Indigenous

It was two years later, in early December 2022, when police broke the news: Morgan had been murdered.

Between March and May of that year, a serial killer had systematically targeted vulnerable Indigenous women experiencing homelessness and addiction, luring them to his Winnipeg apartment with offers of food, shelter, or substances before murdering, dismembering, and disposing of them in rubbish bins.

Morgan Harris was his second victim. She was 39 years old.

Winnipeg police were first alerted to the then 35-year-old self-proclaimed white supremacist on May 16, 2022, when the partial remains of Rebecca Contois were found in a rubbish bin. Skibicki was charged two days later, and the following month, police began searching the Brady Road Landfill, a municipal landfill on the outskirts of the city, where they found more of her remains.

Morgan and Marcedes’s families were told that their relatives' remains were likely in the privately operated Prairie Green Landfill, a sprawling waste disposal site north of Winnipeg.

To their dismay, police refused to search the landfill, believing they had enough evidence to convict Skibicki without the remains of his victims.

"It was like losing her all over again," says Elle of the moment she learned the police wouldn’t search for her mother’s remains. "They called us into a room and just told us - no warning, no asking how we felt about it. They said, 'We're not going to look for your mom,' like she was just garbage to be thrown away."

The provincial government of Manitoba, of which Winnipeg is the capital, declared a search of the Prairie Green landfill "unfeasible", stating that the 10,000 truckloads of waste deposited in the seven months since the women were murdered, combined with the compacting and decomposition that had occurred, made recovery nearly impossible.

But Elle and the other relatives refused to accept that.

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As images of burned children, starving families, and bombed hospitals in Gaza become the constant soundtrack of daily life, the Palestinian communities that survived the Nakba and stayed in the lands that were occupied by Israel in 1948 (hence called “’48 Palestinians”), are filled with anger, frustration, and a sense of hollowness and disempowerment. Against the general paralysis, Umm al-Fahm, the main Palestinian city in “the Northern Triangle region,” stands out.

Palestinian activists in the town, united around the local “popular committee,” keep trying to break the barriers of repression and fear that have taken hold in their community since October 7. The last attempt was on Saturday, May 24.

The popular committee in Umm al-Fahm called for a national demonstration backed by the Higher Follow-Up Committee of the Arab Public — the united leadership of ’48 Palestinian communities — alongside the Committee for Solidarity with the Administrative Detainee Raja Eghbarieh.

The invitation for the demonstration came under three slogans: “We stand with our people! No to ethnic cleansing and genocide! Freedom to the teacher Raja and all other detainees!”

Even as the demonstration was licensed, the police did not let it end peacefully. As we gathered in Dawar al-‘Uyun, plainclothed “detectives” started to attack demonstrators and tear down some banners that they did not like. I noticed specifically that they objected to such banners as “No to Genocide” and “No to Ethnic Cleansing.”

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Is the U.S. genuinely aiming to save Gaza’s population from starvation? Or is the true purpose of Israeli-U.S. aid in Gaza to empower Israel to prolong its war while pacifying Palestinians with minimal food supplies amid mounting international pressure? After Rafah was completely destroyed — homes flattened and entire families erased from the civil registry — Israel took full control of the city. On May 27, it distributed what it called “aid,” with U.S. assistance. During the so-called aid distribution, Palestinians who had walked long distances searching for basic food supplies were killed by the Israeli military. Has bread now become something we must pay for with blood?

For Gaza’s people, reaching the Israeli-U.S. aid point in Rafah was no easy task. The journey was long, dangerous and shadowed by constant airstrike threats. There is no safety in Gaza. But hunger — a weapon Israel has deliberately used against civilians — has forced many families to take the risk, especially after several children in the Strip have starved to death.

The suffering was not just hunger or distance — it was the complete collapse of life in Gaza. No transportation, no services, no infrastructure. All this hardship for a small bag of basic food! But what happened next was even more devastating. On May 27, after these families finally arrived, the Israeli army opened fire on civilians scrambling for food. Three were killed, 46 wounded. The military’s excuse? “There was chaos.”

