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.
The fund – to which countries have pledged more than $10 billion – adopted a landmark policy to protect indigenous people who often live in or near forests, where the fund plans to back conservation projects.
The smiling red-faced logo which has for years been criticized as racist by the Native American community and others will be removed from the team’s jersey sleeves and caps starting in the 2019 season, the MLB announced Monday.
Over the objections of Italian American civic groups, the council made the second Monday in October a day in L.A. to commemorate “indigenous, aboriginal and native people.”
A federal judge ruled that the federal permits authorizing the pipeline to cross the Missouri River just upstream of the Standing Rock reservation, which were hastily issued by the Trump administration just days after the inauguration, violated the law in certain critical respects.
The board approved a resolution introduced by Supervisor Sandra Lee Fewer urging City Treasurer Jose Cisneros to add the Dakota Access Pipeline to the list of screening factors he considers when making city investment decisions.
The Navajo Nation is making moves to join a growing number of tribes that have already respectfully, but conclusively, shown Wells Fargo the door.
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.”
