The Wetʼsuwetʼen are a First Nation who live on the Bulkley River and around Burns Lake, Broman Lake, and François Lake in the northwestern Central Interior of British Columbia.

They speak Witsuwitʼen, a dialect of the Babine-Witsuwitʼen language which, like its sister language Carrier, is a member of the Athabaskan family.

Their oral history, called kungax, recounts that their ancestral village, Dizkle or Dzilke, once stood upstream from the Bulkley Canyon. This cluster of cedar houses on both sides of the river is said to have been abandoned because of an omen of impending disaster. The exact location of the village has been lost. The neighbouring Gitxsan people of the Hazelton area have a similar tale, though the village in their version is named Dimlahamid (Temlahan)

The endonym Wetʼsuwetʼen means "People of the Wa Dzun Kwuh River (Bulkley River)"

The Wet’suwet’en First Nation was formerly part of the Omineca Band. However, in 1984 the Omineca Band split into the Broman Lake and Nee-Tahi-Buhn bands. The Skin Tayi band later split off from Nee-Tahi-Buhn. Today, the Skin Tyee Band, Nee Tahi Buhn Band, Wet’suwet’en First Nation, Moricetown Band and Hagwilget Band make up the Wet’suwet’en Nation.

Like most First Nations here, Wet’suwet’en never signed treaties with the Canadian or provincial governments. Nevertheless, the latter took the land and leased forested acreage to logging companies. Today just 20% of British Columbia’s old-growth forests remain.

In 2020, after decades of activist pressure, the province identified about a quarter of the remaining old growth as at high risk for logging and recommended a pause while deciding their fate. Yet today, logging has been deferred in less than half of the high-risk area.

Another conflict with the settler state has been the Coastal GasLink pipeline, which seeks to transport liquefied natural gas from northeast BC to a terminal on the coast near the town of Kitimat.

The 670-kilometre (417-mile) pipeline will cut across traditional Wet’suwet’en lands that cover 22,000sq km across northern BC.

The hereditary chiefs, who under Wet’suwet’en law claim authority over those traditional territories, said they never gave their consent for the project to move forward. They have raised concerns about the pipeline’s potential effects on the land, water, and their community.

In late July, Amnesty International took the extraordinary step in naming Dsta’hyl Canada’s first ever designated prisoner of conscience, and now demanding his immediate and unconditional release.

“The Canadian state has unjustly criminalized and confined Chief Dsta’hyl for defending the land and rights of the Wet’suwet’en people,” Amnesty International’s Ana Piquer stated in a press release. “As a result, Canada joins the shameful list of countries where prisoners of conscience remain under house arrest or behind bars.”

In October 2021, Dsta’hyl was arrested and charged with criminal contempt after confiscating and decommissioning heavy equipment utilized by Coastal GasLink to construct its LNG pipeline on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. Dsta’hyl said he was enforcing Wet’suwet’en laws as the company did not have the free, prior and informed consent of hereditary chiefs to build the pipeline.

• Meet the hereditary chief who Amnesty International calls Canada’s first prisoner of conscience

• Wet'suwet'en Hereditary Chiefs Reject Pipelines

• Invasion

• ‘We can feel our ancestors’: one First Nation’s fight to save Canada’s old forests; The Wet’suwet’en Nation never signed treaties with the Canadian or provincial governments, yet their land was leased

• Yintah (2024)

• Criminalization of Wet’suwet’en land defenders

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• Almost 20% of the Kayapó Indigenous Territory has burned in this year’s Amazon drought, the worst ever recorded in Brazil.
• The land has for years been subjected to illegal mining, cattle ranching and burning of forests, degrading both the soil and rivers and significantly disrupting the way of life for the Mebêngôkre-Kayapó people.
• The Indigenous inhabitants now confront a growing crisis as wildfires and drought threaten their lands, particularly along the Riozinho River.
• According to ecologist Rodolfo Salm, who has worked with the Kayapó since 1996, fire has now surpassed illegal logging as the greatest danger to the region.

