Indigenous

President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax bill is on its way to his desk for a signature after House Republicans passed the legislation with a vote of 218-214 on Thursday. As the administration celebrates, many Americans are contemplating its effects closer to home. With deep cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and renewable energy projects, the bill is likely to have a devastating effect on low-income and rural communities across the country.

“These bills are an affront to our sovereignty, our lands, and our way of life. They would gut essential health and food security programs, roll back climate resilience funding, and allow the exploitation of our sacred homelands without even basic tribal consultation,” said Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson, president of the Tlingit and Haida in Alaska, in a statement. “This is not just bad policy — it is a betrayal of the federal trust responsibility to tribal nations.”

Tribes across the country are particularly worried about the megabill’s hit to clean energy, complicating the development of critical wind and solar projects. According to the Department of Energy, tribal households face 6.5 times more electrical outages per year and a 28 percent higher energy burden compared to the average U.S. household. An estimated 54,000 people living on tribal lands have no electricity.

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Tribal representatives in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron have rejected a reported proposal to establish a so-called “tribal emirate” in exchange for recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, Anadolu Agency reported on 7 July.

The proposal, first revealed by the Wall Street Journal, alleged that Hebron tribal leaders sent a letter to Israeli Economy Minister Nir Barkat, offering formal recognition of Israel in return for being appointed as representatives of Arab residents in Hebron and setting a timetable to join the US-led Abraham Accords.

In a press conference on Sunday, Hebron tribal figure Nafez al-Jaabari denounced the offer and declared the community’s rejection of the initiative.

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The Oak Ridge Fire has burned 10,814 acres southwest of Window Rock and remains 42% contained as of Sunday. Crews are bracing for extreme temperatures and critically dry fuels that threaten to spark new fires across the region.

Firefighters continue to work the southern edge of the fire near Hunters Point, Oak Springs, and Pine Springs. Operations Chief Tyler Chesarek said infrared maps helped crews locate and suppress hot spots.

“Crews were able to get around, get some depth, and hit some of the hot spots of concern,” he said.

A controlled burn near Oak Springs was also successful. Teams pushed northward and secured lines near the Klagetoh, Arizona, area

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The head of the Chiefs of Ontario (COO) has blunt words for Ontario and Alberta, who this week called on the federal government to not reintroduce legislation that would mandate safe drinking water in First Nation communities.

“Ontario and Alberta’s opposition to Bill C-61 is not only disappointing, it is a direct attack on the rights, health, and safety of First Nations,” COO Regional Chief Abram Benedict told APTN News in a statement.

“This legislation was developed to ensure that our communities finally have access to clean, safe drinking water, a basic human right that far too many have been denied.”

He reiterated that Ontario has the highest number of long-term drinking water advisories in the country and gave the example of Neskantaga First Nation whose members have lived under a boil water advisory for over 30 years, calling it “a national failure that must be addressed.”

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Republican congressional proposals to sell off huge swaths of public land for housing could threaten tribal nations’ constitutional and treaty rights to access hunting and fishing grounds, as well as their cultural and ceremonial sites, experts say.

The latest proposed text, obtained by E&E News, from the Senate Committee on Natural and Energy Resources would allow the sale of Bureau of Land Management lands within 5 miles of a “population center.” A previous version included Forest Service lands, and federal lands within reservation boundaries. The legislation would also conflict with current procedures that allow tribes to obtain nearby public lands at no or low cost, instead requiring that such lands be purchased at “fair market value.”

“This is a frontal assault on tribal treaty rights and the exercise of those,” said Cris Stainbrook, Oglala Lakota and CEO of Indian Land Capital Company, which assists tribal nations in regaining land.

The proposed legislation — which has not yet passed out of committee — repeatedly puts states and local governments ahead of tribal nations. For example, the bill gives state and local governments the “right of first refusal” when land is put up for sale but denies tribes that same right. The bill would also prioritize land nominated for sale by states and local governments but not land that is nominated by tribes. While the legislation does include a requirement to consult with tribes as well as with states or local governments affected by land sales, it’s not clear how such proposals would be weighed should they conflict with one another. The state of Montana and federally protected lands are exempt, though tribal nations do not appear to have been consulted on the legislation.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5433240

We survived the hospital. Now we’re fighting to find a safe home.

