indigenous

• More than half the world’s languages could go extinct by 2100, The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues says.
• Roughly 4,000 of the world’s 6,700 languages are spoken by Indigenous communities and contain knowledge key for conservation and human health, but multiple factors threaten their existence along with their speakers’ cultures.
• Joining the podcast is Jay Griffiths, author of ‘Wild’ and other seminal books about how language and relationship are central to cultural survival, and why connection to the land is a universal human right.

Deep cultural connection to land and nature are inherent to the human experience and a birthright, says Jay Griffiths, author of WILD: An Elemental Journey (2006). But what happens when communities become displaced, either voluntarily or through force?

The Sydney-based Institute for Economics & Peace estimates that there could be 1.2 billion climate refugees by the year 2050. How do cultures and their people survive amid increasing climate disruption or the violation of their human rights?

A culture “carries itself through language, and also that’s how it makes the land, a spoken place, is through the language,” Griffiths says on this episode of Mongabay’s Newscast. She also draws parallels between humans, nature and culture: “There’s great research that suggests that we learned ethics from wolves [of taking] an attitude to the world of both me the individual and of me the pack member,” in caring for all members of the group.

Griffiths joins the Mongabay Newscast to talk with co-host Rachel Donald about narratives surrounding Indigenous cultures, animal culture, and more.

The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues estimates that by 2100 more than half of all the 6,700 languages spoken today could become extinct. Currently, more than 4,000 of these languages are spoken by less than 6% of the global population, who happen to be Indigenous.

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An indigenous broadcaster in Canada is paving the way for language revitalisation after a recent decline in native speakers.

Julie Grenier (Inuk from Kuujjuaq) was one of the key speakers at the World Indigenous Television Broadcasters Network conference today alongside Pango production chief executive Bailey Mackey.

Grenier is the director-general for Taqramiut Nipingat Incorporated (TNI), an indigenous regional radio and television production company.

Canada has three indigenous groups called the First Nations (aboriginal people), Inuit and Métis.

Grenier said their mission was to promote the language in hopes of increasing the number of fluent speakers.

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• Used in rituals by the ancestors of the Indigenous Tupinambá people in Brazil, sacred capes made from bird feathers were lost in time and today survive only as museum pieces in Europe.
• Only 11 of these capes are known to exist today; one of them, held in Denmark, is set to be returned to Brazil.
• A key player in the negotiations to secure its return was Indigenous artist and activist Glicéria Tupinambá, who in 2020 started making these sacred capes once again.
• “The Tupinambá who made the original cape lived more than 400 years ago, so the first person to make it, to design this cape, [manifests themselves] through my hands,” she says of her painstaking work.

A central figure in many Indigenous systems is that of the Enchanted Ones, ancestral entities thought to connect the earthly world and the spiritual world. Some of these contacts are said to occur through dreams, liturgies or dances. For Glicéria Tupinambá, an Indigenous artist and activist from Brazil, it was a dream in 2006 that she says set her on the path she’s now on.

She tells of hearing a call from the Enchanted Ones to rescue a feather cape, more than 400 years old, that belonged to her people. The piece in question sat in the storage vault of a prominent French museum, so it wouldn’t be possible to bring it back to Brazil. But there was another way to go.

“In 2018, during a visit to the Quai Branly Museum’s storage in Paris, I had access to the cape, and the cape spoke to me,” Glicéria tells Mongabay. “[It] showed this dimension where women’s hands make the cape. Women bear their own cape. From then on, I started making a cape in 2020 for Chief Babau — a cape authorized by the Enchanted Ones.”

That first cape, for Babau Tupinambá, her brother and the chief of the Serra do Padeiro village in Bahia state, represents for Glicéria not just the renewal of ancestral Indigenous cosmology and the tradition of sacred garments, but also a new perspective on belonging and on Indigenous peoples’ identity and struggle to preserve their culture.

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The Muisca are one of Colombia's most famous cultures because of their connection to gold and the legend of El Dorado. But the Muisca were far more complex than goldsmiths and created a flourishing culture. Discover this culture and it's conquest in this video.

Over the past few months, appalling videos have emerged from the conflict zone in Gaza of Israeli troops looting the properties of Palestinians who have fled their brutal aggression. Soldiers can be seen smiling to the camera and showing off watches, jewellery, cash, and even carpets and sports jerseys that they had stolen from Palestinian homes. Historical artefacts stolen from Gaza have even been put on display at the Knesset.

Once established, the state of Israel continued to steal on a greater scale from the Palestinians, taking their land and property. Palestinian natural resources, particularly water, have also been looted. Today, the war in Gaza is serving as a convenient cover for another theft on a grand scale; this time Israel is seeking to plunder the maritime offshore gas reserves that are the property of the state of Palestine.

In late October, the Israeli Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure announced that it had awarded concessions for natural gas exploration to Israeli and foreign companies in zones that significantly overlap with the maritime borders of Gaza.

One has to wonder why foreign companies, including Italian Eni, British BP and Dana Petroleum, a subsidiary of Korea National Oil Corporation, have decided to continue their participation in this deal, particularly amid the continuing Israeli campaign of what the International Court of Justice has identified as a plausible case of genocide.

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• Wild rice or manoomin is an ecologically important and culturally revered wetland species native to the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada, which once covered thousands of acres and was a staple for Indigenous peoples.
• Over the past two centuries, indiscriminate logging, dam building, mining, and industrial pollution have decimated the wild rice beds, and today climate change and irregular weather patterns threaten the species’ future.
• In recent years, native tribes and First Nations, working with federal and state agencies, scientists and funding initiatives, have led wild rice restoration programs that have successfully revived the species in parts of the region and paved the way for education and outreach.
• Experts say more research and investments must be directed towards wild rice, and such initiatives need the support of all stakeholders to bring back the plant.

