World Wilderness Congress Focuses on Indigenous Knowledge

"Humanity stands at a crossroads and must come together to realize dramatically different and supportive relationships with one another, the Earth, and all life on the planet, if we are to surmount cascading ecological and social crises now underway."

That was the message of Chief Arvol Looking Horse, the spiritual leader of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples, who on Sunday welcomed hundreds of attendees to the 12th World Wilderness Congress convening this week in the Black Hills, or He Sapa in the Lakota language. Though these gatherings, dedicated to assessing and often resetting global conservation work, date back to the 1970s, this is the first such congress being convened by a tribal authority. The agenda is dedicated heavily to centering Indigenous perspectives in the global struggle to protect wild lands and waters.

Indigenous peoples articulate alternative environmental perspectives and relationships to the natural world. Indigenous mythologies and oral traditions express a non-anthropocentric environmental ethic. Indigenous groups offer ancient tried-and-tested knowledge and wisdom based on their own locally developed practices of resource use. And, as Native peoples themselves have insisted for centuries, they often understand and exhibit a holistic, interconnected and interdependent relationship to particular landscapes and all of the life forms found there. Despite making up a tiny fraction of the world's population, Indigenous peoples hold ancestral rights to some 65 percent of the planet. This poignant fact conveys the enormous role that Native peoples play not only as environmental stewards, but as political actors on the global stage.

All over the world, Native peoples are engaged in battles with hostile corporations and governments that claim the right to set aside small reserves for Native people, and then to seize the rest of their traditional territory. They are confronting the destructive practices of industry and leading the charge against climate change while defending the rivers, forests and food systems that we all depend on. At the same time, they are blocking governments from eroding basic rights and freedoms and turning to the courts of the world to remedy 500 years of historical wrongs. Native peoples are putting their lives on the line and fighting back for political autonomy and land rights. And all the while, they are breathing new life into the biocultural heritage that has the potential to sustain the entire human race.

Looking Horse, the 19th Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe and Bundle, is as revered among the original people of this land as the Dalai Lama is by the people of Tibet or the Pope for Catholics around the world.

"We warned that some day you would not be able to control what you had created. And that day is here. Mother Earth is sick and has a fever," Looking Horse told the group assembled from nations, tribes, and communities across the world.

The chills of that "fever"--the accelerating shocks of climate destabilization caused by centuries of colonial extraction, fossil fuel combustion, and ecological destruction--rocked communities around the world in 2023, with 2024 continuing to break heat records. A "State of the Climate" report that drew on the work of nearly 600 scientists pointed to unprecedented levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere as the cause of Earth's overheating. Records were similarly broken for ocean heat, sea-ice loss, and sea-level rise. In all, industrially-driven global warming exposed nearly 80 percent of the people on the planet to at least 31 days of extreme heat, another study found. This level of heat was virtually impossible if not for the burning of fossil fuels and development-driven deforestation, Climate Central researchers have reminded us.

But organizers and attendees at WILD12 aren't there to haggle over carbon credits or debate the benefits and risks of carbon capture technologies and blue hydrogen, the substance of so many climate gatherings and debates. Instead, The WILD Foundation, through decades of international gatherings, aims to interrupt one driver of climate crisis that gets far less air time than carbon emissions: the global loss of the planet's wild spaces, which for millions of years have served as the planet's lungs and carbon sinks.

Yet even conservation spaces and agendas have offered a shallow understanding of problems and solutions, overlooking the deeper cultural--and thus colonial--roots of ecological collapse. What makes this year's congress so significant is its aim to reformulate the global conservation agenda not only by placing Indigenous leadership at the forefront of conservation action, but more foundationally, by centering Indigenous knowledge and worldviews in understandings of what Western cultures call wilderness.

In other words, the cultural roots of the collapse of our shared biosphere lies not in the make, model, or brand of the tools we use to clearcut forests or fuel plastics production. Rather, it lies in a fundamental misunderstanding that goes all the way to the bottom of Western thought: the hierarchical dualism that imagines the "human" as both separate from and superior to "nature".

Perhaps the most important aspect of Indigenous cosmology is the conception of creation as a living process resulting in a living universe in which a kinship exists between all things. Thus the Mother Earth is a living being, as are the Sun, Stars and the Moon. Hence the Creators are our family, our Grandparents or Parents, and all of their creations are children who are also our relations.

What needs to be understood and challenged, then, is the very basic conceptual groundings of Western culture itself, which gave birth to capitalism as a global economic system for extracting profit both from the bodies of people racialized and gendered as "others" and from land, treated as a dead thing or "resource" to extract from. For it is these philosophical and economic assumptions that--especially from an Indigenous perspective--facilitated colonization and enabled the genocides, slavery, and racial capitalism that followed.

The industrialized West is largely unaware of how Indigenous societies have functioned and the strengths they possess that industrial cultures have lacked. Our notions of progress are based on the idea that high tech means better, and that industrial cultures are somehow more advanced socially. The current state of our threatened environment demands that communication channels be opened for dialogue and engagement with Native environmental ethics. Native people are not only trying to protect water sources, clean up uranium tailings and mount opposition to fossil fuel extraction, they are also continuing their spiritual ways of seeking to celebrate and support all life by means of ceremonies and prayers.

Ancient Forest Gardens Support Native Land Claims

A study by Simon Fraser University in British Columbia found that Indigenous-managed forests -- cared for as "forest gardens" -- contain more biologically and functionally diverse species than surrounding conifer-dominated forests and create important habitat for wildlife and pollinators. According to researchers, ancient forests were once tended by Indigenous peoples living along the coast of British Columbia. These forest gardens continue to grow at remote archaeological villages on Canada's northwest coast and are composed of native fruit and nut trees and shrubs such as crabapple, hazelnut, cranberry, wild plum, and wild cherries. Important medicinal plants and root foods like wild ginger and wild rice root grow in the understory layers. These plants never grow together in the wild, so people obviously put them there to grow all in one spot -- like a garden.
 

Forest gardens were a method of agriculture in which practitioners cleared the land around or near villages, planted crops, and managed with agricultural methods like controlled burns and fertilization to increase the productivity of the plants. The gardens frequently showed a carefully overlapped structure, with a canopy of fruit and nut trees, a mid-layer of berries, and roots and herbs in the undergrowth. Rather than engaging in annual planting cycles, the Indigenous people collected, transplanted, and carefully tended these plants over many years. Traces of species like Pacific crabapple, beaked hazelnut, wild cherry, and others have been found in recent years -- in some cases, still growing even more than a century after they were tended. Even now these abandoned forest gardens are still productive and biodiversity hotspots that seem to be able to naturally hold back the encroaching surrounding conifer forests.
 

