A Chilean police officer has been jailed for killing a Mapuche farmer during a vehicle chase in a case that cast a harsh spotlight on the country’s treatment of its largest indigenous group.
Related: Chile: four police officers arrested over fatal shooting of indigenous man
Continue reading...The police stories: Two former Western Australian and NSW officers speak out about what they saw during their time in uniform
One of the worst moments of Jim Taylor’s eight-year career as a Western Australian police officer was the day he strip-searched a 10-year-old Aboriginal boy.
Taylor, now 44, was working in Perth in the Juvenile Aid Group, or “Jag”. He says he was driving around the city’s central business district with his senior sergeant and two other officers when they came across a group of four young Aboriginal kids. They rounded them up and took them back to the station.
Continue reading...Indigenous communities say planned Øyfjellet turbines will interfere with migration paths
Indigenous reindeer herders are bringing a legal action against a proposed wind power project that would be one of the largest in Norway.
The Sámi herders from Nordland county are accusing the Øyfjellet windfarm constructors of breaking licensing agreements which stipulated that construction would not interfere with reindeer migration paths.
Continue reading...Islands surrounded by US military study area, including Guam and Saipan, call for activity that harms the whales to stop
In the midst of the western Pacific, flanked by the world’s deepest ocean trench, the waters off the Mariana Islands are home and habitat to whales, dolphins, and countless other marine mammals as they breed and feed.
It’s also where they encounter the might of the US military.
Continue reading...In a country where indigenous people are increasingly displaced and journalists are killed at an alarming rate, a courageous new voice has emerged: Lupita, a Tzotzil-Maya woman at the forefront of a Mexican indigenous movement. Twenty years after Lupita lost her family in the Acteal massacre in southern Mexico, she has become a spokesperson for her people and for a new generation of Mayan activists. She balances the demands of motherhood with her high-stakes efforts to re-educate and restore justice to the world
Continue reading...Film-maker Monica Wise talks about making her documentary on Mexican indigenous resistance
Our latest Guardian documentary tells the story of Lupita, a courageous young Tzotzil-Maya woman at the forefront of a Mexican indigenous movement. Over twenty years after Lupita lost her family in the Acteal massacre in southern Mexico, she has become a spokesperson for her people and for a new generation of Mayan activists. She balances the demands of motherhood with her high-stakes efforts to re-educate and restore justice to the world. The film-maker Monica Wise talks to us about her experience making the film.
Continue reading...Illegal goldminers supported by Bolsonaro bring environmental destruction and coronavirus to Yanomami communities
A petition with 439,000 signatures demanding “miners out, Covid out” of the Yanomami reserve in Roraima state was handed to Brazil’s congress this month as shamanic images were projected on to the building’s exterior. With Covid-19 ravaging the Yanomami population since the first death from the disease was reported in April, the existence of the “garimpeiros”, or goldminers, has brought even greater threats to the reserve.
The estimated 20,000 miners were already blamed for bringing alcohol and prostitution into the Yanomami reserve, where they have worked illegally for decades, clearing forests and polluting rivers with mercury used in separating out the gold. The destruction wreaked by their work has increased since far-right president Jair Bolsonaro took office – and they have kept working during the pandemic.
Continue reading...Brayden Bushby hurled metal trailer hitch that hit Barbara Kentner, who later died of complications resulting from trauma
A man who hurled a metal trailer hitch at an Indigenous woman walking along a snowy street in Thunder Bay has been found guilty of manslaughter, in a case widely seen as a grim reminder of the Canadian city’s deadly legacy of racism.
In her ruling Monday afternoon, Justice Helen Pierce found that the actions of Brayden Bushby led to the death of Barbara Kentner, 34, on 29 January 2017.
Continue reading...Astonishing rock paintings discovered in Colombia hold a lesson for today’s rainforest
In the past week, remarkable images of ancient cave art have hit the headlines: rock paintings made in South America around 12,000 years ago. The art, created on rock faces in the Serranía de la Lindosa, on the northern edge of the Colombian Amazon, is a riot of ochre-coloured geometrical pattern, handprints, and images of animals and humans. Until recent excavations, the works of art had been unknown to the international community. Their exuberant creativity will soon be revealed to a broad audience in the UK thanks to the Channel 4 series Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon.
The people who made these works of art were, it is believed, among the earliest humans to occupy the region, after migrations across what is now the Bering Strait some 25,000 years ago. Preliminary study of the iconography of the art has led scholars to speculate that among the deer, tapirs, alligators, bats, serpents, turtles and porcupines, long-extinct megafauna are also represented: mastodons, American ice-age horses, giant sloths, camelids.
Continue reading...Study calls for more rights for indigenous reserves as rising gold price attracts more miners
A new report has exposed the scale and impact of mining on indigenous reserves in Amazon countries as gold prices soared during the Covid-19 pandemic. More than 20% of indigenous lands are overlapped by mining concessions and illegal mining, it found, covering 450,000 sq km (174,000 sq miles) – and 31% of Amazon indigenous reserves are affected.
The report, released on Wednesday by the World Resources Institute, said indigenous people should be given more legal rights to manage and use their lands, and called for better environmental safeguards. As pressure mounts over the issue, a leading Brazilian thinktank has called for regulations tracing gold sold by financial institutions.
Continue reading...Joyce Echaquan is seen grimacing as nurses call her ‘stupid as hell’, renewing calls for country to confront systemic racism
A shocking video showing hospital staff in Canada taunting a dying Indigenous woman has left a community in mourning and renewed calls for the country to confront the realities of systemic racism.
