The Misaks: Balance and Harmony as Medicine
For the peaceful Misak people of Colombia’s Andean region, harmony and balance are the most important medicines, and they are willing to fight for them.
The Kamëntšá Biyá: Land Use Planning in Defense of the Sacred
Territorial planning is sacred work for the Kamëntsá Biyá people of the Upper Putumayo region in Colombia. Their approach reflects a radically different view of land use — one that is integrally connected with their view of public health.
A journey through ancient cultures during the pandemic that shook the world
Cosmology & Pandemic: What We Can Learn From Indigenous Responses to the Current Health Crisis is many things at once. It’s a transmedia series — meaning a series of articles and films and other forms of media that work together in concert. In this case, it’s a collaboration between my longtime friend and colleague, Argentine […]
Celebrating Katira: 65 Years of Magic and Activism
I met Juan José Uxamuire “Katira” Ramírez 10 years ago this coming February. I had just come down from the mountaintop of Cerro Quemado, the Birthplace of the Sun, along with about a thousand other pilgrims, gathered there in a historic all-night ceremony to pray for the salvation of the sacred desert of Wirikuta from […]
Totem pole travels to unite Native struggles
Perhaps no other Native people knows better than the Lummi the risks of megaprojects imposed on indigenous communities without consultation or consent. The tribe’s ancestral territory is located at a prime Northwest Pacific Coast shipping juncture. Battling against proliferation of toxic oil pipelines and coal ports, the heirs of Washington state’s original human settlements took […]
Lakota child boarding school victims come home to rest
Malorie Arrow recalls the Sicangu Lakota Youth Council members’ tour of the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania like it was yesterday. Their last stop was at the gravesites of children who had died while attending the boarding school some 140 years ago. They laid small pieces of candy on the graves as offerings. Her cousins […]
Native independence events snuff out governor’s fireworks dreams
RAPID CITY – Grassroots Native treaty rights events here during the national Independence Day holiday this 4th of July featured a peaceful but spectacular civil disobedience action: Four indigenous technical climbers scaled downtown’s landmark private grain elevator to drop a gigantic, inverted U.S. flag from the top. “An upside-down flag represents being in distress and […]
The Blackfoot Wisdom that Inspired Maslow's Hierarchy
Some months ago, I was telling a friend that I had come across unpublished papers by Abraham Maslow suggesting changes to his famous Hierarchy of Needs. Roberto Rivera, Executive Director of Alliance for the 7th Generation, was familiar with the subject and turned me on to something else I didn’t know.
Native hemp farming, opportunity to lead New Green Revolution
This fall, when we bring in the sheaves, they will be of hemp. Then we’ll have a harvest hoedown to follow up.
Mapuches revitalize 'blue' indigenous economy in Chile
Regardless of whether or not one belongs to a First Nation, more and more people and communities are seeking to resume a good life, that is, to achieve common and personal well-being in coexistence with our living planet. Throughout history, and now more than ever, learning from First Nations and the traditional knowledge they offer may be the key to our resilience as living beings “to survive well together” in the Anthropocene.
Anti-Pipeline Grandmothers Launch Treaty People Gathering
ST. PAUL, Minnesota – At the state Governor’s Mansion on Anishinaabe (Ojibway) ancestral land, 1,000 grandmothers rallied “for future generations” May 26th. They timed the event to punctuate a call from organizers worldwide urging allies to attend the Treaty People Gathering for non-violent direct actions against oil pipelines during the first week of June 2021. […]
Day of Awareness honors missing, murdered Native relatives
LAME DEER, Montana — With more than 200 organizations across Turtle Island backing May 5 as a National Day of Awareness for Missing Native Women and Girls, the date received widespread attention in 2021. The national movement to end violence against Native women has organized activities supporting the commemoration since 2017. The five-year campaign, led […]
Conversations with LaDonna and Cheryl
Many thousands this past weekend were hit hard by the news that we had lost a living treasure on Earth, the inimitable and irreplaceable LaDonna Allard. The Lakota historian, water protector and Standing Rock movement founder had been struggling for a long time with brain cancer. And even though those of us who love her […]
LaDonna fights on in the resistance of Native youth
FORT YATES, N.D. – As the Standing Rock Sioux Nation prepared for services April 16-19 honoring late water protector LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, Native youth carried on the crusade to defend treaty land from pipeline construction, which she inspired when she established the Sacred Stone Camp near here five years ago. Known as Tamaka Waste […]
As temps rise, so do water protector arrests
Construction of Enbridge’s Line 3 faces growing resistance led by Indigenous groups who see the project as a violation of treaty rights.
