The Raven, the story goes, alighted on the beach and heard sounds coming from a giant clamshell. He found creatures cowering inside but, ever the trickster, he cajoled them out into the world. Liberated, they became the first people of the islands of Haida Gwaii.

The Haida people have lived for thousands of years on Haida Gwaii, a remote archipelago in the Pacific Ocean off Canada’s western coast, just south of Alaska.

Nearly wiped out by smallpox after the arrival of Europeans, the Haida clung to their land — so rich in wildlife it is sometimes called Canada’s Galápagos, coveted by loggers for its old-growth forests of giant cedars and spruce.

For decades, despite their geographic isolation, the Haida’s unwavering fight to regain control over their land drew outsize attention in Canada, raising questions about the country’s long unacknowledged, brutal colonial history.

The Haida opposed clear-cut logging, building ties with environmentalists. They forged alliances with non-Haida communities at home and found common cause with other Indigenous groups across the world.

They sued British Columbia for title to their land in 2002, and supported their claims of ancient ties to the archipelago with a museum that showcased their art, artifacts and foundation myths, like the story of the Raven.

Their methodical and painstaking quest came to fruition in May when the government of British Columbia passed a law — the first of its kind in Canada — recognizing the Haida’s aboriginal title throughout Haida Gwaii. No provincial or federal government in Canada had ever willingly recognized an Indigenous people’s title to their land.

Over the next few years, the provincial government’s authority over the land and resources is expected to be handed over to the Council of the Haida Nation, the Haida people’s government.

“On our side, we knew exactly what we wanted, who we were and why we were doing what we did,” said Frank Collison, 89, a hereditary chief who recalled facing unresponsive provincial and federal governments for decades. “They just weren’t interesting in doing anything and quite satisfied to keep us under their thumb.”

full article

Leonard Peltier, the 79-year-old Indigenous activist who has spent nearly 50 years in prison for the 1975 murders of two FBI agents, has been denied parole. Many fear the ruling all but ensures that the longest-imprisoned Indigenous American will die behind bars.

Peltier has maintained his innocence since he was arrested in connection with the deaths that occurred at the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota. For decades, advocates such as Coretta Scott King, Nelson Mandela, Pope Francis and James H Reynolds, the US attorney who handled the prosecution and appeal of Peltier’s case, have fought for his release.

Despite evidence of prosecutorial misconduct and due process violations throughout his trial, Peltier will now remain in prison at least until 2026, when the US Parole Commission set his next hearing. His health has severely declined over the past few years, and his supporters considered his most recent hearing, which occurred last month, his last chance of not dying in prison.

On 26 June 1975, years-long tensions between Oglala Lakota traditionalists, who sought to govern in customary ways, and assimilationists, who wanted to adapt to American standards of governance, culminated in a standoff at the Pine Ridge Indian reservation. Two FBI agents in unmarked cars pursued a vehicle they believed to be operated by Jimmy Eagle, for whom they were serving an arrest warrant, onto a part of the reservation that was occupied by traditionalists.

In the chaos, a shootout erupted and the FBI agents were soon joined by more than 150 Swat team members and other law enforcement. By the end, two FBI agents and a member of the American Indian movement (Aim) – a cold war-era liberation group that supported the traditionalists – had been killed.

Peltier was among the four men who were indicted in connection with the agents’ murders.

full article

Secondarily there is also another urgent ask for a trailer for our permaculture specialists

https://ko-fi.com/emsenn

Indigenous land is disproportionately affected by wildfire and their isolated nature makes aid access difficult

When Robert Laboucan pictured his son taking his first steps he imagined it would be at home, maybe even in front of a camera in their living room. Instead, the one-year-old first walked in the hallway of the Flamingo Inn in High Level, the tiny Alberta town where the family have been living for more than a year after escaping the massive wildfires that devastated the Indigenous-owned Fox Lake Reserve.

“It was really hard,” said Laboucan, a member of the Little Red River Cree Nation.

Laboucan, his partner Jennifer, and their five children, aged one-16, are among dozens of fire evacuees still living at the hotel. While they will not get an exact replacement of the home they lost, Laboucan has been told that a new home will be ready for the family by July – approximately 14 months after the 2023 Paskwa fire tore through the Little Red River Cree Nation.

