This archive tracks meaningful progress on Indigenous rights, sovereignty, and community well-being across the U.S. and around the world. The 138 articles here cover land rights victories, cultural preservation efforts, health equity gains, and policy wins won by Indigenous communities and their advocates. Each story centers the people driving change.
Sweat lodge ceremonies were already deeply rooted across Indigenous North America by 800 C.E., practiced from the Arctic to the southern plains. Inside a dome of bent saplings, heated stones called “grandfathers” turned poured water into steam, carrying prayer and song through four increasingly intense rounds. It remains one of the continent’s oldest continuously practiced healing traditions.
DMT plant medicine in South America goes back at least 4,000 years, with pipes from northwest Argentina dated to around 2130 B.C.E. testing positive for DMT residue. Ayahuasca itself appears far more recent, with no firm evidence before the 18th century. What endures is a living tradition of plant knowledge, still evolving today.
The Bering Land Bridge carried the first people into the Americas sometime between 20,000 and 13,000 years ago, across a grassy plain nearly 1,000 miles wide. Genetic evidence traces hundreds of Indigenous nations back to those travelers, who reached the tip of South America within a few thousand years — one of the fastest continental migrations in the human record.