SÃO FÉLIX DO XINGU, Brazil — In the village of Tepdjàti, nestled deep within the Kayapó Indigenous Territory in the Brazilian Amazon, the air is thick with smoke and the landscape is parched. The village’s only water source is an artesian well with a solar-power pump. But the thick smoke from nearby wildfires has blocked out the sunlight, leaving the device without any power.

Even water from the nearby river, once a lifeline for the village, has become polluted and undrinkable. “It’s not suitable for bathing, drinking, or preparing our food,” Ngory Maradona Kayapó, a local leader, tells Mongabay. The situation is dire, with crops like bananas, yams and manioc, all vital to the Indigenous villagers’ subsistence, reduced to ash by a recent fire.

This village is just one of many across the Kayapó Indigenous Territory, in the state of Pará, that’s grappling with the devastating effects of Brazil’s worst drought on record. The Riozinho River, which once sustained them, is now dry, forcing them to rely on contaminated streams for water. The drought, coupled with rampant wildfires, has wreaked havoc on the Kayapó way of life. With low river levels, boats, the primary form of transportation, cannot be used for delivering food or medicine or for transporting patients to hospitals. “The medicine that comes from the health service is very little. Many children are suffering from vomiting, diarrhea and fever,” Ngory says.

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The Israeli offensive against northern Gaza continues for the twelfth day in a row, imposing a brutal siege on an area that houses at least 200,000 Palestinians. The offensive, which began in early October, is targeting the town and refugee camp of Jabalia, in addition to Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun, and has featured a massive air and ground assault to destroy the infrastructure that remains in those areas.

The Israeli army ordered residents of northern Gaza to leave, indicating only one route through Salah al-Din Street that extends from Gaza’s north to the south. Most crucially, this prevents residents from fleeing to Gaza City and staying north of Wadi Gaza. Jabalia in particular has received the brunt of the Israeli attack. Eyewitness testimony shared with Mondoweiss indicates that the Israeli army’s strangulation of Jabalia has served as a siege within the larger siege of northern Gaza.

During the recent onslaught, the camp has been pounded with heavy artillery and airstrikes while Palestinian residents have also been targeted with quadcopter drones. On Thursday, October 17, an Israeli airstrike targeted the Abu Hussein boys school in Western Jabalia, where thousands of Palestinians took shelter. The strike, conducted with two air missiles, killed at least 28 Palestinians, including children, and wounded more than 50.

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Muwekma Ohlone Tribe were arrested on their second day of encampment outside capitol building, after their "trail of truth" journey from San Jose, California to DC. Group camped out on the lawn outside the capitol building to protest the governments refusal to recognize the Muwekma tribe federally.

The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe is an unrecognized organization for people who identify as descendants of the Ohlone, an historic Indigenous people of California.

• Before the arrival of European colonizers, rural societies in the Amazon Basin domesticated plants and developed agricultural practices and infrastructure which provided supplies of food and fiber and improved crop yields.
• As missionaries and the expansion of trade brought pathogens into communities which lacked immunity, the number of Indigenous people across the Amazon dropped drastically in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from an estimated 4 to 15 million people to about 400,000.
• In Brazil, a population census in the early 1990s showed an increase of Indigenous population, indicating higher birth rates and increased Indigenous self-identification. Boosting the latter across the Amazon Basin requires policies that prioritize the formalization of land rights of communities with specific ethnic heritage.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Amazonian lowlands were home to several hundred ethnic groups living in tens of thousands of villages with a population estimated at between four and fifteen million inhabitants. Over millennia, these societies transformed landscapes along the main stem of the Amazon River and its major southern tributaries by developing agricultural practices that created dark earth soils, a technology that improved the physical and chemical properties of tropical soils, increased their productivity and ensured their sustainable use over centuries.

Tragically, all of these societies collapsed in the fifteenth and sixteenth and centuries, when epidemics caused by pathogens introduced during the Colombian Exchange burned through their communities. Although archaeology has yet to discover all the gruesome details, these societies were particularly susceptible to pandemics because of their relatively high population density and a trade network that promoted cultural interactions. The population is believed to have fallen to fewer than 400,000 individuals in a cataclysmic demographic collapse.