Last year saw Canada’s worst wildfire season ever: 6,132 blazes erupted across the country, destroying 16.5m hectares of land, according to Statistics Canada. A thousand of the fires broke out in Alberta.

And a year later, as Canada braces for another hot summer, many Indigenous communities in the northern parts of the western provinces are still displaced.

“It’s a pretty substantial challenge, actually, for our establishment,” said Flamingo Inn manager Tyceer Abou Moustafa. “At the beginning our suppliers didn’t have enough stock on hand to even maintain feeding the people. So that was a pretty hard challenge of finding new suppliers and new people who could keep up with what we needed.”

Research has shown that Indigenous land in Canada is disproportionately affected by wildfires. A 2019 study from the Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction found that 80% of Indigenous communities are located in fire-prone regions. Matters are further complicated by the isolated nature of many communities which are often outside the jurisdiction of local firefighters and lack infrastructure such as all-weather roads.

A tight-knit community of just over 2,000 people, Fox Lake sits in the forest along the south side of Peace River. After the spring thaw, access is only possible by water.

On 2 May, the blooming Paskwa wildfire drew closer and the population scrambled to evacuate. Residents were told they had just 30 minutes before the flames reached the ferry landing and were urged not to take anything except their families and essentials.

full article

At least six Palestinians have been killed in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), and several homes have been destroyed as Israeli forces pushed deeper into the city and pressed further into Shujayea in northern Gaza.

Israeli tanks, which re-entered Shujayea four days ago, fired shells towards several houses, leaving families trapped inside and unable to leave, residents said. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated that “60,000 to 80,000 people were displaced” from Shujayea in recent days.

For those who remain, “our lives have become hell”, said 50-year-old resident Siham al-Shawa.

She told the AFP news agency that people were trapped as strikes could happen “anywhere” and “it is difficult to get out of the neighbourhood under fire”.

“We do not know where to go to protect ourselves,” she said.

full article

The Congo Civil War, or Congo Crisis, was a complex political tumult that began just days following Belgium’s granting of Congolese independence in 1960. Lasting four years, the associated violence claimed an estimated 100,000 lives including the nation’s first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, and UN Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld, who was killed in a plane crash as he attempted to mediate the crisis. Escalating with the secession of the southernmost province of Katanga, the conflict concluded five years later with a united Congo emerging under the dictatorship of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu.

On June 30, 1960, Belgium negotiated post-colonial mining rights in declaring an independent Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Yet within days, soldiers of the Congolese army mutinied, demanding increased pay and the removal of white officers from their ranks. When Belgium intervened militarily, more soldiers rebelled. Many of these soldiers gravitated toward the radical nationalist Prime Minister Patrice Emery Lumumba.

Then, dominated by Belgian business interests, the mineral-rich Katanga province under the leadership of Moïse Kapenda Tshombe seceded from the DRC with Belgian support. Congolese President Joseph Kasavubu and Prime Minister Lumumba asked and received a peacekeeping force from the United Nations (UN).

The conflict also became the site of a dangerous Cold War “proxy” contest between western powers led by the United States and the Soviet Union-led Communist bloc. Under pressure from western nations and in exchange for UN support, President Kasavubu purged his government of radical elements including Prime Minister Lumumba. The ultra-nationalist Lumumba, though supported by the Congolese, was viewed by Western business leaders as an obstacle to their continued investments in Congolese diamond mines. Fearing Lumumba was secretly a Communist, the United States was particularly adamant about his removal from power.

Lumumba responded by firing Kasavubu as both leaders claimed control over the country, and Army Chief of Staff Joseph Mobutu in turn orchestrated a military coup d’état which ousted the two leaders. Mobutu’s government was supported by western governments. The Soviet Union and other Communist nations supported Lumumba who ultimately was killed by Katangan rebels.

With his chief rival removed, Mobutu pledged nominal support to President Kasavubu and the two led the successful effort to end the Katanga secession. UN forces eventually recaptured all of Katanga province. In 1964, a new rebellion began in the Eastern Congo when armed fighters (“Simbas”) began to spread across the region. Ironically, Moïse Tshombe, who had led the secessionist Katanga province, was made prime minister with the mandate to defeat these rebels and end other regional revolts. The Simbas were defeated in November 1964.

