indigenous

One of the things Ka-Voka Jackson, the Cultural Resources director of the Hualapai Nation, most appreciates about Ha’Kamwe’ is its peacefulness. Located on a former ranch in western Arizona, the hot spring is framed by rolling desert hills. Though trucks may sometimes drive down a nearby dirt road, it’s mostly quiet. That serenity is an important part of Hualapai cultural practices that have taken place here for millennia, from gathering plants to holding ceremonies.

“When we visit and we look across the landscape, that’s the same landscape that our ancestors looked at and that our ancestors lived in, and so we hold a deep connection with the integrity of that landscape,” Jackson said.

But amid the green energy boom, Ha’Kamwe’ is threatened by lithium exploration by the Australia-based company Arizona Lithium (AZL), and these days, peace seems elusive. Already, the mining company has drilled approximately 50 exploratory wells near the hot springs, disturbing the tribe’s cultural practices and threatening the aquifer. Since 2021, when High Country News first covered the threat that this drilling poses to Hualapai religious practices, the Bureau of Land Management has signed off on even more drilling near Ha’Kamwe’. This July, the BLM approved AZL’s plan to bore approximately 130 more wells near the hot spring, reaching more than 300 feet deep and surrounding the hot spring on three sides. AZL will construct drill pads sites, roads and other support infrastructure as it surveys the area further for a potential open-pit lithium mine.

On Aug. 8, the Hualapai Nation sued the BLM and the Department of the Interior. According to the lawsuit, the agencies violated multiple laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act, in approving this new phase of exploratory mining. Since September, AZL has been under a temporary restraining order to prevent further drilling.

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The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is arguably one of the most important non-state actors in modern West Asia. While fighting a brutal guerrilla war against the Turkish government, it has also managed to inspire Kurdish movements in Syria, Iraq and Iran, as well as Iran’s non-Kurdish protesters. In a region where many parties are nakedly sectarian, the PKK has gone from Marxist-Leninist nationalism to a form of radical-democratic “libertarian municipalism” inspired by the late anarchist thinker Murray Bookchin.

For better or worse, the PKK exists today only because the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), a now-obscure Palestinian force, agreed to shelter some Kurdish exiles in the 1980s. That experience in the Palestinian camps permanently affected the worldview of the PKK’s founding generation. Not only did the PKK learn how to fight a guerrilla war, it also walked away with a strong sense of internationalism.

In fact, some of the PKK’s founding figures spent time in an Israeli detention camp as prisoners of war. Old issues of the party magazine Serxwebun tell the remarkable story of the “Beaufort Castle Heroes,” a group of Kurds who had been training at a Palestinian base in Lebanon when they were captured by Israeli forces in June 1982. (Serxwebun means “independence” in Kurdish.) New Lines is reporting much of their story in English for the first time.

The June 1984 edition of Serxwebun features drawings and poetry from the prisoners, including one Iranian Kurdish fighter. The Iranian Kurd, codenamed Sami, recalled being beaten by an Israeli interrogator who shouted, “You came to kill Jews, you’re lying … Kurdistan, Turkistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Arab, you are all antisemitic, we will kill you all.”

The PKK was just one of many foreign fighter contingents in Lebanon. (Sami was captured alongside a Bangladeshi fighter, and another Serxwebun article mentioned the presence of an Iranian from the left-wing People’s Fedai Guerrillas.) At the time, the Palestinian movement was the international leftist cause celebre, and leftists understood it to be part of an unbroken chain of Third World liberation struggles.

“If you know Vietnam, you know Kurdistan … a new Vietnam in our hearts,” Sami wrote in a poem. “To the defenseless prisoner in Diyarbakir, to the leaf on the tree in Vietnam, to the living being in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the orphan baby in Sabra and Shatila.”

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Extra reading: PKK Internationalists in the Palestinian Resistance

ONONDAGA NATION TERRITORY (AP) — The Onondaga Nation has regained 1,000 acres (405 hectares) of its ancestral land in upstate New York, a tiny portion of the land members say was unjustly taken by the state beginning in the 18th century.

The heavily forested land is south of Syracuse and near the Onondaga’s federally recognized territory. The land, which includes headwaters of Onondaga Creek, was transferred by Honeywell International on Friday under a federal Superfund settlement related to the contamination of the environment, according to the Onondaga Nation.

The land is part of an expanse of 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) in central New York the Onondagas say was taken over decades by New York beginning in 1788 through deceitful maneuvers that violated treaties and federal law.

