In a motion to join a lawsuit, as one of the first tribes to potentially sue against the detention center, the case argues that the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Miami-Dade County, and the Florida Division of Emergency Management did not seek an environmental review.

The filing alleges the center’s proximity to Miccosukee villages, ceremonial sites, and access to traditional hunting grounds, and “raises significant raises significant concerns about environmental degradation and potential impacts.”

“We are going to make sure that we fight this facility on whatever front is available to us,” said William “Popeye” James Osecola, who is the secretary of the Miccosukee tribal council. He hopes the lawsuit will “signify that the tribe will continue fighting to do what it’s always done, which is protect the land and save the land that saved us.”

According to Osecola, since the facility’s operation began, tribal members have been restricted from gathering plants and roots for uses such as medicine. “Obviously, that’s not an option for us right now,” he said. “At the moment, it’s the first time we’ve ever seen gates like that there, so it’s very jarring for us.” 

Nearby the facility, 15 active tribal villages reside inside Big Cypress National Preserve, located within the Everglades. 

During the 19th century, the Seminole Wars, which the Seminole Nation and Miccosukee Nation view as one continuous conflict against the U.S., many members fled into the wetlands and used their natural environment as refuge. 

In a press conference at the detention center last month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said there would be  “zero impact” on the wetland’s environment. The site is located on an abandoned airstrip, once a controversial project that aimed to be the world’s largest airport. Observers outside the facility said they could see lights on at all hours, attracting mosquito swarms. Recent satellite images also reveal that a freshly paved road has been laid down. 

Last year, the tribe and the National Park Service signed a co-stewardship agreement for Everglades National Park. The partnership aimed to collaborate on protecting tribal practices, restoration efforts for the land’s vegetation, and protection. 

In these cypress swamps and toothy sawgrass marshes, wildlife alongside alligators includes bats, turtles, and panthers. Because species such as the panther are critically endangered, Osecola implied that the continuous traffic at Alligator Alcatraz will “see more deaths with the wildlife”. “It’s taken decades just to get Everglades restoration going like it is now,” he said.

While the Department of Homeland Security distanced itself after promoting the facility for weeks, claiming Florida controls the facility under state hands, critics are not convinced. Elise Bennett, Florida and Caribbean director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization that filed alongside Friends of the Everglades in the case last month, noted that “setting aside the funding for detaining immigrants is essentially a federal function. This is a federal project, regardless of what they say in their court filings.”

Last week, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a legal notice with an intent to sue that the construction also violates the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act, raising concerns such as light pollution and the use of insecticide to mitigate mosquitoes on-site that could affect the area’s wildlife and surrounding water. 

Each day since its opening, protestors and groups have noticed trucks coming in carrying diesel, generators, and caged vehicles holding detainees. There are currently 3000 beds inside the facility and at least 400 security personnel on-site. 

After state legislators were blocked from entering the Alligator Alcatraz’s premises, Governor DeSantis invited legislators and the state’s members of Congress to tour the facility over the weekend. According to Osecola, the Governor of Florida did not extend that invitation to tribes. 

Some Republican members claimed that the detention center was clean and safe. Others, such as Democratic State Representative Anna Eskamani, reported that, “The environmental impact of this facility cannot be overstated — there is new asphalt, thousands of gallons of water used every day and gas tanks powering generators. No alligators seen, but plenty of mosquitoes.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A tribe in Florida joins the fight against the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention center on Jul 15, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Miacel Spotted Elk.

The Yurok people have lived, fished, and hunted along the Klamath for millennia. But when the California gold rush began, the tribe lost 90 percent of its territory. 

For the last two decades, the Yurok Tribe has been working with the nonprofit Western Rivers Conservancy to get its land back. The 17,000 acres composes the final parcel of a $56 million, 47,097-acre land transfer that effectively doubles the current land holdings of the Yurok Tribe. 

The tribe has already designated the land as a salmon sanctuary and community forest and plans to eventually put it into a trust and care for it in perpetuity. 

“No words can describe how we feel knowing that our land is coming back to the ownership of the Yurok people,” said Joseph James, the chairman of the Yurok Tribal Council, who is from the village of Shregon on the Klamath River. “The Klamath River is our highway. It is also our food source. And it takes care of us. And so it’s our job, our inherent right, to take care of the Klamath Basin and its river.”

The land transfer comes just months after the utility PacifiCorp removed four dams on the Klamath River, the largest dam removal project in U.S. history. The removal of the dams enabled coho and Chinook salmon that had been blocked to finally swim upstream to spawn for the first time in more than a century. The deal is also part of a broader push to revitalize the Klamath River Basin, where water diversions and pollution have long strained the wildlife and the Indigenous peoples who rely on them. 

Josh Kling, conservation director at the Western Rivers Conservancy, said the nonprofit acquired the land in pieces from Green Diamond, a timber company, and paid for it using a combination of private funding, tax credits, carbon credit sales, low-interest loans, revolving loans, federal revolving loan programs, and settlement funds. The project was also partially funded by the state of California, which returned 2,800 acres of state land along the Klamath River to the Shasta Indian Nation last year. 

Kling said the 47,000 acres of land returned to the Yurok Tribe includes redwood forests that help protect against climate change and protect crucial habitat for birds such as the marbled murrelet, Humboldt marten. and northern spotted owl, just as the trees were becoming ripe for a fresh round of logging.

“The project was really timely to get in there before a new round of timber harvest and the associated road building,” said Kling. He is particularly excited about how Blue Creek, a cold-water tributary just 16 miles from the mouth of the river, is now protected because of how the tributary provides an essential place for salmon and steelhead to cool off before heading further upstream to spawn.

“The importance of Blue Creek to the larger Klamath system really can’t be overstated,” he said. “With the dam removals and the restoration of fish passage to over 400 miles of spawning habitat in the upper basin, none of that means anything if the fish can’t get there.”

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James from the Yurok Tribe described Blue Creek as a high prayer area, a village site, and essential fishing grounds. In 2020, it was also where Yurok officials helped persuade PacifiCorp officials to move forward with dam removal after two decades of advocacy. James credited Troy Fletcher, a former executive director of the Yurok Tribe who played a key role in the dam removal campaign and who has since passed away, for helping to initiate the landback project.

Restoring the land will involve everything from stream restoration projects to road maintenance, James said: “We want to do everything we can to protect Mother Earth.”  

Kling said the conservancy is increasingly working with tribal nations to facilitate land transfers and hopes to work with more. Studies have shown that conservation goals are more effectively met when Indigenous peoples manage their own territories. 

“The more that we can partner with tribal stewards to achieve our conservation outcomes, those are durable lasting results,” Kling said.

James, too, hopes that the deal will be far from the last. 

“Here’s a model that we can share with the Indian Country,” he said. “Indigenous people are the managers of the land, and they’re driving it.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In California’s largest landback deal, the Yurok Tribe reclaims sacred land around Klamath River on Jun 5, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anita Hofschneider.

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Dr. Phil, the powerhouse TV personality, has long dispensed practical advice to anyone hoping to avoid financial ruin — advice he’s shared with his millions of viewers. “No. 1 is avoid debt like the plague,” he’s said.

On other episodes of his syndicated talk show, he’s urged people to pay off their costliest obligations first: “You got to get rid of that high-interest debt.”

Yet for thousands of people mired in debt, Dr. Phil’s eldest son has been part of the problem, an investigation by ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News found.

Jay McGraw, a TV producer, became involved in the payday lending industry over a decade ago and has been affiliated with a range of financial services businesses, more recently launching a firm that sells used cars online at costly interest rates and targets Texans with low or no credit.

Earlier this year, McGraw settled a federal civil suit that had accused him of playing a key role in CreditServe Inc., a financial technology consulting firm that helps arrange small-dollar consumer loans online — with interest rates that can exceed 700% — via a company owned by a Native American tribe in Alaska.

