Category Archives: Indigenous peoples

2023 Goldman environmental prize winners include Texas Gulf coast defender

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Diane Wilson took on Formosa Plastics and won a $50m settlement to help clean up decades worth of toxic plastic waste

Grassroots activists who took on British mining giants and a serial plastics polluter – and won – are among this year’s recipients of the world’s most prestigious environmental prize.

The environmental campaigns led by the six 2023 Goldman prize winners highlight the hurdles faced by some local activists, who are often on the frontlines confronting the toxic mix of corporate greed and systemic corruption that is fuelling the climate emergency, biodiversity collapse and increasingly forced displacement.

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How an Arctic snow school aims to respond to climate crisis with Inuit help

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Canadian project plans to strengthen understanding of Arctic environment by drawing on Indigenous knowledge

Alexandre Langlois was surprised to learn that snow that has stayed on the ground for a couple days in the Arctic can be heard even before it is felt.

Margaret Kanayok, an Inuk elder from Ulukhaktok, an Inuit community in the neighbouring Northwest Territories, had come to speak to a group of scientists who had gathered to attend the world’s first Arctic snow school, being held in Nunavut, Canada.

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UK company mining gold in Amazon on disputed land

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London-listed Serabi Gold extracting gold without approval of Brazilian land registry and Indigenous communities

A London-listed company has been mining gold in the Amazon rainforest without approval from the Brazilian land agency or the consent of nearby Indigenous communities, according to an investigation by the Guardian and partners.

Serabi Gold has been blasting 4.5 metre-wide tunnels and trucking ore from the Coringa project site in Pará state. But interviews with land agency officials and documents seen by the Guardian, Unearthed and Sumaúma indicate that ownership of the area is disputed and the land was allegedly occupied by illegal land-grabbers.

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Horror in Winnipeg as another Indigenous woman’s body found in landfill: ‘It keeps happening’

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Remains of Linda Mary Beardy, 33, spotted by staff at Canadian garbage dump amid crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women

Police in Canada say the body of another Indigenous woman has been found at a Winnipeg landfill, in the latest grim episode of the country’s crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

The body of Linda Mary Beardy, a 33-year-old mother from Lake St Martin First Nation, was spotted on Monday by staff at the Brady landfill.

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Indigenous tattooist becomes Vogue’s oldest ever cover star at 106

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Apo Whang-Od appears on front of Philippine edition and is credited with keeping batok form of art alive

An Indigenous tattooist in the Philippines credited with helping to keep alive a form of the art known as batok has become the oldest Vogue cover star after appearing in the Philippine edition of the magazine at the age of 106.

Apo Whang-Od, who is from Buscalan, a remote, mountainous village in the Kalinga province of the northern Philippines, began tattooing at 16. Once described as the last remaining mambabatok, or traditional Kalinga tattooist, she has since inspired a new generation to learn batok, said Vogue. Batok involves tapping the tattoo into the skin by hand, using a thorn, which is dipped in soot and natural dye, and is attached to a bamboo stick.

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Mark Dreyfus rejects human rights commissioner’s claim Indigenous voice would undermine principles of equality

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Attorney general declines to comment on calls for commissioner Lorraine Finlay to consider her future in the role

Federal attorney general Mark Dreyfus “does not agree” with the human rights commissioner that the proposed Indigenous voice to parliament would undermine human rights principles of equality and non-discrimination in Australia, but would not comment on calls for the commissioner to consider her future in the role.

In an opinion piece published in the Australian on Thursday, commissioner Lorraine Finlay wrote that the draft wording of the referendum question and proposed amendment to the constitution “inserts race into the Australian constitution in a way that undermines the foundational human rights principles of equality and non-discrimination, and creates constitutional uncertainty in terms of its interpretation and operation”.

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Indigenous children suffer most from illegal miners’ Amazon invasion

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The influx of heavily armed gangs, now being tackled by President Lula, has had a catastrophic effect on infant health

The severely malnourished Yanomami baby girl is about eight months old but weighs just 2.75kg (6lbs) – less than half the average for her age. A catheter runs into her tiny right foot, delivering a blood transfusion doctors hope will save her life.