The rubber boom of the late nineteenth century led to another round of decimation, as Indigenous communities were enslaved, displaced or massacred. Most survived as ethnic entities by fleeing deeper into the forest, occupying forest landscapes along tertiary tributaries or remote valleys in the Andean foothills and Guiana highlands. Anthropologists estimate that Amazonian Brazil had a population of only about 100,000 Indigenous people in the mid-1970s.

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After the completion of a land transfer from Honeywell International on Sept. 30, the Onondaga Nation reclaimed over 1,000 acres of their historic land, which include the pristine headwaters of Onondaga Creek and a bounty of native wildlife and natural medicines.

Hill, the Tadodaho of the Onondaga Nation, remembers swimming in the creek water as a child. Nowadays, Hill said, children don’t swim in the creek, whose downstream waters are brown and murky. Those downstream waters run full with silt and other deposits from mud boils, caused by salt mining.

“You have Onondaga Creek, you have Onondaga Lake. Can’t use these places,” Hill said. “I’m an Onondaga. What’s that tell you?”

Here, however, in the land the Onondagas reacquired, dozens of headwaters remain clean, clear and cold – safe for consumption, and ideal for native brook trout to thrive.

The 1,000 acres — two separate 758-acre and 256-acre parcels — are a mere fraction of the 2.5 million acres guaranteed to the Onondagas in treaties with the US government. This title transfer, though, represents a critical milestone in the Nation’s ongoing battle to regain its ancestral lands.

The transfer of land followed a 2022 resolution from the The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation that came as part of a broader plan to restore Onondaga Lake. The agencies directed Honeywell International, the corporation that owned the land, to cede the title of the parcels to the Onondaga Nation.

For more than half a century, Honeywell conducted solution salt mining, a process in which water is pumped underground to dissolve salt and push the brine to the surface. Decades of mining depleted the soil, leaving massive vacuums where the salt once was.

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A year ago, Palestinians began to experience new levels of their ongoing catastrophe, the Nakba, which started 76 years ago. In response to the attack that killed roughly 1,200 Israelis and caused a major embarrassment to the Israeli army and intelligence, Israel unleashed an extermination campaign on Gaza, leveling entire residential blocks, destroying education and health institutions, eliminating the basic infrastructure needed to sustain a society, and burying entire families under the rubble.

In the West Bank, Israeli settlers set out to forcibly expel Palestinian rural communities and steal the lands of Palestinian towns and villages. The Israeli army ramped up its spree of raids on refugee camps, destroying their infrastructure, and systematically forcing inhabitants to live in a situation similar to the one lived in Gaza.

I have lived in Palestine almost all my life. The Nakba has always been part of my consciousness. Its continuity has been my reality. However, there are particular dimensions to the experience of living the Nakba that I had never known, except in the memories of those who lived in its early years. My father, who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, always struggles to contain his tears when he describes the refugee families, expelled from West Jerusalem, Lydd, Ramleh, and their surrounding villages, and how they were still sleeping in stables and caves in our hometown in the late 1950s because all the houses were taken.

He would describe how they had lost all their possessions and were forced into underpaid labor in the fields to sustain themselves, how some of their children had bare floors for beds, and how they had gradually started to become part of the town’s social fabric. Some of them, with peasant origins, took their sick children to the church in our Christian town and, despite being Muslims, had them baptized out of simple religiosity, imploring the Virgin, the saints, and the prophet Muhammad to heal them because they couldn’t afford medical care.

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For two years, Latino health advocates have pushed for legislation that would require the state to collect better health data on the number of Mesoamerican indigenous peoples who immigrate to California. After a blow to their efforts in 2023, the proponents of SB1016, also known as the Latino and Indigenous Disparities Reduction Act, are now celebrating—Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law on September 28.

