The Innu Council of Uashat mak Mani-Utenam (ITUM) and its Chief Jonathan Shetush—on his 100th day in office—announced the establishment of a protected area running the full length of the Moisie River in eastern Quebec.

The project is called the Innu Protected Area of ​​the Mishta-shipu (Moisie River) Watershed.

André Michel, director of ITUM’s Office for the Protection of Rights and Territory, said the Moisie, known in Innu-aimun as “Mishta-shipu,” or “The Great River,” is central to the lives of the community.

“The entire history of the Innus of Uashat mak Mani-utenam is based on this river,” Michel told APTN News. “Our ancestors were nomads who spent 10 months of the year inland. This was the main route of penetration that led inland, where they spent the whole winter searching for caribou.”

“The projects we submitted for protection may not be accepted in their entirety,” Michel said. “But as a government, even if the Quebec government does not agree with the protected area projects, we, as Innu, will protect them and recognize them as Indigenous protected areas. If there is development in that territory, whether it be forestry, hydroelectric, or mining, we will oppose all projects in that protected area.”

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KIRUNA, Sweden -- High atop the Luossavaara Mountain in northern Sweden, Sami reindeer herder Lars-Marcus Kuhmunen mapped out a bleak future for himself and other Indigenous people whose reindeer have roamed this land for thousands of years.

An expanding iron-ore mine and a deposit of rare-earth minerals are fragmenting the land and altering ancient reindeer migration routes. But with the Arctic warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, herders say they need more geographic flexibility, not less, to ensure the animals' survival.

If a mine is established at the deposit of rare-earth minerals called Per Geijer, which Sweden heralds as Europe’s largest, Kuhmunen said it could completely cut off the migration routes used by the Sami village of Gabna.

That would be the end of the Indigenous way of life for Kuhmunen, his children and their fellow Sami reindeer herders, he said, in this far-north corner of Sweden some 200 kilometers (124 miles) above the Arctic Circle.

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A conservative mainland group whose lawsuit against Harvard University ended affirmative action in college admissions is now building support in Hawaiʻi to take on Kamehameha Schools’ policies that give preference to Native Hawaiian students.

Students for Fair Admissions, based in Virginia, recently launched the website KamehamehaNotFair.org. It says that the admission preference “is so strong that it is essentially impossible for a non-Native Hawaiian student to be admitted to Kamehameha.”

Kamehameha’s Board of Trustees and CEO Jack Wong said in a written statement that the school expected the policy would be challenged. The institution — a private school established through the estate of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop to educate Hawaiians — successfully defended its admission policy in a series of lawsuits in the early 2000s. The trustees and Wong promised to do so again.

“We are confident that our policy aligns with established law, and we will prevail,” the statement said.

The campaign also drew criticism from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, established in the late 1970s for the betterment of Native Hawaiians. OHA’s Board of Trustees called it an “attack on the right of Native Hawaiians to care for our own, on our own terms.”

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The Trump administration’s efforts to reshape federal cultural institutions as part of a broader attack on what the president characterizes as “woke” or diversity, equity, and inclusion policies have left many Indigenous arts and culture institutions in a challenging position, according to leaders at those institutions as well as culture workers and advocates who spoke to Truthout.

Institutions offering Indigenous arts and culture programming, as well as those centering the histories and culture of other communities of color, are at disproportionate risk of being defunded and further marginalized under the administration’s policies. Faced with sweeping cuts to federal agencies that have historically supported cultural programming nationwide, these institutions are dipping into reserves, building new partnerships, turning to their communities for donations, and receiving added support from philanthropic organizations.

“At one level or another, we’re all impacted by this,” Estevan Rael-Galvez, executive director of Native Bound Unbound, told Truthout of his organization’s work and others in the field. Native Bound Unbound is a digital humanities project archiving histories of Indigenous slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Still, Rael-Galvez told Truthout, the Trump administration’s attack on cultural heritage programs “puts all the more fire in my belly to work towards recovering these histories.”

The Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums (ATALM) called the proposed elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) a threat to the future of Indigenous archives, libraries, museums, cultural centers, historic preservation offices, and language programs in the U.S. in April 2025.