For anthropologists, ethnologists, and other scientists, the existence of these gardens contradicts the long-held hunter-gatherer theory that maintained that the region's Indigenous peoples didn't improve and nurture their lands. Instead, experts now believe this method of agriculture and land manipulation helped First Nations communities (the collective name given to most of Canada's Indigenous peoples) thrive. While there is not a definitive catalog of the forest gardens, there are remains of them up and down the coast of British Columbia -- some known, some still used by communities, some being rediscovered.
 

Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, a historical ecologist, researcher, and assistant professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, has been working with First Nations communities to rediscover, confirm, and document the gardens, complementing traditional knowledge cultivated over time, sometimes for thousands of years. Armstrong's work supports the idea that some forest environments in British Columbia that were once considered wild are, in fact, often the result of careful shepherding and agricultural practices. There is similar evidence of forest gardens in Indigenous communities around the world, especially in tropical regions.
 

Nonetheless, Armstrong added, "Despite decades of research on the topic, this idea of Indigenous peoples' homelands as being culturally mediated and highly influenced spaces is still so utterly contested in courts, in public policy, in environmental regulations."
 

The legal justification for taking First Nation lands is directly linked to the colonial view that Indigenous peoples weren't using all of their lands and so they were essentially in the colonial eyes ripe for the taking. It's a concept that continues to be used against Indigenous peoples and the work that Armstrong does with the communities is just picking away at that argument.
 

So far, efforts to cite the remnants of cultivated gardens to support First Nations' land reclamation claims have failed to gain much legal traction. The current test for land title in British Columbia is evidence of regular and exclusive use of land before 1846. Proving regular use has been a challenge for the First Nations, in part because of the rugged coastal terrain. 

 

But the priority of First Nations communities is to restore their forest gardens in some form. "At the end of the day, this is the goal: Bring these places back to life," said Armstrong. These communities are using Armstrong's work to refurbish their forest gardens. Clearing competing plants has already helped, with particular attention being given to the crabapples, which are flourishing.
 

Kelsey Charlie Sr. of the Sts'ailes (also known as Chehalis) Nation says ecosystems that have thrived for thousands of years with balance and harmony have been knocked off-kilter. At the same time, he added, more and more people are returning to these places to gather the plants that their elders used.
 

"It's a very, very simple thing," said Charlie Sr. "The way our elders said it was that we had agreements and arrangements with all living things."
 

Charlie said that part of the community's snoweyelh, or law of everything, is their responsibility to take care of the land. "Our elders always told us that we never owned the land, but we were a part of the land. And if we look after it, then it will look after us."

Peyote and Tribal Sovereignty

by Darren Thompson
Director of Media Relations
Lakota People's Law Project
 

On Friday, April 12, the Native American Church of North America (NACNA) hosted a summit in Farmington, New Mexico focused on protecting peyote, a cactus medicine sacred to Native Peoples across Turtle Island. The one-day summit brought leaders from Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma together with church delegates to discuss next steps for the largest American Indian religious organization in the country.
 

Leaders say development near peyote's natural habitat, which in the U.S. only grows naturally on private lands in four counties in southern Texas, has decreased the supply of the plant. A growing community comprised mainly of non-Natives wants to bring psychedelic drugs into mainstream society and tout research that psychedelics aid in improving mental health.
 

Under the 1994 Amendment, only enrolled members of federally recognized tribes are permitted under federal law to possess, transport and ingest peyote in bonafide traditional ceremonies. However, the plant, and ceremonies that are centered around its traditional use are threatened by non-Native interests, including Big Pharma.
 

Official efforts to decriminalize mescaline, the active ingredient in peyote, have succeeded in places like Oakland and San Francisco, and others want to follow their lead. In February, California State Senator Scott Wiener introduced California Senate Bill 1012 — The Regulated Psychedelic-assisted Therapy Act and the Regulated Psychedelic Substances Control Act — which aims to decriminalize mescaline and other psychedelics.
 

If passed, the bill would authorize the establishment of a regulatory system that would control regulated psychedelic substances for use with regulated psychedelic-assisted therapy. While the bill mentions the respect for Indigenous cultures and their use of "psychedelic substances," it would also legalize mescaline, which the federal government classifies as the active hallucinogenic ingredient in peyote.
 

"Mescaline is mescaline, whether it is peyote or other cacti," says Justin Jones, Diné and General Counsel for the Native American Church of North America. "California cannot decriminalize mescaline in other cacti and say that peyote is exempt, because mescaline is mescaline, no matter what cactus you have."
 

Protecting peyote use and habitat, church leaders point out, is an issue of tribal sovereignty. Only enrolled members of federally recognized tribes have rights protected under AIRFA, and in this way, the federal government has acknowledged the inherent sovereignty that tribes possess. Leaders of the Native American Church have traveled across Indian Country and even to Capitol Hill with the message that opening an avenue for legalized mescaline threatens one of the legal cornerstones of tribal sovereignty. They're asking for strengthened enforcement of AIRFA, which was drafted to protect intrusions on traditional American Indian cultures and religions.
 

Over the past several years, non-Native individuals promoting the benefits of peyote have encouraged direct violations of the law. Mainstream interests want to extract the core of one of the last protected plants for American Indian people and profit off it. Over the next several months, the Lakota People's Law Project will document and support leaders advocating for enforcement of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act's 1994 amendment. While the possession, transportation, and use of peyote is protected, its natural environment is not. If Big Pharma achieves its goal of decriminalizing mescaline, peyote and its natural environment will surely be put at risk.
 

It's also notable that efforts to incorporate psychedelics into organized religions are gaining steam, also challenging the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. While it is not our responsibility to challenge people and their prayers, it is our duty to fight for tribal sovereignty and protect sacred spaces of American Indian culture for our next generations.

Climate-Endangered Tribe Sues Louisiana

By now, you're likely well aware of the climate crisis and its significant dangers to Indigenous communities the world over. The problem is especially magnified on islands and in coastal regions, where sea level rise can wipe away traditional homelands and make climate refugees of those who have been displaced. That's true even right here in the United States, where hundreds of Native communities -- in South Dakota, Alaska, Florida, Hawai'i, Washington, and Louisiana -- face existential threats.
 

And now, the first community to supposedly be moved from harm's way -- the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation -- is facing a new set of problems. Just before the new year, the tribe filed a landmark civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) against the state of Louisiana. In 2016, HUD granted Louisiana $48 million in aid to resettle the tribe. But, its complaint asserts, Louisiana failed to properly implement the grant and has ethnically and racially discriminated, violated tribal sovereignty, excluded cultural components central to a proper relocation program, and provided poor replacement housing.
 

