Indigenous

The recent attack on April 23, 2025, on ancestral Indigenous institutions in Guatemala through the criminalization of two of their former leaders is illegal and contrary to national and international law. Cultural Survival demands respect for ancestral Indigenous mayoral offices and the immediate release of those detained.

As an organization whose mission is to defend the rights of Indigenous Peoples, Cultural Survival supports communities' self-determination, cultures, livelihoods, and political resilience. Cultural Survival strongly denounces the attack by the Corrupt Pact in Guatemala, carried out by the Public Prosecutor's Office, against ancestral K'iche' Indigenous institutions through the arbitrary detention of two of its former leaders, Luis Pacheco (K'iche') and Héctor Chaclán (K'iche'), on terrorism charges for having participated in 106 days of peaceful pro-democracy protests in Guatemala. The arrest of these comrades violates fundamental rights enshrined in both the Guatemalan Constitution and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, signed and endorsed by Guatemala.

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But in Gaza today, cash has all but disappeared. Aside from the brief ceasefire interlude that started in January and Israel ended on 19 March, when some cash aid was delivered by international organizations, no cash had entered Gaza for 15 months prior and none since.

In the first three months alone after October 2023, according to the World Bank, Israel destroyed or damaged 93 percent of all bank branches.

With no banks and only the cash that was already there – so overused by now that it is starting to disintegrate – Palestinians in Gaza have had to improvise.

Digital transactions have eased some of the pressure, while bartering has become common.

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Since entering office in January, Donald Trump’s repeated threats to seize control of the Panama Canal, a critical passage for global freight traffic, have dominated headlines around the world. But two hours west of Panama City, 12,000 locals have a more pressing concern: their government plans to flood their lands and relocate them to create an artificial lake to ensure water supply to the canal.

“Tell the president to leave us alone. Does he know everything we are going to lose: the land, the crops, the homes? We are worried,” says Elizabeth Delgado, a resident of Limón de Chagres, a community on the banks of the Indio River that is the focus of the planned damming project. Along the river, the Delgados and roughly 500 other families face seeing their homes submerged.

The Panama Canal is a artificial waterway that cuts across the Central American country to connect the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean. Proposals for the reservoir project have come after decades of gradually increasing freight traffic transiting through the canal, which now handles around 5% of global maritime trade and reported revenues of around $5bn for the 2024 financial year. The route is particularly crucial for the US, with around 40% of the country’s container traffic travelling through the canal each year.

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Four years ago, Harvard University moved a long-planned solar geoengineering project from Arizona to Sápmi, the homelands of Sámi peoples across what is now Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. The Sámi had no idea it was coming.

“We did not know about the plans until we got alerted by the [Indigenous Environmental Network] and they were saying, ‘You should be aware of this,'” said Sámi council member Åsa Larsson Blind.

Blind said that it’s unlikely Harvard deliberately ignored consulting the Sámi about the project before moving it to Kiruna, Sweden. More likely, she thinks, they weren’t aware that they needed to.

“But at the same time, you don’t need to do much research to know that Kiruna is in Sápmi, and that there is an Indigenous people,” Blind said. “There is one Indigenous people in Europe, and that’s the Sámi people, and we are not unknown.”

The idea behind solar geoengineering is that it combats global warming by reflecting sun rays back into space with chemical particles sprayed into the atmosphere. Known as the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx, the Harvard project would have experimented with the dispersal of those chemicals over Sámi lands. But this kind of climate manipulation goes against Sámi traditional beliefs about caring for nature, the Sámi council wrote in an open letter to Harvard that called for an end to the program. Critically, Harvard also failed to inform the Sámi people of the project or obtain their consent before starting it, the council pointed out, violating their right to free, prior, and informed consent — rights enshrined in international law. Representatives with Harvard’s SCoPEx project did not return requests for comment.

The Sámi are not alone in experiencing such violations and joining the ranks of Indigenous peoples relying on international law to challenge “climate solutions” projects, like SCoPEx, in their territories.

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About 10,000 people — descendants of 12 Indigenous tribes — make up the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation today. They like to call their land “God’s Country,” a place of near-divine beauty where sheer cliffs descend from dense timberlands and plunge into the Columbia River. Rugged alpine mountains bisect the reservation, opening onto windswept plains with stands of towering trees on its western edge. Junipers and huckleberries dot the woods along with other culturally significant plants.

The Colville Reservation is one of the many Indigenous tribal communities protected by its own tribal wildfire fighters with funding from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). In 2019, about 80% of tribal forests were managed in part or fully by tribal programs funded directly by the BIA. Tribal communities that lack their own programs can opt for direct management by the BIA.