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At Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, Manal Zaqout accompanies her 6-year-old daughter, Aya, for treatment. Aya had been moved to the hospital from the al-Mawasi areas east of Khan Younis after a continuous cough, fever, and fatigue that refused to resolve itself. The child was diagnosed with the flu, but the symptoms were far more severe than regular influenza.

On Sunday, the Gaza Government Media Office said that a “new strain” of the virus is spreading across Gaza amid a severe shortage in medicines due to Israel’s blockade of humanitarian assistance to the Strip.

“The rapid spread is attributed to extreme overcrowding, lack of water and ventilation, and the deterioration of healthcare services due to the war, in addition to restrictions imposed by the occupation,” the Government Media Office said in the statement.

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It’s meant to recognize the common experience shared by Japanese Americans and Indigenous communities who faced forced removal and oppression by the United States.

United Tribes Technical College on Sept. 5 will hold a dedication ceremony for a new monument honoring the memory of Japanese Americans who were imprisoned there during World War II.

During the war, the U.S. government incarcerated more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent. Some were held in military posts like Fort Lincoln, which would later be converted into United Tribes Technical College in the late 1960s.

Almost 2,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned at Fort Lincoln beginning during the 1940s.

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Fleeing its notorious record and mounting international legal scrutiny, Blackwater, the world's most infamous private military company, found safe harbor in the Persian Gulf. There, the UAE opened its coffers, welcoming the mercenary firm with open arms. A new empire was forged on a brutal foundation: safeguarding monarchies and executing foreign agendas in exchange for cash, immunity, and impunity.

In 2009, Blackwater rebranded as Xe Services LLC after a string of war crimes in Iraq, notably the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad two years earlier. The cosmetic change masked a continuity of purpose, which is circumventing international law and orchestrating illicit operations from the shadows.

Founder Erik Prince officially stepped down but relocated to the UAE in 2010, where he launched Reflex Responses (also known as R2) and retained a 51 percent stake, ushering in a new era of industrial-scale mercenary recruitment.

By 2011, the outlines of a covert UAE mercenary army had emerged, tasked with exerting influence across West Asia and Africa. This was no accident as Blackwater played a central role, with then-Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ) serving as one of its chief patrons.

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Time is running out for wild salmon in the Columbia River Basin in the Pacific Northwest. Their populations, as well as those of some other native fish, have been declining for decades. Now, President Donald Trump is attacking the progress that had been made to restore those once-abundant salmon runs.

In June 2025, Trump signed a memorandum signaling his administration’s unwillingness to consider dam removal on the lower Snake River, a tributary of the Columbia River, and reneging on a landmark agreement that would have provided more than a billion dollars over the next decade to Pacific Northwest tribes for renewable energy projects and salmon recovery.

The federal government entered into the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement under the Biden administration in December 2023 after two years of negotiations. Other parties to the agreement include environmental advocates; Oregon; Washington; and the Umatilla, Nez Perce, Warm Springs, and Yakama tribes. Those tribes entered into treaties with the U.S. government in the mid-1850s, ceding land but maintaining a perpetual right to their fishing grounds in the Columbia River Basin. The government has failed to ensure the tribal fishing rights it promised to protect in those treaties.

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As hundreds of Druze civilians were being massacred in Suwayda in July, a portrait of one of the youngest victims began to circulate widely online: a girl with flowing dark hair and a violin in her hands.

Her name was Ghina Mazen Helal. She was 14 years old.

The Cradle spoke with Ghina’s relatives and friends to investigate the circumstances of her death. Their accounts point to a chilling conclusion: Ghina was deliberately shot by a sniper from Syria’s General Security forces as she tried to escape the besieged city with other women and children. Her uncle and cousin were also killed during the same events.

Contrary to claims by Syrian President and former Al-Qaeda commander, Ahmad al-Sharaa (Abu Mohammad al-Julani), that security forces were deployed to protect civilians, these testimonies and video evidence suggest the opposite: that Sharaa's forces carried out a calculated campaign of mass killing against the Druze population of Suwayda.

