Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The speed of economic growth hinges to a large extent on the supply of fossil fuel, especially of oil and gas, which depends in turn on pipeline capacity. Thus, if we are to turn the tide against economic growth, pipelines are a good strategic place to start.
Each situation is adjudicated according to whatever opposition has been mustered and whatever degree of engagement the state chooses as well as the anticipated value of the proposed project. Thus, in concept and practice, the original votes in the UN for Free, Prior and Informed Consent were toothless.
Mining is already part of the poly-crisis, the Great Unraveling, the center of the conversation, debate, or struggle, whichever it turns out to be, at the intersection of our fossil fueled past and our so-called clean future. Indigenous communities everywhere will increasingly, visibly, loudly, and painfully, be at the forefront of that conversation.
During the signing ceremony, Chief Sisk spoke about the significance of the salmon’s return to the river and Winnemem Wintu homelands, and the role salmon play as both harbinger and provider of health.
The idea of Land Back — a growing movement to return occupied land to the Indigenous people that it rightfully belongs to, often exists as a metaphor for us.
With water becoming an ever more valuable and contested resource, we need to be crystal clear that it doesn’t belong in the private property system. It belongs in the commons.
Attorney Frank Bibeau found a way to legally protect nature by suing the state of Minnesota in the name of manoomin, or wild rice, sacred to the Ojibwe people.
Seattle’s South Lake Union may be home to Facebook, Google, and Amazon, but now, thanks to Native rights activists, it will once again be home to hand-carved canoes, too.
The Imazighen’s more recent anti mining struggle began on August 20, 2011, when activists from Imider — a municipality with more than seven villages — climbed Mount Alebban in the High Atlas Mountains and shut down a pipeline diverting water from the reservoir to a silver mine that has been operational for nearly four decades.
Indigenous delegates said they had been amazed at the “wilful ignorance” they encountered when demanding global banks cease financing new fossil fuel projects on their ancestral lands in what is today North America.
A Missouri State University study identified the main citizen concerns voiced: health effects of radioactivity released by uranium, underground water contamination, land and environmental destruction due to mining, lack of Native American consultation, and cultural rights to water based on historic treaties.
The moment the U.S. Forest Service posted its July notice of a draft decision to permit gold prospecting at Jenny Gulch here in the Black Hills, tribes, water protectors and treaty rights defenders turned out in droves to ward off the project and others like it.
