cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/51868

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Carolyn Jones
CalMatters

When Celestina Castillo filled out the ethnicity forms at her children’s school, she’d always check Latino and Native American. After all, the family is proud of both its heritages.

But because of a loophole in the state’s data collection system, checking Latino or Hispanic meant that her children’s Native American identity was not counted at all, and they would not receive the extra services they’re entitled to. When Castillo learned of this, she stopped checking the Latino box altogether

According to the arcane way California counts its 5.8 million students, students who say they are Hispanic and Native American get counted as solely Hispanic. Native American students who also identify as another race, such as Black, white or Asian, are counted as “two or more races,” not Native American.

The problem affects all multiracial students, but it’s especially pronounced among Native Americans because the majority are multiracial. It’s resulted in an undercount of Native American students by as much as 90 percent, advocates said.

“If someone is Black, or Asian, or white, they’re counted that way,” said Castillo, a director of a college learning center who lives in Los Angeles. “Why does it not count if someone is Native American? That’s not OK. It feels like erasure.”

More services, fewer stereotypes

Last year California schools said they had 24,822 Native American students, but the actual number may be as high as 156,000, according to an Assembly report on a new measure, Assembly Bill 1581, that seeks to fix the problem. If those students were identified, they’d be entitled to cultural services and other programs that could help them succeed in school.

A more accurate count could also change the public perception of Native Americans generally, according to Assemblymember James Ramos, the San Bernardino Democrat who authored the bill. Instead of being thought of as rare or even extinct, the public could see that Native Americans are everywhere, Ramos said.

“We’ll start to see the true picture of Native Americans in California,” said Ramos, a member of the Serrano/Cahuilla tribe. “Native American students should be able to stand up in the classroom and say who they are and be proud of it.”

Changes in the U.S. Census

There’s a long history of the government marginalizing Native Americans in California, particularly in schools. In the late 19th and 20th centuries, not long after 90 percent of California’s Native American population was murdered or killed by disease, the federal government forced thousands of Native American children in California into boarding schools, where they were forced to speak English and abandon their cultures.

Things started to change in 1970 when the U.S. Census Bureau started improving the way it counted Native Americans. Now, Native Americans can write in their tribal affiliation or list themselves as multiracial, and still be counted as Native American. Although Native Americans are still undercounted more than any other ethnic group, the census changes resulted in a tenfold increase in the official number of Native Americans in the U.S. In 1960, Native Americans only made up .3 percent of the population. In 2020 they were almost 3 percent.

The improved census data also revealed that California has more Native Americans than any other state. More than 760,000 people in California identify as Native American, with most living in urban areas like Los Angeles.

Ramos’ bill would allow Native American students to write in the name of their tribe on school forms and identify as Native American plus another race, if applicable. The hope is to give a more comprehensive, more nuanced view of California’s Native American student population, allowing them to get extra services regardless of their biracial identity. So far, the bill has no opposition.

‘We’re in the modern world, too’

Shannon Rivers, who works on education issues for the Los Angeles-based California Native Vote Project, said an accurate count of Native Americans is essential to dispel stereotypes and bring public awareness to issues affecting Native American communities.

“In the eyes of many Americans, there’s still this image of Native American people from the past, from the 1800s,” said Rivers, who is a member of the Akimel Oʼodham tribe in Arizona. “That history is important, but we’re in the modern world, too. We’re doctors, lawyers, scientists, artists, educators.”

He’s hopeful that Ramos’ bill will improve conditions generally for Native American students in California schools. With more accurate student counts, schools could get more federal and state funding to provide extra services, such as tutoring, to Native American children. More schools could host events and curriculum centered on Native American history and culture.

When Ramos was growing up in San Bernardino, he remembers staring at the ethnicity form at school and not knowing what bubble to fill. His mother was Native American but she was labeled “white” on her birth certificate. His father, also Native American, was labeled “Hispanic.”

“Were we white or Latino? I didn’t know. We had to accept whatever the school told us we were,” Ramos said. “I’d go home and ask, ‘Are we Caucasian?’ That started a whole other conversation. It was confusing.”

Castillo, a descendent of the Tohono O’odham tribe in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, said that as a child, she thought everyone was Native American. But when she started school she realized that very few people identified as she did, and worse, it was stigmatized.

Years later, she saw her own children singled out as oddities. One day her son, who had long hair, was dressed for a Native American dance and another child pointed and said, “Look, mom, it’s an Indian!”

“My son felt like a dinosaur or a unicorn, like we didn’t exist,” Castillo said.

By leaving the ethnicity question blank on school forms, Castillo knew it meant her children would not receive extra services they’re entitled to, either at the charter school they attend or through Los Angeles Unified.

“That angered me,” Castillo said. “I’m hoping that this bill will help make Native students visible to local and state education policy makers.”

The post ‘Feels like erasure’: Why Native American students may be undercounted by 90 percent in California schools appeared first on ICT.

From ICT via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/51603

Hundreds of Greenlanders demonstrated outside the new US Consulate in Nuuk on Thursday as President Donald Trump's envoy signaled that he's still seeking to control the self-governing Danish territory that straddles the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.

Various Greenlandic politicians also declined invitations to attend the opening of the consulate, with Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen telling the local outlet Sermitsiaq that "we haven't made a decision in principle, but I won't participate."

Protesters were armed with Greenland's red and white flag and signs that read "USA ASU," which translates to "Stop USA," as well as messages in English, including "Make America go away!" and "We are not for sale!" Their chants included "Greenland belongs to Greenlanders," "Go home," and "No means no."

"It's very important, now more than ever, to show the American people what we already said, that no means no, and that the future and self-determination of Greenland belongs to the Greenlandic people," said Aqqalukkuluk Fontain, a 37-year-old IT account manager and protest organizer, according to The Guardian.

"The protest itself is not to provoke Donald Trump or Jeff Landry but to show the world that Greenland has its own democracy," Fontain added. Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana and the president's envoy to the island, arrived in Nuuk on Sunday.

The newspaper noted Trump's envoy traveled there "uninvited with a delegation including a doctor, who caused fury by saying he was there to 'assess the medical needs of Greenland.' Landry briefly attended a business conference with the US ambassador to Denmark, Kenneth Lowery, and left Nuuk on Wednesday night."

During Landry's "ham-handed trip," The New York Times reported, "he offered chocolate chip cookies and red MAGA hats to people he met on the street. He didn't get many takers, and Greenlandic officials criticized the visit."

It was Landry's first visit to the island of 57,000 since Trump appointed him as envoy in December. On Monday, he met with Greenlandic Foreign Minister Múte Egede and Nielsen, who called the talks "constructive," even though there was "no sign... that anything has changed" regarding Trump's position.

While polling has shown Americans and Greenlanders alike oppose Trump's takeover threats, Landry told Agence France-Presse near the end of his trip that "I think it's time for the US to put its footprint back on Greenland."

"I think that you're seeing the president talk about increasing national security operations and repopulating certain bases in Greenland," he continued. "Greenland needs the US."

The envoy made similar remarks on Friday during a Fox News appearance, highlighting Greenland's oil resources amid soaring global prices—which stem from Trump's illegal war on Iran that led the Iranian government to restrict ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a key trade route for fertilizer and fossil fuels.

In addition to waging war on Iran and continuing to threaten both Greenland and Cuba, Trump invaded Venezuela early this year, abducting President Nicolás Maduro and seizing control of the South American country's nationalized oil industry.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/51268

Nika Bartoo-Smith
Underscore Native News + ICT

PORTLAND, Ore. – Around 300 high school students dressed in gowns, costumes and elaborate makeup danced until their feet hurt to music from DJ Aspen blaring through the speakers, their smiles and laughter filling the air at this year’s annual Queer Prom.

The Native American Youth and Family Center’s Two-Spirit program has hosted the event for four years since taking a hiatus during the pandemic.

“My ultimate goal with this is creating a space for queer youth, especially Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQ+ youth, to be unabashedly themselves, to truly not have to worry about the way that they’re being perceived, but just be able to celebrate themselves, celebrate each other, and to showcase the fact that we’ve always been here — Indigenous, trans, queer, we’ve always been here. We’re not going anywhere,” said Kiara Wehrenberg, Tlingit and the Two-Spirit program coordinator at the center. Wehrenberg coordinates Queer Prom.

As prom season is well underway, Queer Prom is a space built for students from all backgrounds to have a space centering joy, in Portland.

“Queer Prom is so unique and so special,” said this year’s emcee, Dr. Poison Waters, an iconic Portland drag queen. “There are people in this country that wish they could come to a Queer Prom.”

Planning Queer Prom

Wehrenberg worked with youth from the center’s Two-Spirit program to find a theme and organize a prom built for them. The group made pamphlets for a swag table during the May 15 event, that offered a resource guide, information about the term Two Spirit and a list of Two-Spirit powwows across the country

This year’s prom theme was “Superheroes vs. Villains Edition” and students showed out in all kinds of costumes. From Captain America and the Joker to fantasy inspired looks include elf ears and elaborate makeup. The theme extended beyond dress as projected graphics all around the room feature comic book inspired illustrations.

Food, catered by Brittinie Love and her company Cooking with B. Love, took the superheroes versus villains theme to the next level. The menu featured items such as “Gotham Fire Beef Skewers” and “The Green Goblin Spring Rolls” with mocktails like “Radiant Recharge” and “Arctic Blast.”

Planning for Queer Prom began as soon as last year’s ended, according to Wehrenberg. This began with reaching out to vendors and event venues, such as AVENUE Portland, where this year’s prom took place.

“I think Queer Prom is just a beautiful place for connection,” said Marvin Colbow, whose drag name is Marvin Killboy, a senior at Benson Polytechnic High School. “I just went to my own prom, and I did not feel the same amount of connectivity that I feel here with my fellow transgender and queer people.”

Wehrenberg reached out to Queer-Straight Alliances and Indigenous Student Unions across Portland and beyond to open up the event to youth across the city, beyond youth at the center’s Many Nations Academy.

“Queer specific spaces are necessary across the board,” said Ellen Whatmore, a teacher at Franklin High School and the school’s co-advisor for the Gay-Straight Alliance. “Having an opportunity to shine and be in the spotlight and be celebrated is unparalleled.”

Whatmore attended Queer Prom dressed in a Medusa-inspired look, as an event volunteer and also helped advertise the event to Franklin students after receiving an email invitation from Wehrenberg.

Guest Appearances

A few hours into the dance, students were interrupted from tearing up the dance floor when Dr. Poison Waters invited two other drag performers from Darcelle’s XV out onto the dance floor.

Dressed in a big, blonde wig with hot pink heeled boots and a matching hot pink ruffled robe, T’Kara Campbell Star made her way onto the dance floor. As “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus filled the speakers, she shed her robe to reveal a bright green body suit and matching sun hat decked out in fake flowers. Her performance was met with cheers as students formed a half circle around her. At the end of three songs, T’Kara Campbell Star invited a student dressed as Maleficent to the center of the floor to dance with her.

Following her performance, Ilani E. Nova made her way onto the dance floor, decked out with a black feather boa, thigh high leather boots and a black and tan body suit. She danced with the students, lip syncing to a compilation of Abba classics.

And of course, Dr. Poison Waters herself also performed, moving from stage to the middle of the dance floor.

As the night wore on, the dance floor remained full as laughter and song sing-alongs drifted through the air, mixed with the beats spun by DJ Aspen.

“I just see so much queer joy in our youth and I’m so happy and honored to be a part of this,” said Mitch Saffle, Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a chaperone at Queer Prom and a data and evaluation support specialist at the center. “I’m so grateful to see that a space like this exists for our youth. Not only our queer youth, but our Indigenous queer youth.”

Later on in the evening, Yin Glossier, Dior Glossier and Deity 007 from PDX Ballroom brought vogue to the dance floor as students sat in a circle around the three performers, completely engaged.

Following their own performance, Yin Glossier explained a bit about the ball scene which started in Harlem in the 1920s, expanding in the 1970s and 1980s, when Black and Brown drag queens were not allowed to be at White drag queen pageants.

“So, as Black and Brown people do, we make our own shit,” Yin Glossier said. “In that, we have the birth of ballroom.”

They then explained some of the main categories that “Houses” of the ball scene compete in: fashion, body, sex appeal, face, vogue.

Students were then invited to compete in ballroom style, lining up to compete for “best dressed.” A hard decision on the part of the judges, composed of performers from Darcelle’s XV and PDX Ballroom. Ultimately a student dressed in a Master Shake, from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, costume took home the prize: a pair of rainbow beaded earrings donated by the center’s Two-Spirit program.

For Wehrenberg, Saffle, volunteers and students an event like Queer Prom is so crucial for the community.

“Being able to have a space like this is really important because it provides an opportunity for us to come together in community and celebrate queer joy,” Wehrenberg said.

Wehrenberg expressed that so often when Indigenous and 2SLGBTQ+ stories are told in the media, it is through a lens of oppression and tragedy.

“It is also really important to highlight and tell stories of resilience and love and joy, because we all deserve to be seen as we are here, queer, trans, Indigenous, proud, strong and fully human, because only telling the stories of oppression and tragedy, in a way, strips us of humanity because it doesn’t highlight or show any understanding of the fact that we have whole lives and joy and love surrounding us too,” Wehrenberg said.

This story is co-published by Underscore Native News and ICT, a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest.

The post Queer Prom: A space for queer youth to be ‘unabashedly themselves’ appeared first on ICT.

From ICT via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/51219

This story was originally published by Grist.

Te Aniwaniwa Paterson
Grist

This story is published through the Indigenous News Alliance.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, record-breaking storms and flooding are impacting Māori land, health, and culture. And, according to a new national climate report, colonization has intensified those risks.

The 2026 National Climate Change Risk Assessment is composed of four reports, including a companion document focused on Māori communities. That report argues that climate change is likely to deepen existing inequities shaped by colonization, exclusion from decision-making, and chronic underinvestment.

