This archive covers documented progress on Indigenous rights, sovereignty, land protection, cultural preservation, and community health. Stories here highlight policy wins, legal milestones, and Indigenous-led initiatives that are improving lives and strengthening self-determination around the world.
At Standing Rock in December 2016, thousands of water protectors camped on the North Dakota plains erupted in cheers when the U.S. Army Corps denied the easement to drill the Dakota Access Pipeline under Lake Oahe. The pause proved temporary, but the movement brought tribal treaty rights and the phrase “water is life” into wider American conversation.
The Great Bear Rainforest agreement, signed in February 2016, protected 85% of old-growth trees across 6.4 million hectares of British Columbia’s coast — a temperate rainforest roughly the size of Ireland. Reached after nearly 20 years of negotiation, it placed 26 First Nations at the center as co-managers, embedding Indigenous authority into conservation law.
Yasuní National Park was established in 1979, when Ecuador drew a boundary around roughly 10,000 square kilometers of Amazonian rainforest where the equator, Andes, and Amazon converge. A single hectare there holds more insect species than all of North America. The park remains home to the Huaorani and two uncontacted peoples who have lived there for generations.
Indigenous protection in Brazil took its first formal shape on June 20, 1910, when the government created the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios, the Americas’ first federal agency tasked with shielding Indigenous peoples from settler violence. Its leader, Cândido Rondon, instructed agents entering uncontacted territory unarmed: “Die if you must, but never kill.”
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.