The tribal lending operation, Minto Money, is based in the log cabin village of Minto, 50 miles northwest of Fairbanks, and has delivered a new revenue stream to the community since its inception in 2018. But it’s also created a rift within the tribe, as some members are appalled by the burdens inflicted on poor and desperate people.

“It’s bringing in a lot of money. But it’s off the misery of the people on the other end who are taking out these loans,” said Darrell Frank, a former chief of the tribe. “That’s not right. That’s not what the elders set this tribal council up for.”

There’s documented harm. As of July 2024, the Federal Trade Commission had received more than 280 consumer complaints about Minto’s lending operations. That total includes complaints forwarded from the Better Business Bureau, where Minto Money holds an “F” rating. Customers who took out loans — which range from $200 to $3,000 — pleaded for relief from onerous terms that allowed Minto Money to claw back the sums multiple times over through automatic bank withdrawals.

“This loan is outrageous with interest over 700%!” one person complained to the Better Business Bureau about having paid $4,167 on a $1,200 loan from Minto Money. “I am one step away from filing from bankruptcy.”

A federal suit filed in Illinois in November by five Minto Money borrowers contends that McGraw has provided “tens of millions of dollars” in capital for the loans. CreditServe provides the infrastructure to market, underwrite and collect on them while “the Tribe is merely a front” and shares in only a small percentage of the revenue, according to the suit.

It called McGraw the “enterprise’s principal beneficiary,” asserting that he and CreditServe’s CEO, Eric Welch, have collected “hundreds of millions of dollars of payments made by consumers.”

The suit alleged that McGraw and the other defendants, including Minto Money, violated state usury laws and federal prohibitions against collecting unlawful debt. A confidential settlement resolved the lawsuit in early May but left open the possibility that other Minto Money customers could file similar suits in the future.

A. Paul Heeringa, who is representing McGraw, Welch and CreditServe, wrote in an email to reporters that “our clients cannot comment on any of your questions, or the case generally, other than to say that the allegations in the Complaint are not facts and were not proven to be true, and that our clients categorically deny the allegations.”

CreditServe was set up by a Hollywood lawyer who has represented the McGraws, California records show. Its principal address in the Larchmont Village neighborhood of Los Angeles is a box in a mail shop that also has served as the published address for many other McGraw family companies.

There is nothing in the public record linking Dr. Phil — whose full name is Phil McGraw — to the lending businesses, including CreditServe.

A lawyer for Phil McGraw said McGraw declined to comment for this story but shared a short statement from a spokesperson for Merit Street Media, which airs “Dr. Phil Primetime.”

“Dr. Phil knows his son Jay to be a smart, strong, caring human being and while he does not know his business Dr. Phil supports him 100%,” the statement said. “The suggestion that Jay’s business ignores or is even comparable or relevant to advice from Dr. Phil or Dr. Phil Primetime on Merit Street Media is false and only included in your article as click bait.”

Lori Baker, chief of the Minto tribal government, said in an email that the Minto Village Council had no comment in response to questions about the lending operations and members’ concerns.

Among critics of Minto’s lending operation, the idea that outsiders can’t be trusted is central to their opposition.

One Minto elder who no longer lives in the community worries that strangers are taking advantage of the tribe and its loan customers alike. The elder asked not to be named because of concerns about reprisals for criticizing the lucrative business.

“They are exploiting our village,” the elder said. “It is not right taking from poor people to get yourself rich.”

Jay McGraw got into the lending business as he branched out from other ventures. Minto got into it to help the people of the village.

By the time the company that would become CreditServe was formed in 2011, McGraw had obtained a law degree, gone into the film production business with his father, pioneered a highly successful daily syndicated medical advice show called “The Doctors” and written a series of self-help books for teens.

More quietly, he ventured into the high-interest lending business. Corporation papers in 2013 listed McGraw as the president of Helping Hand Financial Inc., a company that offered payday loans online at CashCash.com. “Get the CashCash You Need Fast!” the firm’s website exhorted.

The following year, when CreditServe Inc. filed an amendment to its articles of incorporation with the California secretary of state, it showed McGraw as president and secretary. Helping Hand Financial dissolved in 2017, but CreditServe remained in business. In both ventures, McGraw teamed up with Welch.

McGraw is not currently listed in California records as a top officer at CreditServe. But the federal suit in Illinois describes his role as significant. “McGraw and Welch dominate CreditServe and are responsible for all key decisions made by it,” the complaint states.

Welch declined to comment for this story.

He and McGraw are also named on corporation papers for Cherry Auto Finance Inc., formed in 2021, which offers easy financing for used cars online at cherrycars.com, appealing to subprime borrowers. The site posts estimated annual percentage rates of 22.4%.

Just as desperate borrowers turn to unconventional and high-interest loans, a few dozen Native American tribes in dire need of economic rescue have been drawn to the business side of that same industry.

The community of 160 in Minto faces the same challenges as many Native villages in Alaska, which are set in hard-to-reach places on ancestral hunting and fishing lands. Village leaders have struggled to build an economy in a remote place with few jobs, spotty internet and sky-high costs.

In 2018, Doug Isaacson, a non-tribal member working for Minto’s economic development arm, brought Minto an idea that could help the village. Isaacson — the former mayor of North Pole, a city outside Fairbanks that revels in its association with Christmas — suggested that the tribe get involved in the lending business. Tribes in America are in demand as business partners because they can claim that, as sovereign entities, their operations are exempt from state interest rate caps. Critics of such lending partnerships have called them “rent-a-tribe.”

To the tribal council, the lending business sounded like a way to create jobs and bring in much-needed revenue. The household income in Minto is about 30% lower than the statewide median. But groceries are more expensive and gas costs $7 a gallon.

Minto adopted a Tribal Credit Code, stating that “E-commerce represents a new ray of economic hope for the Tribe and its members.”

The Illinois lawsuit contends that on paper, the tribe appears to control the lending operation, but CreditServe provides the key services, including “lead generation, technology platforms, payment processing, and collection procedures.” Most of the money also flows to CreditServe, which has an office in suburban Austin, Texas, according to the suit.

McGraw’s lifestyle stands in sharp contrast to those living in Minto. He owns a lakeside mansion in the Austin area, valued at over $6 million. A real estate listing noted that the gated home features a “glass ceiling, life-size fireplaces, 2nd floor tower and an 85 foot infinity pool & spa overlooking miles of unobstructed views,” with “guest house, elevator tram and boat dock.”

The Instagram pages for McGraw and his wife, a former Playboy model, portray a life of affluence, with photos of excursions to Paris, Napa Valley, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Cabo San Lucas and Palm Beach. There are golf outings and time on a yacht.

In Minto, people live in single-story log homes. They enjoy trapping wolves and beavers, hunting geese and watching school basketball games. Many worry about protecting the land and wildlife.

“Used to see a lot of moose by the village; right now just two,” minutes of a 2020 Minto fish and game advisory committee meeting state. “Global changes have really affected us.”

There are no outward signs in the village of a massive online lending operation. The headquarters listed on the Minto Money business license is the address of the tribe’s two-story lodge, which houses the tribal council offices, a nutrition program for elders, a community gathering space, and rooms rented to tourists and hunters.

The business license is signed by Shane Thin Elk, listed as commissioner of Minto’s financial regulatory body, tasked with oversight of the lending businesses. Thin Elk is a member of a different tribe and doesn’t live in Alaska. Reached by phone, he hung up on a reporter.

The tribe started with a single lending website — Minto Money — and later launched another, Birch Lending. Neither company lends to people in Alaska.

Once it got underway, the lending business took off. The Illinois lawsuit contends that “McGraw, CreditServe, and Welch have collected more than $500 million dollars from consumers” over the last four years.

Minto’s take was small in comparison. Still, it has made a difference.

ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News obtained documents for Minto Money showing dramatic growth, from $2 million in annual revenue in 2020 to nearly $7 million in 2022. A former tribal lending manager for the operation, Cameron Winfrey, said that in 2024 that figure reached $12 million for all its lending operations.

Online lending “has thus far surpassed all expectations and provided enormous benefits to our community,” Winfrey wrote to the Minto Village Council in a January 2024 letter.

In an accompanying report, he listed some of the benefits that the lending business generated. He noted that $1.8 million was distributed to the Village Council in 2023, up about 50% from the prior year. Money went to the Minto library and computer lab as well as community organizations.

Winfrey also wrote that $627,000 was paid out in salaries and benefits in 2023 for employees of the tribe’s economic development corporation, known as BEDCO, and its subsidiaries, which includes Minto Money. He told ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News that only a few people in Minto work for the lending operation.

Notably, the profit enabled the tribe to do what most tribes cannot: help fix its local school.

Yukon-Koyukuk School District Superintendent Kerry Boyd said the Minto tribe’s economic development corporation offered a surprise windfall when district officials discovered rising material and construction costs for a new gymnasium had increased the price tag by millions of dollars.

The tribe paid more than $3.2 million to finish the new gym, she said. A 2024 letter from BEDCO to the Minto tribal council stated that the money donated to the gym came from lending revenue.

In her more than 16 years running the district, Boyd had never seen such a generous donation. “I said, ‘Wow, this is almost unheard of.”

Many residents can’t say for sure where the lending money is going but point to newfound largesse. Folks get their heating fuel tanks filled by the tribal government. Some members receive “hardship” grants. There was money for a youth center. Musical instruments for the worship center. Dogsled races. A holiday party.

Still, some tribal members wonder why more money isn’t spread around. A handful of residents are calling for audits, greater transparency and federal investigations.

Some people thought the lending business would seed other economic development and lead to regular dividend checks. Instead, there is infighting and bitterness about who in the tribe receives the money. The division pits year-round Minto residents against members who live outside the village, in Fairbanks or elsewhere.

“If you don’t live in Minto, you don’t get shit,” said lending opponent Frank, the former chief. He is seeking an audit and a halt to the enterprise.

Once a tribe starts taking in large sums, it’s rare for internal disputes to go public.

“It’s a blessing and a curse,” one tribal member said recently. “We’re blessed that we get all this money, and it’s a curse because with money comes greed.”

“And some people don’t know the difference.”

Isaacson, the non-tribal Alaskan who promoted the idea, has shrugged off concerns about legal problems.

In a 2023 email obtained by reporters, Isaacson wrote, “Lawsuits are the cost of doing business these days.” He noted that “in no century have money lenders ever been revered, but they have always been essential.” (Isaacson told reporters he no longer works on tribal lending operations and could not comment.)

The Minto tribe’s business entities have been sued in federal court by consumers at least 17 times. The tribe has argued that arbitration agreements signed by borrowers, as well as tribal sovereign immunity, protect the businesses from lawsuits. In at least one suit, it expressly denied the characterization of Minto Money as a “rent-a-tribe” operation.

Several federal cases have been dismissed on sovereign immunity grounds, but more often they have settled quickly without reaching the discovery phase that could reveal more details about the lending operation’s structure.

It’s unlikely that the legal risks will end with the private settlement in the Illinois case. Ten days after that settlement, the plaintiffs’ lawyers filed a new federal suit on behalf of three different borrowers, making the same allegations against McGraw, Welch, Minto Money and CreditServe. The latest suit adds a debt collection agency as a defendant.

Across the country, other tribal lending operations have been subject to large settlements in recent years, including a tribe in Wisconsin that also is alleged in federal lawsuits to have partnered with CreditServe, among other outside entities. That tribe, the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, settled a federal class-action lawsuit in Virginia last year for $1.4 billion in loan forgiveness and $37 million in payments to customers and lawyers on the case. Of that, $2 million came from tribal council members named in the suit, while the rest came from business partners. (CreditServe was not named in the Virginia case or settlement.)

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which already had a spotty record of overseeing high-interest lending, is being gutted by the Trump administration. But a handful of states have pushed back against tribal lenders. In December, in response to complaints, the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions issued a warning advising consumers that Minto Money and Birch Lending are not registered to conduct business in the state. And in late April, the Massachusetts Division of Banks publicly advised borrowers to avoid predatory loans “including from tribal lenders,” listing Minto Money and Birch Lending as examples.

Minto Money already avoids lending in 10 states, primarily where attorneys have acted forcefully to protect consumers, though Massachusetts and Washington are not among the states it shuns.

In recent months, the tribal council consolidated its control over the lending business, removing Winfrey from both his position as Minto Money’s general manager and his seat on the council after a bitter dispute. Tribal leaders criticized his performance.

But Winfrey, who said Minto Money ranked among the country’s top-earning tribal lending businesses during his tenure, believed he was ousted because he had started asking too many questions about where the money was going.

He had planned to pitch the idea of tribal lending to other Alaska villages.

“They need the money,” he said one afternoon in February. But by May, he had met with only one community. Leaders there were wary of the idea, and Winfrey said that he, too, had started having second thoughts.

“They said, ‘Isn’t this a rent-a-tribe thing?’ I flat out said, ‘Yes. That’s exactly what it is.’ ”

The “tribe gets pennies,” he told an Anchorage Daily News reporter. “It should be the other way around, where the tribe gets all the funds and CreditServe gets crumbs.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News, and Megan O’Matz and Joel Jacobs, ProPublica.

Magpies, black-and-white birds with blue-tinted wings, land on stacks of lumber and dig for insects. Chainsaws rev and roar and wood-cutting machines crank and squeak. A mist of sawdust hangs in the air. 

Foreman Kenneth Cruz, wearing a white hard hat and neon yellow jacket, is watching crewmember Jacob Vann use a chainsaw to cut up logs of thick Tamarack pine. 

“That looks dense,” says Cruz, craning his neck to look at the center, or heartwood, of the log Vann is working on.

“Yeah, it is – it’s really dense,” Vann says, tilting up his hard hat to wipe his brow. “You can tell the difference between this one and that cedar. Cut right through that cedar, but when it comes to this Tamarack? It takes a lot sometimes.” 

These slices of cedar and pine will eventually be hauled over to the other end of the yard, where a firewood processor is splitting logs into even cuts of firewood.

They bought this heavy-duty machine and other equipment with a $1 million grant from the U.S. Forest Service in 2023. Now, the Washoe Tribe produces about a thousand cords of firewood a year. One cord, which consists of about 800 pieces of firewood, provides heating for about one month. 

Some surplus firewood ends up on shelves in local gas stations, grocery stores and area campgrounds’ supply shops. Customers who buy a bundle for their fireplace or campsite are also helping the Washoe Tribe’s energy initiative. 

“The idea is that for every cord that is sold, that also pays to have a cord cut, split, and delivered to a tribal elder,” Cruz says. 

It’s a program called Wood for Elders. It’s similar to a food bank. But instead of food, Cruz and his crew deliver firewood to about 110 Washoe elders – at no cost – so they can keep warm during the cold months. Although winters in the West are trending warmer, research shows that climate change can lead to more severe winter storms and cold snaps, conditions that make a well-heated home essential.

For years, the Washoe Tribe relied on volunteers to split wood from their forests and donate bundles to as many elders as possible. But, they didn’t have a consistent amount of volunteers – or wood. 

Now, they have a paid crew that works year-round. That enables them to provide every elder with at least three cords of firewood each winter, which would normally cost someone about $900, Cruz says. 

“Some rely solely on wood for their heat,” he notes. “That helps out those people that have a hard time through the winter.” 

The Washoe Tribe says nearly three-fourths of members heat their homes with firewood and have the option of another form of fuel, like propane. But one-third heat their homes solely with firewood, said Washoe Tribal Chairman Serrell Smokey.