The Jean Charles Choctaw Nation has resided on the Isle de Jean Charles for five generations, since the ancestors of its citizens escaped the Trail of Tears in the early 1830s amid President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act. Its homelands and burial grounds are located in a region facing perpetual devastation and erosion by storms and sea level rise. Since 1955, the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation has lost over 98 percent of its lands to the encroaching ocean.
 

It's also worth noting that the tribe is located in Terrebonne Parish, a region notorious for oil extraction, high pollution rates, and environmental justice violations. The Parish and over 90 percent of its property are largely controlled by non-local fossil fuel and chemical companies. The infamous "Cancer Alley" is just upstream.
 

By filing its complaint with HUD, the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation is looking to the federal agency to investigate the grant-funded resettlement program, currently run by Louisiana's Office of Community Development (OCD). The tribe hopes HUD will order OCD to respect tribal needs and authority as the program's implementation proceeds. The lawsuit is also significant in that, while the tribe has state recognition from Louisiana, it does not have federal recognition, which would extend access to more grants, disaster assistance, and various legal powers -- including constitutional protections and self-governance recognized by the United States.

Environmental Victory for Alaska Natives

On January 8th, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the State of Alaska's bid to fast-track the legal process, overrule the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and gain approval for the Pebble Mine -- slated to extract enormous amounts of copper, gold, and molybdenum from the pristine and sensitive ecosystem known as Bristol Bay. Located in a remote, wild, and generally uninhabited part of Southwest Alaska, Pebble is the largest known undeveloped copper ore body in the world.
 

The populations in the area rely heavily on wild resources for subsistence, harvesting moose, caribou and salmon. Wild resources play an important part in the region's cultural heritage. There are more than 30 Alaskan native tribes in the region that depend on salmon to support their traditional subsistence ways of life, in addition to other inhabitants and tourists in the area. A diverse coalition led by Alaska Natives has consistently fought against the proposed mine for more than two decades. It eventually gained support from the EPA, which ultimately blocked the mine proposal in January 2023 over concerns it would threaten an aquatic ecosystem supporting the world's most prolific sockeye salmon fishery.
 

This decision is significant, particularly considering the current High Court's tendency to support states' rights, limits on regulation -- especially of the environmental variety -- and corporate concerns. Alaska's request, filed in June, was unusual in that it sought to skip lower appeals courts to challenge the EPA's decision on the basis that it violated Alaska's state sovereignty.
 

Under the law, alleged violations of state sovereignty are one of the few categories of cases that grant the Supreme Court original jurisdiction -- meaning a state can bypass the usual state/federal court appeals process and file straight with the High Court. The justices could easily have decided to hear the case and decide in favor of the mining company, which has shown no qualms about engaging in some shady business practices over the years.
 

As the single most productive sockeye salmon fishery in the world, Bristol Bay contains biodiversity and abundant wild fish populations which present a stark contrast to many other fisheries in the Pacific Northwest (and worldwide). All five Eastern Pacific salmon species spawn in Bristol Bay's freshwater tributaries. Most have experienced severe depletion over the last few decades. Sockeye salmon, like all Pacific Salmon, are a keystone species, vital to the health of an entire ecosystem. Of course, salmon also provide a sacred food source for Indigenous communities up and down the West Coast.
 

Kudos to the United Tribes of Bristol Bay, a consortium of Alaska Native tribes fighting to preserve the traditional Yup'ik, Dena'ina, and Alutiiq ways of life in Southwest Alaska, for leading the charge. The Supreme Court's decision confirms all the hard work put in by tribes and allies, including the Save Bristol Bay Coalition. It remains to be seen whether Alaska's conservative leadership will continue with legal challenges at a lower court level -- but, for now, Indigenous People have won a big battle in this decades-long fight to protect their homelands.

Native Actor Lily Gladstone Makes History

Today, I share with you some great news! On January 7, in case you missed it, Blackfeet and Nez Perce actor Lily Gladstone made history as the Golden Globes' first Indigenous winner in the category of Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama. Gladstone, who goes by both she/they pronouns, brought an understated power to their portrayal of Mollie Burkhardt, an Osage woman struggling amid the murders of her family and community by greedy settlers, in Martin Scorcese's "Killers of the Flower Moon."
 

After beginning their acceptance speech with a traditional Blackfeet introduction and a round of thank-yous, Gladstone said something important and inspiring: "This is a historic win, but it doesn't belong to just me. I'm holding it with all of my beautiful sisters. And this is for every rez kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid out there who has a dream, who is seeing themselves represented and our stories, told by ourselves in our own words, with tremendous allies and tremendous trust from with and from each other."
 

That last statement is filled with both truth and nuance. It's a beautiful sentiment, but Gladstone may also be acknowledging that Hollywood remains a place with rich and powerful gatekeepers. Even in 2024, non-Native filmmakers (allies or not) like James Cameron (the "Avatar" franchise) and Scorcese are most often still the ones helming stories featuring Indigenous People and perspectives.
 

This needs to change. Allies are important, and representation is wonderful. Still, even the most positive representation on-screen is not the same thing as agency -- the ability to tell their own stories, centering their own narratives. And agency, particularly for the Native women without whom this story does not exist and the movie could not function, is largely missing for much of "Killers of the Flower Moon." When Native actors occupy the screen, the movie seems to vibrate at a different frequency. I'm left wondering what could have been had their characters' arcs been less peripheral.
 

Much has been written about the movie by Indigenous People across the nation. From a glowing review by Vincent Schilling, founder and editor of NativeViewpoint.com, to a scathing indictment from "Reservation Dogs" star Devery Jacobs, opinions on the movie vary widely -- and understandably so. The three-hour-plus epic, based on true events, is ambitious, messy, and devastating. Critics praise the movie's effort to highlight Osage history with Indigenous actors in prominent roles but express reservations about its graphic violence and lack of historical context, foregrounding of white characters and lack of an Indigenous screenwriter or director. One thing everyone seems to agree upon, though, is the powerful performances given by Gladstone and other Native People in supporting roles. I, for one, look forward to seeing more from all of them, especially in movies and shows written and directed by Indigenous storytellers.

Let's Stand Again With Standing Rock

It's time to take action and stop the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL)! It's been over six years since DAPL began carrying oil and nearly a year and a half since the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the pipeline operator Energy Transfer's attempt to avoid producing a required Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Today, in violation of a separate court order, DAPL continues to operate illegally, without a federal easement. Finally, after interminable delay, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has finally released an extremely problematic draft EIS for public input.
 

That's where you come in. You now have just a few weeks to submit your public comment demanding the Corps shut this pipeline down and require a new, valid EIS. Please stand with Standing Rock in this critical moment and write to the Army Corps right now.
 