The Latino and Indigenous Disparities Reduction Act passed both chambers of the California State Legislature with overwhelming support in August. Now, with Gov. Newsom’s sign-off, the California Department of Public Health will begin distinguishing Mesoamerican indigenous groups in health data about Latinos. Indigenous peoples from Latin America are typically lumped into government data about Latinos, although many do not identify as Latinos themselves. The World Bank estimates there are 780 indigenous peoples and 560 indigenous languages spoken in Latin America.

The California Department of Public Health will include 10 nationalities and six languages in data collection and will leave a blank space in surveys for people to fill out additional demographic information. The agency will have five years to produce a report that includes rates for major diseases, leading causes of death, and information about pregnancy, housing, and mental health. Then, the department will begin issuing annual reports.

Full article

The Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, were a series of coordinated attacks carried out by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) from the Gaza Strip in areas bordering Israel on October 7, 2023. The attacks marked the beginning of the war between Israel and the Gaza Strip that continues to this day.

Operation al-Aqsa Flood was a significant turning point in the Palestinian struggle, marking the most fundamental change in the philosophy of resistance since the First Intifada (1987). The Palestinians, who for many decades thought that they would end the occupation and establish an independent state thanks to the support of the Arab world, realized by the mid-1970s that the Arabs would not take the necessary steps in this regard.

The leadership of the Palestinian resistance realized that the only path to progress depended on their own will and initiative, and launched a massive uprising against Israel with the power of its people. The First Intifada, therefore, led to a significant paradigm shift in the Palestinian resistance. Rather than waiting for a move from the international community or the Arab world, the local struggle against the occupying Zionist regime, albeit with limited means, could enable Palestine to make gains toward independence.

This new strategy also allowed the Palestinian resistance to institutionalize and build a strong identity. Moreover, the establishment of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) at the beginning of the First Intifada signaled that not only a methodological but also an ideological transformation would take place in the Palestinian resistance. As a matter of fact, in the following years, Hamas’ conception of the political order, the methods it used, the discourse it produced, and its clear stance against the Israeli occupation resulted in this movement finding a response throughout Palestine and becoming one of the most powerful actors in Palestinian political life

Hamas’ determined strategy over the years and the combat experience of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades allowed for the launch of an operation against Israel from Gaza. The operation, which began on the morning of October 7, marked a paradigm shift in the aftermath of the First Intifada. The Gazan resistance elements, led by the Qassam Brigades, shifted from a defensive model of resistance against Israeli attacks to an offensive strategy of multi-pronged infiltration. In addition, establishing a “joint operation center” of 12 different resistance groups to fight against the occupation forces in a coordinated manner was also noteworthy in uniting all Palestinian groups against the common enemy

As the first hours of Operation al-Aqsa Flood sent shockwaves through the Israeli side, the first signs of psychological damage also surfaced. For years, the Israeli state has created a convincing myth about the effectiveness and competence of its intelligence units. The undermining of the general belief that any action posing a threat to Israel inside or outside Palestine would be detected in advance and necessary measures would be taken constituted the first leg of psychological damage that started on October 7.

In addition to the failure of the potent intelligence myth after the operation, another myth that collapsed was related to the Iron Dome air defense system. The Iron Dome, widely regarded as one of the most potent air defense systems in the world, failed to fully defend Israel from thousands of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades missiles. This meant that even points far from Gaza could now threatened by the resistance. The failure of the system it had built has caused more damage than ever to Israel’s state machinery and society. In addition, the neutralization of a large number of army officers and the capture of hundreds of prisoners in the first hours of the operation shows how Operation al-Aqsa Flood dismantled the Israeli security apparatus.

The operation Al-Aqsa Flood and its subsequent local, regional and global repercussions, restored the Palestinian cause to its pivotal position on the Arab, regional and international levels, placing it in a central position amongst the general public as a liberation struggle against colonialism and uprooting racism. This provides an exceptional historical opportunity to reestablish the Palestinian cause on the international level as liberation struggle, facing the most unjust racist colonial aims in modern and contemporary history. This significant issue places a heavy load on not only the liberation activists, but also all the vigorous social actors around the world, especially in the Arab region, who bear the responsibility to take action. Those people are obliged to pursue all possible means to support the Palestinian cause and keep pace with the global solidarity with this cause at various political, diplomatic, legal, media, cultural and intellectual levels.

