Category Archives: Indigenous peoples

Dom Phillips was ‘collateral damage’ in drunken ambush, claims Brazil vice-president

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Hamilton Mourão’s claim sparked anger from Indigenous communities who believe organised crime was involved

Brazil’s vice-president has claimed that British journalist Dom Phillips was “collateral damage” in an attack on his travelling partner, the Indigenous activist Bruno Pereira, as grisly details emerged about the killing of the two men in early June.

One of the three men in custody for the killings said he and his accomplices tried to burn the bodies after shooting them dead at the edge of a river in western Brazil.

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Brazil police identify five more people linked to killings of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira

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Officers have already arrested three people, one of whom confessed to killing British journalist and indigenous advocate

Police investigating the murder of the British journalist Dom Phillips and indigenous advocate Bruno Pereira have identified five more people connected with the killings, bringing to eight the number of suspects in a crime that has shocked Brazil.

Police had already arrested two brothers, one of whom confessed to the crime, and a third man handed himself in to authorities on Saturday.

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Canadian priest arrested for 1960s sexual assault at First Nations residential school

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Canadian government has admitted that physical and sexual assault at the schools was rampant and has apologized

Canadian police said they arrested a 92-year-old retired priest for a sexual assault more than 50 years ago at one of Canada’s residential schools for Indigenous children.

Sgt Paul Manaigre of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said on Friday that police arrested retired Father Arthur Masse for the assault. Manaigre said the victim was 10 years old at the time and it happened between 1968 and 1970 at Ford Alexander residential school in Manitoba.

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In his own words: Dom Phillips’ reporting on Brazil and the Amazon

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Dom Phillips, whose death in the Amazon has shocked many, was a frequent contributor to the Guardian. Here are some of his outstanding pieces of journalism

Over some of the most tumultuous years in Brazil, Dom Phillips bore witness to the politics of his adopted home and to the fate of the Amazon rainforest. Travelling into the forest is a slow and laborious process, yet Phillips returned again and again.

Phillips wrote regularly for the Guardian and other publications. Here, we have collected some of his most outstanding pieces of journalism.

For more than a decade after the reserve was set up in 1998, its 16 uncontacted Indigenous tribes were among the best protected in Brazil. Yet today it is invaded on multiple fronts, leaving its isolated groups – who hunt with bows and arrows or blow-pipes, and avoid contact with modern society – at risk. Contact with outsiders can be deadly for these groups, who lack immunity to diseases like flu.

“The vulnerability of these peoples is growing,” Beto Marubo, a Javari Indigenous leader, told the United Nations permanent forum on indigenous issues in New York in April. “There is no effective protection.”

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Brazil Indigenous agency staff strike over Bruno Pereira disappearance

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Employees walk off the job amid anger over statements criticising the former Funai employee who went missing with Dom Phillips

Employees with Brazil’s national Indigenous foundation (Funai) have launched a one-day strike, amid anger over what they say is the dismantling of a key government agency and official statements criticising Bruno Pereira, the former Funai employee who went missing along with the British journalist Dom Phillips last week.

Funai staff and related civil service employees walked off the job at 9am on Tuesday in Brasília, Florianópolis and Dourados, and others are voting on whether to launch a wider strike next week, officials with the unions said.

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Maasai leaders ​arrested in protests over​ ​Tanzanian game reserve

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Dozens wounded in clashes with police over eviction from ancestral lands to make way for hunting and safaris

Ten Maasai leaders were detained and more than 30 people wounded during violent clashes with police in northern Tanzania on Friday, as they protested against eviction from their land to make way for a luxury game reserve.

One police officer was reportedly killed in the clashes and hundreds of people are in hiding after the protests in Loliondo, which borders Serengeti national park.

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Hopes fade of finding missing men as Brazilian police report finding ‘apparently human’ material

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Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira, missing for more than five days, had failed to show up in Atalaia do Norte at the end of a reporting trip

Hopes of finding a British journalist and a Brazilian guide faded on Friday as police announced an unsettling development in the search for the two men last seen five days ago on a remote river in Amazonia.

“Search teams found on the river, near to Atalaia do Norte, apparently human organic material,” Brazil’s federal police said in a statement.

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Indigenous groups scour forests and rivers for Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira

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Indigenous activists have been searching for the missing pair since just hours after they vanished, with support from armed members of the military police

Warm rain lashed the speedboat as it barrelled south towards the spot where Binin Matis’s mentor vanished without a trace.

“He was like a father to me,” said the 31-year-old Indigenous leader as his vessel advanced to the U-shaped bend where Bruno Pereira was last seen. “Now he’s gone, I’m not sure what I’ll do.”

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John Kerry commits to look into case of missing British journalist in Brazil

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Dom Phillips, a Guardian contributor, was last seen on Sunday morning travelling with Indigenous expert Bruno Araújo Pereira

The US climate envoy John Kerry has committed to pursuing the facts behind the disappearance of a veteran Guardian contributor and a celebrated Indigenous expert in the Brazilian Amazon.

Dom Phillips and Bruno Araújo Pereira were last seen on Sunday morning travelling by boat through the remote Javari Valley, a region plagued by violence involving illegal fishermen, illegal loggers, drug traffickers and security forces.

Kerry, a former US secretary of state, appears shocked at details of the case recounted by the Brazilian Indigenous leader Sonia Guajajara in a WhatsApp video of the encounter seen by the Guardian.

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Missing British journalist’s wife pleads with Brazil to find ‘love of my life’

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Alessandra Sampaio, whose husband Dom Phillips was last seen in the Amazon on Sunday, makes appeal in tearful video message

The wife of the British journalist who has vanished in a remote corner of the Amazon with a celebrated Indigenous expert has issued an emotional plea for Brazilian authorities to work harder to find “the love of my life”.

