Indigenous

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/37912

In the last five years, Indigenous agriculture has received attention in academia as an alternative model, though on a smaller scale, to modern farming systems. Research has shown that some traditional farming systems, such as growing maize, beans and squash together, protect soil health, reduce biodiversity loss and support Indigenous knowledge, known as traditional ecological knowledge.

How many of these elements from traditional farming can successfully translate into larger crop production models, when little research defines their economic value, is a question Kamaljit Sangha, a researcher in ecological economics at Charles Darwin University, wanted to explore in a new study published earlier this month in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.

“How do we take it from the perspective where there are holistic and multiple values [of Indigenous farming], which are mostly hidden in the current way of measuring the importance of these food systems?” said Sangha. “The key message we wanted to get out is that if we highlight the non-monetary values of these food systems, we hope that this can attract more attention from policy decision makers and governments to support these indigenous peoples and local communities’ food systems.”

When assessing how many publications include rigorous empirical evidence to measure potential scalability and sustainability for Indigenous farming systems against mainstream agriculture, “there is a gap between advocacy and evidence,” the report read.

In the study, Sangha and Charles Darwin University researchers found that when reviewing 49 published research articles on Indigenous peoples and local communities, known as IPLCs, most literature highlighted the benefits of communities’ traditional farming practices. This comes at a crucial vantage point, as global industrialized agricultural systems are swept up by climate change risks. The study also found a lack of research examining the quantitative productivity and scalability of IPLC farming, an area Sangha hopes to see more literature on in the near future.

It’s estimated that a 35 to 56 percent increase in food production, achieved while suspending land clearing for agricultural use, is vital to feeding a projected 10 billion people by 2050. As climate change has emerged as a threat, food producers are looking to these reliable traditional forms of farming.

As average temperatures climb, climate change is decreasing biodiversity, altering nutritional values and degrading soil health. These effects are disrupting global food production and Indigenous food systems alike. Currently, food systems are responsible for 26 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Sangha said this review couldn’t be done without acknowledging the impact of colonialism on traditional farming. “In countries like Australia, a lot of food practices Indigenous people have carried in the past have been severely impacted, and in many other countries as well,” she said. The expansion of “mainstream food systems” has resulted in changes to Indigenous communities’ diets and the widespread loss of knowledge needed to carry these practices on to future generations.

The study also argues that merging the two systems, rather than viewing them as opposites, is required to tackle the climate crisis. With government investment and targeted policy, IPLC agriculture can build a resilient wall against threats driven by climate change, while modern farming industries can learn from these traditional ways of growing food. Otherwise, both systems face the loss of ecological, economic and cultural resources.

“Beyond market value, IPLC farming systems generate substantial non-market economic contributions by reducing household expenditure on food, medicine, fibre and fuel,” the report read. The review suggests that government funding and support can provide larger food producers with a look into how to address growing challenges caused by climate change and the impacts of fertilizers on soil health.

In 2024, the United Nations Global Biodiversity Framework Fund ratified investments to dedicate 20 percent of its resources to support IPLC initiatives to improve their lands and conserve biodiversity. Yet, a global commitment to specifically fund efforts to conserve traditional food systems is so far missing.

“If we highlight these non-monetary values of these food systems, and they’re important for policy decision-making, we hope that this can attract more attention from policy decision-makers and governments to support these Indigenous peoples and local communities’ food systems,” Sangha said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Modern agriculture is collapsing under climate change. Indigenous farming has answers. on Mar 26, 2026.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/37597

My name is Jack Strong, and I’m a member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. I’m the executive chef of The Allison Inn and Spa in Newberg, Oregon, and I’m a partner with the Siletz Valley culinary program at the school that I went to as a kid.

Students in the course cook from-scratch meals for the entire school (K through 12), located just outside the Siletz Reservation, in central Oregon. They also run a food truck, which is named YA-TR’EE-YAN (“a gathering of people around food” or “feast” in Dee-ni) and offers free meals to students and tribal members during the summer. They serve some recipes from my cookbook, too, with Native ingredients like venison, elk, salmon, and sablefish.

I’ve heard Native foods described as the first cuisine of the Americas and the last to be discovered. All these different Asian and European cultures are represented in the U.S., but until recently people wouldn’t even say there is a Native cuisine. Coming up, I didn’t have any Native chefs to look up. Telling that story, at the restaurant and to my students, has been something I’ve really tried to do.

I was raised on the Siletz reservation in central Oregon by my grandmother and grandfather. I enjoyed growing up in a small town. It felt safe; you knew everyone; there was no traffic. There was the forest where you could run around a little bit, and the river for fishing, and this place called the play shed, where I played basketball. You got to experience different sports because there weren’t a lot of kids—they needed everybody to make a team.

One of Strong’s signature dishes at JORY: Pan-roasted Skuna Bay King salmon with a salmon skin chip, set on sunchoke purée and quinoa and topped with cranberry relish and radish microgreens. (Photo credit: Kari Rowe)

My grandma would tell me stories about the history of our family and tribe. There was a time when we were a recognized tribe. Then, from the 1950s to the 1960s, the U.S. government eliminated federal status for tribes. We lost all federal recognition, access to land, resources, benefits. We call that the “termination” period.

What we have now in Siletz is a mere fraction of what our original land was. We moved here from our ancestral homelands, which are primarily from Southern Oregon into Northern California.

Termination was a tough time for our tribe, but they continued to fight to be recognized as a sovereign nation again and have land to create a home that would be ours for generations. Many tribal leaders made trips to Washington, D.C., to speak in front of Congress on our behalf, including my grandfather, who was on our tribal council as well as being a war veteran. In 1977, we regained federal status.

I was fortunate because as I grew up, the tribe started do more culturally important activities that we hadn’t done during termination. Our community started what we call “culture camp” that we still do every year over a weekend. They were teaching the youth things like basketry making and preparing eels to eat. My grandma would tell stories about teaching herself everything—like her amazing beadwork —and was a big part of making sure I went to that camp to learn about our culture.

“Friends and family knew there was always some kind of meal happening at the Strong house.”

My grandfather passed away when I was ten, but growing up, my grandmother was working and he was retired, so I originally started cooking for him. It was basic stuff that I learned from my grandmother—who cooked everything from scratch for us—and I learned I had a love for being in the kitchen.

I got into fishing as a young teenager. The Siletz River runs through the town and reservation, then it joins the ocean in the Siletz Bay. Growing up, I’d see salmon and steelhead trout spawning in the river.

My family was connected with seafood. My uncle was known for his smoked salmon—he would barter with smoked salmon like currency. He’d dig for clams and mussels, too. My other relatives worked in seafood processing. They would bring my grandma salmon heads. She would boil them and eat all the parts—the eyeballs, the cheeks. Later, in my first job out of culinary school, I did a lot of seafood butchery, and we would break down all of our salmon, and I’d bring the heads to her as gifts.

I’ve been asked quite a bit throughout my career about my grandma’s cooking. Her time was so much about survival. It was being taken from your homelands and away from your native foods. Growing up toward the end of that in the ‘80s, we were still on commodity foods—the flour and fats and sugars that were given to us. One of my first early times helping her in the kitchen was making noodles from scratch for chicken noodle soup.

Friends and family knew there was always some kind of meal happening at the Strong house. It was never just us eating by ourselves—it was always people coming over. I had this connection that food equates to taking care of other people, it gives you a sense of home and community.

My Culinary Influences

My first job was in high school at a fish-and-chips place in Newport, along the coast, 20 minutes away. It was a husband and wife who owned it, and they were mentors for me. He would go down to the boats on the bay front and get fresh fish, bring it back, and teach us how to fillet it.

I learned to appreciate fresh products and also the basics of hospitality, like cleanliness and multitasking, and how to interact with guests and the importance of being a strong player to support the team.

Afterwards, I enrolled in a two-year hands-on culinary program at Lane Community College in Eugene, and then at a local restaurant. That chef asked me to do a dish that might speak more to my culture.

I thought of fry bread, which was such a big part of our culture, but also came out of survival. My chef was Jewish, so I made a play off of lox and bagel with fry bread and cold-smoked cured salmon lox. That was probably the first-ever dish highlighting some part of my culture. That’s when I started to do what I do now every day.

After eight years at the restaurant, I started to get itchy. I wanted to try something else. I got an offer from the Phonecian Resort, near Phoenix, that had over 1,200 employees—more staff than people who lived in the town I came from. Arizona was the opposite of Oregon. Here, it’s beautiful and green and wet. There, it was dry and sunny every day. It was completely different from what I was used to. It was overwhelming, but I grew quickly there because I was like a sponge, absorbing everything.

I learned about the foods from the other beautiful tribes around there—the Navajo, Hopi, Gila River, Tohono O’odham. They’re all so different, and they’re all based off of place. Southwest foods include so many different chiles, beans, and corn—all Native foods. It was just so clear to see how these foods have sustained people for generations.

Students at the Siletz Valley School culinary program butchering local albacore tuna. (Photo credit: Rachelle Hacmac)

My Local Foods

After many years of working in Arizona—including at the Sheraton Grand at Wild Horse Pass, on the Gila River Reservation, and KAI, which is influenced by the food of the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash peoples—I ultimately came back to the Northwest to be close to family. Now, at The Allison in Newberg, I get to highlight Native foods in the kitchen and garden. I really love that—it’s my culture and home, and it’s nice to be able to share all the great things that come from here.

My role as a chef is about taking care of others, nourishing people. I’ve always felt like my part in this ecosystem is to support the farmers, the fishermen—to put money back into community.

If you’re getting any kind of tribal foods or just even local foods, usually they’re not really set up with infrastructure, so it takes extra effort on your part. At JORY, the fine-dining restaurant at The Allison, we use a lot of local.

“I’ve always felt like my part in this ecosystem is to support the farmers, the fishermen—to put money back into community.”

We have local fishermen through Northwest Fresh Seafood, which is a cute little fish shop right in Newberg. Our meats all come from Northwest Premier Meats nearby in Tualatin—her name’s Tina, and she takes care of us. Our cheese is from Briar Rose Creamery, 15 minutes away. Bread comes from our baker, Tim, at Carlton Bakery. We get our mushrooms and huckleberries and black and white Oregon truffles from Misty Mountain. We have a guy down at Oregon Royal Sturgeon, which is in the Fort Klamath area, and their fish is so fresh. For special events I might get something specific, like the Ozette potatoes from the Makah tribe up in Neah Bay, Washington, which I get through a gentleman who works for the Northwest Native Chamber.

Our produce is from local farms or our 1.5-acre garden, and last year we grew some Ozettes too. Anna, our master gardener, is so cooperative and passionate about what she does. We recently planted miner’s lettuce out there, which is a Native food. I do this dish called The Allison Garden, with a “soil” out of dark rye bread and vegetables stuck in that soil, with greens on the side. I use the miner’s lettuce as part of this dish.

Reconnecting With Native Traditions

Growing up, our Siletz language, Dee-ni, wasn’t taught in school. Now they have an online dictionary and programs in the elementary schools, so younger generations have access to our language. I learned what I know when I moved back to the reservation as an adult, going to once-a-month classes and coming home to put sticky notes on objects in the house. I mostly use our language around food—for things like lhuk (salmon), gus (potato), or ch’aa-ghee-she’ (egg)—especially on menus, because it relates to me that way.

When I was young, as far as I’m aware, the tribe wasn’t really foraging for traditional foods like huckleberries, and camas was only for ceremonies. Now every year I go picking huckleberries on tribal lands, and they’re one of my favorite foods. We serve them often at The Allison. You can go savory or sweet with huckleberries, and I’ve worked with the pastry chef, Shelly Toombs, to develop a huckleberry semifreddo.

My Work With Native Youth

In 2024, I got a message from Patrick Clarke, the director of the Siletz Valley School culinary program, which started the previous year. He said, “You should come out to the school and meet the kids sometime.”

I invited the class out to The Allison for a field trip tour of the garden and kitchen, followed by lunch and a Q&A. The class of about 20 students got to learn about cooking and other aspects of hospitality, including marketing, housekeeping, HR, accounting, admin—all these different jobs you can have under one roof at a place like The Allison. They asked me questions about my path and my advice for them. I feel like my path into the culinary world is very approachable, very driven by taking care of others and just pushing yourself to be the best you can.

It could have been just the one tour, but Patrick and I kept talking. Next, the school hosted me. They made lunch and gave a tour of the school and their food truck. The kids used the recipe out of my cookbook for fry bread, and I hopped in the food truck to make it with them.

Since then, a lot of what I do with the culinary program is giving them opportunities to learn and connect with other Native chefs—like at the Native American Heritage Month event we hosted at The Allison last November. The students helped with everything, from prep days to shucking oysters that night.

“I do whatever I can to give them experiences. The more experiences they have, the bigger and better picture they’ll see.”

I try to give them a path toward a good career in the kitchen, about being happy in what you do. But I’m also very transparent about the difficulties. You’re going to work holidays and your birthday, and you’re going to be taking care of others on their special days. It can be long days of physical work.

Siletz is a small town with no stoplights, a thousand people, and really no business besides a mini-mart gas station—unless you work for the tribe, and those jobs are limited. So it’s really all about exposure to new things. That’s half the battle—getting out of Siletz a bit and seeing what’s in the world. I do whatever I can to give them experiences, like going up into Portland and being part of the governor’s conference [in April 2025], feeding lawmakers and representing the tribe. The more experiences they have, the bigger and better picture they’ll see.

Last month, there was an event called the Blue Foods Forum in Portland, all focused on foods from the ocean. The kids cooked Oregon albacore and supported the chefs, including helping with a plating for a demonstration I led with tribal-caught salmon from Iliamna Fish Co.

Through the Oregon Albacore Commission, they also got to go out on a boat—which I know for some kids was their first time. They received a donation of whole albacore tuna that they learned to butcher. As part of the lesson, they took the fish heads and other parts of the skeletons and buried them to help create a natural fertilizer, as part of this full-circle journey so that nothing goes to waste and everything stays in the ecosystem.

It was like one of the times, as a kid, that I came back home with trout for my grandma. I didn’t clean the fish at the river, and she reprimanded me. She was happy I had caught trout, but she was like, ‘You need to gut those at the river. You need to wash the inside of their flesh with the water. All of what you cleaned out is going to be eaten by the crawdads and all the other life that’s in the river, and that’s part of the process.’ With the students learning how to break down albacore after the boat trip—that was their teaching moment of how everything is connected.

It’s really impressive to see how far some of the students have come. The program gives them direction; it pushes them to see what they can do, and it benefits the school and the community. I try to do whatever I can to support the students. For the past two years at JORY, we’ve had a special dish on the menu that highlights traditional Siletz foods, with some of the proceeds going towards the culinary school program.

I really connect with the youth in Siletz. As someone who came from that school, I understand what those kids are going through, what their opportunities are. For me, it’s personal—I can say: “I’ve sat where you’re sitting.”

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The post ‘Native Foods Have Sustained People for Generations’ appeared first on Civil Eats.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/37223

Twin Sisters Native Plant Nursery, jointly operated by West Moberly First Nations and Saulteau First Nations in northern ‘B.C.,’ converted from propane to biomass heating a decade ago. Now, West Moberly First Nations plans to go even greener — growing food in greenhouses heated by geothermal energy from deep underground. Photo courtesy Government of B.C./Flickr

This story was originally published by The Narwhal here and is reprinted with permission and minor style edits.

Moldy strawberries, wilted lettuce. A forlorn cauliflower pocked with brown.

West Moberly First Nations Coun. Clarence Willson jokes that produce available in nearby stores is sometimes “compostable” before it hits the shelves.

That produce arrives by way of a very long supply chain, and their northeastern “B.C.” territory, a three-and-a-half hour drive northeast of “Prince George,” is often the end of the line.

And thanks to the compounding effects of hydro dams, seismic lines for oil and gas, forestry and coal mines, traditional foods the nation has long harvested or hunted have grown increasingly scarce or unsafe to eat.

“We have to start looking at how we sustain ourselves,” Chief Roland Willson of West Moberly First Nations says. “Not just West Moberly, but the people in the northeast.

“The idea of the greenhouse is, to me, where I think we have to go.”

Chief Roland Willson, of West Moberly First Nations. Photo by David P. Ball

‘We want to be in control of our supply of food’

Growing fresh food year-round in greenhouses could improve food security in the community and across the region, but it would take a lot of energy, too.

Fortunately, the First Nation has a serendipitous asset buried deep underground: scalding hot, salty water.

Thanks to the province’s lively tectonic faults, it has an abundance of this underground water, a key ingredient in what’s known as conventional geothermal energy.

Hot water is pumped to the surface, using tools like turbines and heat exchangers to generate renewable electricity or direct heat.

Elsewhere, companies are working to design so-called “unconventional” geothermal technologies to extract the earth’s heat from places without such reservoirs, but the drilling required makes it much more costly.

“B.C.’s” geothermal opportunities, in other words, are a relatively low-hanging fruit — one that could literally yield fruit, and other fair-weather crops like tomatoes and peppers, even in winter’s subzero temperatures.

“British Columbia has a world-class geothermal resource,” says Emily Smejkal, a geologist and policy lead for the Cascade Institute’s geothermal energy office.

“We’re just not using it.”

Geothermal energy supplies consistent power, making it similar to the hydro dams and natural gas “B.C.” currently relies on.

If the nation’s project succeeds, the West Moberly direct heat geothermal greenhouse project would be the first of its kind in “Canada.”

Such innovation brings risks to its trailblazers, but Clarence, a longtime lead on the geothermal project, says the potential outcomes are worth it.

“When we learned about this geothermal availability, it fit right into our idea of food sovereignty,” he says.

“We want to be in control of our supply of food, knowing what goes into it and what’s good about it.”

Wilted, moldy produce like these strawberries is not an uncommon sight at grocery stores in ‘B.C.,’ especially in remote and rural areas. The province imports much of its fresh produce, and by the time the food has arrived on store shelves, it’s often past its prime. Photo by Zoë Yunker

Impacts of fragmented food systems

Fresh food used to be abundant in West Moberly’s territory.

“If you needed meat, you’d go to the mountains and get yourself a caribou,” Roland says.

Fish came easily, too: rivers were once plentiful enough that you could catch them by hand.

The nation’s members travelled throughout their territory with the seasons, maintaining balance and keeping their impacts in check.

Over a century ago, “Canada” signed Treaty 8, which promised signatory First Nations would retain the right to hunt and fish as they always had.

But that’s not what happened.

To supercharge resource extraction in the north, former premier W.A.C. Bennett dammed the Peace River, bisecting the once-expansive migration of transient caribou that fortified the residential herds.

“Caribou that roamed throughout the territory got fragmented down into these small, little pockets,” Roland says, “and then wolves came in.”

Wolves and other predators made use of roads — and seismic and power lines etched across the territory, offering them an easy-access escalator to the caribou’s mountain hideaways.

As logging and mining further depleted caribou habitat, the herds plummeted.

In 2014, the nation launched a breeding pen program with the Saulteau First Nations, and yet herds remain in critical condition.

Other foods suffered, too: moose and elk populations fell, thanks in part to habitat loss and to new hunting pressure in the caribou’s absence.

Berries throughout the territory were sprayed with glyphosate, a chemical now deemed “probably carcinogenic” by the World Health Organization.

For decades, fish remained relatively plentiful — and critical to diminishing food security.

Every year in May, Clarence and his family would gather at a special spot along the Crooked River to fish for char, sometimes setting up barbecues to cook by the river as they worked.

But worries began to surface, thanks in part to a sign in the Hudson’s Hope post office warning of elevated mercury levels in the Williston Reservoir.

The nation knew that fish travelled through the reservoir, and initiated a study in 2015 to determine whether they were safe to eat.

“I was in tears when we got the results back, because I knew my family had been eating those fish for years,” Clarence says.

Ninety-eight percent of the samples had mercury concentrations above provincial health guidelines.

Women of childbearing age could safely eat only a Hershey’s Kiss worth of fish every other day.