Sid Hill, the Tadodaho, or chief, of the Onondaga Nation, said Monday they were grateful to federal and state officials for working with them to return “the first 1,000 acres of the 2.5 million acres of treaty-guaranteed land taken from us over the centuries.”

“This is a small but important step for us, and for the Indigenous land back movement across the United States,” Hill said in a prepared statement.

• The Indonesian government is embarking on yet another project to establish a massive area of farmland at the expense of forests and Indigenous lands, despite a long history of near-identical failures.
• The latest megaproject calls for clearing 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) in the district of Merauke in the eastern region of Papua for rice fields.
• Local Indigenous communities say they weren’t consulted about the project, and say the heavy military presence on the ground appears to be aimed at silencing their protests.
• Similar megaprojects, on Borneo and more recently also in Merauke, all failed, leaving behind destroyed landscapes, with the current project also looking “assured to fail,” according to an agricultural researcher.

JAKARTA — Indigenous Papuans say they’ve been caught off guard by helicopters flying over their villages and excavators tearing down their forests in their area, all while accompanied by the Indonesian military.

What they’re being subjected to is one of the largest deforestation projects in the world, which will see the development of 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of rice fields in Merauke, a district in Indonesia’s Papua region that borders Papua New Guinea.

The military is involved in the project because it’s led by the Ministry of Defense and has been designated a project of national strategic importance. Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto, who will be sworn in as Indonesia’s next president on Oct. 20, has appointed the hugely controversial Jhonlin Group to help administer the project.

The military’s involvement, coupled with the lack of free, prior, informed consent (FPIC) from Indigenous communities living in the area, have fueled concerns that the project will create new conflicts in the region.

Indonesia has maintained a heavy military presence in the Papua region since annexing it in 1963, with security forces frequently accused of committing human rights violations under the justification of cracking down on a low-level independence movement.

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“Tansi, today we are going through some random phrases,” Julia Ouellette says to the camera. She holds up slips of paper with English words while repeating the Cree translations quickly and then slowly. “tantahtwaw,” she says, holding a paper that says “how many,” emphasizing each syllable. “tantahtwaw. Repeat after me.”

Ouellette, a grandmother from Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation in Saskatchewan, posts Cree-language videos regularly on TikTok, where she has more than 16,800 followers. The videos are casual, with a simple formula: Ouellette, in glasses, with her hair tied back, offers viewers a few Cree words or phrases to practise aloud. In both languages, her voice has the distinct quality of a Cree speaker: rich and resonant, her “r”s and “l”s—consonants not found in Cree—are especially pronounced when she speaks English. A former language teacher at Big Island Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, she started posting videos on TikTok in 2020 that included such COVID-era phrases as “wash your hands” (kasichiche) and “get away” (awas), along with more cheerful ones, like “Merry Christmas” (miyo-manitowi-kîsikanisi). Ouellette never writes out the Cree words or phrases, instead instructing the viewer to repeat what they hear.

Ouellette is part of a growing community of Indigenous-language speakers using social media as a teaching tool. James Vukelich Kaagegaabaw, a descendant of Turtle Mountain, shares an Ojibwe word regularly with his 135,000 Instagram followers. Jonathan Augustine, who goes by RezNeck Farmer on TikTok, shares Mi’kmaw lessons along with folksy videos about gardening. Zorga Qaunaq, under the username Tatiggat, posts on TikTok about daily life, beading, and Inuit culture, alongside how to properly pronounce words like “Inuit.”

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At the beginning of the 1830s, nearly 125,000 Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida–land their ancestors had occupied and cultivated for generations. By the end of the decade, very few natives remained anywhere in the southeastern United States. Working on behalf of white settlers who wanted to grow cotton on the Indians’ land, the federal government forced them to leave their homelands and walk hundreds of miles to a specially designated “Indian territory” across the Mississippi River.

Taking the journey through an unusually cold winter, they suffered terribly from exposure, disease, and starvation, killing several thousand people while en route to their new designated reserve. They were also attacked by locals and economically exploited - starving Indians were charged a dollar a head (equal to $24.01 today) to cross the Ohio River, which typically charged twelve cents, equal to $2.88 today.

Indian Removal

Andrew Jackson had long been an advocate of what he called “Indian removal.” As an Army general, he had spent years leading brutal campaigns against the Creeks in Georgia and Alabama and the Seminoles in Florida–campaigns that resulted in the transfer of hundreds of thousands of acres of land from Indian nations to white farmers. As president, he continued this genocide. In 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act, which gave the federal government the power to exchange Native-held land in the cotton kingdom east of the Mississippi for land to the west, in the “Indian colonization zone” that the United States had acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase. (This “Indian territory” was located in present-day Oklahoma.)

