The agreement promises to compensate residents and ensure drinking water infrastructure is built
Canada’s federal government has reached a C$8bn settlement in two class-action lawsuits with First Nations communities over access to clean drinking water.
The agreement promises to compensate residents, ensure drinking water infrastructure is built and modernize legislation – as First Nations leaders have been demanding for decades.
Continue reading...A resurgence in the traditional drink is offering rural communities independence and a sustainable alternative to industrial soy and cattle farming
Four men emerge from the intense heat and steam of the barbacuá into the cold winter’s night in the rural district of Edelira, southern Paraguay. They rest, leaning on pitchforks they have used to turn over the prized load of fragrant yerba mate leaves inside this traditional drying oven. The centuries-old design drives hot air from a fire on to the large wooden frame where the leaves sit.
“I control the leaf’s humidity through intuition,” says Lisandro Benítez, the group’s lead, or uru. “Too humid and it won’t have the right flavour, too hot and dry and it could catch fire.”
Continue reading...Karapiru Awá Guajá, among the last of the hunter-gatherer Awá tribe, survived a massacre and a decade alone in the forest, inspiring others with his resilience and ‘extraordinary warmth’
He survived a massacre that killed most of his family in the Brazilian Amazon and lived for 10 years alone in the forest, but Karapiru Awá Guajá could not escape the pandemic.
Karapiru, one of the last of the hunter-gatherer nomadic Awá of Maranhão state, died of Covid-19 earlier this month. With only 300 Awá thought to remain, they have been called the “earth’s most threatened tribe”.
Continue reading...People coming to the aid of the Wet’suwet’en nation to stop a pipeline are using direct action that is prompting terror charges
The night of 28 November, Samantha Brooks, 24, hunched over the railway tracks near Bellingham, Washington, about 32km (20 miles) south of the Canada-US border and installed a “shunt,” according to trial documents obtained by the Guardian.
Related: Dakota access pipeline: court strikes down permits in victory for Standing Rock Sioux
Continue reading...The recent discovery of unmarked graves at residential schools is the latest incident in decades of trauma for Indigenous Canadians, who are using lyricism to process it
After the recent discovery of hundreds of Indigenous children’s unmarked graves at former Canadian residential schools, Drezus – an rapper of Cree and Ojibwe heritage from the Muskowekwan First Nation in Saskatchewan province – grew unsure about his longstanding plans to release a new music video, Bless. He starts the song by calling the atrocities his people have faced “an act of war”, then follows that with bar after bar of Indigenous empowerment. Unsure if that would be appropriate while his people grieved, he turned to his mother, who had attended one of those schools. Her advice? “Release it, son. We need it now.”
This government-funded, Christian church-administered boarding school system was established in Canada in the late 1800s. Its founders’ intent: to forcibly remove Indigenous children from their “savage” parents and impose English and Christianity. Some 150,000 Indigenous children attended these schools before the last one closed in 1997. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report detailed nearly 38,000 sexual and physical abuse claims from former residential school students, along with 3,200 documented deaths. The mortality rate for those children was estimated to be up to five times higher than their white counterparts, due to factors including suicide, neglect and disease.
Continue reading...Kona Williams says many unanswered questions remain about how to investigate remains found at the sites of residential schools
In her job as a forensic pathologist, Kona Williams investigates hundreds of deaths a year.
But when she heard that unmarked graves had been found at the site of a residential school in late May, she was seized by a grim realization.
Continue reading...Around the world, activists are pushing to protect their rivers by giving them legal personhood. Is this just symbolism, or can it drive lasting environmental change?
The Magpie River winds majestically through the forests of Quebec for nearly 200 miles. Its thundering ribbon of blue is cherished by kayakers, white-water rafters and the indigenous Innu people of Ekuanitshit. Earlier this year, in a first for Canada, the river was granted legal personhood by local authorities, and given nine rights, including the right to flow, the right to be safe from pollution – and the right to sue.
Uapukun Mestokosho, a member of the Innu community who campaigned for the recognition of the Magpie’s rights said spending time on the river was “a form of healing” for indigenous people who could revive their traditional land-based practices that had been abandoned during the violence of the colonial era. “People are suffering a lot, with intergenerational traumas linked to the past,” Mestokosho told CBC. As well as this benefit for people, she said that her ancestors had always protected the Magpie, known as the Muteshekau-shipu, in the past, and a recognition of its rights would help protect it for future generations.
Continue reading...UN human rights experts decry arrests and evictions of ethnic Karen from Kaeng Krachan national park
UN human rights experts have urged Unesco not to grant World Heritage Site status to a national park in Thailand, where they said Indigenous people are being arrested and evicted from their traditional lands.
The UN experts said in a statement: “This is an important precedent-setting case, and may influence policies on how Indigenous peoples’ rights are respected in protected areas across Asia.
Continue reading...• Indigenous community seeks Canada state and church records
• Report on finding of 215 unmarked graves calls for wider search
The First Nations community that shocked Canada with the discovery of unmarked graves says school records will be critical in identifying victims – and that a much greater area needs to be searched to understand the true scale of the tragedy.
Related: The Indigenous children who died at Canada’s residential schools – podcast
Continue reading...Conviction of businessman who conspired in murder of indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres raises hopes of end to impunity
When Bertha Zuñiga heard that a former Honduran army intelligence officer and businessman had been found guilty of collaborating in the murder of her mother, Berta Cáceres, she breathed a big sigh of relief. Five years after the environmental campaigner was assassinated by hired hitmen, this was the verdict her family and friends had been waiting for.