“This is a really difficult moment for us,” says Francinete Rodrigues, the director of the Santo Antônio children’s hospital in Boa Vista, an institution on the frontline of an Indigenous health catastrophe Brazil’s president calls an attempted genocide.

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Canada: university president to take leave amid controversy over Indigenous ancestry claim

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Incident involving Vianne Timmons is latest high-profile case of apparent cultural identity fraud

The president of a Canadian university has apologized and is taking a leave of absence after allegations that she falsely claimed to be Indigenous, in the latest high-profile case of apparent cultural identity fraud.

Vianne Timmons, who is president of Memorial University of Newfoundland, said that she would be taking a six-week leave after the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) published a report last week questioning her claims that her father’s great-great-grandmother was Mi’kmaq.

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Biden denies reports that Alaska oil drilling project has been approved

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Signing off on the Willow plan would place the president’s political career in conflict with climate-minded Democrats

The Biden administration has denied reports that it has authorized a key oil drilling project on Alaska’s north slope, a highly contentious project that environmentalists argue would damage a pristine wilderness and gut White House commitments to combat climate crisis.

Late Friday, Bloomberg was first to report citing anonymous sources that senior Biden advisers had signed off on the project and formal approval would be made public by the Interior Department next week.

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‘A war society doesn’t see’: the Brazilian force driving out mining gangs from Indigenous lands

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An elite unit is on a mission to expel the illegal miners who devastated Yanomami territory during Bolsonaro’s presidency

For the last four years Brazil’s rainforests bled. “They bled like never before,” said Felipe Finger as he prepared to venture into the jungle with his assault rifle to staunch the environmental carnage inflicted on the Amazon under the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.

Moments later Finger, a mettlesome special forces commander for Brazil’s environmental protection agency, Ibama, was airborne in a single-engine helicopter, hurtling over the forest canopy towards the frontline of a ferocious war on nature and the Indigenous peoples who lived here long before Portuguese explorers arrived more than 500 years ago.

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Canadian minister calls for emergency order to save country’s last spotted owls

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Steven Guilbeault wants to block logging of critical old-growth forest to prevent owls from going extinct in British Columbia

Canada’s environment minister plans to use a rare emergency order to protect the last of an endangered owl species in an area where critical old-growth forest is slated for further clearcutting.

Steven Guilbeault advised the environmental groups Ecojustice and the Wilderness Committee that he believed the spotted owl was facing “imminent threats to its survival” and he would use the powers to block further destruction of its habitat in British Columbia, the groups announced on Thursday afternoon.

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Peru’s ‘racist bias’ drove lethal police response to protests, Amnesty says

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In a damning report, human rights group says state permitted ‘excessive and lethal use of force’ against Indigenous groups

Peru used “excessive and lethal force” driven by “marked racist bias” against a largely indigenous and campesino population, Amnesty International has concluded, following an investigation into more than two months of anti-government protests which have claimed at least 60 lives.

An Amnesty International fact-finding mission investigated 46 possible cases of human rights violations and documented 12 cases of deaths from the use of firearms – all the victims appeared to have been shot in the chest, torso or head – following visits to the capital Lima and the southern cities of Chincheros, Ayacucho and Andahuaylas.

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Brazil ministers to visit site of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira’s murder

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Visit is part of push by Lula’s government to beat back illegal miners, loggers and poachers who wrought environmental havoc

Indigenous activists are planning to take some of Brazil’s top ministers to the spot where Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were murdered in the Amazon rainforest amid reports security forces are poised to launch a major environmental clampdown in the remote border region.

Leaders of Univaja, the Indigenous association for which Pereira worked in Brazil’s Javari Valley, said senior politicians, including justice minister Flávio Dino and the minister for Indigenous peoples Sônia Guajajara, would travel there on 27 February.

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West Papuan separatists release video of New Zealand pilot they took hostage

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Phillip Mark Mehrtens, a pilot for Susi Air, was abducted by armed wing of the Free Papua Movement

Separatist rebels in Indonesia’s restive Papua province have released photos and videos of a man they say is the pilot from New Zealand they took hostage last week.