Now that the EIS has been released, we can confirm what we already suspected. Prepared by a member of the American Petroleum Institute -- clear conflict of interest -- the EIS addresses none of Standing Rock's many grave concerns about DAPL. Those include DAPL's imminent threat to the Missouri River, big problems with Energy Transfer's emergency response plans, Energy Transfer's horrendous safety track record, continued lack of transparency with Standing Rock throughout the environmental review process, inaccurate characterizations of tribal consultation, and sensitive habitat and sacred burial sites along the riverbank.
 

Earlier this year, four U.S. senators including Bernie Sanders submitted a letter to the Corps seeking an explanation. The reply from Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works Michael Connor did not adequately or honestly address the tribe's complaints. Standing Rock replied, pointing out the flaws in approach and demanding redress.
 

For now, it's up to us to lend a hand. We must flood the Army Corps with a single, unified message: This illegal pipeline's operations must be terminated and the Army Corps must start over with a legitimate environmental review. In the midst of a climate emergency, let's defend sacred ground and safeguard Unci Maka (our Grandmother Earth). This may be our last, best chance to end DAPL once and for all. Please take action now.

An Indigenous Perspective on Climate Change

Greenland, also known as Kallaalit Nunaat by the local Inuit peoples, is the "Ground Zero" of climate change. Its geographic location and expansive ice sheets make it extremely vulnerable to climate change, resulting in disproportionate impacts for those who live there. Greenland's population is extremely dispersed, with a majority being Inuit, who live in communities organized around subsistence hunting. Using dog sleds and boats resembling kayaks, the Inuit hunt seals, walrus, narwhal, polar bears and other Arctic animals.
 

In general, the lifestyle of the Inuit communities paired with the environmental conditions of Greenland create a multi-layered vulnerability to climate change. Rising sea levels increase coastal erosion, while melting ice inhibits travel, hunting and other subsistence activities. The mixture of snow and thinner ice makes traditional travel paths extremely unreliable for dog sleds and snowmobiles, increasing isolation and immobility. Increasingly, Inuit are being forced to seek modernized work opportunities, driven out of generational hunting traditions due to climate change and the resulting economic insecurity. This has had devastating impacts on Inuit communities, particularly young men who can no longer partake in traditional hunting.
 

The spiritual significance of climate change

Inuit shaman Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq speaks about the spiritual significance of climate change at international conferences around the world. Angaangaq is a traditional healer, storyteller and carrier of the Qilaut (wind drum), whose  family belongs to the traditional healers of the Far North from Greenland. His name means 'The Man Who Looks Like His Uncle'. Since he was a child he was trained by his family--especially by his Grandmother Aanakasaa--for becoming a shaman. The spiritual task given by his mother is: "Melting the Ice in the Heart of Man."

 

Angaangaq bridges the boundaries of cultures and faiths in people young and old. His work has taken him to over 70 countries around the world. He conducts circles, seminars and Aalaartiviit--traditional sweat lodges. His teachings are deeply rooted in the wisdom of the oral healing traditions of his people, which enabled people over thousands of years to survive in one of the harshest places on Earth.
 

In an interview with LifeGate, Angaangaq shared an Indigenous perspective on climate change. Everyone talks about climate change but nobody talks about its spiritual significance. "According to the old people, a third of the population on Earth will vanish," says Angaangaq, "they say many people will die, some will barely survive, and few will have a life." His message is very powerful as it is not just about Mother Earth, who is ever-changing, it is about human lives--and we have never been so many.
 

"The ice is a living thing, you can see it in my grandmother's village. In the summer it breaks and explodes and when water gushes out you can't hear anything but that. Sometimes when there's a storm the waves are so strong that they can spew chunks of ice several kilometres away. Ice that weighs a ton," he says. The difference now is not only in our numbers but in what we have done to the Earth: "We've raped Mother Earth, taken all her resources and we're still doing it without considering the impact it can have on our personal life."
 

Angaangaq also believes that while we often talk about animals as inferior creatures we don't realize that they have a much greater capacity of adaption than us. For example, we can only live in a temperature range of 100 degrees Celsius, whereas that range is as high as 200 degrees for polar bears. "We can't adapt to hot weather, they can. Isn't that so interesting?" Angaangaq ponders.
 

Becoming the hope
 

"The changes are so bad that we can no longer save the world, we can no longer stop the melting of the big ice," confides Angaangaq. "The only thing I can think of now is to somehow find the strength and capacity within myself to become the hope. Not because I'm better than anyone else but because as a grandfather I hope that my grandchildren will have a life worth enjoying, with beauty everywhere, where you kill animals without forgetting to say thank you, where you grow what you eat, and I want to find other people willing to change their lives to be that hope."
 

"Right now the government doesn't talk about this, nor do the activists. You're just one name out of several billion but, really, you have a beautiful spirit and you're worth knowing and doing something for! The land will sink, this is a fact, what will they do with you when the ocean comes? As my father used to say, we know so much but comprehend so little."
 

The melting of the Arctic ice sheets is a call for us to reflect on the spiritual significance of climate change and our way of living. It's time to look with eyes of faith into our future and believe we can make a difference. If we have hope, there is potential for extraordinary change--things will survive. The Indigenous elders teach us if we return to harmony in our lives, melting the ice in our hearts, reconnecting with one another, we will survive. It is time to use this knowledge to help mankind.

The World is Running Out of Water

The world is "running out of water," Makasa Looking Horse says, and if we don't take action soon, it will be too late. Looking Horse, from Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario, is one of the hosts of the Ohneganos Ohnegahdę:gyo -- Let's Talk about Water podcast, which won a 2021 David Suzuki Foundation Future Ground Prize. The prize recognizes youth-led movements. It's a podcast created, the Suzuki Foundation says, to "engage Indigenous communities and disseminate research findings by facilitating meaningful discussion about water issues and climate change."
 

Looking Horse points to Aberfoyle, Ontario, where BlueTriton Brands, Inc., an American beverage company based in Connecticut, has permits to take 3.6 million litres of water a day out of an aquifer there. BlueTriton is the new name of the giant corporation better known as Nestlé Waters North America. The name was changed to BlueTriton Brands in 2021.
 

She says "they're making millions off our water and selling it. And the thing about aquifer waters that it takes 6,000 to 10,000 years for that water to filter through the ground. We'll never see that water within our lifetime again and that's why it's so important that we stop water extraction."
 

BlueTriton says, in a report from November 2021, that it has conducted "extensive testing and studies over the years to ensure that their operations do not diminish the availability of water for other users or the environment." The company says "permit conditions require BlueTriton to monitor the natural and pumping-related variations in groundwater and surface water levels." The permit was renewed by the Ontario government in 2021 and runs until November 2026.
 