In the late summer of 2023, thick stands of wild rice stood tall and shimmered gold in some of Lac du Flambeau’s lakes. The plant has been virtually absent in these lakes for decades, so for Joe Graveen, the sight of grain-filled stalks was a thing of joy, he says. As the wild rice program manager for the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, a tribal band in northern Wisconsin, Graveen was seeing the fruits (or grains, literally) of hard work he and his tribe’s members had put in over the past six years.

“It was the first time that I think a lot of us saw wild rice in a while, in about 20 years or maybe longer,” Graveen says. “It always brings a smile to my face to see our harvesters’ reaction.”

The wild rice only grew here after years of grit and endurance. In late 2017, the band launched a new program to revive wild rice in some of the 260 lakes on their reservation. Leading the program is Graveen, a “ricer” and knowledge keeper who learned about the plant and harvesting methods from his elders. The restoration involved seeding the lakebeds with tons of rice seeds, monitoring water quality, fending off geese from gobbling the young rice plants, and keeping tabs on the lakes’ water levels.

Full article

• The creation of the UNESCO-listed Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in Mexico’s Campeche region has led to a long-standing conflict with Indigenous residents who argue the government restricted their livelihoods, despite promises of support and land titles by Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT).
• According to researchers, these conflicts are due to a fault in nations’ application of international conservation policy by overemphasizing the expansion of protected areas while paying less attention to socioeconomic factors and equitable management included in these policies.
• Authors underline the importance of adapting international conservation policy, such as the “30 by 30” pledge, which plans to conserve 30% of Earth’s land and sea by 2030, to specific local contexts and needs.

Conflicts between communities and government plans to protect vast swaths of land in line with international conservation policies, such as the “30 by 30” goal of preserving 30% of the world’s land and ocean area by 2030, are already simmering, according to a new study.

In Mexico’s Campeche state, a farming community living in the UNESCO-listed Calakmul Biosphere Reserve (CBR) is seeking to redraw its boundaries to allow for daily activities such as growing food and hunting. But the federal government, which has jurisdiction over biosphere reserves, has rejected it, according to José Adalberto Zúñiga Morales, director of the CBR.

The argument behind this, according to the study’s authors, was that Mexico needed to comply with one of the Aichi targets — now Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) — which means increasing, not decreasing, the percentage of land under conservation.

Full article

A lot of people are unaware of Marlon Brandos extensive efforts to bring attention to Indigenous rights issues. From attempting to platform an Indigenous person during the Oscars, to giving an RV to the American Indian Movement that the feds would pull over in Wichita, it is no wonder we find him at the Fish-ins during 1964. The title image shows Brando with Puyallup tribal leader Bob Satiacum, Brando is holding one of 2 steelhead salmon he caught during the protest.

It's important to note the real impetus of these protest not only being the Puyallup but the Nisqually people as well which, the right hand map shows in reference to Puyallup. Puyallup being in the middle of Tocoma, Nisqually is right outside the western city limits. All of this history of course is underpinned by settler-colonialism that we can't help but see being repeated (only with modern technology) in Palestine.

Of course we all know Lewis and Clark to be foundational to western expansion, their expedition having ended in the PNW, it makes sense why when Ft. Lewis was built they would name it after Meriwether. This is why we can't colonial occupation and land grabs to something "hundreds of years ago" considering Bill Frank was born only 25 years after their treaty was signed and lived to be 101. Our elders and leaders have a living memory of this time because it really wasn't that long ago

In total I have heard elders say 400 times the franks had been arrested, 40 were the times they were charged with a crime instead of only having property seized

And if you are ever lucky enough to meet the people who grew up learning from the Frank's, you will see why I felt the need to inform people more about this topic. You see February 12th marked 50 years since the courts ruled in favor of the organizers

Yet the salmon are not safe, and in fact are on the brink of extinction. When I went to the Pacific Northwest I went to Frank's Landing, I visited the Puyallup, and then I went North to Lummi. There I would have an interview with Children of the Setting Suns production crew, and would meet with Jewel James. There I learned about the effort to establish an International governing body to protect the salmon from over-exploitation called the Salmon Peoples Project, which would seek to connect people who rely on salmon for their way of life, to fight on behalf of the Salmon.

Solidarity on an International level has always been at the root of Red Power, and is why I think people should learn to put down their hubris, and humble themselves to hear about the kinship between our nations and the other-than-human nations that are often hard for settlers to understand.

There's a great song by the AIM activist Floyd 'Red Crow' Westerman (a grandpa of mine) called "They Didn't Listen" which is painfully relevant today, as is his song "Where were you when" when I mention humbling oneself to hear another world. While in Lummi I learned their traditional river only saw 3 salmon return, and I was honored with a can of smoked salmon of one of them, and feasted with them after being invited to an incredible ceremony to celebrate the end of a totem journey.

This is despite the best conservation efforts of settler society, and the elders there believe this year there will be no salmon if the dams are not removed. There has been incredible efforts to do this, but the question remains what will happen? Have their predictions changed since 2019 and 2021 when I last heard them? We will see.

I can only talk so much about this specific story out of respect for the people who I was a guest to, but you can read about it https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/indigenous-carvers-totem-pole-to-journey-across-pacific-northwest-to-bolster-dam-removal-movement/ where I am actually behind the camera as the photo of the 3 of them is takem (Jewel being to the right). They were actually laughing and smiling right before the camera took the photo and had to take considerable effort to stop smiling. The totem pole shown above is my photo of the same one shown in the paper, and neither of us took a photo of the other side. On the other side was a red women waiting to be reborn through the salmon, this symbolized Indigenous resurgence through traditional food systems brought into the future and updated. It was an honor to have met these people and shared our stories, to hear how they valued the salmon like we value buffalo. I look forward to visiting again this year and to hear about the dams they are tearing down, and what theyre carving next.