To mitigate the impacts of climate change, the assessment points to Māori-led adaptation as uniquely effective. It calls for policy grounded in Māori customs and knowledge, Indigenous data sovereignty, and stronger Māori authority in climate decision-making.

“For more than 150 years Māori have been pushed to the margins, literally, by an aggressive colonization process,” said Paora Tapsell, who is Ngāti Whakaue and Ngāti Raukawa, and the director of the Kāika Institute of Climate Resilience at Lincoln University.

The assessment, released earlier this month, adds to a growing body of national reports that highlight the harmful impacts of colonial policies on Indigenous peoples and the environment. In 2023, the United States’ Fifth National Climate Assessment found that land theft and colonization had exacerbated climate change’s impact. The year before, Australia’s State of the Environment report was prepared with an Indigenous lead author for the first time; it found that Indigenous peoples were more likely to be impacted by extreme weather events like fires. It too called for incorporating Indigenous knowledge into climate policies. Despite these findings, Indigenous leaders around the world say national governments are still not listening to them.

Aotearoa New Zealand recently experienced one of its most active severe weather seasons on record, with multiple declared states of emergency across the nation’s two islands. It also found that the country’s Indigenous peoples are essential in responding to such disasters. “The report accurately acknowledges that many kāinga [Māori settlements], despite their relative impoverishment, are still willing first responders on the front line of increasingly severe climate events,” Shaun Awatere, who is Ngāti Porou and lead author of the companion report, said.

The assessment’s seven interconnected risk areas span environmental, cultural, and economic domains. It says the loss of protected endemic species is not only a biodiversity issue but also affects food gathering places, the Māori lunar calendar, traditional customs, and intergenerational knowledge systems. According to the report, some species could face near-irreversible decline in parts of the country under high-emissions scenarios by 2090.

Across Māori lands, climate-driven extreme weather events have had a destructive impact on infrastructure. But the report outlines how flooding, erosion, storms, and wildfires also present cultural risks by threatening tribal meeting places, burial sites, and communal homes. It warns that repeated damage and displacement could lead to long-term cultural fragmentation and disconnection from ancestral land.

Climate impacts may also be felt economically. Māori-owned forestry, farming, aquaculture, and horticulture enterprises face rising pressure from climate hazards, costs, and underinvestment in adaptation. Without structural reform and targeted support, the assessment says that economic vulnerability will increase.

Awatere said the findings confirm what tribes have been saying for years. “Climate events do not arrive one at a time,” he said. “A storm floods a road, damages a marae [tribal meeting place], erodes whenua [land], disrupts access to mahinga kai[food gathering places], and overwhelms health and welfare systems that were already stretched, all at once. Each of those harms compounds the next.”

The assessment also said climate-driven displacement and ecological degradation could disrupt the transmission of language, customary practices, lineage relationships, and Indigenous knowledge systems between generations.

Awatere highlighted ongoing structural exclusion of Māori from climate planning and adaptation systems, despite the government’s obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi, which is the country’s founding document. The report describes legal exclusion and governance failure as a major risk multiplier, compounding climate impacts across all domains.

Awatere said the central question is whether adaptation plans will reflect that evidence, or whether Māori communities will continue to carry a disproportionate risk of harm.

The post Māori climate risk worsened by colonization, report finds appeared first on ICT.

From ICT via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/48924

Evan R. | Red Phoenix correspondent | Oregon–

Oceti Sakowin activists celebrate their victory in Rapid City, SD. (NDN Collective)

Deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota, known as He Sapa to the Oceti Sakowin (the Great Sioux Nation), organized Indigenous power has secured a vital victory in the ongoing struggle for national sovereignty. This triumph, while perhaps temporary, marks a significant milestone in the long-standing effort to reclaim ancestral lands and exercise self-determination.

The United States Federal District Court for the District of South Dakota in Rapid City ruled in favor of Oceti Sakowin tribes and activists by issuing a temporary restraining order against exploratory graphite drilling near the sacred Pe’ Sla, a site which holds high religious and cultural significance to the Oceti Sakowin people.

Pe’ Sla is a site in He Sapa that aligns with celestial patterns in traditional Lakota spirituality. It is a “bald spot” of prairie in the middle of the otherwise heavily forested mountain range. Used for prayer and sacred ceremonies, much of the land is now tribally owned, ensuring the Lakota can continue their cultural and spiritual practices there.

Spanning several thousand acres, the area is divided between land owned by the sovereign nations of the Oceti Sakowin and territory managed by the U.S. Forest Service. In a 2014 Memorandum of Understanding, the Forest Service formally recognized the site’s profound cultural and religious significance to the Oceti Sakowin, establishing a two-mile buffer zone and committing to the protection of that surrounding area.

The drilling sites at Pe’ Sla. (NDN Collective)

This victory did not emerge from a vacuum, nor did it spring from the grace or goodwill of the state administration; it was seized through the disciplined, organized action of the Oceti Sakowin and their allies. When the Forest Service granted the local firm Pete Lein and Sons exploratory drilling rights within the two-mile buffer zone surrounding Pe’ Sla, Indigenous defenders and their supporters immediately mobilized, utilizing every available tactic to halt the encroachment.

Nine tribal nations, representing the entire Oceti Sakowin people, filed suit. They were joined by allied organizations such as the Rapid City based NDN Collective, Black Hills Clean Water Alliance and Earthworks in Washington D.C. The lawsuit alleges that the Forest Service misapplied a “categorical exclusion” to circumvent required evaluations of the project’s environmental and cultural impacts.

Beyond just legal action, activists from the NDN Collective launched an active campaign of civil disobedience, physically stopping the drilling by occupying the site. Starting on Apr. 30, activists set up camps and began religious ceremonies in Pe’ Sla, and several members of the Oglala Lakota Youth Council locked themselves to the drilling machinery to prevent its operation.

Oceti Sakowin activists occupying a drilling site near Pe’ Sla. (ictnews.com)

Many of those involved in the struggle at Pe’ Sla are also involved in a mobilization against uranium mining in southern He Sapa, where the Canadian-based company Clean Nuclear Energy Corporation plans to begin exploratory drilling seven miles north of Edgemont, SD.

According to its application, the company intends to drill holes up to 700 feet deep at 50 different locations on state land, with each project lasting roughly two weeks. Similar drilling proposals for federal land are currently being evaluated by the U.S. Forest Service. Court hearings for this are scheduled for the May 20 and 21.

This project is proceeding under a “fast-track” permit issued by the Trump regime, part of a broader mandate to open publicly-managed lands for private exploitation.

As the administration accelerates the opening of federal lands and systematically guts the Forest Service budget, it has become clear that there is an intentional effort to dismantle long-standing protections for over 193 million acres of American wilderness. The ultimate objective is the complete privatization of these lands, handing them over to extractive industries. Due to the fact that Indigenous peoples represent a fundamental barrier to this project, the state has resorted to forced displacement.

The provocations by state and federal authorities here are merely the latest in a relentless history of attacks against the Oceti Sakowin and Indigenous nations at large.

After the long, drawn out wars of conquest during the late 1800s, the United States government signed the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868, which recognized He Sapa and all lands west of the Missouri river in present-day South Dakota as part of lands “set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of the Oceti Sakowin as a “permanent home.”

Known as Wamaka Og’naka I’cante (“the heart of everything that is”) in Lakota, the entire mountain range is considered sacred to the Oceti Sakowin, not just Pe’ Sla.

He Sapa. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

Following the 1874 Custer expedition’s discovery of gold, which triggered a massive influx of illegal settlers, the U.S. government attempted to purchase He Sapa in 1876. The Oceti Sakowin refused. In response, the U.S. launched an unprovoked war of aggression that same year. Despite heroic resistance, the Oceti Sakowin were eventually defeated, and their land was unilaterally seized in 1877.

The illegality of this seizure was so absolute that in 1980, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Oceti Sakowin, ordering the U.S. government to pay $106 million in compensation. The tribes refused the settlement. Their position remains steadfast: the land was never ceded by tribal authorities, and their continued resistance declares with firmness that it is still not for sale

In a testimony to Congress in 2023, Oglala tribal president Frank Star Comes Out said:

“The United States broke its treaty promises when it invaded our territory to make war. After the defeat of the United States and the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn in June 1876, Congress attached a ‘Sell or Starve’ rider to the Indian Appropriations Act of 1876, 19 Stat. 176, which cut off rations to our people in an attempt to coerce us to sell the Black Hills to the United States. Yet, we stood firm, and the United States was unable to secure our consent to the sale of the Black Hills. We said then — and we have repeated for generations — that the Black Hills are not for sale.”

The victory at Pe’ Sla is a testament to the fact that the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty is inseparable from the global fight against extractive capital. We Marxist-Leninists recognize here that, the state is not a neutral arbiter of law but an instrument of the ruling class. The “fast-track” permits and the gutting of the Forest Service are not mere policy shifts; they are the machinery of primitive accumulation, where the remaining commons are seized to offset the falling rate of profit in the metropole.

The Oceti Sakowin’s refusal of the 1980 settlement is a profound rejection of the commodification of the earth. It asserts that land is not capital to be bought and sold, but the material basis for national existence. By physically occupying Pe’ Sla and locking themselves to the machinery of production, the Oglala Lakota youth have engaged in the highest form of class struggle: direct confrontation with the forces of private property.

However, as long as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie remains intact, these victories will remain temporary. The state’s drive toward privatization and environmental degradation is an existential necessity for the capitalist mode of production. True liberation for the Oceti Sakowin,and the protection of Wamaka Og’naka I’cante, requires a unified revolutionary front that recognizes the Indigenous struggle as a vital part of the  struggle against imperialism. The land is not for sale because the future of the working class and the survival of the planet depend on its liberation from the hands of the exploiters.

This struggle demands more than passive observation; it requires the active mobilization of the international working class. We must move beyond “solidarity” in name only and do our utmost to organize the Indigenous Nations and integrate their struggle for self-determination as an integral part of our eventual socialist revolution.

We can support the front-line defenders at Pe’ Sla and those resisting uranium mining in the southern Hills by contributing to the NDN Collective and the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance. We must organize within our own communities to disrupt the flow of capital to the extractive industries that seek to desecrate Indigenous land. The fight for He Sapa is a fight for the future, not just for the Oceti Sakowin, but for all who wish to preserve a home on this Earth.

As the Lakota say, Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ: we are all related. The Indigenous struggle is inseparable from the movement for a truly free, democratic, and progressive society; one that finally represents the collective will of the people rather than the insatiable greed of the bourgeoisie.

From The Red Phoenix via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/50076

Mike Leon, at centre, leads the Katzie First Nation’s team of eight guardians. They’ll be monitoring the benefits of the wetland restoration to measure its impact on native species, including sandhill cranes and salmon. Photo by Santana Dreaver

This story was originally published in the Narwhal and appears here with permission and minor style edits.

On a late April morning, a group of Katzie First Nation land guardians, conservation workers, government representatives and others trek down to Xwíʔləm̓nəc (Addington Point Marsh).

They gather in the First Nation’s Lower Mainland territory to celebrate the long-awaited completion of a wetland restoration project connecting to the Stó:lō (Fraser River).

Mike Leon leads Katzie’s team of eight guardians, and has been involved with the marsh restoration project from the beginning.

After everyone bypasses a locked gate — there to reduce the risk of bear-human encounters — they stop by the water, and he addresses the group.

“I would really like to raise my hands to all of you, to the hard work and willingness to work with us,” he said, “to be with us, to be with this land.”

READ MORE: New wetland salmon habitat to help restore syilx floodplain

The restoration effort was funded by the provincial government and the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Katzie First Nation implemented the project with Resilient Waters, Ducks Unlimited Canada, and the Nature Trust of British Columbia, with many helping hands involved.

For three years, the partners worked together to reestablish waterflow in the marsh.

The wetlands connection to the “Pitt River” and south “Fraser River” system was disconnected when early settlers installed a dike, which has since been removed.

“I love doing the work,” added Mackenzie Adams, another Katzie guardian.

“I love being on our territory and helping the environment.”

Adams monitored the site throughout the project, and collected water and bird surveys to compare data before and after restoration.

The marsh restoration project was a collaboration among many partners, with all partners clear that Katzie First Nation was in the lead.

‘You can already see the differences’

Xwíʔləm̓nəc is now letting nature take its course, and with the area being home to one of the country’s largest salmon runs and smallest sandhill crane populations, monitoring the wetland is critical work for Katzie guardians.

“Comparing the first day to the last day was pretty eye opening because you can already see the differences from the river water coming in,” Adams said.

“It will be an awesome habitat for all birds and salmon fry.”

While the exact impact is still unknown, wetland restoration benefits are well-documented.

According to the B.C. Wildlife Federation, wetland monitoring is just as important as the initial restoration during a project.

“Monitoring, maintenance, and data collection help us evaluate the effectiveness of restoration techniques and improve the performance and function of future projects,” it reads on their website.

READ MORE: Indigenous conservationists are imitating beavers — hoping for their return

Leon’s team will be on top of that data, working with partners to restore and conserve native plants and animals in the area.

Beyond its environmental impacts, the project has brought people together from all walks of life who want to see salmon and wildlife in and around the Fraser River thrive.

Relationships between Katzie guardians and partners in the project have flourished.

A local property owner who attended the celebration shared their initial concerns after seeing excavation equipment clearing a path to the dike — and their relief after learning more about the endeavour.

Katzie had final say in restoration with many partners

Dan Straker, the manager for the Resilient Waters project, was a lead organizer under the direction of Katzie guardians and the First Nation’s leaders.

He said Katzie First Nation informed the project along the way and held final decision-making power.

“All the partners fell in line with that idea and thinking,” Straker told the Narwhal.

“What we ended up with was this really nice blended way of doing things.”