Looking Horse's commitment to protecting water was passed down from her parents. Her mother is Dawn Martin-Hill, one of the founders of the Indigenous studies program at McMaster University and the winner of the University of Oklahoma's International Water Prize, for her commitment to improving water security for the people of the Six Nations of the Grand River. 

 

Her father is Chief Arvol Looking Horse, 19th Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe. He was given the responsibility at age 12, the youngest keeper in history. Looking Horse  says her path into activism and water sovereignty didn't happen overnight. It was a long and encompassing journey full of passion for earth, prayer for water and everything on earth.
 

Similar to Looking Horse, the United Nations (UN) also has concerns about how much water humans can access. According to a UN report, by 2025 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two thirds of the world's population could be living under "water stressed conditions."
 

In June of 2019, Looking Horse hand delivered a cease and desist letter from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Chiefs Council to Nestlé Waters in Aberfoyle. In 2021, the council sent another letter to BlueTriton, after the company changed its name, saying "the majority of our people at Six Nations do not have access to clean drinking water... we declare your activities to remove [aquifer] waters under our territories unpermitted and demand that you cease your activity immediately."
 

The fight for water sovereignty and for clean drinking water continues for Looking Horse. "The urgency worldwide is huge because the world is running out of water. This is only one example of exploitative extraction by a big corporation. This doesn't include all of the pollution and micro plastics that are living in waterways and systems across the globe," she said.
 

"I've been praying for water and working with water for a very long time, and that's where it started," she said. "You start to learn how valuable water is on a spiritual level, but also on a statistic level. The world is really in a water crisis. So, it's in our culture to protect the water and have a responsibility."

Court Case Threatens Native Sovereignty

A serious threat to Native American tribes across the United states looms large. A decision on the Supreme Court case Brackeen v. Haaland -- a direct assault on the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), and by extension, the very right of tribes to be classified as sovereign nations -- is expected later this year.
 

Enacted in 1978, ICWA was part of the federal government's efforts to rectify the incomprehensible harm it caused to Native families through the forcible removal of Native children from their communities into boarding schools or non-Native foster and adoptive homes. Between 1819 and 1969, hundreds of thousands of children were taken from their families and homes. 

 

ICWA establishes minimum standards for a Native child to be removed from their home and empowers tribes to be more involved in adoption and custody procedures for kids enrolled or eligible to enroll in tribal nations. The law gives tribal courts exclusive jurisdiction over members who live on tribal land, in the hopes of keeping families together, and creates a process whereby they're noticed and involved in cases outside of these boundaries.
 

For years, people and organizations hostile to ICWA have tried to erode the legislation through the court system. Should ICWA fall, it's not only adoption and foster cases that will be gravely impacted; the basic foundations of tribal sovereignty could be unwound. Observers in Indian Country have long believed that attacks on the legislation have broader aims in mind than the wellbeing of children, and many anti-ICWA proponents are also perceived as gunning for access to natural resources, mineral rights and more.
 

Calling into question the authority of Congress to deal with tribal nations as distinct sovereigns would have ​major reverberations throughout the field of Indian law. These attacks on sovereignty can be traced back to the Trail of Tears, the deadly westward displacement of five tribes between 1830 and 1850 initiated by then-President Andrew Jackson. The argument made at the time was that the tribes were being overwhelmed by European settlers, and they would be annihilated if the government didn't take them into custody and move them. ​In truth, those tribes controlled the waterways, and Andrew Jackson said, "​We want it, and we are going to take it."
 

Tribal sovereignty predates the coming of the colonial powers. From 1778 to 1871, the United States federal government signed 370 treaties with tribal nations. Many were used as tools to forcibly remove Indigenous people from their native lands and relocate them to reservations. In exchange for the land they had lived on for generations, tribes were offered many now-broken promises from the government: of peace, the provision of health and education, hunting and fishing rights and protection against enemies.
 

According to the Constitution, treaties can only be enacted between two sovereign nations. That status and the right of tribes to self-govern was affirmed in the 1832 Worcester v. Georgia Supreme Court case. It's also grounded in the Constitution through not one, but two clauses, and was reiterated yet again in the 1990s by a Department of Justice memorandum that tribal nations have the unique status of ​"domestic dependent nations." You can help protect tribal sovereignty by supporting the Native American Rights Fund.

FNX - First Nations Experience

First Nations Experience (FNX) is the first and only national broadcast television network in the United States exclusively devoted to Native American and World Indigenous content. Through Native-produced and themed documentaries, dramatic series, nature, cooking, gardening, children's and arts programming, FNX strives to accurately illustrate the lives and cultures of Native people around the world.
 

Created as a shared vision between Founding Partners, the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians and the San Bernardino Community College District, FNX is owned by and originates from the studios of KVCR-PBS San Bernardino. FNX began terrestrial broadcast in the Los Angeles area on September 25, 2011 and went national on November 1, 2014 via the Public Television Interconnect System (PBS satellite AMC - 21 Channel SD08), making the non-profit channel available to PBS affiliates, community and tribal stations, and cable television service providers across the country. 

At the ceremonial unity launch of FNX in February 2011, Cherokee actor Wes Studi confessed he didn't see this coming. "Thank you for proving me wrong," Studi said, speaking at the KVCR/FNX studios in San Bernardino, California. "I once said that I didn't think in my lifetime I'd see a TV channel dedicated to Indian people like you and me, people who are rarely seen on screen in authentic ways. We're making history with this powerful new media tool. This is something I can tell my grandchildren about -- I'll tell them I was there when it launched."

San Manuel Tribal Chairman James Ramos said FNX is "fulfilling a dream our ancestors had ... using the resources we have built through gaming. It's important that people know what our ancestors had to go through so we could be here today. It's time for us to change negative perceptions about indigenous peoples in mainstream audiences. We need to stand together as one voice and make things better for our people."

Ramos added context from his own tribe's past. "There was a time in California's history when there was an effort to get rid of Indian people; we were shot and killed here in the San Bernardino Mountains," Ramos said. "Many people never heard that story, and today some people don't want to talk about that history. But it's important that we do so that we can learn from the past and move forward working together for a better future."

FNX is working diligently to obtain channel carriage in as many communities as possible across the United States. Currently, FNX is carried by 22 affiliate stations broadcasting into 25 states from Alaska to New York and has a potential viewing audience of more than 74.5 million households across the United States! Several additional stations have also begun streaming FNX digitally throughout their communities and states. More new stations are always coming on board, so stay tuned -- FNX may be available in your city very soon! If you'd like to get FNX carried in your community, please reach out to your local stations, cable and satellite service providers. I can't recommend FNX enough and best of all it is totally free!