“They can’t afford to pay high prices of propane,” Smokey says. “And if we have long winters with snow, then the firewood is a way that everybody would heat their homes.” 

Chairman Smokey says the tribe strategically removes logs from overgrown forests and areas previously scorched by wildfire and turns that timber into firewood. The tribe has a long history of forest stewardship, including the use of cultural fire, but colonial federal policies in the 1900s suppressed their sovereign ability to manage their forestlands. Over the last decade, however, federal fire officials have begun working with tribes and recognizing the value of Indigenous knowledge in environmental policy.

For its Wood for Elders program, the Washoe Tribe partners with the National Forest Foundation, the nonprofit branch of the U.S. Forest Service. The group hauls out damaged logs from forest thinning projects and donates them to the Washoe wood yard to use for their elders’ program. 

“Our ability to remove some of this material and put it to good use while also coming up with solutions to address what to do with hazardous fuels, it really is a sort of a win-win in that sense,” says Sam Pankratz, the National Forest Foundation’s Rocky Mountain region manager. 

Pankratz says these efforts are even more important as global temperatures rise and wildfires grow more frequent and severe. 

Scientific research backs up that sentiment. A 2016 study found climate change had caused the number of large wildfires in the West to double between 1984 and 2015. A 2021 study concluded that climate change has been the main driver of the West’s increasing fire weather – when high temperatures, low humidity and strong winds combine. 

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“If we don’t take care of the forest, it will take care of itself, and not in a way that we want,” Smokey says. “It’s one lightning strike, one cigarette butt.”

In all, the National Forest Foundation’s Wood for Life program provides wood to tribes in Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico, Montana, Arizona and California. The nonprofit partners with the Hopi, Ute Mountain Ute, Northern Arapaho, Shoshone-Paiute, Eastern Shoshone, Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and Navajo Nation.

In the Navajo Nation, which stretches across parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, more than 60 percent of households – thousands of families – use wood to heat their homes. 

“It’s a huge benefit because it’s used for warming the home, cooking, and everyday needs,” said Rosanna Jumbo-Fitch, the Navajo Chinle Chapter president. 

Back at the Washoe wood yard, Cruz is taking inventory of the different types of timber they have on hand. 

“Most of it is Jeffrey pine,” says Cruz, scanning the stacks of logs around the yard. “We do have some sugar pine. We have some red fir, white fir, some oak, and we do have some cedar.”

All of it is more wood for their elders. 

“To me, it’s a good feeling that I think we’re doing something good for our communities and for our people,” Cruz says. 

He adds that the Washoe Tribe will sell firewood to other tribes across the region if they are low on this precious – and potentially life-saving – energy resource. 

This story was also supported by the Indigenous Journalists Association and Solutions Journalism Network’s 2024-25 Health Equity Initiative.

This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the Washoe Tribe built a business to sustain a firewood bank that helps elders heat their homes on May 20, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kaleb Roedel, KUNR.

A group of Indigenous people who were evicted from their ancestral village in Nagarhole Tiger Reserve in south India 40 years ago have returned to their former homes.

It’s believed to be the first time Indigenous people in India have asserted their rights in this way, and returned en masse to their homes after being evicted from a Protected Area.

Forest department officials warn the Jenu Kuruba against re-occupying their homes inside Nagarhole National Park. The Indigenous people castigated them for delaying recognition of their forest rights, and went ahead anyway. ©Survival International

More than 50 Jenu Kuruba families took part in the long-planned operation, and have started building houses using their traditional materials and techniques. The Jenu Kuruba say they decided to return because their sacred spirits, who still dwell in the old village location, became angry at being abandoned when the community was forced from the forest in the 1980s.

Forest department officials, backed up by police, warned the Jenu Kuruba against re-occupying their homes, but the Indigenous people castigated them for delaying the recognition of their forest rights for years, and went ahead anyway. Today around 130 police officers and forest guards were on the scene, and prevented journalists from accessing the area.

Shivu, a young Jenu Kuruba leader, said today: “Historical injustice continues to happen over us by denying our rights on our lands, forests and access to sacred spaces. Tiger conservation is a scheme of the forest department and various wildlife NGO’s to grab indigenous lands by forcefully moving us out, but opening the very same lands in the pretext of tourism to make money

We have to today returned to our home lands and forests. we will remain here. Our sacred sprits are with us.”

Jenu Kuruba families begin to construct a house for their ancestors, as they rebuild their old village inside Nagarhole National Park. ©Sartaz Ali Barkat/ Survival

In a statement the Jenu Kuruba of Nagarhole said: “Enough is Enough. We can’t part from our lands anymore. We want our children and youth to live a life that our ancestors once lived. Tigers, elephants, peacocks, wild boar, wild dogs are our deities. We have been worshipping them as our ancestral spirits since generations. This deliberate attempt to separate us from our lands, forests and sacred spaces will not be tolerated. We resist the current conservation model based on the false idea that forests, wildlife and humans cannot coexist.”

For decades it has been official policy in India, as in many other countries around the world, to evict Indigenous people whose lands are turned into Protected Areas, a practice known as Fortress Conservation.

An estimated 20,000 Jenu Kuruba people have been illegally evicted from Nagarhole. Another 6,000 resisted, and have managed to stay in the park.

The Jenu Kuruba’s belief system centers around their connection to the forest, its wildlife, and their gods – including the tigers who live there – but forest guards harass, threaten, and even shoot members of the tribe.

Jenu Kuruba people are experts in their environment. They gather medicine, honey, fruits, vegetables, tubers, and the thatch and bamboo needed to build their houses.

Famed for their honey collecting skills – Jenu Kuruba means “honey collectors” – they are guided from birth to death by the philosophy “Nanga Kadu Ajjayya… Nanga Kadina Jenu Ajjayya – Our forests are sacred… The honey from our forest is sacred.”

Those beliefs underpin the tribe’s careful management of their environment and have ensured tiger survival. Indeed, the healthy tiger population found in their forest is what drove the Indian government to turn the area into a Tiger Reserve. It has one of the highest concentrations of tigers in all of India.

Caroline Pearce, Director of Survival International, said today: “The Jenu Kuruba people’s re-occupation of their ancestral land is an inspirational act of repossession. They’re reclaiming what was theirs, in defiance of a hugely powerful conservation and tourism industry that has enriched itself at their expense.

“If the Indian government really cares about tiger conservation, it will not only allow the Jenu Kuruba people to return, but encourage them to do so – because the science is clear that tigers thrive alongside the Indigenous people whose forests they live in.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

One of the world’s most isolated tribes will be wiped out if the Indian government presses ahead with a mega-development project on their island, according to a new report published today.

The report “Crushed: How India plans to sacrifice one of the world’s most isolated tribes to create ‘the new Hong Kong’” is published by Survival International.

It warns that the uncontacted Shompen people, who live only on Great Nicobar Island in the Indian Ocean, will not survive if the Great Nicobar Development Project goes ahead.

The project includes plans to build a mega-port, defense base, power station and new city of 650,000 people, and bring in around a million tourists and other visitors to the small island each year.

Indian government visualisation of the Great Nicobar mega-port, just one part of the huge project planned for the island.

Survival International said today that it is sending the report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, UN Special Rapporteurs, and other UN officials, and urging them to call for the project to be scrapped.

Thirty-nine genocide scholars wrote to the Indian government in February 2024 warning that the project would wipe out the Shompen if it went ahead.

Around 300 Shompen people live in the lush rainforests of the island’s interior, the majority of whom are uncontacted. Great Nicobar is part of the same island chain that is home to the uncontacted Sentinelese people, where an American influencer was arrested this month for trying to contact the tribe.

Survival International Director Caroline Pearce said today: “It’s appalling that the authorities in India are pressing ahead with this project that will wipe out the Shompen, one of the world’s most isolated tribes. While they’re prosecuting someone for going to the island of the Sentinelese, they cannot justify building a city of 650,000 people on the island of their uncontacted neighbors the Shompen.

