Category Archives: Indigenous peoples

Giving £2 a day to people in the Amazon helps protect rainforest, pilot project finds

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Researchers say almost 90% of participants in unconditional basic income scheme in Peru adopted environmentally beneficial practices

A pioneering project to provide Indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon with an unconditional basic income has contributed to the protection of the rainforest, according to a study.

The analysis from the University of Bath is expected to contribute to a growing debate about the role of direct payments to communities that maintain globally important ecosystems.

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Flávio Bolsonaro’s advance in Brazil’s election is grim jolt for climate campaigners

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Inquest under way into why President Lula’s success in curbing Amazon deforestation has not led to success at polls

More fire, more ash, more crime, more death. And a globally important ecosystem driven ever more rapidly towards a point of no return. That is the prospect for the Amazon rainforest for at least the next four years if Flávio Bolsonaro holds on to the lead he established this week in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election.

This appears to be of far more concern to the outside world than to voters in Latin America’s biggest, richest and most biodiverse nation.

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Sweden must apologise for harm done to Sami people, says state-backed report

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Independent commission accuses country of failing Indigenous people, amid rising tensions over land rights

An independent commission set up by the Swedish state has called on the country’s government to apologise for the “harm and injustice inflicted upon the Sami people” and to start a national process for “redress and reconciliation”.

The Truth Commission for the Sami People also called for a special apology to be issued urgently to elderly Sami people who were forced as children to attend segregated so-called “nomad school” and other boarding schools where they were “subjected to violations or abuse”.

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People protecting nature and land set up self-defence units amid threat of murder

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Defenders of forests and rivers killed at rate of one every three days in 2025, with 85% of deaths in Latin America

Nature and land defenders were murdered at the rate of one every three days last year, prompting many communities to set up self-defence units, according to the latest annual death toll by the independent watchdog Global Witness.

Organised crime groups or professional killers were implicated in more than a third of the 124 killings of defenders in 2025 as narco-trafficking activities overlapped with intrusions into indigenous territories and environmental crime, such as illegal logging and wildcat gold mining.

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Gangs taking villages on Brazil-Peru border ‘hostage’, say Indigenous leaders

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Delegation sent to Brasília after gunmen from organised crime group enter homes in western Amazon Forest

Indigenous leaders on the Brazil-Peru border say their communities are being “taken hostage” by organised crime groups who are running rampant across the region, destroying Amazon Forest, building roads and trafficking drugs.

Earlier this month, masked men armed with semi-automatic weapons entered homes in Apiwtxa, a village in the Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous Territory, intimidating people and searching for targets.

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We received no alert, say leaders of First Nations communities razed by Canadian wildfires

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Chiefs in Ontario say they were left to self-evacuate before homes burned to ground, after being told there was no imminent threat

Fast-moving wildfires have burned two First Nations communities in Canada to the ground, as members said they were left to self-evacuate without government help or emergency alerts.

Thirteen communities in Ontario province have been ordered to evacuate because of wildfires, most of them First Nations. The Ontario premier, Doug Ford, told reporters on Monday that close to 2,000 people had been evacuated so far to cities including Toronto and Niagara Falls.

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New pipeline in Canada to proceed after C$150bn pledged to ease BC and First Nations concerns

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Port expansion and protections for whales part of BC and Alberta plan to expand country’s presence overseas

The governments of Canada and the province of Alberta will move forward on a major new oil pipeline after the pair announced a plan to ease concerns of British Columbia and First Nations on the Pacific coast.

Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, shuttled between British Columbia and Alberta on Thursday to announce more than C$150bn in new investments in both provinces, part of a broader project of reducing trade with the United States and expanding his country’s presence in overseas markets.

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‘Native children belong in Native communities’: tribes decry New Mexico drug-exposed newborn rule

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Groups say new directive fails to respect Native sovereignty amid complicated history of Indigenous child removals

One morning early last July, Micha Bitsinnie arrived at work to an onslaught of messages from confused families.

New Mexico’s governor Michelle Lujan Grisham had just issued a directive mandating the state’s child welfare department seek custody of all newborns who had been exposed to drugs and alcohol in utero. Some parents wondered whether medications that they were taking for addiction recovery, such as methadone, would flag their cases. Healthcare providers wondered whether the fentanyl in an epidural counted as a drug exposure.

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‘Amazon of America’: film paints vision of a post-coup Brazil giving up rainforest

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Vitória Régia imagines rightwing Bolsonaro plot succeeded with US help – and highlights threats facing Indigenous peoples

The year is 2025 and far-right coup plotters have annihilated Brazil’s democracy, assassinating the president, closing the national congress and surrendering the Amazon rainforest and its untold riches to the United States.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Amazon of America,” a thick-accented North American soldier tells a group of journalists being taken on a propaganda tour of an oil refinery in the newly annexed jungle realm. Nearby, a replica of the Statue of Liberty has been carved out of the wilderness to celebrate Washington’s tutelage over more than half of Brazil.

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Danish treatment of Greenlandic mother may be ‘ethnic discrimination’, says UN

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Exclusive: Letter sent to government about case of Inuit woman whose baby was removed after now-banned test

The United Nations has warned Denmark that the treatment of a Greenlandic mother whose newborn child was removed by Danish authorities as a result of controversial parenting competency tests “may amount to ethnic discrimination”.

Keira Alexandra Kronvold’s daughter, Zammi, was taken away from her when she was two hours old and placed in foster care in November 2024 after Kronvold was subjected to so-called FKU (parental competence) psychometric tests. At the time, she was told that the test was to see if she was “civilised enough”.

