indigenous

Millions of bison once roamed the grasslands, until colonialism nearly wiped them out. Now, Indigenous people are bringing them back and restoring balance to their homelands

My Métis ancestors hunted and lived relationally with Buffalo, and I can envision how the prairies must have looked hundreds of years ago when millions roamed freely from Alaska’s boreal forests to the western grasslands of Mexico, across the continent from Banff to the eastern Appalachian Mountains. Then colonizers nearly wiped them out, part of a deliberate genocidal effort to starve the Indigenous nations of the plains.

Now, there are far fewer Buffalo to be seen, but Indigenous communities are working to rematriate them to the grasslands. Rematriation, a concept advanced by the late Sto:lo author Lee Maracle, is the process of restoring lands and cultures, done with deep reverence to honour not only the past and present but also the future, and rooted in Indigenous law.

The Buffalo Treaty, signed in September 2014 by eight nations, now has more than 50 signatories and includes 11 articles emphasizing co-operation, renewal and the restoration of Buffalo populations. This cross-border collaboration aims to return Buffalo to their rightful wild status, as they are currently considered “domestic” due to their historical confinement, a word that hardly suits their ancestral legacy.

Buffalo don’t care about borders, and yet, there are rigid regulations in place that stop their movement. The treaty envisions ecological corridors that will allow Buffalo to migrate and roam freely, similar to elk, bears, deer and moose. These corridors are essential for maintaining genetic diversity, supporting the vast ecosystem dynamics of the plains, preserving cultural and spiritual connections for Indigenous peoples and ensuring the long-term viability of bison populations by preventing overgrazing and disease outbreaks.

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Maskwacis, Alberta, Canada - Nadalie Lightning stares out of her living room window praying to wake up from what she describes as a nightmare. In the early hours of August 30, her 15-year-old grandson Hoss Lightning Saddleback was shot and killed by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers after what the RCMP describe as a “confrontation” in the nearby city of Wetaskiwin.

Nadalie is devastated by the loss and struggling to understand how a call for help turned fatal. On the night of his death, Hoss had initially reached out to his grandmother in desperation.

"He was calling me that night. I missed 18 calls," Nadalie revealed, her voice breaking with emotion as the screen on her phone showed her grandson’s attempts to contact her. "He texted me right here at 1:01am, 'Can you come pick me up?' And then it's just, 'I called the police.'"

She had been the one who had always told her grandson to call the police if he was ever in trouble. According to an RCMP release, it was Hoss who had called them, believing people were following him and trying to kill him.

That afternoon members of the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT) showed up at her doorstep asking Nadalie to identify her grandson, one of a string of Indigenous people to have died during interactions with police in Canada since late August.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, the former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations RoseAnne Archibald, expressed her frustration at what she emphasised was a longrunning issue.

"[The First Nations have] been sounding the alarm bell for a long time - for many, many years,” Archibald said. “This has happened time and time again. They’re just trying to kill us off, it’s maddening. Is that the first way they deal with us, is violence towards us?”

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The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is arguably one of the most important non-state actors in modern West Asia. While fighting a brutal guerrilla war against the Turkish government, it has also managed to inspire Kurdish movements in Syria, Iraq and Iran, as well as Iran’s non-Kurdish protesters. In a region where many parties are nakedly sectarian, the PKK has gone from Marxist-Leninist nationalism to a form of radical-democratic “libertarian municipalism” inspired by the late anarchist thinker Murray Bookchin.

For better or worse, the PKK exists today only because the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), a now-obscure Palestinian force, agreed to shelter some Kurdish exiles in the 1980s. That experience in the Palestinian camps permanently affected the worldview of the PKK’s founding generation. Not only did the PKK learn how to fight a guerrilla war, it also walked away with a strong sense of internationalism.

In fact, some of the PKK’s founding figures spent time in an Israeli detention camp as prisoners of war. Old issues of the party magazine Serxwebun tell the remarkable story of the “Beaufort Castle Heroes,” a group of Kurds who had been training at a Palestinian base in Lebanon when they were captured by Israeli forces in June 1982. (Serxwebun means “independence” in Kurdish.) New Lines is reporting much of their story in English for the first time.

The June 1984 edition of Serxwebun features drawings and poetry from the prisoners, including one Iranian Kurdish fighter. The Iranian Kurd, codenamed Sami, recalled being beaten by an Israeli interrogator who shouted, “You came to kill Jews, you’re lying … Kurdistan, Turkistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Arab, you are all antisemitic, we will kill you all.”