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On Aug. 25, The National Boarding School Healing Coalition’s (NABS) made its 14th stop on a 20-stop national tour in downtown Portland, becoming a place of remembrance and community. Children ran around the decorated banquet tables of the Hilton Embassy Suites, as elders joined together in conversation, laughter and prayer as a hand drum echoed through the second-level hallways.

“Our goal is to provide a safe space for survivors to share their story,” said NABS’ co-director Lacey Kinnart. “It’s to give them this opportunity to speak their truth and record it because a lot of times they’re sharing something for the very first time.”

Last November, NABS made a tour stop in Hilo, Hawaii, to interview Native Hawaiian attendees of boarding schools. Kinnart, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, said the language used to describe boarding schools in Hawaii is different than in the U.S. and Canada, with students referred to as “attendees” and their schools referred to as “reformatories” and “seminaries,” but the horrors remained the same.

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On Wednesday morning, on the Rosebud Reservation of South Dakota, two cousins named Karen and Phil Little Thunder addressed the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Council to announce an unprecedented return of dozens of cherished belongings.

It was 170 years since a village led by the Little Thunders’ great-great-grandfather was massacred by the U.S. Army, leaving 86 Lakota dead, many of them women and children. As I wrote in a November 2024 feature story for Smithsonian, the episode, which occurred 35 years before the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee, remains little known even today. I also reported how, while the village lay smoldering, Army Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren, a noncombatant topographer attached to the force, collected dozens of Lakota belongings. Warren soon donated the belongings to the Smithsonian, then barely a decade old, where they remained primarily in storage ever since.

Now, after a long and seemingly quixotic quest led by the Little Thunder cousins and several associates, including Paul Soderman, a relative of William S. Harney, the Army brigadier general who orchestrated the massacre, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has returned the Lakota belongings under a policy designed to address unethical museum collecting practices from the past. A few days before the tribal council, Phil Little Thunder told me he planned to announce that “the people are bringing the ancestors’ belongings back to where they left this earth.”

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Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory Grand Chief Cody Diabo had a simple message for Quebec Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette: First Nations are not subordinate to the province of Quebec, and will not be included in any provincial constitution.

“There is no Quebec nation,” Diabo told APTN News. “[Jolin-Barrette is] a Canadian at the end of the day. They’re not separate from Canada. This whole push to want to try to separate, if that’s what they want to try to do, by all means, but you’re not leaving with Mohawk land. You don’t have jurisdiction over us.”

Diabo traveled to Quebec City Wednesday, to meet with Jolin-Barrette and discuss the provincial government’s plan for a Quebec constitution. He was accompanied by Kahnawà:ke Chief Political Advisor Lloyd Phillips, as well as by Regional Chief Francis Verrault-Paul of the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador.

The push for Quebec to develop its own constitution is the product of the Report of the Advisory Committee on Quebec’s Constitutional Issues within the Canadian Federation, also known as the Proux-Rousseau Report. That document was tabled in late November of 2024 and encouraged the adoption of a constitution as a means for Quebec to establish its autonomy inside Canada.

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Israel just decimated the olive groves of the Palestinian village of Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah, where olive oil production is an important part of the yearly income of most families. The Israeli army had imposed a curfew on the village last Thursday and began to search homes, arresting an unspecified number of Palestinians, including the village mayor, Ameen Abu Alia, over the course of three days. The siege on al-Mughayyir came following reports that an Israeli settler had been attacked near the village, after which the Israeli army’s bulldozers uprooted some 10,000 olive trees in the eastern plain of the village, according to the local farmers’ association. Some of the trees were up to 100 years old.

The Israeli army said that the curfew and destruction of the village’s farmland were aimed at capturing the attacker, but Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz quoted the Israeli army’s central command chief saying that “uprooting the trees was intended to deter everyone. Not just this village, but any village that tries to raise a hand against the [Israeli settler] residents.” The Israeli commander reportedly said that “every village should know that if they commit an attack, they will pay a heavy price and will be under curfew and surrounded.”