Remembering Indigenous Rights Advocate James Abourezk

A few days ago, we lost a tireless champion of the rights of the Indigenous Peoples of North America. Retired South Dakota United States Senator James Abourezk, the architect of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), passed away at his home in Sioux Falls on Friday, Feb. 24 on his 92nd birthday. James George Abourezk was born in 1931 in Wood, South Dakota, the son of Lebanese immigrants. Growing up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, he spoke only Arabic at home and did not learn English until he went to elementary school.
 

After high school graduation in 1948, Abourezk served in the US Navy during the Korean War. Following military service, he earned a degree in civil engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines in Rapid City in 1961, and worked as a civil engineer in California, before returning to South Dakota to work on the Minutemen missile silos. At the age of 32, he decided to pursue law, and earned a J.D. degree from University of South Dakota School of Law in Vermillion in 1966.
 

Abourezk began a legal practice in Rapid City, South Dakota, and joined the Democratic Party. He ran in 1968 for Attorney General of South Dakota but was defeated by Gordon Mydland. In 1972, Abourezk was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he served from 1973 to 1979, after which he chose not to seek a second term. He was the first chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. His legislative successes in the Senate included the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, as well as the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act gives federal protection to the traditional religions of the American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and Native Hawaiians.
 

Abourezk's signature legislation was the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA, 1978), designed to protect Native American children and families from being torn apart. Native American children have been removed by state social agencies from their families and placed in foster care or adoption at a disproportionately high rate, and usually placed with non Native American families. This both deprived the children of their culture and threatened the very survival of the tribes. This legislation was intended to provide a federal standard that emphasized the needs of Native American children to be raised in their own cultures, and gave precedence to tribal courts for decisions about children domiciled on the reservation, as well as concurrent but presumptive jurisdiction with state courts for Native American children off the reservation.
 

In 1973, Senators Abourezk and George McGovern attempted to end the occupation of Wounded Knee by negotiating with American Indian Movement (AIM) leaders, who were in a standoff with federal law enforcement after demanding that the federal government honor its historical treaties with the Oglala Sioux nation. The Wounded Knee Occupation began on February 27, 1973 when about 200 Oglala Lakota and followers of AIM seized and occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The occupation lasted for a total of 71 days, during which time two Lakota men were shot to death by federal agents and several more were wounded. It was a key moment in the struggle for Native American rights.
 

The summer after the occupation of Wounded Knee, Abourezk introduced the American Indian Policy Review Commission Act, which created the eleven-member commission to study legislation with the goal of addressing key issues in Indian Country. He served as its chairman until its landmark report was published in 1977. He took the gavel as chairman of the Select Committee on Indian Affairs from its creation in 1977 to 1979, when he left the Senate.
 

In 1980, Abourezk founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a grassroots civil rights organization. In 1989, he published his Advise and Dissent: Memoirs of South Dakota and the U.S. Senate. He was the co-author, along with Hyman Bookbinder, of Through Different Eyes: Two Leading Americans -- a Jew and an Arab -- Debate U. S. Policy in the Middle East (1987).
 

After his retirement from the Senate, Abourezk worked as a lawyer and writer in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He continued to be active in supporting tribal sovereignty and culture. Since 2005, he chaired the Lakota People's Law Project Advisory Committee. The Lakota People's Law Project is committed to defending the rights of South Dakota's Native American families, exposing the epidemic of illegal seizures of Lakota children by the state of South Dakota, working towards the structural solution to end this injustice. Just last year, Sen. Abourezk assisted their legal team in filing an amicus brief supporting ICWA with the United States Supreme Court. Later this year, the High Court could overturn the senator's landmark piece of federal legislation -- and that poses an imminent threat to Native families and sovereignty.

However Wide the Sky: Places of Power

Pamela Pierce, founding partner and CEO of Silver Bullet Productions in Santa Fe, New Mexico recently announced that "However Wide The Sky: Places of Power" has received an Emmy award in the Best Documentary category. This beautifully filmed documentary originally aired on the New Mexico Public Broadcasting Station. Narrated by Indigenous actress Tantoo Cardinal, the documentary explores the history and spirituality of the Indigenous people of the American Southwest, who are deeply rooted in the land. Since the beginning of time, they have been stewards and protectors of their home lands, past and present. When the Pueblo people pray, they pray for the living land as far as they can see. However wide the sky is, this is who they pray for.

Pierce worked with tribal leaders to film on the land. The areas chosen are: Chaco Canyon, Bears Ears, Zuni Salt Lake, Mount Taylor, Pueblo of Santa Ana, Taos Blue Lake, Mesa Prieta and Santa Fe. These places intimately connect the people and their beliefs to the natural world. This is their story, of the land and who they are. Pierce says the concerns about the use, misuse, development, drilling and mining of scared places in New Mexico began a conversation between Silver Bullet Productions and tribal leaders about the importance of education in 2016.

 

"The land was treated as a commodity, something to be owned, mined, drilled or developed," she says. "In order to protect land and water rights, it seemed that educating about the significance of land might help alert those leaders. The more we know, the better we do. Film can be a powerful tool to change thinking, and motivate people to vote. The danger to land, and the fight to protect land, will always be an issue worth fighting for, regardless of culture or national origin. All land is sacred, and it is a universal concern worth fighting for."
 

The documentary features New Mexico's Chaco Canyon and Utah's Bear's Ears, which is significant because the locations are under siege. Bear's Ears is a modern day story of government versus layers of culture, and the risk of development if the power and policies of the U.S. shift -- it is just how fragile the protection of land is. Chaco Canyon, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is facing drilling for fracking wells. It's not just the wells and the roads that have an impact on the land. Tribal leaders see it as a real threat to their spiritual well being. Pierce thought it was important to really put that out there for the public to see and make them understand why this issue is important to tribes. From their perspective, the land does not belong to them. They belong to the land.
 

Pierce says some of the themes in the film include a distinction between stewardship and ownership, the layers of cultural life on every piece of land, no place is ever abandoned, but remains living from the ancestors who have come before, places have shared cultural history and the difference between being from a place, and of a place. Here is the trailer.

Second Annual Wopila Gathering

A message from Chase Iron Eyes, Co-director of the Lakota People's Law Project:
 

I'm excited to announce that our Second Annual Wopila Gathering is almost here -- and you're invited! Please come spend a couple hours with me and many of our Lakota Law leaders at the live-streamed event this Giving Tuesday, Nov. 29 at 5 p.m. Mountain Time.
 

I'm very much looking forward to hosting you for these candid conversations. Four powerful women -- Madonna Thunder Hawk, Phyllis Young, Waste Win Young, and DeCora Hawk -- will join me to talk with you about three of the most critical issues in our Native communities. This year's topics are Water is Life (including the importance of Indigenous resistance to environmental racism), Indian Child Welfare (and protecting ICWA), and the Native Vote.
 

