At least 83 murdered in 2012-2019, with a third of attacks targeting opponents of energy mega-projects
At least 83 Mexican land and environment defenders were murdered between 2012 and 2019, while hundreds more were threatened, beaten and criminalized, according to a new report.
Latin America is the most dangerous continent in the world to defend environmental, land and human rights, with Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala ranking worst.
Continue reading...Resolution follows days of intense negotiation but falls short of agreement over controversial natural gas pipeline
Indigenous leaders in Canada have reached a “milestone” agreement with government officials in a land dispute that has sparked widespread protests and railway blockades throughout the country.
The tentative resolution follows three days and nights of intense negotiations between hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en nation in British Columbia and federal and provincial ministers – but falls short of addressing concerns over a controversial natural gas pipeline project.
Continue reading...An unprecedented movement has been triggered by police raids on Indigenous land – and dialed up the pressure on Justin Trudeau
Since a police raid on an Indigenous territory at the start of February, a wave of civil disobedience has surged over Canada.
Mohawks in Ontario and Quebec have erected rail blockades that paralyzed passenger and freight travel on some lines. Other protesters – Indigenous and non-Indigenous – have followed suit, blockading tracks across the country. Thirty-seven people were arrested in Toronto this week for standing on commuter tracks during evening rush hour, paralyzing the city’s Union Station.
Continue reading...My friend Jenny Vernon, who has died aged 75, was a museum curator who worked at Gainsborough Old Hall in Lincolnshire and later became keeper of Lincoln Castle. But she also had a keen interest in, and knowledge of, Arctic Canada, which she nurtured throughout her adult life.
Jenny was born in Bromley, Kent, to George Vestey, a metallurgist, and Violet (nee Grant), a clerical worker. She spent most of her childhood in Hertfordshire, where she went to school in St Albans. After studying geography at Manchester University she landed a job in 1966 as a geographer with the Canadian government, carrying out field work in the maritime provinces and publishing reports on settlement patterns.
Continue reading...A Costa Rican indigenous defender has been killed by an armed mob while trying to reclaim ancestral land – the latest in a spate of violence targeting native communities in Central America’s safest country.
Yehry Rivera, 45, from the Brörán community in Térraba, was shot dead around 11pm on Monday after being surrounded by a group of angry locals armed with sticks, machetes, stones and at least one gun.
Continue reading...An untracked number of Indigenous people have more than one relative missing or murdered in unexplained circumstances
When Pauline HighWolf’s son came to her home in Montana three months ago to tell her that her sister was dead, she was overwhelmed by a painful jolt of deja vu.
HighWolf, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, had been helping her 64-year-old sister Laverna Wallowing to transition out of homelessness in California to a senior living apartment in southern Montana. Wallowing had died of a head injury, but HighWolf still doesn’t know how or why.
Continue reading...Letter offers scathing criticism of police’s tactics against Wet’suwet’en people amid growing protest over gas pipeline
Canadian federal police had “no legal authority” to make ID checks and searches on activists seeking to block a pipeline project on Indigenous territory, according to newly released correspondence from the force’s oversight body.
The nine-page letter written by Michelaine Lahaie, chair of the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP, offers scathing criticism of the police’s continued use of tactics against Indigenous people which she had previously warned against.
Continue reading...The subsistence farmers of the Gongwang Bonyo tribe are among the most isolated people in Myanmar. Living near the Indian border, they gather each year to bless the harvest
Continue reading...Group of about 20 blocked Canadian National Railway Co rail line near Edmonton, capital of the western province of Alberta
Demonstrators opposed to a Canadian gas pipelinehave blockaded another railway line in the west of the country, adding to pressure on Justin Trudeau to solve a two-week protest.
Freight traffic in eastern Canada has already been stopped for days after campaigners blockaded a main line in Ontario. Protesters across the country have taken up the cause of the Wet’suwet’en indigenous people who are seeking to stop the C$6.6bn (US$4.98bn) Coastal GasLink gas pipeline project in British Columbia.
Continue reading...Justin Trudeau has called for patience and dialogue as his government seeks a peaceful end to a rail blockade that has shut down freight and passenger traffic. But the Canadian prime minister is under increasing pressure from the Conservative opposition to clear the tracks.
For almost two weeks, protesters across the country have taken up the cause of the Wet’suwet’en indigenous people of British Columbia in their campaign against the C$6.6bn (US$4.98bn) 40-mile Coastal GasLink gas pipeline project.
