cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3776799

Beef is one of America’s most beloved foods. In fact, today’s average American eats three hamburgers per week.

American diets have long revolved around beef. On an 1861 trip to the United States, the English novelist Anthony Trollope marveled that Americans consumed twice as much beef as Englishmen. Through war, industry, development and settlement, America’s love of beef continued. In 2022, the U.S. as a whole consumed almost 30 billion pounds (13.6 billion kilograms) of it, or 21% of the world’s beef supply.

Beef has also reached iconic status in American culture. As “Slaughterhouse-Five” author Kurt Vonnegut once penned, “Being American is to eat a lot of beef, and boy, we’ve got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that’s why you ought to be glad you’re an American.”

In part, the dominance of beef in American cuisine can be traced to settler colonialism, a form of colonization in which settlers claim – and then transform – lands inhabited by Indigenous people. In America, this process centered on the systemic and often violent displacement of Native Americans. Settlers brought with them new cultural norms, including beef-heavy diets that required massive swaths of land for grazing cattle.

As a food historian, I am interested in how, in the 19th century, the beef industry both propelled and benefited from colonialism, and how these intertwined forces continue to affect our diets, culture and environment today.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3759886

Millions of bison once roamed the grasslands, until colonialism nearly wiped them out. Now, Indigenous people are bringing them back and restoring balance to their homelands

My Métis ancestors hunted and lived relationally with Buffalo, and I can envision how the prairies must have looked hundreds of years ago when millions roamed freely from Alaska’s boreal forests to the western grasslands of Mexico, across the continent from Banff to the eastern Appalachian Mountains. Then colonizers nearly wiped them out, part of a deliberate genocidal effort to starve the Indigenous nations of the plains.

Now, there are far fewer Buffalo to be seen, but Indigenous communities are working to rematriate them to the grasslands. Rematriation, a concept advanced by the late Sto:lo author Lee Maracle, is the process of restoring lands and cultures, done with deep reverence to honour not only the past and present but also the future, and rooted in Indigenous law.

The Buffalo Treaty, signed in September 2014 by eight nations, now has more than 50 signatories and includes 11 articles emphasizing co-operation, renewal and the restoration of Buffalo populations. This cross-border collaboration aims to return Buffalo to their rightful wild status, as they are currently considered “domestic” due to their historical confinement, a word that hardly suits their ancestral legacy.

Buffalo don’t care about borders, and yet, there are rigid regulations in place that stop their movement. The treaty envisions ecological corridors that will allow Buffalo to migrate and roam freely, similar to elk, bears, deer and moose. These corridors are essential for maintaining genetic diversity, supporting the vast ecosystem dynamics of the plains, preserving cultural and spiritual connections for Indigenous peoples and ensuring the long-term viability of bison populations by preventing overgrazing and disease outbreaks.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3680066

• The WAP Complex of protected areas that straddles the border region of Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger is one of West Africa’s most important protected areas and a haven for many iconic endangered species.
• Servals, caracals and African wildcats are also found in the WAP Complex, but almost nothing is known about their status, distribution, ecology or threats.
• Covert surveys of medicine markets in the region have found serval and caracal skins, though it’s not known if the skins originated within the WAP Complex.
• The presence of jihadist militants in the region severely impacts conservation and research, particularly in the Niger and Burkina Faso portions of the complex.

In the border region between Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso lies a network of protected areas that form one of the largest intact wildernesses in West Africa. The W-Arly-Pendjari (WAP) Complex is a mosaic of gallery forests, savannas and riparian habitats, and the last refuge for many of the region’s most iconic species, including West African lions (Panthera leo leo), savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) and cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus).

With conservation focused on these threatened and beloved species, it’s easy for the small cats to get lost. There are three species of small cats — servals (Leptailurus serval), caracals (Caracal caracal) and African wildcats (Felis lybica) — in the WAP complex. Though all three have a conservation status of least concern on the IUCN Red List, there are few hard facts about their numbers in the WAP Complex or West Africa. With continuing insecurity plaguing the region, and little money for small cat research, these species risk falling even further into obscurity.

At the heart of the WAP Complex lie three strictly protected areas: Pendjari National Park in Benin, Arly National Park in Burkina Faso, and W Regional Park, which straddles the Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger border region. Together, these parks, along with adjoining hunting zones, wildlife reserves and areas under other forms of protection, cover 34,000 square kilometers (13,100 square miles). The core area, about half of it, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Over the past few years, the region has been plagued by insecurity. Jihadist militants are entrenched in the Burkina Faso and Niger portions of the complex, with violence increasingly spilling over into Benin. Conservation work has become difficult and dangerous, though South Africa-based organization African Parks, which manages Pendjari National Park and the Benin portion of W, still carries out some biomonitoring activities, says Jacques Kougbadi, marketing and communications coordinator for African Parks.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3615203

The Empresa de China ("China enterprise") was a long-time projected conquest of China by the Spanish Empire. Proposed repeatedly through the 16th century as a natural culmination of the conquest of the Philippines, it involved the invasion and assimilation of the Ming dynasty by a coalition that would include Spaniards, Portuguese, Filipinos and Japanese from the Toyotomi regency, as well as potential masses of Chinese allies.

Military conquest of China appeared viable by the reports of Christian missionaries and ambassadors, who described the Ming population as demobilized, inefficiently administered and easy to sublevate against their own governors, offering a situation similar to those of the Aztec and Inca empires where control of the territory could be wrested away. Once conquered, the plan included mass evangelizing activities and the promotion of mestizaje between Iberians and Chinese, hoping to turn China into a source of strength to extend Hispanic control and Christianity across all of Asia. In a best case scenario, the Spanish Empire could aspire to form an oriental theater in the Ottoman–Habsburg wars.