Char like this Dolly Varden species populate the Crooked River in northeastern B.C. and have long served as a vital food source for West Moberly First Nations. But the impacts of mining and logging in the area have contaminated the water, leading to unhealthy mercury levels in the fish. Photo courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Site C dam raised the stakes — and the risks

Before it was flooded, the community learned that BC Hydro’s new dam project, Site C, would bring mercury contamination closer to home.

The reservoir is downstream of the Moberly River, which threads through the nation’s territory and flows into Moberly Lake directly facing their community.

Just as the Crooked River carried the reservoir’s toxins upstream, the Moberly River is poised to do the same.

“A lot of us eat fish directly out of the lake,” Clarence says.

“They went ahead with Site C with the full knowledge that it was going to do the same thing there.”

Clarence added that selenium pollution from nearby coal mines also impacts the region’s watersheds. “All the river networks in our region are affected by something,” he says.

With many traditional food sources depleted or contaminated, West Moberly has taken action over the years to regain access to fresh foods.

The nation funded community members to build garden beds, but short growing seasons mean they offer limited respite to a year-round problem.

A greenhouse could bridge the seasons, but West Moberly First Nations has no natural gas service in its community.

And according to Michael Keefer, president of the ecological restoration consultancy Keefer Ecological, the added costs of using electricity to power a greenhouse year-round would make the prospect a non-starter.

“It’s very energy-intensive to heat a greenhouse,” he says.

That is, unless the nation has another energy source to draw from.

The Site C dam on the Peace River. Photo courtesy BC Hydro

Energy from an ancient sea-floor

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the earth’s supercontinent broke up along the border of northeastern “B.C.” and “Alberta,” turning it — and what would become West Moberly’s traditional territory — into a shallow tropical sea, populated by giant reptilefish.

Eventually, sediment and rock covered it over, leaving little holes underground where that sea-floor had been.

“If that buried sea-floor doesn’t hold air anymore, it holds salty water or oil or gas,” Smejkal says. Known as “brine,” that water is more plentiful than its fossil fuel cohabitants.

“Oil and gas are hard to find,” Smejkal says. “Water is actually pretty easy.”

In addition to that ancient sea-floor, “B.C.’s” geothermal potential also abounds beneath the chains of volcanoes tracing its coast.

There, hot water comes from rain that trickles underground through porous rocks, heated by the volcanoes’ pimple-like proximity to the earth’s molten core.

Some “B.C.” buildings use a geothermal-lite technique called “geo-exchange” to supplement their energy needs by heating water in shallow underground pipes, but to date no projects have successfully tapped the potential of deep-buried water.

Glen Clark, chair of the BC Hydro board, said he thinks the province’s lacklustre geothermal industry is due in part to an abundance of cheap hydropower and gas.

“You’ve got these inexpensive fuel sources that have impaired, in a way, the kind of experimentation you’d have if the price were higher,” he says.

But Clark says geothermal is “a really, really important resource,” that could play a key role in “B.C.’s” energy system in the future.

Producing electricity from underground water is also finicky: it needs to be super hot, at around 120 C.

But industrial sites like greenhouses can easily skip the electricity step, using geothermal heat directly in their operations, creating a less risky project.

When West Moberly realized the heat in their geothermal resource was ideal for greenhouse conditions, it seemed like an obvious conclusion, Clarence says.

“That’s been a topic we’ve discussed for years,” he says.

West Moberly First Nations’ existing greenhouse nursery has been heated with biomass fuel for a decade. The community hopes to start growing food in geothermal-heated facilities in the future. Photo courtesy of West Moberly Corporate Alliance

Next phase of geothermal project is risky

If all goes as planned, West Moberly’s geothermal greenhouse will bring fresh produce and fish back to the territory.

Using a system known as aquaponics, the nation plans to raise fish in tanks and use their waste to fertilize vegetables in the greenhouse, cutting down on or eliminating the use of synthetic fertilizers.

“The waste from the fish is excellent fertilizer for the greenhouse products,” Clarence says.

“They work together very well.”

So far, the nation plans to raise fish like tilapia alongside produce like tomatoes, strawberries, greens and peppers in a 40,000-square-foot greenhouse — enough to provide food for its members and surrounding communities.

Keefer is working with the nation to develop a business plan, including reaching out to local grocery stores. He’s confident their products will be in high demand — as long as everything goes according to plan.

Even though the project is designed to produce a more forgiving form of direct heat, the enterprise still brings risk.

“For our project, flow is our big worry,” Ben Lee says.

He’s an operations engineer and heat transfer specialist with Calgary-based company Raven Thermal Services, which is helping to design the geothermal project with the nation.

If the company doesn’t find enough water in the reservoir it targets, it won’t be able to bring enough heat to the surface, and may need to drill farther into the rock to access it, upping the project’s costs.

Lee says they chose to locate the project next to an abandoned oil and gas well near the community, which can serve as a pre-drilled test plot to assess subsurface conditions they might encounter.

This is among the many conservative decisions made, Lee says, to reduce risks inherent in the project.

“When you’re talking about a community-based project,” he says, “risk management becomes absolutely critical.”

West Moberly First Nations’ geothermal greenhouse plans are inspired by similar projects throughout the Westland region of the Netherlands, such as this greenhouse operated by the B.L. de Bakker & Zn nursery in Wateringen. Photo by Jeroen van Luin/Flickr

‘Trying to have good food here’

Having received early feasibility funding from federal and provincial governments, the project now requires substantial new funding to take on the next big step of drilling the hole to determine how much water is there.

In countries where geothermal energy has boomed, Smejkal says that risk-taking has often been a shared enterprise.

For example, in what’s known as the “glass city” — the Westland region of the Netherlands — geothermal-powered greenhouses produce food for distribution across Europe.

There, governments agreed to help compensate for the cost difference between geothermal power and natural gas, and offered an insurance program to reduce risks for geothermal projects.

By removing the consumer carbon tax and failing to provide consistent support for geothermal energy, Smejkal worries “Canada” is heading in the opposite direction.

Clark sees a role for the utility to advance geothermal in the province and help to reduce risks for developers.

But, he warns, it faces competing demands for funds and time, including major substation investments to replace aging infrastructure.

He says he wasn’t aware of West Moberly’s geothermal greenhouse project, but added that the utility generally enters into equity agreements with First Nations to share ownership of the energy system, like transmission lines, “as opposed to more historic reparations.”

He added that he didn’t know enough about the mercury issues related to Site C to comment on them.

In an interview from his home alongside Moberly Lake, Clarence says those responsible for the community’s collapsing food system are indebted to help.

 “Some of these people that are poisoning our food supply,” he says, “they should help us with trying to have good food here.”

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/37245

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletterhere.

Katie Surma
Inside Climate News

MAIKIUANTS, Ecuador — By the time Olger Kitiar reached the ridge, his shirt was wet with sweat, clinging to his back. Built with the solid frame of a linebacker, he moved through the rainforest with a quick, even rhythm that defied the steep, slick climb.

Then he froze.

“Stop,” he hissed in Spanish, his hand snapping up.

Jhostin Antún, a few steps behind, halted mid-stride. To an outsider, the trail ahead looked like any other patch of churned Amazonian mud—slick, brown and dense enough to swallow a boot. But Olger’s eyes, trained by a lifetime in the Shuar territory of Maikiuants, saw it instantly. He squatted down, pointing to a deep, four-toed indentation. The track was fresh. And massive.

“Jaguar,” he whispered, a grin spreading across his face.

The print belonged to a cat bigger than the female they’d recorded on a camera trap in October, one month earlier. The men photographed the imprint carefully, not as a memento, but for legal evidence.

Maikiuants, perched high in Ecuador’s southeastern Amazon highlands near the Peruvian border, sits atop copper-rich ground now claimed by Solaris Resources, a Canadian mining company seeking to gash an open-pit mine into these mountains. If extraction moves forward, the forest Jhostin and Olger were walking through—home to endangered species, waterfalls, medicinal plants, generations of Indigenous knowledge and undiscovered beings—could be permanently altered.

The jaguar’s presence here holds weight as a matter of law. In Ecuador, endangered species—and nature more broadly—have legal rights. The government must clear a far higher bar than under conventional laws before approving projects like large-scale mining.

Jhostin and Olger are paraecologists, people who document life in their homelands using generations of ecological expertise and scientific methods. They work with Ecoforensic, a nonprofit that trains paraecologists—paramedics for ecosystems—to document how ecosystems function and how they are harmed. Ecoforensic works in places in Ecuador like Maikiuants: biodiverse regions where scientific data is thin or nonexistent.

The data paraecologists collect, such as species inventories and water samples, is then translated into evidence that carries weight in courts. Increasingly, it’s winning cases.

In 2023, in Ecuador’s Intag Valley, community paraecologists helped halt a proposed mega copper mine by documenting threats to endangered species that the company’s environmental studies had failed to account for. The ruling hinged on Ecuador’s “rights of nature” laws, enshrined in the country’s constitution in 2008.

Those laws rewrote the legal status of ecosystems, transforming them from property or objects—like a car or a microwave—into living subjects with rights to exist, regenerate and maintain their vital cycles. Since then, courts have repeatedly applied those rights, siding with forests, rivers, marine ecosystems and wild animals, and thwarting large-scale extractive activities that judges found would harm them irreversibly.

But like any right, nature’s rights are not absolute.

Ecuador, among the world’s most biologically diverse countries, also holds enormous reserves of oil, copper, gold and other minerals. Global markets want them. Multinational companies are itching to dig. And a cash-strapped government is eager to sell. The legal battles are intensifying.

The Ecuadorian Amazon near Limón Indanza. (Photo by Katie Surma)

Ecoforensic is helping to prove that the rights of nature can go toe to toe with those forces. The work now underway in Maikiuants may be its most consequential effort yet.

For Jhostin, Olger and the rest of Maikiuants’ 480 residents, the outcome is existential. Protecting their territory, Jhostin explained, is inseparable from protecting their own lives—they are nature protecting nature. If the forest is destroyed, so are the people who live within it.

Their people did not migrate to this region. They are from here. Every generation before them was born on this land, a continuity that Jhostin, 21, says his grandparents impressed upon him as a responsibility. His elders’ message was simple and unambiguous: This place must be defended.

Now, that duty rests with him.

That’s why the two paraecologists step carefully around the jaguar’s tracks and continue climbing toward a camera trap tucked deep inside their forest. The device has been silently recording for weeks and they are eager to see what it captured.

Thousands of Mining Concessions

Days earlier, a white pickup truck had wound down the Amazonian mountainside above Maikiuants, its wiper blades squeaking as they swept away the rain.

Inside, British ecologist Mika Peck tapped the brakes, peering through the windshield as dense fog closed in. His wife, Inde Kaur Hundal, squeezed the bar above her seat, bracing against a pothole the size of a bathtub. The co-founders of Ecoforensic were on their way to deliver good news: The organization will establish a permanent research station in Maikiuants.

It had been two years since they first sat down with residents there to talk about Ecoforensic. They had met in a wooden community center featuring a mural of a Shuar warrior spearing a colonist. For over an hour, the community had grilled the couple. They wanted to know what Ecoforensic would do with the data paraecologists produced—and whether Peck and Hundal were just more outsiders there to extract knowledge, then disappear with it.

Most of all, they wanted to know how Ecoforensic could help protect their territory.

The Ecuadorian government had been carving up Shuar territory into mining concessions since the 1990s, but the threat had been confined to maps and paperwork until 2019. That was when Solaris Resources acquired the Warintza Project. Since then, the company’s mineral exploration subsidiary has been a constant presence, scouring the region for copper and gold while attempting to win over a handful ofnearby Shuar communities that would be displaced or otherwise impacted, their ancestral mountains blown up.

Maikiuants was a wall of resistance. But communities facing extractive giants fight an almost impossible battle, with financial, political and legal power stacked against them. In Ecuador’s Amazon, that’s been the story of oil for decades. Now, mining is the new frontier.

Ecuador’s rights of nature laws offer communities a fresh and powerful legal foothold, but winning court cases requires rigorous ecological proof. That was the gap Ecoforensic was built to fill, Peck told Maikiuants’ residents during that first meeting.

Peck and Hundal were inspired by a landmark 2021 rights of nature ruling by Ecuador’s highest court, a case that defined how nature’s rights in Ecuador could be enforced. The decision centered on Los Cedros, a protected cloud forest.

The government granted a Canadian company a mining concession in 2016 covering more than half of the forest, despite its protected status. Local residents and scientists challenged the decision using decades of ecological research.

Some of that evidence came from Peck’s own work. Through a paraecologist project he launched in 2005, local researchers documented critically endangered brown-headed spider monkeys in the region. That effort formed part of a broader scientific record showing that more than 240 near-threatened, vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered species lived in Los Cedros—many absent from the company’s environmental impact studies used to justify its operations.

That body of evidence proved decisive. In siding with the forest, the court found that mining would threaten Los Cedros’ biological integrity and disrupt evolutionary processes unfolding over billions of years.

Peck, typically stoic, cried with joy when he learned that Los Cedros had prevailed in late 2021. Then he, Hundal and their Ecuadorian colleagues went to work.

Los Cedros had benefited from a dedicated scientific research station. But vast swaths of Ecuador are, scientifically speaking, a black box—and they are also threatened by mining.

Peck did the math: The Ecuadorian government had granted nearly 8,000 mining concessions as of 2021. Roughly 30 percent of those overlapped with protected areas, and 20 percent overlapped with Indigenous territories. The most impacted are the Shuar.

The need to proactively document Maikiuants’ ecosystems, Peck told the community in their 2023 meeting, was “urgent.”

“When the Threats Come”

On their first morning back in Maikiuants in late November, Peck and Hundal woke to the faint scent of woodsmoke in the cool air. Outside their tent, green peaks rose skyward, shrouded with forest and clouds, making the village feel held by the landscape itself.

Today, Peck’s work centers on the web of relationships that bind this place together—water and soil, fish and forest, and the people who depend on them. But early in his career, he was trained to see the world in fragments. He studied aquatic systems in isolation, looking at “safe” levels of contaminants in water, an approach that mirrors how conventional environmental law regulates pollution.

But the more time he spent measuring thresholds, the more uneasy he became with the premise itself. The idea that ecosystems could absorb endless damage as long as it stayed below a regulatory line struck him as a fundamental misunderstanding of how living systems work. Nature is all about relationships.

Peck, with close-cropped graying hair and a sinewy frame, tries to live that way too. Colleagues describe him as a rare mix of intellectual rigor and emotional intelligence—someone who listens as carefully as he measures. He instinctively looks to the communities embedded in the ecosystems he studies, a perspective that runs against conservation’s prevailing top-down approach. Real change, he believes, emerges from the grassroots.

Ecuador’s rights of nature laws took shape in much the same way, emerging from Indigenous communities who brought their legal traditions to the state and demanded recognition.

Now, a barefoot Peck, one pant leg slightly rolled up, stepped again to the front of the community center, where about 45 Shuar sat in a semi-circle. This time, the mood was light. Peck was no longer an outsider, but a trusted scientific ally.

The first order of business was brainstorming. What should the research station look like? Where should it be built? And what are residents concerned about?

They broke into small groups, scrawling ideas with magic markers across long sheets of paper. Ángel Nantip, 63, a muscular community elder with a direct and unflinching gaze, spoke first. Nantip remembers when mining engineers and the Ecuadorian military first arrived in the 1990s to prospect for metals. They told him nothing bad would happen to the territory or the spiritual beings that live within it, he said. Only later did he learn how destructive the planned open-pit mine would be—and that it would sever the relationships among communities.

Before anything else, Nantip told the group, the community needed a way to protect its environmental defenders.

“We need an alert system when the threats come,” he said, his angular face tightening.

Peck wasn’t surprised when others raised the same concern. Each week, an average of three environmental defenders—people who peacefully protect ecosystems—are killed around the world, a number widely believed to be an undercount given the remote and politically repressed places where many of them work. The sector most closely linked to that violence: mining. Maikiuants was not immune.

Since Solaris arrived, the largely tranquil region had grown tense, driven by what leaders describe as a “divide and conquer” tactic. Mining companies secure the backing of certain communities or leaders with financial incentives, often filling gaps left by the state—access to schools, health clinics or basic infrastructure. Maikiuants’ school, for instance, has one teacher for about 45 students spanning all grade levels. Two nearby Shuar communities and an umbrella Shuar organization entered into various cooperation agreements with Solaris, the contents of which are confidential.

“As independent and legally recognized communities, we have the right to seek a better quality of life for the people of our community, where our children can study, our elderly can work, and we can have access to widespread healthcare that we have never had before,” the pro-mining communities said in a court filing about their relationship with Solaris. A spokesperson for those communities did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

Though the project has advanced without the consent of all impacted Indigenous groups, Solaris has likewise framed it as community-driven.

“At Solaris Resources, we believe that sustainable mining is not just an economic endeavour; it is a journey that must include the insights and values of every stakeholder involved, especially our indigenous populations,” said company president and CEO Matthew Rowlinson in a written statement on Solaris’ website. “Their lived experiences and deep connection to the land are vital to shaping responsible mining practices.”

Solaris did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, nor did it respond to a list of questions about the project, including its impact on local communities.

On the ground, the divisions sown by the company’s presence are stark. It’s turned neighboring villages into adversaries, with pro- and anti-mining communities’ disputes with one another spilling into court battles, military deployments and threats.

In 2022, members of the two pro-mining communities filed a criminal complaint against three Maikiuants residents, including Nancy Antún, a leader of the Maikiuants women, alleging they planned an attack on a mining camp in the region. All three fiercely denied the allegation. Antún said people from pro-mining communities have themselves made multiple threats against her, including that they will burn her house down while her children are inside.

Another prominent Shuar leader said she received a death threat from a Solaris executive—an allegation the company denies. Amidst the turmoil, the government deployed military forces to protect the concession, including on Maikiuants’ territory, which Ecuador’s Constitution recognizes as self-governing. In response, community guards detained several soldiers and now face criminal charges.

Similar disputes elsewhere in Ecuador have escalated into violence. In recent years, Indigenous leaders who opposed extractive projects—including A’i Cofán leader Eduardo Mendúa and Shuar leader José Isidro Tendetza Antún, a relative of multiple Maikiuants residents—have been killed, cases that rights groups say underscore the risks faced by environmental defenders in the region.

Back in the community center, as the morning meeting ended, the path forward was clear—and fraught. In Maikiuants, building the evidence needed to defend the forest carries risks. There would be no separating the science from the struggle.

The Monkey’s Axe

In many ways, Ecoforensic shouldered the work the Ecuadorian government was meant to do: protect its people, uphold the constitution and ensure companies followed the law. Instead, successive administrations deployed the military to suppress protests over pollution, shielded foreign firms from liability for massive toxic dumping and weakened civil society’s ability to resist.

Under President Daniel Noboa, an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, those pressures intensified. In recent months, his administration froze the bank accounts of prominent Indigenous leaders and environmentalists—including one belonging to a lawyer for Maikiuants —while dismantling the environment ministry and imposing sweeping restrictions on nongovernmental organizations.

The crackdown has made coalitions essential. Communities, lawyers and scientists are banding together as they push back against Noboa’s drive to accelerate mining and oil extraction.

Now, as the afternoon meeting got underway, Peck invited an aquatic ecologist to the front of the room: Edwin Zárate, a lanky, soft-spoken biology professor at the University of Azuay in Cuenca. In Maikiuants, Zárate was quietly helping to build the scientific record of how the territory works as a living system—supporting paraecologists, establishing an agro-ecology program and setting up a meteorological station to track the climate in real time.

Peck moved through the room, handing out spiral-bound packets thick with color photographs—frogs no larger than a thumb, fish flecked with purple and green, each image paired with a short description.

“These are the species paraecologists have documented so far,” Peck said, as pages rustled open. “And they’re discovering more.”

“Every time we do new studies, we find new species,” Zárate added. Some, he said, were unknown to science—like the one paraecologists had recently found, a frog with skin as dark as night, speckled with iridescent blue dots, like a tiny galaxy.

Maikiuants, Zárate explained, sits in the rugged transition zone where the high Andes meets the tropical lowlands. It is a landscape defined by ancient upheaval: millions of years ago, colliding tectonic plates forced the Pacific seabed upwards. Each ridge and fold created its own microclimate, isolating species in narrow ecological niches. Here, extinction can come suddenly. Destroy a single slope, he said, and an entire evolutionary lineage can disappear with it.

