Indigenous

President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax bill is on its way to his desk for a signature after House Republicans passed the legislation with a vote of 218-214 on Thursday. As the administration celebrates, many Americans are contemplating its effects closer to home. With deep cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and renewable energy projects, the bill is likely to have a devastating effect on low-income and rural communities across the country.

“These bills are an affront to our sovereignty, our lands, and our way of life. They would gut essential health and food security programs, roll back climate resilience funding, and allow the exploitation of our sacred homelands without even basic tribal consultation,” said Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson, president of the Tlingit and Haida in Alaska, in a statement. “This is not just bad policy — it is a betrayal of the federal trust responsibility to tribal nations.”

Tribes across the country are particularly worried about the megabill’s hit to clean energy, complicating the development of critical wind and solar projects. According to the Department of Energy, tribal households face 6.5 times more electrical outages per year and a 28 percent higher energy burden compared to the average U.S. household. An estimated 54,000 people living on tribal lands have no electricity.

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Tribal representatives in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron have rejected a reported proposal to establish a so-called “tribal emirate” in exchange for recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, Anadolu Agency reported on 7 July.

The proposal, first revealed by the Wall Street Journal, alleged that Hebron tribal leaders sent a letter to Israeli Economy Minister Nir Barkat, offering formal recognition of Israel in return for being appointed as representatives of Arab residents in Hebron and setting a timetable to join the US-led Abraham Accords.

In a press conference on Sunday, Hebron tribal figure Nafez al-Jaabari denounced the offer and declared the community’s rejection of the initiative.

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The Oak Ridge Fire has burned 10,814 acres southwest of Window Rock and remains 42% contained as of Sunday. Crews are bracing for extreme temperatures and critically dry fuels that threaten to spark new fires across the region.

Firefighters continue to work the southern edge of the fire near Hunters Point, Oak Springs, and Pine Springs. Operations Chief Tyler Chesarek said infrared maps helped crews locate and suppress hot spots.

“Crews were able to get around, get some depth, and hit some of the hot spots of concern,” he said.

A controlled burn near Oak Springs was also successful. Teams pushed northward and secured lines near the Klagetoh, Arizona, area

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Republican congressional proposals to sell off huge swaths of public land for housing could threaten tribal nations’ constitutional and treaty rights to access hunting and fishing grounds, as well as their cultural and ceremonial sites, experts say.

The latest proposed text, obtained by E&E News, from the Senate Committee on Natural and Energy Resources would allow the sale of Bureau of Land Management lands within 5 miles of a “population center.” A previous version included Forest Service lands, and federal lands within reservation boundaries. The legislation would also conflict with current procedures that allow tribes to obtain nearby public lands at no or low cost, instead requiring that such lands be purchased at “fair market value.”

“This is a frontal assault on tribal treaty rights and the exercise of those,” said Cris Stainbrook, Oglala Lakota and CEO of Indian Land Capital Company, which assists tribal nations in regaining land.

The proposed legislation — which has not yet passed out of committee — repeatedly puts states and local governments ahead of tribal nations. For example, the bill gives state and local governments the “right of first refusal” when land is put up for sale but denies tribes that same right. The bill would also prioritize land nominated for sale by states and local governments but not land that is nominated by tribes. While the legislation does include a requirement to consult with tribes as well as with states or local governments affected by land sales, it’s not clear how such proposals would be weighed should they conflict with one another. The state of Montana and federally protected lands are exempt, though tribal nations do not appear to have been consulted on the legislation.

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Red Feather is dedicated to improving housing conditions on the Hopi and Navajo nations in the Four Corners region. It has helped thousands of families with stove replacement, heat pump installation and weatherization assistance. The group has been doing this work for decades, but in recent years, it has seen a surge in work, in part due to increased funding from the federal government.

A big part of that funding, a $500,000 environmental justice grant Red Feather received from the Environmental Protection Agency, has now been terminated.

Red Feather is just one of hundreds of groups that have had grants meant to help disadvantaged communities canceled by the Trump administration. An Inside Climate News analysis, which relied on federal government spending data and federal court filings from the Trump administration, found the EPA’s grant terminations focused almost entirely on cutting spending on poor and minority communities, affecting 384 primary grants worth more than $2.4 billion.

“At the end of the day, we’re about solutions,” said Joe Seidenberg, Red Feather’s executive director. “And the solutions we’re advancing—clean heating, affordable energy, local workforce development—deliver real value, no matter who’s in office.”

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A peer-reviewed article—on Indigenous dance in Palestine and Native North America as resistance to genocide—was formally accepted then rejected by the editors of The Journal of Somaesthetics, citing fear of criticizing Israel’s genocide.