Most recently was a totem pole https://around.uoregon.edu/content/totem-pole-journey-will-make-stop-uo-campus that was an orca being ridden by an Indigenous woman in reference to the same orca from 2018 that inspired the journey I saw the end of. They call orcas the people under the sea, and I think when we see literal organized attacks on yachts, we should consider what that means for organizing given stories of crows collecting change for people when trained to. Theres a lot you can do thinking outside the box, to me this is how we invent the future

So if you learned something and want to help us out we are currently raising $1000 for an Anishinaabe families electric bill that got away from them with rising prices, and ultra cold, cold spells and weirdly warm spells making bills extremely unpredictable. As well, the utility is owned by enbridge who is being required to remove Line 5 from Bad River lands where this family lives, to us we believe there might be a case of mass retaliation through raising prices. We have 711/1000 we are also looking for help paying the storage costs of an elder and community leaders ceremonial items he has had to store to house 15 people during the winter. We have 87.50/200 needed to pay that bill.

You can of course support these people monthly and our organizers via the patreon or liberapay (found on https://linktr.ee/chunkalutanetwork) and hear the CLN podcast as soon as the episode is ready verse on the 20th of every month for the public feed. All content is eventually made free and we encourage that you steal and distribute it, who knows maybe a pirate RSS feed might appear to get patreon content for free at the same time. At any rate supporting us monthly will go towards paying $500 a month stipends for International organizers of a variety of orgs, that were they given that extra support could dedicate far more time to incredible work. We are increasing our first year goal to 3k/month as we have identified several candidates that we believe could do incredible work, if supported how people support podcasters doing the bare minimum. The podcast is a byproduct of easily produced theoretical and relevant discussions to the current moment and organizing our networks are doing. We are hoping to start writing more when the website launches and ask forgiveness for the delays in thats launch, as well as the delay in the audio documentary (we are doing some rewrites due to time constraints of the second narrator we wrote in and we are making all of the music ourselves now) anyway I promise it is worth the wait and things just take time to do right and not cheat people for the years of support theyve given me in pursuing this research. Its been a real honor and turned into the Chunka Luta Network so it really is just something else worth documenting the best I can the first time. However you can see rough drafts on patreon before publication lmao. Anyway thanks for reading all of this if you did

Uruçuca, Brazil – Mukunã Pataxó remembers his aunt began to sing moments before the gunfire rang out.

Maria de Fátima Muniz, 52, was a spiritual leader among the Pataxó Hã-Hã-Hãe, an Indigenous group in northeastern Brazil. A short, serious woman with dark, shoulder-length hair, she was known to lead her people in prayer and song, her voice deep and steady.

But on January 21, that voice could not quell the violence about to erupt in the rolling green hills outside Potiraguá, a town in the state of Bahia.

About 50 members of Maria’s village had gathered there to set up camp one day prior, in an effort to reclaim part of their ancestral homeland. She, her brother Chief Nailton Muniz and the other Pataxó Hã-Hã-Hãe activists had planned to plant traditional crops in the area: beans, cassava and corn, alongside medicinal herbs.

But their presence generated backlash among the local landowners. A social media message soon circulated on WhatsApp, calling on merchants, farmers and landholders to “take back” the parcel.

More than 30 vehicles arrived the next morning, blocking access to the roads. The Brazilian government later estimated there were 200 non-Indigenous “ruralists” present. Some came armed.

Mukuna said police on the scene had assured the Pataxó Hã-Hã-Hãe of their safety. Video showed the group chanting at the top of a dirt path, while officers stood metres away.

Law enforcement did nothing, however, as the ruralists raised their guns to shoot, Chief Muniz and his stepson Mukunã allege.

The ruralists opened fire and attacked the group, wounding at least five people and setting fire to Pataxó Hã-Hã-Hãe vehicles. Chief Muniz was shot in the kidney. And his sister was fatally injured. She died on the way to the hospital.

“The police were watching everything,” said Mukunã, “as if we were nothing to them.”

Maria became the second Pataxó Hã-Hã-Hãe leader to be shot dead in southern Bahia in the past three months.

Her death has raised lingering questions about the ongoing violence against the Pataxó Hã-Hã-Hãe community — and whether Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva can follow through with his promises to defend Indigenous rights.

full article

Cw: fish

On the 2nd of march 1964, a group of indigenous rights activists, among them actor Marlon Brando and Puyallup tribal leader Bob Satiacum, illegally fished in the Puyallup River to protest the denial of treaty rights to Native Americans. This form of civil disobedience is known as a "fish-in", and in this specific incident both Brando and an Episcopal clergyman were arrested.

The fish-in was staged by the National Indian Youth Council, a Native American civil rights organization formed in Gallup, New Mexico in 1961. It became part of the so-called "Fish Wars", a set of protests spanning decades in which Native American tribes around the Puget Sound pressured the U.S. government to recognize fishing rights granted by the Point No Point Treaty.

The protests eventually won indigenous people in the area the right to fish without state permits - in the 1974 case "United States v. Washington", U.S. District Court Judge George Hugo Boldt stated that treaty right fishermen must be allowed to take up to 50% of all potential fishing harvests and required that they have an equal voice in the management of the fishery.

The so-called "Boldt Decision" was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in 1979 and has been used as a precedent for handling other, similar treaties.

• Looking back at the Fish Wars 50 years later

• Fish Wars

• The Civil Rights Struggle of the Pacific Northwest—The Fish Wars

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Tribal climate action plans are being stymied by state-owned land within reservation borders.