Hey comrades 💙

I’m reaching out again because my sisters and I really need your help right now. Thanks to your incredible support before, my sisters were able to get the emergency medical care they needed .. you truly saved their lives. Now we’re facing the next big challenge: finding a safe place to stay.

Right now, we’re stuck in a temporary spot that’s not safe or permanent. We could be asked to leave any time, and with things getting worse for LGBTQ+ people here, it’s terrifying not knowing what could happen next.

We can’t go back to the Gorom camp .. the host community doesn’t want us there anymore. UNHCR told us to stay in Juba while they keep working on our resettlement, but they’re out of donations due to the global crisis. They asked us to try to “blend in” here for now, but that’s almost impossible without a safe place. There are over 300 LGBTQ+ refugees here from Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Ethiopia, and Congo in the same struggle after camp attack and no safe house is big enough for everyone.

So we’re trying to get a small, affordable apartment here in Juba that can fit the four of us together. Somewhere we can finally feel safe and breathe again.

So far, I’ve raised $66 through my GoFundMe, but it’s not nearly enough yet. Here’s our budget for this move:

🚐 Transport to Juba for 4 people = $100–150 🏠 Initial rent + deposit (1–2 months) =$250–350 🛏 Bedding and essentials (mattresses, blankets, cooking items) = $150 🍲 Food & basics for the first month = $200 🏥 Follow-up checkups and meds =$50

📌 Estimated total needed: $700–850

This would cover getting us to Juba safely, securing a small apartment, and making sure we have food and the meds my sisters still need.

Any support donations, shares, or advice on safe places would mean everything to us right now. Every dollar brings us closer to safety and keeps us off the streets. 💜

The mutual aid link is in my profile just tap my name. Thank you so much for standing with us.

The homes of Miccosukee and Seminole people, as well as their ceremonial sites, surround the detention center on three sides.

Osceola-Hart’s great-grandfather Wild Bill Osceola fought against the development of an airport at the same site where the ICE facility’s construction is now underway.

In 1968, authorities in Dade County, now known as Miami-Dade County, began building the Big Cypress Jetport on land the Miccosukees used for ceremonial practices. The Dade County Port Authority referred to the project as the “world’s largest airport,” with six runways designed to handle large jets, and officials were quoted as calling the environmental and tribal leaders who opposed it “butterfly chasers.”

Osceola-Hart is proud of her great-grandfather’s efforts to stop the 1960s development, but she is disappointed the Miccosukees lost land they considered sacred. “We got kicked out of ceremonial grounds,” she says.

Finding a safe place to live has been an ongoing battle for the tribes in Florida. Seminoles retreated into the Everglades after the Seminole wars ended in 1858.

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Red Feather is dedicated to improving housing conditions on the Hopi and Navajo nations in the Four Corners region. It has helped thousands of families with stove replacement, heat pump installation and weatherization assistance. The group has been doing this work for decades, but in recent years, it has seen a surge in work, in part due to increased funding from the federal government.

A big part of that funding, a $500,000 environmental justice grant Red Feather received from the Environmental Protection Agency, has now been terminated.

Red Feather is just one of hundreds of groups that have had grants meant to help disadvantaged communities canceled by the Trump administration. An Inside Climate News analysis, which relied on federal government spending data and federal court filings from the Trump administration, found the EPA’s grant terminations focused almost entirely on cutting spending on poor and minority communities, affecting 384 primary grants worth more than $2.4 billion.

“At the end of the day, we’re about solutions,” said Joe Seidenberg, Red Feather’s executive director. “And the solutions we’re advancing—clean heating, affordable energy, local workforce development—deliver real value, no matter who’s in office.”

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A peer-reviewed article—on Indigenous dance in Palestine and Native North America as resistance to genocide—was formally accepted then rejected by the editors of The Journal of Somaesthetics, citing fear of criticizing Israel’s genocide.