• Operation al-Aqsa Flood: A Rupture in the History of the Palestinian Resistance and Its Implications

• Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the Aftermath: Towards a Global Action for Liberation of Palestine

• Oct 7th and the 'Mass Hannibal Directive'

• The Gaza Ghetto Uprising

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Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
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A mine excavating coal beneath greater Sydney’s water catchment has damaged a site of “significant” cultural heritage, prompting an investigation by the New South Wales government and warnings from Indigenous elders about “a second Juukan Gorge”.

A routine inspection at the Dendrobium coalmine near Cordeaux dam in March found fracturing and associated rock falls beneath an overhang that features culturally significant artwork, authorities say. Subsidence, as soil and rocks sank into the void left by the mining, is blamed for the cracking.

Four months later, on 25 July, the then mine owner South 32 invited WaterNSW and the registered Aboriginal parties to inspect the damage to the site. The First Nations’ stakeholders were distressed by what they saw, authorities said.

Paul Knight, a former head of the Illawarra Local Aboriginal Land Council, one of the mine’s registered Aboriginal parties, said the damage from coalmining was just the latest involving cultural and environmental sites on the Woronora plateau region north-west of Wollongong.

Knight, who is a traditional custodian of the area, noted that Dendrobium and other mines within the Illawarra Metallurgical Coal group were approved with a “performance measure” based on modelling that less than 10% of such sites would be affected by subsidence.

“The whole system is flawed in terms of accountability,” he said, adding it was up to the mine owner to report damage. Its inspection teams may not visit each year and traditional owners had only limited visiting rights.

Knight said destruction or damage to one site potentially disturbed links to the landscape as a whole.

“Songlines are basically a journey, a path of a story,” he said. “Now if you damage one in the middle, that’s like removing a whole section of pathway [and] you can never journey take that journey again because you’ve disconnected.”

Sydney is among the few cities anywhere in the world to allow mining within its water catchment areas. Scientists have argued for years that the longwalls were causing cracks to reach the surface, diverting water away from some of the 1,000 upland swamps in the Woronora plateau and reducing inflows into nearby dams.

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The nepohualtzintzin is a calculation device used in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican cultures, including the Mayans, that is now making a comeback in several education programs, which are making use of this powerful tool to teach mathematics at an early age in a completely organic way.

Maskwacis, Alberta, Canada - Nadalie Lightning stares out of her living room window praying to wake up from what she describes as a nightmare. In the early hours of August 30, her 15-year-old grandson Hoss Lightning Saddleback was shot and killed by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers after what the RCMP describe as a “confrontation” in the nearby city of Wetaskiwin.

Nadalie is devastated by the loss and struggling to understand how a call for help turned fatal. On the night of his death, Hoss had initially reached out to his grandmother in desperation.

"He was calling me that night. I missed 18 calls," Nadalie revealed, her voice breaking with emotion as the screen on her phone showed her grandson’s attempts to contact her. "He texted me right here at 1:01am, 'Can you come pick me up?' And then it's just, 'I called the police.'"

She had been the one who had always told her grandson to call the police if he was ever in trouble. According to an RCMP release, it was Hoss who had called them, believing people were following him and trying to kill him.

That afternoon members of the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT) showed up at her doorstep asking Nadalie to identify her grandson, one of a string of Indigenous people to have died during interactions with police in Canada since late August.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, the former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations RoseAnne Archibald, expressed her frustration at what she emphasised was a longrunning issue.

"[The First Nations have] been sounding the alarm bell for a long time - for many, many years,” Archibald said. “This has happened time and time again. They’re just trying to kill us off, it’s maddening. Is that the first way they deal with us, is violence towards us?”