Leon added that, throughout the endeavour, Katzie brought in its customs, culture and laws.

READ MORE: How this Katzie First Nation birth worker carries on the teachings of her great-grandmother

“It’s really important and special to us to know our place names in our territory,” Leon said.

“When we have our guardians come out, we’re honoured to be on those place names such as Xwíʔləm̓nəc.”

It’s a sentiment shared by Katzie’s guardian co-ordinator April Pierre. In a quiet moment of emotion in the circle, she addressed a reality shared by many First Nations people: growing up away from her homelands.

The Xwíʔləm̓nəc restoration project gave Pierre an opportunity to spend time on land she had never been to — the land of her ancestors.

It’s one emotional moment of many that were shared during the celebration, as others reflected on the marine and wildlife already making appearances in the marsh.

After three years of restoration work, Katzie First Nation guardians and partners from conservation, government and community celebrated the reconnection of the Xwíʔləm̓nəc (Pitt-Addington Marsh) to the Stó:lō (Fraser River) watershed and surrounding floodplains — restoring critical salmon habitat in their territory.

Farmland saw marsh habitat ‘alienated’ from river

Dikes were built to create flat land for agriculture in the area since the late 1800s.

Restoring the marsh’s connection to the river has immense ecological benefits and cultural benefits for local First Nations.

“Conservation organizations in previous decades had a different approach to conservation land management that I think sometimes excluded other organizations and nations,” said Eric Balke, a senior restoration biologist with Ducks Unlimited.

“I think we are learning new and better ways of moving forward — more collaborative ways — and this project is a great example of that.”

Balke has been involved with restoring Xwíʔləm̓nəc since brainstorming and planning stages, eventually passing the reins to his colleague Alison Martin, a conservation specialist with degrees in ecological restoration.

The project is “all about restoring relationships,” Balke said, something he’s particularly excited about.

“You’re restoring the relationship between the river and these wetlands that were formerly alienated by dikes,” he explained.

“You’re restoring the relationship between Xwíʔləm̓nəc and juvenile salmon that previously were prevented from accessing the site … It’s also restoring the relationship between Katzie and their kin.”

Wetland restoration benefits salmon

In the Pacific Northwest, both people and the ecosystem know how important salmon is.

Xwíʔləm̓nəc is connected to Stó:lō waterway, the country’s largest salmon-bearing watershed.

“Floodplains provide critical, food-rich habitat for juvenile salmon,” explains the Pacific Salmon Foundation.

“These low-lying areas adjacent to stream channels allow young salmon to grow healthy and strong before their journey to the ocean.”

READ MORE: Troubled waters: A new fish weir on Stó:lō territories is met with colonial challenges

But dikes disrupt the river’s connection to the marsh, blocking valuable nutrients and harming the salmon and other species.

Tidal marshes and other wetlands collect nutrient-rich sediment, helping protect communities from flooding, he said.

“This land that settlers found is super valuable for farming and agriculture,” he said. “It was valuable because of the sediment that was delivered — because of the nutrients that were delivered — by the river.

“When we construct dikes we disconnect the river from its floodplain. The river can no longer deliver those critical ingredients.”

A huge benefit of restoring tidal marshes is that they are one of the most effective ways of capturing and storing carbon, contaminants, and pollutants that flow downstream.

Wetlands have many ecological benefits. But they also protect people and communities by mitigating the risk of floods, which have hit the valley hard around the Stó:lō (Fraser River) three times in the past five years.

Further, Xwíʔləm̓nəc is home to wapoto and tule, two traditional plants for Katzie First Nation that have been impacted from dikes.

Members of the nation say restoring their wetland is giving hope that these plants can be harvested for food and mat-making once again.

The marsh is also home to sandhill cranes, whose local population has hovered around just 30 to 35 birds for decades, wildlife biologist Myles Lamont told the Narwhal.

He joined the restoration project as a sandhill crane consultant. He said the few remaining birds often next on golf courses and small regional parks.

READ MORE: In ‘B.C.’s’ interior, a syilx program is returning burrowing owls to the grasslands

“Unfortunately they’ve been getting struck by golf balls,” he said.

“Quite commonly over the last 10 to 15 years, I’ve had to rescue a few birds that have had broken legs or injuries as a result of golf ball strikes.”

He hopes restoring Xwíʔləm̓nəc to a wetland will bring in enough water to create a nesting habitat for the birds, drawing them away from golf courses.

As participants spoke around the sharing circle, Lamont spotted a sandhill crane flying above the gathering, and called out, “Crane!”

To Adams, being part of the restoration initiative was “really cool … knowing that we’re making a difference,” recalled the Katzie guardians member.

“The salmon habitat has a place to go throughout the winter, and so do the sandhill cranes and [other] birds,” Adams said.

“It’s a good feeling … I feel accomplished.”

The post Katzie First Nation guardians and partners celebrate restoration of important ‘B.C.’ marsh appeared first on Indiginews.

From Indiginews via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/49688

This story was originally published by Grist.

Joseph Lee
Grist

As the Trump administration continues its push to secure critical minerals like lithium, the U.S. government and private corporations have ignored Indigenous peoples’ rights in Nevada. That’s according to a report released May 12 by Amnesty International, which is calling for the suspension of federal permits for all lithium mines in the state.

The Silver State has emerged as a key source of lithium, the main component in electric vehicle and other batteries. About 85 percent of the country’s known reserves are in Nevada, and several Indigenous nations and organizations, alongside environmentalists, have been fighting for years against its extraction and the environmental risks that creates, including water contamination and biodiversity loss. “This is our land,” said Fermina Stevens, a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone and the executive director of the Western Shoshone Defense Project. “We should have a say in what happens. But I know that they don’t want us there because Nevada is so rich in all of these minerals.”

The three projects Amnesty International highlights in its report are Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, Nevada North Lithium Project, and Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron Project. Each is located primarily on public land that the Western Shoshone and Paiute people consider unceded territory. Thacker Pass is under construction and Rhyolite Ridge is slated to begin construction this year, while Nevada North is in the exploratory phase.

Amnesty International’s report says all three are violating Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent. That principle, known as FPIC, is an international standard that affirms Indigenous peoples’ right to approve or deny projects that impact their land and communities. Although the projects were approved by federal agencies, Amnesty International argues the review processes fell short of FPIC and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP.

“They’ve got to come down on the right side,” Mark Dummett, the organization’s head of business and human rights, said of the mining companies. “They’ve got to come down on the side of human rights, rather than getting the minerals at all costs.” He added that, regardless of domestic laws in the countries in which they operate, these firms must follow international human rights standards. The report also highlights the impact of the Trump administration’s push for deregulation, including fast-tracked permits and limited environmental review, which reduces the ability of Indigenous peoples to offer full consent.

In a statement, a spokesperson from the U.S. Department of Interior said, “The climate crazed activists behind this report are notorious for making baseless claims, repeatedly rejected by courts, as part of their pathetic rage against energy production that is not only bipartisan, but proven to benefit the American people.” They also said that a review of lithium projects in Nevada by the federal Bureau of Land Management included extensive environmental review and opportunity for tribal engagement.

Nevada is experiencing a lithium boom that has seen more than 20,000 claims filed. The report also comes amid global resistance by Indigenous peoples to “green transition” mining that they say comes at the expense of their land and rights. Given the increasing demand for minerals like lithium, cobalt, and copper, Dummett said that mining companies around the world are taking advantage of gaps in regulation and human rights enforcement. “The way that this mining has always taken place has been incredibly damaging to the environment and people,” Dummett said. “We don’t want to see the mistakes of the past repeated.”

Stevens said that although her people have experienced a long history of land theft and abuse by the U.S. government and corporations, consultation has grown even more perfunctory amid the worldwide drive for lithium, which has surged since the war in Iran. “War and the military complex is all that they can see,” she said. “And so they’re blinded to the things that are sacred, that are more important for human survival. And I just don’t think that they care about those things.”

Lithium Americas, the owner of the Thacker Pass mine, disputed many of the report’s claims in a response submitted to Amnesty International, including inadequate consultation, environmental risks, and violation of Indigenous rights. Its reply also noted that UNDRIP is not binding in the United States, but argued that the project complies with it anyway. “The Thacker Pass Project has the potential to significantly advance America’s electrification efforts, reduce carbon emissions, and strengthen domestic supply chains for critical minerals — strengthening America’s energy future. LAC has made stakeholder engagement, including with Tribes, an important part of the development of the Project,” its response reads.

A spokesperson for Ioneer, the owner of the Rhyolite Ridge project, said the company “respectfully but firmly disagrees with the findings released by Amnesty International,” and highlighted the company’s engagement with tribes. “We take great pride in our compliance with all U.S. legal requirements and remain committed to a transparent process that respects tribal sovereignty while delivering a reliable and secure domestic supply of critical minerals,” the spokesperson said.

Surge and Evolution, the owners of the Nevada North Lithium Project, did not respond to a request for comment, but in a response to Amnesty International, Evolution said, “We take all reasonable efforts to conduct proactive and ongoing engagement with Indigenous peoples.”

Indigenous leaders said they do not expect the mining companies to change, but will continue the fight to protect their land. “We can survive without technology, but we can’t survive without water,” Stevens said. “We can’t save the Earth through the energy transition while we’re simultaneously destroying biodiversity.”

The post Report: Nevada’s lithium boom comes at the expense of Indigenous rights appeared first on ICT.

From ICT via This RSS Feed.

In 2001, a Canadian mining company proposed a massive gold and copper mine at the headwaters of Bristol Bay, a pristine water system on the coast of the Alaska Peninsula that’s home to the largest sockeye salmon run in the world. The salmon support a thriving ecosystem and are a cultural and economic lifeblood for native Alaskans, who have stewarded the land and water for thousands of years.

As the company moved ahead with plans to build the largest open-pit mine in North America, those Indigenous communities joined together to bring it to a halt. In 2023, they secured a rare “EPA veto” of the proposed Pebble Mine, and the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize for North America recognizes an Indigenous leader in this fight.

Alannah Hurley is the executive director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay. Her Yup’ik name is Acaq, her great-grandmother’s name. She is the winner of the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize for North America. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/49031

This story was originally published by North Dakota Monitor.

Mary Steurer
North Dakota Monitor

The North Dakota Supreme Court has instructed a district court judge to stop an overseas free speech lawsuit against the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The Amsterdam-based organization Greenpeace International filed suit against Energy Transfer in the Netherlands in response to the lawsuit the environmental group faces in North Dakota. Energy Transfer accuses Greenpeace of International and two other Greenpeace affiliate organizations of engaging in conspiracy, defamation and other crimes to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline pipeline from being built. A Morton County jury last spring sided with most of Energy Transfer’s claims.

Greenpeace International in early 2025 counter-sued Energy Transfer under a relatively new European Union law that protects those sued in retaliation for protest speech. The environmental group claims Energy Transfer has weaponized the legal system against it to punish Greenpeace for supporting the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

Energy Transfer, meanwhile, alleges that Greenpeace International is only bringing the Dutch case to overturn the unfavorable verdict it received in North Dakota.

Energy Transfer asked Southwest Judicial District Judge James Gion last year to order that Greenpeace International refrain from pursuing the overseas lawsuit.

Gion denied the request, finding that Greenpeace International was not attempting to relitigate the North Dakota case because different matters are at issue in the Dutch suit. Gion also noted that the North Dakota case will likely wrap up before the Netherlands suit gets far enough along to interfere with it.

Energy Transfer appealed the decision to the North Dakota Supreme Court in September.

The high court on May 7 ruled 4-1 to overturn Gion’s decision, with Chief Justice Lisa Fair McEvers being the lone dissenting justice. District court judges Stephanie Hayden and James Shockman sat in on the case in place of justices Mark Friese and Douglas Bahr, who recused.

The four justices in the majority opinion agreed with Energy Transfer’s claim that Greenpeace International’s case in the Netherlands threatened to undermine the Morton County jury’s verdict. They directed Gion to enter an order halting the Dutch suit.

Greenpeace International wants the Amsterdam court to find that Energy Transfer’s suit is “manifestly unfounded and abusive,” Justice Jerod Tufte wrote in the majority opinion. He said this would require the court to find that Greenpeace International “did not engage in unlawful conduct, did not cause Energy Transfer’s losses, and did not act with malice.”

This goes against the Morton County jury’s decision, Tufte wrote.

He called the Dutch lawsuit “an attack on a fundamental policy of this state.”

He pointed to the fact that Greenpeace filed the Dutch suit about two weeks before its trial in Gion’s court started, he noted. This could have been a deliberate attempt to circumvent the North Dakota case, Tufte said.

“The only apparent purpose of filing a duplicative foreign action on the eve of trial is to create a vehicle for collaterally attacking the anticipated verdict,” he wrote.

Greenpeace International Senior Legal Counsel Daniel Simons in a statement said the organization is still digesting the North Dakota Supreme Court’s decision. Simons noted the order doesn’t prevent Greenpeace International from pursuing other legal action in the Netherlands related to the North Dakota case.

“This ruling does not enable Energy Transfer to escape accountability under Dutch and EU law for their back-to-back abusive court proceedings in the U.S.,” he said in the statement.

Trey Cox, the lead attorney representing Energy Transfer in its lawsuit against Greenpeace, applauded the ruling. In a Thursday statement, he said the high court’s decision “protects the authority of the North Dakota judicial system and the jury’s unanimous verdict from an improper end-run abroad.”

Fair McEvers in her dissent stated that she would deny Energy Transfer’s request, writing that there wasn’t enough evidence Gion acted in error.

She agreed with Gion that the Dutch case does not appear to be rehashing the same issues heard in his court.

“While there are some similarities, the types of actions differ,” she wrote.

Fair McEvers was also skeptical that the overseas suit threatened the integrity of the North Dakota case.