The enterprise was formulated by several figures of the Hispanic Monarchy, but its main driving force would be a sector of the Society of Jesus led by Alonzo Sánchez, who clashed against other churchmen over the Vitorian legitimacy of a new conquest. King Philip II allowed in 1588 the founding of an official council, the Junta de la Empresa de China, but the failure of the Spanish Armada the same year caused the project to be abandoned. The invasion of China briefly resurfaced later, with a new project to topple the Toyotomi regency and conquer Japan with the help of its own native uprising, potentially including Tokugawa Ieyasu, after which the Japanese armies would be used against China.

"Dude just conquer the Ming dynasty and half of Asia so you can open a new front against the ottomans"

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3608218

Giant Canada geese, so ubiquitous today in cities across the country, were once considered extinct. What can we learn from watching them up close?

In the opening minutes of Karsten Wall’s short film, Modern Goose, a flock of geese arrives in a cacophony of honks, barks, cackles and splashes, as it touches down in a human-made pond behind an outlet mall. The ruckus blends with the hum of traffic as they waddle under the neon glow of billboards and parking lot lights, picking at patches of grass and dodging vehicles in the drive-thru lane.

It’s a scene that would feel familiar in most Canadian cities, where geese have become ubiquitous to daily life. As it happens, these geese are Winnipeggers, descendants of a historically significant flock once thought to have disappeared altogether.

“A lot of people in the cities consider them pests, but then a lot of people go to Fort Whyte to watch the migration,” he says. “It was important to me to just let people sit and appreciate their amazing flying abilities, their migration abilities and how well they’re actually doing.”

There are other aspects of goose life that are relatable to humans. They mate for life (with just a 15 per cent separation rate, according to a Canadian field naturalist study titled “Divorce in Canada Geese”), raise their young together and migrate as a family. When female geese mature and find mates, they return to the place they were hatched to build nests of their own.

With today’s geese so abundant, it’s difficult to imagine a world without them.

But at the turn of the 20th century, unregulated hunting, egg collection and habitat erosion had nearly wiped out North America’s goose population and the giant Canada goose was thought to have disappeared altogether.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3601667

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.”

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Extra reading: PKK Internationalists in the Palestinian Resistance

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3600404

• 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

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3600098

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.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3595011

“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.”

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3556271

'Colonial-rooted poverty will not be solved by more colonial solutions'

Thirty-four years ago, Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel was thrust into the spotlight when she was chosen as the spokesperson for the Kanienʼkehá:ka (Mohawk) communities of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke, as they resisted the planned expansion of a golf course on into their sacred lands and burial grounds in southern Quebec and police and military attempted to subdue them by force.

“You do not call it the Oka Crisis,” Gabriel tells me, of the village near the golf course that media and Canadians generally use to refer to the confrontation. “Oka caused the crisis. It was Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke that were under siege, and were attacked because of the municipality of Oka and the private corporations behind the project.”

In the decades since the 78-day standoff ended, Gabriel has remained a steadfast defender of Indigenous homelands and an advocate for Indigenous Rights and sovereignty, particularly the rights of women. She has spoken at the United Nations and addressed Parliament, and served for more than six years as president of the Quebec Native Women’s Association, drawing connections between the protection of Indigenous lands and the rights, dignity and future of Indigenous nations.

In a new book, When the Pine Needles Fall, Gabriel and settler historian Sean Carleton chart a course from the events of 1990 to the present, while extending into a generous and expansive vision of the future. The book, which they began writing in 2019, evolved during the pandemic, taking shape as a series of conversations that articulate the urgency and necessity of Indigenous resistance. Centring Gabriel’s own words through dialogue, Carleton writes, was a way to “divest my power and authority as an academic to create space for Ellen’s brilliance … to hold space and amplify Ellen’s voice, while also co-creating through conversation.”

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3534540

As the helicopter approached Caas Tl’aat Kwah (also known as Serb Creek), a 1,600-hectare (about 3,953-acre) watershed, the forest became a blanket of deep green, cleaved only by yellow-green wetlands threaded with glacial blue streams.

“We want to conserve it for future generations,” said Charlotte Euverman, the Wet’suwet’en woman leading a fight to save this area, which includes a traditional feasting site. “We have to leave them something.”

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

Now Caas Tl’aat Kwah is in the crosshairs of a debate over the scope of First Nations’ agency, biodiversity loss and protection – and the role industrial logging plays in amplifying Canada’s forest fires, the effects of which are being felt across the globe.

In summer 2023, more than 150,000 sq km (58,000 sq miles) burned across the country, an all-time record, carrying smoke across the continent and air pollution all the way to Europe and China.

Caas Tl’aat Kwah is not yet accessible by road, so the helicopter ride was the first opportunity for Nation member Sandra Harris to see it, despite the fact that her great-grandfather, Jack Joseph, once had a cabin there. The pilot set the helicopter down upon a boggy meadow, and DeWit, who is acting director of the Office of Wet’suwet’en, led the way through the trees to a newer cabin, where he gave a framed photo of Joseph pride of place.

Harris explained the significance of seeing the land, saying: “We have a lot of stress in our lives with racism, working with colonial systems that are so unkind to our ways.” The land is healing, she said.

“Today, we can feel our ancestors,” Harris said. “We remember our stories when we are able to put our feet on the land … There’s lots of good medicine there for us.”

Conventional wisdom has long held that increased fire severity is due not just to climate change but also dense overgrowth from fire suppression. The prescription has been to thin forests and set controlled burns. But a growing number of scientists now say that approach fails to recognize the role of industrial logging in increased fire severity: it kills complex communities of life that stabilize the water cycle.

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