Oak Flat: Fresh hope for menaced Apache sacred land
OAK FLAT, Arizona — To make good on Joe Biden’s recent Presidential Memorandum for tribal consultation and strengthening nation-to-nation relationships, the U.S. Forest Service on has rescinded its permit for a massive foreign copper mine that would engulf sacred Apache sites here. For years, the two biggest metal mining companies in the world, Rio Tinto […]
The American Borderlands and the Rights of the Child
On Christmas Eve, 2018, in a remote corner of the Texan desert, Esperanza Project editor Tracy Barnett interviewed activists organizing a creative resistance against the detainment of thousands of youths at the now defunct Tornillo Child Detention Center. It was deep in winter and the wind bit at the chain-link fence as she spoke with […]
Native observers question 'nefarious' attitude toward Deb Haaland
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Deb Haaland, the first Native American nominated to be a Cabinet secretary, remained characteristically cool under grilling from Republican petroleum industry defenders during Senate committee hearings, ultimately gaining a recommendation March 4 for confirmation to the post at the Interior Department. U.S. President-elect Joe Biden nominated Haaland as Interior secretary to put […]
Navajo Nation: From No. 1 in infections to No. 1 in vaccinations
TUCSON, Ariz. – Even though Agnes Attakai is a longtime Indian health administrator, she had no way of knowing that her Diné family members would become a textbook illustration of Native America’s disadvantages in facing the Covid-19 pandemic. Then she was forced to say goodbye to two aunts, an uncle and a cousin who succumbed […]
Colombia's resilient Wayuu resist global and local threats
La Guajira is a dry and windy peninsular desert region between Northeast Colombia and Northwest Venezuela. The striking landscape has been harsh and borderline uninhabitable for many thousands of years. The southernmost parts of the peninsula border the slopes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range, where the principal waterway of La Guajira is born, […]
Tokata Iron Eyes stars at Black Hills Film Festival
HILL CITY, S.D. — A Standing Rock Sioux teen tribal member is among Native headliners to play on the moving picture screen beginning Feb. 22 during the Black Hills Film Festival’s 12th annual season. Lakota youth pipeline fighter and climate justice advocate Tokata Iron Eyes stars in “My Name Is Future,” a new independent feature […]
Putting the Heart Back in the Valley by Putting the Fire Back in the Ground
“Restoration of habitats and regenerative, localized food production need to be foundational in our economies moving forward. We should be turning resources towards these efforts with the same vigor the destruction and depletion was carried out with. Sucking the life out of our lands while polluting the water to grow human fodder void of nutrition […]
Lakota call out inequity in law enforcement at U.S. Capitol riot
PHILIP, South Dakota – The difference in law enforcement handling of peaceful Native pipeline resisters compared to that of the violent mob that breached the U.S. Capitol Building was an inequity not lost on Indian Country. “At a time when white rioters are being let off the hook after raiding the nation’s Capitol and driving […]
Defending the Birthplace of the Sun
It’s been a decade now since Mexico experienced its Standing Rock moment. It was the native Wixárika people—better known internationally by their Spanish name, the Huicholes—who galvanized a global movement with their call for help. In the north-central state of San Luis Potosí, one of their most sacred sites—the Birthplace of the Sun—was being readied for […]
Deb Haaland: First Native woman tapped for Interior Secretary
“Haaland’s appointment gives us a voice in a department that has long been responsible for our exploitation.”
Enlightening Our Way Together with Chief Phil
For many thousands who have tuned into his work, Hereditary Chief Phil Lane has been a beacon in a time of powerful transition. His work over the decades to unify the human family through his Four Worlds International Institute has taken him all over the world, and now he is consolidating that work in a […]
Diné grassroots sow precedent in clean energy history
KYKOTSMOVI VILLAGE, Arizona – Some 30 years ago, when Navajo Nation member Nicole Horseherder returned to her Native land after college, her hopes of building a home like her grandmother’s near here were dampened because wells had dried up with massive coal strip mining and power plant development that drained the underground water tables while polluting Diné and Hopi communities.
Camp Mni Luzahan launches community Covid-19 testing
RAPID CITY, S.D. – Isolating herself from family after her Covid-19 diagnosis on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation, Sicangu Lakota great-grandmother Cheryl Angel found little choice but to traipse from one lonely hotel room to another for shelter. Angel, a veteran Water Protector and self-described Sacred Activist, vowed that if she survived the deadly contagious […]
A Spiritual Health Shield: For the Huicholes, and For the World
We recently sat down (at a distance) for an interview with Paola Stefani, producer of the movie Huicholes: The Last Peyote Guardians. Together with the director of the film, Hernán Vilchez, and with the collaboration of the protagonist, Wixárika Mara’akame or spiritual leader José “Katira” Ramírez, and with the approval of the authorities of two […]