However, these tribal wildfire fighters, who protect some of the nation’s most vulnerable communities, are stretched to their limits. Long-term federal land mismanagement and climate change have caused the number and intensity of reservation fires to soar. About 7% of the 4 million acres of tribal lands in the country burned between 2010 and 2020.

Wildfire-fighting programs across the nation all struggle with low pay, funding and recruitment. But on tribal lands, the pressure is even more acute.

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“It was 5 in the morning, and my wife and children were still sleeping when I saw three bulldozers coming from a distance on the village’s main road,” said Raed Srour, 45. “When they approached, I could see that they were accompanied by several military jeeps, and I understood that it was an occupation demolition mission on its way to the village. I wondered where they might be headed. It didn’t occur to me that they were coming for my house.”

A father of four, Raed Srour didn’t know that on Monday morning, he and his family had just spent their last night in their home in the village of Ni’lin, west of Ramallah. Srour’s family had been living in that house for seven years after almost ten years of hard work, building it stone by stone.

Elsewhere in the West Bank on that same day, Israeli forces moved to demolish several more Palestinian homes: in Beit Ummar, north of Hebron, a seven-floor residential building was demolished, and in Anata, north of Jerusalem, 14 Palestinian properties received demolition orders. Later in the week, Israeli forces demolished a three-floor residential building in the village of Za’tara east of Bethlehem, in addition to several water wells in Tarqumia, west of Hebron.

The demolition of Palestinian homes is the other side of the coin of Israel’s seizure of Palestinian land for settlement expansion. Since 2023, home demolitions have displaced 7,392 Palestinians.

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Oglala Sioux Tribal President Frank Star Comes Out says U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum should deny a major media request to reveal the Black Hills Claim accounting record. Speculation is that interest earnings are worth over $1 billion on the $102 million land payment that federal courts adjudged to the Sioux Nation 50 years ago.

The Oglala and their six fellow Teton Sioux bands never took the 1974 federal claim money offer for the theft of their Black Hills treaty-guaranteed territory. So, the Interior Department, as their legal trustee, invested the nations’ behalf through its Bureau of Trust Funds Administration.

CNN Investigative Unit reporter Casey Tolan, a data journalist, filed the request under Freedom of Information Act terms. He asked the Interior Department for “the most recent statement available listing the total amount of money held in trust by the department.” Oglala leaders recently rejected the idea after being notified by the department.

When Interior officials notified the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Star Comes Out said the request is “just an underhanded way to ultimately get the Oglala Sioux Tribe to implicitly accept the 1980 Black Hills Claim.’’ He told Buffalo’s Fire: “All the Sioux tribes have informed the United States since 1980 that 'The Black Hills Are Not For Sale'.”

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The first time Jennifer Simard saw lake sturgeon, she was as a teenager visiting the Moose Cree Homeland with her family. They stumbled on a group of the fish, namew in Moose Cree dialect, stranded in a spillway, designed to help prevent dams from overflowing but often dangerous to aquatic species.

“They were in these little pools, and their dorsal fins were sticking out of the water. They wouldn’t have lived there long — and it was hot too, because it was July,” Simard said. “Something would have eaten them eventually, or they would have died there.”

Simard and her family began to move the fish, each about three or four feet long, back to the river. They used bins they had in the truck at the time, usually meant for moving wood and harvesting other animals and fish. She remembers returning about 10 fish to the river that day. Her family knew what they were doing, but moving these massive fish isn’t recommended for the average person.

“[The species] was really explained to me by my family as something really special, and something that my relatives survived off of in the past,” Simard said. “That was my first interaction with sturgeon and, over the years, I’ve gotten to learn more about them and how much more they have to share.”

After her rescue mission as a teenager, Simard went on to become an ecologist and later co-founded the group Learning From Lake Sturgeon. It’s a partnership between the Wildlife Conservation Society of Canada and Moose Cree First Nation, where Simard is now the director of Ontario Power Generation relations.

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Palestinian Christians in Gaza remember Pope Francis and his daily calls to the Catholic church in Gaza. “Gaza was among his last words,” one member of the parish told Mondoweiss. "His voice made us forget the sound of the planes and the bombs."

Christians around the world are mourning the death of Pope Francis, who passed away on April 21. But in the Gaza Strip, the local Christian community is not just mourning the loss of a religious leader, but the loss of a friend – someone they called “a true father.”