The law required the government to negotiate removal treaties fairly, voluntarily and peacefully: It did not permit the president or anyone else to coerce Native nations into giving up their land. However, President Jackson and his government frequently ignored the letter of the law and forced Native Americans to vacate lands they had lived on for generations. In the winter of 1831, under threat of invasion by the U.S. Army, the Choctaw became the first nation to be expelled from its land altogether. They made the journey to Indian Territory on foot (some “bound in chains and marched double file,” one historian writes) and without any food, supplies or other help from the government. Thousands of people died along the way. It was, one Choctaw leader told an Alabama newspaper, a “trail of tears and death.”

The Trail of Tears

The Indian-removal process continued. In 1836, the federal government drove the Creeks from their land for the last time: 3,500 of the 15,000 Creeks who set out for Oklahoma did not survive the trip.

The Cherokee people were divided: What was the best way to handle the government’s determination to get its hands on their territory? Some wanted to stay and fight. Others thought it was more pragmatic to agree to leave in exchange for money and other concessions. In 1835, a few self-appointed representatives of the Cherokee nation negotiated the Treaty of New Echota, which traded all Cherokee land east of the Mississippi for $5 million, relocation assistance and compensation for lost property. To the federal government, the treaty was a done deal, but many of the Cherokee felt betrayed; after all, the negotiators did not represent the tribal government or anyone else. “The instrument in question is not the act of our nation,” wrote the nation’s principal chief, John Ross, in a letter to the U.S. Senate protesting the treaty. “We are not parties to its covenants; it has not received the sanction of our people.” Nearly 16,000 Cherokees signed Ross’s petition, but Congress approved the treaty anyway.

By 1838, only about 2,000 Cherokees had left their Georgia homeland for Indian Territory. President Martin Van Buren sent General Winfield Scott and 7,000 soldiers to expedite the removal process. Scott and his troops forced the Cherokee into stockades at bayonet point while his men looted their homes and belongings. Then, they marched the Indians more than 1,200 miles to Indian Territory. Whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera and starvation were epidemic along the way, and historians estimate that more than 5,000 Cherokee died as a result of the journey.

By 1840, tens of thousands of Native Americans had been driven off of their land in the southeastern states and forced to move across the Mississippi to Indian Territory. The federal government promised that their new land would remain unmolested forever, but as the line of white settlement pushed westward, “Indian Country” shrank and shrank. In 1907, Oklahoma became a state and Indian Territory was gone for good.

• Trail of Tears cherokeehistorical

• Trail of Tears Britannica

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'Colonial-rooted poverty will not be solved by more colonial solutions'

Thirty-four years ago, Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel was thrust into the spotlight when she was chosen as the spokesperson for the Kanienʼkehá:ka (Mohawk) communities of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke, as they resisted the planned expansion of a golf course on into their sacred lands and burial grounds in southern Quebec and police and military attempted to subdue them by force.

“You do not call it the Oka Crisis,” Gabriel tells me, of the village near the golf course that media and Canadians generally use to refer to the confrontation. “Oka caused the crisis. It was Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke that were under siege, and were attacked because of the municipality of Oka and the private corporations behind the project.”

In the decades since the 78-day standoff ended, Gabriel has remained a steadfast defender of Indigenous homelands and an advocate for Indigenous Rights and sovereignty, particularly the rights of women. She has spoken at the United Nations and addressed Parliament, and served for more than six years as president of the Quebec Native Women’s Association, drawing connections between the protection of Indigenous lands and the rights, dignity and future of Indigenous nations.

In a new book, When the Pine Needles Fall, Gabriel and settler historian Sean Carleton chart a course from the events of 1990 to the present, while extending into a generous and expansive vision of the future. The book, which they began writing in 2019, evolved during the pandemic, taking shape as a series of conversations that articulate the urgency and necessity of Indigenous resistance. Centring Gabriel’s own words through dialogue, Carleton writes, was a way to “divest my power and authority as an academic to create space for Ellen’s brilliance … to hold space and amplify Ellen’s voice, while also co-creating through conversation.”

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In the Navajo Nation—a sweeping landscape of red-rock canyons and desert that takes in the Four Corners—water is not taken for granted. Here, more than 1 in 3 Diné, as Navajo people call themselves, must haul water to their homes, often across long distances. The Diné use the least amount of water per person of anyone in the U.S., and pay the most.