She noted that Greenpeace International submitted testimony from a Dutch law expert who indicated that even if Greenpeace International receives a favorable ruling in Amsterdam, it wouldn’t necessarily undermine the jury’s verdict.

Fair McEvers pushed back against the majority’s assertion that the timing of Greenpeace International’s Dutch suit was dubious.

While she agreed that the North Dakota judiciary has an interest in protecting its courts, she did not think the circumstances surrounding the Dutch case justified overruling Gion’s decision.

Both the majority opinion and Fair McEvers’ dissent acknowledge that the issues presented by Energy Transfer’s appeal are new to the North Dakota Supreme Court.

They also noted that there aren’t straightforward rules for how judges ought to decide when it’s appropriate to issue orders stopping another lawsuit.

In addition to Greenpeace International, Energy Transfer’s North Dakota lawsuit is also against two other Greenpeace organizations: Greenpeace USA and Greenpeace Fund. Those two aren’t part of the Dutch lawsuit.

Greenpeace International’s suit is still in its early stages. An Amsterdam court in mid-April held a hearing on claims brought by Energy Transfer asking for the case to be dismissed.

The more than three-week trial in Gion’s court last year featured dozens of witnesses, including current and former Greenpeace employees, Indigenous activists, Energy Transfer representatives and law enforcement.

The Morton County jury ultimately directed Greenpeace to pay Energy Transfer $667 million.  Gion later reduced that amount, and in March finalized an order for a $345 million judgment against Greenpeace. The three Greenpeace defendants have since filed a motion requesting a new trial.

The post North Dakota Supreme Court orders judge to halt Dutch suit against Dakota Access Pipeline developer appeared first on ICT.

From ICT via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/47513

Last week, the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues released urgent calls to action, including a pause on fast-tracked critical mineral projects and increased funding for Indigenous climate projects. But those recommendations come as the Forum itself is facing an existential crisis.

For 25 years, the Forum has been the leading United Nations body representing Indigenous peoples, but that status has not always translated to policy change by member states or the U.N. itself. Growing questions about the Forum’s effectiveness also come amid budget cuts at the U.N., Trump’s rejection of multilateralism, and ongoing efforts to streamline U.N. processes. These intersecting challenges are all threatening to push the Forum, and the causes Indigenous representatives bring to it, even further toward the margins.

“For us, climate change is not a distant threat. It is a present and lived human rights crisis,” Aluki Kotierk, who is Inuk from Canada and current chairperson of the Permanent Forum, said Friday at the conclusion of the Forum’s two-week annual meeting in New York City. The Forum’s recommendations reflect discussions and research conducted by hundreds of Indigenous delegates and experts over the past year. They join more than 1,000 recommendations issued by the Forum since it first began to meet, many of which Indigenous advocates deem critical to their survival. But state governments often blatantly ignore them.

A new “Systemic Assessment” report by a group of current and former members of the Permanent Forum underscores this problem. “While UNPFII has succeeded in establishing itself as a visible and legitimate global platform, questions remain regarding its ability to translate dialogue, recommendations, and knowledge production into tangible outcomes for Indigenous Peoples on the ground,” the report said. “The proliferation of recommendations has not been matched by corresponding mechanisms for implementation, follow-up, and accountability.”

The report underscores the limitations of Forum, which makes recommendations on behalf of Indigenous peoples to U.N. agencies and member states, but has been hamstrung by funding cuts and the willingness of other U.N. agencies and global leaders to listen. Annual funding for the U.N. Trust Fund on Indigenous Issues, which helps the Permanent Forum carry out its mission, is at a historic low, falling from more than $300,000 in 2021 to less than $50,000 in 2026. Currently, only three U.N. member states contribute to the fund, down from nine member states in 2006.

The drop in funding reflects a broader liquidity crisis at the U.N. driven in part by late payments from key members like the U.S. and China. Kotierk said the lack of funding has led to staff reductions at the Forum, shorter meeting times, and fewer interpretation services.

That didn’t stop the Forum from issuing bold calls to action on Friday, including urging U.N. member states to seriously consider international court rulings to mitigate climate change by 2027, and to legally protect Indigenous lands, especially land belonging to uncontacted tribes. The Forum published multiple reports Friday with recommendations ranging from asking member states to develop legal protections for nomadic Indigenous communities, to urging the Green Climate Fund and Global Environment Facility, multi-billion dollar government-funded global funds, to provide direct funding to Indigenous peoples to mitigate climate change.

Eirik Larsen, who attended this year’s Forum on behalf of the Saami Council, urged Forum members to consider capping the number of recommendations to maximize their effectiveness, and to ask member states and U.N. entities to report back on whether they’ve implemented recommendations from previous years.

Larsen said that despite the need for improvement, he keeps returning to the Forum because it’s an important arena for discussing critical issues at the international level. “It’s a unique venue for Indigenous peoples to interact directly with member states,” he said.

The systemic assessment of the Forum found that many Indigenous survey respondents agreed with Larsen’s appreciation of the Forum, seeing it as “a place of visibility, exchange, and recognition,” the report found. “Yet a large number also characterize it as overly performative, a ‘talk shop,’ or a space in which testimony is heard but not translated into meaningful change.”

To Ghazali Ohorella, international relations and Indigenous rights advisor of the Alifuru Council, the assessment could not have been issued at a worse time. Just a year ago, the U.N. embarked on a process of restructuring, which could lead to U.N. bodies like the Forum being consolidated or eliminated. Today’s Permanent Forum is the result of decades of advocacy by Indigenous peoples for a dedicated space within the U.N., which by design, privileges the voices of recognized state governments and doesn’t allow Indigenous peoples who remain under colonial rule to vote in the General Assembly. Ohorella is worried that the report — which is based on a survey of 200 respondents, rather than the thousands of attendees over the past 25 years — could give ammunition to the Forum’s detractors. “It allows them to say: See, even Indigenous Peoples themselves identified problems with the Forum. Retire it,” Ohorella said.

Read Next

Indigenous peoples bear the brunt of climate change — and get almost none of the money to fight it

Anita Hofschneider

One of the most valuable aspects of the Forum is its ability to elevate issues that otherwise might be ignored, like Indigenous health, which was the main topic of this year’s gathering. “There is no health without land. The well-being of Indigenous Peoples is inseparable from our lands, waters, and territories,” Kotierk said in her closing speech on Friday. “To restore health, we must advance decolonization.” This year, the Forum’s official recommendations urged U.N. member states to disaggregate health data on Indigenous peoples by 2027, and “to treat prolonged climate-induced displacement of Indigenous Peoples as a health emergency.”

Kotierk said that the Forum has been instrumental in influencing global policies. “This Forum has consistently elevated what the world too often ignored. It has brought visibility to the crisis of Indigenous Peoples’ languages, affirmed the rights and leadership of Indigenous women and girls, and ensured that Indigenous Peoples’ voices are not only present—but heard—in international decision-making,” Kotierk said.

Yet despite its importance, it’s not easy for Indigenous advocates to participate in the Permanent Forum. Structural barriers that limit participation include challenges obtaining visas — which have worsened under the Trump administration — lack of awareness about the Forum and how to register, and the high cost of travel. In the systemic assessment report, survey respondents suggested the Forum consider holding regional, national and local gatherings “that do not force all meaningful participation through a single annual gathering in New York.”

Mariah Hernandez-Fitch, a first-year law student at Emory University and a member of the United Houma Nation, attended the Forum for the first time as a youth fellow for the Ban Ki-Moon Foundation. Hernandez-Fitch has never been abroad and this was her first time participating in a global Indigenous space. “It was beautiful to see people not all in suits,” she said. “Seeing people in their cultural attire, their formal wear, that was very exciting to me.” She listened to someone from Vietnam speak about how climate change was affecting their community and was moved by how similar their experience was to her family’s experience with rising seas in southeastern Louisiana.

But she also felt overwhelmed by the process, confused by when the side events were happening, and ended up not delivering a planned statement, in part because she was intimidated by the process. “There’s rules, but if you don’t know about them, you do feel out of place even in a space that is for Indigenous peoples,” she said.

Still, now that she’s back in New Orleans, Hernandez-Fitch can see herself returning to the Forum. “I can see myself applying the law and my experience into those spaces,” she said. “I could see myself not being scared of making an intervention.” It helped to meet other Indigenous youth who care just as much as she does about making a difference. “There’s a communal kind of excitement and I feel excited for the future.”

Conversations about how to make the Forum more effective will continue at next year’s gathering, which will be held from May 10 to 21 and focus on global progress on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The uncertain future of the UN’s leading voice on Indigenous rights on May 6, 2026.

From Grist via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/47531

Kalle Benallie ICT

This story is part of ICT’s series on the 10th anniversary of the Standing Rock movement.

Water protectors came from far and wide. It was 2016 and the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline just begun. ICT shares the stories of those who were there.

TAYLAR DAWN STAGNER

Stagner was 23 years old and decided with two other people that she wanted to help fight against the pipeline. She helped cook and clean at a camp for a couple days in the fall of 2016.

Stagner said it developed her personally and professionally, as she later became a journalist and writer. It helped her reconnect with her roots, being Cheyenne Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone.

“I remember pulling in, throwing my stuff in a communal tent, and running to the main fire,” Stagner recalled. “I was so emotional the whole time, and talked to so many people from across the nation.”

She said being with so many Indigenous people was powerful.

“It just made me feel very like, there’s so many of us, and I don’t know how else to put it. It made me feel not alone, which sounds weird, but at the time I was reconnecting,” she said. “I mean, the energy was palpable. There was an electrified understanding of purpose of why we were there, and the importance of what we were doing.”

Stagner added how there was a lot of healing and medicine there.

“It’s made me be more connected to my own community, to fight for Buffalo rematriation on the Wind River and just better information systems everywhere in Indian Country because I truly believe that that’s really important too,” she said.

JULIE RICHARDS

Julie Richards, Oglala, said she was at the Red Warrior Camp at Standing Rock. She saw the progression of the Standing Rock community since she was there earlier in August.

“I remember in November coming over the hill from Cannonball and just seeing all the tipis and just looking at them and I was like, ‘Wow, this must have been kind of what [The Battle of] Little BigHorn looked like.'”

Richards said she did a lockdown, which is a tactic by demonstrators by physically attaching themselves to objects or each other, with her camp to stop construction of the pipeline. She said the mercenaries for the pipeline were trying to get through and the farmers who supported the pipeline were shooting off guns.

“We didn’t know if they were aiming at us or whatever, but I just put my head down and then I started praying. When I looked up, there were just hundreds of people there. I was like, where do these people come from?” Richards said.

She said she was at Standing rock to bring awareness to the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people. She was there originally with the Mothers Against Meth Alliance before joining the Red Warrior Camp.

“It felt like every Indigenous person was there. It was really powerful to see the solidarity of like, all of the tribes coming together and even the Crow tribe coming out to support,” Richards said.

The post Standing Rock: ‘It felt like every Indigenous person was there’ appeared first on ICT.

From ICT via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/48035

A ceasefire was declared between Israel and Hamas seven months ago, but just as the deal has not stopped the killing of hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, it has failed to alleviate the acute malnutrition crisis that was created when Israel began blocking almost all humanitarian aid in October 2023.

The international aid group Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), on Wednesday accused Israel of imposing a "manufactured malnutrition crisis" that is proving particularly devastating for pregnant and breastfeeding women, newborns, and infants.

At four clinics operated by MSF in Gaza between late 2024 and early 2026, medical teams found higher levels of miscarriage among mothers who experienced malnutrition.

The group also analyzed data on 201 mothers of newborns who required treatment in neonatal intensive care units at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis and Al-Helou Hospital in Gaza City between June 2025 and this past January. More than half of the mothers had been affected by malnutrition at some point in their pregnancy.

Ninety percent of the babies had been born prematurely and 84% had low birth weight.

"Neonatal mortality was twice as high among infants born to mothers affected by malnutrition compared to those born to mothers without malnutrition," said MSF.

Samar Abu Mustafa, a displaced mother from Abasan al-Kabira, said she was diagnosed with malnutrition while pregnant with her 3-month-old baby.

"I don't know how I will provide diapers and milk, nor how I will provide food for my other daughters. There is no income and no support," said Abu Mustafa. "There is nothing apart from food parcels from the World Food Program and community kitchens. Every six months, we might get a food parcel once. It's barely enough. It is all rice and lentils. We are forced to eat whatever is in front of us."

"For a long time, we haven't eaten anything nutritious and the baby does not get enough milk from me, so I am forced to provide formula, but I don’t have money for it," she said. "I have just one remaining can of milk."

Mercè Rocaspana, MSF's medical referent for emergencies, emphasized that malnutrition in the exclave was "almost nonexistent" before Israel began bombarding Gaza and blocking humanitarian aid—an action Israeli and US officials persistently claimed Israel was not taking before the ceasefire was reached, even as the number of deaths from starvation climbed to nearly 500.

“The malnutrition crisis is entirely manufactured,” said Rocaspana. "For two and a half years, the systematic blockade of humanitarian aid and commercial goods, on top of insecurity, have severely restricted access to food and clean water. Healthcare facilities have been forced out of service and living conditions have profoundly deteriorated. As a result, vulnerable groups of people are at heightened risk of malnutrition.”

Before the war, there were no dedicated therapeutic medical feeding units in Gaza's hospitals, but MSF teams admitted more than 500 infants under six months of age to outpatient feeding programs between October 2024-December 2025—programs that the bombardment has made impossible for many families to complete.

"Of those admitted, 91% were at risk of poor growth and development. By December, 200 infants were no longer in the program—only 48% of them were cured, while 7% died, another 7% were referred to a program for older children, and a staggering 32% defaulted due in part to insecurity and displacement."

