#indegenous land defenders
The Air That Trees Breathe: Translating climate science into Ojibwe | International Institute for Sustainable Development
The Air That Trees Breathe: Translating climate science into Ojibwe
the Ojibwe translation of some of the terminologies we encountered was based on the function, the action, and the observer’s understanding associated with these terms.
For example, carbon dioxide in Ojibwe is mitigoo-inanaamowin, meaning “(the air that) the trees breathe.” You will find many more such neologisms created in the lesson plans.
A long-lost document sheds light on the case of Chief Spokane Garry’s stolen land
A long-lost document sheds light on the case of Chief Spokane Garry’s stolen land
I want people to know the horrific history of what really happened here in the stealing of Garry’s land by prominent founders and citizens of our city and leaders of our nation,” Beine said. “It is time to set the record straight.”
Beine’s book, “Whodunnit: The Continuing Case of Spokane Garry,” lays out those facts. The centerpiece of the 284-page book is a long-lost document Beine discovered in the National Archives detailing Garry’s yearslong attempt to get his land back and the coterie of Spokane power brokers that colluded against him.
A Bigger Picture Gives Our Ancestors Their Full Humanity - YES! Magazine
A Bigger Picture Gives Our Ancestors Their Full Humanity
Via Suppressed History Archives
“In 1611, Father Pierre Biard, a French missionary assigned to colonial Canada, wrote home to complain about the locals. Apparently, the Indigenous Mi’kmaq didn’t think much of what they’d seen of European civilization:
“They consider themselves better than the French … they say, ‘you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other … you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour.’ They are saying these and like things continually.”
"Readers brought up on a certain kind of history may find this account somewhat surprising. To say the least, it is uncommon to read of Native Americans as social theorists probing into European settlers’ psyches. The Dawn of Everything, the new book from which this passage comes, offers many such charged moments. In it, archeologist David Wengrow and the late David Graeber, an anthropologist, public thinker, and activist, confront deep assumptions about how human society developed from its humble origins.
…
"Upon contact with Europeans, Native American groups like the Iroquois and Wendat had well-established democratic institutions, and individuals’ material needs were generally guaranteed among their communities. In the face of such radically different social arrangements, apologists for European systems rationalized their own structures by belittling Native Americans’ accomplishments as “savagery.” Whether based on production modes (such as hunting-gathering, farming, or complex urban specialization) or governmental arrangement (tribes, chiefdoms, and states), the resulting narrow models of social development remain more or less baked into history textbooks, right down to the present day.
"The Western Enlightenment view of social progress is not only chauvinistic but, as these two social scientists contend, is increasingly untenable in the face of mounting scholarly evidence. By ditching the “myth of progress,” Graeber and Wengrow are free to examine prehistorical and precolonial societies with fresh eyes. From the earliest bands of hunter-gatherers, to the rise of cities, up to major moments of first contact, the book brings together previously siloed academic evidence and little-publicized interpretations. Marijuana, we learn, was widely cultivated in prehistoric Japan. Centuries before Montezuma, Mesoamerican city-dwellers developed a precursor to urban social housing. Each mini-revelation is fascinating in its own right; together, they pose a serious challenge to both the Hobbesian and Rousseau-ite interpretations of the human past.
"Developing a renewed conception of fundamental social freedoms also brings the Indigenous critique full circle, with the Eastern Woodlands confederacies of North America as their exemplars. Crucially for Graeber and Wengrow, there was among these groups no obvious way to convert wealth into the kind of power over others that coerces or forces labor. Leaders were elected, but office holders “couldn’t compel anyone to do anything they didn’t wish to do.” We learn how, through generous social welfare provisions and consensus-seeking deliberations, groups like the Iroquois and Wendat self-consciously cultivated communal practices and institutions that vouchsafed human dignity without undue sacrifice of agency. Native American societies are once more cast as noble, but not as the pure, Edenic “savages” of Enlightenment imaginary.
"Mi’kmaq critics … jibed that they were richer than their French counterparts—not in material possessions or extractive technologies, but in “other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time.” I don’t know that they "jibed,” but they certainly declared the fact.
A Plant That Sterilizes Medical Equipment Spews Cancer-Causing Pollution on Tens of Thousands of Schoolchildren — ProPublica
Entire communities of human beings have been sacrificed for our industrial economy.
