The Shinnecock Hills Golf Club on Long Island earns millions when it hosts the U.S. Open. But the nearby Indian tribe has for years only received a fraction of that.

Nick Tilsen, founder of NDN Collective, spent nearly four years fighting felony charges that he says were politically motivated.

The reservation schools might be "officially" shut down, but the colonizers keep showing how they think of Natives as less than human.

This is at the stage of proposed legislation. Far from a done deal yet

cross-posted from: https://thelemmy.club/post/49015592

Where I live, I have to have this conversation way too often with people.

Bound by a common threat, unlikely allies of tribes, commercial fishermen and the conservation community came together to stop a gold and copper mine, and won.

The Trump administration is evicting bison herds from federal grasslands in Montana, siding with ranchers and Republican leaders over environmentalists and tribal leaders.

Tidal marshes are crucial nurseries for young Chinook salmon and a focal point for efforts to bring these fish back from the brink of extinction. The Stillaguamish Tribe has been buying riverfront land in its traditional territory and removing levees to turn farmland into wetland with the hope of restoring Chinook.

Nine Native American tribes have filed a lawsuit against the US Forest Service over its approval of a graphite drilling project near Pe’ Sla, a site in the Black Hills that holds cultural and spiritual significance for Native Americans.

The Oglala Sioux Tribe, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, Santee Sioux Tribe, Sisseton-Whapeton Oyate, Spirit Lake Sioux Tribe, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and Yankton Sioux Tribe — also known as the Oceti Sakowin, or Seven Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation — are all plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit challenges the decision to allow Rapid City-based Pete Lien and Sons to allow exploratory drilling for a potential graphite mine. Graphite is used in electric vehicle batteries, lubricants, pencils and other products.

The drilling is planned near Pe’ Sla, also known as Reynolds Prairie, which is owned and used by the tribes for prayer, ceremony and cultural activities.

The lawsuit says the US Forest Service improperly used a process known as a “categorical exclusion” to bypass environmental and cultural reviews. The tribes never ceded the land in the Black Hills to the United States, Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out said in a press release.

“The Black Hills remain the spiritual center of the Great Sioux Nation, and they are not for sale, lease, or exploitation by energy companies,” Star Comes Out said. “This lawsuit represents a united tribal response to protect a sacred site from those who continue to desecrate our ancestral lands.”

The tribes argue the drilling activities “will harm the land and natural and cultural resources in the Black Hills,” and will especially harm Pe’ Sla by “disrupting and interfering with sacred ceremonies and practice there,” according to the press release.

The lawsuit alleges a categorical exclusion was improper because the project includes drilling, road work and other activity near Pe’ Sla, which goes beyond what a categorical exclusion allows. The plaintiffs also argue that Pe’ Sla’s religious and cultural importance should have triggered a fuller review, rather than the abbreviated process.

Archived copies of the article:

• ghostarchive.org
• archive.today — has a history of modifying archived pages

On most browsers (not Safari) you can put a '.' after '.com' and before the '/' to skip the paywall as well.

The vision of Lucille Contreras (Lipan Apache), CEO & founder of the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project, is to revive and reconnect all the tribes of Texas through a regenerative herd of American bison, or Iyane’e. Contreras learned to care for bison on the Pine Ridge reservation, then purchased 77 acres in rural Gonzalez County, Texas, in 2020 with a new farmer-rancher loan from the USDA. The herd of 34 bison has grown from the initial eight acquired in 2021.

The “Land Back” movement seeks to restore a people to sacred stewardship of their ancestral lands, and successes like the one in Texas are happening across the country. The work of the NDN Collective, a South Dakota-based international Indigenous organization, is just another example.

Nick Tilsen (Oglala Lakota), the founder of NDN Collective, explains that a Land Back ethic doesn’t mean going back in time, but moving forward with all people to create a just and equitable world.

Contreras and Tilsen have found common cause as members of the Black Liberation-Indigenous Sovereignty Collective, co-founded by Trevor Smith (a Black man) and Savannah Romero (an Indigenous woman and citizen of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe). According to Romero, most Land Back successes in their member organizations are in rural areas of Indian Country or near reservation communities.

The BLIS Collective serves as a hub to connect leaders in the Land Back movement with those seeking reparations, or healing and restoration, for African American people injured because of their group identity. By promoting a braided narrative of justice for both Black and Indigenous people, BLIS includes dozens of member organizations who work to articulate the intrinsic tie between Land Back and reparations.

The Bad River Band is fighting to stop Line 5 and protect its watershed. Meanwhile, local sheriffs are already tallying the cost of riot gear.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34794729

Undaunted, the activists in Santarém took on one of the US powerhouses of world trade. Cargill generates revenues of more than $160bn (£119bn) a year, employs 155,000 people and accounts for more than 70% of the soy and maize shipped through Santarém.

[...]

This interrupted one of the focal points of the global food trade because the Cargill facility in Santarém is a primary hub between the nation with the biggest farms – Brazil – and the country with the most numerous dining tables – China, which is the destination for most of the soy.

...which is fed to enslaved animals which the humans in China then eat.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34794706

Santarém, Pará, Brazil – On Monday, February 23, Brazil’s government announced the revocation of Decree 12,600/2025, which opened the door to the privatizing the Tapajós, Madeira, and Tocantins rivers for industrial waterways in the Amazon. The government confirmed the decision following a meeting in Brasília between Indigenous leaders Sônia Guajajara, Brazil’s Minister of Indigenous Peoples, and Guilherme Boulos, Minister of the Presidency’s General Secretariat. The announcement came amid an Indigenous occupation of Cargill’s port in Santarém, Pará State, and in the wake of growing national and international solidarity and extensive news coverage of the mobilization.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34757533

• Indigenous communities in Indonesian Papua have filed an administrative objection against forestry ministry decrees that reclassify more than a million acres as nonforest land, clearing the way for oil palm development under the government’s food estate program.
• The rezoning last September was carried out without the communities’ knowledge or consent, and the affected areas include swaths of forest that they have proposed as customary forests.
• The communities only learned of the decision months later, after NGOs obtained the decree. If the ministry fails to respond to their objection, they plan to sue in the State Administrative Court.
• The expansion aligns with the government’s drive to boost food and biofuel production, but Indigenous rights advocates warn the plan could cost communities their forests, livelihoods and cultural ties to the land.