That fragility has legal implications. Ecuador’s Constitution gives special protection to species with unique evolutionary paths—those that exist nowhere else on Earth, representing a “one-of-a-kind” branch on the tree of life.

“Some species are more important for rights of nature cases than others,” Peck said. “Those at risk of extinction are very important—and species that exist only here.”

He turned next to keystone species, animals whose influence ripples through entire ecosystems. Jaguars, for instance, regulate prey populations, shape plant growth and feed scavengers through their kills. When keystone species disappear, food webs unravel. “The future of other species depends on them,” Peck said.

“The condor is another,” Zárate added. With wingspans stretching up to 12 feet, Andean condors are among the largest flying birds in the world. They are critically endangered in Ecuador, with fewer than 150 remaining, largely due to poaching and agricultural expansion. As scavengers, they play a vital role in disease control. A rapidly emerging threat: habitat loss from mining.

The information in the packets, Peck and Zárate explained, could give the landscape a voice, grounding nature’s constitutional rights in ecological data.

Using a small projector powered by a cable threaded through a gap in the wall, Peck cast a diagram of Ecuador’s rights-of-nature framework onto a poster affixed backward to the wall as a makeshift screen. The government’s duty to prevent species extinction appeared on an infographic, circled in red, adjacent to other constitutional guarantees.

Peck pointed to the protections for biocultural heritage—the inseparable ties between communities and the plants and animals they live with. That was something science alone couldn’t document.

“We need your stories,” he told the room. “Which species matter most to you? Why?”

The room erupted into conversation. Lead paraecologist Claudio Ankuash Nantip, who goes by Pinchu, pointed to a photograph of a capuchin monkey.

“When people die, they don’t disappear,” he said. “They return as animals.”

Those who lived badly might come back as creatures of fear. Others return as protectors.

“Like the monkey,” he said.

Nearly a century ago, Pinchu said, a demon terrorized the community with an axe, killing people. It was the monkey who defeated it, burying the axe deep inside a mountain.

Elders once saw the species often. Now it is almost gone. Paraecologists have so far been unable to document it.

“Now,” Pinchu said, “the company wants to dig the axe up.”

Dreams of a Father

The next morning, Peck, Hundal and Zárate pulled on knee-high rubber boots and tried to keep pace with a group of Shuar heading into the forest to scout sites for the research station. The group was led by Jorge Antún, 60, a lifelong resident of Maikiuants and the father of paraecologist Jhostin Antún.

Compact and powerfully built from decades in the forest, Jorge moved easily along the trail. His long-sleeved beige shirt, visibly stained with mud and sweat in the warm, humid air, clung to his torso as he climbed.

Minutes in, he stepped off the path. Reaching into the vines, he plucked a leaf and held it up.

“This is good medicine for insects that burrow into your skin,” he said, explaining how the leaves are cooked into a paste and applied to the body.

Every few steps, the forest offered another lesson. Berries used as dish soap. Plants that calm sunburn. Ants whose bites burn like fire.

“The forest,” Jorge said, his eyes bright, “is our own storage unit for food and medicine.”

That is not how mining firms see it.

Companies’ environmental impact studies—required before permits are granted—are meant to assess a project’s social, cultural and ecological risks. In practice, lawyers say, Indigenous ecological knowledge is hardly ever included. Also absent are mentions of communities’ spiritual relationships to the land, like Maikiuants’ waterfalls, which residents view as sacred temples of spiritual renewal where their futures are revealed.

Companies’ science can also fall short. Ecoforensic’s review of Solaris Resources’ environmental impact assessment identified what it called “critical deficiencies,” including the omission of 91 at-risk or endangered species and scant attention to fish—an especially glaring oversight in an industry notorious for contaminating waterways. Mining has left a global legacy of heavy-metal pollution, acidic runoff and depleted aquifers.

The assessment also had mistakes, such as its failure to include the vulnerable-to-extinction giant anteater and bush dog. Paraecologists had already documented both species on Maikiuants’ lands.

More broadly, the document never analyzed whether the project could violate Ecuador’s rights-of-nature laws. That requires evaluating impacts on ecosystem functions (the work ecosystems do to keep themselves alive, like a tree converting sunlight into oxygen and wetlands filtering dirty water); on life cycles (think of a frog’s journey from egg to tadpole to adult); and on evolutionary processes (the long-term change of life over millions of years as it adapts for survival).

Now, as Peck followed Jorge down the trail toward his home, it was hard for the ecologist to imagine company contractors producing the kind of patient, place-based knowledge needed to truly understand an ecosystem. The thought lingered as he ducked through the low doorway of the Antún family’s traditional hut.

Inside, the oval structure was meticulously kept: a swept dirt floor, a long wooden table with benches, a smoldering fire at its center. Pots, pans and a rifle hung from the walls. On a bench, two relatives, one in a dark T-shirt with her hair pulled into a loose bun and the other in a sage-green blouse, shelled peanuts into a large container while another lifted a squirming child from a colorful activity seat and brought the baby to her breast.

Jorge’s wife, Ilda Chias Nakaim Antún, handed out glasses of fresh pineapple juice and steaming plates of yucca and plantains, alongside hard-boiled eggs served with chili-flecked salt. But for the salt, everything came from the land around them.

Over the meal, Jorge spoke quietly about ideas for sustainable businesses: fish farming, fruit cultivation, even a local variety of vanilla.

“We want alternatives to mining,” he said. “We can be an example for others.”

His family is firmly opposed to the mine. His daughter Marcia Antún, the young mother, worried about air and water contamination.

“The company could force us to leave,” she said.

As the conversation turned back to economic possibilities, they discussed precedents. A cocoaproject tied to paraecologists’ work on the brown-headed spider monkey helped farmers triple their incomes by pairing market access with forest protection. Other communities turned to ecotourism. In West Papua, Indonesia, where Peck helped develop paraecology initiatives, one of the first paraecologists went on to earn a Ph.D. and now leads the Binatang Research Center, Papua New Guinea’s leading conservation research institute.

In each case, the model produced something durable: livelihoods tied to ongoing scientific work, not extraction.

Reliable internet, now possible through satellite services, could open paths to e-commerce. The University of Azuay’s business school might help with planning. Jorge also imagined sharing the Shuar’s medicinal knowledge with the world, on their own terms.

“I have dreams for my family,” he said. “But I’m afraid I won’t be able to fulfill them because of the company.”

Time was not on their side. Solaris Resources’ final operational approval was expected within months.

Sustaining Life

Later that day, lead paraecologist Pinchu, who told the story of the monkey’s axe, set out on a narrow trail climbing out of Maikiuants, his 10-year-old son Kirup and Zárate following close behind. The forest tightened around them, the canopy draping over the path like a botanical cloak that choked out the midday sun, the air warm and faintly sweet with the scent of ripening fruit. They walked in silence until Pinchu signaled for everyone to stop.

A five-foot-long snake, no thicker than a golf ball, lay stretched across the path, its dark body blending into leaves like a shard of obsidian.

“It’s sleeping,” Pinchu whispered.

He picked up a fallen branch and shook it above the snake. Unhurried, the animal stirred, slid off the trail and vanished into the undergrowth.

Farther on, the forest began to open. Sunlight pierced the canopy in narrow shafts, and then, suddenly, the trail opened into a hidden alcove. A waterfall spilled over a jagged ledge of dark rock, unraveling in thin silver strands into a lagoon below. Thick vines draped overhead like green tresses.

Kirup grasped one of the vines and slid smoothly down to the lagoon, diving in. Zárate and Pinchu followed, wading toward a small island carpeted in soft green moss. There, Pinchu pulled out a container of tobacco leaves steeped in water. Among the Shuar, the mixture isn’t smoked but inhaled as a tea—a practice Pinchu said brings calm and sharpens his connection to the forest, helping him listen and feel more deeply.

Waterfalls hold deep spiritual significance for the Shuar. When life’s challenges arise, they follow protocols refined over generations, preparing carefully before visiting, communing with and leaving these places.

Only recently has Western science begun to affirm what many Indigenous communities have long understood. Time spent in nature has been shown to lower stress hormones, reduce inflammation, strengthen immune response and sharpen focus.

Yet the places where such scientific findings carry the greatest authority are often those most disconnected from the natural world—and whose consumption is driving the destruction of ecosystems like this one.

The copper beneath these mountains would likely be shipped to the United States and other wealthy countries, feeding the expansion of military hardware, energy transitions and infrastructure behind the artificial-intelligence boom, such as data centers.

A conventional data center can require up to 15,000 tons of copper. Facilities built to power AI systems can demand more than three times that amount, driving prices to record highs.

Those artificial worlds feel impossibly distant here, where now, a dripping wet Zárate emerged from the lagoon. This marked the 12th trip he’d made to Maikiuants, each one reinforcing for him the importance of scientists stepping out of walled offices and learning from other knowledge systems.

“We have to be more holistic,” he said.

The industrialized world, Pinchu added, has “a different way of viewing nature—only thinking about money.”

He dreams of a future in which his people can evolve and develop without losing the essence of who they are.

“We have ways of living that are also valuable,” he said. “Our ancestral knowledge is valuable, and it’s not about money—it’s about sustaining life.”

Love and Hope

With the fresh jaguar tracks documented, Jhostin Antún and Olger Kitiar quickened their pace toward the camera trap, anticipation building with every step. They were high in the mountains now, far above the waterfall where Pinchu had taken Zárate.

The camera was fastened to a tree washed in sunlight—a deliberate choice, since it ran on solar power. When Olger reached for it, pure delight sparked in his eyes.

“I love this,” he said. “I love seeing all the animals—sometimes there are things we haven’t seen in real life.”

He began transferring the data to his phone using Bluetooth, a 10-minute process that felt far longer. To pass the time, they scrolled through older recordings: pig-like peccaries rooting through the undergrowth, a spectacled bear lumbering past, turkeys, a species they call wild dogs, perdiz birds—and a jaguar, caught once, briefly, slipping through the frame.

This camera was one of two they maintained on their territory. The other required an eight-hour hike each way and an overnight stay in the forest.

“It’s still as exciting as it was in the beginning,” Olger said. “We’re learning more and more and discovering new species.”

Jhostin had been part of the team that discovered an unknown frog, soon to be named the Maikiuants frog.

His work, he said, was both fun and deeply serious. Gesturing with his hands, he described the rhythms of daily life—planting, harvesting, eating what the forest provides. Agriculture, for his community, is not a commercial activity but a way of sustaining the body and spirit.

“Ecoforensic gives me hope that this way of life can still be protected,” Jhostin said.

He wants children someday, and he wants them to live in the forest without fear, free of contamination. Without territory, he said, you cannot teach children who they are. You cannot teach them the forest.

He wants a future of buen vivir—living well, living in balance. His father, Jorge, taught him the forest by walking through it, by explaining what each plant and river meant. His grandfather did the same, offering guidance not through lectures but through nature itself. That, Jhostin said, is where wisdom comes from.

And that is what he is trying to protect.

Olger signaled that the data had finished loading. The footage showed a lone tinamou, a chicken-like bird.

Their task finished, the two paraecologists walked back to the village—crossing a gushing, pristine river on the way, its banks alive with hundreds of iridescent blue butterflies rising and falling in slow waves.

On a narrow bank of stones and sediment in the middle of the river, where the water divided and came together again farther down, Jorge Antún sat quietly, taking in the sweep of forest and sky. Jhostin spotted his father and smiled. He and Olger crouched at the river’s edge, splashing the cool water over their faces before cupping their hands to drink, the current threading around them as it always had.

The post In the Fight to Defend the Amazon, This Indigenous Community’s Secret Weapon Is Science appeared first on ICT.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/37099

The recent acceleration of Israel’s plans to illegally annex the occupied West Bank has coincided with a major surge in settler violence against Palestinians

Illegal Israeli settlers continued their violent attacks across the occupied West Bank on 23 March, after several destructive pogroms targeted Palestinian villages over the weekend.

Palestinian farmers and shepherds in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, came under attack by settlers on Monday.

“Muhammad Yahya Abu Aram, 35, and Elias Saeed al-Amour suffered from suffocation and fainting after colonists sprayed them with pepper spray following an attack on shepherds and farmers in the western part of Al-Rakeez village in Masafer Yatta,” anti-settlement activist Osama Makhameh told WAFA news agency.

Groups of settlers also uprooted scores of olive trees in Beita, south of Nablus, on Monday, while also raiding a school in Huwara – spray painting graffiti on the walls and replacing the Palestinian flag with an Israeli one.

Overnight, a health clinic in Burqa, east of Ramallah, was torched by settlers.

As the war on Iran rages and Tehran continues its large-scale retaliatory campaign against Israel, extremist settler violence against Palestinians – which was already at an all-time high – is now surging.

Israeli settlers rampaged through multiple Palestinian villages in the occupied West Bank overnight on 21 March, smashing cars, burning homes, and attacking and injuring Palestinians who were defending their homes.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/36260

Donald Warne, MD, MPH
Oglala Lakota

A proposed federal policy change could have profound health consequences — especially for tribal and rural communities. The proposal from the U.S. Department of Education would exclude public health and nursing from a new definition of “professional degree programs,” and could potentially affect eligibility for scholarships and financial aid.

As a physician, elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, public health leader, and Oglala Lakota community member from Pine Ridge, South Dakota, I am alarmed by what is at stake.

Public health is arguably one of the most impactful professions. The greatest gains in life expectancy over the past century are largely due to public health advances — clean water, vaccination, tobacco control, maternal and child health — not medical care alone. To redefine these degrees in a way that diminishes their professional standing ignores their historic and present-day impact.

Especially concerning is how the “professional” designation and its implications for federal loan eligibility, impacts students. If public health and nursing lose that status, middle- and lower-income students will lose access to the funding that makes a graduate degree possible.

As is so often the case, the burden of this change would not fall evenly. Rural communities already suffer from too few trained public health and nursing professionals. This workforce gap will increase if this policy passes, and result in greater medical costs for rural states and regions. When people have to use emergency rooms for care for illness and injury that could have been prevented by upstream public health measures, it drives greater economic, social, and human capital costs to society.

My Indigenous students often come to public health organically: they’ve seen programs  for diabetes, vaccination, mental health, and smoking reduction that improve quality of life for their families and relatives. The urgency became disastrously clear during the COVID-19 pandemic. They are motivated to pursue higher education because it will help them best serve their communities, which face some of the nation’s highest rates of chronic disease and preventable mortality.

Workforce demographics are not symbolic — they directly affect quality of care. When health professionals share cultural understanding and lived experience with those they serve, the improved trust and communication results in better outcomes. In Indian Country, where health disparities are rooted in generations of underinvestment and structural inequity, we cannot afford to weaken the pathway for developing Indigenous public health leaders.

This issue is personal for me. My mother was a public health nurse who dedicated her life to caring for our community. Watching her work showed me that public health is both a calling and a career. But a calling alone does not pay tuition. If mission-driven students cannot afford the education required to improve health outcomes, our workforce will become even more fragile and unsustainable.

I’ve dedicated over 10 years to developing the world’s first Indigenous-focused Doctor of Public Health program because we need trained public health leaders who are accountable first and foremost to their communities. Policies that reduce financial access move us in the wrong direction.

As policymakers consider this change, I would ask: What is the benefit? I have not seen a clear justification. If the goal is to save money, this approach is shortsighted — student loans get repaid, and investing in public health professionals yields measurable returns through stronger communities, reduced downstream health costs, and lives saved. What I do see is risk — to workforce development, to health equity, to affordable health care, and all of these risks would be borne disproportionately by Native and other rural communities.

At a time when tribal and rural health systems are already stretched thin, we should be strengthening — not restricting — the pathways into public health. I urge the Department of Education to revisit this proposal and I call on lawmakers to hold them accountable to that end. Our communities depend on it.

About the author:  Donald Warne, MD, MPH, is a professor in International Health and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health. He is an acclaimed physician, one of the world’s preeminent scholars in Indigenous health, health education, policy and equity, as well as a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe from Pine Ridge, South Dakota. He is also Johns Hopkins University’s provost fellow for Indigenous Health Policy. The author’s views are his own and not those of Johns Hopkins University.

This opinion-editorial essay does not reflect the views of ICT; voices in our opinion section represent a variety of reader points of view. If you would like to contribute an essay to ICT, submit your op-ed here.

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Amelia Schafer
ICT

PORCUPINE, S.D. — Laughter, hope and resilience echoed through the walls of Pine Ridge’s newest domestic shelter, operated by nonprofit Where All Women Are Honored, as it opened its doors on Feb. 23.

For roughly 17 years, since the closure of previous shelter Cangleska, domestic violence victims seeking shelter had to drive over 90 miles to Rapid City for shelter or over an hour to the neighboring Rosebud Reservation if its White Buffalo Calf Women’s society had space.

Across Indian Country, despite disproportionately high rates of domestic violence and violence against women, there are only 55 Indigenous-focused domestic violence shelters compared to 575 federally recognized tribes, according to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center. This lack of safe houses and shelters can directly tie into the high rate of missing and murdered Indigenous women nationwide, said Norma Rendon, Oglala Lakota and the founder of Where All Women are Honored.

Advocates for Where All Women Are Honored pose for a photo at the grand opening of the new shelter in Porcupine, South Dakota. (Photo by Amelia Schafer, ICT)

Leaving an abusive relationship isn’t easy, it takes a lot of courage to leave, and adding the need for a vehicle for travel to Rapid City or friend to drive there can add to the fear victims may experience when planning their escape, advocates said.

Over half of American Indian/Alaska Native women have experienced intimate partner violence in their lifetimes, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

From 2020-2023, at least three people have been killed as a result of domestic violence on the Pine Ridge Reservation, according to data provided to ICT from the South Dakota Department of Health’s Violent Death Reporting System. The Violent Death Reporting System’s statewide data collection started in 2020.

“It’s very sad because it’s not our way of life,” Rendon said.

Three years ago, roughly 2 miles north of the new shelter, 19-year-old pregnant woman Ashton Provost, Oglala Lakota, was shot and killed by her boyfriend McKenzie Big Crow, 20. Big Crow was found guilty of Involuntary Manslaughter, violating the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, and Possession of an Unregistered Firearm following a three-day jury trial in Rapid City, South Dakota in 2025.

During the trial, Provost’s family testified that she had been a victim of domestic violence prior to her death.

Homicide rates for American Indian and Alaska Native women are more than ten times the national average in some counties and overall, 2.8 times higher that of White women, according to a study by the National Congress of American Indians.

While opening the shelter, Rendon acknowledged the Indigenous people killed as a result of domestic violence, and her hope that this shelter can prevent future deaths.

“I think it plays a vital role,” Rendon said. “If we can get together to develop a policy and protocols, we can help keep our neighbors safe and our relatives safe.”

Rendon herself is a survivor of domestic violence. Rendon said she escaped an abusive relationship in 1977 in Minneapolis, after which she began meeting with other survivors in her community and working to create a support network and eventually her organization.

Where All Women Are Honored is the first full-service shelter on the reservation since 2009. The tribe does have its own victim services shelter, however, it’s not currently operational, representatives said.

The home, in a rural, remote portion of the Pine Ridge Reservation, is guarded by rolling plains, remoteness and security cameras. Rendon said organizers are working to employ a fulltime security guard as well.

Norma Rendon addresses attendees of the grand opening for the new shelter in Porcupine, South Dakota on February 23. (Photo by Amelia Schafer, ICT)

It’s equipped with a swimming pool, playground equipment and wooded area home to chokecherries and traditional medicines that residents can gather as needed. With five bedrooms, Rendon said the shelter can accommodate up to five families (one per room) and provides space for overnight emergency shelter if it’s over capacity.

“The numbers for domestic and sexual and violence that is happening on Pine Ridge can be staggering,” said Amanda Takes War Bonnett, Oglala Lakota and the Public Education Specialist at Native Women’s Society of the Great Plains. “Sexual violence especially is a silent epidemic here that has consequences that affect our family structures, schools and economy.”

