America’s original peoples

David Treuer writes: In 1851, members of a California state militia called the Mariposa Battalion became the first white men to lay eyes on Yosemite Valley. The group was largely made up of miners. They had been scouring the western slopes of the Sierra when they happened upon the granite valley that Native peoples had long referred to as “the place of a gaping mouth.” Lafayette Bunnell, a physician attached to the militia, found himself awestruck. “None but those who…

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Traditional healers are preserving their knowledge, and with it, the biodiversity of Brazil’s savanna

Traditional healers are preserving their knowledge, and with it, the biodiversity of Brazil’s savanna

Sarah Sax writes: Since Lucely Pio was a little girl, she has been collecting medicinal plants in the Cerrado, Brazil’s tropical savanna. At 5, she walked through the grasslands and forests of the Cerrado with her grandmother, a midwife and healer, who taught her about where to find and how to harvest the thousands of different plants that only existed there. When picking leaves and flowers, they would arise in the dark hours of the morning, before the sun came…

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In Trump against Biden, Native American voters played a crucial role. It’s time to recognize that

In Trump against Biden, Native American voters played a crucial role. It’s time to recognize that

Julian Brave NoiseCat writes: On Election Night, CNN broadcast a table showing the results of an exit poll that broke the national electorate down into racial demographics. It read: White — 65 percent, Latino — 13 percent, Black — 12 percent, Something else — 6 percent, Asian — 3 percent. Almost immediately, that second-to-last category, “Something Else,” provoked an online uproar among the digital denizens of Indian Country. We were outraged that CNN had, rather clumsily, grouped the First Peoples…

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Ayahuasca helps traumatized war veterans rediscover their humanity

Ayahuasca helps traumatized war veterans rediscover their humanity

The New York Times reports: Before their first ayahuasca ceremony, the veterans met individually with two Peruvian “maestros,” or healers, from the Shipibo community in Peru. “Their hearts are hardened,” said Teobaldo Ochavano, who helps run the nighttime ceremonies alongside his wife, Marina Sinti. “They seemed unable to experience love or joy.” Ms. Sinti said years of interacting with foreigners on retreats had made it painfully clear why these rituals are in such high demand. “People in the United States…

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