Indigenous

When Iranian missiles began raining down on Israel, many residents scrambled for cover. Sirens wailed across the country as people rushed into bomb shelters.

But for some Palestinian citizens of Israel – two million people, or roughly 21 percent of the population – doors were slammed shut, not by the force of the blasts and not by enemies, but by neighbours and fellow citizens.

Mostly living in cities, towns, and villages within Israel’s internationally recognised borders, many Palestinian citizens of Israel found themselves excluded from life-saving infrastructure during the worst nights of the Iran-Israel conflict to date.

Palestinian citizens of Israel have long faced systemic discrimination – in housing, education, employment, and state services. Despite holding Israeli citizenship, they are often treated as second-class citizens, and their loyalty is routinely questioned in public discourse.

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There are more than 500 miles between the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation’s tribal reservation in northeastern Kansas and 1,500 acres of mostly prairie in northern Illinois.

So, Raphael Wahwassuck has come far to visit the site of a long-gone cabin there. Except it’s not an unfamiliar place to him and his kin. Wahwassuck is a member of the Prairie Band’s tribal council and a direct descendant of Chief Shab-eh-nay, for whom the state park is named after.

Most members of the tribe were forced from their homelands of the Great Lakes region into Kansas. They ceded approximately 28 million acres to the United States government, while an 1829 treaty promised Chief Shab-eh-nay 1,280 acres of reservation in Illinois.

Yet when he left in 1849 to visit his relatives in Kansas, the U.S. illegally sold the chief’s land to white settlers.

Over the last 15 years, the tribe has spent $10 million to purchase parts of the original reservation — including 130 acres near Shabbona Lake State Park in what is now DeKalb County, Illinois.

For Wahwassuck, this return is a step toward “correcting some of the historical injustices” his tribe has experienced.

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For the fewer than a hundred people that make up the entire population of Port Heiden, Alaska, fishing provides both a paycheck and a full dinner plate. Every summer, residents of the Alutiiq village set out on commercial boats to catch salmon swimming upstream in the nearby rivers of Bristol Bay.

Because of their location, diesel costs almost four times the national average — the Alaska Native community spent $900,000 on fuel in 2024 alone. Even Port Heiden’s diesel storage tanks are posing challenges. Coastal erosion has created a growing threat of leaks in the structures, which are damaging to the environment and expensive to repair, and forced the tribe to relocate them further inland. On top of it all, of course, diesel generators contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and are notoriously noisy.

In 2015, the community built a fish processing plant that the tribe collectively owns; they envisioned a scenario in which tribal members would not need to share revenue with processing companies, would bring home considerably more money, and wouldn’t have to spend months at a time away from their families. But the building has remained nonoperational for an entire decade, because they simply can’t afford to power it.

In 2023, Climate United, a national investment fund and coalition, submitted a proposal to participate in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF — a $27 billion investment from the Inflation Reduction Act and administered by the Environmental Protection Agency to “mobilize financing and private capital to address the climate crisis.” Last April, the EPA announced it had chosen three organizations to disseminate the program’s funding; $6.97 billion was designated to go to Climate United.

Then, in the course of President Donald Trump’s sweeping federal disinvestment campaign, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was singled out as a poster child for what Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claimed was “criminal.”

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Alarm sirens and fire tails lighting the sky have become a daily occurrence in Israeli cities for the past four days, as Iran continues to send retaliatory waves of ballistic missiles following Israel’s initiation of war with the country. The Israeli attack on Iran also continues, with both sides pledging to escalate military confrontation.

Meanwhile, Israel continues its onslaught on Gaza, as its relentless bombardment of the Strip has not stopped since it launched its attack on Iran. On Monday alone, Palestinian medical sources reported that 43 Palestinians had arrived dead at medical centers, including the Red Cross field hospital in Gaza. Among the dead were 38 Palestinians who were shot and killed while waiting to receive aid at a site run by the Israeli-backed and U.S.-controlled Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the controversial organization tasked with distributing aid to Palestinians instead of the UN. Israeli forces have committed several aid massacres against starving Gazans at the GHF’s distribution points in southern and central Gaza. The massacres have seen the killing of dozens of civilians at GHF sites on a near-daily basis, often after the Israeli army has opened fire on desperate crowds of civilians.