One year later, Mobutu seized power from President Kasavubu after having persuaded Western leaders that he was the most effective leader in the fight against communism. Kasavubu and Tshombe were exiled as Mobutu set up a one-party dictatorship, controlling the nation until 1997. Nonetheless, for the first time since independence, all of the country was ruled by one government.

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

• 📀 Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
• 🔥 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
• ⚔ Come talk in the New Weekly PoC thread
• ✨ Talk with fellow Trans comrades in the New Weekly Trans thread

reminders:

• 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
• 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
• 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
• 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
• 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
• 🍉 Resources for Palestine
• 🐌☕ Zapatista Coffee

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

• After more than three years of legal wrangling, a court in Paris has ruled that a civil case brought by Indigenous communities in Mexico against French energy giant EDF can go ahead.
• The case was filed by Zapotec communities in Oaxaca state, who complain that EDF’s Gunaa Sicarú wind farm project violates their land rights and lacks reasonable consultation with communities.
• The case against EDF was filed under the recently approved French Corporate Duty of Vigilance Law, designed to hold French companies accountable for abuses overseas.
• Projects that support the energy transition and climate change mitigation can stir local conflicts similar to those associated with fossil fuels if community rights are not properly considered, experts warn.

JUCHITÁN, Mexico – Indigenous farmers from southern Mexico angry over landscape damage and poor consultations associated with a massive wind power project have had their day in court in France, where judges have allowed their case to proceed.

Zapotec communities from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in the state of Oaxaca and their supporters in Europe launched a legal action against French energy giant EDF, alleging the company failed to prevent violence and intimidation of residents who opposed the wind farms on their ancestral land.

After more than three years of legal wrangling, judges at the Paris Court of Appeals authorized the civil case to go forward in a ruling issued June 18, according to a statement from the plaintiffs’ lawyers.

“This landmark decision sends a clear message for transnational corporations,” said Guillermo Torres, a senior lawyer with the Mexican campaign group ProDESC, which helped launch the court action. “Their activities can be subject to judicial review whenever they fail to comply with the law.”

full article

NICE, France (AP) — A pro-independence leader in the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia was transferred to a prison facility in mainland France to await trial on charges relating to two weeks of unrest in May that left nine people dead, the public prosecutor in the territory said Sunday.

Christian Tein, an Indigenous Kanak leader of the pro-independence party known as The Field Action Coordination Unit, was flown to mainland France overnight Saturday, along with six other activists, prosecutor Yves Dupas said in a statement.

The seven Kanak activists were transferred to pre-trial detention on “a specially chartered plane” because of “the sensitivity of the procedure,” Dupas said. Moving the detained activists into custody 17,000 kilometers (10,500 miles) away from their homeland would allow the investigation into their alleged wrongdoings to continue “in a calm manner and without any pressure,” he said.

The Kanak people have sought for decades to break free from France, which first took New Caledonia in 1853.

The top United Nations human rights official has warned of the worsening situation for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the “unconscionable death and suffering” in the Gaza Strip.

“The situation in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is dramatically deteriorating,” Volker Turk told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday.

He said 528 Palestinians, 133 of them children, were killed by Israeli military forces or settlers from the start of the current war on Gaza in October to June 15, “in many cases raising serious concerns of unlawful killings”.

In the same period, 23 Israelis were killed in clashes with Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel, including eight members of security forces, according to the UN’s high commissioner for human rights.

Two weeks ago, Turk said people in the West Bank were being “subjected to day after day of unprecedented bloodshed”.

He spoke as the Israeli military arrested at least five Palestinians during the storming of several towns and villages in Ramallah and el-Bireh governorate in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa, which also reported a settler attack on Palestinian farmland in the village of Yasuf, east of Salfit.

Overnight, Israeli forces arrested dozens of Palestinians in Qusrah near Nablus, also in the West Bank, taking them to a school where they were held and interrogated, Wafa reported.