“I know there is still a long road, maybe very long and very hard, but to have achieved a guilty verdict against the [former] president of a corporation, [who is] connected to the armed forces: it is unprecedented in our country,” says Zuñiga, 30.
Continue reading...A First Nations community in western Canada has announced the discovery of at least 160 unmarked graves close to a former residential school – the latest in a series of grim announcements from across the country in recent weeks.
Members of the Penelakut Tribe in south-western British Columbia said in a statement late on Monday that the graves had been discovered near the site of the Kuper Island industrial school on Penelakut Island, nearly 90km north of the provincial capital Victoria.
Continue reading...Colombian health workers struggling to cope as malnutrition and dirty water ravage new arrivals in Maicao’s swelling shanty towns
A seemingly endless lake of cardboard and tin shacks surrounds the perimeter of a former airport runway in Colombia’s desert-like city of Maicao. Known locally as La Pista, the area is home to more than 2,000 families, and is one of 44 informal settlements to have emerged around the city in the past two years.
The old airport has become a landing strip for desperate migrants and bi-national indigenous Wayuu people fleeing the economic and political crisis in Venezuela, where the basic essentials of life are hard to come by.
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Chile to Cambodia
Continue reading...After hundreds of unmarked graves were found at Canada’s former Catholic-run residential schools, churches in First Nations territories have been destroyed by suspected arson
For more than a century, the clapboard church set amid rolling hills in western Canada has been a spiritual home to the Upper Similkameen Indian Band.
To build St Anne’s, residents of Chuchuwayha Indian Reserve #2 travelled 40 miles to the closest town, hauling lumber back to their community by horse and wagon.
Continue reading...Protesters in Manitoba have pulled down a statue of Queen Victoria outside the state legislature as outrage grows over the discovery of unmarked graves belonging to indigenous children sent to the country’s notorious residential schools. A smaller statue of Elizabeth II was also toppled on the east side of the grounds. Both royals are seen as representative of the country’s colonial history
Continue reading...Smaller statue of Queen Elizabeth also removed in Winnipeg during protest at treatment of Indigenous children in notorious residential schools
A statue of Queen Victoria has been toppled in Canada amid growing outrage over the discovery of unmarked graves belonging to Indigenous children.
A group gathered at the Manitoba legislature pulled down the statue on Canada Day – an annual celebration on 1 July that marks the country’s confederation.
Continue reading...In Canada, more than 1,000 unmarked graves have been discovered on the grounds of three former church-run residential schools, where an estimated 150,000 First Nations children were sent as part of a campaign of forced assimilation for more than a century until 1996.
On Wednesday, the remains of 182 people were found at a former school in British Columbia – weeks after 215 unmarked graves were found at an institution in the province and 751 in Saskatchewan.
A historic truth and reconciliation commission was conducted in the 2000s. In 2015 it concluded that the residential school system amounted to cultural genocide and that unmarked graves would be found in the former school grounds, but the recent findings still shocked many Canadians and prompted calls for a new investigation. Leyland Cecco explains how the discovery is just the tip of the iceberg in uncovering Canada's traumatic colonial past
Continue reading...Lower Kootenay Band finds human remains at former residential school in British Columbia – the third such discovery in weeks
A First Nations community in western Canada has discovered the remains of nearly 200 people on the grounds of a former residential school, adding to the growing tally of unmarked graves across the country.
The Lower Kootenay Band said on Wednesday that ground-penetrating radar had revealed 182 human remains at St Eugene’s Mission residential school, near the city of Cranbrook, British Columbia. Some of the remains were buried in shallow graves only three and four feet deep.
Continue reading...After the discovery of 751 unmarked graves at the site of a former school for Native children in Canada, it is time to investigate similar abuses in the US
There is so much mourning Native people have yet to do. The full magnitude of Native suffering has yet to be entirely understood, especially when it comes to the nightmarish legacies of American Indian boarding schools. The purpose of the schools was “civilization”, but, as I have written elsewhere, boarding schools served to provide access to Native land, by breaking up Native families and holding children hostage so their nations would cede more territory. And one of the primary benefactors of the boarding school system is the Catholic church, which is today the world’s largest non-governmental landowner, with roughly 177 million acres of property throughout the globe. Part of the evidence of how exactly the church acquired its wealth in North America is literally being unearthed, and it exists in stories of the Native children whose lives it stole, which includes my own family.
The full magnitude of Native suffering has yet to be entirely understood, especially when it comes to the nightmarish legacies of American Indian boarding schools
Continue reading...Alberto Curamil, an award-winning environmental activist, was seriously injured during a protest against the burning of a Mapuche home
Former recipients of a prestigious environmental award, together with Amnesty International and the lawyer of indigenous land rights defender Alberto Curamil, have launched an appeal for Curamil’s safety after he was seriously injured in a shooting by police.
Curamil, an indigenous Mapuche leader who in 2019 won the Goldman Environmental Prize (GEP), also known as the “green Nobel”, was left with 18 riot shotgun pellets embedded in his body after police chased his truck and opened fire after a protest against an arson attack on a Mapuche home on contested land in southern Chile.
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