Israeli forces also continued to impose a total closure on the occupied West Bank since Friday, including the roads between West Bank towns and cities. Closures have caused a total halt to public transportation in several parts of the West Bank.

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A sweeping Biden-era initiative to restore Columbia Basin salmon runs, boost tribal energy development and provide a pathway for dam removal on the Lower Snake River has been canceled by President Donald Trump.

A presidential memorandum issued Thursday revoked the 2023 Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, which Trump stated “placed concerns about climate change above the Nation’s interests in reliable energy sources.”

A statement from the White House said Trump’s action “stops the green agenda in the Columbia River Basin.”

The memorandum directs federal agencies to withdraw from agreements stemming from “Biden’s misguided executive action.” In coordination with the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, they are to review and revise environmental reviews related to the agreement, including an environmental-impact statement underway on dam operations on the Columbia and Snake rivers.

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The governments of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu have announced their commitment to create a massive multinational Melanesian Ocean Reserve. If implemented as envisioned, the reserve would become the world’s first Indigenous-led ocean reserve, covering an area nearly as big as the Amazon Rainforest.

Speaking at the U.N. Ocean Conference underway in Nice, France, representatives of both countries said the vision for the ocean reserve is to cover at least 6 million square kilometers (2.3 million square miles) of ocean and islands. The reserve will include the combined national waters of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, and extend to the protected waters of New Caledonia’s exclusive economic zone. All of the island countries, largely inhabited by Indigenous Melanesians, are located in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, within the region known as Melanesia.

“The Melanesian Ocean Reserve will give the governments and peoples of Melanesia the ability to do much more to protect our ancestral waters from those who extract and exploit without concern for our planet and its living beings. We hope our Indigenous stewardship of this vast reserve will create momentum for similar initiatives all over the world,” Vanuatu’s environment minister, Ralph Regenvanu, said in a joint press release.

Melanesia is one of the world’s most biodiverse regions, hosting an incredible diversity of both land and marine species, including an estimated 75% of known coral species and more than 3,000 species of reef-associated fish.

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If you could walk the ocean floor off the coast of Cape Arago in Oregon in the summer, you’d find yourself in the mysterious green depths of a forest of kelp. Look up, and you’d see sunlight filtering through the fronds waving in the current; look down, and you’d see the plants anchored to an ocean floor covered with life. But if you walked a little bit farther, you’d come to a barren clearing, no sign of kelp or much else — just a carpet of purple sea urchin, a creature that is devouring kelp at an alarming rate.

The disappearance of kelp forests is widely felt here; gray whales have changed their foraging patterns, and the red abalone fishery in Northern California closed after swarms of urchins and warming waters destroyed more than 90% of the kelp forests there. In Oregon, a 2024 study by the Oregon Kelp Alliance found that over a 12-year period, the kelp forest off the coast declined by up to 73%, primarily due to an out-of-control population of purple sea urchins, which graze on the kelp. This system is out of balance largely owing to the absence of a keystone species: xvlh-t’vsh, which means “sea otter” in the Athabaskan language of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. For more than 20 years, the Siletz Tribe has been working to reintroduce sea otters.

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Product of decades-long process aims to restore Heiltsuk’s system of coherent governance destroyed by colonial powers

When outsiders arrived in the lands of the Heiltsuk people, they brought with them a rapacious appetite for the region’s trees, fish and minerals. Settlers and the government soon followed, claiming ownership of the thick cedar forests, the fjords and the abundance of life. Heiltsuk elders were confused. “If these are truly your lands,” they asked, “where are your stories?”

For the Heiltsuk, stories explain everything from the shape of a local mountain to the distinct red fur fringes on the sea wolves stalking shores. They tell of the flesh-eating monster baxbakwa’lanuxusiwe, whose entire body was covered with snapping mouths before it was destroyed by a shaman and became a cloud of mosquitoes.

Passed down over generations, in ceremonies forbidden by Canada’s government, the stories weave together the physical world, the supernatural and the liminal space that binds the two.

Such stories are also the bedrock of the Heiltsuk’s newly created constitution, a document recently ratified through ceremony that asserts the nation’s long-held convictions that they are the original inhabitants and rightful stewards of the region’s future.