The 20-point ceasefire agreement stipulated that at least 600 aid trucks must enter Gaza daily and that border crossings must be reopened, but as Common Dreams reported in April, five leading aid groups gave "humanitarian aid access" a failing grade in a scorecard rating conditions in Gaza six months after the deal was reached.

Israel was still restricting deliveries, and food items sold in Gaza were anywhere from 3% to 233% more expensive than they were before the war started.

Al Jazeera's Hind Khoury reported Thursday that only 150 aid trucks are being allowed in daily.

Last week, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that while there's been a 72% increase in the amount of humanitarian aid reaching Palestinians in Gaza since the ceasefire was brokered, 11% of coordinated humanitarian missions are still being denied.

"Many lives have been saved in Gaza because of scaled up humanitarian effort since the ceasefire. But much more to do: We need to sustain access, protection of civilians, neutrality, and partnership," said Tom Fletcher, UN under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs.

Gaza: Six months into the ceasefire, hunger continues to shape daily life and malnutrition levels remain high.@WFP is on the ground supporting those most in need, but aid alone is not enough for full recovery. pic.twitter.com/gABZySEjFI
— United Nations (@UN) May 6, 2026

Sahar Nafez Salem, who lives with her children in a tent in Khan Younis, told MSF that her family has been relying on a charity kitchen to eat.

"We eat lunch from it and save some for dinner," she said. "We try to manage getting lunch for our poor children every Friday, so we can bring them joy, but all week long, almost everything is from charity kitchens... The last time I received aid was during Ramadan... There is rice and lentils... Other things, like vegetables, are expensive. We can't get them all the time. So sometimes we go without vegetables for months."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/44995

A few years ago, I was watching Ken Burns’ The American Buffalodocumentary when a photo of Fred Dupree and Mary Good Elk Woman popped up on the screen, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, where did he get that? That’s our family photo!’ Fred and Mary are my great-great-great-great-grandparents, and they were living on the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation in the late 1800s when Mary Good Elk Woman had a dream about saving the buffalo. The next morning, when she woke up, she told Fred he needed to get their sons and get out there and save the buffalo.

So they went out and rounded up some calves. The federal government supported efforts to eradicate the bison—it was a very purposeful campaign to destroy our food source—but the calves didn’t have any economic value at the time, so hunters left them alone. There were herds of just calves roaming around. So Fred and his sons went out, rounded up some calves, and eventually created a herd that helped repopulate the buffalo in parts of the Great Plains. Most all the buffalo in Custer State Park are descended from our family’s herd. And now, when I see baby bison, not orphaned but with their families, I get choked up, because we’ve come full circle – from a few orphans left to die on the plains to these joyful calves today zooming around their mothers.

I love that so much of my work today is still about helping bring the buffalo back to Tribes. I’m the vice president of Native Nations Conservation and Food Systems at the World Wildlife Fund. I started there in the fall of 2024 after spending four years as the director of the USDA’s Office of Tribal Relations under the Biden Administration. While I was at the USDA, I worked hard to change the agency’s policies to be more inclusive of Tribes, Tribal producers, and Indigenous foods. At the WWF, my team gets to continue much of these efforts, working to integrate Indigenous values into conservation work, and to directly support Tribal conservation—particularly with buffalo and buffalo food systems.

“You can only do so much with a PowerPoint. You really need people to experience things firsthand.”

While at USDA I often spoke to different agencies about the federal government’s role in slaughtering the buffalo in order to control Tribes’ access to food and to force Native people into becoming western farmers. It was important for people throughout the agency to understand how purposeful federal policy decisions led to the challenges you see today in Indian Country—high rates of diabetes, food insecurity, poverty, complicated land ownership, inaccessibility of Indigenous foods—because if we don’t understand the historical lens, then we can’t fix it.

But you can only do so much with a PowerPoint. You really need people to experience things firsthand. When we take people into Indian Country, it’s really impactful, but that’s hard to do. So we tried to bring experiences to D.C. as well. For Native American Heritage Month one November, my office decided to have an Indigenous Foods “cookoff” for the department. We invited people from all the different USDA agencies to stop by the office, where we had all kinds of Native ingredients on display, and pick an Indigenous ingredient to cook a dish with.

Across the board, people really got really excited, from the meat inspectors to the lawyers. One person even made brownies using tepary beans, a drought-resistant bean native to the Southwest. It was great to see folks who have never been to Indian Country doing their research on Indigenous foods and really excited, and I thought, “Wow, we have to do this every year.”

When I started at the USDA, I walked in hot. I had very specific things that I wanted to work on. I had spent years working for several large land-based Tribes, and I was aware of just how much USDA policies affect people in Indian Country. It’s our school lunches. It’s whether healthy and Indigenous foods are available through the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR), which we call “the commodity program” or “commods.” It’s also our grazing rights and lack of access to farming and ranching programs. And it’s our ability to process Indigenous sources of protein, like buffalo, reindeer, and salmon.

I did a lot of hiring to make sure there was a Tribal liaison in each USDA agency. That’s important because, for example, for nutrition programs like FDPIR, SNAP, and WIC, you need someone who understands that Native bodies evolved with non-European diets. For example, Indigenous Alaskans, they’re like the original Keto diet, right? Highfat, low carbohydrate. So, whale blubber, seal, and salmon. The high proportion of those kinds of foods don’t always meet Western nutritional guidelines. So if you don’t have a Native person to consult with, you’re not going to recognize that Native bodies are different, and you’re going to be feeding those bodies the wrong foods.

That’s what happened for years and years. After we were pushed off our lands and lost our food sources, we were forced to became dependent on the federal government to feed ourselves. The FDPIR program is the modern version of that dependence, and it’s a necessity for Tribes on large reservations where grocery stores are few and far between. The USDA purchases and ships domestically sourced foods to Tribal governments, and Tribes distribute it through warehouses or Tribal stores. Historically, those food packages were lard and flour and things that were really bad for Indigenous bodies and caused dramatic problems with diabetes and obesity.

When I was at USDA, I was able to get that changed somewhat so that Tribes could choose more of the foods they wanted to eat: wild rice in the Great Lakes, buffalo in the Great Plains, blue corn in the Southwest, salmon in Alaska. It’s not across the board, but where it’s been implemented, it has been wildly successful. So now you’re seeing people calling up the FDPIR office and asking, “Hey, is the bison in?” and really wanting to participate in these programs because they are foods that are both culturally appropriate and nutritionally appropriate for the bodies in those regions. So that was a big win.

“It’s what happens when you let Tribes do what Tribes want to do: They buy healthy foods locally, and they eat healthy foods locally.”

But the really big win for Indigenous Food Sovereignty when I was at the USDA was the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program (LFPA), which was funded first through the American Rescue Plan and later extended. It took the federal dollars and rather than USDA doing the food purchasing, it gave the money directly to states and Tribes. Those governments could then purchase whichever foods they wanted, as long as the food they bought came from within 400 miles. The idea was to strengthen local food producers after COVID showed that parts of our food supply chain were vulnerable to disruption.

I can’t speak for the states, but the LFPA was revolutionary for Tribes. It changed everything, because for the first time, Tribes had the dollars themselves to do what they’ve been thinking about forever: eating local Native foods. The Sitka Tribe of Alaska was buying crab and salmon and clams, and the Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota was buying wild berries, wild turnips, and buffalo, and several Ojibwe Tribes were buying wild rice. It also empowered people within Indian Country to go out and get wild foods, like by digging up prairie turnips and starting a bison harvesting plant because they had a buyer. And it also empowered the people who wanted to eat these wild foods because now they could access them. So it created this whole economy around Indigenous local foods. It’s what happens when you let Tribes do what Tribes want to do: They buy healthy foods locally, and they eat healthy foods locally.

Unfortunately, the dollars ran out on that, but I’m hoping that Congress rethinks it, because it’s a very conservative principle. It’s basically stopping the federal government from running your nutrition programs and letting local communities empower local producers. The LFPA is also a good example of the importance of having Native people in the federal government, because originally, the LFPA did not include Tribes. The money was just going to go to state governments. We helped change that, because Tribes are not subsidiaries of the states, we’re not counties, we’re our own sovereign governments.

Another thing I helped change was access to meat processing. For 250 years, the USDA has really only invested meat-processing dollars in harvesting European domesticated animals—cattle, pigs, sheep, and chickens. We’ve never funded the processing of the animals that are actually native to the U.S. But our people want to eat seal and whale and deer and elk and moose and bison. So for the first time ever, the USDA gave grants to fund meat processing for those animals, through the Indigenous Animals Harvesting and Meat Processing Grant. And one really cool project that came out of the grants was the mobile meat-processing trailers that Tribes can take out to the field to process a buffalo.

Many Tribes don’t like to load a bunch of buffalo on a truck and take them to a big slaughterhouse. We think that’s disrespectful, because the buffalo are our relatives, and that is very stressful for them. We prefer to bring a sharpshooter out onto the prairie who takes down the animal in one shot while it’s grazing. The buffalo doesn’t ever know what’s coming and doesn’t get stressed. It lives and dies with dignity where it’s lived its whole life.

But the only way you can do that and also address modern food safety requirements is if you’ve got a refrigerated mobile harvest trailer so you can field-dress that animal out on the prairie. So I got the USDA to finance, along with the Intertribal Buffalo Council, a harvesting trailer to show it could be done. It was wildly successful. I don’t even know how many we have now, I think about 15 trailers. Every Tribe wants one. And they‘re only like $100,000 each. So compared to a $30 million stationary processing facility, they’re very accessible.

Another important policy that I worked on at USDA was changing school lunches to include more Native foods. The biggest challenge to school lunches is that the federal appropriation amount is so small; it’s a little over $4 a child, and that forces most schools to buy really unhealthy food in bulk. Schools turn to these large food corporations that consolidate the market and can offer them ultra-processed food that is not really food.

So, one of the biggest issues we faced at USDA was, how to empower schools in Indian Country to purchase local foods that are healthier for their people when you only get $4 per student? It’s really hard. So, to be frank, we’ve only been able to include Indigenous foods in Native schools when Tribes or grants have subsidized the cost. Because the price point of buying local food, whether it’s buffalo or wild rice or other things, is so much more expensive than what schools have in their budgets.

I also helped clarify to people who work in schools in Indian Country what the rules are for buffalo meat inspection. That was something we really wanted to get across during last year’s Buffalo to School Conference, because there’s a myth that all meat you serve in schools has to be USDA-inspected, but that’s not true. Buffalo and game meat are not required by USDA to be USDA-inspected. So we spent a lot of time demystifying that. We also brought together Native buffalo ranchers and school staff so they could get to know one another and create a pipeline for getting more buffalo meat into schools.

During my last year at the agency, I remember we had a panel on Indigenous Food Sovereignty with Native celebrity chef Sean Sherman and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. Sean was criticizing the USDA’s destruction of Indigenous foodways and lack of inclusion of Indigenous foods in USDA programs, and Secretary Vilsack got upset, and he pushed back and talked about how important Indigenous foods were and then listed out all the things the USDA was doing to support Tribes and Indigenous foods.

And I thought, OK, my work here is done. For a USDA secretary to actually care enough about Indigenous foods to be proud of the work, to get upset about it, and to know in detail all the things USDA is doing to help with Indigenous food sovereignty? That was a first for the history books.

As told to Civil Eats and lightly edited.

The post Finding ‘Big Wins’ for Indigenous Food Systems appeared first on Civil Eats.

From Civil Eats via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/46234

Editor’s note: ICT will refer to individuals defending the Black Hills as treaty defenders. The Black Hills is unceded territory in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and acknowledged by the 1980 Supreme Court ruling of the United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians.

Amelia Schafer*ICT*

RAPID CITY, South Dakota – Roughly a dozen Indigenous treaty defenders gathered near Pe’ Sla, a sacred site in the Black Hills, early Thursday morning to show their opposition to drilling near the site. Treaty defenders conducted ceremonial activities near two drill pads in response to recent exploratory graphite drilling within the two-mile buffer zone around Pe’ Sla.

Lakota youth “locked down” to drilling equipment, by taping their arms to machinery, and organizers constructed a prayer altar nearby. As of Thursday morning, organizers were informed law enforcement was en route but had not yet arrived.

Indigenous people in South Dakota concerned, alarmed at potential drilling project at sacred site

Treaty defenders said they fear that mining activity could threaten the nearby Rapid Creek Watershed, which supplies water to several tribal communities as well as local municipalities like the Ellsworth Air Force Base. Drilling also could disrupt ceremonies regularly held at Pe’ Sla, tribal leaders told ICT in May 2025.

For Oceti Sakowin (Lakota, Dakota and Nakoda) people, Pe’ Sla is sacred in part because it aligns with the constellations at various points in the year and is a focal point of oral history. Pe’ Sla is roughly 50 miles west of Rapid City. The area has been used by Oceti Sakowin nations for generations as a site for ceremony and gathering.

Exploratory drilling for graphite, in this case, involves drilling up to 18 holes that are 3 to 3.5 inches in diameter 1,000 feet into the earth.

Currently, all of the United States’s graphite comes from China, representatives from the South Dakota Mineral Industries Association told ICT in May 2025. With new tariffs from President Donald Trump, companies are looking for a domestic solution. That solution could come in the Black Hills, but not without threatening hard fought for tribal sovereignty over an area already promised to the Oceti Sakowin.

A man sits in prayer near a piece of drilling equipment used for exploratory graphite drilling near Pe’ Sla in the Black Hills. Credit: Courtesy Angel White Eyes, NDN Collective

The U.S. Forest Service granted local mining company Pete Lien & Sons a permit allowing for exploratory drilling near the site on Feb. 27. The permit was deemed to be exempt from the federal environmental review process required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

At least 10 drill pads are operating within the two-mile buffer zone surrounding Pe’ Sla, according to NDN Collective, a nonprofit Indigenous advocacy organization headquartered in Rapid City. The buffer zone was created following the purchase of portions of Pe’ Sla by several Oceti Sakowin tribes, after which it was placed in federal trust.