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In Argentina’s Patagonia region, Indigenous Mapuche communities are clashing with President Javier Milei’s government over rights to their ancestral lands. Facing a deep financial crisis, Milei sees Argentina’s vast natural resources—minerals, oil, timber—as central to economic recovery. But the Mapuche, among the country’s strongest voices fighting for environmental protection, are being evicted from land they’ve lived on for over 14,000 years. On GZERO Reports, Will Fitzpatrick travels to Patagonia to interview Mapuche community members about the legal fight they say threatens Argentina’s unique biodiversity and indigenous culture, as well as their survival.

Land disputes between the Mapuche and the Argentinian state have existed for decades, but after the Milei government revoked a key law that protected Indigenous territories at the end of 2024, officials began an aggressive eviction campaign. Recent raids and accusations of arson have escalated tensions, and many Mapuche fear state power is now being wielded to push them off resource rich territory.

Earlier this month, the Israeli army confirmed its plans to occupy Gaza City, with the invasion reportedly set to start on October 7. But on the ground, the invasion has already started.

On August 10, the Israeli army began invading the eastern parts of Gaza City, with Israeli ground forces moving into one of the city’s largest neighborhoods, al-Zaytoun. The neighborhood borders the Netzarim corridor to the south.

Locals from the Zaytoun neighborhood told Mondoweiss that they had received orders via phone calls to evacuate their homes to the southern Gaza Strip. Shortly after, the Israeli army started relentlessly bombarding the neighborhood.

Based on the pace of the carpet-bombing, locals in Gaza are now speculating that October 7 would not be the date Israel’s occupation of the city began, but the deadline for when Gaza City would be completely erased.

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Chiefs in Ontario are raising serious concerns about the legislative processes behind the federal government’s Bill C-5 and Ontario’s Bill 5, saying they are being asked to support Canada’s national development priorities while many of their communities still lack basic infrastructure like clean water and safe housing.

“We will see, you know, the results of that in the coming months when the rubber hits the road around project development,” said Ontario Regional Chief Abram Benedict at a news conference during the Chiefs of Ontario’s 2025 First Nations Community Wellness Conference in Toronto.

“When the government thinks that they can assert their jurisdiction through First Nation territories, they’re gonna be sadly mistaken. That’s not what’s gonna be happening. First Nation rights holders have to be at the table.”

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Geneva, 15 August 2025 — As the INC-5.2 Global Plastics Treaty negotiations come to an end in Geneva, Switzerland, affected groups aligned for justice express strong disapproval of the treaty process and the state of the chair’s proposal text. Indigenous Peoples, waste pickers, trade union workers, youth, and fenceline communities are drawing the line and are amplifying a shared message: The negotiations in Geneva made achieving an inclusive, just transition impossible, by design.

During an August 13 press conference, consisting of justice-aligned groups, Aakaluk Adrienne Blatchford, an Inupiaq mother and land defender, testified to the embodied violence of erasures and exclusions at INC-5.2. Representing the Indigenous Environmental Network, she insisted, “A treaty about us, without us, is erasing history. Indigenous Peoples, waste pickers, People of Color, marginalized fenceline and frontline communities are here. Our bodies are born on the line. We will hold the line because we are the line.”

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For many, summertime activities such as boating and swimming are first to mind when visiting Big Sandy Lake near McGregor in northern Minnesota. However, to several generations of Ojibwe people, the shoreline of the lake is described as a “graveyard.”

Every year on the last Wednesday of July, Native communities and allies from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan gather for the annual Sandy Lake Memorial, a ceremony also called Mikwendaagoziwag.

In the Ojibwe language, Mikwendaagoziwag means “they are remembered.” The day honors what is now known as the Sandy Lake Tragedy, an event that led to the deaths of more than 400 Ojibwe tribal members in the winter of 1850-51.

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On 29 September 2024, an Israeli airstrike targeted the home of displaced Palestinian journalist Wafa al-Udaini in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza. She, her husband, and their two young daughters were killed. Her two sons survived but were left injured and orphaned.