The PKK was just one of many foreign fighter contingents in Lebanon. (Sami was captured alongside a Bangladeshi fighter, and another Serxwebun article mentioned the presence of an Iranian from the left-wing People’s Fedai Guerrillas.) At the time, the Palestinian movement was the international leftist cause celebre, and leftists understood it to be part of an unbroken chain of Third World liberation struggles.

“If you know Vietnam, you know Kurdistan … a new Vietnam in our hearts,” Sami wrote in a poem. “To the defenseless prisoner in Diyarbakir, to the leaf on the tree in Vietnam, to the living being in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the orphan baby in Sabra and Shatila.”

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Extra reading: PKK Internationalists in the Palestinian Resistance

• The Indonesian government is embarking on yet another project to establish a massive area of farmland at the expense of forests and Indigenous lands, despite a long history of near-identical failures.
• The latest megaproject calls for clearing 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) in the district of Merauke in the eastern region of Papua for rice fields.
• Local Indigenous communities say they weren’t consulted about the project, and say the heavy military presence on the ground appears to be aimed at silencing their protests.
• Similar megaprojects, on Borneo and more recently also in Merauke, all failed, leaving behind destroyed landscapes, with the current project also looking “assured to fail,” according to an agricultural researcher.

JAKARTA — Indigenous Papuans say they’ve been caught off guard by helicopters flying over their villages and excavators tearing down their forests in their area, all while accompanied by the Indonesian military.

What they’re being subjected to is one of the largest deforestation projects in the world, which will see the development of 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of rice fields in Merauke, a district in Indonesia’s Papua region that borders Papua New Guinea.

The military is involved in the project because it’s led by the Ministry of Defense and has been designated a project of national strategic importance. Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto, who will be sworn in as Indonesia’s next president on Oct. 20, has appointed the hugely controversial Jhonlin Group to help administer the project.

The military’s involvement, coupled with the lack of free, prior, informed consent (FPIC) from Indigenous communities living in the area, have fueled concerns that the project will create new conflicts in the region.

Indonesia has maintained a heavy military presence in the Papua region since annexing it in 1963, with security forces frequently accused of committing human rights violations under the justification of cracking down on a low-level independence movement.

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ONONDAGA NATION TERRITORY (AP) — The Onondaga Nation has regained 1,000 acres (405 hectares) of its ancestral land in upstate New York, a tiny portion of the land members say was unjustly taken by the state beginning in the 18th century.

The heavily forested land is south of Syracuse and near the Onondaga’s federally recognized territory. The land, which includes headwaters of Onondaga Creek, was transferred by Honeywell International on Friday under a federal Superfund settlement related to the contamination of the environment, according to the Onondaga Nation.

The land is part of an expanse of 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) in central New York the Onondagas say was taken over decades by New York beginning in 1788 through deceitful maneuvers that violated treaties and federal law.

Sid Hill, the Tadodaho, or chief, of the Onondaga Nation, said Monday they were grateful to federal and state officials for working with them to return “the first 1,000 acres of the 2.5 million acres of treaty-guaranteed land taken from us over the centuries.”

“This is a small but important step for us, and for the Indigenous land back movement across the United States,” Hill said in a prepared statement.

“Tansi, today we are going through some random phrases,” Julia Ouellette says to the camera. She holds up slips of paper with English words while repeating the Cree translations quickly and then slowly. “tantahtwaw,” she says, holding a paper that says “how many,” emphasizing each syllable. “tantahtwaw. Repeat after me.”

Ouellette, a grandmother from Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation in Saskatchewan, posts Cree-language videos regularly on TikTok, where she has more than 16,800 followers. The videos are casual, with a simple formula: Ouellette, in glasses, with her hair tied back, offers viewers a few Cree words or phrases to practise aloud. In both languages, her voice has the distinct quality of a Cree speaker: rich and resonant, her “r”s and “l”s—consonants not found in Cree—are especially pronounced when she speaks English. A former language teacher at Big Island Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, she started posting videos on TikTok in 2020 that included such COVID-era phrases as “wash your hands” (kasichiche) and “get away” (awas), along with more cheerful ones, like “Merry Christmas” (miyo-manitowi-kîsikanisi). Ouellette never writes out the Cree words or phrases, instead instructing the viewer to repeat what they hear.

Ouellette is part of a growing community of Indigenous-language speakers using social media as a teaching tool. James Vukelich Kaagegaabaw, a descendant of Turtle Mountain, shares an Ojibwe word regularly with his 135,000 Instagram followers. Jonathan Augustine, who goes by RezNeck Farmer on TikTok, shares Mi’kmaw lessons along with folksy videos about gardening. Zorga Qaunaq, under the username Tatiggat, posts on TikTok about daily life, beading, and Inuit culture, alongside how to properly pronounce words like “Inuit.”