And there isn’t accurate data on how present the issue is, Takes War Bonnett said. Not all cases of domestic violence are reported to law enforcement and often, accountability doesn’t happen.

“There are thousands and thousands of dollars that are being funneled through grants and organizations to Pine Ridge for prevention, awareness and advocacy but one key piece is having a place of safety to go when escaping violence or needing to refocus and heal,” Takes War Bonnett said. “In opening this shelter, Where All Women Are Honored is going to offer women and their children that key piece for safety and to heal.”

The violence directly ties back to the generational trauma experienced during the boarding school era and colonization as a whole, Rendon said.

“It’s [generational trauma] like a blister, that wound eventually has to open up and seep out,” Rendon said. “And that’s what it’s done now. All those wounds have seeped out and so our sexual assault is a learned behavior and it just increases more and more. And the same with domestic violence.”

Founded in 2018, Where All Women Are Honored has an office space in Rapid City, South Dakota that’s served as their homebase for several years. For a period of time, the organization had a makeshift shelter in the Sioux San Hospital, a former segregated tuberculosis clinic for Native Americans on the west side of Rapid City. After the hospital was torn down in 2022, Rendon said the group was unable to secure a new space for a shelter.

After that, Rendon said the group shifted gears to operate as an outreach organization, all while working towards the goal of making a shelter in Pine Ridge someday.

In addition to its new shelter and outreach programs in Rapid City, Where All Women are Honored also provides educational programs for youth to learn what a healthy relationship looks like and how to be a good partner.

Rendon said the group also works to help get victims on their feet again and able to find housing of their own and a job. From there, Where All Women are Honored will help victims access groceries, hygiene products, counseling and other essentials as they continue on their healing journey.

“It’s up to them what they want to do, where they want to live, because it’s not my program, it’s theirs,” Rendon said. “We help get them reestablished, and we continue to work with them. And we tell them that you’ve got this. Look what you’ve done so far. But we still stay in touch because they’re just getting established.”

All of this is in an effort to help prevent victims from going back to their abusers, Rendon said.

“There’s a study that says [victims return] seven to eight times,” Rendon said. “In my experience, it’s nine to ten times before they finally leave. Or if the abuser gets help and really wants to change and really wants their family.”

The shelter is open to any victim in need, regardless of gender or whether or not they’re Native, Rendon said.

“It’s, you know, Where All Women are Honored,” Rendon said. “Mitakuye Oyasin, we are all related. So a non-Native woman can come here and get help just like anybody else.”

Rendon said the outreach program in Rapid City will continue its operations and even is able to transport victims to the shelter in Pine Ridge if needed.

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Anna Kaminski
Kansas Reflector

Originally published in Kansas Reflector.

TOPEKA — Kansas acquired land nearly a century ago that is home to some of the state’s oldest buildings, but the state now faces an ownership challenge from the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, raising questions about how history is preserved and who is represented.

The Shawnee Indian Mission State Historical Site was a Methodist boarding and manual labor school for hundreds of Native American children from across the country from 1839 to 1862. The site today hosts three historic buildings — one of which is a museum accessible to the public — surrounded by kept grounds, wooden benches, herb and native plant gardens, and a winding creek.

The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation wants the land conveyed to itself so it can create a site for cultural revitalization, language preservation and ceremony, said Joseph Rupnick, chairman of the nation.

The buildings on roughly 12 acres of land represent a painful history, Rupnick said at a Thursday legislative hearing.

Such boarding schools were notorious for forcing Native American children to assimilate to settlers’ way of life. Physical punishment was often levied against children, including at the Shawnee mission school, and abuse was common at government-run schools.

“The land today carries the weight of those memories,” Rupnick said.

Rupnick, who said he attended two government boarding schools, said transferring the land to tribal ownership would provide justice and healing, and it would honor the relationship between the state and sovereign nations. He envisions a collaborative preservation effort, incorporating multiple tribes that include descendants of children who went to the school.

But the state has not appeared interested in Rupnick’s vision.

“We remain the best steward for the site,” said Patrick Zollner, the executive director of the Kansas Historical Society.

The state has planned preservation efforts of its own, and it led the charge to establish the buildings as a national historic landmark in 1968. The state, the city of Fairway and the Shawnee Indian Mission Foundation announced in 2022 a plan to conduct a ground penetrating radar study to locate potential gravesites. That plan hasn’t yet come to fruition.

The state acquired the land, which sits in present-day Fairway, in 1927 by eminent domain — the first and only time it has used such a method, Zollner said. At one point, the city of Fairway wanted to build a new city hall on the grounds, according to historical records.

The West building at the Shawnee Indian Mission State Historical Site on March 6, 2026, in Fairway, Kansas, is in need of repairs. It is one of the state’s oldest buildings. (Photo by Anna Kaminski)

The site’s east building is a museum, run by the city. It contains artifacts from the time the school was open, along with descriptions of life and living conditions there.

“Some Native Americans accepted mission education as necessary for their children to live in a white world,” one placard read. “Others resisted.”

The school was not a place for traditional Native American education. Teachers threatened and physically punished children, and life at the mission was meant “to change the way children acted and thought,” according to museum displays.

Mostly Shawnee and Delaware children went to the mission, but children from more than 20 other tribes also attended. Boys were trained to be farmers and girls were trained to be housewives, displays said.

“Children were put into American clothes. They were forbidden to speak their native languages,” a placard read. “If they arrived without an American name, they were given one. Individual achievement, not group cooperation, was praised.”

“Its purpose was explicit: to assimilate Native children, to suppress their languages, cultures and identities,” Rupnick said.

The site was home in 1855 and 1856 to offices for Kansas’ first territorial legislature, or the “Bogus Legislature,” a crucial precursor to “Bleeding Kansas,” cementing the land’s reputation as one of the state’s most prized historical sites.

Sen. Adam Thomas, an Olathe Republican, introduced Senate Bill 518 in late February on behalf of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation. It marked at least the third attempt in recent years to shift ownership from the state to a tribe.

In 2024 and 2025, the Shawnee Tribe, which is headquartered in Oklahoma, supported legislation in the House to transfer ownership to its tribal government, citing improper use of the facilities and a contracted architect’s report that showed buildings in distress.

On Thursday, Rupnick relied on the same report that indicated the site’s east building desperately needs repairs, which the state has vowed to address.

Sen. Tory Marie Blew, a Great Bend Republican, saw pictures of the building, and said at the Thursday hearing “it doesn’t look safe.”

Repairs are going to cost millions, she said, questioning whether the state could take on the cost.

Opponents, including Zollner and members of the Shawnee Indian Mission Foundation, reiterated a concern that the state’s relinquishment of ownership would lead to erasure.

Foundation leaders described the tribe’s interest in ownership as a “critical threat.”

Under the agreement proposed in SB 518, the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation would pay for the site’s conveyance and take over ownership in July 2028. The bill contains restrictive covenants to prohibit gaming on the land and conditions to prohibit surrounding land from being used to build a casino.

Sen. Larry Alley, a Winfield Republican, said he was concerned stable funding would cease if public ownership was eradicated.

He was not ready to advance the bill Thursday. Instead, he encouraged compromise. He proposed the two sides meet and discuss potential solutions that involve all historical perspectives.

Rupnick said he was willing to discuss the site’s future opponents, as long as any meeting is open to all federally recognized tribes that want to be involved.

“There has to be some sort of an agreement that makes sure that we are not erased, the sacrifices there were not erased. Part of that was built by our kids’ backs,” Rupnick said.

He added: “We want to make sure we have a very strong voice in whatever is adopted or pushed forward.”

Alley said he visited the site ahead of the hearing. He held up a thick packet of paper he said contained the names of children who attended the school. He said he saw names of Native children carved on the attic ceiling in one of the buildings.

“The names are preserved in record,” Alley said, “and I was very impressed with the records that are being kept for both (of) the historical events that have happened at the entire site.”

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Yereth Rosen
Alaska Beacon

Originally published on Alaska Beacon.

Ten conservation groups have sued the Trump administration over its decision to remove decades-old protections from 2.1 million acres of federal land in Interior Alaska.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, targets the Department of the Interior’s action to overturn public land orders dating back to the early 1970s that protect a portion of the corridor around the 800-mile trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

The department’s decision, finalized on Feb. 25, allows the state government to take over the land and open it to development. Potential uses for the land include construction of the controversial Ambler Access Project, a proposed 211-mile road through the Brooks Range foothills to an isolated mining district in northwest Alaska, and a long-proposed pipeline megaproject that would ship natural gas from the North Slope.

The lawsuit alleges that the Department of the Interior violated several laws with its action by failing to hold any public hearings in affected communities, failing to provide justification for removing long-established protections from “iconic areas of northern Alaska” and other lapses.

The laws cited in the suit are the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.

The 2.1-million-acre corridor and the areas around it are “profoundly important to Alaska’s wildlife and people,” the lawsuit says. It supports 25 different species of fish, including salmon, and holds habitat for migratory birds, moose, caribou and a variety of other species, making it important to subsistence food harvesters and recreational visitors, the lawsuit says.

In a statement, the plaintiffs cited mining development as a particular threat to natural resources and the people who depend on them.

“The Trump administration conjured up flimsy and vacuous reasons about ‘putting America first’ to try to justify transferring public lands out of federal management to benefit billionaires,” said Bridget Psarianos, senior staff attorney with Trustees for Alaska, the nonprofit environmental law firm representing the plaintiffs.

“The Trump administration’s destructive obsession with giving away our public lands for the benefit of mining companies has forced us to go to court,” Matt Jackson, Alaska senior manager for The Wilderness Society, said in the statement.

The administration’s action poses special threats because the corridor now stripped of protection lies between Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the plaintiffs said.

Revoking protections that had been in place for half a century is “a blatant effort to avoid national environmental laws to allow construction of a road that will enrich foreign mining companies and harm wild lands, Alaska Native communities, and America’s conservation legacy,” Jim Adams, senior Alaska director of National Parks Conservation Association, said in the statement. “Ending these public land orders also exposes the entire eastern side of Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve to state management practices along its border that devalue park wildlife and the needs of rural residents.”

The Department of the Interior declined to comment on the lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Promoting ‘Energy Dominance’ agenda

When he announced the action on Feb. 20, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said it will help achieve President Donald Trump’s goal of “unlocking opportunity for American Energy Dominance.”

“By opening these lands, we are empowering Alaska to chart its own course and develop energy, minerals and infrastructure that strengthen America’s security and prosperity,” Burgum said in a statement then.

At the time, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy and the state’s all-Republican congressional delegation hailed the decision as important to the state’s resource-extraction-based economy.

“Alaska has a right to produce, and Alaska has a right to benefit from our God-given resources,” U.S. Rep. Nick Begich. R-Alaska, said in a joint statement issued by the delegation.

But the Tanana Chief Conference, an organization of Interior Alaska tribes that is not part of the latest lawsuit, condemned the administration’s action.

The decision was made without necessary tribal consultation, and it could strip federal subsistence-harvesting protections from important food-gathering sites, TCC said in a statement.

“This decision opens the door to development that puts our lands, animals, waters, and subsistence resources at real risk,” TCC Chief and Chairman Brian Ridley said in the statement. “For our communities, these are not remote acres on a map. These are the places where our families hunt, fish, and gather to feed our people. Protecting these resources is critical to our food security, our culture, and our future.”

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(Photo: Julia Taubitz on Unsplash.)

ACT MP Todd Stephenson misuses the concept of free speech in his stance on the Nursing Code of Conduct, writes Professor Dominic O’Sullivan.

ACT MP Todd Stephenson’s campaign against “Treaty and equity obligations” in nursing and other professional codes of conduct is not really a defence of free speech.

In reality, he is effectively arguing that Māori people shouldn’t get the same quality of care as everyone else.

Let me explain.

The Nursing Council’s draft code is out for public consultation. It proposes banning nurses from using “offensive”, “inflammatory”, or “ill-informed” language in social media posts. The intention of the ban is to ensure that nurses don’t use disinformation to harm others, as in the anti-vaccination movement, for example.

Todd Stephenson is right to say that the Nursing Council needs to be cautious about doing this. The language in the draft is vague. The thresholds for what counts as breaching the code would need to be clarified to protect lawful free speech. This is important and the Council has work to do.

But Stephenson goes on to say: “The problem is made worse by the draft code’s expanded Treaty and equity obligations.”

The code’s references to Te Tiriti are, in fact, minimal. They require nurses to treat Māori patients equitably, meaning those patients get the same opportunity for positive outcomes as anyone else.

There is extensive evidence that not all nurses, and not all health professionals, give everyone the same quality of care. Rachael Walker and her colleagues provide just one example. They showed that racism contributed to inequitable outcomes for Māori people requiring kidney transplants. They write:

“Reported experiences of racism in Aotearoa New Zealand are consistently associated with negative measures of health, self-rated health, life satisfaction, and reduced access to high-quality healthcare with subsequent poor health outcomes.”

Unrestricted free speech would mean nurses are free to say that they don’t want to treat Māori patients equitably. They might say this explicitly. They might use offensive and inflammatory language to make their point. Either way, they’re saying they want to do harm to some patients.

For these nurses, Te Tiriti stands in their way, and that’s why it matters.

Te Tiriti supports the Nursing Council’s statutory responsibility for patient safety, which is essential for people to have trust and confidence in the health system.

The idea that it doesn’t matter how nurses speak to people, or what choices they make about whose care to prioritise and whose values to respect and offend, is to remove humanity from healthcare. It also explains how and why racism contributes to ill-health.

Professor Yin Paradies and his colleagues reviewed 293 studies, mostly from the US and other high-income countries, which found that racism is consistently associated with poorer health.

So this is not just a New Zealand problem. We should, of course, be free to argue that Te Tiriti doesn’t provide the best response to this problem. But it is quite another thing to argue that we don’t need a response at all because, in Stephenson’s words, it is equity objectives that are the problem.

To connect Te Tiriti to the right to quality care is far from “embedding race-based or ideology-driven” practices into healthcare. Racism, by contrast, is ideologically driven.

A nurse who pretends that colonialism isn’t real, and that racism doesn’t help explain relative Māori ill-health, can’t approach a Māori patient with the care and respect that positive outcomes require.

Te Tiriti doesn’t use the word race, and Māori people don’t routinely refer to themselves as a race, either. That is other people’s language. Whakapapa, culture, and colonial context are what matter, and they are vastly more complex.

Despite Stephenson’s framing, Te Tiriti hardly features in the draft code. It says that nurses should “Recognise Māori as tangata whenua and uphold their rights under Te Tiriti o Waitangi”. One could rightly say that this is vague, and expect problems of interpretation to follow. However, the code’s next sentence is explicit. It says nurses should “Take steps to reduce health inequities and address the ongoing impacts of colonisation”, one of which is racism and its impact on people’s opportunities for good health.

The Nursing Council is not a private club. It regulates a profession to assure the public that the people it registers can practice competently. To say that it should be selective when it carries out this task, applying it to some people but not others, is exactly the kind of outcome that Te Tiriti protects against.

In this respect, the Pharmacy Council’s Competence Standards are more explicit, requiring pharmacists to contribute to reducing health inequities and to understand how Te Tiriti might help achieve this.

In my forthcoming book, Te Tiriti, Equality and the Future of New Zealand Democracy, I argue that Te Tiriti helps because it’s concerned with how authority and responsibility are shared to support fundamental human equality.

Te Tiriti contributes to better health outcomes because it says that government (kāwanatanga) exists to serve the interests of all people, not just non-Māori. And the Nursing Council, while independent, is part of the machinery of government.

Kāwanatanga should work equally well for everyone because it belongs equally to everyone. This is how Article 3 constrains the powers of government when it says that Māori people may exercise citizenship with equal tikanga. Rangatiratanga sits alongside by guaranteeing Māori rights over their own affairs, including the protection and development of culture as part of good health.

Te Tiriti is important to healthcare because it respects Māori spaces of ownership and influence — including spaces of influence over how health systems work, and the objectives they should follow.

Importantly, Te Tiriti protects culture because without culture, we are devoid of humanity.

Culture matters, not as a source of privilege that takes away other people’s rights to good health outcomes, but as a matter of fundamental human equality. Te Tiriti helps frame what that equality means in practice.

For example, it gives Māori the same opportunity as other citizens to influence how health systems work — whether those are independent Māori health systems or state systems. It gives Māori the same opportunity as other citizens to influence the regulation of the nursing profession and to define what is required to fulfil the Nursing Council’s statutory obligation to “protect the health and safety of the public”, set “standards of clinical and professional competence”, assess “the fitness of practitioners to practise”, define “scopes of practice”, and manage “disciplinary processes”. Māori should also have the same opportunity as other citizens to decide whether these are the most suitable regulatory criteria.

Contributing to these tasks requires accepting that kāwanatanga doesn’t belong to Pākehā alone. Kāwanatanga is the shared authority of citizens. It belongs to everyone because it is everyone, and free speech is an equal right. Māori people are entitled to think and contribute to public decisions in ways that make cultural sense, for purposes that make cultural sense, and to respond to the colonial context.

When Australia considered free speech laws in 2014, the Attorney-General told parliament that people have “a right to be bigots“. But is this a threshold we can accept if we really believe nurses should care for everyone equally well? It’s hard to see how someone who wants to offend and inflame social tensions can have the skill and big heart that Stephenson said are the main qualities a nurse needs.

Yes, free speech means people are entitled to critique interpretations of Te Tiriti. People should be free to object to the state’s chosen path. Māori and other nurses have always done this to argue for better quality care.

But to say that it’s reasonable for nurses to argue against equitable care is to argue against the profession itself.

Dominic O’Sullivan (Te Rarawa and Ngāti Kahu) is a professor of political science at Charles Sturt University, adjunct professor at the Auckland University of Technology and Victoria University of Wellington. Dominic is the author of nine books, includingTe Tiriti, Equality and the Future of New Zealand Democracy, which Auckland University Press will publish in June 2026.

E-Tangata, 2026

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This article by Patricia Calvillo originally appeared in the March 13, 2026 edition of El Sol de San Luis.

Indigenous communities of the Tének and Nahuatl ethnicities in the Huasteca region of San Luis Potosí have raised their voices to express their rejection of any oil and gas exploration and extraction project that involves the use of hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, in the region. In a statement addressed to the President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, representatives of these communities warned of the environmental, social, and cultural risks that they assert would result from implementing such projects in their territory.

The document was issued in recent days from the municipality of Tancanhuitz de Santos, in the Huasteca Potosina region, and is addressed to both the federal government and national and international public opinion. In it, the communities express their concern over what they consider a change in the government’s commitment to prohibiting hydraulic fracturing, a technique used to extract hydrocarbons from complex geological formations.

The signatories of the statement point out that fracking consists of injecting fluids at high pressure to fracture the rock and release gas or oil trapped underground, although the possibility of using water recycling systems has been raised, they warn that the technique involves inherent risks such as the release of methane, the possible generation of induced seismicity and the production of toxic waste derived from the process.

According to the communities, the official discourse has presented the extraction of national gas as a strategy for energy sovereignty; however, they maintain that the development of unconventional deposits in Mexico depends largely on technology, machinery, and specialized services from foreign companies, mainly from the United States, which in their view would maintain a form of technological dependence.

Communities also argue that proceeding with such projects without their consent would violate the rights of Indigenous peoples recognized in the Mexican Constitution and international treaties. They cite Articles 1 and 2 of the Constitution, as well as Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization , which establishes the right of Indigenous peoples to be consulted in a prior, free, and informed manner about projects that may affect their territories.

One of the central points of the statement is the impact the technique would have on water, a fundamental resource for life and the economy of the region. The Huasteca region is known for its abundance of rivers, springs, and other bodies of water, but community representatives warn that the extraction processes require large volumes of fresh water to begin operations.

According to the document, the first stage of fracking would require millions of liters of water that would have to be extracted from local rivers or aquifers; in addition, they mention that recycling the water used in the process is not completely efficient and generates residual sludge that may contain hazardous chemicals.

The communities point out that the project would directly affect 3,268 localities where mostly Indigenous Tének and Nahuatl peoples live.