Israeli forces have been rounding up an average of 35 Palestinians a day since the war started, with 9,112 Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails as of June 1, nearly double the number of Palestinians jailed on October 1, according to tallies by Palestinian prisoners groups.

full article

• Commercial cattle ranching is banned on Indigenous territories in Brazil, but a yearlong Mongabay investigation reveals that large plots in the Arariboia Indigenous Territory have been used for ranching amid a record-high number of killings of the region’s Indigenous Guajajara inhabitants.
• Our investigation found a clear rise in environmental crimes in the region in mid-2023, including an unlicensed airstrip and illegal deforestation on the banks of the Buriticupu river, key for Guajajara people’s livelihood.
• With four Guajajara people killed and three others surviving attempts on their lives, 2023 marked the deadliest year for Indigenous people in Arariboia in seven years, equating to the number of killings in 2016, 2008 and 2007.
• Our findings show a pattern of targeted killings of Indigenous Guajajara amid the expansion of illegal cattle ranching and logging in and around Arariboia: we tracked several dozen illegal or suspicious activities; the hotspot killing areas coincide with the bulk of the tracked activities and with police operations curbing illegal logging in Arariboia’s surroundings. There’s no evidence that the owners of the businesses were responsible for the killings.

full article

This is a good quick read about the Alaska Native Brotherhood and the decades long legal and political struggle that lead to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. IDK how well known the story is, but Alaska natives weren't confined to reservations like most Indigenous people in the Lower 48. However, they weren't given title to their land and resources, either. Starting in ~ the 20s the ANB was formed to press Alaska Native's legal and political rights to their land and resources. The result was teh ANCSA which granted Alaska Natives rights to large segments of their lands organized under regional corporations. It's good to know about.

https://ancsaregional.com/about-ancsa/

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title43/chapter33&edition=prelim

(d) no provision of this chapter shall constitute a precedent for reopening, renegotiating, or legislating upon any past settlement involving land claims or other matters with any Native organizations, or any tribe, band, or identifiable group of American Indians;

Lol of course

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Native_Claims_Settlement_Act

Horrified by Israel’s war on Gaza and the spiralling death toll, primarily young Vietnamese people have begun to raise their voices in support of Palestinians. In the process, they are discovering historical ties between Vietnam and Palestine and their shared fights for national liberation.

But the decades-old relationship between the two nations has been overshadowed by more recent promotion of Israel’s business culture to a younger generation of Vietnamese.

Focused on achieving success in Vietnam’s fast-growing free market economy, many have been inspired by Israel's startup business culture while knowing little about the darker side of Israel's success in terms of its long occupation of Palestinian land.

Through art, discussion and other means of expression, pro-Palestinian activists in Vietnam are helping their peers understand concepts such as Zionism, the Nakba, the Oslo Accords and settler colonialism.

And step by step, they are reasserting the context and history of Palestinian loss and removal that narratives in Vietnam in local media and books omit in their telling of Israel’s emergence as an economic success story

Tlingit interpretation of the mandaloian. Back in the day the Tlingit used armor made from wooden slats bound with cordage for a very effective protection.

Tlingit people mostly lived in SE Alaska in coastal communities, but they're all over these days. Their are a lot of cool Tlingit artists and artisans out there, definitely worth looking up.

Subcomandante Marcos, It was the guerrilla name of Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, who was the main spokesman and military commander of the Mexican indigenous armed group called the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), which made its public appearance on January 1, 1994, when they launched a military offensive in which they took over six municipal capitals in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, demanding democracy, freedom, land, bread and justice for the indigenous people. His face covered by a balaclava went around the world as a symbol of resistance. On May 25, 2014, he announced his retirement from the leadership of the guerrilla group.

Born June 19, 1957, in Tampico, Mexico. He is the son of Spanish immigrants from Zamorano, and studied at a Jesuit high school in Tampico. In his hometown he did his first letters, later he went to the cities of Guadalajara and Monterrey to continue his studies, and then he entered the Universidad Autónoma de México, where he graduated in Philosophy and Letters, with the thesis work Philosophy and education: discursive practices and ideological practices in elementary school textbooks. He is a former professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) in Mexico City, which he left at the age of 24 to move to Chiapas and become an advocate for the rights of the indigenous people of Chiapas.

Marcos, at the head of the Zapatista Army of Zapatista Liberation, took six cities in the state of Chiapas on January 1, 1994, among them San Cristóbal de las Casas. After twelve days of confrontations and numerous dead and wounded, talks began between the EZLN and the government.

In February 1996, government and guerrilla delegates signed an agreement in San Andres on the rights of the indigenous community, but months later, the EZLN accused President Zedillo's government of not complying with the agreements and the dialogue between the parties was interrupted.