Phillip Mark Mehrtens of Christchurch, a pilot for the Indonesian aviation company Susi Air, was abducted by independence fighters from the West Papua National Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Free Papua Movement, who stormed his single-engine plane shortly after it landed on a small runway in Paro, in the remote Nduga district.

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How one Derbyshire museum took initiative in returning Indigenous artefacts

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Buxton Museum returned entire collection of Native American and First Nation artefacts to their original communities

When Taa.uu ‘Yuuwans Nika Collison first opened the email from Buxton Museum, she was, she says, “sort of in shock”.

Collison is a member of the Haida nation, the Indigenous inhabitants of a remote archipelago called Haida Gwaii off the very far north-west coast of Canada. For 25 years she and others had been lobbying museums and collectors around the world to return items made by her people back to their homeland, often with very little success. Here was a curator from a small town in Derbyshire she had never heard of, saying it had some Haida items in its collection, and it wanted to send them back.

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Canada announces plans to protect vast marine zone with Great Bear Sea project

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Political and Indigenous leaders hope to replicate success of British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest conservation area

Nearly a decade ago, Canadian political leaders, environmental activists and Indigenous nations came together to shelter a sprawling 6.4 million-hectare area of trees, sea wolves, salmon and grizzly bears – a project that was named, with some branding acumen, the Great Bear Rainforest.

The plan has since been hailed as a triumph for protecting swathes of old-growth cedar and spruce and drawing global attention to an area of pristine forest the size of Ireland.

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Investigate Bolsonaro for genocide, says Brazil’s Marina Silva

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Exclusive: Environment minister calls for ex-president to be held to account as she prepares to tackle illegal gold miners

Former president Jair Bolsonaro should be investigated for genocide, Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, has said, as she prepares an operation to drive illegal goldminers from the site of a humanitarian disaster on Indigenous land.

In the coming days, armed police and environmental protection agents will launch the first of a series of operations by plane and helicopter to expel thousands of miners, who proliferated in Brazil’s Yanomami Indigenous territory during Bolsonaro’s administration, contaminating Amazonian rivers, wrecking the rainforest and spawning Brazil’s worst health crisis in living memory.

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Why a Swedish town is on the move – one building at a time

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Subsidence from the world’s biggest iron ore mine threatens to swallow up the Arctic town of Kiruna. But what does its relocation mean for the local Sami reindeer herders?

In the far north of Sweden, 125 miles above the Arctic Circle, sits the church of Kiruna, once voted the most beautiful old building in the country. The cosy terracotta-coloured church, with its fairytale rooftop points, is designed to resemble a hut of the indigenous Sami people. It opened in 1912, with almost no religious symbols, and is described by the vicar, Lena Tjärnberg, as “the living room of the community”. But if Kiruna church is to stay the same, it must go.

In 2026, the entire 600-tonne wooden building will be loaded on to trailers and moved to a new spot near the local graveyard. It’s just one large – and technically tricky – piece of a project to move Kiruna to a new home, three kilometres (1.9 miles) east of the old town. Billed as the world’s most radical relocation project, Kiruna is moving because subsidence from the local iron ore mine is threatening to swallow the town. Cracks have already appeared in the hospital; a school is no longer safe for its pupils.

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Ontario says ‘colonization’ costs mean it does not owe First Nations billions

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Canadian province argues in court it is not responsible for compensating Indigenous people over broken treaty obligations

Ontario has claimed that it does not need to pay billions of dollars owed to First Nations over broken treaty obligations, arguing that it has already spent the sum on the historical costs of resource extraction and the infrastructure of “colonization”.

Canada’s federal government and the province have spent the last week in a Sudbury court arguing neither is responsible for compensating Indigenous nations for more than 150 years of lost revenues.

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Canada: five RCMP officers charged over Indigenous man’s 2017 death in custody

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Two Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers accused of Dale Culver’s manslaughter and three others face obstruction charges

Five officers with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have been charged over the death of an Indigenous man, nearly six years after he died while in police custody.

Dale Culver, 35, was arrested by police in the British Columbia city of Prince George in 2017 following reports that a man had been seen “casing” vehicles on a downtown street. Police say there was a struggle between the officers and Culver, a member of the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan First Nations, who attempted to flee on a bicycle.

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