It is unclear why—after a year of nonstop affirmation and written acceptance from both editors—the decision was suddenly reversed. Finally, it is also unclear why making a political statement (or being perceived as making one), or putting a journal, its editors, and/or its board members “in a difficult position” are legitimate grounds for reversing a formal acceptance for publication in an academic journal. My subsequent attempts to clarify and resolve the situation have all gone nowhere.

From these exchanges, I logically inferred, as did several colleagues in Philosophy and Dance Studies (via email correspondence), that the real reason for the journal’s sudden reversal was my essay’s naming and condemnation of the genocide in Palestine, and the journal leadership’s attempt to protect itself from feared retaliation. In support of this interpretation, my essay also introduced a likely conflict of interest for Richard Shusterman, the founder of somaesthetics, cofounder of its journal, and currently first-listed member of its Editorial Board. Since Shusterman received a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was a lecturer in Israel at Ben-Gurion University, Bezalel Academy of Art, and the Hebrew University, for his journal to publish an essay critical of Israel’s genocide of Palestine, in today’s climate, would presumably have involved personal, professional, and political risks for him.

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Ras Ain al-Ouja is one of the largest Palestinian Bedouin villages in the occupied West Bank. Nestled amid a ridge of high silt hills just north of Jericho city, the village is facing intensified Israeli government-funded settler efforts to expel its residents.

The community’s 1,200 residents are surrounded from all sides by the illegal Yitav settlement and four illegal settler outposts, the most recent of which was built one year ago.

Settlers descend onto the village and raid residents’ homes on a daily basis, physically attacking people, stealing sheep, and terrorizing families. They also took over the nearby spring of Ain al-Ouja, one of the main springs in Palestine and a major water source for the entire area that drew local tourism. Today, all Palestinians are barred from accessing it.

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A study published via the Harvard Dataverse reveals that Israel has “disappeared” at least 377,000 Palestinians since the start of its genocidal campaign against the Gaza Strip in 2023.

Half of this number is believed to be Palestinian children.

The report was written by Israeli professor Yaakov Garb, who used data-driven analysis and spatial mapping to show how the Israeli army’s siege of Gaza and indiscriminate attacks on civilians in the enclave have led to a serious drop in its population.

The 377,000 Palestinians who are unaccounted for due to Israel’s genocide are approximately 17 percent of the Gaza Strip’s entire population, which now stands at about 1.85 million. Prior to the war in Gaza, the strip’s population was estimated at 2.227 million.

While some are displaced or missing, a significant number are believed to have been killed by Israeli forces, according to the report.

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In Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie, longtime Minnesota journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty trace this staggering transformation.“ The Europeans who colonized North America in the 19th century transformed the continent’s hydrology as thoroughly as the glaciers,” they write. “But, remarkably, they did it in less than 100 years instead of tens of thousands.”

In putting hundreds of millions of acres of prairie to the plow, settlers not only forcibly displaced Indigenous nations, but completely altered the region’s ancient carbon and nitrogen cycles. They also turned the region into an agricultural powerhouse. The deep black soil once prevalent in the Midwest — the result of thousands of years of animal and plant decomposition depositing untold carbon stores into the ground — became the foundation of the modern food system. But the undoing of the American prairie also dismantled one of the Earth’s most effective climate defenses.

Grasses, like all plant life, inhale planet-warming carbon dioxide. As a result, “​​earth’s soils now contain one-third of the planet’s terrestrial carbon — more than the total released by human activity since the start of the Industrial Revolution,” Hage and Marcotty write. A 2020 Nature study found that restoring just 15 percent of the world’s plowed grasslands could absorb nearly a third of the carbon dioxide humans added to the atmosphere since the 1800s.

Today, the tallgrass prairie, which covered most of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and the far eastern edge of the plains states, clings to about 1 percent of its former range. Even the hardier shortgrass prairie of the American West has been reduced by more than half.

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There’s been a flash point of change in the U.S. that has brought new recognition and reckoning with the high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous people.

After decades of sporadic police and public interest and investigation, public awareness, support and funding sources have aligned in a way that may finally bring closure and justice for families.

Recent developments in the decades-old murder case of Susan “Suzy” Poupart highlight the shifts.

And, ICT has learned, that after years of struggling to pay for expensive DNA testing of evidence found with Poupart’s remains, the Vilas County sheriff’s department will be receiving help from the Bureau of Indian Affairs Missing and Murdered Unit, which will fund the testing as part of the agency’s initiative Operation Spirit Return. The initiative focuses on solving cold cases in Indian Country.

The recent momentum, however, could be endangered by the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, which targets public policies or programs that examine underlying causes of problems driven by racial or social inequity.