Udaini had long been a target. At the start of the war on Gaza, she appeared on a TalkTV broadcast hosted by British anchor Julia Hartley-Brewer, who had just finished a soft interview with Israeli army spokesperson Peter Lerner. When Udaini described Israeli attacks on Palestinians as a “massacre” – using the same word Lerner had applied to Hamas – she was ridiculed and cut off. The segment went viral. Israeli media outlets weaponized the interview to smear Udaini. She was soon receiving direct threats from the Israeli military. In private conversations, she described herself as a marked woman. In the months that followed, when asked by The Cradle if she had moved from her home in Al-Rimal, Gaza City, she said, “I can’t say, sorry.” She added:

“The anchor killed me … They are using the interview to justify killing me.”

Months later, Israel killed Wafa.

Wafa’s assassination was not isolated. It was the culmination of a campaign to normalize the erasure of Palestinian journalists. The occupation army even has a special unit dedicated to this war crime, known as the ‘Legitimization Cell.’

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The boom in AI and data centers is driving Indigenous communities to defend their land, resources, and cultural knowledge from new forms of extraction.

When the United Nations marked the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples last week, it signaled a growing recognition of a new kind of extraction. Artificial intelligence, or AI, systems are being trained on massive troves of online data, much of it collected without the consent of the communities involved. For Indigenous peoples, this new form of extraction has raised questions about who controls their histories, languages, and cultural knowledge and whether the technology will erase or distort them entirely. With this in mind, tribes and nations have been pushing to assert “data sovereignty” — the right to control how information is collected and used — and claim a seat at the table as tech companies and governments set the rules for AI oversight.

Perhaps as a reflection of the AI boom and its implications for Indigenous communities, this year’s theme for the international Indigenous day was “Indigenous Peoples and AI: Defending Rights, Shaping Futures.” At the heart of the commemorative event was the acknowledgement of a stark reality: While information extraction, data center development, and the global critical minerals race have harmed Indigenous communities, emerging AI technologies also offer tools to address some of these challenges. The critical minerals used in batteries for backup power at data centers are often sourced from ecologically sensitive regions in Indigenous territories such as the Atacama Salt Flat in Chile. The centers also consume vast amounts of water and energy, which can strain local aquifers and cause pollution. But even as communities grapple with ecological destruction and changes to their way of life due to the AI boom, some are beginning to recognize the potential it holds for language revitalization and climate forecasting.

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On a warm night in late July, a dozen people gather over barbecued burgers and hotdogs in Shawanaga First Nation, about 30 kilometres northwest of Parry Sound, Ont. They’re not just here to snack and socialize, though. Clad in headlamps and settled into folding chairs, when the clock strikes 10 p.m., their nets will open.

The small crowd gathers near an abandoned church, where the community knows 200 to 300 bats come to roost. They’re here to help Shawanaga’s species-at-risk team net and tag bats, mostly the little brown myotis species, as they emerge at dusk to hunt for insects. Nearby is a specially designed “bat condo” built by Shawanaga member Dave Pawis in 2022, which offers an alternative roost for at least 1,000 bats. The air is filled with enthusiastic anticipation, along with thousands of mosquitoes.

Soon, bats are landing in the carefully set traps and the biologists — some from Shawanaga’s species-at-risk-team and another handful from neighbouring First Nations — handle them one by one. They record their gender, weight and age before tagging and releasing them. More Shawanaga residents come by after the local baseball game to take a peek, and even tag some bats’ wings themselves.

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Even as it continues to bomb the Palestinian civilians it is starving, Israel is pushing ahead with what may be its ultimate - or perhaps penultimate - vision for Gaza: the physical confinement of survivors in a guarded zone on Rafah's rubble - an actual concentration camp.

If it is not stopped, pathogens could yet become Israel's deadliest weapon in Gaza.

Disease is often not merely a side effect but a major agent in genocides, from smallpox that devastated the Indigenous peoples of the Americas to the barracks of Auschwitz. Concentration camps in particular have a long and ghastly history as places where, by design or otherwise, disease kills as many as - or even more than - those directly killed by the genocidal regime that confines them.

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