Universally hailed as a champion of the oppressed and the marginalized, the late Pope demonstrated his commitment to this reputation during the past 18 months of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. It has been widely reported that he made regular and near-daily calls to the Holy Family Church in Gaza and that he roundly condemned Israel’s actions, describing them as “terrorism” with “the characteristics of a genocide.”

“The death of Pope Francis is a great loss to the world and an even greater loss for those who did not see the world through his eyes — the eyes of justice and truth,” says George Anton, head of the emergency committee of the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza, where Palestinian Christians in Gaza have sought refuge since the start of the war. “He always championed the oppressed and always stood up for what was right, no matter what. This was reflected in his stance with us during the war.”

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Delegates to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues – one of the largest annual gatherings at UN headquarters in New York City – may decide to move future meetings outside the United States because of the current political climate.

Fears about treatment of international visitors and difficulty or delays in gaining visas to travel into the U.S. are already reducing attendance at this year’s meeting, which is set to start Monday and run through May 2.

Now members are considering moving the event altogether.

“We're concerned about the ability of Indigenous people from around the world to actually make it in the country and not be harassed,” Geoffrey Roth, Standing Rock Sioux, one of 16 members of the Permanent Forum, told ICT Friday.

“Considering the safety of Indigenous peoples and their ability to actually make it to meetings and participate in a meaningful way,” he said, “I think it's time to move, and that's my personal opinion.”

Roth has heard from delegates and representatives that it’s not a safe time to travel to the United States, and they’re scared to do it. On top of that, visas are being denied or delayed, impacting those who can participate — especially those from countries in Africa or from Russia.

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Mary Annette Pember will publish her first book, Medicine River, on Tuesday. She signed to write it in 2022 but feels she really started work more than 50 years ago, “before I could even write, when I was under the table as a kid, making these symbols that were sort of my own”.

A citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe, Pember is a national correspondent for ICT News, formerly Indian Country Today. In Medicine River, she tells two stories: of the Indian boarding schools, which operated in the US between the 1860s and the 1960s, and of her mother, her time in such a school and the toll it took.

“My mother kind of put me on this quest from my earliest memory,” Pember said. “I’ve always known I would somehow tell her story.”

More than 400 Indian boarding schools operated on US soil. Vehicles for policies of assimilation, perhaps better described as cultural annihilation, the schools were brutal by design. Children were not allowed to speak their own language or practice religions and traditions. Discipline was harsh, comforts scarce. As described by Richard Henry Pratt, an army officer and champion of the project, the aim was to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man”.

In the 1930s, Pember’s mother, Bernice Rabideaux, was sent with her siblings to St Mary’s Catholic Indian boarding school, on the Ojibwe reservation in Odanah, Wisconsin. Bernice was marked for life. On the page, Pember describes how as a young child she responded to her mother’s dark moods by hiding under the kitchen table, making her symbols on its underside. But she also writes about how her mother’s “terrible stories” about the “Sisters School”, about psychological and physical abuse, helped form a bond that never broke.

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• Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren was in Washington earlier in April to watch President Donald Trump sign an order aimed at revitalizing the coal industry.

• Coal mines and coal-fired power plants were once steady income sources for the Navajo Nation, but the money dried up with the closure of a key plant and the mines that supplied it.

• Some Navajo organizers say Nygren's support for coal ignores the effects of fossil fuels on the climate and on human health. One expert said Nygren exaggerated the importance of coal.

Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren traveled to Washington, D.C., earlier in April to watch President Donald Trump sign an executive order aimed at deregulating coal production on federal lands and revitalizing the mining industry, signaling what appears to be the tribal leader's support for coal.

In the executive order, Trump asserted that coal is vital to the nation’s economic and national security. He declared that removing federal regulatory barriers to coal production is a national priority and encouraged the use of coal to help meet the country’s growing energy needs.

"Today marks a pivotal moment for energy policy in the United States," Nygren said of the president's action. "As President Trump signs an executive order aimed at revitalizing the coal industry, I want to emphasize the importance of including tribal nations like the Navajo Nation in this national conversation."

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Our reporter Rowan Glass went deep inside one of the world’s most enduring anti-capitalist movements, offering a rare and intimate glimpse into a community that has defied militarisation, marginalisation, and globalisation. Granted exclusive access to the 30th anniversary of the Zapatistas' 1994 uprising, our team captured the group’s commemorations, their political education programs, and their vision of self-governance – built from the ground up by Indigenous communities.