Treaty defenders placed signs and banners on mining equipment and sang and drummed at the site.

NDN Collective and two environmental advocacy groups, Black Hills Clean Water Alliance and Earthworks, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service on April 2 in response to its decision to permit drilling. The lawsuit cites violations of the National Environmental Policy Act and potential threats to lands recognized for religious and cultural importance.

In late April, the three plaintiffs filed for a temporary restraining order to stop drilling, NDN Collective organizers said.

“Pe’ Sla is our sacred land, and we are doing everything we can to protect it,” said Valeriah Big Eagle, Ihanktonwan Dakota and the director of He Sapa Initiatives at NDN Collective in an April 30 press release. “We will not cease our ceremony in the face of destruction, disrespect, and illegal drilling.”

The post Treaty defenders demonstrate against drilling near sacred site appeared first on ICT.

From ICT via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/45788

Billions of dollars have been pledged to fight the climate crisis, but almost none is reaching Indigenous peoples, even as world leaders credit them as essential to solving it. “From the Amazon to Australia, and Africa to the Arctic, you are the great guardians of nature, a living library of biodiversity conservation, and champions of climate action,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York City last week.

But global funding hasn’t followed those words. Multi-billion-dollar financial institutions set up to address the climate crisis have largely failed to deliver money to Indigenous communities, or even track whether they’re benefiting. At the Permanent Forum, Indigenous advocates described how their communities have been devastated by flooding and wildfires and called on governments and global funds to provide direct access to climate finance.

“The demand for direct access to finance by Indigenous peoples is a matter of right. It’s actually explicitly mentioned in the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that because of the historical injustices and the need for us to develop, we need direct access to finances,” said Joan Carling, who is Indigenous Kankanaey Igorot from the Philippines, a former expert member of the Permanent Forum and executive director of the organization Indigenous Peoples Rights International.

An analysis by the Rainforest Foundation Norway estimates that between 2011 and 2020, Indigenous peoples and local communities involved in land tenure and forest management received less than 1 percent of global funding for climate change mitigation and adaptation. Indigenous peoples are often combined with “local communities” in conservation spaces, despite calls from Indigenous U.N. experts to distinguish them.

“We are not asking for charity. We are not asking for privilege,” Carling continued. “This is a matter of right for us because it’s a matter of social justice. It’s just enabling us to adapt to the impacts of climate change that we did not create in the first place.”

The climate crisis is forcing many Indigenous leaders to make painful choices: rebuild homes after major disasters or relocate entire villages from ancestral lands. Those decisions are made harder by a lack of financial resources and despite international court rulings affirming the right to reparations for those harmed by climate change.

“We are protecting forests, we are protecting biodiversity,” said Deborah Sanchez, who is Indigenous Miskito from Honduras. Sanchez is the director of the Community Land Rights and Conservation Finance Initiative, which was created in 2021 to address the need for more direct climate financing. “Once the rights are realized for the communities, that’s the basis where everything can really be sustainable over time.”

The Green Climate Fund, or GCF, the official global climate fund designated by the Paris Agreement, has a portfolio of $20 billion. But not a single Indigenous peoples organization has been accredited to receive money from it, according to Helen Magata, who is Indigenous Kadaclan Igorot and serves on the fund’s Indigenous advisory committee, established in 2022. “That goes without saying that access to the fund by Indigenous peoples is near to nil,” said Magata.

Getting accredited involves meeting stringent criteria — financial management and accounting standards, environmental and social safeguards — and can take years. The fund’s minimum grant of $10 million can also be difficult for smaller communities to manage. “We have to jump through hoop after hoop in order to even qualify,” said Janene Yazzie, who is Diné and a member of the climate finance working group of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change. “They literally created a problem that is on us to prove our capacity to solve.”

A 2025 report by the fund’s Independent Evaluation Unit found that “the Green Climate Fund has not actively pursued a portfolio with Indigenous peoples” and that its processes lacked the flexibility to serve them. “For Indigenous peoples, this challenge is often compounded to the point of being insurmountable,” the report concluded, recommending the fund create a dedicated funding window for Indigenous peoples.

Magata said the fund also lacks a mechanism to track how much money Indigenous peoples actually receive. Funding recipients may claim their projects will serve Indigenous peoples, but it’s often unclear what percentage of the money reaches those communities. “If you don’t have a framework like that, then how could you say how much Indigenous peoples are really benefiting or not?” she said.

Rebecca Phwitiko, a communications specialist for the Green Climate Fund, acknowledged in an email that the fund does not yet have “a dedicated marker to track funding flows specifically to Indigenous Peoples’ organisations.” She said the fund has revised its accreditation process and supported projects benefiting Indigenous peoples in the Amazon, Australia, and the Pacific.

“Strengthening tracking, reporting, and accountability around Indigenous Peoples-related finance is an area GCF recognises as important and is continuing to work on,” she said. The fund recently held its first-ever Indigenous peoples conference in South Korea and last year accredited the International Land and Forest Tenure Facility, which works to secure land tenure rights for Indigenous peoples and local communities.

The Global Environment Facility, another major international climate fund, has disbursed more than $27 billion over three decades, including $50 million in dedicated funding for Indigenous peoples and local communities over the past eight years. Adriana Moreira, the fund’s head of partnerships, said it plans to increase that to $100 million for the next four-year funding round and intends to partner with five Indigenous-led trust funds. “We are constantly seeking to learn and improve,” she said.

Unlike the Green Climate Fund, the Global Environment Facility doesn’t require an extensive accreditation process and offers $75,000 capacity-building grants to Indigenous-led organizations. It has also set a goal of directing 20 percent of all its funding to Indigenous peoples and local communities. But like the Green Climate Fund, it is still working on ways to verify whether money actually reaches those communities. Sarah Wyatt, a senior biodiversity specialist at the fund, said it recently tested a new tracking method within one program and plans to expand it. “It is admittedly not going to be an exact science,” Wyatt said. “But still, if you don’t count, you can’t try to improve, right?”

Even if both funds improve their processes, neither can reach Indigenous peoples in the Global North. Both rely on governmental contributions classified as “official development aid” — funding that flows exclusively from wealthy countries to developing ones. At the U.N.’s annual climate conference in 2022, Yazzie was part of a caucus of Indigenous peoples who called on states to recognize the “false dichotomy of developed and developing countries in regard to funding initiatives and actions directed to Indigenous Peoples.”

At the Permanent Forum, delegates from Indigenous nations in North America described how melting ice and rising seas are causing irreversible harm to their traditional homelands — communities excluded from the current global climate financing structure. “We are dealing with the same issues and same forms of disenfranchisement across those global barriers,” said Yazzie. “It actually invisibilizes the way that the so-called ‘developed North’ profits from the theft of lands of Indigenous peoples within their own territories. To demand that those flows only go to the South is a continuation of those same colonial policies.”

Yazzie also criticized the widespread use of the phrase “Indigenous peoples and local communities,” which U.N. experts have called on climate treaties to abandon. Representatives from the Global Environment Facility said they use the description of local communities in the Convention on Biological Diversity, which describes local communities as embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity. “So you see how much more narrow that truly is,” said Wyatt from the Global Environment Facility. “But I would give the example actually in the Pacific, where folks may not always call themselves Indigenous, but they would fit that type of definition.” She added the term also helps channel funding to communities in countries that don’t formally recognize Indigenous peoples — but acknowledged they don’t know what share of their grants go to Indigenous communities specifically versus local communities more broadly.

The challenge of receiving global climate finance is pushing some groups to build alternatives. “We were in the communities, we saw that the funding didn’t go to the ground,” said Sanchez from the Community Land Rights and Conservation Finance Initiative, whose organization draws mostly from private philanthropy to provide grants to Indigenous peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant organizations.

Magata remains hopeful that the major funds can change. “At the end of the day, the ultimate objective is we want to bring as much money as near to the ground as possible,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous peoples bear the brunt of climate change — and get almost none of the money to fight it on Apr 29, 2026.

From Grist via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/44304

Hamas stressed in a statement on Sunday, April 19, the necessity of obligating Israel to implement all the terms of phase one of the US-brokered Gaza ceasefire deal, as a prelude for launching phase two of the agreement.

The statement was released after the movement held a series of meetings with mediators and Palestinian factions in Egypt’s capital, Cairo, last week, to explore ways to complete the implementation of the agreement terms.

Hamas asserted that it dealt with the deliberations positively, affirming its keenness to continue coordinating with the mediators to reach “an acceptable agreement” based on the initiative of US President Donald Trump, and the understandings formulated in the Sharm El-Sheikh summit, in order to end the humanitarian suffering in the Gaza Strip.

Moreover, the movement accused the Israeli occupation of not adhering to most of its pledges and continuing to violate the agreement on a daily basis. It also emphasized that any agreement must include the complete withdrawal of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) from the entire besieged enclave, alongside the start of the reconstruction process.

Israel committed over 2000 violations during phase one of the agreement

Hamas’ demands came after the IOF committed over 2000 violations since phase one of the deal came into force on October 10, 2025.

According to health sources, at least 780 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes across the war-torn territory as a result of these violations.

Meanwhile, the death toll of Palestinian people killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023, has risen to 72,560, with the latest reports from the United Nations indicating that 38,000 women and girls were among the fatalities. 

The post Hamas demands that Israel implement phase one of Gaza ceasefire appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

From Peoples Dispatch via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/44311

At least five Palestinians were killed, including two children and a woman, in different parts of the occupied West Bank in the past two days.

Aws al-Nassan (14), and Jihad Abu Na’im (32), were shot dead in a terror attack carried out by illegal Israeli settlers on a boys school in Al-Mughayyir village, in the central West Bank governorate of Ramallah and al-Bireh on Tuesday, April 21.

Israeli violence against the people of the village did not stop there, as the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) fired live ammunition, stun grenades, and tear gas on mourners taking part in the funeral procession of Al-Nassan and Abu Na’im the next day.

Tuesday also saw the tragic death of Mohammad al-Jaabari (16), who was run over by a car of an Israeli colonist, while he was riding a bike on his way to school in the southern governorate of Hebron.

Israeli newspaper Maariv reported that the vehicle, which hit Al-Jaabari, belonged to the security convoy of Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir.

However, Haaretz (another Israeli newspaper) said it was informed by a security source that the car was en route to provide personal protection and security for settlements minister Orit Strook.

Either way, for many, the incident reflects the systematic targeting of Palestinian civilians by Israeli far-right government officials, such as Ben-Gvir and Strook, who are known for their racism and incitement of violence against Palestinians.

Read more: Israeli minister Ben-Gvir storms Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron to provoke an escalation in the West Bank

A fourth fatality was reported in the northern governorate of Jenin on Tuesday after Palestinian woman Rajaa Oweis (45) succumbed to injuries she sustained during an IOF raid on Jenin refugee camp two and a half years ago.

On Wednesday, April 22, Odeh Awawdeh (29) was killed in Israeli gunfire after a group of settlers attacked the village of Deir Debwan, east of Ramallah.

Israel killed 1,156 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 2023

Al Jazeera reported on Monday, April 20, that 1,151 Palestinians have been killed in onslaughts waged by the IOF and illegal Israeli settlers since October 2023. This means that the death toll has risen to 1,156, following the assaults launched on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Read more: Twelve Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks across the West Bank

The post Israeli violence claims more lives across the occupied West Bank appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

From Peoples Dispatch via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/43996

This story is published through the Indigenous News Alliance which includes ICT.

Anita HofschneiderGrist

Hundreds of delegates are arriving at the United Nations this week for the world’s largest gathering of Indigenous peoples. But they arrive against an increasingly hostile global backdrop, facing an artificial intelligence boom driving new extraction on ancestral lands, a U.S. administration that has made it increasingly difficult for Global South delegates to secure visas to attend, and the twin challenges of climate change and green energy projects that have frequently run afoul of Indigenous land rights.

This year’s United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues is focused on the grim topic of survival in the midst of war, with its official theme “Ensuring Indigenous Peoples’ health, including in the context of conflict.” Experts emphasize that Indigenous peoples already face health inequities from colonialism and climate change, and these harms are compounded by armed conflicts and militarization that risk ecological degradation and further displacement of Indigenous peoples from their lands. Experts say that health for Indigenous peoples is directly tied to the environment, land, and sovereignty, and can’t be siloed into clinical discussions about medicine or public health.Warfare isn’t the only concern — advocates are seeing the extraction of critical minerals for the green transition drive Indigenous rights violations, and are echoing a long-standing call to make climate financing directly available to their communities, instead of through state or foreign intermediaries.

But before diplomatic conversations can even begin, many delegates must confront the practical barrier of visa restrictions put in place by the Trump Administration. Mariana Kiimi Ortiz Flores, who is Na Ñuu Savi from Mexico and works as an advocacy assistant at Cultural Survival, said last year, her organization prepared Indigenous representatives from Africa to attend the forum, but their visa applications were denied, and this year, one of their Indigenous staff members from South America was denied her visa as well.

“It’s getting harder and harder to access the United States, not only because of the visa [issues],” said Flores. “People from the Global South, especially Indigenous peoples that have a certain look like brown skin and certain characteristics, we feel threatened because of the general climate of insecurity and hate speech against Latin people and Indigenous peoples.”

Last year, Flores’ organization helped Indigenous leaders from Bolivia attend the forum to protest mining in their traditional lands. They left the forum after being harassed by the leader of a political party in Bolivia, and, coupled with health issues, have decided not to return. “The forum is meant to be for Indigenous peoples, but we really felt that that’s not what’s happening anymore and that at the end of the day the states are the ones who have more power over our lives,” Flores said. “This struggle of defending their land against this extractive industry is really affecting them not only physically but also mentally, spiritually.”

