Protecting New Mexico’s centuries-old water democracy
With water becoming an ever more valuable and contested resource, we need to be crystal clear that it doesn’t belong in the private property system. It belongs in the commons.
indigenous rights
How a Tribal Rights Lawyer Is Winning Back the Rights of Nature
Attorney Frank Bibeau found a way to legally protect nature by suing the state of Minnesota in the name of manoomin, or wild rice, sacred to the Ojibwe people.
Reclaiming Salish Canoe Culture in the Shadow of Tech Giants
Seattle’s South Lake Union may be home to Facebook, Google, and Amazon, but now, thanks to Native rights activists, it will once again be home to hand-carved canoes, too.
How the Indigenous Amazigh people in Morocco fight for language and land
The Imazighen’s more recent anti mining struggle began on August 20, 2011, when activists from Imider — a municipality with more than seven villages — climbed Mount Alebban in the High Atlas Mountains and shut down a pipeline diverting water from the reservoir to a silver mine that has been operational for nearly four decades.
‘Wilful Ignorance’: Indigenous Delegation Incredulous At Bankers’ Attitude to Fossil Fuel Impacts
Indigenous delegates said they had been amazed at the “wilful ignorance” they encountered when demanding global banks cease financing new fossil fuel projects on their ancestral lands in what is today North America.
Small-town citizens get creative in Black Hills uranium mine fight
A Missouri State University study identified the main citizen concerns voiced: health effects of radioactivity released by uranium, underground water contamination, land and environmental destruction due to mining, lack of Native American consultation, and cultural rights to water based on historic treaties.
Tribes and water protectors ward off new Black Hills gold rush
The moment the U.S. Forest Service posted its July notice of a draft decision to permit gold prospecting at Jenny Gulch here in the Black Hills, tribes, water protectors and treaty rights defenders turned out in droves to ward off the project and others like it.
Focus on Ecosystem Health
Conservation, restoration, and participatory management of ecosystems (i.e., from the inside-out) are not only hands-on forms of “engagement with nature,” but also reciprocally restorative practices: restorative for the people involved as well as for the ecosystems undergoing restorative actions.
Wixárika community takes back financial autonomy in historic vote
After four years of struggle, the Wixárika community of San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlán in Mezquitic, Jalisco, will directly receive federal resources to manage amongst themselves without the intervention of local officials or political parties.
A Growing Movement to Reclaim Water Rights for Indigenous People
Native tribes are reliant on their local water sources, which have been continuously exploited and contaminated by the U.S. government and non-Native people. Indigenous groups are finding new ways to demand justice.
Supporting Indigenous Practices
Supporting indigenous Territorialities goes beyond supporting biodiversity conservation; it is also an invitation to organize and reinscribe communal systems that have been erased and dismantled all over the world by the increasing expansion of the capitalist economy and the conservation paradigm.
The struggle for what’s essential
Whether communities are fighting to address mining harms or standing in the way of these unwanted projects, their struggles are potent examples of the sort of reimagining and digging in for fundamental change that Arundhati Roy urged at the start of this pandemic.