“This project would seem absurd if it weren’t so deadly. The Shompen have the right to survive, and just want to be left in peace. The government must allow them to do so by scrapping this project, rather than pressing ahead and condemning the Shompen to annihilation.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

Reports that a US national has been arrested after landing on North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean to make contact with the uncontacted Sentinelese people are “deeply disturbing”, Survival International’s Director Caroline Pearce said today.

“It beggars belief that someone could be that reckless and idiotic. This person’s actions not only endangered his own life, they put the lives of the entire Sentinelese tribe at risk. It’s very well known by now that uncontacted peoples have no immunity to common outside diseases like flu or measles, which could completely wipe them out.

“The Sentinelese have made their wish to avoid outsiders incredibly clear over the years – I’m sure many remember the 2018 incident in which an American missionary, John Allen Chau, was killed by them after landing on their island to try to convert them to Christianity.

“It’s good news that the man in this latest incident has been arrested, but deeply disturbing that he was reportedly able to get onto the island in the first place. The Indian authorities have a legal responsibility to ensure that the Sentinelese are safe from missionaries, social media influencers, people fishing illegally in their waters and anyone else who may try to make contact with them.

Map showing the remote location of the Andaman Islands. Map from traveltwins.dk

“Uncontacted Indigenous peoples around the world are experiencing the invasion of their lands on a shocking scale. Countless uncontacted peoples in the Amazon are being invaded by loggers and gold-miners. The uncontacted Shompen of Great Nicobar Island, not far from North Sentinel, will be wiped out if India goes ahead with its plan to transform their island into “the Hong Kong of India.” The common factor in all these cases is governments’ refusal to abide by international law and recognize and protect uncontacted peoples’ territories.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

A West Papuan doctoral candidate has warned that indigenous noken-weaving practices back in her homeland are under threat with the world’s biggest deforestation project.

About 60 people turned up for the opening of her “Noken/Men: String Bags of the Muyu Tribe of Southern West Papua” exhibition by Veronika T Kanem at Auckland University today and were treated to traditional songs and dances by a group of West Papuan students from Auckland and Hamilton.

The three-month exhibition focuses on the noken — known as “men” — of the Muyu tribe from southern West Papua and their weaving cultural practices.

• READ MORE: Other West Papua noken reports

It is based on Kanem’s research, which explores the socio-cultural significance of the noken/men among the Muyu people, her father’s tribe.

“Indigenous communities in southern Papua are facing the world’s biggest deforestation project underway in West Papua as Indonesia looks to establish 2 million hectares  of sugarcane and palm oil plantations in the Papua region,” she said.

West Papua has the third-largest intact rainforest on earth and indigenous communities are being forced off their land by this project and by military.

The ancient traditions of noken-weaving are under threat.

Natural fibres, tree bark
Noken — called bilum in neighbouring Papua New Guinea — are finely woven or knotted string bags made from various natural fibres of plants and tree bark.

“Noken contains social and cultural significance for West Papuans because this string bag is often used in cultural ceremonies, bride wealth payments, child initiation into adulthood, and gifts,” Kanem said.

“This string bag has different names depending on the region, language and dialect of local tribes. For the Muyu — my father’s tribe — in Southern West Papua, they call it ‘men’.

In West Papua, noken symbolises a woman’s womb or a source of life because this string bag is often used to load tubers, garden harvests, piglets, and babies.

“My research examines the Muyu people’s connection to their land, forest, and noken weaving,” said Kanem.

“Muyu women harvest the genemo (Gnetum gnemon) tree’s inner fibres to make noken, and gift-giving noken is a way to establish and maintain relationships from the Muyu to their family members, relatives and outsiders.

“Drawing on the Melanesian and Indigenous research approaches, this research formed noken weaving as a methodology, a research method, and a metaphor based on the Muyu tribe’s knowledge and ways of doing things.”

Hosting pride
Welcoming the guests, Associate Professor Gordon Nanau, head of Pacific Studies, congratulated Kanem on the exhibition and said the university was proud to be hosting such excellent Melanesian research.

Professor Yvonne Underhill-Sem, Kanem’s primary supervisor, was also among the many speakers, including Kolokesa Māhina-Tuai of Lagi Maama, and Daren Kamali of Creative New

The exhibition provides insights into the refined artistry, craft and making of noken/men string bags, personal stories, and their functions.

An 11 minute documentary on the weaving process and examples of noken from Waropko, Upkim, Merauke, Asmat, Wamena, Nabire and Paniai was also screened, and a booklet is expected to be launched soon.

• The exhibition is at the Pacific Collaborative Space, L1, Herenga Matauranga Whanui, General Library Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, until July 3.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The sprawling business empire created by tribal leaders in northern Wisconsin was born of desperate times, as the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians faced financial ruin. Its subsequent success would be built on the desperate needs of others far from the reservation.

The tribe had made some poor choices as it sought to expand its fortunes beyond a modest casino in its home state of Wisconsin two decades ago. Grand plans for a floating casino off Cancun, Mexico, collapsed, and a riverboat gambling venture in Mississippi required more cash than the tribe had on hand.

The resulting loans — $50 million in bonds issued in 2008 at 12% — proved crushing. Struggling to make debt payments, tribal officials soon were forced to slash spending for essential programs on the reservation and lay off dozens of employees.

Protests erupted, with demonstrators barricading themselves inside a government building and demanding audits and investigations. When angry tribal members elected a new governing council, it refused to pay anymore. The tribe defaulted on a loan it had come to regret.

The LDF tribe turned to the one asset that could distinguish it in the marketplace: sovereign immunity.

This special status allowed it as a Native American tribe to enter the world of internet lending without interest rate caps, an option not open to other lenders in most states. The annual rates it charged for small-sum, installment loans frequently exceeded 600%.

Business partners, seeing the favorable math, were easy to find. So, too, were consumers who had run out of options to pay their bills. Their decisions to sign up for LDF loans often made things worse.

ProPublica traced the key decisions that put LDF on the path to becoming a prominent player in a sector of the payday lending industry that has long skirted regulation and drawn controversy.

LDF did not just dabble in this type of lending; it fully embraced it. Like other tribes that have taken this route, LDF built its success on a series of complex business arrangements, with roles and motives difficult to unravel.

Over time, ProPublica found, LDF signed off on deals involving outsiders with histories of predatory practices — associations that carried profound implications for the tribe. Not only did they put the tribe’s reputation at risk, they generated a barrage of costly lawsuits and questions of whether LDF was allowing partners to take advantage of tribal rights to skirt state usury laws.

In Boston, Brian Coughlin initially had no idea that a Native American tribe was involved in the small loan he took out with a high interest rate. He only learned about LDF after he filed for bankruptcy to seek protection from his creditors.

“I was definitely surprised,” he said. “I didn’t think they operated things like that.”

During the bankruptcy process, an LDF partner still hounded him to pay, which Coughlin said pushed him to a breaking point and a suicide attempt. Federal law prohibits chasing debtors who have filed for bankruptcy, and Coughlin sued the tribe in a dispute that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Last year, the court — in a decision with far-reaching implications for tribes — ruled that LDF could be held liable under the Bankruptcy Code.

His and other consumer lawsuits paint LDF as a front for outsiders who take an oversized cut of the proceeds, leaving LDF with only dollars per loan. Interviews and ProPublica’s review of records also show how heavily LDF relies on its partners for most of the essential operations. These descriptions are disputed by LDF, which has told ProPublica that it merely is outsourcing for much-needed expertise while still maintaining control.

In a statement to ProPublica this year, John Johnson Sr., LDF’s president, described the tribe’s lending business as “a narrative of empowerment, ethical business practice, and commitment to community enrichment.” He has declined to be interviewed and did not respond to written questions for this story.