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'Colonial-rooted poverty will not be solved by more colonial solutions'

Thirty-four years ago, Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel was thrust into the spotlight when she was chosen as the spokesperson for the Kanienʼkehá:ka (Mohawk) communities of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke, as they resisted the planned expansion of a golf course on into their sacred lands and burial grounds in southern Quebec and police and military attempted to subdue them by force.

“You do not call it the Oka Crisis,” Gabriel tells me, of the village near the golf course that media and Canadians generally use to refer to the confrontation. “Oka caused the crisis. It was Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke that were under siege, and were attacked because of the municipality of Oka and the private corporations behind the project.”

In the decades since the 78-day standoff ended, Gabriel has remained a steadfast defender of Indigenous homelands and an advocate for Indigenous Rights and sovereignty, particularly the rights of women. She has spoken at the United Nations and addressed Parliament, and served for more than six years as president of the Quebec Native Women’s Association, drawing connections between the protection of Indigenous lands and the rights, dignity and future of Indigenous nations.

In a new book, When the Pine Needles Fall, Gabriel and settler historian Sean Carleton chart a course from the events of 1990 to the present, while extending into a generous and expansive vision of the future. The book, which they began writing in 2019, evolved during the pandemic, taking shape as a series of conversations that articulate the urgency and necessity of Indigenous resistance. Centring Gabriel’s own words through dialogue, Carleton writes, was a way to “divest my power and authority as an academic to create space for Ellen’s brilliance … to hold space and amplify Ellen’s voice, while also co-creating through conversation.”

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As the helicopter approached Caas Tl’aat Kwah (also known as Serb Creek), a 1,600-hectare (about 3,953-acre) watershed, the forest became a blanket of deep green, cleaved only by yellow-green wetlands threaded with glacial blue streams.

“We want to conserve it for future generations,” said Charlotte Euverman, the Wet’suwet’en woman leading a fight to save this area, which includes a traditional feasting site. “We have to leave them something.”

Like most First Nations here, Wet’suwet’en never signed treaties with the Canadian or provincial governments. Nevertheless, the latter took the land and leased forested acreage to logging companies. Today just 20% of British Columbia’s old-growth forests remain.

In 2020, after decades of activist pressure, the province identified about a quarter of the remaining old growth as at high risk for logging and recommended a pause while deciding their fate. Yet today, logging has been deferred in less than half of the high-risk area

Now Caas Tl’aat Kwah is in the crosshairs of a debate over the scope of First Nations’ agency, biodiversity loss and protection – and the role industrial logging plays in amplifying Canada’s forest fires, the effects of which are being felt across the globe.

In summer 2023, more than 150,000 sq km (58,000 sq miles) burned across the country, an all-time record, carrying smoke across the continent and air pollution all the way to Europe and China.

Caas Tl’aat Kwah is not yet accessible by road, so the helicopter ride was the first opportunity for Nation member Sandra Harris to see it, despite the fact that her great-grandfather, Jack Joseph, once had a cabin there. The pilot set the helicopter down upon a boggy meadow, and DeWit, who is acting director of the Office of Wet’suwet’en, led the way through the trees to a newer cabin, where he gave a framed photo of Joseph pride of place.

Harris explained the significance of seeing the land, saying: “We have a lot of stress in our lives with racism, working with colonial systems that are so unkind to our ways.” The land is healing, she said.

“Today, we can feel our ancestors,” Harris said. “We remember our stories when we are able to put our feet on the land … There’s lots of good medicine there for us.”

Conventional wisdom has long held that increased fire severity is due not just to climate change but also dense overgrowth from fire suppression. The prescription has been to thin forests and set controlled burns. But a growing number of scientists now say that approach fails to recognize the role of industrial logging in increased fire severity: it kills complex communities of life that stabilize the water cycle.

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The highest peak at Great Smoky Mountains National Park is officially reverting to its Cherokee name more than 150 years after a surveyor named it for a Confederate general.

The US Board of Geographic Names voted on Wednesday in favor of a request from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to officially change the name Clingmans Dome to Kuwohi, according to a news release from the park. The Cherokee name for the mountain translates to “mulberry place.”

“The Great Smoky National Park team was proud to support this effort to officially restore the mountain and to recognize its importance to the Cherokee People,” Superintendent Cassius Cash said in the release.

“The Cherokee People have had strong connections to Kuwohi and the surrounding area, long before the land became a national park. The National Park Service looks forward to continuing to work with the Cherokee People to share their story and preserve this landscape together.”