“We’ve come so far,” said Stacey June Ettawageshik, executive director of Uniting Three Fires Against Violence in an interview with ICT. Ettawageshik is a citizen of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians.

“We are finally just beginning to get our voices heard and gaining access to funding,” Ettawageshik said. “But having that suddenly taken away would be devastating for our communities and leave us back to square one.”

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At least 140 people were killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza over the past 24 hours as the confrontation between Israel and Iran teetered on the precipice of an even more dangerous conflagration.

Among those killed were people attempting to access aid being brought in by UN trucks in central Gaza.

Around 400 people have been killed while attempting to reach aid since the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began distributing food on 27 May, and more than 3,000 injured, according to authorities in Gaza.

More than 55,600 people have been killed in Gaza and nearly 130,000 injured since Israel’s military assault began in October 2023, according to the Palestinian health ministry in the territory. More than 5,330 people have been killed and nearly 18,000 injured since Israel broke a two-month-old ceasefire on 18 March.

The UN human rights office called on the Israeli military “to immediately cease its use of lethal force around food distribution points in Gaza, following repeated instances of shooting and killing of Palestinians seeking to access food there.”

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Since mid-May, wildfires across Canada have burned 9.6 million acres, prompting the evacuation of approximately 40,000 people. According to Indigenous Services Canada, a government ministry, more than half of those evacuees are from First Nations communities, and nearly 34 tribes in almost every province are affected. The sudden rush of refugees has challenged the country’s crisis response infrastructure as people seek shelter and services in cities far from their homes, with little information of when they may return to their communities.

Officials estimate that 76 percent of wildfires currently burning are concentrated in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta — Canada’s western provinces — while additional provinces like British Colombia, Ontario, and Quebec are also affected. Provincial and First Nation governments, tribal organizations, and the Canadian Red Cross have coordinated emergency efforts in the affected regions. According to officials, on average, 2.1 million acres are lost to wildfires each year, far below the current 9.6 million that have been lost. The current, record-setting fires are also sending smoke plumes into the United States and as far away as Europe, creating hazardous air quality conditions.

“For the first time, it’s not a fire in one region. We have fires in every region,” Manitoba’s Premier Wabanakwut Kinew, a member of the Onigaming First Nation, said in a recent press conference. “That is a sign of a changing climate that we are going to have to adapt to.”

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When Iranian missiles began raining down on Israel, many residents scrambled for cover. Sirens wailed across the country as people rushed into bomb shelters.

But for some Palestinian citizens of Israel – two million people, or roughly 21 percent of the population – doors were slammed shut, not by the force of the blasts and not by enemies, but by neighbours and fellow citizens.

Mostly living in cities, towns, and villages within Israel’s internationally recognised borders, many Palestinian citizens of Israel found themselves excluded from life-saving infrastructure during the worst nights of the Iran-Israel conflict to date.

Palestinian citizens of Israel have long faced systemic discrimination – in housing, education, employment, and state services. Despite holding Israeli citizenship, they are often treated as second-class citizens, and their loyalty is routinely questioned in public discourse.

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There are more than 500 miles between the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation’s tribal reservation in northeastern Kansas and 1,500 acres of mostly prairie in northern Illinois.

So, Raphael Wahwassuck has come far to visit the site of a long-gone cabin there. Except it’s not an unfamiliar place to him and his kin. Wahwassuck is a member of the Prairie Band’s tribal council and a direct descendant of Chief Shab-eh-nay, for whom the state park is named after.

Most members of the tribe were forced from their homelands of the Great Lakes region into Kansas. They ceded approximately 28 million acres to the United States government, while an 1829 treaty promised Chief Shab-eh-nay 1,280 acres of reservation in Illinois.

Yet when he left in 1849 to visit his relatives in Kansas, the U.S. illegally sold the chief’s land to white settlers.

Over the last 15 years, the tribe has spent $10 million to purchase parts of the original reservation — including 130 acres near Shabbona Lake State Park in what is now DeKalb County, Illinois.

For Wahwassuck, this return is a step toward “correcting some of the historical injustices” his tribe has experienced.

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For the fewer than a hundred people that make up the entire population of Port Heiden, Alaska, fishing provides both a paycheck and a full dinner plate. Every summer, residents of the Alutiiq village set out on commercial boats to catch salmon swimming upstream in the nearby rivers of Bristol Bay.

Because of their location, diesel costs almost four times the national average — the Alaska Native community spent $900,000 on fuel in 2024 alone. Even Port Heiden’s diesel storage tanks are posing challenges. Coastal erosion has created a growing threat of leaks in the structures, which are damaging to the environment and expensive to repair, and forced the tribe to relocate them further inland. On top of it all, of course, diesel generators contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and are notoriously noisy.