"¡Ya Basta! 30 Years of Zapatista Autonomy" explores the legacy and future of the EZLN, reflecting on how a masked, rural rebellion reshaped Mexico’s political landscape and inspired activists across the globe.

What does revolution look like when it refuses to seize state power? And what can the world learn from a community that continues to build its own system from the ground up?

Consider supporting our independent journalism at www.patreon.com/moderninsurgent.

Find the rest of our work at www.moderninsurgent.org

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Israel resumed its genocidal attacks on the Gaza Strip on 18 March, issuing evacuation orders for nearly 37 percent of the territory and designating these areas as combat zones.

This escalation followed Israel’s complete closure of the Rafah crossing in early March, cutting off essential supplies – food, medicine and fuel – pushing Gaza’s already dire humanitarian crisis to the edge of catastrophe. By late March, the situation had worsened, with Israel ordering the full evacuation of Palestinians from Rafah, a city devastated by invasion since May 2024, albeit briefly interrupted by a ceasefire.

According to Axios, citing a senior Israeli official’s comments to the media, the Israeli military has intensified its ground offensive, aiming to occupy 25 percent of Gaza within weeks as part of a “maximum pressure” campaign to force Hamas to release hostages. Thousands who already lost their homes may never return, as entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble in previous attacks are now being overtaken by Israeli forces.

Gaza is shrinking, fueling fears that this is the first step in a larger plan to displace Palestinians entirely. Israeli officials have openly discussed plans for long-term control over occupied areas, with some calling for the forced transfer of Palestinians to neighboring countries. With no safe zones and sealed borders, we are trapped – pushed from place to place, starving under relentless bombardment, while essential infrastructure, including hospitals and shelters, collapses under the weight of destruction.

These attacks came after Israel broke a fragile two-month ceasefire, during which speeches and plans were made about Gaza’s possible future.

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Since October 7, 2023, the situation in Israeli prisons has been the worst it has ever been since the beginning of the Israeli occupation. Prisoners say that whoever had been detained before October 7 had never truly seen prison. Just as the Israeli occupation carries out a genocide in Gaza, it is aslo carrying it out behind bars, using torture, deliberate starvation, sexual assault, humiliation, and SA. Even Israeli doctors have notoriously assisted in the torture of Palestinian detainees, sharing prisoners’ medical information with interrogators to “greenlight” torture, teaching interrogators how to inflict pain without leaving physical marks, and sometimes directly engaging in torture themselves.

Prisoners released from the occupation’s jails are the clearest evidence of the conditions inside. A large number of them are released having lost significant weight, or suffer from serious health conditions such as scabies, requiring immediate transfer to hospitals.

In recent months, several prisoners have died in Israeli prisons. According to a statement from the Palestinian Prisoners Club, the number of martyrs from the prisoners’ movement has reached 64 since the beginning of the genocide on October 7, 2023, and these are only the ones whose deaths have been officially announced.

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On March 31, the Supreme Court of B.C. released its decision on a historic case with implications for the future of resource management in Canada.

The judge sided with the Haida Gwaii Management Council and Province of British Columbia against logging giant Teal Cedar Products Inc., which argued its profitability had unjustly diminished due to the former’s sustainability regulations and improved forestry stewardship standards. In its defence, Haida Gwaii Management Council and the province pointed to Teal’s careless logging and business practices, which it continued despite expert, repeated advice from Haida and Crown governments. Proceedings involved numerous expert witnesses and took place over the course of 64 days in 2023. Almost exactly two years later, the judge dismissed Teal’s claims.

In a statement, Skil Hiilans (Allan Davidson), hereditary title holder of St’lang Laanaas and chair and founding member of the council, said, “We welcome this judgment that strongly affirms the [Haida Gwaii Management Council] has the mandate and authority to make the decisions that best maintains the cultural and environmental integrity of Haida Gwaii.”

Keith Moore, a forester and long-time Haida Gwaii resident, and a witness in the case, calls the decision “a great victory” for all the work the communities, the Haida Nation and the provincial government did to create the progressive land-use plan for Haida Gwaii. Though Haida leaders and conservation experts testified during the proceedings, Moore says the judgement is “purely based on the law” as the judge rejected all three of Teal’s arguments. “But it is great support for all the work that was done on Haida Gwaii and good news for the future elsewhere. Governments and First Nations can move forward to make the important decisions to change the way we manage forests with the full support of the law.”

The decision is not only significant for future conservation initiatives — it also affirms the Haida principle of Yahguudang (respect) and upholds the rights of First Nations to safeguard their homelands.

