Indigenous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Half of this number is believed to be Palestinian children.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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There are more than 500 miles between the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation’s tribal reservation in northeastern Kansas and 1,500 acres of mostly prairie in northern Illinois.

So, Raphael Wahwassuck has come far to visit the site of a long-gone cabin there. Except it’s not an unfamiliar place to him and his kin. Wahwassuck is a member of the Prairie Band’s tribal council and a direct descendant of Chief Shab-eh-nay, for whom the state park is named after.

Most members of the tribe were forced from their homelands of the Great Lakes region into Kansas. They ceded approximately 28 million acres to the United States government, while an 1829 treaty promised Chief Shab-eh-nay 1,280 acres of reservation in Illinois.

Yet when he left in 1849 to visit his relatives in Kansas, the U.S. illegally sold the chief’s land to white settlers.

Over the last 15 years, the tribe has spent $10 million to purchase parts of the original reservation — including 130 acres near Shabbona Lake State Park in what is now DeKalb County, Illinois.

For Wahwassuck, this return is a step toward “correcting some of the historical injustices” his tribe has experienced.

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The governments of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu have announced their commitment to create a massive multinational Melanesian Ocean Reserve. If implemented as envisioned, the reserve would become the world’s first Indigenous-led ocean reserve, covering an area nearly as big as the Amazon Rainforest.

Speaking at the U.N. Ocean Conference underway in Nice, France, representatives of both countries said the vision for the ocean reserve is to cover at least 6 million square kilometers (2.3 million square miles) of ocean and islands. The reserve will include the combined national waters of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, and extend to the protected waters of New Caledonia’s exclusive economic zone. All of the island countries, largely inhabited by Indigenous Melanesians, are located in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, within the region known as Melanesia.

“The Melanesian Ocean Reserve will give the governments and peoples of Melanesia the ability to do much more to protect our ancestral waters from those who extract and exploit without concern for our planet and its living beings. We hope our Indigenous stewardship of this vast reserve will create momentum for similar initiatives all over the world,” Vanuatu’s environment minister, Ralph Regenvanu, said in a joint press release.

Melanesia is one of the world’s most biodiverse regions, hosting an incredible diversity of both land and marine species, including an estimated 75% of known coral species and more than 3,000 species of reef-associated fish.

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If you could walk the ocean floor off the coast of Cape Arago in Oregon in the summer, you’d find yourself in the mysterious green depths of a forest of kelp. Look up, and you’d see sunlight filtering through the fronds waving in the current; look down, and you’d see the plants anchored to an ocean floor covered with life. But if you walked a little bit farther, you’d come to a barren clearing, no sign of kelp or much else — just a carpet of purple sea urchin, a creature that is devouring kelp at an alarming rate.

The disappearance of kelp forests is widely felt here; gray whales have changed their foraging patterns, and the red abalone fishery in Northern California closed after swarms of urchins and warming waters destroyed more than 90% of the kelp forests there. In Oregon, a 2024 study by the Oregon Kelp Alliance found that over a 12-year period, the kelp forest off the coast declined by up to 73%, primarily due to an out-of-control population of purple sea urchins, which graze on the kelp. This system is out of balance largely owing to the absence of a keystone species: xvlh-t’vsh, which means “sea otter” in the Athabaskan language of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. For more than 20 years, the Siletz Tribe has been working to reintroduce sea otters.

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Product of decades-long process aims to restore Heiltsuk’s system of coherent governance destroyed by colonial powers

When outsiders arrived in the lands of the Heiltsuk people, they brought with them a rapacious appetite for the region’s trees, fish and minerals. Settlers and the government soon followed, claiming ownership of the thick cedar forests, the fjords and the abundance of life. Heiltsuk elders were confused. “If these are truly your lands,” they asked, “where are your stories?”

For the Heiltsuk, stories explain everything from the shape of a local mountain to the distinct red fur fringes on the sea wolves stalking shores. They tell of the flesh-eating monster baxbakwa’lanuxusiwe, whose entire body was covered with snapping mouths before it was destroyed by a shaman and became a cloud of mosquitoes.

Passed down over generations, in ceremonies forbidden by Canada’s government, the stories weave together the physical world, the supernatural and the liminal space that binds the two.

Such stories are also the bedrock of the Heiltsuk’s newly created constitution, a document recently ratified through ceremony that asserts the nation’s long-held convictions that they are the original inhabitants and rightful stewards of the region’s future.

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When Jaike SpottedWolf saw empty lots on Tillman Street she envisioned a sacred space for Detroit’s Indigenous community — a powwow ground, smokehouse, garden, church, and gathering place. The Thečhíȟila Collective, which she co-founded to support community needs, hoped to buy the land for its listed price of $7,000.