They question the feasibility of installing oil projects in areas far from populated areas, as has been suggested in some technical presentations. In the Tampico-Misantla Basin region, there is a high density of rural and Indigenous communities, meaning that virtually any project would be located near agricultural areas or water sources.

The potential impact of this phenomenon is not limited to the environmental sphere. Communities point out that the project would directly affect 3,268 localities inhabited primarily by indigenous Tének and Nahuatl peoples, populations that have historically faced poverty and marginalization.

They believe that the introduction of extractive projects could profoundly alter the social and economic fabric of the region, affecting traditional activities such as small-scale agriculture and access to natural resources on which numerous families depend.

Communities say economic development cannot be built on the dispossession of Indigenous territories or on environmental degradation.

Another point of concern is the risk to existing bodies of water in the area. According to the communities , there are at least 1,019 rivers, springs, aquifers, and other water bodies in the region that could be directly or indirectly affected by mining activity.

Furthermore, soil disturbance and potential contamination could trigger a process of environmental degradation that would affect local biodiversity. The Huasteca region is considered to be of great biological richness, with flora and fauna species that form part of the country’s natural heritage.

The communities also argue that proceeding with such projects without their consent would violate the rights of Indigenous peoples recognized in the Mexican Constitution and international treaties. They cite Articles 1 and 2 of the Constitution, as well as Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization , which establishes the right of Indigenous peoples to be consulted in a prior, free, and informed manner about projects that may affect their territories.

Given this situation, they have decided not to give their consent to the strategic plan that contemplates the exploitation of hydrocarbons in the area, nor to any initiative that may affect their territory, their culture, or their natural environment.

The statement also affirms that the Huasteca region should not be considered a sacrifice zone for energy projects and maintains that it is a living ecosystem and a territory with a millennia-old cultural history that requires protection, not exploitation.

Finally, they formally requested a direct meeting with President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo to establish a respectful and direct dialogue about the future of the region. They stated that economic development cannot be built on the dispossession of Indigenous territories or on environmental degradation.

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This article originally appeared in the March 10, 2026 edition of Proceso.

The Zapotec community of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag, an indigenous town nestled in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, which became a national and international point of reference when they denounced the sports company Adidas Mexico for cultural appropriation for presenting the “Huarache Oaxaca Slip-On” model, by designer Willy Chavarría, without their authorization, has maintained a process of recovery and protection of its cultural wealth since 2023.

The struggle of this community is not only focused on the controversy of a unique model or prototype of huarache called “Huarache Oaxaca Slip-On”, whose design bears similarities to the traditional huaraches of the community of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag, Oaxaca, but it goes back to the recovery of their official Zapotec name that they had lost in 1877.

Over the years, Villa Hidalgo Yalálag has also compiled a catalog of its niches, chapels, hermitages and churches that are part of the community, as confirmed by the municipal authorities of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag and their legal advisor Juan Maldonado Vargas.

In addition, they reported that the Municipal Register of Pets, cats and dogs, has been created to maintain control for public health purposes.

Maldonado Vargas states that the objective is for the community to have a catalog with its elements of Cultural, Natural, Material and Intangible Heritage, such as its dances, music, traditions, gastronomy, clothing, crafts and of course its natural spaces.

The sports company Adidas has joined these community projects for the protection of the cultural wealth of Yalálag and although no one has confirmed the version, it is known that in the main access of the community past its church of San Antonio de Padua, construction work is being carried out on what appears to be a sports complex.

It is worth remembering that on August 2, 2025, at the San Juan Museum of Art in Puerto Rico, during a musical concert, a unique model or prototype of huarache called “Huarache Oaxaca Slip-On” was presented, whose design bears similarities to the traditional huaraches of the community of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag, Oaxaca, made in a handcrafted way, by the different families that dedicate themselves to the production, from a Yalalateco, to entire families that clean, tan and prepare the hides.

The Huarache Oaxaca Slip-On: Adidas appropriated the cultural creations & traditions of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag.

The Huarache was created by designer Willy Chavarría in collaboration with the sports company Adidas México S. A de CV, who were in charge of launching and producing the Huarache according to the presentations released in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The municipal authority, residents, and huarache artisans of the community of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag were made aware of the situation, which necessitated holding various meetings involving the huarache artisans and community advisors, particularly Juan Maldonado Vargas, a descendant of Yalalteco who fulfills his role of assisting the community with various problems, in order to present a position regarding cultural appropriation or misappropriation.

The reactions from the Government of the State of Oaxaca were not long in coming. On August 4, 2025, Governor Salomón Jara Cruz and the head of the Oaxaca Ministry of Culture and Arts, Flavio Sosa Villavicencio, as well as the Oaxaca Congress, publicly declared their position regarding the cultural appropriation of the huarache by designer Willy Chavarría and Adidas, “Huarache Oaxaca Slip-On,” which bears a strong resemblance to the huaraches made in the community of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag using traditional and ancestral methods.

Similarly, the federal government, through the head of the Ministry of Culture, Claudia Curiel de Icaza, and the Undersecretary of Cultural Development, Marina Núñez Bespalova, as well as the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples, made statements regarding what they considered the possible cultural appropriation of the identity elements that fully identify the community of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag in the presence of the President of the Republic, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo.

Meanwhile, in the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca, in an act of strengthening identity, the community of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag, in a community assembly, after a detailed review of all its elements, issued a statement asking for “respect and recognition of indigenous cultural intellectual property and intangible cultural heritage, respect for the ancestral knowledge and wisdom of the community of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag.”

In the statement that was disseminated in the different media, they demanded a dialogue table for the recognition of the ancestral knowledge and wisdom of the production of the artisanal huarache of Yalálag with the production of the Adidas Huarache “Oaxaca Slip On”, to which they agreed.

Days later, representatives from Adidas Mexico and the community of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag issued a public apology, a document that was read in both Spanish and Yalálag Zapotec, in which the Adidas representatives humbly expressed their recognition of the ancestral knowledge and wisdom of the Yalálag community.

The public apology highlighted: “At Adidas, we deeply value the cultural richness of the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico, with the aim of engaging in direct dialogue on the points raised in your letter and exploring, together with your Authority, the steps that will allow us to move towards reparation for the damage done to the Zapotec Community of Yalálag.”

“Today, in front of the Yalalteca community, on behalf of Adidas Mexico, we offer our most sincere recognition and respect for the cultural richness of the indigenous communities of Mexico, with the profound symbolic and traditional meaning of their valuable artisanal legacy, present in the cultural representations and traditional techniques that we witness here.”

They acknowledged that the “Oaxaca Slip-On” model was conceived taking inspiration from a design originating in the State of Oaxaca, typical of the tradition of the town of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag.

The Mexican state, through its federal, state, and municipal levels of government, has been in violation of international norms and conventions since 1972, and in 2003, by failing to generate the records, inventories, registers, or catalogs for the protection of the Cultural Heritage of Indigenous Peoples and Communities, and above all, their protection. As a result, businessmen or companies, due to the economic power they represent, appropriate the ancestral elements that identify the Indigenous communities.

This is how, up to this point, it is known unofficially that the damage repair agreement continues to strengthen between the Villa Hidalgo Yalálag Community and Adidas Mexico.

The legal advisor of the Yalálag community confirmed that, for the past three years, they have been working on a process of recovering and protecting their cultural heritage.

He emphasized that on March 18, 2023, by decree of the Oaxaca Congress, Yalálag recovered its official name. In 1877, it had been known as Villa Hidalgo, as Decree 35 had discontinued the use of the town name San Juan Bautista Yalálag. Officially, its name remained Villa Hidalgo, even though the community’s identity is Yalálag. Therefore, the municipal authority and the citizens’ assembly, through a name recovery process, requested the legislative branch to officially recognize Villa Hidalgo Yalálag, as this is the name that reflects the identity of the indigenous community.

• 

  News Briefs

  Zapotec Community in Oaxaca Strengthens Defense of its Cultural Heritage After Dispute with Adidas Over Appropriation

  March 14, 2026March 14, 2026

  Villa Hidalgo Yalálag is working not only to protect its cultural designs, but also recovering the official Zapotec name they had lost in 1877.

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  La Via Campesina Issues Global Call Against WTO & Free Trade Agreements

  March 14, 2026

  The relentless promotion of Free Trade Agreements has led to widespread privatization and deregulation, primarily benefiting corporations at the expense of the working class everywhere.

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  Analysis

  Organized Crime & Capitalism

  March 14, 2026March 14, 2026

  Combating transnational organized crime and criminal corporations would mean combating an essential part of the capitalist system, since organized crime is a fundamental mechanism for obtaining profits & accumulating power.

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RAMALLAH — Traffic was at a standstill outside of Nablus in the occupied West Bank on Saturday, as sunset neared and hungry residents were forced to trickle through an Israeli checkpoint to get home and break their fasts.

The Israeli military had sealed the city off from the outside world. Just over a week after the U.S. and Israel launched their joint war on Iran, Israeli settlers have ramped up their violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and Israeli forces have imposed a near-total closure of municipal centers, shutting gates and restricting crossings without warning or perceptible logic.

“It’s so unpredictable,” said Shadya Saif, 40, a Palestinian mother of three who teaches at a private school in Ramallah. The Intercept rode alongside Saif as she traveled back to Ramallah from Nablus on Saturday, when the Israeli military closed all but one checkpoint out of the city, putting it under an effective blockade and forcing all traffic through a checkpoint called Shavei Shomron.

The unannounced closures left Palestinians scrambling. Many were visiting Ramallah to see family members during Ramadan, and they hoped to reach their destinations in time for iftar, the fast-breaking meal enjoyed at sunset. Others needed to enter the city to receive medical treatment they cannot obtain elsewhere. Saif had risked the journey to see her dying uncle and, knowing the risks of crossing, she’d left her chronically ill daughter in Nablus with him.

“I was worried I would get stuck here,” Saif told The Intercept inside a yellow “service” taxi, the only form of public transportation widely available in the West Bank. Even though nearly all of her family lives in Nablus, she has tried to avoid visiting since October 7, 2023, after which the Israeli military clamped its ubiquitous yellow gates over entry points throughout the West Bank.

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Israeli soldiers stopped each car to inspect Palestinians’ IDs. At their limit, drivers began pulling their cars onto roundabouts and driving the wrong way down the street, but the final say lay with Israeli forces, who allowed only one car at a time to approach the military installation. Some abandoned their cars to walk through checkpoints and reach their families on foot. An elderly Palestinian woman prayed aloud, saying that all she wanted was to make it safely to her family in Ein Yabrud, a village on the outskirts of Ramallah.

“I was worried I would get stuck here.”

As we sat waiting at the checkpoint, Saif’s face was filled with worry. She opened her phone to show pictures of her daughter, dressed in pink and smiling at the camera.

Saif’s daughter has muscular dystrophy and requires specialized treatment and 24-hour supervision. Saif took a big risk visiting Nablus to see her dying uncle in the hospital, she said, because if she were to get stuck there due to a checkpoint closure — which did happen for three days last week — her daughter’s health would be put in jeopardy.

“I left her with my uncle just for the day, but I have to be there to care for her,” Saif said. “I know her medications and how to ensure she doesn’t get sick.”

Saif made it back to Ramallah, but she said it would not have been possible a few days earlier.

A roadblock Israeli settlers installed on the main road between Sebastia, a Palestinian village south of Nablus, and Route 60, which connects the city to the central and southern West Bank, seen on March 7, 2026. Photo: Theia Chatelle

The day after the U.S. and Israel started attacks on Iran, the prevailing sentiment in Ramallah was anxiety. People wondered if there would be road closures and food and fuel shortages like during last year’s Twelve Day War, and whether the Israeli government would impose what Palestinians describe as collective punishment in the West Bank, even though they were not involved in the conflict.

“It has nothing to do with anything Palestinians in the West Bank are doing or not doing,” said Aviv Tatarsky, who leads an Israeli protective presence collective that organizes watches to deter settlers from invading Deir Istiya, a village outside Ramallah. “And still, there’s an Israeli decision, and life comes to a stop.”

“There is no money, no work. We are in debt, and I have four mouths to feed. What am I to do?”

Ramallah, which has long functioned as a relatively insulated bubble from the effects of Israel’s occupation, is also dealing with a struggling economy. Paired with the war, the economic downturn has muted Ramadan celebrations, according to residents who spoke with The Intercept.

“We are suffering,” said Faisal Taha, who drives taxis in Ramallah. “There is no money, no work. We are in debt, and I have four mouths to feed. What am I to do? I have been driving my taxi all day, and I have forty shekels.”

Unemployment in the West Bank is hovering around 40 percent — up from 13 percent two years ago — and GDP has contracted by 13 percent since October 7.

Dror Etkes, founder of Kerem Navot, an Israeli NGO that monitors settlement construction in the West Bank, said he was not surprised by the restrictions imposed by Israel.

“They always use instances of violence to perpetuate more violence,” Etkes said. “This is what we have seen for years, since October 7, and now it is worse than ever.”

As during the Twelve Day War last year — after which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a “historic victory” that would “stand for generations” against the Islamic Republic of Iran — there are already the beginnings of flour and fuel shortages in the West Bank as the Israeli Civil Administration, which runs the military occupation of the territory, imposes import restrictions.

“This is not something new. It happened in June during the Twelve Day War, and it’s kicking off again,” Tatarsky said. “But what’s different this time is that Israel is also blocking roads — not only disconnecting Palestinians from Area C, but also blocking roads between Palestinian villages.”

A week later, on March 7, there was still only one checkpoint out of Ramallah open, forcing all traffic through a bottleneck that passes by the Beit El settlement and through the Jalazone refugee camp. This is the only route for Palestinians living in Ramallah to access Route 60, the main thoroughfare connecting Palestinian communities in the south to those in the north.

“They always use instances of violence to perpetuate more violence.”

Driving up the highway and passing village after village that had been closed off by the Israeli military, Etkes said it was clear the war with Iran was being used as a pretext for “a system that is meant to reduce as much as possible the area where Palestinians can move freely,” part of the settlement movements’ goal to alter the facts on the ground regarding de facto annexation.

Nabih Odeh, 63, who has been driving public transit taxis in the West Bank for more than 30 years, has watched what he describes as the slow annexation of the West Bank unfold. As he drove up Route 60, he pointed to village after village sealed off by the Israeli military.

“There, that’s Aqraba, closed,” Odeh said. “If you want to get in or out, you must walk. That’s Turmus Ayya — very wealthy — still closed.”

Eighty percent of Turmus Ayya’s residents have U.S. citizenship, yet the town was closed off, its yellow gate locked. Service taxis pulled up to drop residents off, leaving them to walk to the town center or be picked up by relatives. Its status as a wealthy American Palestinian village has no bearing on Israel’s decision.

At the same time, Israeli settlers have used the war with Iran as an opportunity to launch further attacks on Palestinian communities, largely in Area C — the roughly 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli civil and military control — working in tandem with movement restrictions in Areas A and B, the Palestinian-administered population centers and villages created under the 1995 Oslo Accords.

Messages circulating in settler WhatsApp groups have called for violence against Palestinians to match Israeli airstrikes in Iran. One graphic depicting a roaring lion, to match the Israel Defense Forces’ name for the military operation against Iran, reads: “It is time to launch a preemptive attack in all arenas, until the enemy is expelled from the country and subdued outside it. This time we win, once and for all.”

“I mean, generally, when you’re speaking about Israeli society, it is torn apart in so many ways,” said Orly Noy, editor at Local Call and chair of B’Tselem’s executive board. “But there’s one thing that always unifies,  and I’m speaking about the Jewish section of society, of course, and this is war.”

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Netanyahu is willing to do anything to stay in power, Noy added, and during his time in office, he has worked effectively to paint the Iranian regime as an existential threat to Israel, working in tandem with the U.S. “He has taken advantage of it very well,” Noy said.

During Operation Rising Lion, this rally-around-the-flag effect has not only served Netanyahu’s interests but also those of settlers living in the West Bank.

WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, estimates that settler attacks have increased 25 percent since the start of the conflict. Israeli settlers have killed six Palestinians since the start of the war with Iran, including three in one incident in the West Bank community of Khirbet Abu Falah, east of Ramallah.

Israeli settlers shot Fare’ Hamayel and Thaer Hamayel, and a third man, Mohammad Murra, died of suffocation from tear gas deployed by Israeli forces.

As the world’s attention remains on Iran, solidarity activists said that Israeli settlers appear to feel they have additional impunity to conduct attacks.

“They will be treated as heroes by their supporters, by their society,” Etkes said. “And the government will do nothing about it.”

The post With World’s Eyes on Iran, Israel Locks Down the West Bank appeared first on The Intercept.

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A first-of-its-kind project by West Moberly First Nations looks deep underground for clean energy solutions

West Moberly First Nations has limited access to fresh foods, due to long supply chains, cold winters and environmental contamination that has made many traditional foods unsafe to eat.

The First Nation believes a greenhouse could boost food security and food sovereignty, and plans to tap a geothermal reservoir — which holds scalding hot water buried deep underground — to heat it.

Their geothermal project could be the first of its kind in the province, which boasts major geothermal opportunities but has no commercial-scale projects in operation.

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This story was originally published by Montana Free Press.

Nora Mabie
Montana Free Press

Inside the University of Montana’s Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, Donovan Taylor stretched his arms across a wooden conference table holding his phone, which was recording, up to two gray speakers. He furrowed his brow and closed his eyes as he listened to a 1968 recording of a Cheyenne love song.

Next to him, Theresa Small, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council, leaned closer to the speakers and cupped a hand to her right ear, trying to hear the drums and singers through the lo-fi audio.

After months of consultation with the school, a group of about a dozen Northern Cheyenne elders and cultural leaders traveled from the southeastern Montana reservation to the University of Montana in Missoula last week to review and reclaim ownership of dozens of culturally significant items, recordings and documents in the university’s collections. When such belongings are returned to tribal ownership, Indigenous leaders say, community members regain connection to their identity, ancestors and history.

“They don’t sing like that now,” Taylor, a traditional singer himself, told the group after the song ended. “We’re losing our culture.”

UM has digitized dozens of audio recordings of Cheyenne songs and interviews with elders, which were originally recorded on cassettes or wax cylinders by anthropologists or professors. But the digitizations are imperfect. Some of the recordings sound slow and garbled, like the speakers are underwater. Others make the voices of Northern Cheyenne elders sound high-pitched, like chipmunks.

Taylor asked Wallace Bearchum, chair of the Northern Cheyenne Cultural Commission, to play the Cheyenne love song again. He closed his eyes again as drums filled the room.

“I’m going to try to learn it,” he said. “Bring it back.”

Universities, museums and other institutions nationwide house Native American ancestral remains, cultural artifacts and belongings. Sometimes, the items have been donated. Other times, an employee may have purchased or unethically obtained tribal belongings for research purposes. It’s often unknown how the possessions were originally taken from tribes, whether they were stolen from graves or traded.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, enacted in 1990 and commonly known as NAGPRA, establishes processes by which tribes can request the return of belongings and ancestral remains from institutions that house them. But in the more than 30 years since it passed, many institutions remain noncompliant with the law. ProPublica reported in 2023 that about half of the institutionally held remains of 210,000 Native Americans had not been returned.

In 2024, new NAGPRA provisions strengthened tribal authority in repatriation processes, requiring institutions that receive federal funding to get tribal consent before displaying or providing public access to tribes’ cultural belongings. New regulations also require institutions to consult with tribes on all tribal belongings within a five-year deadline.

Complying with NAGPRA is rarely straightforward. Institutions, which may hold thousands of items, must identify which tribe an item belongs to and contact appropriate people within the tribe to facilitate its return. UM in 2023 hired Courtney Little Axe, the school’s first full-time NAGPRA repatriation coordinator and collections manager, and during the 2025 legislative session lawmakers passed a state budget that included a $367,665 appropriation to UM to support repatriation efforts. That money, Little Axe said, was used to establish a student NAGPRA team at UM, with one student repatriation liaison assigned to each tribe in the state.