Over time, LDF has set up at least two dozen internet lending companies and websites, ProPublica determined. Its loans are so pervasive the LDF tribe showed up as a creditor in roughly 1 out of every 100 bankruptcy cases sampled nationwide, as ProPublica reported in August.

This year, LDF and some of its business affiliates agreed to a federal class-action settlement in Virginia that, if finalized, will erase $1.4 billion in consumer debt and provide $37 million in restitution. Tribal defendants are responsible for $2 million of that; the tribe in a statement has indicated that its business arm would pay.

Tribal officials have consistently denied wrongdoing. A newsletter to tribal members as LDF was starting up its venture said the tribe “is not practicing any type of predatory lending.” In his statements to ProPublica for the August story, Johnson stressed that the tribe complies with tribal and federal law, that its lending practices are transparent, that its collections are done ethically and that the loans help distressed borrowers who have little access to credit.

LDF leaders have not publicly stated any desire to alter their business practices, even as some community members express concern.

“Feeding greed with unscrupulous business practices is crushing us,” one LDF member recently wrote on a community Facebook page.

After the bond debacle in the 2000s, LDF leaders felt stung by their outside financial advisers, believing they were deceived about the terms of the transaction and risks involved.

Moving forward, they wanted someone they could trust. They found that in Brent McFarland.

McFarland was not a tribal member, but he grew up near the reservation and had friends on the Tribal Council. McFarland, an investment adviser who’d run a restaurant and worked in real estate, offered some helpful advice to the tribe, and the council eventually hired him for a wider role. He helped it establish the Lac du Flambeau Business Development Corporation in 2012, governed by a board answerable to the Tribal Council. And he looked for ways LDF could make money, apart from gaming.

“I ended up meeting some people that were doing online lending,” he said in an interview.

Tribes could get into the industry — attracting willing partners with expertise in lending — without putting up any capital because sovereign immunity was its own bounty.

But as certain as LDF was that state laws wouldn’t apply to its operations, the tribe took a careful approach. LDF decided it would not lend to people in Wisconsin, including its own members. “It keeps our relationship with the state of Wisconsin healthy,” McFarland told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Peter Bildsten, who ran the state Department of Financial Institutions then, remembers visiting the reservation as it was embarking on the new venture. He recalled that he met some of LDF’s business partners, who recognized that the lending operation would be extremely lucrative but also potentially controversial.

“They talked about yeah, we are doing it, and we know there’s virtually nothing you can do about it and especially if we don’t lend to any people in Wisconsin. You can’t do anything,” Bildsten said. “It was almost kind of a dare.”

Many tribes, still suffering from a legacy of racism and inadequate federal resources, struggle to find economic solutions for their people. McFarland, who no longer works for LDF but does consulting for tribes, defended LDF’s decision to move into high-interest loans as a legitimate option.

“The business is offering a service where the interest rates and cost of borrowing are well disclosed to consumers,” he told ProPublica in an email. “It’s expensive, but if used responsibly can be more affordable than many other options. The costs and risks are not hidden from consumers.”

Johnson, LDF’s president, has said there was a rational reason for the tribe’s business partnerships: It needed outside expertise as it entered a new industry.

“But let me be more specific: Zero I.T. enterprise architects, data analysts, or marketing strategists lived on the Lac Du Flambeau reservation when the Tribal Council decided to enter this industry,” he wrote in an email to ProPublica in August.

LDF’s partners run their operations far from tribal land. ProPublica identified several Florida lawsuits that allege a straight-forward process: “The LDF Tribe mints a new ‘tribal’ limited liability company, supposedly organized under Tribal law, for each new investor. Each new investor then runs his or her own ‘tribally owned’ website, offering consumers loans at interest rates between 450% and 1100% annually.”

Those cases were settled or dismissed without LDF addressing the allegations.

LDF does not publicly disclose its partners. ProPublica identified one of them as RIVO Holdings, a fintech firm based in a high-rise in downtown San Diego that has serviced two LDF websites.

RIVO is an acronym for respect, integrity, value and opportunity. The company’s founder and CEO is Daniel Koetting. His personal website touts his employment of “over 200 local employees at RIVO.” His brother Mark, of Kansas, managed a separate lending portfolio for the tribe.

The brothers entered the tribal lending industry after facing regulatory scrutiny for previous lending operations. In 2006, Califonia issued a cease-and-desist order to both men for unlicensed lending; Daniel Koetting received a similar demand from New Hampshire in 2011.

Initially, the Koettings partnered with the Big Lagoon Rancheria tribe in California to offer high-interest loans beginning in 2013. But that relationship began to fall apart several years later.

The tribe alleged that the Koettings surreptitiously pushed customers to new lending companies set up with LDF, and an arbitrator awarded Big Lagoon Rancheria $14 million in 2018. Years of litigation followed as the Koettings fought the decision. The case is still pending.

“I actually called Lac du Flambeau and warned them and informed them that they were getting into business with Big Lagoon’s client list,” Virgil Moorehead, Big Lagoon Rancheria’s chairperson, told ProPublica.

Joseph Schulte Jr., who once worked at RIVO, likened one area of the company’s San Diego office to a Wall Street trading floor, with exuberant staff celebrating short-term wins, such as meeting daily sales goals. To keep the staff pumped up, he said, management brought in pallets of free Celsius energy drinks.

“People were making a lot of money working there,” Schulte said of RIVO Holdings.

Although figures for LDF’s loan portfolios are private, Daniel Koetting’s previous venture with the Big Lagoon Rancheria amassed approximately $83 million in revenue over five years, according to a legal filing.

Court papers, including divorce filings, show Daniel Koetting enjoying a lavish lifestyle in recent years, living in a five-bedroom, five-bath house in La Jolla, an affluent seaside enclave of San Diego. He owned thoroughbred horses, drove a Porsche and dabbled in motion pictures. He and his wife had three children. In the divorce, he reported household expenses in 2021 that included an average of $7,000 a month on groceries and eating out, plus an additional $5,000 a month for “entertainment, gifts and vacation.”

Daniel and Mark Koetting did not reply to emails, calls or letters from ProPublica seeking comment.

Meanwhile, the two companies that RIVO and LDF run — Evergreen Services and Bridge Lending Solutions — are associated with more than 200 complaints from customers since 2019, frequently about onerous interest rates and payment terms. “I just don’t understand how people can do this,” a California resident protested to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “This is a predatory lender and I am a victim.”

Bildsten, the former Wisconsin department head, believes that LDF tribal leaders are trying to help the reservation improve services, such as dental care, for its members and that the lending business is part of that laudable goal.

“They’re able to do some good stuff,” Bildsten said, “but the money is dirty.”

Brian Coughlin lit a cigar. Sitting in his Chevy Malibu with the sunroof open to let out the smoke and a bottle of pills next to him, he wondered: When will this end?

He’d faced many hurdles in life, from serious physical and mental health issues to the loss of his father. He’d also used bad judgment, overspending and loading up on multiple credit cards as he blew through a decent paycheck as head of trash collection for the city of Boston.

Like many other Americans with little to no savings and poor credit scores, he was enticed by online pitches for quick cash — offers that came with exorbitantly high interest rates.

Months earlier, in December 2019, he’d filed for bankruptcy, expecting relief. There would be payment plans and a court injunction halting contact from creditors — a key protection laid out in U.S. bankruptcy law. But one creditor would not give up.

Lendgreen, one of LDF’s initial companies, had loaned Coughlin $900 at an annual percentage rate of 741%. At the time of the bankruptcy, he owed $1,595. The company continued to call, email and text him, fueling his anxiety. A phone log shows Lendgreen called Coughlin 50 times during one four-month period.

“This is all for nothing,” Coughlin recalls thinking of the bankruptcy process.

That night in his Chevy, Coughlin took a fistful of pills and ended up in the hospital. Lendgreen still was calling him while he recovered. But now he was ready to fight.