“Making sure there’s a space for native youth, native elders for them all to come together if they want, that isn’t gatekept. That doesn’t exist for us in the city,” she said of the approximately 30,000 Native people living in metro Detroit.

But months after the group expressed interest in 4751 Tillman, the Detroit Land Bank Authority raised the price of the parcel, which included seven lots, by nearly 2,000% to $136,500 — putting it far beyond the collective’s budget and raising questions about how land is valued and who gets access to it in a city with deep histories of displacement.

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The passage of the sweeping legislation is sure to inflame already-fraught tensions with First Nations. One of the most contested aspects is its creation of “special economic zones,” where the government can establish a zone, and then exempt certain companies or projects inside it from having to comply with certain provincial laws or regulations, or municipal bylaws. It also slashes several of Ontario’s endangered species protections and shelters the government from some lawsuits.

But that was only one controversial moment, in a week stuffed full of ’em.

The Doug Ford government also moved forward legislation that blocks municipal green building standards meant to reduce emissions from construction, heating and air conditioning — a particularly stunning about-face after defending the efforts of cities to fight climate change by implementing higher standards just a few years ago.

Government officials tabled another bill promising to prioritize data centres and order the electricity regulator and operator to focus on economic growth. And they tabled a third bill the government advertised as part of an attempt to “streamline” mine tailings facilities.

Oh, and the budget, which cuts Ontario’s emergency preparedness funds, bans congestion pricing and continues the premier’s fixation with cracking down on bike lanes, also passed.

Here’s what happened over a big week at Queen’s Park.

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• The Banggai archipelago is a remote landscape of around 97% limestone karst east of Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island.
• Extractive concessions on 39 locations on Peleng island, the largest island in the Banggai Islands district, may soon cut into the karst bedrock to mine the ancient limestone for cement, glass and other industrial applications.
• Indigenous villagers on Peleng Island say they worry the development could catalyze unprecedented local environmental damage, impairing the cultivation of unique yam varieties grown only here.

Deslin is known as the Ibu Kampung — “village mother” — of the Tolobuono Komba-komba Indigenous community here in the center of Peleng, one of a cluster of karst islands just east of the much larger Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

That honorific reflects Deslin’s advocacy against plans to quarry the limestone that surrounds Komba-komba village, and that makes up around 97% of the rest of the island chain, known as the Banggai Islands.

Karst systems like the Banggai Islands are landscapes of soluble bedrock riddled with caves and underground rivers formed by erosion from acidic water over millions of years. Around 15% of the world’s land surface is karst, or carbonate rocks, the most common of which are dolostone and limestone.

Indonesia accounts for around 155,000 square kilometers (60,000 square miles) of karst landscapes. Almost a tenth of this area has experienced degrees of environmental damage, mainly due to mining, according to Gadjah Mada University karst expert Eko Haryono.

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On 30 April, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun told Sky News Arabia that Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas had raised the issue of disarming Palestinian factions in Lebanon’s refugee camps at the emergency Arab Summit in Cairo in early March.

It was a remarkable revelation. The emergency summit’s goal was the reconstruction of Gaza. But Abbas had other priorities. Both before and in the weeks since the Arab summit, Abbas has criticized the armed resistance by Palestinian factions on several occasions, especially by Hamas, notably demanding that what he called the “sons of dogs” release the remaining Israeli captives in Gaza.

For decades, the Lebanese authorities have treated the Palestinian camps in Lebanon as armed hotbeds that could explode at any moment and have ignored Palestinian refugees’ human rights.

Instead of transcending this narrow approach, Abbas’ ​​visit reduced the Palestinian presence in Lebanon to only a security matter.

Why, and why now?

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More than 17,000 acres around the Klamath River in Northern California, including the lower Blue Creek watershed, have returned to the Yurok Tribe, completing the largest landback deal in California history.

The Yurok people have lived, fished, and hunted along the Klamath for millennia. But when the California gold rush began, the tribe lost 90 percent of its territory.

For the last two decades, the Yurok Tribe has been working with the nonprofit Western Rivers Conservancy to get its land back. The 17,000 acres composes the final parcel of a $56 million, 47,097-acre land transfer that effectively doubles the current land holdings of the Yurok Tribe.

The tribe has already designated the land as a salmon sanctuary and community forest and plans to eventually put it into a trust and care for it in perpetuity.

“No words can describe how we feel knowing that our land is coming back to the ownership of the Yurok people,” said Joseph James, the chairman of the Yurok Tribal Council, who is from the village of Shregon on the Klamath River. “The Klamath River is our highway. It is also our food source. And it takes care of us. And so it’s our job, our inherent right, to take care of the Klamath Basin and its river.”