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When Jaike SpottedWolf saw empty lots on Tillman Street she envisioned a sacred space for Detroit’s Indigenous community — a powwow ground, smokehouse, garden, church, and gathering place. The Thečhíȟila Collective, which she co-founded to support community needs, hoped to buy the land for its listed price of $7,000.

“Making sure there’s a space for native youth, native elders for them all to come together if they want, that isn’t gatekept. That doesn’t exist for us in the city,” she said of the approximately 30,000 Native people living in metro Detroit.

But months after the group expressed interest in 4751 Tillman, the Detroit Land Bank Authority raised the price of the parcel, which included seven lots, by nearly 2,000% to $136,500 — putting it far beyond the collective’s budget and raising questions about how land is valued and who gets access to it in a city with deep histories of displacement.

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The passage of the sweeping legislation is sure to inflame already-fraught tensions with First Nations. One of the most contested aspects is its creation of “special economic zones,” where the government can establish a zone, and then exempt certain companies or projects inside it from having to comply with certain provincial laws or regulations, or municipal bylaws. It also slashes several of Ontario’s endangered species protections and shelters the government from some lawsuits.

But that was only one controversial moment, in a week stuffed full of ’em.

The Doug Ford government also moved forward legislation that blocks municipal green building standards meant to reduce emissions from construction, heating and air conditioning — a particularly stunning about-face after defending the efforts of cities to fight climate change by implementing higher standards just a few years ago.

Government officials tabled another bill promising to prioritize data centres and order the electricity regulator and operator to focus on economic growth. And they tabled a third bill the government advertised as part of an attempt to “streamline” mine tailings facilities.

Oh, and the budget, which cuts Ontario’s emergency preparedness funds, bans congestion pricing and continues the premier’s fixation with cracking down on bike lanes, also passed.

Here’s what happened over a big week at Queen’s Park.

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• The Banggai archipelago is a remote landscape of around 97% limestone karst east of Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island.
• Extractive concessions on 39 locations on Peleng island, the largest island in the Banggai Islands district, may soon cut into the karst bedrock to mine the ancient limestone for cement, glass and other industrial applications.
• Indigenous villagers on Peleng Island say they worry the development could catalyze unprecedented local environmental damage, impairing the cultivation of unique yam varieties grown only here.

Deslin is known as the Ibu Kampung — “village mother” — of the Tolobuono Komba-komba Indigenous community here in the center of Peleng, one of a cluster of karst islands just east of the much larger Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

That honorific reflects Deslin’s advocacy against plans to quarry the limestone that surrounds Komba-komba village, and that makes up around 97% of the rest of the island chain, known as the Banggai Islands.

Karst systems like the Banggai Islands are landscapes of soluble bedrock riddled with caves and underground rivers formed by erosion from acidic water over millions of years. Around 15% of the world’s land surface is karst, or carbonate rocks, the most common of which are dolostone and limestone.

Indonesia accounts for around 155,000 square kilometers (60,000 square miles) of karst landscapes. Almost a tenth of this area has experienced degrees of environmental damage, mainly due to mining, according to Gadjah Mada University karst expert Eko Haryono.

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On 30 April, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun told Sky News Arabia that Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas had raised the issue of disarming Palestinian factions in Lebanon’s refugee camps at the emergency Arab Summit in Cairo in early March.

It was a remarkable revelation. The emergency summit’s goal was the reconstruction of Gaza. But Abbas had other priorities. Both before and in the weeks since the Arab summit, Abbas has criticized the armed resistance by Palestinian factions on several occasions, especially by Hamas, notably demanding that what he called the “sons of dogs” release the remaining Israeli captives in Gaza.

For decades, the Lebanese authorities have treated the Palestinian camps in Lebanon as armed hotbeds that could explode at any moment and have ignored Palestinian refugees’ human rights.

Instead of transcending this narrow approach, Abbas’ ​​visit reduced the Palestinian presence in Lebanon to only a security matter.

Why, and why now?

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More than 17,000 acres around the Klamath River in Northern California, including the lower Blue Creek watershed, have returned to the Yurok Tribe, completing the largest landback deal in California history.

The Yurok people have lived, fished, and hunted along the Klamath for millennia. But when the California gold rush began, the tribe lost 90 percent of its territory.

For the last two decades, the Yurok Tribe has been working with the nonprofit Western Rivers Conservancy to get its land back. The 17,000 acres composes the final parcel of a $56 million, 47,097-acre land transfer that effectively doubles the current land holdings of the Yurok Tribe.