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One of the things Ka-Voka Jackson, the Cultural Resources director of the Hualapai Nation, most appreciates about Ha’Kamwe’ is its peacefulness. Located on a former ranch in western Arizona, the hot spring is framed by rolling desert hills. Though trucks may sometimes drive down a nearby dirt road, it’s mostly quiet. That serenity is an important part of Hualapai cultural practices that have taken place here for millennia, from gathering plants to holding ceremonies.

“When we visit and we look across the landscape, that’s the same landscape that our ancestors looked at and that our ancestors lived in, and so we hold a deep connection with the integrity of that landscape,” Jackson said.

But amid the green energy boom, Ha’Kamwe’ is threatened by lithium exploration by the Australia-based company Arizona Lithium (AZL), and these days, peace seems elusive. Already, the mining company has drilled approximately 50 exploratory wells near the hot springs, disturbing the tribe’s cultural practices and threatening the aquifer. Since 2021, when High Country News first covered the threat that this drilling poses to Hualapai religious practices, the Bureau of Land Management has signed off on even more drilling near Ha’Kamwe’. This July, the BLM approved AZL’s plan to bore approximately 130 more wells near the hot spring, reaching more than 300 feet deep and surrounding the hot spring on three sides. AZL will construct drill pads sites, roads and other support infrastructure as it surveys the area further for a potential open-pit lithium mine.

On Aug. 8, the Hualapai Nation sued the BLM and the Department of the Interior. According to the lawsuit, the agencies violated multiple laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act, in approving this new phase of exploratory mining. Since September, AZL has been under a temporary restraining order to prevent further drilling.

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The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is arguably one of the most important non-state actors in modern West Asia. While fighting a brutal guerrilla war against the Turkish government, it has also managed to inspire Kurdish movements in Syria, Iraq and Iran, as well as Iran’s non-Kurdish protesters. In a region where many parties are nakedly sectarian, the PKK has gone from Marxist-Leninist nationalism to a form of radical-democratic “libertarian municipalism” inspired by the late anarchist thinker Murray Bookchin.

For better or worse, the PKK exists today only because the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), a now-obscure Palestinian force, agreed to shelter some Kurdish exiles in the 1980s. That experience in the Palestinian camps permanently affected the worldview of the PKK’s founding generation. Not only did the PKK learn how to fight a guerrilla war, it also walked away with a strong sense of internationalism.

In fact, some of the PKK’s founding figures spent time in an Israeli detention camp as prisoners of war. Old issues of the party magazine Serxwebun tell the remarkable story of the “Beaufort Castle Heroes,” a group of Kurds who had been training at a Palestinian base in Lebanon when they were captured by Israeli forces in June 1982. (Serxwebun means “independence” in Kurdish.) New Lines is reporting much of their story in English for the first time.

The June 1984 edition of Serxwebun features drawings and poetry from the prisoners, including one Iranian Kurdish fighter. The Iranian Kurd, codenamed Sami, recalled being beaten by an Israeli interrogator who shouted, “You came to kill Jews, you’re lying … Kurdistan, Turkistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Arab, you are all antisemitic, we will kill you all.”

The PKK was just one of many foreign fighter contingents in Lebanon. (Sami was captured alongside a Bangladeshi fighter, and another Serxwebun article mentioned the presence of an Iranian from the left-wing People’s Fedai Guerrillas.) At the time, the Palestinian movement was the international leftist cause celebre, and leftists understood it to be part of an unbroken chain of Third World liberation struggles.

“If you know Vietnam, you know Kurdistan … a new Vietnam in our hearts,” Sami wrote in a poem. “To the defenseless prisoner in Diyarbakir, to the leaf on the tree in Vietnam, to the living being in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the orphan baby in Sabra and Shatila.”