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The Israeli military is arming gangs to combat Hamas in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed on Thursday. The revelation comes to light after right-wing Israeli lawmaker Avigdor Lieberman accused Netanyahu on Israeli public broadcaster Kan yesterday of arming a gang of hundreds of men in Rafah as a counterweight to Hamas influence in the Strip. The Prime Minister’s office responded by saying that it was combating the Palestinian resistance group “in various ways, on the recommendation of all heads of the security establishment.”

Later, Netanyahu officially confirmed the reports in a video posted on X. “On the advice of security officials, we activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas,” the Israeli Prime Minister said. “What’s wrong with that? It only saves the lives of Israeli soldiers.”

Among these groups is an armed gang led by a man named Yasser Abu Shabab, a thief and drug trafficker from Rafah who led groups of hundreds of armed men in looting aid convoys during the latter half of 2024. Descended from the influential Bedouin Tarabin clan, which spans southern Gaza, the Sinai, and the Naqab Desert, Abu Shabab has been described by Israeli media outlets as “linked to ISIS,” likely due to Abu Shabab’s involvement in drug trafficking networks between Gaza and the Sinai in which ISIS has been implicated.

This policy comes in the wake of a systematic Israeli campaign of assassinating the Hamas government’s civil servants to cause social collapse in Gaza and foment chaos and lawlessness in the Strip. The Israeli army has been deliberately targeting Interior Ministry bureaucrats, the police force, and the security services to create a vacuum that is then filled by armed looters like Abu Shabab’s group, as recently reported by Mondoweiss.

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With its cold climate, short growing season, and dense forests, Michigan's Upper Peninsula is known as a challenging place for farming. But a new Dartmouth-led study provides evidence of intensive farming by ancestral Native Americans at the Sixty Islands archaeological site along the Menominee River, making it the most complete ancient agricultural site in the eastern half of the United States.

The site features a raised ridge field system that dates to around the 10th century to 1600, and much of it is still intact today.

The raised fields are comprised of clustered ridged garden beds that range from 4 to 12 inches in height and were used to grow corn, beans, squash, and other plants by ancestors of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin.

The findings are published in Science.

"The scale of this agricultural system by ancestral Menominee communities is 10 times larger than what was previously estimated," says lead author Madeleine McLeester, an assistant professor of anthropology at Dartmouth. "That forces us to reconsider a number of preconceived ideas we have about agriculture not only in the region, but globally."

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The Israeli government’s decision last Thursday to create 22 new settlements in the West Bank was reported as regular news in most mainstream media. Although it received official condemnations from the UK, Finland, and some Arab states, the decision passed with absolutely no practical consequence for Israel, despite European threats to impose sanctions.

On the other hand, within Israeli politics, the decision was regarded as far from ordinary and received with widespread fanfare. The Israeli Defense Ministry called the decision “historic,” while the Defense Minister, Israel Katz, said that the decision “reinforces Israel’s control over Judea and Samaria,” Israel’s term for the occupied West Bank.” Israel’s hardline Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, celebrated the move as “a great day for the settlement movement and an important day for the State of Israel.”

The geographical distribution of this planned network of settlements, some of it already in existence, will ensure Israel’s grip on the West Bank is all-encompassing. The sprawling web includes four settlements in the Ramallah area in the central West Bank, four in Jenin in the north, four more in Hebron in the south, two in Nablus in the center-north, one in Salfit in the northeast, three in Jericho in the southern Jordan Valley, three more across the Jordan Valley itself, and one in East Jerusalem.

In short, it is annexation in all but name.

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As images of burned children, starving families, and bombed hospitals in Gaza become the constant soundtrack of daily life, the Palestinian communities that survived the Nakba and stayed in the lands that were occupied by Israel in 1948 (hence called “’48 Palestinians”), are filled with anger, frustration, and a sense of hollowness and disempowerment. Against the general paralysis, Umm al-Fahm, the main Palestinian city in “the Northern Triangle region,” stands out.

Palestinian activists in the town, united around the local “popular committee,” keep trying to break the barriers of repression and fear that have taken hold in their community since October 7. The last attempt was on Saturday, May 24.

The popular committee in Umm al-Fahm called for a national demonstration backed by the Higher Follow-Up Committee of the Arab Public — the united leadership of ’48 Palestinian communities — alongside the Committee for Solidarity with the Administrative Detainee Raja Eghbarieh.

The invitation for the demonstration came under three slogans: “We stand with our people! No to ethnic cleansing and genocide! Freedom to the teacher Raja and all other detainees!”

Even as the demonstration was licensed, the police did not let it end peacefully. As we gathered in Dawar al-‘Uyun, plainclothed “detectives” started to attack demonstrators and tear down some banners that they did not like. I noticed specifically that they objected to such banners as “No to Genocide” and “No to Ethnic Cleansing.”

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