Coughlin’s attorney filed a motion with the bankruptcy court in March 2020 asking a judge to order Lendgreen, the LDF tribe and LDF Business Development Corporation to stop harassing him.

The case was about more than just harassment, however. Coughlin wanted compensation for all that had happened. He asked the court to award him attorneys fees, medical costs, expenses for lost time from work while hospitalized and punitive damages.

To Coughlin’s surprise, LDF told the court that sovereign immunity protected it even in a federal bankruptcy case, and the bankruptcy judge in Massachusetts agreed. When Coughlin took the case to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and won, the tribe appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

As they dug into who actually violated the collections ban, Coughlin’s attorneys needed to unravel the business relationships surrounding Lendgreen, which no longer has an active website. That led them on an international paper chase from Wisconsin to Ontario, Latvia and Malta, an island in the Mediterranean, where an entity that provided capital for Lendgreen appeared to be based.

In gathering evidence, Coughlin’s lawyers obtained an agreement between Lendgreen and another company — Vivus Servicing Ltd. of Canada — showing Vivus was to handle most all operations of issuing and collecting the loans made in Lendgreen’s name. It also would retain most of the profits.

For each new or renewed loan, the contract called for Vivus to share $3.25 with LDF as well as $3.25 per loan payment, or not less than $10,000 a month.

Vivus Servicing had subcontracted certain administrative functions of the Lendgreen loans to 4finance Canada, an affiliate company of a European lending conglomerate based in Latvia, court records show. An attorney who represents Vivus and 4finance declined to comment.

“There’s money flowing to all sorts of places,” Coughlin’s attorney Richard Gottlieb said.

As he began to better understand the web of connections, Gottlieb concluded that LDF’s role in its lending operations was minimal. The partners, he said, performed all the key functions — “from the creation of the loans themselves to the maintenance of the computer software and internet sites to the collections personnel to the customer service reps to the management.”

Even though LDF fought in court to be able to pursue collections against people in bankruptcy, internal documents indicate that the head of LDF Holdings, which oversees the tribe’s lending enterprise, was not pleased with how a business partner treated Coughlin.

Coughlin inquires with Lendgreen about why its phone calls have not ceased.

Jessi Lorenzo, president of LDF Holdings at the time, communicated in May 2020 with 4finance Canada about Coughlin’s loan. Why had they not stopped soliciting repayment once notified that Coughlin had filed for bankruptcy, she asked in an email.

“Everything should have ceased then,” wrote Lorenzo, who was based in Tampa.

In a brief interview on her porch, Lorenzo declined to comment on the Coughlin case and said she did not want to be part of a tribal lending story that might be negative. Later, in an email, she wrote that she was proud to have worked for LDF as it “built a business that benefited their community, providing modern careers with upward mobility and good benefits in a remote part of Wisconsin.”

LDF tribal leaders don’t talk much about their business with outsiders. But there is little doubt that the lending business has altered the shape of the tribe’s finances, allowing LDF to move past its costly mistake of issuing $50 million in bonds for the Mississippi casino boat.

The Tribal Council agreed in 2017 to pay $4 million and finance an additional $23 million to settle claims against it after defaulting.

But the tribe and its partners continue to face new threats from a range of legal actions.

The attorneys in the Virginia case have promised future litigation against more LDF partners. And as LDF keeps lending, it opens its companies up to additional consumer lawsuits. Dozens of such cases have been filed since 2019, most of which end quickly, with undisclosed settlements.

McFarland takes issue with these types of cases against tribes. “The law firms filing class action lawsuits seek to paint tribes as either victims or villains in online lending,” he said in an email. “This approach has been employed against tribes since Europeans came to the Americas, whether Tribes are entering gaming, cannabis, selling tobacco, and a host of business opportunities.”

When Coughlin’s suit reached the Supreme Court, some of the issues involving tribal-lending partnerships were touched on, if only briefly.

During a hearing in April 2023, Justice Samuel Alito interrupted LDF’s lawyer as he was talking about sovereign immunity and the Constitutional Convention. Alito inquired about the tribe’s relationship with Lendgreen.

“Who actually operates this?” he asked.

“The tribe does, Your Honor,” replied attorney Pratik Shah, representing LDF. “This is not a rent-a-tribe situation.”

Shah said the enterprise employed 50 to 60 people working out of a headquarters on the reservation, though “they use third-party vendors, servicers and all, like any other business.”

Shah added: “This is a fully tribal operation.”

But the central issue was whether the tribe could be held liable for violating bankruptcy rules.

“What the tribe is saying is you can’t sue them for hundreds of thousands of dollars of actual damages,” Shah told the court. “That’s at the core of sovereign immunity.”

In June of last year, the high court sided with Coughlin, ruling 8-1 that there’s no sovereign immunity for tribes when it comes to the Bankruptcy Code.

Justice Clarence Thomas concurred in the ruling, not because of his reading of the Bankruptcy Code, but because he held that sovereign immunity does not apply to lawsuits arising from a tribe’s commercial activity conducted off-reservation.

Back in Bankruptcy Court, Coughlin continued to pursue LDF and Lendgreen for damages and legal fees. In mid-August, in the midst of settlement talks, Coughlin asked the court to pause the process required to unmask the outside entities involved with LDF as all sides tried to resolve the dispute. In September, a judge approved a settlement in which the tribe and Lendgreen agreed to pay Coughlin $340,000. LDF denied liability as part of the agreement.

At the same time, pressure is mounting on the tribe’s business partners. As part of the deal, the tribe will give Coughlin documents “with respect to the culpability and responsibility” of the outside partners, according to the settlement. That will enable Coughlin’s lawyers to dig further. LDF also will make a corporate representative available to testify in legal actions against their former business allies, if necessary.

“I want to see all the actors that are actually part of this scheme brought to justice, in a way,” said Coughlin, who now lives in Florida.

“I don’t necessarily believe the tribe is the orchestrator of this whole mess. I think they’re a pawn, unfortunately.”

To do the best, most comprehensive reporting on this opaque industry, we want to hear from more of the people who know it best. Do you work for a tribal lending operation, either on a reservation or for an outside business partner? Do you belong to a tribe that participates in this lending or one that has rejected the industry? Are you a regulator or lawyer dealing with these issues? Have you borrowed from a tribal lender? All perspectives matter to us. Please get in touch with Megan O’Matz at megan.omatz@propublica.org or 954-873-7576, or Joel Jacobs at joel.jacobs@propublica.org or 917-512-0297. Visit propublica.org/tips for information on secure communication channels.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Megan O’Matz and Joel Jacobs.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In bankruptcy filings and consumer complaints, thousands of people across the country make pleas for relief from high-interest loans with punishing annual rates that often exceed 600%.

Although they borrowed small sums online from a slew of businesses with catchy names — such as Loan at Last or Sky Trail Cash — their loans stemmed from the same massive operation owned by a small Native American tribe in a remote part of Wisconsin.

Over the past decade, the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians has grown to become a prominent player in the tribal lending industry, generating far-reaching impact and leaving a legacy of economic despair. A ProPublica analysis found companies owned by the LDF tribe showed up as a creditor in roughly 1 out of every 100 bankruptcy cases sampled nationwide.

That’s the highest frequency associated with any of the tribes doing business in this sector of the payday loan industry. And it translates to an estimated 4,800 bankruptcy cases, on average, per year.

ProPublica also found that LDF’s various companies have racked up more than 2,200 consumer complaints that were routed to the Federal Trade Commission since 2019 — more than any other tribe in recent years.

“THIS IS THE TEXTBOOK DEFINITION ON LOANSHARKING,” one Californian with an LDF loan complained in all caps in June 2023 to federal regulators. The person, whose name is redacted, argued that “no one should be expected to pay over $11,000 for a $1,200 loan,” calling the 790% rate “beyond predatory.”