Before Jon Eagle Sr. began working for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, he was an equine therapist for over 36 years, linking horses with and providing support to children, families, and communities both on his ranch and on the road. The work reinforced his familiarity with the land, and allowed him to explore the rolling hills, plains, and buttes of the sixth-largest reservation in the United States. But when he became Standing Rock’s tribal historic preservation officer, he learned that the land still held surprises, the biggest one being that much of that land didn’t belong to the tribe. Standing Rock straddles North and South Dakota, and both states own thousands of acres within the tribe’s reservation boundaries.

“They don’t talk to us at all about it,” Eagle said. “I wasn’t even aware that there were lands like that here.”

On the North Dakota side, nearly 23,500 acres of Standing Rock are managed by the state, along with another 70,000 of subsurface acres, a land classification that refers to underground resources, including oil and gas. The combined 93,500 acres, known as trust lands, are held and managed by the state and produce revenue for its public schools and the Bank of North Dakota. The amount of reservation land South Dakota controls is unknown; the state does not make public its trust land data and did not supply it after a public records request.

And Standing Rock isn’t alone.

Data analyzed by Grist and High Country News reveals that a combined 1.6 million surface and subsurface acres of state trust lands lie within the borders of 83 federal Indian reservations in 10 states.

read more; https://grist.org/indigenous/tribal-reservation-state-land-trust-profit/

Federal prosecutors say Travis John Branson and others killed about 3,600 birds during a yearslong “killing spree” on the Flathead Indian Reservation and elsewhere

A Washington state man accused of helping kill more than 3,000 birds — including eagles on a Montana Indian reservation — then illegally selling their carcasses and feathers intends to plead guilty to illegal wildlife trafficking and other criminal charges, court documents show.

Federal prosecutors say Travis John Branson and others killed about 3,600 birds during a yearslong “killing spree” on the Flathead Indian Reservation and elsewhere. Feathers and other parts of eagles and other birds are highly prized among many tribes for use in sacred ceremonies and during powwows.

Branson of Cusick, Washington, will plead guilty under an agreement with prosecutors to reduced charges including conspiracy, wildlife trafficking and two counts of unlawful trafficking of eagles, according to court documents filed Tuesday. The documents did not detail how many birds he will admit to killing.

A second suspect, Simon Paul of St. Ignatius, Montana, remains at large after an arrest warrant was issued when he failed to show up for an initial court appearance in early January. His attorney, Dwight Schulte, declined to comment Tuesday.

The defendants are accused of selling eagle parts on a black market that has been a long-running problem for U.S. wildlife officials. Illegal shootings are a leading cause of golden eagle deaths, according to a recent government study.

Immature golden eagle feathers are especially valued among tribes, and a tail set from one of the birds can sell for several hundred dollars, according to details disclosed during a separate trafficking case in South Dakota last year in which a Montana man was sentenced to three years in prison.

A grand jury in December indicted the two men on 15 criminal charges. They worked with others — who haven't been named by authorities — to hunt and kill the birds and on at least one occasion used a dead deer to lure an eagle that was killed, according to the indictment.

read more: https://ictnews.org/news/man-to-plead-guilty-in-killing-spree-of-eagles-and-other-birds

The 50+1 Collective requested the search for justice for a woman, until now identified as indigenous, who was murdered near the San Antonio de Padua chapel, in the municipality of Simojovel, on February 21st.

The Commission for a Life Free of Violence of the Collective strongly rejected any act of violence against girls and women, which is why they demanded the maximum penalty for the femicide.

In addition, it regretted that more cases continue to occur and there are no effective prevention campaigns in the state.

It should be noted, according to the Collective, in 2022 there were 38 femicides; by 2023 there were 36 and in two months of 2024, three have been registered.

The second femicide of the year occurred on January 15th, committed against a girl whose identity was protected, events that occurred inside the coffee farm called “Café Mar”, Agua Escondida Canton, Huehuetán.

The FGE reported that it was linked to the process against Gabriel “N” due to his probable responsibility in the crime of femicide.

The first occurred on January 5th, 2024, in the municipality of Venustiano Carranza. Laura Soledad, who worked as a municipal police officer, was found murdered at the entrance of San José La Grandeza.

read more: https://schoolsforchiapas.org/35-femicides-in-state-in-2023/

Members of a First Nation in Canada have launched a lawsuit alleging they were subjected to a secret medical experiment without their consent that left them feeling “violated and humiliated”.

The class-action lawsuit, which was certified by the Nova Scotia supreme court in early February, revives the painful history of Canada conducting medical experiments on Indigenous peoples and the persistent discrimination they continue to face within the country’s healthcare system.

In a statement of claim, Chief Andrea Paul, the lead plaintiff, says she and 60 other members of the Pictou Landing First Nation participated in an MRI in 2017 for a medical research project administered by the Canadian Alliance for Healthy Hearts and Minds.

But after the test finished, staff at the hospital in Halifax kept her for a second test.

“As she lay inside the claustrophobic MRI chamber, holding her breath, and cringing from the loud banging sounds around her, the MRI scans generated data that revealed intimate medical information about her body without her knowledge or consent,” reads the statement of claim. “She had been singled out for the one reason – she was Mi’kmaq.”

A year later, Paul, who also serves as regional chief for the Assembly of First Nations in Nova Scotia, learned that two radiologists had allegedly used the second procedure to conduct MRI elastography to study the livers of Indigenous subjects, without their knowledge or consent.

full article

Fosen Peninsula, Norway – A herd of reindeer running through thick, white snow sounds a bit like thunder.

It is a spectacle that has been replayed for at least the past 10,000 years on eastern Norway’s Fosen Peninsula and one that Maja Kristine Jama, who comes from a family of reindeer herders, is deeply familiar with.