In 2015, the community built a fish processing plant that the tribe collectively owns; they envisioned a scenario in which tribal members would not need to share revenue with processing companies, would bring home considerably more money, and wouldn’t have to spend months at a time away from their families. But the building has remained nonoperational for an entire decade, because they simply can’t afford to power it.

In 2023, Climate United, a national investment fund and coalition, submitted a proposal to participate in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF — a $27 billion investment from the Inflation Reduction Act and administered by the Environmental Protection Agency to “mobilize financing and private capital to address the climate crisis.” Last April, the EPA announced it had chosen three organizations to disseminate the program’s funding; $6.97 billion was designated to go to Climate United.

Then, in the course of President Donald Trump’s sweeping federal disinvestment campaign, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was singled out as a poster child for what Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claimed was “criminal.”

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Alarm sirens and fire tails lighting the sky have become a daily occurrence in Israeli cities for the past four days, as Iran continues to send retaliatory waves of ballistic missiles following Israel’s initiation of war with the country. The Israeli attack on Iran also continues, with both sides pledging to escalate military confrontation.

Meanwhile, Israel continues its onslaught on Gaza, as its relentless bombardment of the Strip has not stopped since it launched its attack on Iran. On Monday alone, Palestinian medical sources reported that 43 Palestinians had arrived dead at medical centers, including the Red Cross field hospital in Gaza. Among the dead were 38 Palestinians who were shot and killed while waiting to receive aid at a site run by the Israeli-backed and U.S.-controlled Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the controversial organization tasked with distributing aid to Palestinians instead of the UN. Israeli forces have committed several aid massacres against starving Gazans at the GHF’s distribution points in southern and central Gaza. The massacres have seen the killing of dozens of civilians at GHF sites on a near-daily basis, often after the Israeli army has opened fire on desperate crowds of civilians.

Israeli forces also continued to impose a total closure on the occupied West Bank since Friday, including the roads between West Bank towns and cities. Closures have caused a total halt to public transportation in several parts of the West Bank.

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A sweeping Biden-era initiative to restore Columbia Basin salmon runs, boost tribal energy development and provide a pathway for dam removal on the Lower Snake River has been canceled by President Donald Trump.

A presidential memorandum issued Thursday revoked the 2023 Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, which Trump stated “placed concerns about climate change above the Nation’s interests in reliable energy sources.”

A statement from the White House said Trump’s action “stops the green agenda in the Columbia River Basin.”

The memorandum directs federal agencies to withdraw from agreements stemming from “Biden’s misguided executive action.” In coordination with the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, they are to review and revise environmental reviews related to the agreement, including an environmental-impact statement underway on dam operations on the Columbia and Snake rivers.

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The governments of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu have announced their commitment to create a massive multinational Melanesian Ocean Reserve. If implemented as envisioned, the reserve would become the world’s first Indigenous-led ocean reserve, covering an area nearly as big as the Amazon Rainforest.

Speaking at the U.N. Ocean Conference underway in Nice, France, representatives of both countries said the vision for the ocean reserve is to cover at least 6 million square kilometers (2.3 million square miles) of ocean and islands. The reserve will include the combined national waters of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, and extend to the protected waters of New Caledonia’s exclusive economic zone. All of the island countries, largely inhabited by Indigenous Melanesians, are located in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, within the region known as Melanesia.

“The Melanesian Ocean Reserve will give the governments and peoples of Melanesia the ability to do much more to protect our ancestral waters from those who extract and exploit without concern for our planet and its living beings. We hope our Indigenous stewardship of this vast reserve will create momentum for similar initiatives all over the world,” Vanuatu’s environment minister, Ralph Regenvanu, said in a joint press release.

Melanesia is one of the world’s most biodiverse regions, hosting an incredible diversity of both land and marine species, including an estimated 75% of known coral species and more than 3,000 species of reef-associated fish.

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If you could walk the ocean floor off the coast of Cape Arago in Oregon in the summer, you’d find yourself in the mysterious green depths of a forest of kelp. Look up, and you’d see sunlight filtering through the fronds waving in the current; look down, and you’d see the plants anchored to an ocean floor covered with life. But if you walked a little bit farther, you’d come to a barren clearing, no sign of kelp or much else — just a carpet of purple sea urchin, a creature that is devouring kelp at an alarming rate.