“I want to make an appeal to the federal government and the relevant organs to intensify their search efforts, because we still have some hope of finding them,” Alessandra Sampaio, the wife of longtime Guardian contributor Dom Phillips, said in a tearful video message.

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‘Every second counts’: wife of British journalist missing in Amazon urges action

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Alessandra Sampaio, wife of Dom Phillips, tells Brazilian authorities: ‘Please answer the urgency of the moment with urgent actions’

The wife of a British journalist who has gone missing in a remote corner of the Brazilian Amazon notorious for illegal mining and drug trafficking has urged authorities to intensify their search efforts.

Dom Phillips, a longtime Guardian contributor, vanished on Sunday morning while journeying by boat through the Javari region of Amazonas state where he was reporting for a book he is writing about conservation.

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‘Pivotal’ Māori leader Tipene O’Regan made member of Order of New Zealand

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Champion of Māori rights honoured by Queen for life of work dedicated to improving ‘economic, cultural and social standing of Māori communities’

A Māori leader, educator and historian who has dedicated his life to the betterment of Māori and was instrumental in developing Māori fishing interests has been awarded New Zealand’s highest honour.

Tā (Sir) Tipene O’Regan, 83, has been made a member of the Order of New Zealand as part of the Queen’s birthday honours list. O’Regan was awarded the distinction alongside Dame Silvia Cartwright, a former governor general and the first woman in New Zealand to become a high court judge.

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White Canadian man found guilty of murder of two Indigenous hunters

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Jury finds Anthony Bilodeau and his father guilty in the deaths of Maurice Cardinal and his nephew, Jacob Sansom, who were Métis

A white man who shot and killed two Indigenous hunters on a country road in the Canadian province of Alberta has been found guilty of murder and manslaughter in a case that laid bare racial tensions in the region. The man’s father was also found guilty of two counts of manslaughter.

Anthony Bilodeau, 33, and his father, Roger Bilodeau, 58, were charged in the deaths of Maurice Cardinal, 57, and his nephew, Jacob Sansom, 39, on a March 2020 evening. After deliberating for less than a day, an Edmonton jury found both men guilty late on Tuesday.

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Archaeologists discover ancient Mayan city at Mexico construction site

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Researchers estimate the city, which features the Mayan Puuc style of architecture, to have been occupied from AD600 to 900

Archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of an ancient Mayan city filled with palaces, pyramids and plazas on a construction site of what will become an industrial park near Mérida, on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula.

The site, called Xiol, has features of the Mayan Puuc style of architecture, archaeologists said, which is common in the southern Yucatán peninsula but rare near Mérida.

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Cruelty of Canada’s residential schools ‘unimaginable’, governor general says

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Mary Simon, first Indigenous person to hold post, attends service at Kamloops school to honor thousands of children who died

Canada’s governor general has described the country’s residential schools as places of unimaginable cruelty, in a eulogy to honour the thousands of Indigenous children who died while attending the institutions.

“Today, we make ourselves heard across the country. Although it is hard, we are telling Canadians and the world about our wounds and pain,” Mary Simon, the Queen’s representative in Canada, told hundreds gathered on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian residential school.

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Indigenous and Alaska Native women could face escalated violence if Roe is repealed

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They are also two to three times more likely to die as a result of pregnancy than white women, according to the CDC

The repeal of federally protected abortion rights would result in an increase in violence experienced by Indigenous women, girls and all those who birth, predicted the director of one of the leading research institutes on Indigenous and Alaska Native people across the US.

“The only option we have right now if this was to be overturned, is to provide the limited resources and support, but it will be limited, especially initially. As a direct result our people are going to suffer,” Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, told the Guardian.

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‘History repeating’: Amazon base in Cape Town splits Indigenous groups

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Building work is quiet, for now, on £200m project that pits different visions of South Africa’s future against one another

Smoke curls into the air, a drum beats, the dance begins, a chant is raised. Ten metres away, cars howl past on a busy road, drivers unaware of the sacred ritual taking place in the centre of a bustling South African city.

Francisco Mackenzie, a chief of the Cochoqua community of the Khoi people, talks of ancient beliefs and battles five centuries ago, against invaders from overseas. He points to the iconic skyline of Table Mountain, and then to a nearby building site.

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Canada: trial of white men who killed two Indigenous hunters in 2020 begins

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Roger Bilodeau and his son Anthony Bilodeau believed that Jacob Sansom and Maurice Cardinal were thieves, court hears

Two white Canadian men followed and then shot dead two Indigenous hunters because they believed they were thieves, prosecutors have told a court at the start of a murder trial in Alberta.

Roger Bilodeau, 58, and his son Anthony Bilodeau, 33, have both pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder over the deaths of Jacob Sansom and his uncle, Maurice Cardinal in March 2020.

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‘Jurisdictional maze’ hinders investigation of sexual violence against Native women, report says

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Amnesty International calls for restoring full tribal control over crimes on Native land to improve enforcement

Amnesty International has called on the US government to fully restore tribal jurisdiction over crimes on Native lands in the face of staggeringly high rates of sexual violence against Native women, according to a report released on Tuesday.

Nearly one in three American Indian and Alaska Native women have been raped – more than twice the average for white women and probably an undercount given gaps in data collection, according to the report.

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Tanzania’s Maasai appeal to west to stop eviction for conservation plans

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Thousands of Indigenous people sign letter to UK, US and EU protesting at appropriation of land for tourist safaris and hunting

Thousands of Maasai pastoralists in northern Tanzania have written to the UK and US governments and the EU appealing for help to stop plans to evict them from their ancestral land.

More than 150,000 Maasai people face eviction by the Tanzanian government due to moves by the UN cultural agency Unesco and a safari company to use the land for conservation and commercial hunting.

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