"Once the Declaration of Independence is issued by Congress, then it kind of changes the calculus. Then, both sides are putting pressure on Native people to join one side or the other."
"Today, our Board took decisive action to protect what generations before us fought to build. These so-called prediction markets are an attempt to bypass tribal authority and recast gambling as a financial product. We will not allow that. We will stand united to defend tribal sovereignty and the integrity of Indian gaming."
When California became a state in 1850, officials signed 18 treaties setting aside millions of acres for tribal reservations. Congress killed the deals in secret after pressure from state leaders. Many tribes had already moved, trusting the promises. Now California wants to make good.
These polymetallic nodules, as they're known, take millions of years to form, slowly accumulating metals like nickel, cobalt and manganese. That's made them a target for mining companies, looking to feed the world's growing hunger for materials that go into advanced batteries and other technologies.
The case is one of the most notorious examples of British involvement in illegal enslavement in Brazil, said historian Joseph Mulhern and a stark symbol of how, even after the UK Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, British citizens and companies profited from slavery in Latin America's biggest country for another half century.
Financial strangulation, as he put it, is the latest weapon in the government's escalating effort to clear the way for expanded mining and oil development in one of the world's most biodiverse countries. Months earlier, officials had temporarily frozen the accounts of several of Ecuador's most prominent environmental defenders, including Tapia, citing investigations into unjust private enrichment and financing terrorism.
The idea that hiking trails are a tool for conservation is based on a simple premise: people protect what they know. That requires making conservation areas accessible. There's no point telling people you only protect what you know, if you don't give them the tools to know. The trail is this tool. People who hike, people who camp, these people often become defenders of the environment.
The river won, the forest won, the memory of our ancestors won, said the campaigners in Santarem when it was clear their actions had forced the Brazilian government into a U-turn on plans to privatise one of the world's most beautiful waterways and expand its role as a soy canal.
To say press freedoms in the U.S. have taken a knock during the first year of Donald Trump's second term would be a gross understatement. Perhaps the most glaring example is the Department of Defense's new policy requiring journalists covering the Pentagon to sign a pledge promising not to use any information that hasn't been explicitly authorized. But the Trump administration's attacks on a free press have also included other tactics, like the effort to dismantle Freedom of Information Act processes across federal departments.
Global warming is thawing the Arctic and igniting a high-stakes race for the riches beneath its ice. Global warming is heating up the Arctic, and global powers like the United States, Russia and China are manoeuvring to stake a claim to the resources under its melting ice. Some experts say the region, once known as an exception an island of international cooperation in the midst of geopolitical struggles is becoming the site of a second cold war.
Natives have been told our whole lives - in classrooms, through academic research and in popular myth - that humans first migrated into North America around 12,000 years ago. Native histories consistently disagree, however, asserting that humans were here much earlier than that. Using the phrase time immemorial is a way to push back; it succinctly communicates longevity without quibbling over exact numbers and dates.
A moratorium that has protected vital rainforest since 2009 is on shaky ground as several players from Brazil's soy industry say they are pulling out. Specifically, the Brazilian industry association ABIOVE, whose members include global companies such as Cofco International, Bunge, Amaggi and JBS, have said they will no longer refrain from growing soy on deforested land. Environmentalists fear this could fuel a new wave of Amazon logging.
Police and prosecutors from Brazil, French Guiana, Guyana and Suriname have arrested nearly 200 people in their first joint cross-border operation targeting illegal gold mining in the Amazon region, authorities said. The operation was backed by Interpol, the EU and Dutch police specialising in environmental crime. It involved more than 24,500 checks on vehicles and people across remote border areas and led to the seizure of cash, unprocessed gold, mercury, firearms, drugs and mining equipment, Interpol said.
The Klamath Indigenous Land Trust recently purchased 10,000 acres along the Klamath River, signifying one of the largest Indigenous-led private land purchases in U.S. history as salmon continue to make their historic return to the newly revived watershed. The expansive property, located mostly in California and extending into Oregon, includes the sites of reservoirs that existed up until the removal of four of the Klamath's dams in 2023 and 2024.