The problem, as old as the land itself, was predicted. The hydrology of the Colorado River Basin is highly variable, a fact that was not fully appreciated (or was flatly ignored) by those who drafted the foundational policy that governs water use in much of the West—the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Despite warnings from experts, the compact based the amount of water to be divided among its signatories on a brief period that proved to be one of the wettest in history. This flaw was compounded by tremendous population growth, Indigenous dispossession, competing values, procrastination, and deadlocked disputes over how water is used.

On paper, the Navajo Nation is drenched in water. Under the “first in line, first in right” principle that defines water use in the West, the Diné have first dibs on the same declining supply that serves Washington County, which has roughly as many people on one-tenth the land: the Colorado River, its tributaries, and two underlying aquifers. Yet little of it reaches them. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Arizona v. Navajo Nation, that the federal government has no obligation to provide water to the Navajo Nation. But by the time of the ruling, a crucial exercise of “first rights” was already in peril.

The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project aims to deliver treated water from the San Juan River to 240,000 people via 300 miles of pipes. Conceived in the 1960s and begun in 2009, the $2.1 billion project must be completed by Dec. 31 or the Navajo Nation loses its right to that water. It's far from done. Its fate resides in U.S. House Bill 3977, which would extend the deadline to 2029 and appropriate $689.45 million to finish the job.

Washington County isn’t the cause of the Navajo -Nation’s thirst. The water gap is an enduring legacy of manifest destiny; the infrastructure, and legislation, that came with it still largely define how water is used. In the American West, irrigated agriculture uses a whopping 86% of fresh water consumed—the largest share by far going to animal-forage crops like alfalfa. Privately, a St. George resident told me, “Why should I compromise the things that bring me enjoyment when alfalfa is still being grown? I hate to say that out loud, but that’s the reality.” On the other hand, since 2002, water--strapped Southern Nevada, including Las Vegas, cut its use by 26% while adding 750,000 people—proof that measures like the Post-2026 Operational Guidelines really matter.

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In 1876, Canada adopted the Indian Act. The legislation established which Indigenous people were legally recognized through the Indian status system and implemented colonial structures like the reserve system, which restricted First Nations people to lands “reserved” for them to live on, a fraction of their ancestral territories.

The Indian Act still dictates much of Indigenous people’s lives, including many land rights. Only a status “Indian” has the constitutionally protected right to hunt, fish, harvest and live on reserve lands, the last of which is no longer mandatory.

The more status “Indians” there are, in other words, the more people for whom Canada is legally obligated to uphold treaty promises, including to share lands and resources. Which is why, from the beginning, “Canada was very clear that the goal of the [Indian Act] was ultimately to assimilate all First Nations individuals,” Vancouver lawyer Ryan Beaton says.

To expedite assimilation, Indigenous people were pushed to accept enfranchisement, which meant renouncing Indian status in order to gain Canadian citizenship. Although enfranchisement was framed as voluntary, coercive policies outlined in the Indian Act would suggest otherwise. Status holders couldn’t own property off reserve, buy alcohol or vote. Indigenous men were automatically enfranchised if they got a university degree or became priests.

Indigenous women had even less choice regarding assimilation, because of gender discrimination in the Indian Act. If an Indigenous woman married a non-status or a non-Indigenous man, she lost her own status and was no longer recognized as a member of her First Nation. If she married an Indigenous man with status in a nation other than her own, she lost her own status number and band membership, becoming legally recognized through her husband’s First Nation and seen as an entity attached to his status number. And if an Indigenous man was enfranchised, his wife and children lost their status too.

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As the helicopter approached Caas Tl’aat Kwah (also known as Serb Creek), a 1,600-hectare (about 3,953-acre) watershed, the forest became a blanket of deep green, cleaved only by yellow-green wetlands threaded with glacial blue streams.

“We want to conserve it for future generations,” said Charlotte Euverman, the Wet’suwet’en woman leading a fight to save this area, which includes a traditional feasting site. “We have to leave them something.”

Like most First Nations here, Wet’suwet’en never signed treaties with the Canadian or provincial governments. Nevertheless, the latter took the land and leased forested acreage to logging companies. Today just 20% of British Columbia’s old-growth forests remain.

In 2020, after decades of activist pressure, the province identified about a quarter of the remaining old growth as at high risk for logging and recommended a pause while deciding their fate. Yet today, logging has been deferred in less than half of the high-risk area

Now Caas Tl’aat Kwah is in the crosshairs of a debate over the scope of First Nations’ agency, biodiversity loss and protection – and the role industrial logging plays in amplifying Canada’s forest fires, the effects of which are being felt across the globe.