After the electoral defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the July 2000 elections, the leader of the National Action Party (PAN) and new president of the Republic, Vicente Fox, appointed former senator Luis Alvarez, Commissioner for Peace in Chiapas. Alvarez had been part of the Commission for Concord and Pacification (COCOPA) charged with drafting a bill summarizing the spirit of the accords which the Zapatistas demanded full compliance with.

Fox proposed to resume talks with the guerrillas and Marcos accepted, even committing himself to travel to the federal capital of the state to restart negotiations on the agreements signed in 1996. The EZLN leader stated, in a crowded press conference held one day after the president's inauguration, that the guerrilla's demands to recover the dialogue included the withdrawal of the army from the area, the fulfillment of the San Andres Accords and the release of imprisoned EZLN activists.

In his first days in office, Fox ordered the release of forty Zapatista prisoners, a partial withdrawal of the army troops stationed in Chiapas and the sending to Congress of the bill on indigenous rights agreed upon in 1996. Marcos responded to the measures with the call for a great Zapatista march that would leave for the capital to present the demands of the guerrillas to Congress. A fragile détente in the conflict had been achieved, but it was broken in a few months. The EZLN requested that the indigenous caravan to Mexico City be escorted by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) but the government, under pressure from the business community and the army, blocked this possibility. Fox accused the guerrillas of not giving a favorable response to the government's measures and paralyzed the military withdrawal and the release of prisoners, while Marcos accused the president of appearing to be interested in solving the conflict without seeking a real solution for peace in Chiapas.

On February 24, 2001, the promised Zapatista march to the Mexican Congress began. Fifteen days after starting the journey and after traveling more than 3,000 kilometers through the poorest areas of the country, the Zapatista caravan led by Subcomandante Marcos arrived at the Zócalo square in Mexico City. The leader of the insurgent guerrilla expressed his intention to remain in the capital until the parliamentary approval of the bill granting the autonomy demanded by the ten million Mexican indigenous people was obtained. On March 12, EZLN representatives held a first meeting with the Commission for Concord and Pacification (COCOPA), a step prior to the meeting between the guerrillas and representatives of the Mexican Congress and Senate.

In August 2005 and in his first public appearance since the spring of 2001, Marcos announced in Chiapas his intention not to support any of the presidential candidates in the 2006 elections and harshly criticized the country's progressive formations, especially the PRD presidential candidate and former mayor of Mexico City, Manuel López Obrador. The Subcomandante also stated that the imminent integration of the Zapatista movement into the Mexican political system would take place through the constitution of a broad leftist front.

On January 1, 2006 Marcos, now Delegate Zero, began a tour of the 32 Mexican states to promote the Other Campaign, to gather support for the so-called "National Program of Anticapitalist and Leftist Struggle. In it, he seeks to listen to the Mexican people, to those who are organized and to those who are not, "to all those who from below and to the left seek to change the current state of society", always governed by certain principles, such as: anti-capitalism, horizontality, equity and several others that the movement itself will define as it moves forward (Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle).

The nature of this initiative implies a distance from the three most important political parties in Mexico and their candidates for the presidency, making it clear that the project of building a new country does not involve support for this or that candidate, but for the struggle itself.

The electoral process has already begun and someone is going to come and tell you that if you support him he will solve everything. We are coming to tell them that we are not going to solve absolutely nothing, nor are we coming to bring them solutions, but rather problems, and the invitation to join with the comrades who are rising up in other parts of the country to build the new Mexico.

About the political class (The impossible geometry? of Power in Mexico) it has been mentioned that the PAN "is today led by the ultra-right wing organization El Yunque, is the nostalgia for the burning of the ballots of the 1988 election and the co-government with the PRI", of the PRI "the creator of the State party system, that of the imposition of neoliberal policies that have destroyed the foundations of Mexico" of Roberto Madrazo, whom he describes as "a shameful and criminal thief", of the PRD the party of "tactical errors", of Andrés Manuel López Obrador "the image of Carlos Salinas de Gortari built by AMLO is, in reality, a mirror". Regarding President Fox, he has "given to businessmen all the money that was collected in aid (for victims of Hurricane Stan), while the humble people are still waiting" ("No candidate will change the situation of exploitation").