The tribe has already designated the land as a salmon sanctuary and community forest and plans to eventually put it into a trust and care for it in perpetuity.

“No words can describe how we feel knowing that our land is coming back to the ownership of the Yurok people,” said Joseph James, the chairman of the Yurok Tribal Council, who is from the village of Shregon on the Klamath River. “The Klamath River is our highway. It is also our food source. And it takes care of us. And so it’s our job, our inherent right, to take care of the Klamath Basin and its river.”

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A federal judge issued an injunction Friday that further delays the transfer of Oak Flat, an Indigenous religious site in Arizona, to a multi-national company that would make it one of the largest copper mines in the world.

More than a week ago, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in the case, allowing a lower court order to stand that approved the transfer. The district court judge in Phoenix called for a 60-day delay to allow advocates for Oak Flat to review an upcoming U.S. Forest Service environmental impact statement.

The motions for the delay came from the San Carlos Apache Tribe and a coalition of organizations such as the Center for Biological Diversity, a local Sierra Club Chapter, and Arizona’s Inter-Tribal Association.

The struggle over Oak Flat’s future has been going on for a decade. The final environmental review was released during the first Trump administration, but then halted during the Biden administration. Back in April, the current Trump administration said it would reissue its environmental review, expected June 16.

The review is necessary for the transfer of the land to Resolution Copper, a project from Rio Tinto and BHP, multinational mining companies.

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The Israeli military is arming gangs to combat Hamas in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed on Thursday. The revelation comes to light after right-wing Israeli lawmaker Avigdor Lieberman accused Netanyahu on Israeli public broadcaster Kan yesterday of arming a gang of hundreds of men in Rafah as a counterweight to Hamas influence in the Strip. The Prime Minister’s office responded by saying that it was combating the Palestinian resistance group “in various ways, on the recommendation of all heads of the security establishment.”

Later, Netanyahu officially confirmed the reports in a video posted on X. “On the advice of security officials, we activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas,” the Israeli Prime Minister said. “What’s wrong with that? It only saves the lives of Israeli soldiers.”

Among these groups is an armed gang led by a man named Yasser Abu Shabab, a thief and drug trafficker from Rafah who led groups of hundreds of armed men in looting aid convoys during the latter half of 2024. Descended from the influential Bedouin Tarabin clan, which spans southern Gaza, the Sinai, and the Naqab Desert, Abu Shabab has been described by Israeli media outlets as “linked to ISIS,” likely due to Abu Shabab’s involvement in drug trafficking networks between Gaza and the Sinai in which ISIS has been implicated.

This policy comes in the wake of a systematic Israeli campaign of assassinating the Hamas government’s civil servants to cause social collapse in Gaza and foment chaos and lawlessness in the Strip. The Israeli army has been deliberately targeting Interior Ministry bureaucrats, the police force, and the security services to create a vacuum that is then filled by armed looters like Abu Shabab’s group, as recently reported by Mondoweiss.

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With its cold climate, short growing season, and dense forests, Michigan's Upper Peninsula is known as a challenging place for farming. But a new Dartmouth-led study provides evidence of intensive farming by ancestral Native Americans at the Sixty Islands archaeological site along the Menominee River, making it the most complete ancient agricultural site in the eastern half of the United States.

The site features a raised ridge field system that dates to around the 10th century to 1600, and much of it is still intact today.

The raised fields are comprised of clustered ridged garden beds that range from 4 to 12 inches in height and were used to grow corn, beans, squash, and other plants by ancestors of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin.

The findings are published in Science.

"The scale of this agricultural system by ancestral Menominee communities is 10 times larger than what was previously estimated," says lead author Madeleine McLeester, an assistant professor of anthropology at Dartmouth. "That forces us to reconsider a number of preconceived ideas we have about agriculture not only in the region, but globally."

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Morocco is intensifying its efforts to legitimize its contested claim over Western Sahara – gaining support from powerful nations at the expense of the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination. On June 1, the United Kingdom officially endorsed Morocco’s 2007 autonomy proposal for Western Sahara.

The announcement came after a high-profile visit by the UK’s Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, David Lammy, to Rabat, where he signed multiple investment agreements with his Moroccan counterpart, Minister of Foreign Affairs Nasser Bourita.