But how can anyone expect order from a starving population, terrified of returning home empty-handed to hungry children?

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It’s among hundreds of ice-fed lakes, rivers, and streams in Alaska and western Canada that could turn into prime fish habitat as the planet gets hotter. These new salmon grounds could help counteract other threats to the fish from climate change, such as warming seas and drought. And they could bolster a commercial fishing industry that generates millions of dollars for the state each year.

The disappearance of glaciers is also creating opportunities for the multibillion-dollar mining industry. Like migrating salmon, mineral exploration companies are moving quickly into areas exposed by melting ice, hoping to strike the next big lode.

With gold prices booming and demand soaring for copper, a metal necessary for making solar panels and electric cars, mining corporations have backed a number of major projects in the region. The Canadian government is paying for roads and power lines to improve access to them.

This mineral rush promises jobs and revenue for some towns and First Nations in northern Canada. But it’s troubling to many Alaska fishermen, environmental advocates, and Indigenous leaders living downstream, near several salmon-rich rivers that start in Canada and head west across the international border. The Tulsequah River is a major tributary of the Taku River, which runs about 50 miles from British Columbia’s Coast Mountains to the Pacific Ocean just south of Juneau, Alaska. The Taku supports iconic runs of sockeye and coho salmon that power commercial fishing businesses in both countries. In 2023, Moore and other researchers warned in the journal Science that, barring key policy reforms, future mines could impair future salmon habitat in glacier-fed watersheds like the Tulsequah and Taku.

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Any time a federal agency wants to develop a project in Wyoming — an oil and gas lease, a pipeline, a dam, a transmission line, a solar array — it has to go through Crystal C’Bearing first. C’Bearing is Northern Arapaho and the tribal historic preservation officer, or THPO, for the Northern Arapaho tribe, so if a new wind farm is proposed, for example, she determines if any tribal areas will be impacted by the project.

C’Bearing’s scope extends beyond her home on the Wind River Reservation, to any and all lands ceded by treaty, routes tribal members took during the removal process, burial sites, and religious places. That means she reviews projects across 16 states in addition to Wyoming, from Wisconsin to Montana, New Mexico to Arkansas, and all points in between — traditional homelands of the Northern Arapaho and other Indigenous nations, acquired by the United States as it forcefully expanded westward. Because of that range, hundreds of federal proposals and reports flood her email inbox every week, as is the case with 227 other THPOs working for their respective nations. Many have overlapping historic homelands and histories.

In January, President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency to speed the development of fossil fuel projects, mines, pipelines, and other energy-related infrastructure, cutting the amount of time federal agencies are required to notify Indigenous nations before starting a project. Now, as Trump’s proposed budget for 2026 works its way through Congress, the fund supporting the national THPO program is bracing for a 94 percent budget cut. On top of that, the Trump administration has yet to distribute THPO funds promised for 2025.

Traditionally, THPOs like C’Bearing have 30 days to review a project: 30 days to review federal reports, conduct site visits, identify artifacts or burial grounds, and collaborate with tribal members, sometimes from other tribes. According to C’Bearing, that window was already tight, but under Trump’s energy emergency, that deadline is now seven days. And as the year rolls on, C’Bearing’s budget is evaporating. If the administration doesn’t release the THPO funds already promised, she’ll be out of a job come September.

“If this is the moment that breaks the system, there’s not going to be anything there to catch the THPOs,” said Valerie Grussing, executive director of the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a last-minute plea from Native Americans seeking to challenge a massive copper mining project in Arizona that would destroy a sacred site used for tribal ceremonies, a weighty dispute that pitted religious rights against business interests.

The court turned away an appeal brought by the nonprofit group Apache Stronghold asserting that its members' religious rights will be violated if the Resolution Copper mine goes forward because it would obliterate Oak Flat, the site in question.

The Trump administration recently announced its backing of the project, which is now set to move forward.