That comprehensive toll is one of the central focuses of a key report by Geoffrey Roth, a Standing Rock Sioux descendant, former vice chair of the Permanent Forum, and board chair of the Indigenous Determinants of Health Alliance, an international Indigenous health advocacy nonprofit. “You can’t separate human health from the health of the environment, or our culture, or our language,” Roth said. “Indigenous people view health from a holistic perspective.”

Geoffrey Roth, Standing Rock Sioux descendant, speaks during the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on April 21, 2025. Credit: Tailyr Irvine/Grist

In his report, Roth outlines the Indigenous determinants of health, ranging from land tenure and governance authority that strengthen Indigenous well-being to risk indicators like land dispossession and exclusion from decision-making. Roth argues that fragmented approaches to Indigenous health frequently embraced by the U.N. system and state governments fail to adequately address health problems and underlying causes.

For example, biodiversity policies that ignore Indigenous rights miss opportunities to restore Indigenous land tenure that can both improve ecosystem outcomes and strengthen access to traditional foods. Mental health interventions that ignore state-sanctioned Indigenous language erasure overlook the potential to improve Indigenous mental well-being through language revitalization. “Indigenous health is not just about healthcare, it’s about land, culture, food systems, and community,” Roth said.

The Coquille Indian Tribe in Oregon adopted the Indigenous determinants of health by ordinance last year, and Roth has been working with them as chairman of their executive health board to incorporate the determinants of health across their agencies. “They understand that when they take elders out on a monthly basis to do fishing activities, that is health for those elders,” he said. “It’s continuing their tradition as Coquille people, and it improves the mental health, behavioral health of those elders that are able to participate in that, let alone the food they catch.”

United Nations forum on Indigenous peoples impacted by ongoing budget issues

Roth also calls on the U.N. to recognize the value of Indigenous midwifery, which has been frequently banned in favor of Western practices, forcing Indigenous women into conventional institutions where they often face racism and “obstetric violence,” such as procedures performed without their consent. “Indigenous people have been doing this for thousands of years, not only midwifery, but also caring for the environment and caring for our culture and preserving these food systems,” he said.

In another report to UNPFII, former Permanent Forum chair Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, who is Indigenous Mbororo from Chad, warns that AI acts as a double-edged sword for Indigenous communities. While she urges governments to help Indigenous peoples develop AI tools to revitalize endangered languages and monitor their territories, she also warns of a looming era of digital extractivism as generative AI systems and tech companies actively scrape cultural content, such as medicinal knowledge, traditional stories, and even genetic data.

Lydia Jennings, citizen of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe (Yoeme) and Huichol (Wixáritari), is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College. She said her advocacy for Indigenous data sovereignty — the movement ensuring communities retain the right to own and control their own data — began after a troubling discovery. She noticed a mining company had pulled information about Indigenous cultural practices from an environmental impact statement and was using it on its website to promote a mining project. “That was very alarming to me,” she said. “How much information do we share in efforts to protect our sacred homelands? And what are the ways that we can govern how and who uses that data?”

Newly elected UNPFII Chairperson Aluki Kotierk during the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on April 21, 2025. Credit: Tailyr Irvine/Grist

Like Ibrahim, she says AI can be an opportunity for tribes, noting some might be interested in hosting data centers or using AI to help with language preservation or synthesizing information. However, she remains wary of how much Indigenous data AI systems may be co-opting without consent, as well as the severe risks that massive data centers pose to tribal lands and water resources. “Who has the power and how do we redistribute that power?” she asked. “It can be a tool to power and a tool to harm, but how do we choose to wield it?”

Jennings said there’s a growing movement to incorporate best practices of Indigenous data sovereignty on multiple levels, ranging from academic research to national and international policies.

Another focus of this year’s Permanent Forum is the climate crisis. In a February report focusing on nomadic peoples, experts warned that rigid state borders and exclusionary “fortress conservation” models are curbing the traditional mobility of pastoralists, hunter-gatherers, and seafarers, even as they deal with the fallout of both climate change and increasing lack of access to ancestral lands and waters.

The authors argue that mobility is a deliberate, knowledge-based climate adaptation strategy that state policymakers are actively erasing, citing an example of the Tuareg people in the Sahara Desert. “While the desert knows no borders, contemporary militarized frontiers increasingly restrict ancestral routes and undermine pastoral systems and access to services, rendering these lived realities of Indigenous Peoples invisible in official data and policy frameworks,” the authors describe.

That echoes sentiments expressed by Samante Anne, who is Indigenous Maasai from Kenya and recently spoke at a virtual panel on pastoralists’ legal rights on behalf of the Mainyoito Pastoralists Integrated Development Organization. Anne said although 60 percent of land in Kenya is considered communal, land is increasingly being subdivided for developments and claimed for carbon offset projects that limit pastoralists’ access to land and movement.

“Mobility has everything to do with us adapting to climate change,” Anne said. “Mobility has everything to do with ensuring our livelihoods are secure, our food security is good.”

Making progress on Indigenous health, artificial intelligence, and territorial rights is complicated by a persistent trend within the U.N.: lumping Indigenous peoples together with “local communities.” In official policies and initiatives, the two groups are frequently merged under the acronym “IPLCs”—Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. But while local communities represent a broad category of stakeholders, Indigenous peoples hold distinct, legally recognized rights under international law. Roth from the Indigenous Determinants of Health Alliance said he recently confronted this issue at the World Health Organization when the agency categorized an Indigenous initiative merely as an “equity” issue.

“This is not an equity issue,” Roth said he told the agency. “We are not just another one of your minority populations. We are rights holders, and this needs to be approached from a rights-based approach.”

Former UNPFII chairperson Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim during the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on April 22, 2025. Credit: Tailyr Irvine/Grist

“Conflating us with other populations really diminishes our rights and diminishes our ability to maintain our health in our communities,” Roth said. This grouping also actively hinders participation, Roth said, pointing to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity’s IPLC working group as an example.

“I’ve tried to participate in that group several times, and as an Indigenous person, I don’t feel welcome and I’m not able to participate,” he said. “These (IPLC) institutions are a way to lessen or dilute the voice of Indigenous peoples in these global mechanisms, and that, to me, is unacceptable.”

He is far from the only one who feels that way. In 2023, the U.N.’s three top Indigenous rights bodies — the Permanent Forum, the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — issued a joint statement demanding that U.N. environmental treaties stop using the IPLC acronym entirely. “Indigenous Peoples should not be grouped with an undefined set of communities that may have very different rights and interests,” they wrote.

For advocates on the ground, that debate is just one part of a growing disillusionment with the U.N. system itself. Cultural Survival’s Mariana Kiimi Ortiz Flores said that the institution has suffered from a willingness by member states to simply disregard its laws.

“The United Nations as an international institution has been losing its influence and its power,” said Flores. But despite its bureaucratic hurdles, visa denials, and geopolitical hostility, she said she’s among the many Indigenous peoples determined to show up this week.

“If we as Indigenous peoples don’t do it,” said Flores, “No one else will speak for us and defend us.”

The post War, climate change, and AI: What’s at stake at this year’s UN Indigenous forum appeared first on ICT.

From ICT via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/43984

A report published Tuesday by an international human rights consortium details how Israeli soldiers and settlers are weaponizing sexual violence to facilitate the forced expulsion of Palestinians from the illegally occupied West Bank.

The report, published by the West Bank Protection Consortium (WBPC)—which is led by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and funded by donors including 13 European nations—found that "more than 70% of displaced households interviewed identified threats to women and children, particularly sexualized violence, as the decisive reason for leaving" their homes in the West Bank of Palestine.

The West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem, has been occupied by Israel since 1967 and is the site of an accelerating campaign of US-backed deadly ethnic cleansing dating back to 1947.

Palestinians interviewed for the report described "escalating patterns of sexual harassment in Area C"—the roughly 60% of the West Bank that, under the 1995 Oslo II Accord, is under full Israeli control—"including sexualized insults and gestures, indecent exposure, intimidation, threats of sexual violence, and surveillance of intimate spaces such as bedrooms."

"Participants in multiple locations described settlers exposing themselves, making threats ofremoved, and stalking women as they walked to latrines," the report continued.

"Men and boys also experience sexualized humiliation, forced nudity, and sexualized threats," the publication notes. "In Wadi al-Seeq, after the community was forcibly displaced, three men reported that settlers detained them and attempted to sexually assault one man with a broomstick while he was blindfolded. They described forced stripping, beatings, burning and being urinated on, and said perpetrators circulated images of the abuse."

"Similar abuses have also been reported elsewhere," WBPC continued. "In the Bethlehem governorate, testimony collected during a key informant interview described two 15-year-old boys herding cattle whom settlers attacked, beat, blindfolded, and stripped. The account said one boy was urinated on and the other sustained a leg fracture."

"In another Palestinian Bedouin community in the Jordan Valley... a violent settler raid was reported in which witnesses state that a Palestinian man was subjected to severe sexual assault in front of his family," the report states. "Testimonies further indicate that women and girls were beaten, children were threatened with death, and threats ofremoved were made."

Allegra Pacheco, WBPC's chief of party, said in a statement Monday that “this is how communities are emptied: not in a single moment, but through repeated attacks, fear inside the home, and pressure that makes ordinary life impossible."

In Khirbet Wadi al-Rakhim, one Palestinian reported that "an identified settler sexually harassed them and threatened them with reference to the Sde Teiman detention facility," the notorious prison in the Negev Desert where former Palestinian prisoners, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers, and Israeli medical professionals have said they witnessed torture and other abuse of detainees ranging in age from children to the elderly.

These abuses include severe injuries caused by 24-hour shackling of hands and feet that sometimes required amputations, allegedremoved and sexual assault by male and female soldiers, electrocution, mauling by dogs, denial of food and water, sleep deprivation, and other torture. The IDF is investigating the deaths of dozens of Palestinians at Sde Teiman, including one man who died after allegedly being sodomized with an electric baton.

NRC said Monday that in the West Bank, "displacement reshapes every aspect of life."

"Households reported the impact of prolonged exposure to settler violence, including the sexualized abuse documented in the report," the group noted, adding that "92% of affected households interviewed lost access to land, 88% lost their homes, and 84% lost essential assets."

"More than half lost livelihoods, while 40% of children lost access to education," NRC added. "Women report severe psychological distress at striking rates, alongside ongoing fear, instability, and exposure to further violence after relocation."

Pacheco said that "sexual violence is not incidental to this crisis. It is one of the mechanisms driving people from their land."

“The report documents how perpetrators target women, men, and children in ways that fracture families and deprive communities of the ability to remain," she added. "When coercive conditions leave people with no genuine choice but to leave, this amounts to forcible transfer under international law.”

The WBPC report also highlights that "these abuses occur within a broader environment shaped by systematic discrimination and persistent impunity," an observation underscored by the lack of punishment or slaps on the wrist for Israeli soldiers and settlers who harm Palestinians.

Israel must be held to account for its barbaric crimes. The horrifying reports of the IDF's sexual violence against women & girls in the West Bank demand immediate action. Today, I raised this with the Foreign Secretary - we must punish perpetrators and ensure justice.

[image or embed]
— Dr Rosena Allin-Khan MP (@drrosena.bsky.social) April 21, 2026 at 5:50 AM

Previous reports by groups including United Nations agencies have detailed Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians, including a March 2025 UN publication that found "sexual and gender-based violence—which has risen in frequency and severity—is being perpetrated across the occupied Palestinian territory as a strategy of war for Israel to dominate and destroy the Palestinian people."

An August 2025 investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation featured Palestinian boys kidnapped by Israeli occupation forces in Gaza who said they suffered or witnessed sexual torture committed by their jailers.

Last year, Israel blocked a request from UN sex crimes experts to probe alleged sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas fighters during the October 7, 2023 attack, reportedly to avoid attendant scrutiny ofremoveds and other abuses allegedly committed by Israeli forces against imprisoned Palestinians.

Sexual violence committed by Israelis against Palestinians is as old as the modern state of Israel itself.

Israeli filmmaker Alon Schwarz's 2022 documentary Tantura—which concerns the 1948 massacre and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian residents from the village after which the film is named—features interviews with Israeli veterans who described theremoved of Palestinian women and children. One of the Israelis gleefully recounted theremoved of a child.

A former Israeli soldier recounts the 1948 Tantura events
He refers to serious abuses against civilians, including an assault on a minor
He admits to killings without knowing the exact number of victims pic.twitter.com/ub5LHIdYAY
— ADI ALARDAH (@alardah91) April 9, 2026

When IDF reservists were arrested on suspicion of gangremoved of a Palestinian prisoner at Sde Teiman after video footage of the alleged assault went viral, a mob of right-wing Israelis whose members included senior government officials stormed the prison in a failed bid to free the suspects.

Others, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, demanded a probe—not to seek justice for the victim, but rather to find and punish whoever leaked the video. Meanwhile, Israelis advocating legalized torture andremoved of Palestinian prisoners were given nationwide platforms to air their views during the Sde Teiman scandal.

The IDF later dismissed the indictments of the accused Sde Teimanremoveds.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/43316

This story was originally published by Northern Journal.

This story was produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’sStoryReach U.S. Fellowship. It’s the third in a series about access to commercial fisheries in rural Alaska; readPart OneandPart Two.

Nathaniel Herz
Northern Journal

METLAKATLA, ALASKA — Across Alaska’s coastline, from the Indigenous communities of Bristol Bay to the Tlingit and Haida villages of the panhandle, rural harbors that once bustled with commercial fishing boats now sit unused and empty.

Abandoned boats covered with mold and algae line the shores of one Southeast town; others have seen their fleets sold off and relocated.

In the Indigenous village of Metlakatla, though, it’s a different story.

Fishing vessels pack the downtown harbor on Annette Island, which sits just off the coast at Alaska’s southernmost tip. Huge seiners, with onboard cranes to reel in fish-laden nets, loom over the docks, with many more slips filled in by smaller gillnetters. Fathers and grandfathers still fish with sons and grandsons.