Like most Sami reindeer herders, Jama knows every inch of this terrain without any need for a map.

Instead of going to kindergarten like most other children in Norway, she was raised living outdoors alongside the migrating reindeer. Reindeer husbandry in Norway is a sustainable activity that is carried out in accordance with the traditional practices of Sami culture. Reindeer also play an important role in the Arctic’s ecosystem and have long been a symbol of the region

“Reindeer herding defines me,” Jama says. “We are so connected to nature, we have respect for it. We say that you don’t live off the land, you live within it. But we see our lands being destroyed.”

Europe’s oldest and last remaining Indigenous people are under grave threat as a result of borders, land seizures, construction projects dedicated to the extraction of natural resources and systematic discrimination.

Yet, that creeping sense of suffocation has made the Sami reach out to another set of Indigenous people nearly 4,000km (2,500 miles) away, whose fight for survival they identify with: the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank.

Their own struggle for Indigenous rights and self-determination has turned the Sami into vocal advocates for the Palestinian cause.

“There is an instant urge to stand up for people who are being displaced from their homes,” Ella Marie Haetta Isaksen, a Sami activist and artist widely known for her singing, tells Al Jazeera.

full article

Lautaro (Anglicized as 'Levtaru') (Mapudungun: Lef-Traru "swift hawk") (Spanish pronunciation: [lawˈtaɾo]; c. 1534 – April 29, 1557) was a young Mapuche toqui known for leading the indigenous resistance against Spanish conquest in Chile and developing the tactics that would continue to be employed by the Mapuche during the long-running Arauco War.

In 1546 Lautaro, son of the local chieftain named Curiñancu, was captured by Pedro de Valdivia's army in the vicinity of Concepción. He remained a prisoner of the Spaniards for six years, during which time he became Valdivia's personal companion.

Among his regular tasks was to take care of Valdivia's horses and he always had to accompany him to battles and military exercises. Thus he learned not to fear the horse, he learned to ride until he became a good horseman. In addition, he observed the battle dispositions of the Spaniards, learning from Valdivia his military tactics.

During this period, he made a certain degree of friendship with one of Valdivia's captains, Marcos Veas, who taught him the use of some weapons and cavalry tactics. This practice was common, as Lautaro had to serve as an auxiliary Indian in battles.

In 1550, during the battle of Andalién (February 22) and the battle of Penco (March 12), Lautaro witnessed the chastisements to which Valdivia made the defeated Mapuches submit, mutilating the prisoners and freeing them afterwards, as an example to avoid future rebellions; this had a deep impact on him. It is probable that as a result of these violent acts against his people, a terrible disillusionment and rebellion was engendered within him with respect to Valdivia and the Spaniards.

He escaped sometime in 1552 on horseback and also with the bugle of Pero Godinez, Valdivia's field master, returning to his people. The escape of Valdivia's page did not pass beyond the Spaniards as an almost habitual fact and they did not pursue him.

Lautaro resolutely demonstrated his natural gifts as an innate leader, he taught his people to lose their fear of horses, they learned to ride and to appreciate the horse as a combat weapon. He called meetings in the open field and taught them the military arts and the use of new weapons. He also designed a series of military tactics: the use of squads, the choice of terrain, ambush and guerrilla tactics. In this way, having the authority of the caciques, he led a great military uprising against the Spaniards, who up to that moment were victorious throughout the area between the Mapocho River and the Biobío.

Lautaro knew that his recently trained forces under his command were now in a line called "Interior Line", that is to say, between two forces, those of the Purén fort to the south and those of Concepción to the north. He chooses to neutralize one of them. He deceives Gómez de Almagro in the Purén fort and makes sure that his troops do not join Valdivia's in the Tucapel fort. Lautaro captures an emissary and learns that Valdivia is marching south and must necessarily pass through Tucapel. In effect, Valdivia in mid-December 1553 leaves Concepción and goes to Quilacoya, where he takes some soldiers on his march to Arauco, the Mapuche spies follow the column from the heights of the hills and do not present him with a battle, leaving him to make his way. Valdivia is surprised that he does not receive any news from the fort of Tucapel and that he is not harassed on the way; but he continues, his company is devastated, taken prisoner, tortured and executed.

Then he systematically razed the Spanish cities. Twice he sacked and burned Concepción, center of the Spanish settlements in the south of Chile.

For two years there was no more news of Spaniards in the region, while the situation of the Mapuche people as a result of the war and the drought had caused a great famine that ravaged the Mapuches, the crops had failed due to a season of severe drought and acts of cannibalism appeared, In addition, typhus settled among them, diminishing Lautaro's warrior strength.

Lautaro, in spite of the famine and typhus managed to lead more than 2,000 warriors and with these he crossed the Biobío for the first time and continued northward and began to recruit people among the Picunches, much more peaceful than the Mapuches.

In Santiago, Diego Cano and only 14 men were urgently sent to Santiago to find out the real situation of the Maule. In Santiago, panic spread and defenses began to be built in the city while there was still a dispute over the royal succession of Valdivia.

There is an episode within this period that narrates an interview arranged at a distance, between two hills, that occurred between Lautaro and one of Villagra's captains, Marcos Veas, an old friend of Lautaro in Valdivia's times, in which this Spanish soldier urges Lautaro to lay down his arms since he could not oppose the Spanish power forever. Lautaro responded rudely to Veas by setting the Maule as a border for the Spaniards and also asking them for a tribute in horses, women and weapons in exchange for not attacking the colony. Lautaro's offer was rejected outright by Veas and the interview and friendship ended.