Continue reading...The Atacama in northern Chile is the driest desert in the world, and may be the oldest. It also holds 40% of the world's lithium – an essential ingredient in the rechargeable batteries used in green technology. Indigenous leaders and scientists say Chile's plans to feed a global green energy boom with Atacama lithium will kill the desert. As violent protests rock the country, they are fighting for the mining to stop
Pressure on Justin Trudeau’s government grows even as some politicians decry ‘hard-left ideology’
As armed Canadian police officers advanced through snow towards their camp, the group of Indigenous women was absorbed in a drumming ceremony to honour the spirits of missing and murdered Indigenous women across the country.
Rows of red dresses hung from a fishing line slung across the road, and from pine and spruce trees in the surrounding forest – each one a memorial to the thousands of Indigenous women killed or disappeared in recent years.
Continue reading...The four-to-three split decision giving Aboriginal Australians special status is a major defeat for the deportation powers of the home affairs department
The high court has decided that Aboriginal Australians are not aliens for the purpose of the constitution, a major defeat for the deportation powers of Peter Dutton’s home affairs department and a significant development in the rights of Indigenous Australians.
In a four-to-three split decision on Tuesday the high court ruled that Aboriginal people with sufficient connection to traditional societies cannot be aliens, giving them a special status in Australian constitutional law likely to have ramifications far beyond existing native title law.
Continue reading...Indigenous activists in Canada have vowed to continue their fight against a multibillion-dollar pipeline project across their traditional territory after three female leaders were arrested by police early on Monday.
Freda Huson, Brenda Michell and Karla Tait were among seven people detained when Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers – backed by helicopters, heavy machinery and dogs – moved in on the remote camp in north-western British Columbia.
Continue reading...Our rage, protest and mamae are much easier to dismiss if the forum designated for such processes is not of our own making
This week, to mark Waitangi Day, the Guardian is publishing five pieces of commentary from Māori writers.
Bill English once said of Waitangi Day that New Zealanders were bored of the spectacle – the unnecessary controversy – and deserved a more positive national day. The language is deliberate in its exclusion of Māori as New Zealanders and dismissive of our mamae [pain]. Our anger is a bore and a buzzkill. He declined the opportunity to own those words at Waitangi in 2017, perhaps out of fear or contempt that he would be held accountable. We will never know – his party lost the election in September later that year.
Continue reading...Six indigenous people have been killed and other 10 kidnapped after scores of armed men raided an isolated Nicaraguan nature reserve in an attack linked to raging land disputes.
About 80 attackers stormed a Mayangna commune about 500km (310 miles) north of capital Managua, deep in the north-central Bosawás Biosphere Reserve, the second-largest rainforest in the Americas after the Amazon.
Continue reading...In Brazil’s largest indigenous reserve thousands of saplings have been planted as an alternative to profits from illegal gold mining
The villagers walk down the grassy landing strip, past the wooden hut housing the health post and into the thick forest, pointing out the seedlings they planted along the way. For these Ye’kwana indigenous men, the skinny saplings, less than a metre high, aren’t just baby cacao trees but green shoots of hope in a land scarred by the violence, pollution and destruction wrought by illegal gold prospecting. That hope is chocolate.
Continue reading...Brazil’s president made anti-indigenous joke on Facebook broadcast, the latest in a succession of discriminatory comments
Indigenous activists have vowed to sue Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, for racism after his latest bigoted outburst.
In one of his weekly Facebook broadcasts on Thursday, Bolsonaro declared: “Indians are undoubtedly changing … They are increasingly becoming human beings just like us.”
Continue reading...Project part-funded by Global Greengrants Fund UK provides economic incentive to protect forest
From space, the Amazon rainforest resembles a giant dark-green lung veined with blue rivers that is steadily succumbing to the disease-like spread of grey fires, orange roads and square-cut farms. What the satellite images cannot show is how most of the remaining bands of verdant, healthy foliage are defended on the ground by forest dwellers who act as antibodies to drive out malignant invaders.
Among the most impressive of these is the Tapajós-Arapiuns Extractive Reserve in the state of Para in northern Brazil, where residents are trying to bolster their economic resistance with a series of new agro-forestry and solar power projects.
Continue reading...The Senakw development aims to ease the city’s chronic housing crisis – and to challenge the mindset that indigeneity and urbanity are incompatible
The scrubby, vacant patch beneath the Burrard Street Bridge in Vancouver looks at first glance like a typical example of the type of derelict nook common to all cities: 11.7 acres of former railway lands, over which tens of thousands of people drive every day.
This is not any old swath of underused space, however. It’s one of Canada’s smallest First Nations reserves, where dozens of Squamish families once lived. The village was destroyed by provincial authorities more than a century ago.
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