The disappearance of kelp forests is widely felt here; gray whales have changed their foraging patterns, and the red abalone fishery in Northern California closed after swarms of urchins and warming waters destroyed more than 90% of the kelp forests there. In Oregon, a 2024 study by the Oregon Kelp Alliance found that over a 12-year period, the kelp forest off the coast declined by up to 73%, primarily due to an out-of-control population of purple sea urchins, which graze on the kelp. This system is out of balance largely owing to the absence of a keystone species: xvlh-t’vsh, which means “sea otter” in the Athabaskan language of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. For more than 20 years, the Siletz Tribe has been working to reintroduce sea otters.

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Product of decades-long process aims to restore Heiltsuk’s system of coherent governance destroyed by colonial powers

When outsiders arrived in the lands of the Heiltsuk people, they brought with them a rapacious appetite for the region’s trees, fish and minerals. Settlers and the government soon followed, claiming ownership of the thick cedar forests, the fjords and the abundance of life. Heiltsuk elders were confused. “If these are truly your lands,” they asked, “where are your stories?”

For the Heiltsuk, stories explain everything from the shape of a local mountain to the distinct red fur fringes on the sea wolves stalking shores. They tell of the flesh-eating monster baxbakwa’lanuxusiwe, whose entire body was covered with snapping mouths before it was destroyed by a shaman and became a cloud of mosquitoes.

Passed down over generations, in ceremonies forbidden by Canada’s government, the stories weave together the physical world, the supernatural and the liminal space that binds the two.

Such stories are also the bedrock of the Heiltsuk’s newly created constitution, a document recently ratified through ceremony that asserts the nation’s long-held convictions that they are the original inhabitants and rightful stewards of the region’s future.

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When Jaike SpottedWolf saw empty lots on Tillman Street she envisioned a sacred space for Detroit’s Indigenous community — a powwow ground, smokehouse, garden, church, and gathering place. The Thečhíȟila Collective, which she co-founded to support community needs, hoped to buy the land for its listed price of $7,000.

“Making sure there’s a space for native youth, native elders for them all to come together if they want, that isn’t gatekept. That doesn’t exist for us in the city,” she said of the approximately 30,000 Native people living in metro Detroit.

But months after the group expressed interest in 4751 Tillman, the Detroit Land Bank Authority raised the price of the parcel, which included seven lots, by nearly 2,000% to $136,500 — putting it far beyond the collective’s budget and raising questions about how land is valued and who gets access to it in a city with deep histories of displacement.

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The passage of the sweeping legislation is sure to inflame already-fraught tensions with First Nations. One of the most contested aspects is its creation of “special economic zones,” where the government can establish a zone, and then exempt certain companies or projects inside it from having to comply with certain provincial laws or regulations, or municipal bylaws. It also slashes several of Ontario’s endangered species protections and shelters the government from some lawsuits.

But that was only one controversial moment, in a week stuffed full of ’em.

The Doug Ford government also moved forward legislation that blocks municipal green building standards meant to reduce emissions from construction, heating and air conditioning — a particularly stunning about-face after defending the efforts of cities to fight climate change by implementing higher standards just a few years ago.

Government officials tabled another bill promising to prioritize data centres and order the electricity regulator and operator to focus on economic growth. And they tabled a third bill the government advertised as part of an attempt to “streamline” mine tailings facilities.

Oh, and the budget, which cuts Ontario’s emergency preparedness funds, bans congestion pricing and continues the premier’s fixation with cracking down on bike lanes, also passed.

Here’s what happened over a big week at Queen’s Park.

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• The Banggai archipelago is a remote landscape of around 97% limestone karst east of Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island.
• Extractive concessions on 39 locations on Peleng island, the largest island in the Banggai Islands district, may soon cut into the karst bedrock to mine the ancient limestone for cement, glass and other industrial applications.
• Indigenous villagers on Peleng Island say they worry the development could catalyze unprecedented local environmental damage, impairing the cultivation of unique yam varieties grown only here.

Deslin is known as the Ibu Kampung — “village mother” — of the Tolobuono Komba-komba Indigenous community here in the center of Peleng, one of a cluster of karst islands just east of the much larger Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

That honorific reflects Deslin’s advocacy against plans to quarry the limestone that surrounds Komba-komba village, and that makes up around 97% of the rest of the island chain, known as the Banggai Islands.

Karst systems like the Banggai Islands are landscapes of soluble bedrock riddled with caves and underground rivers formed by erosion from acidic water over millions of years. Around 15% of the world’s land surface is karst, or carbonate rocks, the most common of which are dolostone and limestone.

Indonesia accounts for around 155,000 square kilometers (60,000 square miles) of karst landscapes. Almost a tenth of this area has experienced degrees of environmental damage, mainly due to mining, according to Gadjah Mada University karst expert Eko Haryono.

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