Vicky Peacey, general manager at Resolution Copper, said in a statement that "extensive consultation" with tribes has already led to significant changes to the project.

Peacey added that the "ongoing dialogue will continue to shape the project."

Wendsler Nosie Sr., a member of Apache Stronghold, said in a statement the fight would continue.

"While this decision is a heavy blow, our struggle is far from over. We urge Congress to take decisive action to stop this injustice while we press forward in the courts," he said.

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US and European mining companies need to hurry up and invest in Greenland otherwise it will have to look elsewhere for help exploiting its minerals, including from China, a minister for the vast Arctic territory has warned.

“We want to develop our business sector and diversify it, and that requires investments from outside,’’ Naaja Nathanielsen, Greenland’s minister for business and mineral resources, told the Financial Times.

When asked about turning to China, she replied: ‘‘We do want to partner up with European and American partners. But if they don’t show up I think we need to look elsewhere.”

The comments demonstrate Greenland’s desire to get western help to expand its economy in mining and tourism, with United Airlines due to start flying from New York to the capital Nuuk from next month.

Greenland is home to large but fairly inaccessible deposits of minerals including gold and copper, and is located in a geopolitically crucial area in the Arctic.

Nathanielsen told the FT that she found Trump’s threats to take control of Greenland “disrespectful and distasteful”. Her comments underscore the increasing anger felt by Greenlanders at Trump’s aggressive approach to the island of 57,000 people.

She said that despite Trump’s rhetoric, there was little interest from China in mining deals — right now there are only two Chinese mining companies in Greenland, but both are minority shareholders in inactive projects. She speculated that Chinese investors might be holding back because they don’t want “to provoke anything”.

Her comments come as the country hailed the awarding of its first licence under a new mining code to a Danish-French group to extract anorthosite, a mineral used in the fibreglass industry.

The €150mn mining project in Western Greenland aims to start construction as soon as next year, according to Claus Stoltenborg, chief executive of Greenland Anorthosite Mining.

The company’s backers include a Greenlandic state pension fund, Danish bank Arbejdernes Landsbank, and Jean Boulle, a French mining group.

Nathanielsen said the new four-party coalition government in Nuuk was ‘‘first and foremost committed to creating development for Greenland and Greenlanders” and would prefer to work with “allies and like-minded partners”.

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With the brief window for fiddlehead foraging nearing its close, citizens of the Mi’kmaq Nation hope to collect the traditional food source this week from the Aroostook River flood plain to test as part of their research into understanding, and in turn reducing, forever chemicals in the food supply.

However, they may no longer be able to afford to do the testing they’d planned.

Following months of preparation after securing federal funding in September, the team received an email from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Mission Support on May 13 stating that their four-year grant had been terminated, effective immediately.

“The objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities,” the email read.

The EPA terminated all of the ten grants it had awarded for research into reducing per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, otherwise known as PFAS, in plants and animals, including two others to Maine-based teams led by the Passamaquoddy Tribe and the University of Maine. PFAS have been linked to long term adverse health outcomes, such as cancers and weakened immune systems, and their pervasiveness in agriculture is not fully understood.

“It’s complete overreach,” said Chelli Stanley, co-founder of an organization committed to cleaning contaminated land, Upland Grassroots, which is part of the research team headed by the Mi’kmaq Nation. “We’re going to appeal. We’re also seeking legal aid.”

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As Gaza faces annihilation under Israel’s relentless bombardment, a grim lesson offers no solace: surrendering to Israeli terms does not guarantee safety – a truth painfully reflected in the reality of the West Bank.

Gaza bleeds under genocide, but another wound festers within: a deepening emotional and political divide between Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Many in Gaza feel abandoned — not just by the international community, but by their fellow Palestinians across the separation barriers.

The anger reached a boiling point after a televised speech by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, in which he seemingly referred to Hamas as “sons of dogs” and demanded they “just hand over” hostages.”

For many in Gaza, his remarks seemed aimed at all Palestinians in Gaza. This was not merely a political misstep – it was an unforgivable betrayal.