Kuwohi is a sacred place for the Cherokee people and is the highest point within the traditional Cherokee homeland, according to the park. The peak is visible from the Qualla Boundary, home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Great Smoky Mountains National Park closes Kuwohi every year for three half-days so that predominantly Cherokee schools can visit the mountain and learn its history.

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The name was changed from a confederate brigadier general to a native name so its a double win

"It was different because there wasn't a lot of education [about] our people," she said. "So I only learned my history through my family members."

Years later, Tenasco is learning much more about her culture and her ancestors at a different kind of school — a federally-funded Indigenous archeological field school called Anishinabe Odjibikan.

The school brings together young members of the Algonquin communities of Kitigan Zibi in Quebec and Pikwakanagan in Ontario to dig up, clean and sort items used by their ancestors thousands of years ago.

Tenasco and her fellow Anishinabe Odjibikan participants learn how to document layers of earth and rocks, identify materials and determine if they're local to the area, use surveyor's tools and clean and reassemble pottery pieces found at a dig site.

Anishinabe Odjibikan is part of a growing trend in archaeology of involving the Indigenous peoples whose lands are being excavated — with the work either being led by Indigenous people, done collaboratively or carried out with their consent.

According to Cree/Métis archaeologist Paulette Steeves, the last century of archaeology has invalidated the pre-contact history of the Americas — and the people who lived there for thousands of years.

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On Tuesday, Energy Fuels Resources, the company that owns a uranium mine near the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, began hauling ore to a mill in southern Utah.

In a statement, the company said the shipments are safe, have low levels of radiation and have been permitted by state and federal regulators.

But the transport route includes a large swath of the Navajo Nation, which opposes the mine and has outlawed uranium hauling through its lands.

Navajo President Buu Nygren quickly sent out Navajo police in an effort to turn the trucks back, but the shipments eventually passed through the reservation on highways regulated by state agencies.

The president has vowed to stop any future uranium hauling and spoke with KNAU’s Ryan Heinsius about the tribe’s response.

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The medicine man flashed a mischievous grin as he dabbed his warriors’ eyeballs with a feather soaked in malagueta pepper and watched them grimace in pain. “They’re going into battle and this will protect them,” José Delfonso Pereira said as he advanced on his next target with a jam jar of his chilli potion.

“It hurts and it burns,” the Macuxi shaman admitted. “But it will help them see more clearly and stop them falling ill.”

It was a crisp August morning and a dozen members of an Indigenous self-defence team had assembled in the hillside village of Tabatinga to receive Pereira’s blessing before launching their latest mission into one of the Amazon’s most secluded corners, near Brazil’s border with Guyana and Venezuela.

Some of the men clutched bloodwood truncheons as they prepared to journey down the Maú River in search of illegal miners; others held bows and arrows adorned with the black feathers of curassow birds. Marco Antônio Silva Batista carried a drone.

“If I die, it will be for a good cause – ensuring our territory is preserved for future generations,” said the 20-year-old activist-journalist, whose ability to spy on environmental criminals from above has made him a key member of GPVTI, an Indigenous patrol group in the Brazilian state of Roraima.

Batista, who belongs to South America’s Macuxi people, is part of a new generation of Indigenous journalists helping chronicle an age-old battle against outside aggression. For centuries, non-Indigenous writers and reporters have flocked to the rainforest region to tell their version of that ancestral fight for survival. Now, a growing cohort of Indigenous communicators are telling their own stories, providing first-hand dispatches from some of the Amazon’s most inaccessible and under-reported corners.

“It’s dangerous work and we suffer a lot when we’re out in the field,” said Batista, one of about 26,000 inhabitants of Raposa Serra do Sol, Brazil’s second most populous Indigenous territory. “But it really gives me strength because I’m showing the reality of our lives to the world.”

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won power last year promising to improve the reality of Indigenous lives after four calamitous years under the far-right Jair Bolsonaro, who trashed protection efforts and encouraged illegal mining in places such as Raposa Serra do Sol.

Batista and his comrades from GPVTI (pronounced jeh-peh-vi-chee) were among 60 million Brazilians who voted for the leftist. “He’s seen as a brother here … people respect him because he respects Indigenous culture,” the young journalist said of Lula, who authorised Raposa Serra do Sol’s creation in 2005, to the fury of wealthy rice farmers whose henchmen rampaged through one community burning homes, a church and a school.

But Batista had no illusions that Lula’s return to office would miraculously eradicate the threats facing his mineral-rich home, on which diamond and gold miners have long preyed, as well as drug and gun runners. After being cleansed by the shaman, the journalist and his team left GPVTI’s base in Tabatinga on motorbikes and sped east towards the border with Guyana, determined to capture aerial footage of the miners polluting Raposa Serra do Sol’s rivers. They hoped such images may prompt a government crackdown.

