Category: Comm_Indigenous_CN

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes live among some of the most spectacular landscapes in the country. Their home, the Flathead Reservation, covers 1.2 million acres dotted with soaring mountains, sweeping valleys, and lush forests. Flathead River bisects the land and drains into Flathead Lake, the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River.

A study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances found that historical Indigenous “cultural burning” curtailed wildfire patterns on local scales over a period of roughly 400 years in the southwestern U.S.Driving the news: As warming temperatures drive the risk of increased and intensified wildfires across the world, adapting traditional burning practices into fire management could diminish the role of climate in enkindling today’s wildfires.

For more than two years, leaders of Native American tribes, local environmentalists and Nevada lawmakers have called on the Biden administration to protect about 450,000 acres of land as a national monument at the southern edge of Clark County.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden answered that call, announcing that he would designate the monument through a proclamation.

The Interior Department is considering a 20-year moratorium on new oil development around Chaco Canyon National Historical Park in New Mexico, an area important to many Indigenous communities.

Raymond Red Corn remembers every bit of the drive up to Kansas to buy back his people’s land. Red Corn, who was the assistant principal chief of the Osage Nation, had gotten up early one morning in January 2016 and, with a colleague, loaded up in a Ford SUV they jokingly called “the chief mobile.” It wasn’t a long drive from Osage County, in northern Oklahoma, to Hutchinson, where a ranch broker stood ready to collect bids for the sprawling patch of prairie, but Red Corn wasn’t taking any chances. There was a backup plan: If he crashed or the truck broke down, Osage Nation police would leave him on the side of the road. Their only job was to make sure the sealed envelope they were carrying got to Kansas.

The natural resources that Indigenous peoples depend on are inextricably linked to their identities, cultures and livelihoods. Even relatively small changes in temperature or rainfall can make their lands more susceptible to rising sea levels, droughts and forest fires. As the climate crisis escalates, activists fighting to protect what remain of the world’s forests are at risk of being persecuted by their governments — and even at risk of death.

As the United Nations General Assembly opens this week in New York, Indigenous people are taking to the streets, and waters, of New York to protest for climate justice and call on world leaders to recognize Indigenous rights. Starting Saturday, activists have protested in front of consulates, projected images of deforestation on buildings in midtown, sailed down the Hudson and East Rivers, and held a die-in in front of the New York Stock Exchange.

When the oil tanker Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound, hundreds of thousands of acres of water were threatened.

The Global Indigenous Youth Caucus on Thursday demanded that the United Nations send investigators to Hawaii to probe the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility, a series of World War II-era reserve tanks which have leaked at least 14,000 gallons of fuel-laced water into Honolulu’s groundwater aquifer. The Caucus also urged the U.N. to re-inscribe Hawaii on the list of non-self governing territories – a move that would classify Hawaii as a colonized territory alongside Guam, the Falkland Islands, Western Sahara and 14 others.

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