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RAPID CITY — A unique grassy terrain in the center of the Black Hills is at the center of a local debate on drilling activity.

For Oceti Sakowin (Lakota, Dakota and Nakoda) people, Pe’ Sla is an incredibly sacred site. It aligns with the constellations at various points in the year and is a focal point of oral history.

The site is located in the heart of the Black Hills in western South Dakota, roughly 50 miles west of Rapid City. It’s visually unique, a relatively flat large grassy piece of plains devoid of any trees in the middle of a vast mountainous landscape.

“Pe’ Sla is a site that, in our oral history and tradition, has always been deeply connected to the way that we interact with our ancestors, with the universe, with existence itself, with the cosmos,” said Taylor Gunhammer, the lead of NDN Collective’s Protect the He Sapa Campaign. “It’s not coincidental that at particular times of the year, star constellations align with our sacred sites, it’s not rooted in whimsy or fancy. This is history.”

While much of Pe’ Sla is private property, it’s surrounded by forest service land, which is subject to various types of mining claims and proposals, and a newly proposed exploratory drilling project for graphite near Pe’ Sla is causing alarm amongst both Black Hills locals and Indigenous people.

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Anyone who says Gaza will be at peace if Hamas just surrenders and releases the hostages is either knowingly sowing disinformation or ignorantly sowing misinformation. We need to make sure everyone’s clear on this so nobody can say they didn’t know after history unpacks this one.

Netanyahu has made it completely and unambiguously clear that even if Hamas surrendered today and released every single hostage, Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan will still need to be implemented as a precondition for ending the mass slaughter. To be absolutely 100 percent clear, Trump’s plan for Gaza is that “all” Palestinians be removed on a “permanent” basis, never allowed to return.

There is no way to permanently remove all Palestinians from a Palestinian territory without material coercion — meaning more mass scale violence and siege warfare. There is also no way to argue that this mass displacement would be voluntary even without further violence, since Israel has been deliberately and systematically making the Gaza Strip uninhabitable by destroying civilian infrastructure. Forcing them to choose between starvation in an uninhabitable wasteland or submit to ethnic cleansing is exactly the same as forcing them out at gunpoint.

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A guiding principle of state and federal laws governing child abuse and neglect cases is that foster homes must be safe, comfortable and respectful in order to serve children’s “best interests.” The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians has expanded that legal definition — requiring that children attend cultural events and learn their Native language.

In state courts, biological relatives are prioritized as “kinship caregivers.” But the Pueblo of Acoma defines kin more broadly, considering all tribal women of a certain age to be “aunties” or “grandmothers.”

Similarly, legal terms such as the “termination of parental rights” in foster care courts across the country focus on an individual child. In contrast, a growing number of tribes treat each child’s case as key to their nation’s very survival.

These differences are among the key findings to emerge from a National Indian Child Welfare Association research project concluding next month: Tribes have redefined and tailored U.S. laws governing foster care cases to match the priorities of their unique communities and cultures.

“A child without knowledge of the past is directionless in the path forward; a child without a nurturing present is denied the strengths that lead to the future,” states the child welfare code of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. “It is the Tribe’s policy to favor preventive action over belated reaction, meditation over confrontation, counseling over lecturing, conciliation over punishment.”

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Sean Sherman walks through an expansive commissary kitchen in South Minneapolis, his eyes lighting up with excitement. He isn’t taking in the kitchen as it is—dormant but well-equipped with an industrial smoker, a walk-in sausage-making area, and plentiful storage space. Instead, he’s seeing the future of his Meals for Native Institutions initiative, when the space is up, running, and realizing a long-term vision to introduce more Indigenous foods into the American food system.

Sherman, an Oglala Lakota tribal member with an unassuming demeanor, a soft smile, and a signature long braid hanging down his back, has endeavored to revitalize Native American food traditions since 2014, when he founded The Sioux Chef, a catering and educational enterprise. His focus is on “decolonized” food—made without Eurocentric ingredients such as beef, pork, chicken, dairy, wheat flour, and cane sugar—most notably at his acclaimed Minneapolis restaurant, Owamni.