Full Article

Extra reading: PKK Internationalists in the Palestinian Resistance

• The Indonesian government is embarking on yet another project to establish a massive area of farmland at the expense of forests and Indigenous lands, despite a long history of near-identical failures.
• The latest megaproject calls for clearing 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) in the district of Merauke in the eastern region of Papua for rice fields.
• Local Indigenous communities say they weren’t consulted about the project, and say the heavy military presence on the ground appears to be aimed at silencing their protests.
• Similar megaprojects, on Borneo and more recently also in Merauke, all failed, leaving behind destroyed landscapes, with the current project also looking “assured to fail,” according to an agricultural researcher.

JAKARTA — Indigenous Papuans say they’ve been caught off guard by helicopters flying over their villages and excavators tearing down their forests in their area, all while accompanied by the Indonesian military.

What they’re being subjected to is one of the largest deforestation projects in the world, which will see the development of 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of rice fields in Merauke, a district in Indonesia’s Papua region that borders Papua New Guinea.

The military is involved in the project because it’s led by the Ministry of Defense and has been designated a project of national strategic importance. Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto, who will be sworn in as Indonesia’s next president on Oct. 20, has appointed the hugely controversial Jhonlin Group to help administer the project.

The military’s involvement, coupled with the lack of free, prior, informed consent (FPIC) from Indigenous communities living in the area, have fueled concerns that the project will create new conflicts in the region.

Indonesia has maintained a heavy military presence in the Papua region since annexing it in 1963, with security forces frequently accused of committing human rights violations under the justification of cracking down on a low-level independence movement.

Full article

ONONDAGA NATION TERRITORY (AP) — The Onondaga Nation has regained 1,000 acres (405 hectares) of its ancestral land in upstate New York, a tiny portion of the land members say was unjustly taken by the state beginning in the 18th century.

The heavily forested land is south of Syracuse and near the Onondaga’s federally recognized territory. The land, which includes headwaters of Onondaga Creek, was transferred by Honeywell International on Friday under a federal Superfund settlement related to the contamination of the environment, according to the Onondaga Nation.

The land is part of an expanse of 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) in central New York the Onondagas say was taken over decades by New York beginning in 1788 through deceitful maneuvers that violated treaties and federal law.

Sid Hill, the Tadodaho, or chief, of the Onondaga Nation, said Monday they were grateful to federal and state officials for working with them to return “the first 1,000 acres of the 2.5 million acres of treaty-guaranteed land taken from us over the centuries.”

“This is a small but important step for us, and for the Indigenous land back movement across the United States,” Hill said in a prepared statement.

“Tansi, today we are going through some random phrases,” Julia Ouellette says to the camera. She holds up slips of paper with English words while repeating the Cree translations quickly and then slowly. “tantahtwaw,” she says, holding a paper that says “how many,” emphasizing each syllable. “tantahtwaw. Repeat after me.”

Ouellette, a grandmother from Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation in Saskatchewan, posts Cree-language videos regularly on TikTok, where she has more than 16,800 followers. The videos are casual, with a simple formula: Ouellette, in glasses, with her hair tied back, offers viewers a few Cree words or phrases to practise aloud. In both languages, her voice has the distinct quality of a Cree speaker: rich and resonant, her “r”s and “l”s—consonants not found in Cree—are especially pronounced when she speaks English. A former language teacher at Big Island Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, she started posting videos on TikTok in 2020 that included such COVID-era phrases as “wash your hands” (kasichiche) and “get away” (awas), along with more cheerful ones, like “Merry Christmas” (miyo-manitowi-kîsikanisi). Ouellette never writes out the Cree words or phrases, instead instructing the viewer to repeat what they hear.

Ouellette is part of a growing community of Indigenous-language speakers using social media as a teaching tool. James Vukelich Kaagegaabaw, a descendant of Turtle Mountain, shares an Ojibwe word regularly with his 135,000 Instagram followers. Jonathan Augustine, who goes by RezNeck Farmer on TikTok, shares Mi’kmaw lessons along with folksy videos about gardening. Zorga Qaunaq, under the username Tatiggat, posts on TikTok about daily life, beading, and Inuit culture, alongside how to properly pronounce words like “Inuit.”

Full article