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The affected communities are lashing out at their own leaders for signing land leases worth thousands of dollars with a nonexistent nation that had attempted similar moves in Ecuador and Paraguay

In September 2024, three Irish citizens arrived in the Bolivian Amazon city of Beni posing as Hindu monks. Dressed in orange robes, they presented themselves as protectors of nature, expressing concern over the wildfires that had destroyed more than 10 million hectares the previous year in the Chiquitanía and the Amazon regions. They settled in the municipality of Exaltación, where they offered free yoga therapy and meditation sessions to both urban and rural residents.

A few weeks later, another 17 individuals — of Indian and Chinese origin— followed, entering the community with herbal remedies and promises of food aid. Their strategy, as self-proclaimed delegates of a so-called nation called Kailasa, was to win the trust of locals. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, they were signing lease agreements with leaders of three villages for nearly half a million hectares — an expanse almost five times the size of Bogotá — for just under $200,000.

“The community is upset because their goodwill was taken advantage of. They had been offered medicines and health support, but at no point were they informed about leasing or donating their land,” Justo Molina, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Eastern Bolivia CIDOB, tells EL PAÍS.

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The Tebughna Foundation threw a big celebration in February after the Environmental Protection Agency awarded the nonprofit $20 million to renovate or replace 20 homes contaminated with asbestos and lead for the Native Village of Tyonek in Alaska. The project, which would also connect the homes to solar panels, aimed to upgrade houses built in the 1960s.

" We were all just so happy about this grant that's going to literally change some people's lives," says Vide Kroto, the foundation's executive director.

But within a matter of weeks, the Trump administration froze the funding. When Kroto logged onto the federal payment system on March 7, the status of her grant said "suspended."

She wasn't alone.

More than 22 tribes and nonprofits across the country from Alaska to the Midwest, have had around $350 million in federal funding for key infrastructure projects frozen, often without notice. NPR spoke with 11 of them who say some have found out their funds were suspended when they logged onto the federal payment system in early March. Others have had their grants disappear from that system entirely. Tyonek and other villages in Alaska received no notice whatsoever.

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In front of descendants of Sand Creek Massacre survivors, Colorado lawmakers unanimously greenlighted a memorial sculpture Monday to commemorate the 1864 atrocity at the State Capitol.

The memorial will comprise of a massive, 24-foot-tall sculpture of an Arapaho chief, a Cheyenne chief and a Native American woman holding a child.

The current plan is for the sculpture replace a Civil War statue that was pulled down by protestors in 2020. The location, right in front of the iconic Capitol building, has been boarded off since.

The 1864 Sand Creek Massacre is possibly the worst atrocity in Colorado history. About 250 Arapaho and Cheyenne civilians, mostly women, children and the elderly, were killed by U.S. troops along Colorado's eastern plains, near the modern day town of Eads.

Otto Braided Hair is a representative for the Northern Cheyenne and a descendant of Sand Creek Massacre victims. He was on the Senate floor during Monday's vote on the resolution.

Braided Hair and other Sand Creek victims' descendants have been working for decades to memorialize the massacre at the Capitol. Coming more than a century and a half after the initial event, they say this is just one step in the healing process.

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To escape the federal election in Montreal, all you have to do is cross the Mercier Bridge. In Kahnawà:ke, a Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) reserve along the St. Lawrence River, there is a notable absence of candidate posters and electoral events.

Most people in Kahnawà:ke choose not to vote in Canadian elections.

That doesn’t mean that no one cares about politics in Kahnawà:ke. On the contrary - Kahnawà:ke is home to two distinct forms of government: the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake (MCK) band office, whose leaders are elected by voting, and traditional Longhouse governance, whose leaders are chosen by Clan Mothers and community consensus. Mohawk people are part of the Haudenosaunee confederacy comprising six nations: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. ‍ “No one in this room votes”

Right now, Taiaiake Alfred, a specialist in Kanien'kehá:ka politics and history, is leading the Kahnawà:ke Governance Project (Kgov), bringing community members together to discuss how to restore traditional government in the community. On April 9, after a Kgov meeting, Taiaiake told attendees they could share their thoughts with La Converse about voting in the federal election.

“No one in this room votes,” said a woman in the group of around 20 people to knowing laughter.

As people got up to leave after three hours of discussing how they wanted leadership to work in their community, a few stuck around to speak with La Converse.

Winona Polson-Lahache, longtime political advisor to the MCK, had a brief message for fellow Kahnawà:ke residents: “Don’t vote, it’s not your government.”