Joyce Echaquan, a 37-year-old Atikamekw woman, arrived at a hospital in the Quebec city of Joliette on Monday, complaining of stomach pain.
Continue reading...Milestone is known toll of months of Covid pandemic that has changed everything, from power balances to everyday life
Though an inevitable milestone for months, its arrival is still breathtaking.
Deaths from Covid-19 exceeded 1 million people on Tuesday, according to a Johns Hopkins University database, the known toll of nine relentless months of a pandemic that has changed everything, from global balances of power to the mundane aspects of daily life.
Continue reading...Rieli Franciscato struck in chest as he approached indigenous group he was seeking to shield
A Brazilian government official and expert on isolated Amazon tribes was killed by an arrow as he approached an indigenous group he was seeking to shield.
Rieli Franciscato, 56, spent his career in the government’s indigenous affairs agency, Funai, working to set up reservations to protect uncontacted tribes.
Continue reading...The Paraguayan Guaraní language is a rare regional success story. But its own popularity is a problem for smaller languages
On a hillside monument in Asunción, a statue of the mythologized indigenous chief Lambaré stands alongside other great leaders from Paraguayan history.
The other historical heroes on display are of mixed ancestry, but the idea of a noble indigenous heritage is strong in Paraguay, and – uniquely in the Americas – can be expressed by most of the country’s people in an indigenous language: Paraguayan Guaraní.
Continue reading...Achuar people blame illegal logging for spread and are asking international community for aid
Climate change and multinational corporations have long posed a threat to the people of the Amazon rainforest. Now, however, the region’s indigenous tribes face an even more immediate danger: coronavirus.
Despite living deep in the heartland of Ecuadorian rainforest, the indigenous Achuar tribal people have fallen victim to the pandemic. Over the last several weeks, Covid-19 has struck at the heart of the Achuar community in Ecuador, which is made up of 13,000 people living in 88 groups over 800,000 hectares (3,000 sq miles) along the Pastaza River basin. A further 15,000 Achuar are based in neighbouring Peru.
Continue reading...Indigenous people in headwaters region say financing harms communities and ecosystems
Indigenous people living at the headwaters of the Amazon have called on European banks to stop financing oil development in the region, as it poses a threat to them and damages a fragile ecosystem, after a new report found $10bn in previously undisclosed funding for oil in the region.
The headwaters of the Amazon in Ecuador and Peru are home to more than 500,000 indigenous people, including some who choose to live in voluntary isolation. The area, covering about 30m hectares (74m acres), hosts a diverse rainforest ecosystem, but it is threatened by the expansion of oil drilling.
Continue reading...Indigenous leader Célia Xakriabá and Vagina Monologues author V discuss Brazil’s biodiversity crisis and why this is the century of the indigenous woman
Célia Xakriabá is the voice of a new generation of female indigenous leaders who are leading the fight against the destruction of Brazil’s forests both in the Amazon and the lesser known Cerrado, a savannah that covers a fifth of the country. V, formerly Eve Ensler, is the award-winning author of the Vagina Monologues, an activist and founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against all women and girls and the Earth. The two recently held a conversation in which V asked Xakriabá about what is happening to Brazil’s biodiversity and indigenous peoples, and why women are the key to change.
V: Many people, especially in the west, don’t really understand what’s happening to the Cerrado in Brazil. Can you tell us what’s happening to the forests?
C: It’s very tough at this moment. Every minute one person dies of Covid-19, but also every minute one tree is cut. And whenever a tree is cut, a part of us is cut, a part of us also dies, because the territory dies and with no territory there is no air, no good air for everyone in the world. People can’t breathe. So all this Covid contamination, it gets to the territory through the miners, the gold miners, the loggers and the rangers. And now that we are getting to August, we get even more worried about the fires, all the fires that burned the Amazon last year. It’s going to come back.
Experts say indigenous group has been pressured and cheated into surrendering its land
High in the Sierra de Alamos of Mexico’s northern Sonora state, towering pillars of rock loom above thermal springs where for thousands of years, the indigenous Guarijío people would gather to commune with their ancestors.
Now the springs – and the land around them – have been submerged beneath rising waters trapped behind an enormous dam across the Mayo River. The 25-storey Bicentenario-Los Pilares barrier threatens to displace the living, and leave the graves of their forefathers deep under water.
Continue reading...Global Witness campaigners warn of risk of further killings during Covid-19 lockdowns
A record number of people were killed last year for defending their land and environment, according to research that highlights the routine murder of activists who oppose extractive industries driving the climate crisis and the destruction of nature.
More than four defenders were killed every week in 2019, according to an annual death toll compiled by the independent watchdog Global Witness, amid growing evidence of opportunistic killings during the Covid-19 lockdown in which activists were left as “sitting ducks” in their own homes.
Continue reading...The Triunfo de la Cruz region has been embroiled in a struggle to save their ancestral land from developers and drug traffickers
Fears are growing for the safety of five black indigenous men in Honduras who were abducted from their homes last weekend by heavily armed gunmen in police uniforms.
The victims are Garifuna fishermen from the town Triunfo de la Cruz on the north coast – a region where communities are embroiled in a longstanding struggle to save their ancestral land from drug traffickers, palm oil magnates and tourism developers aided by corrupt officials and institutions.
Continue reading...