It is unclear why—after a year of nonstop affirmation and written acceptance from both editors—the decision was suddenly reversed. Finally, it is also unclear why making a political statement (or being perceived as making one), or putting a journal, its editors, and/or its board members “in a difficult position” are legitimate grounds for reversing a formal acceptance for publication in an academic journal. My subsequent attempts to clarify and resolve the situation have all gone nowhere.

From these exchanges, I logically inferred, as did several colleagues in Philosophy and Dance Studies (via email correspondence), that the real reason for the journal’s sudden reversal was my essay’s naming and condemnation of the genocide in Palestine, and the journal leadership’s attempt to protect itself from feared retaliation. In support of this interpretation, my essay also introduced a likely conflict of interest for Richard Shusterman, the founder of somaesthetics, cofounder of its journal, and currently first-listed member of its Editorial Board. Since Shusterman received a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was a lecturer in Israel at Ben-Gurion University, Bezalel Academy of Art, and the Hebrew University, for his journal to publish an essay critical of Israel’s genocide of Palestine, in today’s climate, would presumably have involved personal, professional, and political risks for him.

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A coalition of groups, ranging from environmental activists to Native Americans advocating for their ancestral homelands, converged outside an airstrip in the Florida Everglades Saturday to protest the imminent construction of an immigrant detention center.

Hundreds of protesters lined part of U.S. Highway 41 that slices through the marshy Everglades — also known as Tamiami Trail — as dump trucks hauling materials lumbered into the airfield. Cars passing by honked in support as protesters waved signs calling for the protection of the expansive preserve that is home to a few Native tribes and several endangered animal species.

Christopher McVoy, an ecologist, said he saw a steady stream of trucks entering the site while he protested for hours. Environmental degradation was a big reason why he came out Saturday. But as a South Florida city commissioner, he said concerns over immigration raids in his city also fueled his opposition.

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Hey everyone 💙,

I’m Onandrah. I’m a trans woman and refugee living with my sisters in Gorom Camp, South Sudan. We fled Uganda after the anti-gay bill was passed, and things have been very hard here.

Recently, people from the host community attacked us for being trans. Our shelters were burned down, and two of my sisters were badly injured. We rushed them to the only private hospital willing to help, and with the amazing support of some comrades, we’ve managed to pay part of the hospital bill but we’re still short.

We need help covering about $825 more to finish the hospital bills, relocate somewhere safer, and get food + medicine so we can recover.

Every kind word, share, or donation truly means the world. If you’d like to help or just connect, my mutual aid link is in my profile or DM me anytime.

Thank you so much for letting me be here solidarity and love to everyone fighting to survive and find safety. 🙏🏿

Ras Ain al-Ouja is one of the largest Palestinian Bedouin villages in the occupied West Bank. Nestled amid a ridge of high silt hills just north of Jericho city, the village is facing intensified Israeli government-funded settler efforts to expel its residents.

The community’s 1,200 residents are surrounded from all sides by the illegal Yitav settlement and four illegal settler outposts, the most recent of which was built one year ago.

Settlers descend onto the village and raid residents’ homes on a daily basis, physically attacking people, stealing sheep, and terrorizing families. They also took over the nearby spring of Ain al-Ouja, one of the main springs in Palestine and a major water source for the entire area that drew local tourism. Today, all Palestinians are barred from accessing it.

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The resistance to the Ring of Fire is now making camp.

Members of Neskantaga and Attiwapiskat First Nations have begun clearing brush at the point where proposed highways would cross the Attawapiskat River, headed north toward the mineral deposit that’s suspected to hold more than $60-billion worth of critical minerals.

The planned bridge sites are 60 and 70 kilometres east of Neskantaga, and another 100 kilometres southwest from the Eagle’s Nest, the mine site developers expect will begin production first.

Neskantaga Chief Gary Quisess says the action is in response to this month’s passage of Bill 5 and Bill C-5. The provincial and federal laws, respectively, aim to expedite development by overriding existing laws, including environmental guardrails and regulatory frameworks for First Nations consultation and accommodation.