On May 3, 2006 the municipal police of Texcoco tried to expel the flower vendors from the Belisario Dominguez market. Inhabitants of San Salvador Atenco supported the Texcoco protest. A day of violence began, resulting in a multitude of injuries, two deaths (Javier Cortés Santiago and Alexis Benhumea), hundreds of people arrested and several disappeared. As a result of these events, the EZLN, via Delegate Zero, declared a red alert and indefinitely suspended the Other Campaign's route in demand of the unconditional and immediate liberation of all prisoners.

On May 25, 2014, in a press conference before media sympathetic to his cause who attended the tribute to José Luis Solís López, better known as "Galeano," a Zapatista killed on May 2 in the community of La Realidad, the military chief of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) announced through a communiqué his retirement from the leadership of the guerrilla group. He was accompanied by six commanders of the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Clandestine Committee and Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés, whom he had announced in December 2013 as his successor in command.

"In the cabaret of globalization, the state shows itself as a table dancer that strips off everything until it is left with only the minimum indispensable garments: the repressive force."

Subcomandante Marcos

• Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask

• Interview with Subcomandante Marcos of the EZLN (Zapatistas)

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

• 📀 Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
• 🔥 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
• ⚔ Come talk in the New Weekly PoC thread
• ✨ Talk with fellow Trans comrades in the New Weekly Trans thread

reminders:

• 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
• 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
• 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
• 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
• 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
• 🍉 Resources for Palestine
• 🐌☕ Zapatista Coffee

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

• A court in Suriname approved an injunction filed on behalf of twelve Indigenous and maroon groups concerned about losing approximately 535,000 hectares (1,322,013 acres) of rainforest to agricultural development.
• The court said the government doesn’t have the right to grant land without free, prior and informed consent, a process in which developers meet with residents to explain how projects would impact daily life.
• Despite the ruling, there are new efforts to bring Mennonite communities from other parts of the region to develop Suriname’s agricultural industry.

A court in Suriname has halted development on hundreds of thousands of hectares of Amazon Rainforest, much of it occupied by local and Indigenous people. The landmark ruling could give new autonomy to native communities and make it harder for projects to develop on primary forest in the future.

The court approved an injunction filed on behalf of twelve Indigenous and maroon groups who were concerned about losing approximately 535,000 hectares (1,322,013 acres) of rainforest to agricultural development. The projects would have been carried out by Mennonites, the Ministry of Agriculture and private entities.

“This gives an interim measure of protection to local and Indigenous communities,” said John Goedschalk, head of Climate Change Advocacy Services, who has been fighting the land deals. “This battle isn’t over, but this is a good first step.”

After reviewing the injunction, the court said the government doesn’t have the right to grant land without free, prior and informed consent, a process in which developers meet with residents to explain how projects would impact daily life. Without that process, burial grounds, areas for hunting and other cultural traditions of tribal living could be at risk, the court said in its ruling.

full article

Attending the Festival of Pacific Arts and Culture, hosted in Hawai’i this year, Yessie Mosby is spreading the urgent message on the impact of rising sea levels and climate change for First Nations people and culture.

As part of the Australian delegation attending the festival, Mosby, a Zenadh Kes Masig man, has been connecting with other countries from across the pacific who are experiencing the same climate crisis on their doorstep.

“When you talk about climate justice, it has to take all of us to come together, like now, here at this festival … because once everybody’s together, the unity is strong,” he said.

“When we fight for climate justice, singly, as our nation only, it doesn’t give an impact. But when we, all [pacific] nations who have the same struggle comes together, that’s where the power sets in.

“To protect our culture, our way of living, and our islands for the next generation.”

full article

But there is one important difference between the two cases: The genocide in Gaza is not taking place in the dark.

While our eyes were on Rafah’s “Block 2371” – the small area in south Gaza which the Israeli military designated as a “safe humanitarian zone” on May 22 but went on to bomb just four days later, massacring at least 45 civilians sheltering in tents – we were reminded of a 15-year-old confidential cable intercepted by WikiLeaks describing the plight of civilians in the final days of the Sri Lankan civil war.

Dispatched in May 2009 from the United States embassy in Colombo to the US Department of State in Washington, DC, the cable recounts how the bishop of Mannar had called to ask the embassy to intervene on behalf of seven Catholic priests caught in a so-called “No Fire Zone” which had been set up as a safe space by the Sri Lankan military.