Lautaro advanced towards the Maule River and once crossed, he learned that Francisco de Villagra, successor of Pedro de Valdivia, had left Santiago with a punitive battalion of 50 horsemen and 30 arquebusiers plus a thousand yanaconas. Lautaro, judging that the capital was unguarded, advanced to the north, letting Francisco de Villagra pass to the south.

In 1555, the Real Audiencia of Lima ordered Villagra to reconstruct Concepción, which was done under the command of Captain Alvarado. Upon learning of this, Lautaro successfully besieged Concepción with 4,000 warriors. Only 38 Spaniards managed to escape by sea the second destruction of the city.

After the second rout at Concepción, Lautaro desired to attack Santiago. He found scant support for this plan from his troops, who soon dwindled to only 600, but he carried on. In October 1556 his northward march reached the Mataquito River, where he established a fortified camp at Peteroa. In the Battle of Peteroa he repulsed attacking Spanish forces under the command of Diego Cano, and later held off the larger force commanded by Pedro de Villagra. Being advised that still more Spaniards were approaching, Lautaro decided to retreat towards the Maule River losing 200 warriors. With the Spaniards in hot pursuit he was forced to retire beyond the Itata River. From there he launched another campaign towards Santiago when Villagra's army passed him by on the way to save the remaining Spanish settlements in Araucanía. Lautaro had chosen to give Villagra's force the slip and head for the city to attack it.

Despite the Mapuches' stealth, the city's leaders learned of the advance and sent a small expedition to thwart it, buying time for word to be sent to Villagra to return to the city from the south. The Spanish forces met in the field, and from a member of the local ethnos, the Picunche, they learned the disposition of Lautaro's camp. At dawn, on April 29, 1557, the conquistadors launched a surprise attack from the hills of Caune, obtaining a decisive victory in the Battle of Mataquito in which Lautaro was killed early in the fighting. After the defeat of his army, his head was cut off and displayed in the plaza of Santiago.

It was April 29, 1557 (some sources mention April 30, or May 1), every April 29 is commemorated the "Day of the Heroes and Martyrs of the Mapuche Nation".

With the end of Lautaro, a remarkable figure of the Arauco war disappears, no one else came to match his conditions as a leader or his military genius, which was at the height of the great strategists of his time.

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Hearings have started at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague on Monday in a landmark case in which 52 countries are jointly presenting evidence about the legal consequences of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

The case stems from a request from the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on December 30, 2022. A majority of UNGA members voted to seek the court’s opinion on the legal consequences of the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestine. The hearings will last until February 26.

On Monday, Palestine presented its case at the ICJ. “We call on you to confirm that Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is illegal,” Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian representative to the United Nations, said during an emotional speech.

“A finding from this distinguished court … would contribute to bringing [the occupation] to an immediate end, paving a way to a just and lasting peace,” he said. “A future in which no Palestinians and no Israelis are killed. A future in which two states live side by side in peace and security.”

Under occupation, the West Bank is rife with military checkpoints and patrols. Movement by Palestinian residents is severely restricted under Israel’s permit regime in the West Bank and for movement in and out of Gaza. Under this system, Palestinians are required to obtain permits to move between the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. These permits can be extremely difficult to obtain. Palestinians are often subjected to violence and theft from settlers with little or no recourse to justice.

Military raids, roadblocks, violence by settlers and curfews have become much more severe since October 7, and Palestinians are living under curfews – often shot at by armed settlers who are supported by Israeli forces if they leave their homes or even move too close to their windows.

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In the very distant past, our great grandmothers and grandfathers founded the Mayan town of Bacalar because of the presence of a lake. Most towns in the Yucatan Peninsula grew around a water source. Bacalar means “surrounded by reeds,” a combination of the Mayan word Bak', which means “surround,” and jalal, which means “cane” or “reed.”

The lake in Bacalar is known for its seven colors, although it is more accurate to say that there are seven shades of blue. There are also three cenotes. The town sits in the coastal state of Quintana Roo, and the people who live there plant corn, squash, beans, papaya, pineapple, banana, mango and other fruits and vegetables. There is also beekeeping and community tourism.

In years past, people from Bacalar lived around the lake, but things have changed. Today there are large hotels, restaurants and tourist-oriented businesses all along the lakeshore.

Over the last decade, the lake has become a water park for tourists and a source of revenue for businessmen. Bacalar will be home to a station of the ill-named “Mayan Train,” which will impact the lake’s health and that of the Mayan people. It is one among other government-sponsored mega-projects that will damage our social, economic, organizational, political and cultural wellbeing.

Just over 15 years ago, Mexico’s Ministry of Tourism (Sectur) declared Bacalar a “Pueblo Mágico.” When Miguel Torruco, the agency’s head, announced this, he said that good things would soon come to Bacalar. His statements reveal his interest in mass tourism. When he says that positive things are on the way, we ask: positive for whom?

As Mayan people, we have watched with concern as megaprojects have arrived to our territory. In response, we have organized at the Peninsular level through the Assembly of Defenders of Mayan Territory Múuch' Xíimbal, of which I am a member.

Our assembly’s goal is to defend Mayan life. To do so we have forged a series of agreements: we will not sell or rent the land; we say “no” to religion and political parties and “yes” to Mayan culture and language, to the defense of our rights and to our identity as Mayan peoples.

As Mayan people, we live in relation with animals, birds, stones, wind, fire, water, and the Yuum [guardians].

Today we worry our entire Mayan relational way of life is threatened by megaprojects, including genetically modified soybean production, pig farms, high impact tourism, photovoltaic and wind energy installations, and, now, the so-called Mayan Train.

In January, the Assembly of Defenders of Mayan Territory Múuch' Xíimbal, which means "we walk together," celebrated its sixth anniversary as an organization. In the context of this celebration, I spoke with a member of the assembly in Bacalar.