“It’s my job to monitor the territory: to see who’s coming in and who is leaving, to find areas being invaded, and to defend the territory because we cannot live without it,” said Batista, who was trained by a local Indigenous association, the Conselho Indígena de Roraima, as part of an initiative called Rede Wakywai, which means “our news” in the local Wapichana language.

Caíque Souza Wapichana, an Indigenous photojournalist who teaches Rede Wakywai’s reporters to use cameras and drones, said he was inspired by a famous 1989 photograph showing a Kayapó activist using a machete to confront the president of a hydropower company plotting to dam a river in another part of the Amazon.

“In the old days we pointed machetes. These days we fly drones,” Souza said, calling unmanned aerial vehicles “defensive weapons” against invaders.

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The controversial construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) gained national and international attention when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers accepted an application filed by Energy Transfer Partners, a Texas-based developer behind the project.

The position of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is that the Dakota Access Pipeline violates Article II of the Fort Laramie Treaty, which guarantees the "undisturbed use and occupation" of reservation lands surrounding the proposed location of the pipeline. In 2015 the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, operating as a sovereign nation , passed a resolution regarding the pipeline stating that "the Dakota Access Pipeline poses a serious risk to the very survival of our Tribe and ... would destroy valuable cultural resources."

To generate momentum for their cause and demonstrate their opposition to the pipeline, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe organized runs, horseback rides, and marches. Many Native Nations, along with non-Native allies, celebrities, and several politicians supported the movement and travelled to join DAPL protesters at the Sacred Stone Camp on the Standing Rock Reservation. Conditions at the camp became intense. North Dakota law enforcement officials and private guards hired by Energy Transfer Partners clashed with protestors, sometimes violently, and made hundreds of arrests.

On September 3rd, 2016, the Dakota Access Pipeline company used bulldozers to dig up part of the pipeline route that contained possible Native graves and burial artifacts; the land was subject to a pending legal injunction.

Protesters stormed the land and were attacked by a private security firm, armed with attack dogs and pepper spray.

The battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline, explained vox

Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline: Native American Perspectives: Background: Historical and Current

Dakota Access Pipeline Company Attacks Native American Protesters with Dogs & Pepper Spray

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Native American children have attended at least 523 Indigenous boarding schools since the 19th century, including hundreds that were run by the federal government to assimilate children into White society, a non-profit group says.

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition released a new list of Indigenous boarding schools Wednesday that surpasses the number of previously reported institutions.

The list of Indigenous boarding schools in the United States includes many that have closed and some that are still in operation today.

Last year, the Department of Interior released a review of the past efforts by the federal government to assimilate Native American children into White American society. It found the federal government ran or supported 408 boarding schools that forced assimilation between 1819 and 1969.

Deborah Parker, the coalition’s CEO, told CNN that her group identified an additional 115 institutions, the majority of which were operated without federal support.

“There’s just so much we don’t know and trying to get records from churches has been incredibly difficult until now. We’re starting to get some records, but it’s just not enough,” Parker said. “We’re really trying to build this movement so that we can help families find their loved ones.”

Parker said people in many Indigenous communities are still looking for relatives who were taken to boarding schools.

“They’re still trying to search for information that could lead them to where their family members are. We know that many, many children died in the boarding schools and yet, we don’t know where they’re right now,” Parker said.

The coalition’s list includes institutions that meet three requirements: the institutions must have been designed specifically for Native American children, have an educational component and house students for any period of time. The Interior Department had similar criteria but only counted schools opened before 1969 that were operated or directly supported by the US federal government.

The list also includes 125 schools that are currently open and that were or are considered Indigenous boarding schools.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Native American children were sent to schools where they were renamed, told not to use Indigenous languages and had their hair cut, the Interior Department’s review states.

Hundreds of those schools were operated or directly supported by the US government but many were also run by religious groups and churches after Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act in 1819. The legislation provided religious organizations with the resources to run more than a hundred schools for Native American children. Many operated like military training camps where children were subject to abuse, neglect and corporal punishment.

In recent years, efforts to raise awareness about the legacy of boarding schools have gained momentum with Interior Secretary Deb Haaland – the nation’s first Native American to serve as cabinet secretary – who launched an initiative to investigate the boarding schools.

The Interior Department’s initial investigation found that 19 boarding schools accounted for the deaths of more than 500 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children but noted the number of recorded deaths was expected to rise, CNN previously reported.

“The Department expects that continued investigation will reveal the approximate number of Indian children who died at Federal Indian boarding schools to be in the thousands or tens of thousands,” the report said.