“Things are not going to move until First Nations are consulted,” says Quisess. “Bill 5, Bill C-5, we weren’t consulted. There wasn’t even time for us to review it. Now they want to come in with their ‘special economic zones’ and their ‘projects in the national interest.’ First Nations are suffering. The way it’s going, this is not going to benefit us.”

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Construction is moving rapidly on a controversial migrant detention center deep in the Florida Everglades nicknamed "Alligator Alcatraz," despite growing concerns from Native American tribes who call the area home.

The facility is being built on an old airstrip at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, roughly an hour and 45 minutes west of Miami. The state is using emergency powers to take over the county-owned land and construct a center that can detain up to 5,000 migrants.

The site is surrounded by wildlife, swampland, and alligators, but it’s also adjacent to Native American land. Members of the Miccosukee Tribe say the project threatens their way of life and the fragile Everglades ecosystem they rely on for food, water, and traditional medicine.

“I started to get upset at the way he described the landscape as if it’s a wasteland,” said Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee tribal member, after comments made by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier. "He talks about there’s only alligators and pythons out here. And I’m like, what about me? I’m out here. My family’s out here."

Osceola lives about three miles from the site and says the entrance to the new detention center is dangerously close to tribal ceremonial grounds.

"This is our homeland and it’s a fragile ecosystem that needs to be protected,” she said. "I have safety concerns — traffic, air quality, spills, and even access to our sacred sites."

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Earlier this year, it seemed as though the final chapter of Leonard Peltier’s story had been written. The eighty-year-old is serving two consecutive life sentences for the 1975 killing of two F.B.I. agents, Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, which he says he didn’t commit. Having exhausted legal channels for appeal, and been denied parole, it appeared that he would die in prison. But, during the final moments of Joe Biden’s Presidential Administration, Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence to home confinement. Peltier is now home, at the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, in North Dakota.

When I called him after he got there, one of the first things he said to me was, “We were at war.” That war had already begun when Peltier was a child. In 1953, when Peltier was nine, Congress passed a bill to terminate his tribe, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. The government’s actions were part of an attempt to end the trust status of tribal lands and the protections that came with it. The Red Power Movement, which advocated American Indian political and cultural autonomy, arose to reverse this agenda, and activists such as Peltier came to see themselves as engaged in a twentieth-century battle akin to the one their ancestors staged in the nineteenth century against the tide of western expansion.

In 1972, Peltier joined the American Indian Movement, among the more confrontational Red Power groups, which had been founded, a few years before, by Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, and others. That fall, AIM helped organize a cross-country caravan called the Trail of Broken Treaties, which ended in the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters, in Washington, D.C., demanding the repeal of termination legislation and renewing federal treaty relations with tribes. AIM brought together fellow-travellers from different tribes who shared similar life stories and who resolved to turn back the existential threats facing tribal life. Many had been taught to feel shame in Native culture and language at Indian boarding schools; others had been hardened by prison stints or by the harsh realities of urban poverty. All were trying to create meaning out of a life that seemed robbed from them. That meant survival by any means, and, as it had for their ancestors, that sometimes meant picking up a gun.

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We as Lakota people came from the center of the earth, out of what is called Wind Cave, in He Sapa, the Black Hills, the heart of everything and the center of our universe. There are multiple iterations of our creation story, but in one, when we first emerged from the Earth, it was clear there was going to be a lot of hardship, that our people would starve and would not be able to live in this new world. As a sacrifice, the last woman out of the cave transformed into a Buffalo, giving herself to feed the people. From that moment on, our people committed ourselves to honor the Buffalo in gratitude; we had an understanding that we would always take care of each other.

The Buffalo have a lot to teach us. But we are still, as we speak, facing the consequences of the federal government’s genocidal campaign, where they killed the Buffalo, intentionally trying to kill us. And it did kill a lot of us, and it killed a lot of things inside of us. Make no mistake: both were intentional.