It still gives me great joy to think back to our inaugural Wopila Gathering last year, when thousands of supporters like you gathered with us throughout the day. This year, we'll have a more focused and intimate event, spending about two hours shining a light on what you helped us accomplish in 2022 and looking ahead to next steps in our shared journey toward greater justice.
 
So I hope to see you there! And please extend this invite to those you love by clicking the social share icons -- to Facebook, Twitter, and email -- on our Wopila Page. Let's continue to grow the circle of support and come together to honor, inspire, and activate! Stay tuned for more info soon.

Wopila tanka -- thank you, always, for your friendship!

Chase Iron Eyes
Co-Director and Lead Counsel
The Lakota People’s Law Project

Words Are Monuments

A national reckoning with American history and racial injustice has been playing out on the terrain of monuments, museums, school curricula, and increasingly -- maps. While the Department of the Interior plans to rename 660 place-names with the derogatory term "sq**w," a new study published in the journal People and Nature shows that misogynist and racist slurs are the tip of the iceberg. Violence in place-names can take many forms, including the erasure of Indigenous knowledge and languages.
 

Titled "Words Are Monuments," the study reveals a system-scale pattern of place-names that perpetuate settler colonial mythologies, including white supremacy. Through a quantitative analysis of 2,200 place-names in 16 National Parks, researchers identified:

• 10 racial slurs

• 52 places named for settlers who committed acts of violence against Indigenous peoples. For example, Mt. Doane, in Yellowstone, and Harney River, in the Everglades, commemorate individuals who led massacres of Indigenous peoples, including women and children.

• 107 natural features that retained traditional Indigenous names, compared with 205 names given by settlers that replaced traditional names found on record.

While the Department of the Interior has established a task force to address derogatory place-names, the agency has faced some criticism for what Washington State officials and area tribes are calling a rushed process, with proposed replacement names that are largely colonial.

Calls to re-Indigenize place-names in national parks and monuments have been gathering steam, from the Blackfeet Nation's recent petition to return traditional names to mountains in Glacier National Park, to the Puyallup Tribe's campaign to rename Mount Rainier to Təqʷuʔməʔ, or Mount Tahoma.
 

A new website and national campaign inspired by these efforts and the place-names study launches today at WordsAreMonuments.org. Created by the pop-up social justice museum The Natural History Museum, the site features an interactive map with stories from problematic place-names cited in the study; a step-by-step guide from the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers on how to officially change place-names; video interviews with cultural geographers and Tribal leaders; and ways to take action to support renaming campaigns.
 

The Natural History Museum will also host a free series of online events featuring Indigenous leaders, artists, activists and scholars that explores:

• Why place names matter and how the movement to 'undo the colonial map' relates to other movements that reckon with American history -- to topple Confederate and colonial monuments, decolonize museums, and overhaul school curricula;

• The relationship between language and ideology, and the power of place names in encoding a way of seeing, understanding, and relating to the land;

• How campaigns to re-Indigenize place names on federal lands are not just about making public lands more inclusive, but are stepping stones on the path to Indigenous co-governance and land rematriation;

• The global reckoning with colonial and imperialist history, including successful and ongoing efforts to replace colonial place-names in New Zealand, India, Palestine, South Africa, and beyond.

Kamloops Indian Residential School

A haunting image of red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside, with a rainbow in the background, commemorating children who died at a residential school created to assimilate Indigenous children in Canada won the prestigious World Press Photo award on April 7. The image was one of a series of the Kamloops Indian Residential School shot by Canadian photographer Amber Bracken for The New York Times. 
 

It was not the first recognition for Bracken's work in the Amsterdam-based competition. She won first prize in the contest's Contemporary Issues category in 2017 for images of protesters at the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota.
 

Her latest win came less than a week after Pope Francis made a historic apology to Indigenous peoples for the "deplorable" abuses they suffered in Canada's Catholic-run residential schools and begged for forgiveness.
 

Last May, the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Nation announced the discovery of 215 unmarked graves near Kamloops, British Columbia. Established in 1890, it was Canada's largest Indigenous residential school and the discovery of the graves was the first of numerous, similar grim sites across the country.
 

"So we started to have, I suppose, a personification of some of the children that went to these schools that didn't come home," Bracken said in comments released by contest organizers. "There's also these little crosses by the highway. And I knew right away that I wanted to photograph the line of these crosses with these little children's clothes hanging on them to commemorate and to honor those kids and to make them visible in a way that they hadn't been for a long time."

 

Source: World Press Photo

"The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity"

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a landmark new book by British archaeologist David Wengrow and the late anthropologist David Graeber, who was a London-based author, anarchist activist and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. Graeber was the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan, "We are the 99 percent."

The Dawn of Everything offers a dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution -- from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality -- and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. In its early chapters, the book proposes that the European Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries was actually, in great measure, a response to the Indigenous philosophies that Colonists and Imperialists had come into contact with in the New World of North America. Ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy did not exist in Medieval Europe. Ever since then, the Western mind has been moving closer, in these areas, to Native American views. As the authors point out, our ideas about human freedom, democracy, and sexual equality are much closer to that of an Indigenous person of the 16th Century than they are to the European Catholic view.

One of the main propositions that Graeber and Wengrow put forth in The Dawn of Everything is that the ancestors of our prehistory were not simple, ignorant savages, but rather self-conscious, idiosyncratic social organizers, evolving through a "carnival parade of political forms." Today we might use words like anarchist, communist, authoritarian, or egalitarian to describe their activity, but that language fails to represent the sheer quirkiness of the actual case studies: large cities without central authorities or farming (Göbekli Tepe), tribal nations spanning entire continents (Cahokia), and social housing projects (Teotihuacan).

 

Some populations would even alternate their social systems on a seasonal basis. For example, the Plains tribes of North America formed into an organized political community under one government during the seasonal bison hunt. There was a police force and squads of warriors with full coercive powers. If anyone endangered the success of the hunt, they could be punished, imprisoned, or even killed. The people who occupied those enforcement roles rotated from year to year. These coercive institutions did not last beyond the period of the hunting and ritual Sundance season. During the rest of the year, these Plains societies would split off into smaller groups which had entirely different social systems where people would have to resolve disputes through processes of deliberation and debate.

 

For 40,000 years, people have been moving between various forms of equal and unequal social structures, building up hierarchies and then dismantling them. The authors make the case that, rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies were considerably more so. How did we get stuck?

One of the key arguments of the book is its stance against a reductionist view of our current circumstances: its insistence that the first 300,000 years of human history offer a past that is more varied, hopeful and altogether more interesting than what we have interpreted it to be, and that the same might be true of our future. Our species has been creating new ways of living in all the diverse ecosystems on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. We have the freedom to create new and different forms of social reality, so why not exercise it. We have done all this before. We can do it again. The book's optimism, in the face of impending climate doom, political polarization, and social upheaval, is itself a provocation to act.