Throughout the interview, he noted that violence in the area has increased since the arrival of the train. He also voiced his disagreement with Torruco and other government officials, who claim that Mayan residents of the area want high-impact tourism.

He emphasized that the communities oppose the train, but that many are misinformed, as information does not always get to them. The person that I interviewed asked to be anonymous for fear of reprisals. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length and translated to English by Ojalá.

read more: https://www.ojala.mx/en/ojala-en/in-defense-of-mayan-land-and-life

A northern iwi has invited Aboriginal fire experts to teach locals traditional fire burnoff methods next month..

Ngāti Kuri Trust Board member Sheridan Waitai (Ngāti Kuri, Te Rarawa, Tainui) has been championing Indigenous knowledge of te ao Māori fire burning practices in Northland for some time.

The trust board organised an International gathering in 2018 to discuss indigenous practices, and it has since built strong bonds between Māori and first nations Australians.

“We had the full burn team from Australia come up to Kapowairua and at that stage they were a full female burn team of Aboriginal traditional owners.”

She says the foundations for this cultural gathering goes back to 2016 when she started attending a few conferences and exchanging knowledge with dreamtime relations and other Indigenous groups.

Waitai says that got them thinking about what their own traditional practices were “in terms of our forest health and what some of the strategies our tupuna would apply just to mitigate risk and stuff like that.”

full article

• A new road in Ecuador’s Pastaza province is under construction to improve access to the interior of the country’s Amazonian region.
• The 42-kilometer (26-mile) project will connect Indigenous Waorani communities to urban centers and aims to reduce food transportation costs.
• Construction of the road, however, hasn’t been managed well by the environment ministry, critics say, and has attracted deforestation along its route, according to a newly published report by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP).
• The project has been met with mixed reactions from communities, according to the president of the Waorani Nation, and an Indigenous guard group has been deployed to ensure environmental standards are being met.

A new road connecting eight Indigenous Waorani communities to urban centers in Ecuador’s Pastaza province aims to improve access to the interior of the Amazon and reduce transportation costs. But while it promises savings in time and costs, the environment and local communities may end up paying a high price, says Gilberto Nenquimo, president of the Waorani Nation, or NAWE.

The 42-kilometer (26-mile) road begins at the Nushiño River before winding west across thick Amazonian jungle to reach the eight Waorani communities in the interior, including the community of Toñampade. First approved in 2018, there are 28.3 km (17.6 mi) left of the road to complete.

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The renewed hunger strike of fifteen political prisoners of the Mapuche resistance movement in Chile has reached a highly critical stage. The prisoners are members of the Coordinadora Arauco-Malleco (CAM), a movement that is involved in direct action to recover ancestral lands in order to protect Madre Tierra from spoliation by logging companies and big business latifundios.

The weichafe ecowarriors also identify by their Spanish acronym PPM (Presos Políticos Mapuche). They have been in a protracted struggle for political autonomy and protection of their wallmapu homeland from destructive commercial exploitation. But the Chilean state, under the supposedly leftist government of Gabriel Boric, insists on criminalizing the CAM and stigmatizing any action for national liberation as terrorist.1

Four weichafe commenced a hunger strike on November 13, 2023, and have since been joined by two other groups of PPM. Their two central demands are:

The annulment of the political and unjust convictions without evidence against CAM political prisoners and the right of due process. Their conviction of at least fifteen years imprisonment was not based on evidence but on racist profiling.

Better conditions of detention, respecting their collective rights as Indigenous people, including the implementation of communal modules in prisons. The Chilean state should respect ILO Convention 169 regarding the cultural relevance of the deprivation of liberty of Indigenous peoples.

Doctors advise that once a hunger striker goes beyond sixty days without food, their internal organs begin to collapse and they are in imminent danger of dying. As at time of writing, January 29, 2024, the first group of strikers are seventy-nine days into their protest.

The families of the political prisoners, especially women, have led the resistance outside the prisons, called for demonstrations and a week of protest. They write:

“We confidently await the ruling on the appeal for annulment on February 9 this year and we will be attentive to the political and racist maneuvers of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the government of Gabriel Boric.”

read more: https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/mapuche-hunger-strike-reaches-crisis-point-political-prisoners-fight-for-madre-tierra/

On a crisp and sunny November morning, the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation welcomed nearly 400 people onto their land to plant 8,500 trees and shrubs. Steam rose from the Bear River’s hot springs. As volunteers arrived, the tribe’s conservation partners unloaded black plastic trays filled with cuttings of willow, cottonwood, chokecherry and more. Brad Parry, the tribe’s vice chairman, stood in a pickup truck bed and greeted tribal members, environmental activists, college students and church groups. “This is the Bear River Massacre site,” he said, “what we call Wuda Ogwa, or Bear River.”

Here, on Jan. 29, 1863, the U.S. Army murdered an estimated 400 Shoshone people, decimating the Northwestern Band in one of the deadliest massacres of Native people in U.S. history. Afterward, Mormon settlers dispossessed the Shoshone of their land throughout the Intermountain West. Some surviving Northwestern Shoshone went north to the Fort Hall Indian Reservation or east to the Wind River Reservation, but many stayed, joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and moved onto land the church claimed in northern Utah. The tribe wasn’t federally recognized until 1987, and it still lacks reservation land.

The settlers diverted water from the Bear River — the Great Salt Lake’s largest tributary — for water-intensive agriculture and livestock. “That was one of the starts of the problem for the Great Salt Lake,” Parry told High Country News. Today, as climate change-induced drought exacerbates the effect of over a century of unsustainable water use, the lake verges on ecological collapse.