Not unlike the Israeli military’s efforts to push Palestinian civilians from across the Gaza Strip into the so-called “safe humanitarian zone” in Rafah, at one point, the Sri Lankan military had urged the civilian population to gather in areas it designated as “No Fire Zones” by dropping leaflets from planes and making announcements on loudspeakers.

As an estimated 330,000 internally displaced people assembled in these zones, the United Nations erected makeshift camps and, together with several humanitarian organisations, began to provide food and medical assistance to the desperate population.

full article

FTA (my emphasis added):

''This is a very important vessel. Historically it was the final expedition ship of Sir Ernest Shackleton," he said Wednesday morning at a news conference at the Marine Institute in St. John's. "As many of you know, he died on this ship on his final expedition of the Shackleton–Rowett expedition, which set out to initially explore Canada."

Now here's the great UKLG in “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”:

One of our finest methods of organized forgetting is called discovery. Julius Caesar exemplifies the technique with characteristic elegance in his Gallic Wars. “It was not certain that Britain existed,” he says, “until I went there.”

To whom was it not certain? But what the heathen know doesn’t count. Only if godlike Caesar sees it can Britannia rule the waves.

Only if a European discovered or invented it could America exist. At least Columbus had the wit, in his madness, to mistake Venezuela for the outskirts of Paradise. But he remarked on the availability of cheap slave labor in Paradise.

The article closes with this:

Traditional Chief Mi'sel Joe of the Miawpukek First Nation, another expedition patron, said he was happy the vessel had been found, noting it had sunk in waters off Mi'kmaw, Innu and Inuit territories.

"I was happy to share local knowledge with the captain and crew of the search vessel ahead of time to find Quest and honoured that Miawpukek Horizon Marine assisted in planning the expedition."

Sebastia is encircled by Israeli settlements, all illegal under international law, including Shavei Shomron a few kilometres away (a little more than a mile).

Sebastia is a pilgrimage site for Christians because it is believed to be where John the Baptist, known in the Quran as the Prophet Yahya, is buried.

It is also believed to be the site of Samaria, the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Israel.

Israelis wishing to see some of that history are escorted to Sebastia’s archaeological park, which has ruins spanning the Greek, Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic periods.

For them, the site is evidence of Jewish ties to the West Bank. For Palestinians, the focus on one specific period of history is an attempt to undermine Palestinians' control of their own land.

Home to about 4,000 people, Sebastia was once a symbol of religious coexistence and is home to relics that chart 3,000 years of history dating back as far as the Iron Age.

Such is the significance of the remains that Palestinian authorities in Sebastia are hoping UNESCO will add them to its World Heritage list. They also hope the archaeological park will join 56 other locations on UNESCO’s register of significant sites considered to be “in danger”.

But any protection that recognition would have afforded the ancient site and the modern-day village has come too late for some because Sebastia is now no longer spared the violence other parts of Nablus district have endured.

In July, 19-year-old Fawzi Makhalfeh was killed by Israeli soldiers as he drove through the village with a friend.

Doctors removed more than 50 bullets from his body, his family said. He was the first Sebastia resident to be killed by Israelis in more than 20 years, and his name is emblazoned on memorials in the village centre. The Palestinian Authority described his killing as an “execution”.

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• Environmental charity Climate Force is collaborating with the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people and rangers to create a wildlife corridor that runs between two UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Australia: the Daintree Rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef.
• Wildlife habitats in this region have become fragmented due to industrial agriculture, and a forested corridor is expected to help protect biodiversity by allowing animals to forage for food and connect different populations for mating and migration.
• The project aims to plant 360,000 trees over an area of 213 hectares (526 acres); so far, it has planted 25,000 trees of 180 species on the land and in the nursery, which can also feed a range of native wildlife.
• The project is ambitious and organizers say they’re hopeful about it, but challenges remain, including soil regeneration and ensuring the planted trees aren’t killed off by feral pigs or flooding.

In Australia’s Cape Kimberley, environmental charity Climate Force is collaborating with the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people and rangers to create a corridor that runs between two UNESCO World Heritage Sites: the Daintree Rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef. To do this, they will need to plant 360,000 trees.

Wildlife habitats in this region have become fragmented. The area where this new forest will be planted is a 213-hectare (526-acre) plot of land that was cleared for cattle in the 1960s and then used as a commercial banana farm until the 1990s. It was choked with invasive Guinea grass and covered in abandoned farm machinery.