But most educational and historical institutions in Montana don’t have a full-time role dedicated to repatriation. Montana State University works in conjunction with the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman on repatriation work. A spokesperson for MSU said the university’s sociology and anthropology departments reached out to 14 tribes in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming in 1996, but no claims were made on items in the school’s possession. The Museum of the Rockies, the spokesperson said, has contacted at least 21 tribes since the 1990s and repatriated several items.

As of Jan. 6, 2025, UM reported having made 83% of more than 200 funerary objects in its holdings available for return to tribes, according to ProPublica’s repatriation database. MSU reported having made none of the 49 funerary objects in its possession available for return, according to the same data.

Bearchum said that since the new NAGPRA provisions were enacted, he’s heard from institutions across the country that possess, and want to return, Northern Cheyenne belongings. The problem, he said, is that the tribe doesn’t have appropriate facilities to receive and store them.

“The issues are money and manpower,” he said, adding that building a temperature-controlled repository with fireproof displays and security could cost millions of dollars.

Inside the social sciences building on UM’s campus Wednesday afternoon, Northern Cheyenne Council member Theresa Small held her hand over a beaded pipe bag displayed on a table alongside other items in UM’s collection.

“Hmm,” she said. “This has come a long way to be here.”

Tribal elders and cultural leaders walked around the table, examining the items — a beaded pouch, moccasins, dolls and pipe bags. The designs, colors and materials, they said, tell a story. A bag had been repurposed from a pair of beaded leggings. The soles on a pair of moccasins were made from a parfleche bag.

“They used everything they could to survive,” Little Axe said.

Bearchum pointed to a pair of green, blue and gold beaded moccasins. The symbols — representing a tipi, thunderbirds, and the sun — tell stories of how Northern Cheyenne people hunted and held ceremonies, he said.

“It’s beautiful,” he said, looking at the shoes. “Our people are smart.”

Annie Bement, an elder, pointed to a doll with solid blue leggings.

“I’m not sure that one’s ours,” she said. Others in the group nodded.

Mikaylia Yellowrobe, a UM repatriation liaison for the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, and Northern Cheyenne herself, stuck a coral-colored Post-it note to the table near the doll.

“Needs more research,” she scribbled.

Bement, 78, never expected to see items like this in her lifetime. She grew up speaking the Cheyenne language at home, but speaking Cheyenne at school came at a cost. She attended St. Labre Indian School, a Catholic boarding school on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, in the 1950s and 1960s. It was one of hundreds of schools nationwide that operated with the explicit mission of assimilation.

“We were slapped for speaking (Cheyenne),” Bement said. “We had to put our hands on a table and were hit with a ruler to be punished.”

Assimilation efforts like those implemented in the boarding school era have contributed to the widespread loss of cultural knowledge and language. Three of the 12 Indigenous languages historically spoken in Montana are considered critically endangered, meaning their youngest speakers are elders who speak the language infrequently, according to a 2020 Montana Budget and Policy Center report. Bement is one of just 300 fluent Cheyenne speakers alive today.

“Our values, our stories, our history is contained in the language,” Bearchum said. “It relates to our identity.”

Small said hearing elders speak Cheyenne on old recordings “is a treat.” She hopes they’ll be used to educate young people on the reservation. Connecting with history that was once taken from tribal members, she said, is restorative.

“Without the ability to see where we came from, we’d be wandering,” Small said. “This is who we are. This is our identity.”

Standing before a crowd of Northern Cheyenne community members and university representatives on Wednesday evening, Northern Cheyenne Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Teanna Limpy and Little Axe signed several agreements to establish tribal stewardship and formally transfer ownership of the belongings in UM’s possession to the tribe.

While it has chosen to continue to house the belongings at the university, “The tribe will now have full authority in what we do, how we handle items, how we store them, how we move them between buildings, and if we educate people using specific belongings or not,” Little Axe said at the signing event. “This gives the tribe authority over their own story.”

Limpy told the crowd she hopes the tribe will one day have a museum to house the belongings.

“This is just the first step,” she said, as the crowd cheered.

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Indigenous advocates who have been fighting for their rights to be acknowledged in global regulations for seabed mining are bracing for the outcome of this week’s gathering of the International Seabed Authority in Jamaica, where representatives from three dozen countries are expected to discuss finalizing mining rules by the end of this year.

The International Seabed Authority has spent a decade trying to formulate regulations to govern where, how, and to what extent corporations can extract minerals from the seabed in international waters, with input from governments, industry players, Indigenous peoples, and environmental advocates. Minerals on the seafloor formed over millions of years, and they include substances like cobalt and manganese that are used to make batteries for electric vehicles, defense technologies in submarines, and fighter aircraft. Leticia Carvalho, the secretary-general of the ISA, said last week that she wants to finalize global rules governing seabed mining by the end of this year, a reversal of her previous position that the regulations could take several years to finalize, in part a reaction to President Donald Trump’s aggressive push to mine both U.S. and international waters outside the international regulatory framework.

Advocates from the Pacific have argued that any mining permits should consider not only the potential effects on deep-sea ecology and historic sites like shipwrecks, but also take into account Indigenous peoples and their cultural connections to the ocean. Frank Murphy from French Polynesia said he can’t imagine the regulations will be finalized this year, given how much left there is to discuss and agree upon, including specific environmental protections.

Murphy is proud of the progress made incorporating Indigenous rights into the draft regulations, but cautioned that nothing is guaranteed. “This is not voted on, and we have no vote,” he said of the draft. “So the first time we did this, everything that we added was taken out. This may be the case again.”

Carvalho’s announcement last week elicited both skepticism from the CEO of The Metals Company, one of the companies working with the Trump administration to mine international waters, and criticism from environmental advocates, who argue there should be a pause on mining until more is known about deep-sea ecosystems.

“The adoption of the code will not bring unilateral actors back to the ISA, and the ISA should not be engaging in a futile race with these rogue players,” said Emma Wilson, policy lead at the advocacy group Deep Sea Conservation Coalition that has pushed for a moratorium. “It really needs to rise above and assert its powers as the authority over human activities in the seabed.” She said there are more than 30 outstanding disagreements within the draft mining code, including how Indigenous rights will be incorporated.

Over the past year, Trump has proposed and approved numerous policies to galvanize the commercial mining industry. The administration has streamlined the application process so that instead of exploring the deep-sea floor first, companies can more quickly sell and profit from mining. Two weeks ago, Trump proposed removing several environmental requirements for one of the regulatory agencies overseeing the industry. Trump has pursued mining in both U.S. and international waters despite opposition in American Samoa and the Mariana Islands.

The Trump administration has entered into an agreement with the Cook Islands to mine its national waters, something that gives advocate Imogen Ingram pause. “Pollution of the water column is a major concern for Indigenous peoples,” said Ingram, who is Indigenous to the Cook Islands. “We have learned from scientific articles that the plume generated by deep seabed mining will smother the tiny plankton that feed the smaller forms of marine life, which in turn provide food for larger marine animals, and so on through the food chain, reducing the availability of pelagic fish like tuna upon which we depend so greatly.”

She’s also one of many advocates who worry that speeding up the ISA regulations will sacrifice environmental protections. Environmental groups like Greenpeace are pushing not only for a moratorium on mining but also for more accountability. In the wake of Trump’s aggressive push to mine international waters, the ISA Council voted last summer to investigate whether any companies that currently hold exploration contracts with the ISA to conduct test mining in international waters are violating their ISA contracts through their participation in the U.S. mining permitting process.

Louisa Casson, who has been tracking the ISA proceedings with Greenpeace, said that the vote to investigate the companies was the most united she had ever seen country representatives at the ISA.

“Last year, governments at the ISA were united in their condemnation and their shock and disapproval of this single private company walking out of the multilateral process,” she said, referring to The Metals Company, which was the first company to seek U.S. approval to circumvent the international process.

The ISA report could be released as soon as this week, but Greenpeace issued its own analysis ahead of the ISA gathering contending that two subsidiaries of The Metals Company, Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. and Tonga Offshore Mining Ltd. are violating international law and calling on the ISA to impose repercussions. The Metals Company did not respond to a request for comment.

Specifically, Casson hopes the ISA will rescind the companies’ exploration contracts, which are up for renewal soon. “The decision to do unilateral mining is such a serious breach of international law that I think it’s really important that governments consider what are the strongest actions they can take to act as a deterrent,” she said.

Murphy, noting that Indigenous peoples without U.N. membership have no vote on final regulations, said he remains hopeful their input will survive into the final draft. “It is amazing that we have gotten this far though,” he said. “So fingers crossed that we may succeed.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous rights, the environment, and international law: What’s at stake at this week’s seabed mining talks on Mar 9, 2026.

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Angela Yu Zhang
Special to ICT

When Emma Albert finally felt safe enough to assess the damage outside her home in Kipnuk, Alaska, the smell of the destruction hit her immediately: sewage, oil, trash, dead pets, and a beached beluga whale. “The smell was so strong, it hurt my nose,” she said.

Emma and her family were living in Kipnuk, Alaska, when Typhoon Halong struck in October. The storm — the worst in a series of Arctic typhoons, according to a media briefing by the Association of Village Council Presidents — tore through the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, a region in western Alaska that is the size of Oregon.

More than 1,600 people were evacuated to places like Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Bethel, making this the largest mass evacuation in Alaskan history. The Alberts were some of those evacuees now living in Anchorage.

Now that most residents have been evacuated and are in the process of resettling, the attention is turning to cleanup of the physical damage left behind.

Kipnuk Council Leader Doreen Carter described her mother’s experience during the storm. “Waking up to the storm the morning after, everything was unrecognizable,” she said. “Everything was destroyed.”

The Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta has been home for thousands of years to Kipnuk and more than 50 other rural communities of mostly Alaskan Native residents. Structures in these villages are connected by boardwalks, with no roads in or out of the community.

Their remote location and harsh tundra environment preclude infrastructure like a sewage system, a municipal trash transfer system, or below-ground heating oil tanks as seen in the rest of Alaska. Typhoon Halong damaged most of these communities, ripping houses off foundations and floating them out to sea, sometimes with people still in them.

Homes and boardwalks were dislodged in Kipnuk, Alaska, after Typhoon Halong struck in October 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Alaska Chadux̂ Network

Approximately 90 percent of Kipnuk was devastated by Typhoon Halong, displacing people from not only their homes but their ancestral lands. Rebuilding this hard-hit village will take a long time. The contamination of oil, sewage, trash, debris must be cleaned up before people can safely return.

The unique landscape of rural Alaska is particularly at risk for widespread contamination after flooding.

Lynn Zender, executive director of the Zender Environmental Health and Research Group, calls these rural communities “land islanded.” They are only accessible by plane, and boats in the summer when the water isn’t frozen over. This makes it difficult to have resources for a sewage treatment plant or landfill system.

Instead, most residents carry their waste out to open wastewater lagoons, and their trash out to unfilled holes in the tundra. Many of these makeshift landfills are within a mile of town or a body of drinkable water, according to Zender.

In addition, each house is heated with its own oil tank, and each community may have a larger community tank. In most homes, these tanks can be buried below ground. But the permafrost Kipnuk is built on is too hard to dig into, so the tanks sit at ground level, said Buddy Custard, chief executive officer of the Alaska Chadux Network, an organization that is helping to clean up the oil pollution.

The exposed sewage, landfills, and oil tanks were especially vulnerable to the flooding that severed tanks from homes and strewed the contents of dump sites all over the tundra.

A crew member from Alaska Chadux̂ Network inspecting an oil drum for damage and in preparation for safe storage in Kipnuk, Alaska, on October 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Alaska Chadux̂ Network

The flooding swept through houses, which also washed out things like batteries and household chemicals. All of these contaminants are harmful to human health, causing anything from minor irritation to multi-organ damage.

“Every single resident was a first responder [after the flooding], and everyone was talking about the water they were walking through,” Zender said. “They’re being exposed to all the pathogens from the lagoons that have basically untreated human sewage … walking through floodwaters contaminated with fuel oil, trying to clean up materials that are hazardous.”

This contamination threatens the subsistence lifestyle that has been passed down through many generations.

Whether they are hunting, gathering berries, or collecting rainwater, many villagers in places like Kipnuk rely on the land for sustenance.

Contamination from oil or chemicals can have long-lasting impacts on subsistence resources, said Davin Hollen, coastal community resilience specialist for Alaska Sea Grants. The flooding also carried oil, sewage, and debris all over the tundra, including to the lakes where residents like Emma would have gone to chip ice from for drinking water.

“I wouldn’t want to get ice around that area,” Emma said. “[If we returned], we would have to go far, far away to get drinking water.”

The U.S. Western Alaska and Arctic Sectors of the Coast Guard and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation conducted post-storm assessments to capture the degree of pollution.

They contracted out to groups like the Alaska Chadux Network and Resolve Marine Group for oil clean-up. Shortly after Typhoon Halong, crews were on the ground siphoning oil out of damaged oil tanks and storing it in secondary containers for safe disposal. Approximately 120 tanks were damaged by floodwaters, according to Alaska’s environmental conservation department.

Those responsible for pollution clean-up were in a race against time.

Response technicians from the Alaska Chadux̂ Network prepare to siphon oil out of an up-ended damaged home heating oil storage tank after Typhoon Halong’s destruction in Kipnuk, Alaska, on October 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Alaska Chadux̂ Network

In the winter, ice traps any free-floating oil and debris that could otherwise be cleared. The waterways out of Kipnuk are also frozen over, preventing the barrels of oil from being shipped to safe containment sites. All clean-up has been paused until the spring thaw, after which the damage and long-term effects can be assessed more accurately.

The environmental conservation department and Coast Guard said they were unsure how long cleanup might last.

Many tanks are still pinned under debris, and fuel sheen can be seen in “almost every puddle under ice,” according to the latest updates on the Alaska environmental conservation department’s website in December.

Kipnuk’s water reservoir was contaminated by saltwater, and the equipment that can treat this water won’t arrive until the spring.

For the few people who chose to stay behind and help rebuild, they are relying on drinking water provided by schools in the area or on bottled water that is being sent up, said council leader Carter.

Coastal storms and typhoons have always been part of the climate in Alaska. However, compared to Typhoon Merbok in 2022 which damaged structures in western Alaska, Typhoon Halong has been far more destructive, said Christopher Houvener, Marine Science Technician for the Coast Guard.

This trend of increasing damage from storms and flooding will only worsen due to climate change, according to Sheryl Musgrove, director of the climate justice program at Alaska Institute for Justice.

Homes and boardwalks were dislodged in Kipnuk, Alaska, after Typhoon Halong struck in October 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Alaska Chadux̂ Network

Alaska is particularly hard hit by climate change as the fastest warming state in the United States.

Warming temperatures are preventing the formation of sea ice, a protective barrier against flooding, and melting the permafrost that comprises 85 percent of Alaska’s land mass, including the villages on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

The thawing permafrost causes the land to sink, making it more vulnerable to flooding and erosion.

“It’s this really vicious cycle,” Musgrove said. “And on the forefront are the tribes in Western Alaska.”

On the ground, crews are also seeing more oil spills due to this cycle.

When the Alaska Chadux Network was founded in 1993, the crew mostly responded to oil spills from small boats or vessels. Recently, that has changed.

“You’re seeing more and more flooding on the river system because of the permafrost melting,” ] Custard said. “What we’re seeing now are more of these [oil] tank spills [from houses] … driven by environmental type incidents.”

Response technicians with the Alaska Chadux̂ Network siphoning oil from damaged tanks into containers for safe storage in Kipnuk, Alaska, on October 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Alaska Chadux̂ Network

A 2022 federal report found that 115 communities are vulnerable to destruction similar to what was seen after Typhoon Halong. Displacement for these communities means more than just losing their home — it means losing the link to their ancestral land that they have lived on for thousands of years, and possibly not being able to return.

The pollution caused by Typhoon Halong is the main concern for Kipnuk residents on returning home, according to Carter.

But even if that is cleaned up in the spring, Carter isn’t certain that people will want to go back in the face of worsening storms.

The council has been holding meetings to discuss resilience measures like laying rocks down as an improvised seawall or building a community fridge on sturdy beams. They recognize that these are stopgap measures instead of infrastructure change such as building more protected areas for treated sewage, trash, or oil.

But the sheer distance of these villages from any existing infrastructure makes the resource cost to build and maintain almost insurmountable, especially for a smaller community with less capital resources, Zender said.

“We have this sort of one-size-fits-all mentality … that national models of how we approach a solution will work regardless of scale,” she said.

Crew members from the Alaska Chadux̂ Network prepare oil containers for winter safe storage as part of the oil clean-up process in Kipnuk, Alaska, on October 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Alaska Chadux̂ Network

But another solution was also proposed during village meetings, Carter said: relocation, to a site 15 miles away from Kipnuk that sits on rock, not permafrost.

“[The youth] are our next generation, and we need to think about them,” Carter said. “They don’t want to go through this again, because they know it’s just going to happen again.”

Once a decision is made, it will be hard to fund, especially given the cancellation of a $20 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency that could have been used to strengthen climate resilience.

Regardless, any decision will have to wait until the spring thaw, when the contamination can be re-assessed.

In the meantime, many have faith that these communities will rebuild, including Buddy Custard: “The one thing about Alaskans, we’re a resilient lot.”

Angela Y. Zhang is a pediatrician and journalist based in Seattle, Washington. Follow her on Bluesky at @zhangela.bsky.social and on Twitter at @zh_angela.

The post Post-Typhoon Halong: Contamination threatens subsistence, drinking water, a move back home appeared first on ICT.

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Palestinians walk through roads surrounded by rubble and collapsed buildings in Al-Zahra, northwest of Nuseirat Refugee Camp in the central Gaza Strip on Dec. 19, 2025.  Photo: Hassan Jedi/Anadolu via Getty Images

In Gaza, movement is no longer a mundane part of daily life. Israel’s military assault and prolonged siege have dismantled Gaza’s transportation system so thoroughly that journeys that once took minutes by car now require hours of walking through rubble and grotesque debris. What used to be an ordinary act — leaving home, reaching a clinic, visiting kin — has now become a form of physical labor, a calculation of pain, and a risk weighed against necessity.

By late 2025, Gaza’s Ministry of Transport and Communications reported that approximately 70 percent of registered vehicles — more than 50,000 cars, taxis, buses, and trucks — had been destroyed or rendered inviable. Between 68 and 85 percent of the road network suffered damage or total destruction, with some areas such as Khan Younis losing more than 90 percent of their routes. Israeli forces repeatedly bombed, cratered, and bulldozed major roads and intersections, instigating chaos that fragmented the Strip into isolated zones where movement between neighborhoods requires long detours or hours on foot.

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While the world turns its attention to Iran, daily life in Gaza has not returned to pre-genocide conditions. Since the U.S. and Israel began their joint assault on Iran, Lebanon, and the broader region, prices in Gaza have risen sharply as people rushed to buy essential goods and fuel. The sudden surge in demand and limited supply spiked the cost of food, water — and transportation. Border crossings were closed for 48 hours, further exacerbating shortages and contributing to the rapid rise in prices. In recent days, prices have begun to gradually decrease and stabilize, but the overall economic burden remains heavy for most households in Gaza, where many people are still struggling to cover basic needs.

Roads no longer connect neighborhoods, and transportation no longer guarantees access to health care, work, or sustenance. Even streets that remain technically passable are obstructed by rubble, vehicles, or collapsed infrastructure beneath the surface. Water and sewage lines burst under bombardment, flooding streets and turning mobility into an endeavor plagued by biohazards. In many areas, roads have become indistinguishable from ruins.

This collapse did not result solely from airstrikes. Israel’s blockade — which continues to restrict fuel, spare parts, tires, batteries, and heavy machinery — has undermined Gaza’s ability to repair or recover. Vehicles that survived bombardment often remain immobilized due to mechanical failures no workshop can fix. Even basic parts and equipment — filters, belts, brake systems — have become hard to find. Fuel scarcity has driven prices far beyond the reach of most families, while mechanics resort to dangerously improvised substitutes that destroy engines and emit toxic fumes across densely populated areas.