When you have a people whose entire social structure is modeled after the Buffalo, an economy modeled after the Buffalo, a food system centered on the Buffalo, and then all of a sudden the Buffalo are not present in our everyday lives—a relationship violently and actively withheld from us, for generations—you can understand that some people may struggle with a sense of purpose.

So, to me, Buffalo restoration isn’t just the next eco-trend or hot new social justice campaign. I see Buffalo restoration as food sovereignty. I see it as language revitalization. I see it as suicide prevention. I see it as an economic alternative to a capitalist society.

I see it as the path towards a healthful Indigenous futurism and the imagination of an otherwise-world. I see it as essential to the continuation of my people on this Earth. It’s not just some romanticized image of Buffalo and Native people; it’s really, truly the core of who we are.

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Leonard Peltier’s home on the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa reservation is nestled among green prairie grasses at the end of a tree-lined gravel road. His small yard and 2-bedroom home sit below the big skies of North Dakota. In the driveway sits an old van that he’s determined to fix. He calls it his Indian Car.

It’s been four months since Peltier moved into his new home. It’s also the first time since Jimmy Carter was president that Peltier lived outside of a prison cell. He said the transition to a comfortable new home in Belcourt, N.D., is “awesome.”

“Coming from that cell to this is like, I guess what heaven must feel like, the Great Spirit, the happy hunting ground must feel like,” Peltier said with a soft smile.

In one of the first lengthy interviews since he was released from prison in February, Peltier described his health and the decades he spent living behind bars. He also described his life as a free man after President Joe Biden issued a last-minute commutation of Peltier’s two life sentences for his involvement in the shooting deaths of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota 50 years ago

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A study published via the Harvard Dataverse reveals that Israel has “disappeared” at least 377,000 Palestinians since the start of its genocidal campaign against the Gaza Strip in 2023.

Half of this number is believed to be Palestinian children.

The report was written by Israeli professor Yaakov Garb, who used data-driven analysis and spatial mapping to show how the Israeli army’s siege of Gaza and indiscriminate attacks on civilians in the enclave have led to a serious drop in its population.

The 377,000 Palestinians who are unaccounted for due to Israel’s genocide are approximately 17 percent of the Gaza Strip’s entire population, which now stands at about 1.85 million. Prior to the war in Gaza, the strip’s population was estimated at 2.227 million.

While some are displaced or missing, a significant number are believed to have been killed by Israeli forces, according to the report.

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This year, the 2025 Sundance Institute Native Lab was held at the Picuris Pueblo-owned Hotel Santa Fe in Santa Fe, where the Native Lab relocated in 2015. Indigenous program director Adam Piron (Kiowa/Mohawk) hosted four new Native Lab fellows and two artists in residence.

A local Pueblo elder, Barbara Gonzalez, the grandmother of recent Native Lab alum, Charine Pilar Gonzales (San Ildefonso Pueblo), gave the opening blessing. She spoke about being courageous in your art and finding your own voice. Every artist, she said, will have something different and special to offer the world, something that only they can provide.

In the years since I was a Native Lab fellow, the program’s focus has shifted from short films to more longform projects. After 2020, it pivoted to supporting feature films and episodic pilots, a move that coincided with a remarkable Indigenous TV explosion.

Every artist, she said, will have something different and special to offer the world, something that only they can provide.

“It wasn’t timed like this, but it just sorta ended up lining up like this,” Piron said. Shows like Rutherford Falls, Reservation Dogs and Dark Winds proved that a full-fledged Indigenous TV industry was already being created. The capacity for Indigenous episodic productions was there, and Sundance needed to support it with a new generation of Indigenous writers and producers.

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SANTA CRUZ DE LA SIERRA, Bolivia - In the tiny farming villages of eastern Bolivia, Indigenous women turned firefighters are preparing for a wildfire season they fear will destroy the region's dry forests and fields as it has in previous years.

Blackened, burnt trees around a school in the Naranjos community in Robore, home to 20 families, are a stark reminder of the lurking danger and damage left by last year's wildfires.