Sherman still cooks at his restaurant, but these days, he has his sights set on a triad of initiatives that bring him closer to the goal of making the U.S. food system more inclusive and indeed more Indigenous. The opening later this year of an Indigenous Food Lab satellite in Bozeman, Montana, is part of that vision. So too is his cookbook Turtle Island (Clarkson Potter), which I coauthored, covering Native foodways across North America.

But in this moment, Sherman is most excited about Meals for Native Institutions, which will provide schools, hospitals, penitentiaries, and community centers with large-format Indigenous foods.

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The forcible expulsion of the Palestinian people is now the explicit goal of Israel’s war on Gaza. Late on Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel would only end the war if “Hamas surrenders, Gaza is demilitarized, and we implement the Trump plan.”

Trump walked back his February plan for the U.S. to “own” Gaza, expel its people, and turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” but Netanyahu seized upon it all the same and took it as a green light to exterminate Gaza. The latest phase in this plan is Israel’s weaponization of humanitarian aid for the purpose of furthering the Gaza final solution.

The plan is simple: starve Gaza’s population, and only create one designated flattened stretch of land where they can come to get food rations — facilitated by the Israeli army and run by a U.S. private contractor. Gaza’s population will be forced to go to these collection points, where they will be corralled inside what would effectively be a concentration camp, located in what used to be the city of Rafah, now a flattened wasteland.

Netanyahu made all this clear in his latest announcement, which came a day after Israel said it would allow “minimal” amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza for “diplomatic reasons” — to avoid war crimes charges and images of famine.

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Indigenous peoples are navigating the slow collapse of winter roads — and an even slower pace of help.

More than 50 First Nations in Canada — with 56,000 people total — depend on approximately 3,700 miles of winter roads. There are no paved roads connecting these Indigenous communities to the nearest cities. Most of the year, small planes are their only lifeline. But in winter, the lakes, creeks, and marshes around them freeze, allowing workers to build a vast network of ice roads for truck drivers to haul in supplies at a lower cost than flying them in.

Despite their isolation, the ice roads are community spaces. They guide hockey and broomball teams from small reserves to big cities to compete in tournaments. They enable families to stock up on cheap groceries. They bring people to medical appointments in cities and facilitate hunting and fishing trips with relatives in neighboring communities.

But the climate crisis is making it harder to build and maintain the ice roads. Winter is arriving later, pushing back construction, and spring is appearing earlier, bringing even the most robust frozen highways to an abrupt end. Less snow is falling, making the bridges smaller and more vulnerable to collapse under heavy trucks.

The rising temperatures give trucks only a few short weeks to bring in supplies — and often with half-loads due to thin lake ice and fragile snow bridges. Last year, chiefs in northern Ontario declared a state of emergency when the winter roads failed to freeze on time, and in March this year, rain shut down the ice roads to five communities.

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Jorge Millán’s home in the small town of El Maitén in Argentina’s Patagonia was raided in February this year. “It was total madness,” said Millán, who belongs to the Indigenous Mapuche community and works at the local radio station, La Radio Comunitaria Mapuche Petü Mogeleiñ. His home was invaded by Argentine military border police officers, who, Millán recalled, told him they were looking for Molotov bombs, or anything that would start or accelerate a fire. “They arrived unexpectedly and violently,” he said in Spanish.

Millán’s house wasn’t the only one raided. It was one of many carried out in towns across the Chubut province, located in central Patagonia, targeting many Mapuche, the biggest Indigenous population in Argentina, where disastrous forest fires have leveled over 50,000 hectares of land (about 123,000 acres) and forced hundreds of Mapuche from their homes since December 2024 as well as areas in neighboring Río Negro Province. Besides record-breaking heatwaves and strong winds, a crippled fire management system and weakened environmental protections have wreaked even more damage.