Conservatives and Liberals: “They're all wings of the same bird”‍

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While Israel continues its genocide in Gaza, militarily and diplomatically supported by the U.S. and Western powers, imperialist rhetoric shapes the ongoing slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. And although it was written decades ago, Ghassan Kanafani’s impeccable and distinguished writing still articulates the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle with amazing clarity.

Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings (Pluto Press) was published in October 2024, a year after Israel’s genocide in Gaza began. Through a translated selection of Kanafani’s political writings, the reader is able to understand Palestinian anti-colonial resistance through his analysis. In the words of editors Louis Brehony and Tahrir Hamdi from the book’s introduction, this resistance is “a confrontation between imperialism and an anti-imperialist liberation movement against brutal settler-colonialism.”

The writings are grouped into five main themes, each chapter distinctively showing how language is essential in conveying the meaning of anti-colonial resistance, the perils from within, and the necessity of looking at Palestinian anti-colonial resistance in terms of what it faces regionally and globally

Kanafani is synonymous with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and renowned for his literary works. It was not until 2005 that Israel admitted to killing him in a targeted assassination by a car bomb in Beirut in July 1972.

In light of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Kanafani’s succinct description of what Palestinians are up against holds absolute relevance.

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Mexico City, April 8, 2025. More than 15 Mayan communities from Campeche, Yucatán, Quintana Roo, and allies from Mexico, Belize, and Colombia met on March 29 and 30 on Isla Arena, Campeche, to analyze common threats to their territories and articulate defense strategies. Participants included representatives from Cherán (Michoacán), Mixtec communities, Binizá, and even the Inga community of Colombia, sharing experiences of autonomy.

“These threats put our existence as Mayan peoples at risk,” the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) stated in a statement. Faced with projects such as pig farms, mega-tourism developments, mining, and carbon offsets, they agreed to create the Mayan Assembly for Autonomy and a Mayan Council to coordinate actions.

The document emphasizes that problems such as land dispossession, agribusiness, and expropriations will no longer be addressed in isolation: “We are convening, meeting, and organizing.” The initiative seeks to strengthen local resistance through self-determination, inspired by examples such as the autonomous government of Cherán.

With a hopeful message, the communities emphasized their commitment to future generations: “Those of us who are now are seeds, we are sowing and fishing hands, we are those who pave the way for those who will come after us… We prefer to leave them an experience of struggle, we prefer to leave them a lesson in rebellion, we prefer to leave them the hope that we can continue living as a Mayan people in harmony with the Yuumts'ilo'ob and Mother Earth.”

The assembly was also described as an “open door” for more Mayan communities to join in the construction of their own alternatives and to emphasize the determination to forge their own paths and their own course as a Mayan People.

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This story about a lawsuit involving First Nations in northern Ontario has deep roots — in mistakes made by the Crown centuries ago

On its face, this is a tale at the intersection of fishing rights and mining. In a court case filed last year, Netmizaaggamig Nishnaabeg alleged the Ontario government wrongly consulted two other First Nations about mining in what Netmizaaggamig asserts is its sole territory. The Anishinaabe community, located a few hours’ drive northwest of Sault Ste. Marie, also alleges this enabled people from those nations to allegedly poach walleye from White Lake, the centre of Netmizaaggamig’s community and culture.

The other two nations and the Ontario government have strongly denied the allegations. But when you dig a little deeper, there’s an even more nuanced story to tell. The root of this dispute goes back to 1849 and 1850, when treaties covering the region were signed — treaties that were missing key information, and set the stage for conflict more than a century later.

It’s a mess created by the Crown, which has left First Nations today to pick up the pieces — as walleye populations in the region continue to deplete.

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A First Nation chief in northwestern Ontario says political rhetoric about running roughshod over Indigenous consultation to fast-track mining and other extraction projects is emboldening an abusive approach to resource engagement.

Onigaming Chief Jeff Copenace says his community “fundamentally opposes” a proposed gold mine and warns that the development “will be opposed at any cost necessary including peaceful protest and direct action.”

In a March 22 email, Golden Rapture Mining president Richard Rivet sent an email to Onigaming First Nation leaders, informing them that Ontario officials would soon deliver the company’s “enviro-friendly exploration plan” for its Phillips Township Gold Property.

Copenace said a number of representatives from the junior mining company had reached out over the past month regarding exploration and development on the proposed 10-000-acre mine site, located between Sioux Narrows and Nestor Falls

If approved, the eight-site project would re-ignite mines that were exploited as long ago as the 1894 Lake of the Woods gold rush.

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