Remembering AIM Co-Founder Clyde Bellecourt

A few days ago, we lost an icon of our time. Clyde Howard Bellecourt (May 8, 1936 – January 11, 2022) was a Native American civil rights organizer. An Anishinaabe activist from the White Earth Reservation, he co-founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) in Minneapolis in 1968 with Dennis Banks, Eddie Benton-Banai and George Mitchell. For years, Bellecourt worked to address issues of poverty and police brutality against Native people. He remained active throughout his long life, eventually becoming a strong advocate for eliminating offensive sports mascots. His Anishinaabe name, Nee-gon-we-way-we-dun, means "Thunder Before the Storm."

Under Bellecourt's leadership, AIM raised awareness of tribal issues related to the federal government, monitored police harassment in Minneapolis, created welfare programs for urban Indians, and founded Indian "survival schools" in the Twin Cities to teach children life skills and to help them learn their traditional cultures. He initiated the Trail of Broken Treaties, a long march to Washington, D.C., in 1972 to serve as a first step to renegotiating federal-tribal nations' treaties and relations. In addition, he founded non-profit groups to undertake economic development to benefit Native Americans.

He became a negotiator at the occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the site of an infamous 1890 massacre of more than 300 Lakota by the U.S. Cavalry. The Wounded Knee Occupation began on February 27, 1973 when about 200 Oglala Lakota and followers of AIM seized and occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The occupation lasted for a total of 71 days, during which time two Lakota men were shot to death by federal agents and several more were wounded. It was a key moment in the struggle for Native American rights.

In 1993, Bellecourt and others led protests against police brutality in Minneapolis when two intoxicated Native men were driven to the hospital in the trunk of a squad car. Bellecourt continued to direct national and international AIM activities. He coordinated the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and the Media, which has long protested sports teams use of Native American mascots and names, urging them to end such practices; the Washington Redskins finally dropped their mascot in 2020 in response to years of protests. He also led Heart of the Earth, Inc., an interpretive center located behind the site of AIM's former "survival school," which operated from 1972 to 2008 in Minneapolis.

Bellecourt died of cancer on January 11, 2022, at the age of 85. At the time of his death, Bellecourt was the last surviving co-founder of the American Indian Movement. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz stated, "Clyde Bellecourt sparked a movement in Minneapolis that spread worldwide. His fight for justice and fairness leaves behind a powerful legacy that will continue to inspire people across our state and nation for generations to come." According to Minnesota Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan, Bellecourt was a "civil rights leader who fought for more than a half-century on behalf of Indigenous people in Minnesota and around the world. Indian Country benefited from Clyde Bellecourt's activism."

"Things are Looking Native"

Nicholas Galanin is a multi-disciplinary artist and musician of mixed Tlingit/Aleut and non-Native ancestry. His work often explores a dialogue of change and identity between Native and non-Native communities. Born in Sitka, Alaska, Galanin first learned to work with jewelry and light metals, apprenticing with his father. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Design and Silversmithing at London Guildhall University in England, and a Masters of Fine Arts in indigenous visual arts at Massey University in New Zealand. Being trained in both traditional and contemporary approaches in art, he pursues and merges both, exploring the questions of identity, misinterpretation and cultural appropriation.
 

Things are Looking Native, Native's Looking Whiter was the centerpiece of "Unsettled," a 2012 exhibit hosted by the Nevada Museum of Art. It is a digital print that bisects and combines two photographs. On the left is a 1906 Edward S. Curtis image entitled "Tewa Girl," a photograph of an unnamed Hopi-Tewa girl with a traditional "squash blossom" or "butterfly whorl" hairstyle. The right half of the photo-montage depicts Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia from the 1977 film Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope with her classic "cinnamon roll" hair style. Galanin's piece is intended as a commentary on cultural appropriation in popular media, which is largely dominated by white actors and directors.
 

Edward S. Curtis's great body of work, while beautifully executed artistically and doubtlessly valuable, has often been criticized. Curtis presented himself as a scientist as well as the artist, documenting the real Indians of North America in their environment. However, by the time Curtis took his first photograph in the 1890s, the noble savage he presented to the public no longer existed. He has also been known to stage his images to look more Native at the time, for example removing or retouching contemporary items in his photos. Each of the images used for Galanin's art piece represent different aspects of cultural appropriation. One--the desire to depict it in an unchanging, romanticized way as a vanishing race; the other--blatantly reusing a piece of cultural heritage while disposing of all Native elements of it.

Hopi Elder Thomas Banyacya

I had the opportunity to meet Hopi elder and activist Thomas Banyacya in 1990 when he gave a talk at Central Oregon Community College in Bend, Oregon. Thomas Banyacya was one of four Hopis (the others were David Monongye, Dan Evehema and Dan Katchongva) who were named by elders to reveal Hopi traditional wisdom and teachings, including the Hopi prophecies for the future, to the general public after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. He spent half a century on a tireless and often thankless Hopi spiritual mission to save the planet from the ravages of modern materialism and greed. He was so steadfast in his devotion to the pacifism, traditions and sovereignty of the Hopi that he spent seven years in jail rather than register for the draft in World War II.  

 

Banyacya told the attendees that the Native peoples of this land were put here by the Creator with instructions to keep this land clean through prayer, meditation, ceremonies and fasting. They believe there is a spirit in every living thing around us, and a spirit in people that makes us choose what to do and correct ourselves when we err. At the present time, much human effort and mineral resources go towards making weaponry, and so nature is turning against us with extreme weather, volcanoes and big winds. These things, he said, are related to the present behavior of mankind. The Hopi elders warned that the white brother might turn away from spiritual ways and use his inventions destructively. We are in a most dangerous period, and prayer and meditation are needed. 
 

At one point, Banyacya showed a painting of a petroglyph known as Prophecy Rock near the Hopi village of Oraibi, explaining the meaning of certain features. One line leading upwards represented an all out materialistic path with success in inventions that could easily lead to self-destruction. Another line represented an alternative spiritual path with a possibility of cleaning up our mess without annihilation. Banyacya said that someday many nations would come together, we would realize the error of our ways, and people would start creating better feeling and harmony and clean up the mess without starting World War III.
 

Hearing Banyacya's message was truly a blessing and an honor. His strong stance on environmentalism, his service to communities and  nations, and his reverence for the traditions and teachings of his people were an inspiration. His words and passion inspired my own activism in environmentalism, Indigenous rights and the ongoing peace movement. Banyacya passed away in 1999 at the age of 89. His message seems very relevant in this time of global crisis.