Since coming to power in 2023, President Javier Milei — who maintains a denialistic stance on climate change — has defunded the National Fire Management System by 81 percent, severely limiting the country’s capacity to prevent and respond to forest fires in ecologically vulnerable regions like Patagonia. He has also downgraded the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, which responsible for national environment policy strategy and coordination, to an undersecretariat status; eliminated the fund that supports the landmark 2007 Native Forests Law to help regulate the use, conservation and restoration of Argentina’s native forests; and repealed the 2011 Land Law that regulates foreign-land ownership in rural areas to protect natural resources.

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Most days, I live in a state of mshahar.

Mshahar is a word in Palestinian dialect, specific to Gaza, that means miserable or terribly unlucky. It’s the feeling that bad luck is chasing you all the time. My mom keeps saying that we’re a mshahar generation – we were born when life was collapsing. It describes Palestinians perfectly because war and agony never fail to leave us alone.

Israel broke the cease-fire in mid-March and the war was back, though it was never really over – over a hundred people were killed by Israeli attacks during the “cease-fire,” and the drones never went away.

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Advocates say the practice is still happening and they want it criminalized. Katy Bear is among those fighting for reproductive justice by taking back her body.

Katy Bear inhaled deeply, at a women's health clinic in Saskatoon, waiting for her prenatal checkup.

In early March, and her due date was just weeks away, she felt a mix of excitement and nerves.

This was a pregnancy she was almost denied.

“The government was against me. Colonization was against me,” said Bear, 41.

Bear, a member of the Mattawa/North Bay Algonquin First Nation in Ontario, lives in Saskatoon.

Twenty years ago, Bear says, she was coerced into a tubal ligation after the birth of her fourth child. The surgical procedure is intended to permanently prevent pregnancy. It can be difficult to reverse.

Canada has a long history of forced and coerced sterilization of Indigenous women, spanning much of the 20th century.

Eugenics laws and government policies “explicitly sought to reduce births in First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities,” relating to poverty, race and disabilities, according to a 2021 report about forced and coerced sterilization from the Senate standing committee on human rights.

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Lee Garman uses maple in nearly everything: from sweets and sodas to soups and meats. The possibilities are endless. “Even if it’s not a main element of a dish, it’s still in there,” he said. Garman is the executive chef at Owamni, an award-winning restaurant that has been dishing up Indigenous foods in Minneapolis since 2021. “Even if we just have a little, tiny bit, maple is in 90% of every single dish that we create,” he said.

Owamni purchases most of its maple sap and other traditional foods from Indigenous purveyors, including some of its employees. But climate change is taking a toll on suppliers, making it more difficult to acquire foods like maple syrup, Garman said. To meet demand, the restaurant is buying sap from more suppliers and at higher prices. “Over the last year or so, I think all of our prices on maple have jumped up at least 25%,” he said.

Indigenous people have harvested tree saps for millennia to make medicines and food. The most well known use is breakfast’s liquid gold — maple syrup. There are 13 maple species native to North America, and more than 100 species worldwide. Globally, the maple syrup industry is worth approximately $1 billion annually.

For food sovereignty activists like Luke and Linda Black Elk, sugarbush is a family affair. Luke Black Elk and the couple’s three sons are enrolled in the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Previously from South Dakota, the Minnesota family taps maple trees as a means of connecting with their community and ancestors. “We don’t have sugar maples or silver maples in the Dakotas, we have boxelder maples,” said Luke Black Elk. “Most sugar maple people laugh at us when we say that’s where we get syrup from because it takes a lot more work, but for me that’s something that my people have gathered for millennia,” he said.