The agreements not only strengthen bilateral economic relations but also show broader geopolitical motivations, particularly as Morocco prepares to co-host the 2030 FIFA Men’s World Cup alongside Spain and Portugal. With its endorsement, the United Kingdom becomes the third permanent member of the United Nations Security Council along with the United States and France, to back Morocco’s “autonomy plan”.

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cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/199000

From BBC News via this RSS feed

May 22, 2025, was the last day of life as they knew it for the Bedouin community of Maghayer al-Deir, which until recently used to reside east of Ramallah, in the central occupied West Bank. The 24 Palestinian families who made up the community were forced to gather their belongings and leave their home in the eastern slopes of Ramallah overlooking the Jordan Valley. After three days of intense harassment and attacks on the community, Israeli settlers now have complete control over the little valley.

Since October 7, 2023, Israeli settlers have intensified their attacks on Palestinian rural communities in the West Bank, harassing, attacking, and completely displacing thousands of Palestinians. With each new displaced community, Israeli settlers gain control of more strategic areas for the expansion of established settlements or the establishment of new settler outposts.

According to Hasan Mleihat, spokesperson for the al-Baidar organization for the defense of Bedouin rights in Palestine, Israeli settlers have displaced 62 out of the 212 Bedouin communities in the West Bank since October 2023. These include 12,000 out of the roughly 400,000 West Bank Palestinian Bedouins.

“It is a wholesale ethnic cleansing campaign of exclusively Bedouin communities, which has been happening far away from the media’s attention,” Mleihat told Mondoweiss.

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On the morning of February 11, Monica Caño received a knock on the door of her home in El Maíten, a small town on the Argentinian side of the Patagonian Andes. At her gate she found a team of security forces—over a dozen of them, masked and armed.

Bleary eyed and terrified, Caño wracked her brain for a reason why they might be there. Her husband, son, mother, father, and two sisters slept inside. A member of the Mapuche community, the largest Indigenous group in Argentina, Caño had felt tensions simmering since the election of Javier Milei in late 2023. Stories of desalojos or violent evictions had swept through Mapuche communities in Patagonia, and many Mapuche households and communities—lofs as they’re called in Mapudungun—were living in a constant state of anxiety and fear.

“‘I have a warrant,’ they told me. But I didn’t let go of the gate. Then a female officer was called over and I thought, she’s going to hit me. So I let go,” recalled Caño. “I thought: they’re going to destroy everything. They’re going to beat us. Why are they doing this? Why are they treating us this way?”

The raid was just one of 12 that happened that day, part of a larger war being waged against Argentina’s Mapuche communities. Since self-described “anarcho-capitalist” Milei assumed office in December 2023, he’s launched a relentless battle against inflation, higher education, and social services. But few know about his shadow war: a coordinated assault on Indigenous rights marked by escalating land evictions, state violence, and violations of civil rights.

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The Israeli government’s decision last Thursday to create 22 new settlements in the West Bank was reported as regular news in most mainstream media. Although it received official condemnations from the UK, Finland, and some Arab states, the decision passed with absolutely no practical consequence for Israel, despite European threats to impose sanctions.

On the other hand, within Israeli politics, the decision was regarded as far from ordinary and received with widespread fanfare. The Israeli Defense Ministry called the decision “historic,” while the Defense Minister, Israel Katz, said that the decision “reinforces Israel’s control over Judea and Samaria,” Israel’s term for the occupied West Bank.” Israel’s hardline Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, celebrated the move as “a great day for the settlement movement and an important day for the State of Israel.”

The geographical distribution of this planned network of settlements, some of it already in existence, will ensure Israel’s grip on the West Bank is all-encompassing. The sprawling web includes four settlements in the Ramallah area in the central West Bank, four in Jenin in the north, four more in Hebron in the south, two in Nablus in the center-north, one in Salfit in the northeast, three in Jericho in the southern Jordan Valley, three more across the Jordan Valley itself, and one in East Jerusalem.

In short, it is annexation in all but name.

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In this follow up video, we explore how the Wari empire worked and why it was so successful. For over 300 years, the Wari empire ruled an area stretching almost the entire coast of Peru, over the Andes and into the Amazonian rainforest. Find out how the empire rose, prospered and fell.