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First Nation asks court to block Alberta referendum on seceding from Canada

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Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation has asked a court to halt the separatist push, arguing it would violate their treaty rights

A First Nation in Alberta has said that a separatist push for the province to secede from Canada is “consummately irresponsible and dishonourable” and should be shut down, arguing in court that a proposed referendum would violate their treaty rights.

A minority of residents of the oil-rich province have long argued that the province’s woes are due to the structure of payments to the federal government and a perceived inability to get their vast fossil fuel reserves to market.

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King Charles concerned about Alberta separatist movement, First Nation chief says

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Joey Pete of Sunchild First Nation said king seemed ‘committed to learning’ after meeting Indigenous leaders

King Charles has expressed concern over a simmering separatist movement in western Canada, according to Indigenous leaders who met the head of state at Buckingham Palace.

Members of the Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations travelled to London from their territories in the province of Alberta to raise the alarm over the secessionist movement, arguing that it ignores key agreements signed between First Nations and the crown nearly 150 years ago.

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Peruvian state responsible for mother’s death in forced sterilisation, court rules

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Landmark ruling in Celia Ramos case finds 310,000 women, most Indigenous, were targeted in brutal 1990s campaign

The highest human rights court in Latin America condemned Peru on Thursday over the death of its citizen Celia Ramos, who died at the age of 34 in 1997 after undergoing sterilisation “under coercion”.

The landmark ruling by the inter-American court of human rights (IACHR) is the first on Peru’s forced sterilisation programme, which operated between 1996 and 2000 and was directed against poor, rural and Indigenous women.

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Native American actor says she was detained by ICE officers who said tribal ID ‘looked fake’

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Elaine Miles of Northern Exposure was stopped by four masked men in Seattle while walking to bus stop

A Native American actor known for her role in Northern Exposure has said she was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Seattle, Washington, who told her that her tribal identification “looked fake”.

Elaine Miles, an Indigenous actor, alleges that she was stopped by four masked men while she was walking to a bus stop in Redmond. She offered them her ID card from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon but was told by an ICE agent that “anyone can make that.”

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Canada minister resigns from cabinet over Carney’s controversial oil pipeline deal

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Minister Steven Guilbeault says Indigenous nations were not consulted and the pipeline would have ‘major environmental impacts’

Mark Carney has agreed an energy deal with Alberta centred on plans for a new heavy oil pipeline reaching from the province’s oil sands to the Pacific coast, a politically volatile project that is expected to face stiff opposition.

The move proved politically damaging within hours, with the minister of Canadian culture, Steven Guilbeault, who is the former environment minister, announcing he would leave cabinet. Guilbault, a former activist and lifelong environmental advocate, said he strongly opposed the plan.

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Canada: ‘Inconvenient Indian’ author Thomas King says he is not Indigenous

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King has announced a genealogist working with the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds found no evidence of Cherokee ancestry in his family lineage

A prominent Canadian-American author, who has long claimed Indigenous ancestry and whose work exposed “the hard truths of the injustices of the Indigenous peoples of North America”, has learned from a genealogist that he has no Cherokee ancestry.

In an essay titled “A most inconvenient Indian” published on Monday for Canada’s Globe and Mail, Thomas King said he had learned of rumours circulating in recent years within both the arts and Indigenous communities that questioned his Cherokee heritage.

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‘His role is to recruit’: the Sheffield-based propagandist for Sudan’s RSF militia

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Abdalmonim Alrabea has appeared in hundreds of videos in which he expresses support for paramilitary group accused of committing genocide

A British citizen based in Sheffield appeared in a TikTok live broadcast laughing along while a notorious fighter from Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces group boasted about participating in mass killings in the city of El Fasher.

The video, broadcast on 27 October, is just one of hundreds posted to social media in which 44-year-old Abdalmonim Alrabea expresses support for the RSF and the ethnically targeted atrocities it has committed in Sudan’s western Darfur region.

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Spain expresses regret over ‘injustice’ suffered by Mexico’s Indigenous people during conquest

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Acknowledgment shows shift in tone after six years of diplomatic spats over colonial-era abuses

Spain has acknowledged and expressed regret over the “pain and injustice” suffered by the Indigenous people of Mexico during its conquest of the Americas, heralding a shift in tone after six years of diplomatic spats over the abuses of the colonial period.

In March 2019, Mexico’s then president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador wrote to King Felipe VI and Pope Francis, who was then the leader of the world’s Roman Catholics, urging them to apologise for the “massacres and oppression” of colonialism and the conquest.

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Story of Indigenous activist’s murder takes top prize at London film festival

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Jury says documentary about killing of Argentinian campaigner Javier Chocobar brings ‘a measure of the justice’ denied by the courts

A documentary about the murder of the Indigenous activist Javier Chocobar has taken the top prize at the London film festival, with the jury calling it “a measure of the justice” that has long been denied by the courts.

The Argentine film-maker Lucrecia Martel’s first documentary, Landmarks, won the best film award in the festival’s official competition, it was announced on Sunday.

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Indigenous and environmental leaders in Ecuador say they are facing state intimidation

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Critics say referendum on rewriting country’s eco-friendly constitution is president’s latest pro-extractivist move

Indigenous and environmental leaders in Ecuador say they are facing a wave of state intimidation ahead of a national referendum next month on whether to rewrite the world’s only constitution that recognises the rights of nature.

The pressure is being applied by the rightwing president, Daniel Noboa, who has begun his second term with a Trumpian agenda of consolidating power and sweeping away legal and social barriers to extractivist businesses, such as mining.

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