In summer 2023, more than 150,000 sq km (58,000 sq miles) burned across the country, an all-time record, carrying smoke across the continent and air pollution all the way to Europe and China.

Caas Tl’aat Kwah is not yet accessible by road, so the helicopter ride was the first opportunity for Nation member Sandra Harris to see it, despite the fact that her great-grandfather, Jack Joseph, once had a cabin there. The pilot set the helicopter down upon a boggy meadow, and DeWit, who is acting director of the Office of Wet’suwet’en, led the way through the trees to a newer cabin, where he gave a framed photo of Joseph pride of place.

Harris explained the significance of seeing the land, saying: “We have a lot of stress in our lives with racism, working with colonial systems that are so unkind to our ways.” The land is healing, she said.

“Today, we can feel our ancestors,” Harris said. “We remember our stories when we are able to put our feet on the land … There’s lots of good medicine there for us.”

Conventional wisdom has long held that increased fire severity is due not just to climate change but also dense overgrowth from fire suppression. The prescription has been to thin forests and set controlled burns. But a growing number of scientists now say that approach fails to recognize the role of industrial logging in increased fire severity: it kills complex communities of life that stabilize the water cycle.

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The highest peak at Great Smoky Mountains National Park is officially reverting to its Cherokee name more than 150 years after a surveyor named it for a Confederate general.

The US Board of Geographic Names voted on Wednesday in favor of a request from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to officially change the name Clingmans Dome to Kuwohi, according to a news release from the park. The Cherokee name for the mountain translates to “mulberry place.”

“The Great Smoky National Park team was proud to support this effort to officially restore the mountain and to recognize its importance to the Cherokee People,” Superintendent Cassius Cash said in the release.

“The Cherokee People have had strong connections to Kuwohi and the surrounding area, long before the land became a national park. The National Park Service looks forward to continuing to work with the Cherokee People to share their story and preserve this landscape together.”

Kuwohi is a sacred place for the Cherokee people and is the highest point within the traditional Cherokee homeland, according to the park. The peak is visible from the Qualla Boundary, home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Great Smoky Mountains National Park closes Kuwohi every year for three half-days so that predominantly Cherokee schools can visit the mountain and learn its history.

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The name was changed from a confederate brigadier general to a native name so its a double win

"It was different because there wasn't a lot of education [about] our people," she said. "So I only learned my history through my family members."

Years later, Tenasco is learning much more about her culture and her ancestors at a different kind of school — a federally-funded Indigenous archeological field school called Anishinabe Odjibikan.

The school brings together young members of the Algonquin communities of Kitigan Zibi in Quebec and Pikwakanagan in Ontario to dig up, clean and sort items used by their ancestors thousands of years ago.

Tenasco and her fellow Anishinabe Odjibikan participants learn how to document layers of earth and rocks, identify materials and determine if they're local to the area, use surveyor's tools and clean and reassemble pottery pieces found at a dig site.

Anishinabe Odjibikan is part of a growing trend in archaeology of involving the Indigenous peoples whose lands are being excavated — with the work either being led by Indigenous people, done collaboratively or carried out with their consent.

According to Cree/Métis archaeologist Paulette Steeves, the last century of archaeology has invalidated the pre-contact history of the Americas — and the people who lived there for thousands of years.

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Heard about it from a Lakota artist I follow. Figure this one is worth keeping an eye on.

“It’s not that they’re mismanaging everything, but their management philosophy and scheme do not align with ours,” said Tony Incashola Jr., the director of tribal resources for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, or CSKT, as he looked out the window of his Jeep at the landscape. “Their tactics sometimes don’t align with ours, which in turn affects our capability of managing our land.”

State trust lands, on and off Indian reservations, make up millions of acres across the Western United States and generate revenue for public schools, universities, jails, hospitals, and other public institutions by leasing them for oil and gas extraction, grazing, rights of way, timber, and more. The state of Montana, for example, manages 5.2 million surface acres and 6.2 million subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other underground resources, which distributed $62 million to public institutions in 2023. The majority of that money went to K-12 schools — institutions serving primarily non-Indigenous people.

States received many of these trust lands upon achieving statehood, but more were taken from tribal nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through a federal policy of allotment, in which reservations were forcibly cut up into small parcels in an effort to make Indigenous peoples farmers and landowners. The policy allowed for about 90 million acres of reservation lands nationwide to move to non-Indigenous ownership. On the Flathead Reservation, allotment dispossessed the CSKT of a million acres, more than 60,000 of which were taken to fund schools.