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The goal has changed due to an unexpected rent increase due to the precarious nature of month to month leases so am increasing it to 2500 to also afford a storage unit while I live in my car for the summer. We currently have 240/2500 so are almost a tenth of the way already! The Goal is to have this by July 1st and will pay for gas, food, shelter when necessary, customary gift giving for oral history given by elders, and hopefully extra can be raised to give mutual aid along the way to organizers I will be meeting with. $ZitkatosTinCan or @zitkato On venmo And you can message for p@yp@l. I will eventually start a gfm since it’s been asked, but I am a very busy person due to my personal life, line cooking, podcasting, researching, organizing, and side hustles. You will be able to see updates and materials created due to this trip And you can message for p@yp@l. I will eventually start a gfm since it’s been asked, but I am a very busy person due to my personal life, line cooking, podcasting, researching, organizing, and side hustles. You will be able to see updates and materials created due to this trip

And the many other endeavors I’ve carried out on the http://patreon.com/ChunkaLutaNetwork where you can support the CLN podcast network and associated organizing on a monthly basis as well, this money pays organizers, cost of media production, and enables a lot of good work despite the slow And cautious public posting. Everything posted on the patreon will be made publicly accessible as to prevent pay walling but also will be provided early to members. We also have great friends doing incredible work you can support on http://ko-fi.com/emsenn expect refresh posts

Like this over the next month to re-engage people and provide updating information. If you are a supporter and accomplice, please share, donate a dollar, or if you want to meet to discuss organizing in your area, or to hang out in a Covid safe way and provide my partner and I a Meal or couch/floor to sleep on, and your along the way from Michigan to Colorado let me know and I can more efficiently plan this trip and have more money to give to organizers and folks in need. We are also working on a CLN website to publish theory, transcripts of podcasts, & Other materials to support the education of cadres and parties trying to develop their lines on the pressing contradictions of the movement today, so we can find a way to build a red road all of us can walk down to reach the new world. I’m sorry for my slow winter I wanted to do

So much more but personal turmoil, errors in judgment, and a plethora of issues have caused the need for serious reflection, critique and structuring before moving. Writings in this regard will release soon and hopefully several podcast episodes beyond the weekly Marx Madness eps

290/2500

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Cody Whiterock was running for his life — the Bureau of Indian Affairs police had come for him again. He’d been drinking at a friend’s bunkhouse on a farm in Owyhee County, Idaho, south of Boise, but the farm’s owner wanted him out and called 911. When BIA police came, Whiterock did what he’d done before — he fled in his car, a BIA officer confronting him at gunpoint.

More than a year later, Whiterock’s grieving family is still searching for answers about his death, but they’ve heard virtually nothing from the agency that killed him. The BIA has not told the family about the circumstances surrounding the shooting or the names of the officers involved. The BIA hasn’t even publicly acknowledged that the March 2024 shooting occurred. An investigation conducted by Idaho State Police remains open — and police and coroner reports make no mention of Whiterock having a weapon on him when he was killed.

Whiterock, 39 when he died, was not the first in his family to be killed by BIA officers in recent years: His cousin, Kirby Paradise, was killed by BIA officers in 2020. Paradise’s death was never reported publicly by either the media or the BIA, and the family faced a similar wall of silence surrounding the circumstances of his death.

Like other families whose loved ones have been shot and killed by BIA officers, Whiterock’s family has encountered an agency that operates as a black hole of information, rarely communicating any information to families or the public and providing no public accounting of the circumstances of deaths at the hands of officers. Amid a nationwide reckoning over police use of force, the BIA has largely evaded widespread or public scrutiny of its policies. In response to questions from InvestigateWest, the BIA said it is in compliance with all federal reporting requirements surrounding in-custody deaths, but did not respond to follow-up questions regarding details in Whiterock’s and Paradise’s killings.

Existing data shows Native Americans face the highest risk of deadly police violence in the United States — between three to five times the rate that others face. And that data is likely an undercount of the true figures. Deaths at the hands of BIA police are rarely reported publicly, particularly if they occur on tribal land, and gaps exist in data meant to record in-custody deaths. For 2020, the BIA confirmed to InvestigateWest that it reported zero arrested-related deaths to the Department of Justice — despite killing two people that qualify for reporting. A lack of media attention means many killings of Native Americans by the BIA and other police agencies pass in silence.