Experts and industry players disagree about the exact reasons for the decline of commercial fishing in the rest of rural, coastal Alaska — with some blaming state policies and others pointing to global market trends.

In Metlakatla, local leaders say their success in sustaining their fishing culture stems from the community’s unusual history.

In the 1970s, the village stayed out of a land claims settlement between Alaska Natives and the federal government — a deal that could have brought cash in exchange for ceding Metlakatla’s reservation and residents’ collective right to pull fish from the waters off their shores. All the other Native reservations in the state were terminated.

As a result, Metlakatla is the only Native community in Alaska that manages its own commercial fishing harvest. The right to earn a living from the ocean waters surrounding the island is tied to tribal membership and can’t be sold off to outsiders — as happened in other rural and Native communities across the state.

Elsewhere, Native residents of coastal villages and cities might have to pony up $100,000 or more for a permit to access state-managed commercial fisheries just offshore. Meanwhile, any Metlakatla tribal member with a boat and $25 can buy a permit and cast their net in the Indigenous-managed fishery that extends 3,000 feet around Annette Island.

“It’s 100 percent of the reason why we’re not down to one boat,” said Albert Smith, Metlakatla’s mayor.

The island fishery sustains the largest tribally managed salmon harvest in the United States. The 1,600-person community has dozens of active commercial fishing vessels, which harvested more than 1.3 million salmon in 2024, according to the most recent tribal data available.

The community stands today as a kind of experiment. Its fishery represents an alternate reality that could have unfolded in rural Alaska if more communities had the same opportunities to access nearby waters — or had state policymakers not chosen to privatize commercial harvest rights in the rest of Alaska’s big salmon fisheries, as they did in the 1970s.

Metlakatla’s narrative is a “direct refutation” of the argument that coastal Alaska Native villages are to blame for the loss of their fishing industries, said Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, who once represented Metlakatla in the state House and several years ago pushed an unsuccessful bill to boost access to rural commercial fishing careers.

In Metlakatla, “every slip in the harbor is full — high schoolers are deckhanding for their uncle, their dad, their best friend’s dad,” Kreiss-Tomkins said. “I think it’s a fascinating case study.”

Local leaders say they’ve still had to fight to sustain Metlakatla’s fleet and its tribal fishery.

The community is now in the midst of a six-year legal effort to expand the waters available to tribal members, which leaders say could help solidify the future of Metlakatla’s fishing industry. But its federal lawsuit faces opposition from Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration, competing fishermen and even neighboring Indigenous people.

‘We’re the salmon people’

The Metlakatlans left northern British Columbia in the late-19th century amid conflicts over land ownership.

Residents secured an invitation to America from President Grover Cleveland and members of Congress at the behest of William Duncan, a charismatic Anglican minister. Duncan had worked with the region’s Indigenous Tsimshian people to establish the original Metlakatla in British Columbia, which he envisioned as a model Christian community.

After a mass migration in canoes and other vessels, the new Metlakatla was built 70 miles away on Annette Island, just across the international border in Alaska, where residents eventually built an enormous church.

A cannery served as a market for residents’ ancestral fishing tradition, which the tribe has described as a “bedrock of the Coast Tsimshian culture and way of life.” A presidential proclamation from Woodrow Wilson in 1916 subsequently set aside the 3,000-foot strip around the island exclusively for use by the village’s fishermen.

For decades afterward, Metlakatla’s commercial fleet harvested both inside and outside the exclusive zone.

Skippers of today, who are mostly men, learned to fish from their fathers, who learned from their fathers and grandfathers before them.

Fishing is “one of the few things that remain unbroken from our forever history,” said David R. Boxley, a Metlakatla artist who served on the village’s tribal council until recently.

“That’s our culture, even though it’s changed in how we do it,” he said. “It’s as old as our people. We’re the salmon people.”

Tribal fishery ‘saved our butts’

In 1971, Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which came with a painful tradeoff.

Newly formed, Indigenous-owned corporations would receive a total of $1 billion and some 45 million acres — roughly 10 percent of the state. In exchange for that money and property, Alaska’s Indigenous people would give up claims to larger swaths of traditional lands, and those that had reservations would surrender them.

Most Alaska Native groups didn’t have reservations at the time, so they had little choice but to participate in the settlement.

Metlakatla had one of only 23 reservations in Alaska and exclusive fishing rights to boot, so it had more to lose. It may have also had less to gain, because the community’s emigration from Canada made its Alaska land claims less certain.

Some in Metlakatla wanted to pursue the payout anyway, according to Boxley.

But elders whose parents and grandparents had been through the exodus from the original village site in British Columbia saw their sovereignty as priceless, he explained.

“We’d already lost a Metlakatla,” Boxley said. “We had to build two communities — one was basically taken from us. Why would we do that again?”

The other 22 reservations in Alaska were dissolved as a result of the settlement. Today, only Metlakatla’s remains.

A few years after the other tribes settled, in an effort to prevent overfishing and make the industry more profitable, the state of Alaska established its “limited entry” program. The system capped the number of skippers in each commercial fishery and transformed fishing from a public right to a private privilege, one available only to those who could afford or inherit a permit. And since the supply of permits was limited, they became valuable commodities.

Commercial fishing permits can now be bought and sold on the open market, in some cases fetching six-figure prices. And over the years, residents of many rural and Indigenous communities have sold their permits to people from Alaska’s larger cities and towns, and from other states.

Rural fishermen also moved out of villages and took their permits with them. And those forces conspired to hollow out rural, coastal communities economically — even as Alaska lawmakers have done little to stem the tide.

In Metlakatla, though, tribal members don’t need those expensive permits to pursue a commercial fishing career. While many fishermen in the village have purchased them anyway — allowing harvests both inside and outside the 3,000-foot zone — other Metlakatlans fish only inside that exclusive strip.

Even top fishermen who roam well beyond Annette Island say that the tribal fishery has helped sustain them in lean years — particularly by providing lucrative catches of sea cucumbers and clams, which are harvested in underwater diving gear and fetch high prices in Asia.

“We’ve had terrible seasons seining,” said longtime Metlakatla fisherman Daniel Marsden, 48, referring to the technique of catching salmon with a huge, circular net. “And we go diving, and that saved our butts.”

A lawsuit to expand fishing rights

While commercial fishing remains vibrant in Metlakatla, the community’s fish processing plant is another story.

The business was long an economic mainstay for the village, providing local jobs and revenue for the tribal government.

But beginning in the 1990s, falling seafood prices challenged its profitability, and since 2018, it’s processed only small amounts of fish.

Today, the cavernous waterfront processing buildings, with peeling white paint, operate at a fraction of their capacity.

Most fishermen who live in Metlakatla and dock their boats in the village harbor sell the salmon they harvest not to the tribally owned plant, but to processing businesses in Ketchikan, 15 miles north. The tribal plant currently lacks the equipment it needs to handle the large volumes of salmon netted by Metlakatla’s fleet, Smith explained.

If more of Metlakatla’s up-and-coming fishermen could harvest farther from the island without having to buy expensive state permits, he added, their catch could be large enough to justify reinvesting in the tribally owned plant.

The 3,000-foot strip around Annette Island, local leaders argue, is no longer the community’s breadbasket. It’s become a “cage” holding back the village’s fleet, according to one longtime fisherman, Edward Gunyah.

To break out of that cage, Metlakatla filed a lawsuit.

Nearly six years ago, the tribe entered a complaint in federal court, asserting that the state of Alaska’s limited entry permit program was illegally barring Metlakatlans from harvesting in areas they were entitled to fish.

The tribe argues that an 1891 federal law granted it the right to enough fish to make the village self-sustaining — which should allow members to harvest anywhere within roughly a day’s travel from the reservation. The suit doesn’t seek to expel other skippers from the disputed waters, only to allow Metlakatla residents to fish there without buying pricey state permits.

“Congress intended to give the community an opportunity to prosper by accessing the fisheries in the waters surrounding the Annette Islands,” the tribe said in its amended complaint.

State and tribal opposition

Metlakatla’s attorneys filed the 2020 lawsuit in federal court on Aug. 7 — a yearly community holiday commemorating the 1887 arrival of the village’s advance party at Annette Island.

Since then, Metlakatla has won preliminary victories as the case has wound through rounds of lower court decisions and appeals.

But it has also faced strong opposition — from the state government, the fishing industry and other tribes.

“We’re going to see this through to the end,” Doug Vincent-Lang, Alaska’s fish and game commissioner, told a group of Ketchikan fishermen in 2024, according to a recording obtained by Northern Journal and APM Reports.

A win by Metlakatla, he said, would invite efforts from other tribes “that don’t have a treaty, or want to expand what they consider their rights to fish outside the state regulatory environment.”

“We’re not against Metlakatla,” Vincent-Lang said in an interview. “We support their right to fish in their tribal waters. It’s just when you start fishing outside of those waters, there’s treaty implications and everything else that comes into play. How do you account for that? It’s just all kinds of questions that come up.”

A trade group representing Southeast Alaska’s fleet of seine boats supports the state’s position.

Some of the group’s members are concerned about the potential for the lawsuit to expand Metlakatlans’ fishing rights in a way that increases competition, said Tom Meiners, who leads the group’s board.

“We don’t see the need for the island fishery to be expanded,” Meiners said, noting how numerous Metlakatla fishermen already have state permits and wouldn’t directly benefit if the tribe wins.

Meanwhile, nearly five years into the litigation, a group of other Southeast Alaska tribal governments, the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida, filed their own motion to dismiss Metlakatla’s case.

The request, ultimately rejected by the judge, said Metlakatla’s Tsimshian residents were descended from Canadians and were infringing on traditional Tlingit and Haida harvest rights and tribal property.

The fight against the lawsuit, particularly by the state and the other tribes, has deeply frustrated Metlakatla’s leaders and allies, who say the village has long contended with hostility to its unique fishing rights. They also say that both written and oral tradition reflect the longtime presence of Tsimshian people on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border before it was established, with traditional names for Southeast Alaska sites derived from Tsimshian names.

“We should be working together” against factory fishing boats that accidentally harvest salmon, and against out-of-state commercial permit holders, said Boxley, the former Metlakatla tribal council member. He added: “That’s who’s devastating the fishery. Not us.”

‘Control our own future’

After five years of the lawsuit ping-ponging between lower and appeals courts, a decision on the expansion of Metlakatla’s tribal fishing rights could come as soon as this year.

Smith, the mayor, said a victory could help rev the village’s processing plant back to life.

“The vision is to see it going full-fledged again,” he said.

While awaiting a decision, the tribe leased a corner of the plant to a start-up, Circle Seafoods, that is testing a new concept for fish processing. Rather than trying to fillet and pack the whole summer salmon harvest in a single frenetic push of a few weeks, Circle freezes fish whole, then thaws and cuts them in batches throughout the rest of the year.

The tribe is interested in replicating the idea because it could sustain a year-round workforce in the village, Smith said. Meanwhile, Annette Island Packing Co., which is owned by the tribe, recently launched a line of freeze-dried salmon pet treats. They’re branded as Ksa Hoon — “just fish” in Sm’algyax, the Tsimshian language.

Operating at full capacity, the plant could churn out profits that the tribe could use to diversify — investing and expanding into other businesses such as ecotourism, Boxley said. He described the lawsuit as aligning with Metlakatlans’ decision a century ago to move from Canada to Alaska, where tribal members would have more autonomy.

“We did all this to be in control of our own future,” Boxley said. “That’s why we came here.”

This story was produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’sStoryReach U.S. Fellowship. It was reported and edited by Northern Journal and APM Reports.

The post ‘The salmon people’: How Alaska’s only Native reservation saved its fishing culture appeared first on ICT.

From ICT via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/41608

This story was originally published by South Dakota Searchlight.

Joshua Haiar
South Dakota Searchlight

Opponents filed a lawsuit in early April challenging the U.S. Forest Service’s approval of a graphite drilling project near Pe’ Sla, a site in the Black Hills of western South Dakota that holds cultural and spiritual significance for Native Americans.

The plaintiffs are the Indigenous rights group known as NDN Collective and the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance, both based in Rapid City, and Earthworks in Washington, D.C.

The lawsuit challenges the Forest Service’s decision allowing Rapid City-based Pete Lien & Sons to move forward with exploratory drilling for graphite. Graphite is used in electric vehicle batteries, lubricants, pencils and other products.

Pe’ Sla, also known as Reynolds Prairie, is a sacred site used for prayer, ceremony and cultural activities. The area is a high-elevation meadow surrounded by forested mountains in the central Black Hills. Pe’ Sla is one of the sites in the Black Hills that corresponds with celestial features in traditional Lakota spirituality.

The lawsuit says the Forest Service improperly used a process known as a “categorical exclusion” to bypass environmental and cultural reviews.

“We will not stand for the desecration of our sacred sites, land, and water by extractive mining companies like Pete Lien,” said Wizipan Garriott, president of NDN Collective, in a press release. “The laws of the United States are often rigged against us, but we are confident this categorical exclusion was unlawful.”

The lawsuit alleges a categorical exclusion was improper because the project includes drilling, road work and other activity near Pe’ Sla that goes beyond what a categorical exclusion allows. The plaintiffs also argue that Pe’ Sla’s religious and cultural importance should have triggered a fuller review rather than the abbreviated process.

Neither Pete Lien & Sons nor the Forest Service immediately responded to requests for comment.

A representative of Pete Lien & Sons previously toldSearchlight the company was reviewing the plan’s potential impact on sites of cultural and historical significance in the proposed project area, and questions and concerns should be directed to the Forest Service.

The post Opponents sue over Forest Service’s approval of drilling near Lakota sacred site in Black Hills appeared first on ICT.

From ICT via This RSS Feed.