More than 10 million hectares (24.7 million acres) were scorched in Bolivia last year, smashing records for its worst-ever fire season which typically runs from early July until September.

Braced against such potential destruction, local women like Angelina Rodas have learned how to fight the wildfires themselves rather than watch them burn out of control with little official response.

"I became a firefighter because of the helplessness of seeing how fires destroyed communities every year," said Rodas.

A community leader of the Chiquitanas Indigenous People, Rodas said she worries the slash-and-burn method, used to clear trees for agriculture and grazing, will spiral out of control as it has before.

While most wildfires are started by humans, warmer and drier conditions driven by climate change, as well as land clearing linked to the booming production of cattle and grains, are helping fires spread more quickly in Bolivia, scientists say.

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In Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie, longtime Minnesota journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty trace this staggering transformation.“ The Europeans who colonized North America in the 19th century transformed the continent’s hydrology as thoroughly as the glaciers,” they write. “But, remarkably, they did it in less than 100 years instead of tens of thousands.”

In putting hundreds of millions of acres of prairie to the plow, settlers not only forcibly displaced Indigenous nations, but completely altered the region’s ancient carbon and nitrogen cycles. They also turned the region into an agricultural powerhouse. The deep black soil once prevalent in the Midwest — the result of thousands of years of animal and plant decomposition depositing untold carbon stores into the ground — became the foundation of the modern food system. But the undoing of the American prairie also dismantled one of the Earth’s most effective climate defenses.

Grasses, like all plant life, inhale planet-warming carbon dioxide. As a result, “​​earth’s soils now contain one-third of the planet’s terrestrial carbon — more than the total released by human activity since the start of the Industrial Revolution,” Hage and Marcotty write. A 2020 Nature study found that restoring just 15 percent of the world’s plowed grasslands could absorb nearly a third of the carbon dioxide humans added to the atmosphere since the 1800s.

Today, the tallgrass prairie, which covered most of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and the far eastern edge of the plains states, clings to about 1 percent of its former range. Even the hardier shortgrass prairie of the American West has been reduced by more than half.

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There’s been a flash point of change in the U.S. that has brought new recognition and reckoning with the high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous people.

After decades of sporadic police and public interest and investigation, public awareness, support and funding sources have aligned in a way that may finally bring closure and justice for families.

Recent developments in the decades-old murder case of Susan “Suzy” Poupart highlight the shifts.

And, ICT has learned, that after years of struggling to pay for expensive DNA testing of evidence found with Poupart’s remains, the Vilas County sheriff’s department will be receiving help from the Bureau of Indian Affairs Missing and Murdered Unit, which will fund the testing as part of the agency’s initiative Operation Spirit Return. The initiative focuses on solving cold cases in Indian Country.

The recent momentum, however, could be endangered by the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, which targets public policies or programs that examine underlying causes of problems driven by racial or social inequity.

“We’ve come so far,” said Stacey June Ettawageshik, executive director of Uniting Three Fires Against Violence in an interview with ICT. Ettawageshik is a citizen of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians.

“We are finally just beginning to get our voices heard and gaining access to funding,” Ettawageshik said. “But having that suddenly taken away would be devastating for our communities and leave us back to square one.”

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At least 140 people were killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza over the past 24 hours as the confrontation between Israel and Iran teetered on the precipice of an even more dangerous conflagration.

Among those killed were people attempting to access aid being brought in by UN trucks in central Gaza.

Around 400 people have been killed while attempting to reach aid since the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began distributing food on 27 May, and more than 3,000 injured, according to authorities in Gaza.

More than 55,600 people have been killed in Gaza and nearly 130,000 injured since Israel’s military assault began in October 2023, according to the Palestinian health ministry in the territory. More than 5,330 people have been killed and nearly 18,000 injured since Israel broke a two-month-old ceasefire on 18 March.

The UN human rights office called on the Israeli military “to immediately cease its use of lethal force around food distribution points in Gaza, following repeated instances of shooting and killing of Palestinians seeking to access food there.”

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