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The Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) is calling for the Vatican to return sacred First Nation artifacts taken from Indigenous communities during the residential school era.

The FSIN, which represents Saskatchewan's First Nations, has previously formally requested the repatriation of items including sacred pipes, medicine bundles, ceremonial regalia and other cultural objects currently housed in the Vatican Museums in Vatican City.

FSIN Chief Bobby Cameron has renewed that request in light of Pope Leo XIV's recent appointment as head of the Catholic Church.

"Every single one of those artifacts are sacred items there, crucial for the healing journey for many residential school survivors," Cameron said in an interview Wednesday.

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May 15 marks a new anniversary of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine perpetrated by the nascent State of Israel in 1948. Seventy-seven years after that original “catastrophe,” a crime prolonged by colonial occupation, the situation of the Palestinian people is desperate. After a brief and fragile ceasefire on March 2, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has resumed its brutal offensive in Gaza, a veritable genocide broadcast live, and carried out with the military and financial means and diplomatic cover of the Zionist state’s main allies: the United States and the European powers. In 18 months, the Israeli army has murdered more than 52,000 Gazans — including some 18,000 children. The Lancet, a journal that tracks the situation in Gaza, estimates that that figure could actually be at least double.

The genocidal war on the Palestinians has also spread to the West Bank, with tens of thousands of people displaced and under attack by both the Israeli army and armed settler gangs. As can be seen in No Other Land (the Oscar-winning documentary) or in the more recent film, The Settlers, the violent attacks against the Palestinian population, their homes, and lands, which accompany the expansion of settler settlements, have been ongoing since long before October 2023 and are part of a plan, openly discussed by Netanyahu’s cabinet ministers, to annex the territory. But with the latest war in Gaza, those plans have taken a leap forward, with the scandalous collaboration of the Palestinian Authority. According to a report by journalists from The New York Times, the streets of the West Bank — Palestinian territory occupied by Israel — are increasingly resembling Gaza: homes reduced to rubble, walls riddled with bullet holes, and bulldozers everywhere. One of the hardest-hit targets was Jenin, from which 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced — the largest population transfer since 1967, when Israel took control of the territory. This does not include the approximately 9,500 Palestinian prisoners held in harsh conditions by the IDF, many of them subjected to torture.

If the genocide was financed and sponsored by former President Joe Biden (one of the factors explaining the Democratic Party’s defeat), it received a strong boost from the White House when President Donald Trump, flanked by Netanyahu, announced his “proposal” to transform Gaza into a luxury resort once the Israeli army finished the dirty work of displacing the two million Gazans to Egypt or Jordan. Although Trump soon abandoned his real estate project in the face of rejection from the United States’ Arab allies and the bewilderment of military analysts and strategists, his announcement was read by the promoters of Greater Israel as a green light to annex all of Gaza.

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Grand Chief Greg Desjarlais of the Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations says no referendum can overturn the treaty that encompasses most of central Alberta.

"We're tired of seeing the government pass these bills where you don't see two sentences of Indigenous inclusion, and that has to stop," Desjarlais told the media at an anti-separatist rally on the steps of the Alberta Legislature building in Edmonton, amiskwaciwaskahikan, on Thursday.

About 600 people were at the demonstration, many with flags and signs protesting Alberta's separation from Canada and the controversial Bill 54, proposed by Premier Danielle Smith's government.

"I think we're tired of being pushed around," Desjarlais said.

"Maybe she thinks First Nations people are in the way, and it's about time that we rise and stand up, in a peaceful way."

Bill 54, the Election Statutes Amendment Act, has sparked resistance from many Indigenous leaders in the province since it was tabled two weeks ago.

The bill would reduce the number of signatures required to trigger a referendum on independence and extend the signature collection period to 90 days from 60.

"Bill 54 is unconstitutional," said rally participant Helen Starr from Peerless Trout First Nation, a community about 230 kilometres north of Slave Lake, Alta.

"Our agreement was with the federal government way before Alberta was even created.... And they [the province] have no right touching anything that does not belong to them."

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