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As formal transportation disappears, residents rely on unsafe alternatives: tuk-tuks with no safety standards, animal-drawn carts, overcrowded cargo trucks not designed for passengers, or walking long distances across shattered streets. Asphalt has collapsed and fractured, mingling with rubble, sewage, twisted metal, and remnants of destroyed buildings, forming uneven, dirt-like paths. Movement through these spaces turns the act of walking into a physically punishing routine. The clatter of collapsing buildings and distant bombardment is constant, and the air feels opaque with dust and smoke.

Municipal authorities cannot clear the wreckage. The fuel shortages and lack of functioning equipment affect them too, preventing large-scale removal of debris. The result is a form of enforced immobility: Entire neighborhoods remain effectively cut off, not by checkpoints but by devastation. Residents plan their days around how far their bodies can carry them.

Residents plan their days around how far their bodies can carry them.

I have experienced this reality repeatedly. Over several weeks, I traveled with my brother, Mohammed, four times to reach a dentist in the Al-Maghazi refugee camp, nearly 10 kilometers from our home. There is no reliable transportation between the two areas. The distance became an ordeal measured not in maps but in muscle fatigue, time lost, and pain that intensified with every uneven step.

On one of those days, rain fell heavily. Broken roads turned to mud layered over shattered asphalt and sharp stones. Water pooled in craters left by bombs. At times, I sprinted across short safe patches, only to be slowed again by mud and debris.

Transportation carried us only part of the distance. We always completed the journey on foot, adjusting our pace to the condition of the road and to the limits of our bodies. Without severe tooth pain, I would not have left my room. The road drained me more than the dental procedure itself. Each step felt like a negotiation between necessity and collapse.

I tried to make the walk bearable by searching for fragments of beauty along the way.

I tried to make the walk bearable by searching for fragments of beauty along the way: a flowering tree growing beside rubble, a rose bush somehow still nourished, a building that had not yet fallen, the faint radiant glow of children playing in a distant schoolyard. I photographed the clouds, took pictures of myself simply to pass time, and paused whenever my body demanded it. These small acts were my survival mechanisms, attempts to assert that Gaza still contained something worth noticing.

This experience is not exceptional. It reflects a broader reality in which access to health care depends not on medical need alone, but on physical endurance. Patients miss appointments or abandon treatment altogether because they cannot reach clinics. Parents carry children for kilometers to medical points. Elderly people and those with disabilities remain trapped in place, dependent on others or forced to forego care indefinitely. The ability to walk through rubble for long distances has become a filter that determines who receives care and who does not.

The ability to walk through rubble for long distances has become a filter that determines who receives care and who does not.

Economic consequences intensify the crisis. Tens of thousands of drivers have lost their livelihoods as taxis, buses, and trucks were destroyed or immobilized. Commercial transport has slowed dramatically, disrupting supply chains and inflating the cost of basic goods. Workers arrive late or not at all. Students walk for hours or drop out entirely. For displaced families, transportation costs have reached apocalyptic levels, with some paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to move belongings short distances. Those without money walk, scavenge what they can, and leave the rest behind.

In the absence of regulation and fuel availability, informal transport operators dictate prices brazenly. Gaza’s local authorities acknowledge the exploitation, but under siege conditions, they have limited options to protect residents. Scarcity governs movement more than public need, reshaping social relations around access, endurance, and pent-up anger. Western‑run aid organizations vow to “maintain a steady and predictable flow of supplies,” yet recent reports note that while some aid has entered Gaza, the overall volume remains insufficient to meet basic needs, fueling frustration and despair.

The pattern of destruction reveals intent. Israeli attacks have repeatedly targeted intersections, bridges, and key road junctions, severing connections between neighborhoods and governorates. These actions obstruct ambulances, humanitarian convoys, and civilian movement, amplifying the effects of injury, hunger, and displacement. Gaza’s government estimates that losses in the transport sector exceed $3 billion, including the destruction of more than three million linear meters of roads. Mobility itself has become a casualty of war, leaving residents lurking between hazards and temporary shelters, pleading for safety.

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Local officials have proposed emergency rehabilitation plans focused on reopening critical routes linking hospitals, shelters, and aid distribution centers. These efforts prioritize survival rather than reconstruction. Without access to fuel, spare parts, and heavy machinery, even minimal recovery remains largely theoretical, constrained by political decisions beyond Gaza’s control.

Transportation in Gaza is not a technical issue or a matter of convenience. It defines the limits of daily life. It determines who can reach a doctor, who can work, who can study, and who must stay behind. As long as movement itself remains under siege, life in Gaza will continue to contract, measured not by distance but by pain, exhaustion, and loss. In the 21st century, Palestinians in Gaza navigate a landscape where walking through ruins has replaced the most basic promise of mobility, ceaselessly testing endurance, resilience, and the abiding human spirit.

The post Israel Destroyed Gaza’s Roads and Transit. Now, We Walk Everywhere. appeared first on The Intercept.

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Last Updated on February 28, 2026 Ecuador’s National Assembly has approved sweeping changes to the country’s mining framework, igniting opposition from Indigenous nations and their allies who say the reforms endanger biodiverse ecosystems and weaken Indigenous rights protections.

On Feb. 26, lawmakers passed the Organic Law for the Strengthening of the Strategic Mining and Energy Sectors by a 77–70 vote as part of a fast-tracked package promoted by President Daniel Noboa and his allies. Supporters argue the changes will ‘modernize’ regulation and make Ecuador’s mining sector more competitive.

But Indigenous leaders and civil society groups have condemned the measure as a threat to their lands and ways of life, raising alarms that the law erodes critical safeguards long championed in Ecuador’s constitution — including recognition of the rights of nature.

The national Indigenous federation CONAIE and regional Amazonian nations publicly rejected the legislation, saying it would accelerate mining activity in territories that have historically been protected from large-scale extractive projects.

They argue the law opens the door to expanded mining without meaningful free, prior and informed consent, a right that’s enshrined in Ecuador’s constitution and international agreements like ILO 169, which Ecuador ratified.

According to Amazon Frontlines, “the bill also conflicts with landmark rulings such as the 2022 Sinangoe decision [and] international agreements including the Escazú Agreement and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.”

Leaders from the Achuar, Kichwa, Shuar, Sápara and Waorani nations have emphasized that their territories comprise some of the most intact forests on Earth, playing a critical role in biodiversity conservation and climate stability. In a public statement issued ahead of the vote, they called on legislators to reject the law, warning that it would fuel conflict and environmental degradation in the Amazon.

“So-called ‘responsible mining’ does not exist. Where mining enters, so do deforestation, river pollution, violence, and organized crime. The data confirms this: in 2024, 4,926 hectares were registered as open-pit mining sites in 105 Indigenous territories, and at least 23 protected areas have lost approximately 14,660 hectares of forest between 2001 and 2024*. This law will only exacerbate this damage,” they said.

“By dismantling environmental safeguards and transferring oversight responsibilities to extractive-sector institutions, the new law deepens tensions between Ecuador’s economic development model and the protection of human rights, biodiversity, and the global climate,” said Amazon Frontlines.

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Chef Crystal Wahpepah’s story is one of intertwining threads, as is her cuisine. The food she serves at her eponymous Oakland restaurant, Wahpepah’s Kitchen, reflects her mixed-raced Kickapoo, Sac and Fox, and African-American heritage. Dishes like wild rice fritters, three-bean bison chili, and blue corn mush take their influences from the two places she calls home: her San Francisco Bay Area hometown of Oakland, and Shawnee, Oklahoma, where her Indigenous ancestors were relocated in the 1800s and where she spent childhood summers with extended family.

It’s fitting, then, that Wahpepah’s first cookbook, A Feather and a Fork, publishing on March 17, centers on intertribal foods. While the 125 recipes are largely informed by her Kickapoo heritage, there are also clear nods to other Indigenous communities, including the Ohlone people, who stewarded the place now known as Oakland for millennia before European arrival and are increasingly reclaiming their relationship to the land.

Beyond her restaurant, the self-proclaimed Indigenous food warrior is deeply involved with Oakland’s often overlooked yet vibrant Native community as well as food sovereignty efforts in the Bay Area.

Those recipes—titled in both English and Kickapoo—are accompanied by pointers on ingredient sourcing and rich storytelling about Wahpepah’s life, her tribe’s history, and cultural context about the featured foods. A James Beard Foundation Emerging Chef Award finalist, she was the first Indigenous chef to compete on Food Network’s Chopped and was inducted into the Native American Almanac for her professional achievements.

Beyond her restaurant, the self-proclaimed Indigenous food warrior is deeply involved with Oakland’s often overlooked yet vibrant Native community as well as food sovereignty efforts in the Bay Area. Known for her effervescent personality and big auntie energy, Wahpepah collaborates closely with the Culture Conservancy, a Native-led nonprofit aimed at preserving and empowering Indigenous cultures, as well as the Intertribal Friendship House, one of the nation’s oldest urban Indian centers.

Civil Eats recently spoke to Wahpepah about A Feather and a Fork, the concept of food as medicine, and fry bread as a symbol of Native resilience.

What does it mean to you to be an Indigenous food warrior?

My interpretation of an Indigenous food warrior is anyone who is participating in the food sovereignty movement and keeping our ancestral knowledge alive—from farmers and seed keepers to hunters and gatherers to those who serve and eat our foods. I first started using the term back when I was doing catering work. My niece and I would be driving between Oakland and Los Angeles [for catering jobs], and we were like, “We’re Indigenous food warriors.”

It became part of our culinary journey and shaped who we are, and we really embraced it as the years went on. When we go to the farm, when we plant the seeds, when we harvest the foods—that’s all being an Indigenous food warrior. It’s so beautiful to see the important work that Indigenous food warriors are doing all across Indian Country.

Bison roast with chokecherry rub (Misiikwaa Katoowakimina). Chokecherries, Wahpepah says, are a powerful medicine rich in antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties. (Photo credit: Clay Williams)

Why is it important to you to get involved in food sovereignty initiatives in the Oakland community?

I wouldn’t be a chef without my community. My community has played a huge role in what I do and what I advocate for. A lot of my food sovereignty work is done in collaboration with the Culture Conservancy.

I met the team maybe 12 years ago when I was cooking a dinner at the Intertribal Friendship House here in Oakland, and the relationship built out from there.

At [the conservancy’s] Sonoma farm, Heron Shadow, we grow all sorts of vegetables, like Hopi black beans, Quapaw red corn, Buffalo Creek squash, chilies, tomatoes, and amaranth. I use some of that produce at the restaurant, but most of it gets distributed to community members.

All of this work is about quite literally providing food access to Native people. It’s also about educating the next generation, because our youth are watching us and want to get involved. Oakland is so rich and multicultural, and we have a huge Native community, especially in the Fruitvale area, where my restaurant is.

If you live here, you already know that, but it’s easy to overlook if you’re not from here. Anyone can get involved in supporting the community by volunteering with the Culture Conservancy, the Intertribal Friendship House, or the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, which is a Native-led nonprofit that helps return Indigenous land to Indigenous people.

I also teach a class at Cal Poly Humboldt’s Food Sovereignty Lab, where I’ve been chef-in-residence since last October. I’m having a lot of fun helping students from all different backgrounds learn about the benefits of Indigenous foods and the importance of sovereignty work. There happen to be a lot of Native students in that class, but it’s made for everyone.

Blue corn mush with mixed berries (Peeskipaateeki Methiikwaki Meekateethichik Miinaki) is a staple on the Wahpepah’s Kitchen menu. It can be served for breakfast or as a dessert. (Photo credit: Clay Williams)

How does the concept of food as medicine factor into your work?

When I was growing up and I was at that period when intergenerational trauma can really take hold, I found myself gravitating toward certain healing foods. For example, I loved picking berries, and that’s still my happiest place to this day.

I believe our ancestors are really calling us to connect with these tribal foods and heal not only for ourselves but for future generations.

A lot of people are feeling lost and disconnected right now, and that’s because they’re not connected with the land. It’s very important to understand whose land you’re on and where your food comes from.

Food as medicine is about approaching things with an open mind and an open heart. It’s about talking to Mother Earth, feeling her, tasting her. For instance, spring is my favorite time of year to pick the miner’s lettuce—we call it Indian lettuce—that grows among the redwoods.

It has a lot of healing properties; it can help if you are feeling fatigued, get headaches, or aren’t sleeping well. Or bay laurel can help lower blood pressure. It’s important that we become fully aware of what these foods have to offer.

The first expansive section of your book focuses on the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash. Why was it important to dedicate so much attention to this Native culinary tradition?

The Three Sisters—what we call neowi ototeemetiaki in Kickapoo—are our pillars of strength. Corn, beans, and squash have fed our Native communities for centuries and are what feeds us to this day. I utilize the Three Sisters not just in the restaurant but also at home, at tribal events, everywhere.

Because so many communities across Turtle Island (North America) have grown the Three Sisters for so long, everyone has their own story. But our shared story is that this is the foundation that we built our Indigenous agriculture upon. At the restaurant, my first menu started off with the Three Sisters, so it made sense to start the book that way, too. Then when you dive deeper into these foods’ healing properties, you can really see the enduring strength of the Three Sisters.

Is there a dish that feels most closely connected to home for you?

That’s easy: dried sweet corn. It brings up so many childhood memories of spending time in Oklahoma with my grandmother and aunties. In the summertime, we celebrate the green corn, then the hot heat of August is the best time to preserve the corn. So I get to bring it from my home in Oklahoma to my home here in Oakland, where we use it for family dinners, birthdays, and other special moments. It’s a food that helps me feel connected to the land and to my identity, no matter where I am.

Let’s talk about fry bread. It’s widely considered a quintessential Native American dish, but in reality, it’s a relatively unhealthy survival food. What made you decide to include it in the book?

We didn’t serve fry bread at the restaurant for the first three years, then eventually we added it to pair with our dried corn soup and other stews. Now it’s one of our staples. When it came to including it in the book, it really took me a while to decide, because I feel like fry bread can overshadow what the story is really about, which is all these beautiful foods from this land. At the same time, fry bread is a big part of our story and reflects who we are as resilient Native people, so I realized if I left it out, I wouldn’t be telling a complete story.

“When you dive deeper into these foods’ healing properties, you can really see the enduring strength of the Three Sisters.”

I grew up very, very poor, and fry bread always kept my family fed. For us, it truly was a generational survival food. It’s what my mom, as a single mother of three kids, fed us. It’s what my grandmother fed her six kids. It’s what the aunties have always fed our community. Of course, fry bread should be eaten in moderation, but during my childhood, we had it every day. For me, it’s a reminder to never forget where you come from.

What do you hope readers take away from A Feather and a Fork?

First and foremost, I want readers to know that Native people are still here. Beyond that, I want them to know we have so many beautiful stories that have been handed down from generation to generation. I come from a really strong family of women, and I feel like it’s my duty to continue to pass along that wisdom. So much of it comes through these foods, which I hope readers can embrace in a respectful way. At the end of the day, we’re all human, and we’re all trying to be healthy. When it comes to health and wellness, why not eat the foods from this land?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Kickapoo Chef Crystal Wahpepah Showcases Oakland’s Native American Side appeared first on Civil Eats.

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In January 2026, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published a grim update to its earlier work, titled “Living Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps”. This report documents the horrific conditions faced by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and detention facilities, revealing structural brutality that must be understood not as isolated injustice but as part of a broader system of violence and exclusion directed against the Palestinian people.

The “Living Hell” report builds on B’Tselem’s previous 2024 publication, “Welcome to Hell”, by incorporating updated figures and testimonies from 21 Palestinians released under ceasefire agreements or in the preceding months. These firsthand accounts, collected in the shadow of threats of re-arrest and intimidation, underline that the treatment of Palestinian detainees is neither random nor incidental, but part of a dehumanizing policy that strips prisoners of dignity, health, and, too often, their lives.

At the heart of the report is a devastating charge: Israeli prisons and detention centers have been systematically transformed into a network of torture camps. According to B’Tselem, these spaces are characterized by sustained physical and psychological abuse, extreme overcrowding, deliberate starvation, denial of medical care, and humiliation of inmates. Within this system, incarcerated men, women, and children experience violence that crosses the boundary into torture as defined by international law.

The evidence is harrowing. Between October 2023 and January 2026, B’Tselem identified 84 Palestinian prisoners and detainees who died in custody (including one minor) amid conditions of chronic neglect and abuse. Israeli authorities have released only four of these bodies to families, retaining the remainder, an act that compounds the suffering of those already bereaved.

The abuses documented are multiple and systematic: prisoners describe prolonged beatings, psychological torment, sexual violence, denial of basic hygiene and food, and a refusal to provide adequate medical treatment. In some cases, allegations include sexual assault with objects and electric shocks, alongside beatings that cause lasting injury. These accounts are corroborated by multiple former detainees and aligned with testimony gathered by international organizations, suggesting patterns that extend far beyond anecdote.

Far from being incidental acts of violence by rogue guards, the report indicates that this treatment is embedded within institutional practices and sanctioned (implicitly or explicitly) by Israel’s political leadership. The far-right Israeli National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who oversees the prison system, has at times publicly boasted of harsher treatment of Palestinian prisoners, even as the Israeli Prison Service denies systemic abuse.

This systemic pattern must be understood in the broader political context of Israel’s coordinated assault on Palestinian life since October 7, 2023. The transformation of prisons into instruments of suffering parallels policies of mass detention, demolition of Palestinian homes, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Palestinians are apprehended en masse from homes, refugee camps, and cities across the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip; tens of thousands have been detained under military orders with little oversight, due process, or transparency.

This violence did not begin in October 2023; it has occurred both before and after that date. Palestinian human rights organizations have documented cases of torture,removed, and abuse that Palestinian prisoners have undergone for many decades. For example, the report by Addameer titled “I’ve been there. A study of torture and inhumane treatment at Al-Moscobiyeh interrogation center” has mortifying descriptions and testimonies of systematic use of torture. Most telling in that report is how the Israeli judicial system has given a shield to the perpetrators of these horrors.

What B’Tselem documented in its 2026 report was the increase in the frequency of the abuse. But what B’Tselem left out was that torture andremoved have always been a part of the Israeli carceral prison system. Between June 1967 and the beginning of October 2023, 237 Palestinians were killed in Israeli prisons – an average of four prisoners per year. This figure does not include the thousands of Palestinians that were detained, tortured and some killed between 1948 and 1967, of which little record exists.

The Palestinian relationship with prisons is as old as the British Mandate in Palestine. Songs were sung of Palestinian prisoners who resisted the British Mandate and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, such as the 1930 song “From Acre Prison.” The scale of abuse faced by the Palestinian detainees is illustrated by the story recounted by Sheikh Hassan al-Labadi. Sheikh Hassan was a renowned religious scholar in Mandate Palestine, arrested in 1939 by the British authorities, imprisoned in the infamous Acre prison, and found by members of his family in an Israeli mental institution in 1982. Sheikh Hassan lost all memory due to the extreme conditions that he witnessed, and he died shortly after his release to his family. The stories of Palestinians enduring years of confinement, torture and abuse are far too common in the Israeli prison context. According to estimates cited by the Red Cross, since 1967 there have been over 1.2 million cases of arrests of Palestinians by Israeli authorities, which constitutes about 20% of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Read more: The Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement: the struggle behind bars

Integral to understanding the violence of this system is its use of administrative detention – a practice under which individuals are held indefinitely without charge or trial. According to B’Tselem’s data, thousands of Palestinians (including many held without formal charges) remain incarcerated under this regime. Such detention violates fundamental norms of justice and due process, leaving detainees in limbo, without legal recourse or clarity about the charges against them.

Politicide

But to grasp the full scope of Israeli punitive policies, we must look beyond aggregated statistics to individuals whose detention has become emblematic of the struggle for Palestinian rights. Marwan Barghouti is one such figure, but there are many others.

Barghouti, a veteran Palestinian leader and key figure in Fatah’s political landscape, has been imprisoned in Israeli jails since 2002. Convicted by an Israeli court on multiple counts related to violence during the Second Intifada (with evidence that is contested and fabricated) he is widely known both inside Palestine and internationally as a political prisoner.