“For a good while now our Country [Indigenous land] has been bare,” Petersen told Mongabay.

The fragmentation of forests leads to a loss of diversity and decline in species. But strips of land that make up wildlife corridors can help connect wildlife populations. They ensure foraging for food, connecting different populations for mating and other migratory need, say conservationists. In December 2022, the U.N. biodiversity framework recognized ecological corridors as an important conservation measure alongside protected areas.

For the Daintree Rainforest, conservationists say a wildlife corridor will help protect endemic Bennett’s tree kangaroos (Dendrolagus bennettianus), spectacled flying foxes (Pteropus conspicillatus) and southern cassowaries (Casuarius casuarius), the closest living species to dinosaurs.

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On this day in 1967, the Israeli Army occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, claiming emergency powers with a military decree that greatly restricts the rights of the occupied. The ongoing occupation is the longest in the modern era.

The Israeli Army action took place in the context of the Six Day War, fought between Israel and a coalition of Arab states. The status of the West Bank as a militarily occupied territory has been affirmed by the International Court of Justice and, with the exception of East Jerusalem, by the Israeli Supreme Court.

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), the military proclamation issued by the Israeli Army on June 7th, 1967 permitted the application of the Defense (Emergency) Regulations of 1945.

These regulations empowered, and continue to empower, authorities to declare as an "unlawful association" groups that advocate for "bringing into hatred or contempt, or the exciting of disaffection against" the authorities, and criminalize membership in or possession of material belonging to or affiliated, even indirectly, with these groups.

HRW goes on to state that these and other broad restrictions on the occupied population violate international law: "The Israeli army has for over 50 years used broadly worded military orders to arrest Palestinian journalists, activists and others for their speech and activities - much of it non-violent - protesting, criticizing or opposing Israeli policies. These orders are written so broadly that they violate the obligation of states under international human rights law to clearly spell out conduct that could result in criminal sanction."

Following the military occupation of the West Bank, Israel began expropriating the land and facilitating Israeli settlements in the area, broadly considered a violation of international law. While Israelis in the West Bank are subject to Israeli law and given representation in the Israeli Knesset, Palestinian civilians, mostly confined to scattered enclaves, are subject to martial law and are not permitted to vote in Israel's national elections.

This two-tiered system has inspired comparisons to apartheid, likening the dense disconnected pockets that Palestinians are relegated to with the segregated Bantustans that previously existed in South Africa when the country was still under white supremacist rule.

• Born Without Civil Rights: Israel’s Use of Draconian Military Orders to Repress Palestinians in the West Bank - Humansrightswatch

• Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory illegal: UN rights commission

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• The Origins of Zionism - Colonialism, Ethnonationalism, and Myth

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• The loko i’a system of native fishponds in Hawai‘i has for generations provided sustenance to Indigenous communities, supported fish populations in surrounding waters, and generally improved water quality.
• These benefits, long understood by native Hawaiians, have now been confirmed by scientists in a new study that looked at the restoration of one such fishpond.
• Unlike commercial fish farms, loko i‘a thrive without feed input and need little management once established — aspects that highlight the holistic thinking and values-based management behind them.
• The study authors say the finding is another step toward communicating Indigenous knowledge to support governmental decision-making, part of wider efforts across the archipelago to weave Indigenous and Western ways of knowing to heal both ecosystems and communities.

For generations, native Hawaiians have understood that their aquaculture systems, fishponds known as loko i‘a, serve as nurseries that seed fish populations in surrounding waters. For the first time, a team of scientists from the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) have modeled this feat of Indigenous science in a study.

“We are using science to translate ‘ike kupuna, or Indigenous knowledge, into policy,” said study co-author Kawika Winter, an ecologist at HIMB and He‘eia National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR). “The value of this paper is that it’s one of the first, if not the first, to really show that there are ways to do aquaculture in ways that benefit the system around it.”

In partnership with He‘eia NERR and Paepae o He‘eia, a nonprofit organization dedicated to stewarding the He‘eia loko i‘a, an ancient Hawaiian fishpond enclosing 36 hectares (88 acres) of brackish water, the team simulated different restoration scenarios in ‘Kāne‘ohe Bay on O‘ahu Island based on a simplified food web. The study found that restoring more of the bay into fully functional loko iʻa would grow fish populations not just within the ponds, but across the bay.

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