In 2018, the tribe purchased roughly 350 acres of its ancestral land at the massacre site, making it the largest area owned by the Northwestern Shoshone. Now, the tribe is restoring the area, estimating that it can return 13,000 acre-feet of water to the Great Salt Lake annually by shifting vegetation from invasives to native plants, cleaning up creeks and restoring degraded agricultural fields to wetlands.

full article

Data obtained through the Land Grab University investigation conducted by Grist shows that much of what remains of the Normal School Trust land is tribal land taken mostly from the Ojibwe people

During the fall 2023 semester there were fewer than 700 Native Americans enrolled at Universities of Wisconsin schools, about 0.4 percent of the total student population, according to system data. Yet despite that minuscule proportion, Tribes in Wisconsin continue to have a large impact on the UW System.

In the 2023 fiscal year, through a land trust managed by the state’s Board of Commissioners of Public Lands (BCPL), the Universities of Wisconsin received more than $1 million earned by lands that had been taken from the state’s tribes during the 19th century.

The UW System is one of 52 land-grant universities that was supported by the Morrill Act. Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, the act used land taken from indigenous tribes to fund the creation of public universities.

But the Morrill Act was just one piece of the actions, from the federal and then-newly formed state government, that used tribal land to prop up the University of Wisconsin. In the 1780s, the Northwest Ordinance opened the created incentives to encourage the settlement of the Wisconsin territory while creating the system in which lands are held in a trust to fund education, according to Matt Villeneuve, a professor of history and American Indian studies at UW-Madison.

In 1850, just two years after Wisconsin achieved statehood, the federal government passed the Swamp Land Act, which allowed states to claim millions of acres of swamp land with the goal of draining the swamps to create more farmland. Wisconsin received the title to more than 3 million acres of land, without regard for whether or not the swamps included tribal land.

This act led to an explosion in the settlement of central Wisconsin despite opposition from the state’s tribes who, according to Villeneuve, tried multiple times to stop the taking of the swamp land. In 1897, the Stockbridge Munsee lost a lawsuit seeking to have some of this land returned to them.

Later, in 1865, the state government decided it didn’t need all the land and, according to the public lands commission, sold off half of it. The Legislature then passed a law which placed half the proceeds from the sale and half of the lands into a trust for the benefit of normal schools, which at the time were the state’s first teaching colleges.

Today, just 70,000 acres remain in the Normal School Trust Fund, yet the fund’s principal has grown to about $30 million.

Data obtained through the Land Grab University investigation conducted by Grist, an independent nonprofit media organization, shows that much of what remains of the Normal School Trust land is tribal land taken mostly from the Ojibwe people.

The extraction of timber from more than 68,000 acres of land originally held by tribal nations spread across the Upper Midwest — for which the federal government paid just $107,352, adjusted for inflation — now contributes about $1 million per year to the Universities of Wisconsin.

In a multi-state investigation, Grist found 8.2 millions of surface and subsurface acres of land taken from 123 Indigenous nations helping to fund 14 public universities. The combined nations were paid a combined $4.3 million for their land, according to Grist, while in 2022 those lands generated $2.2 billion for their schools.

read more: https://ictnews.org/news/university-of-wisconsin-schools-benefit-financially-from-former-tribal-land

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – Yellow and green feathers radiating from his headdress, Davi Kopenawa strode onto the parade route with a mission in mind.

All around him, the city of Rio de Janeiro was pulsing with music and merry-making: It was February 12, and the world’s largest Carnival celebration was under way. But Kopenawa was not in town to party.

Rather, he had travelled more than 3,500 kilometres (2,000 miles) from his village in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest to spread a dire message: His people, the Yanomami, were in trouble.

For decades, the Indigenous Yanomami have suffered at the hands of illegal gold miners, who destroyed vast stretches of their homeland and polluted their rivers with mercury.

But since 2019, the crisis has reached new heights, with hundreds of Yanomami dying from conditions related to the mining. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has gone so far as to declare the situation a “genocide”.

“Every day, we face death in our villages and attacks from illegal miners,” Kopenawa, a shaman, told Al Jazeera.

full article

by Aimee Gabay on 14 February 2024

• In the central highlands of Ecuador, land managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities is associated with improved outcomes for drought adaptation and páramo conservation, according to a new study.
• The study finds that páramo areas managed by communities in this region are better protected than those under the care of the state.
• Due to the advance of the agricultural frontier in the highlands, approximately 4 hectares (9.9 acres) of páramo are lost every day, which threatens the water supply of the entire region.
• Community-led land management that incorporates inclusive participation, traditional knowledge and the cultural values of those who inhabit the areas, coined by reseachers as “social technology,” can aid in the conservation of the páramo.

A recent study found that high-altitude ecosystems in the Andes, known as the páramo, managed by eight communities in Ecuador have led to a reduction in soil and vegetation decline, due to the incorporation of a concept called “social technology.”

According to the paper, published in Mountain Research and Development, community-led conservation initiatives were more effective in curbing páramo loss than state-protected areas, demonstrating the importance of social technology for drought adaptation and páramo conservation.

Social technology, understood in the Latin American context as tecnología social, is the application of social, political, scientific and digital resources to redefine the arrangements among social groups and processes in everyday life, particularly for production and consumption. It involves the inclusive participation of the entire community in this design and implementation of project proposals and recognizes the importance of local knowledge, dynamics and capacities.

“Communities [in these reserves] concerned about the lack of water have realized that they need to take action and have therefore consolidated a set of actions that address three key issues; land use, livestock management and community governance,” María Cristina Torres, lead author of the study and professor at Ecuador’s National Polytechnic School, told Mongabay. “This is called social technology because the actions have been adopted by an empowered community, open to cooperation and agreements, and aware of the importance of protecting the páramo.”

full article