Over the decades, Barghouti’s incarceration has been a symbol of resistance and Palestinian political aspiration, including unity across factions. Many see him as a potential unifying leader for the Palestinian national movement. His absence from a major prisoner release agreement (negotiated during ceasefire talks in 2025 involving nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners) was a stark reminder of his political weight and Israel’s refusal to free him.

More troubling than his continued detention are the documented conditions he has endured while inside. Multiple credible sources report that Barghouti has been held in prolonged solitary confinement since the outbreak of the Gaza genocide, subject to beatings, forced humiliation, and other forms of mistreatment by prison officials. These allegations include being forced to the ground and having his shoulder dislocated, being beaten during transfers, and enduring harsh conditions with limited medical care. Human rights advocates in Israel and beyond have argued that these conditions amount to torture and psychological coercion.

Incarceration and assassination function as parallel instruments within the same political strategy: when imprisonment succeeds in neutralizing leadership, it silences resistance slowly; when it fails, targeted killing removes those figures permanently from the political landscape.

Israel systematically arrests and kills political leaders, community leaders, doctors, engineers, physicists (the case of Imad Barghouthi is one example) down to student activists as part of its campaign of politicide, or the deliberate destruction of a people’s political existence. The assassination and arrest of leaders of Palestinian groups that are outside the Palestinian Authority has become routine and has weakened Palestinian political processes. Prison is a key site of punishment for Palestinian political life – it has become a means to control society by the removal of key figures, the instillation of fear, and the fragmentation of communities. In this way, the prison system operates as a part of a broader strategy to undermine Palestinian self-determination and restrict the ability of the Palestinian people to sustain political organization and national continuity.

But this systematic dehumanization has not stopped Palestinians from resisting this system. Palestinian academics and political leaders imprisoned were able to resist by focusing on education and scholarly work. From the late 1960s, when Palestinians used to write political lectures using chicken bones, ash, and small pieces of paper found in cigarette packs, to going on hunger strikes demanding access to paper, pens, books, and education – the Palestinian experience is truly unique, as they have literally turned prisons into schools and universities. Al Quds University ran a program from 2005 offering Palestinian prisoners bachelor’s and master’s degrees through a system of education and testing designed to ensure academic excellence; up to 2023, 800 Palestinian prisoners were able to graduate from the program.

The suffering of Palestinian prisoners must not be viewed in isolation. Imprisonment serves Israel’s broader political objectives: to suppress Palestinian political leadership, to break the spirit of resistance, and to normalize a regime of control that extends from prison cells to communities across the occupied territories. The transformation of Israeli detention facilities into what B’Tselem rightly calls torture camps is a stark symbol of how the machinery of the state can be deployed to dehumanize an entire population.

As we reflect on the “Living Hell” report, we must insist that international institutions, governments, and human rights mechanisms hold accountable those responsible for systemic abuse. Palestinian prisoners (whether high-profile figures like Barghouti or ordinary civilians swept up in waves of detention) deserve humane treatment, transparency, and legal protections. Ending these practices is not only a matter of legal obligation; it is a moral imperative.

“Living Hell” compels us to confront the reality of Israeli prisons not as isolated sites of criminal justice, but as key nodes in a broader system of oppression. To ignore this brutality is to accept the normalization of torture and cruel treatment in the modern world. It is time for the global community to act – firmly, unequivocally, and in solidarity with the Palestinians whose lives are being shaped inside and beyond prison walls.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).

Ubai al-Aboudi is the Director of the Bisan Centre for Research and Development (Ramallah, Palestine).

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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This article was originally produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

Kaiya Little
The Hechinger Report

Savion Horn watched as “before” and “after” images appeared on a screen at the front of his classroom: black-and-white photos of boys and girls, much younger than him and his classmates, first with faces framed by long hair and traditional clothing, then with their locks cut, wearing high-necked dresses and stiff button-ups.

For Horn, then a high school senior at Grand Prairie High School near Dallas and a descendant of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, it was his first in-depth lesson on the boarding schools where the U.S. government sent hundreds of thousands of Native American children in the 19th and 20th centuries with the goal of assimilating them and eradicating Native culture.

​​“They weren’t allowed to speak their own language. They weren’t allowed to represent themselves with their music or art,” said Horn, who was exposed to the lesson last school year through the American Indian/Native Studies class offered at his high school. “It was very emotional to me, and it would be for anyone who actually wanted to take anything away from the class and learn.”

The American Indian/Native Studies course, or AINS, was piloted in the Grand Prairie school district in 2021 following years of work by Indigenous parents and educators around the state, who drafted course materials from scratch. To build on the success of a Chicano/Mexican American studies class the state approved in 2015, the State Board of Education had in 2018 called for the creation of other ethnic studies classes, including Native studies. Two years later, board members certified the AINS class as an “innovative course,” meaning it covered state-approved topics that fall outside of the required curriculum and other districts could adopt it.

Grand Prairie school district social studies coordinator Lanette Aguero waits to testify at the State Board of Education’s hearing on June 26, 2025, in Texas. Credit: Photo by Kaiya Little/The Hechinger Report

But in 2025, when the class came up for its regular five-year renewal under the process for “innovative courses,” the political landscape in Texas had changed. Starting in 2021, the state had taken steps to limit instruction around issues of race, ethnicity and gender: That year, Gov. Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 3, which restricts instruction on “controversial issues” and says educators should approach those topics “objectively and in a manner free from political bias.”

This past June, just a week before the committee met to discuss the course, the state passed SB 12, allowing parents to review and raise objections about K-12 educational materials and prohibiting policies, activities or programs that “reference race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation.”

At the federal level, President Donald Trump has issued executive orders calling for the end of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices, known as DEI, in public K-12 schools and colleges. And leadership of the Texas education board had changed too, leading to more scrutiny of course content.

Groups including the Ethnic Studies Network of Texas, an organization devoted to the advancement of diverse representation in school curricula, and Native-led nonprofits like the Society of Native Nations lobbied for the course’s survival. Four Native nations from across Texas and Oklahoma also endorsed AINS, sayingthe class offered students the opportunity to understand a more complete, accurate picture of tribal histories than is typically taught in K-12 classrooms.

At the Texas education board’s June hearing, most members were supportive of the class and sympathetic to the frustrations of course organizers with the prolonged renewal process. Some board members, though, expressed concern about the course, arguing that its discussion of the role of Catholic churches in the mistreatment of students at boarding schools might shame Christian students. Another representative questioned the purpose of land acknowledgements recognizing Indigenous people as an area’s original residents, suggesting that some land was traded or given to settlers or was unclaimed and that it wasn’t always clear to whom it belonged.

After two days of debate, the board voted 9-5 in favor of renewing the course. With a compromise to remove a passage in a reading about George Washington that the board objected to, the course will continue to operate as an innovative class for another five years. At a time when DEI is under attack around the country, supporters of the Native studies class view their success as giving hope to others who want to see similar classes created or preserved in other states.

“I cannot underscore enough how important of a win this is,” said Sarah B. Shear, an associate professor of social studies and multicultural education at the University of Washington-Bothell, whose research has found that content on Native Americans in most K-12 social studies curriculum often leaves out information on modern contributions of Indigenous people.

Focus on ‘resilience’

In part because of research like hers, a few other states and districts have taken similar steps to expand Native studies. In 2015, lawmakers in Washington state passed a mandate that every school district teach tribal history, culture and government, becoming the second state to approve a Native Education for All law, after Montana in 1999. In 2025, California expanded history lessons about the Gold Rush and Spanish colonial periods to include more Native perspectives. And in Arizona, students must encounter at least two social studies courses — one in grade school, another in high school — that include the history of Native Americans in their state.

In Texas, educators, parents and tribal members around the state came together over Zoom at the height of the pandemic to develop the course, which covers lessons relating to geography, arts and culture and the contemporary achievements of Indigenous peoples around Texas and the country. The content includes sections about pivotal Supreme Court cases on tribal affairs, boarding schools and Stephen F. Austin’s Indian extermination policies in addition to topics like mascots and Indigenous scholarship in research.

The course’s creators — 22 people from Indigenous and non-Indigenous backgrounds — held trainings on its content and teaching strategies for educators interested in adopting the class. Lanette Aguero, the Grand Prairie district’s social studies coordinator, was among them. She attended an ethnic studies conference at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth in 2019, which led her to want to bring the class to her district.

While the Native American population in the 27,000-student district is quite small — only about 120 identified as Native American in 2023-2024, the most recent year for which data is available — the population of Native Americans in the larger Dallas area is significant. Twelve students in Grand Prairie signed up for the class its first year, 2021, and by 2024 the class had grown to 48 students. In 2024, two other districts, Robstown and Crowley, adopted the course as well.

As one of the first teachers of the American Indian/Native Studies class, Kimberly Rafalski, who is non-Native and a longtime social studies instructor in the Grand Prairie district, said she often felt like she learned alongside her students. Together, they walked through precontact histories and the ongoing stories of Indigenous peoples that are typically left out of traditional textbooks.

Some days were more difficult than others, she said. She recalled leaving school in tears after discussing the history of boarding schools, the image of her own young children in her mind. But throughout the year, Rafalski said, the class grew close through reflection and celebrations of Indigenous perseverance through art.

“There’s a lot of things in this class. They’re hard topics to teach,” Rafalski said. “There’s no sensationalizing any of it.”

But, she added, “We’re not going to do trauma. Every time we learn about something difficult, we do something that shows resilience.”

‘I’m right here’

In 2018, when the state education board called for the adoption of ethnic studies classes, most members supported the idea of expanded instruction, but they had differing views on whether that content should be included in separate courses or integrated into existing ones. Supporters of the ethnic studies classes referenced research suggesting that student performance improved by including representation in their textbooks, while others worried a class specializing in specific ethnic groups could be divisive.

Ultimately, Texas approved a Mexican-American studies course that year, marking the first high school ethnic studies class greenlit in the state and the first K-12 Mexican-American Studies course to be approved by a state board of education. The Native studies class was approved three years later, followed by an Asian-American studies class in 2024.

Students seemed to like the class. Some 97 percent of the 63 students who responded to a Texas Education Agency survey on the course said they felt “more positive about Native American/Indigenous culture than before taking the class.” One student said the course “helped me by not being afraid of who I am as a Native American.”

Walter Dougherty, a 10-year-old from the Conroe Independent School District near Houston who testified in favor of the course, said at the hearing that before AINS, his classes focused more on ancient civilizations than today’s Native Americans.

“People talk about us like we’re gone, but we’re not. I’m right here,” Dougherty said. “My brother and I are Cherokee kids growing up in Texas, and we want people to know our culture and history. … When I learn about my Cherokee family, I feel proud. I feel like I can do anything.”

Tom Dougherty testified at the State Board of Education’s hearing in June 2025 alongside his sons, Henry (left) and Walter. They are members of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Credit: Kaiya Little/The Hechinger Report

“I can’t imagine if my son were to never understand about his ancestors,” said Cheyenne Rendon, Diné and Apache, the senior policy officer for the Society of Native Nations and a lifelong Texan who grew up attending San Antonio schools. AINS, she said, “gives me hope that we’re not going to be erased.”

Related: States were adding lessons about Native American history. Then came the anti-CRT movement

During discussions about reauthorizing the American Indian/Native Studies course, the question of whether it ran afoul of Texas’s latest anti-DEI policies came up repeatedly.

At the hearing, Orlando Lara, cofounder of the Ethnic Studies Network of Texas, defended the course’s legality, noting that the federal Department of Education said in an April 2025 letter that “American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian history is not classified as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or critical race theory (CRT).” Under this direction, Native Americans represent distinct political identities as members of sovereign tribal nations, nonspecific to racial or ethnic classifiers.

But board members continued to press Lara over the technical definitions of race and ethnicity as they questioned how to interpret the latest state legislation.

Because of a lack of guidance from the Texas Education Agency on the “controversial issues” legislation in 2021, Lara said later, “for a long time, a lot of districts didn’t know what would get them in trouble with the law.” To counter this, he said, the Ethnic Studies Network is “trying to get out there that there’s no reason to fear teaching the class.”

There were other objections to the course too. State school board member Julie Pickren, A Republican from Pearland, said materials used in the class depicted “President George Washington as a terrorist” and lessons about boarding schools were “accusing our Christian missions and churches of kidnapping and sending kids to reeducation camps.”

Pickren did not respond to interview requests. Her comments about George Washington appeared to refer to an online resource from academic publisher ABC-Clio, which described his 1779 campaign against Iroquois villages siding with the British in which he instructed the Army “to rush on with the war-whoop and fixed bayonet” because nothing would “disconcert and terrify the Indians more than this.”

Audrey Young, a Republican school board member who represents the Houston area, shared similar concerns. She argued that 2024 curriculum standards requiring “suitable” educational materials to promote patriotism, lawful activity and other values should apply to innovative courses like the AINS class. “Currently, the suitability standards aren’t required” for innovative courses, Young wrote in an email. “But I do believe that if courses are being taught to students, then they should have to follow ALL the laws.”

Pickren and Young were among the five board members who voted against the class, but another nine members voted in favor. Those supporters noted that the AINS course materials had undergone a series of reviews and further deliberation was unnecessary.

“It is Texas history,” Gustavo Reveles, a Democrat who represents El Paso and other predominantly Hispanic border communities and who voted for the course, said in an interview. “A child can see themselves represented, can see themselves as members of this very amazing state and country, not just because of George Washington, not just because of Abraham Lincoln, but because of his people that look like him and talk like him.”

While supporters of the class celebrated the board’s approval, it’s only one step. They are now trying to get the course standards approved as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, which would leave it less vulnerable during review and renewal conversations. As it stands, the class faces another board vote in 2030 at the end of its current five-year innovative course period. Course organizers are also trying to encourage more districts and educators to adopt the class.

After graduating from the Grand Prairie school district last spring, Horn joined his family on the road as he took his place in the family business as traveling circus organizers.

He said the class became a way for him to connect with his culture and family as a descendant of the Potawatomi Nation. Now, he said, he hopes to get involved with his local Native communities and participate in the Texas powwow trail, a Native-run cultural celebration that takes place in several Texas cities each year.

“I appreciate being a part of a community, especially this one,” Horn said. “I know where I’m from, and it means a lot to me.”

Kaiya Little is a member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma who has written about a variety of topics highlighting the environment and Indigenous identities in Texas.

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.

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Te Aniwaniwa Paterson. (Photo supplied)

Behind the marae gates, there’s a deeply uncomfortable conversation going on, writes rangatahi Te Aniwaniwa Paterson, who’s part of a group working to end sexual violence within Māori communities.

At Waitangi, sovereignty is often spoken about. But what does sovereignty mean if we can’t openly speak about harm within our own communities?

I’m the rangatahi representative on Ngā Kaitiaki Mauri, the Māori caucus of a national network to end sexual violence. In this role, I serve alongside kaumātua Russell Smith and Joy Te Wiata. When I ran into them at Waitangi this year, it was a chance to catch up on our kaupapa.

Matua Russell Smith told me that the first time he stood at Waitangi to speak about sexual violence, in the early 2000s, he was unsure whether his kōrero would belong in a space dominated by discussions of whenua.

It was Rangimārie Naida Glavish who steadied his nerves. “She turned to me and said: ‘They’re talking about theremoved of our land, and you’re talking about theremoved of our people. Your kaupapa absolutely belongs here at Waitangi.'”

The conversation reminded him that while the Crown has obligations under Te Tiriti, which might dominate the kōrero at Waitangi, Māori also have responsibilities to each other.

“We have He Whakaputanga and Te Wakaminenga, which guide the kōrero that happens inside the marae gates of our hapū,” he explains.

And within the marae gates, one conversation comes up time and time again: What should we do about sexual abusers, including paedophiles and intimate partner abusers, who want to speak on the paepae tapu?

Joy Te Wiata and Russell Smith with Dame Rangimārie Naida Galvish (centre) at Waitangi this year. (Photo supplied)

Joy Te Wiata says this can be a deeply uncomfortable conversation. But a good way to approach it is to think about “sexual violence” through the kupu Maōri “mahi tūkino”. That wording, she says, makes the abuser’s breach of mana and tapu quite visible.

“Cultural platforms like the paepae are not places to support people who have perpetrated harm. If our marae really want to be places of safety, then they need to uphold tikanga by ensuring that mana and tapu are upheld,” says Joy.

“We’ve got to be careful we aren’t colonised in our own sacred spaces. If we’re saying that it’s okay to allow these things without going through our processes, without hohourongo, that’s not tikanga Maori.”

Russell puts it like this — when people come forward saying their kaumātua abused them, he says: “Kaumātua do not sexually abuse. If someone has done that, we need to remove that status from them. They are not practising kaumātua tikanga.”

This does not mean those who cause harm are cast out entirely or disowned.

Through their clinical and kaupapa Māori work, Russell and Joy have worked alongside many whānau as they navigate the long and difficult process of healing. They have seen that restoration is possible.

While restoration means someone may remain part of their whānau and community, it doesn’t always involve a return to positions of cultural authority. In some cases, the paepae may no longer be an appropriate place for them, Joy says.

And that applies too, she says, to numerous positions across the marae, not just the paepae: “Are we remembering, there’s as much mana in picking pipi, washing dishes, and digging the hāngi pit?”

The pair’s kaupapa Māori approach to healing differs from clinical models that focus on the individual. Instead, their work considers the wider environment in which the harm occurred — the whānau, hapū, and the spaces and systems around that person. It then addresses the conditions that allowed the harm to occur, with supervision, boundaries, and restrictions on alcohol use.

“Our tūpuna left us tikanga for a reason, for safety,” says Joy. “We’re not calling our people to something different — we’re calling them back to their own tikanga.”

“Whakamua whakamuri,” adds Russell. “The way back is forward.”

But kaupapa Māori services like this remain under-resourced.

Late last year, the government moved to redirect $1.7 million from sexual violence support services. Some contracts were extended for six months, but that came with clear warnings not to expect more.

Joy says such funding cuts affect kaupapa Māori services more deeply, because their available resources must support entire whānau.

“We’re whānau-centred, which means that each dollar must expand to cover the whānau approach,” she says. “If we discontinue services, there is a breakdown in trust with whānau, and it takes years to build trust in the first instance. So, it’s not just the end of programmes, it’s a discontinuation of that trust and reliability.”

For Russell, the ability of Māori to sustain our own healing systems is an issue of tino rangatiratanga. “The problem we have today is we don’t have full autonomy over our own resources, and that includes our own mātauranga,” he says.

He describes this as part of a longer pattern: “The Tohunga Suppression Act is still active by the way they prevent our people from accessing us, through not giving us the resources that belong to us, and that’s the biggest Tiriti issue.”

For both, Te Tiriti affirms not only a partnership but also the Crown’s responsibility to ensure Māori can exercise their own pathways to healing. Without that support, Joys says, the obligation remains unmet.

They’ve seen some tauiwi services decline to work with whānau whose needs are complex, leaving kaupapa Māori providers to carry the responsibility. But there are very few kaupapa Māori services across Aotearoa that feel equipped to work directly with people who’ve experienced sexual harm.

“We’re in dire straits, and that has a knock-on effect for our people who are wanting and needing support,” says Russell.

Still, there’s work happening at a national level to strengthen Māori capability.

Ngā Kaitiaki Mauri of Te Ohaaki a Hine is developing tools and resources to support other Māori social services to build confidence and competence in dealing with sexual violence. Rather than centralising a single national model, the focus is on strengthening local Māori providers who already have relationships with their communities.

Over time, they hope to help Māori services expand their own capacity, so whānau don’t have to seek help in systems that are not designed for them.

“Our tūpuna gave us these tools. They are breathed quite deeply into us,” says Russell. “We are basically giving back to our people what belongs rightfully to them.”

Joy and Russell at Te Tii marae, Waitangi. (Photo supplied)

Te Aniwaniwa Paterson (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Rangitihi, Ngā Paerangi, Ngāti Kahungunu) is a journalist and digital producer for Te Ao Māori News based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She represents rangatahi on Ngā Kaitiaki Mauri, the Māori caucus of TOAH-NNEST (the National Network Ending Sexual Violence Together), which operates as a Tiriti o Waitangi-based partnership. She serves alongside Russell Smith and Joy Te Wiata.

E-Tangata, 2026

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