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• The Brazilian military has been involved in a series of controversial episodes that have undermined emergency efforts to tackle the humanitarian crisis in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory.
• Reports show it failed (or sabotaged) airspace control and food deliveries to the Indigenous people, who suffer from malnutrition as a result of mercury contamination from illegal mining.
• President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has spent millions trying to evict the illegal miners and provide care to the Yanomami, but some 7,000 miners remain in the territory, while malnutrition, malaria and other diseases continue to afflict the Yanomami.
• Experts blame the military’s inaction of action against the illegal miners on a colonial ideology that was prevalent under Brazil’s former military dictatorship, and which was revived under the administration of Lula’s predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.

In 1964, the Brazilian military launched a coup d’état, overthrowing the democratically elected government and seizing control of the country. What followed was a 21-year dictatorship, authoritarian rule, censorship, and repression. The generals who took power were driven by their version of McCarthyism, fighting all aspects of civilian life that they accused of being communist or socialist.

The generals were backed by the elite, which had an interest in exploiting Brazil’s vast natural resources. Central to this vision was the Amazon Rainforest. They viewed it as a largely untamed and unpopulated wilderness. To the military regime, the Amazon was not a rich ecosystem teeming with life, nor was it the ancestral home of numerous Indigenous communities who had cared for it and made it home for millennia. Instead, it was a frontier to be conquered, a resource to be exploited in the name of progress and national security. Doing so also served their fearmongering narrative that a foreign enemy could invade Brazil through the jungle.

That ideology was (and still is) explicitly anti-Indigenous and anti-environmental, seeing the forest and its inhabitants as obstacles to be removed in the name of so-called development.

The dictatorship launched a series of aggressive policies aimed at integrating the Amazon into the economy. Slogans like “Integrar para não entregar” (“Integrate to avoid surrender”) reflected the regime’s belief that failing to develop the Amazon would leave it vulnerable to foreign exploitation.

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by Bobby Bascomb

• In 2022, the government of Tanzania began relocating Indigenous Maasai pastoralists from their ancestral home inside and near Ngorongoro Conservation Area.
• Locals say they’ve been forcibly evicted from their land and denied access to grazing areas for livestock and basic social services including health care, education and the right to vote.
• Maasai women have been profoundly affected, some turning to prostitution to survive once communities fell apart.

In 2022, the government of Tanzania began forcibly evicting thousands of Indigenous Maasai from 1,500 square kilometers, nearly 600 square miles, of their ancestral land to make way for elite tourism in the renowned Ngorongoro Conservation Area. A large group of Maasai recently blocked the road leading to Ngorongoro, protesting the evictions and denial of government services including health care, education and the right to vote. After the protests, the president of Tanzania ordered social services be restored, though local residents told Mongabay they still haven’t been.

“Hundreds of families were pushed into extreme poverty as the government confiscated and sold their livestock in public markets,” a local aid worker told Mongabay. A local woman told Mongabay that the communal grazing land used by the Maasai was taken by the government, so any cows that remained grew too skinny to produce milk, a staple food for the Indigenous group and a product they sell to buy other foods.

Mongabay spoke with five Maasai women from the area, all of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. Some names have been changed to protect their identities. “The threats are numerous, including daily arrests, especially for those of us who advocate for human rights. This situation seriously threatens our lives,” a local woman told Mongabay in an email.

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WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack apologized to tribal communities this week for delays in shipments and delivery of expired food during a tense congressional hearing that highlighted widespread failures within the Food Distribution Program on Native American reservations.

Vilsack’s comments followed detailed testimony from leaders of the Chickasaw Nation, Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians and Spirit Lake Sioux Nation about the food shortages during a rare joint hearing of the House Appropriations and Agriculture committees.

“This is a dire issue that’s evoked a genuine bipartisan and bicameral concern in Congress,” said House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, who is a member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma.

The USDA, he said, had failed in its duty to provide “critical food assistance for tribal members and vulnerable senior citizens” for months, amounting to “gross negligence.”

“Missed and delayed deliveries, empty shelves and bare warehouses have become commonplace,” Cole said.

The three tribal representatives detailed how those bare shelves have affected their communities and how the USDA told tribes — rather than consulting with them — about a major change in the program’s contract, leading to distrust and anger.

The three also pressed Congress for much more control over their food supply during the four-hour hearing.

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