In a separate complaint, a Massachusetts customer wrote, “I thought this kind of predatory lending was against the law.”

Such confusion is understandable. Loans like these are illegal under most state statutes. But tribal-related businesses, including LDF, claim that their sovereign rights exempt them from state usury laws and licensing requirements aimed at protecting consumers. And so these businesses operate widely, facing little pushback from regulators and relying on the small print in their loan agreements.

As LDF climbed in the industry, it kept a low profile, garnering little publicity. For years it operated from a call center above a smoke shop in the community’s small downtown, before moving to a sprawling vocational training building, built in part with federal money, off a less visible, two-lane road.

But staying under the radar just got harder. Court filings show that LDF tribal leaders and some of their nontribal business partners have come to an agreement with consumers in a 2020 federal class-action lawsuit filed in Virginia. Nearly 1 million borrowers could finally get relief.

The deal calls for the cancellation of $1.4 billion in outstanding loans. Tribal officials and their associates would also pay $37.4 million to consumers and the lawyers who brought the suit. Although they settled, LDF leaders have denied wrongdoing in the case, and its president told ProPublica it adheres to high industry standards in its lending operations.

A final resolution of the case will take months. If approved, the total settlement would be the largest ever secured against participants in the tribal lending industry, lawyers told the court.

“This is a big one,” said Irv Ackelsberg, a Philadelphia attorney who has faced off in court against other tribal lenders and followed this suit closely. “Is it going to stop tribal lending? Probably not because it’s just a fraction of what’s out there.”

The LDF tribe is central to the suit but is not named. Nor is LDF Holdings, the corporate umbrella over the various lending subsidiaries.

Knowing that both those entities likely would have been entitled to sovereign immunity, lawyers for the borrowers chose a different approach. Instead, they brought the case against members of the tribe’s governing council; high-level employees of LDF’s lending operations; and a nontribal business partner, Skytrail Servicing Group, and its owner, William Cheney Pruett.

Pruett also denied wrongdoing in the case. He did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica.

The proposed settlement notes that the tribal leaders and their partners understood that continuing to defend the case “would require them to expend significant time and money.” LDF, under the settlement, can continue its loan operations.

In emails to ProPublica, LDF President John Johnson Sr. defended the tribe’s lending business as legal and beneficial to both borrowers and the tribal members. He said the loans help people “without access to traditional financial services,” such as those with bad credit histories and people facing financial crises. Many borrowers, he said, have had positive experiences.

He also emphasized the economic benefits to the tribe, including jobs and revenue for vital services. “Please make no mistake: the programs and infrastructure developed through LDF Holdings’ revenue contributions have saved lives in our community and are helping preserve our culture and way of life,” he wrote in an email.

Johnson, who is a named defendant in the suit, and other tribal leaders declined requests to be interviewed.

Historically, some financial services firms formed alliances with tribes, gaining an advantage from the tribes’ sovereign immunity. For years, consumer lawyers and even federal prosecutors have raised questions about whether some tribal lending operations were just fronts for outsiders that received most of the profits and conducted all the key operations — from running call centers to underwriting and collecting.

The LDF tribe is one of only a few dozen of the nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes that have turned to the lending business as an economic lifeline. Typically those tribes are in isolated areas far from large population centers needed to support major industries or hugely profitable casinos. Online lending, or e-commerce, opened opportunities.

“If you look at the tribes who do it, they tend to be rural and they tend to be poor,” said Lance Morgan, CEO of a tribal economic development corporation owned by the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. “Because they don’t really have any other options to pursue from an economic development standpoint. They just don’t. That’s why this appeals to some tribes.”

He said his tribe considered getting into the lending industry but decided against it.

Tribes in the U.S. still suffer from the legacy of racism and betrayal that saw the U.S. government steal land from Native Americans and destroy cultures. Now, with limited economic resources and taxing options, tribal governments draw upon federal grants and subsidies to help fund essential community services — support promised in long-ago treaties, laws and policies in exchange for land. But these programs have proven to be “chronically underfunded and sometimes inefficiently structured,” according to a 2018 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

On the LDF reservation, which is home to about 3,600 people, the median household income is under $52,000, and 20% of the population lives below the federal poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. On lands that are chock-full of lakes, streams and wetlands, the LDF people operate a fish hatchery, hunt deer and cultivate wild rice. The tribe also has a casino, hotel and convention center.

LDF entered the loan business in 2012 and has set up at least two dozen lending companies and websites on its way to massive expansion, a ProPublica examination found. LDF owns the companies and works with outside firms to operate its businesses, which offer short-term installment loans.

Unlike traditional payday loans, these are not due by the next pay period but have longer terms. Borrowers show proof of income and typically authorize the company to make automatic withdrawals from their bank accounts.

To do the best, most comprehensive reporting on this opaque industry, we want to hear from more of the people who know it best. Do you work for a tribal lending operation, either on a reservation or for an outside business partner? Do you belong to a tribe that participates in this lending, or one that has rejected the industry? Are you a regulator or lawyer dealing with these issues? Have you borrowed from a tribal lender? All perspectives matter to us. Please get in touch with Megan O’Matz at megan.omatz@propublica.org or 954-873-7576, or Joel Jacobs at joel.jacobs@propublica.org or 917-512-0297. Visit propublica.org/tips for information on secure communication channels.

Details of the tribe’s business operations are not public. A July 2014 tribal newsletter reported that LDF had three lending companies employing four tribal members. By 2022, an LDF attorney told the Virginia judge that LDF Holdings, the lending parent company, employed about 50 people on the reservation. Johnson told ProPublica it currently employs 170 people “who live on or near the reservation,” of which 70% are tribally enrolled.

Each year, on reservation land, LDF now hosts the Tribal Lending Summit, a gathering of staff, vendors and prospective partners. Attendee lists posted online show dozens of representatives of software companies, call centers, marketing firms, customer acquisition businesses and debt collection agencies.

After this year’s event, in June, the LDF business hosts posted a congratulation message on social media: ”Here’s to another year of growth, learning, and collaboration! We look forward to continuing this journey together and seeing you all at next year’s summit."

Like many operators in this corner of the lending industry, LDF has been forced to defend its business practices in court. It has been subject to at least 40 civil suits filed by consumers since 2019, ProPublica found.

The suits typically allege violations of state usury laws and federal racketeering or fair credit reporting statutes. Johnson, in his statements to ProPublica, said LDF follows tribal and federal regulations, and he cited LDF’s sovereign status as the primary reason state laws on lending don’t apply to its business practices.

“Expecting a Tribe to opine on and/or submit to State regulatory oversight is akin to expecting Canada to submit to or speak on the laws of France,” he wrote.

Most suits against LDF’s lending companies settle quickly with the terms kept confidential. Consumers can be at a disadvantage because of the arbitration agreements in the fine print of their loan contracts, which attempt to restrict their ability to sue.

Karen Brostek, a registered nurse in Florida, borrowed $550 in 2017 from LDF’s Loan at Last at an annual percentage rate of 682%. The contract required her to pay back $2,783 over nine months.

The agreement with LDF required her to pay $2,233 in finance charges on a $550 loan.

It wasn’t her first foray into short-term borrowing. She said her salary did not cover her expenses and she had “to borrow from Peter to pay Paul.”

Loan at Last tried numerous times to collect the debt, even threatening in one phone call to have her jailed, she said. Finally, in August 2019, she satisfied the obligation.

Brostek sued LDF Holdings in small claims court in Pasco County in 2021. The suit cited Florida laws that make it a third-degree felony to issue loans with APRs over 45%.

The parties settled within weeks. Brostek recalls receiving about $750. LDF’s Johnson did not comment on Brostek’s case in his response to ProPublica.

She said she does not begrudge the tribe making money but said, “We need to find another way to help them so they don’t feel they’re backed into a corner and this is their only alternative.”

The Virginia class-action suit claimed that LDF’s governing council delegated the daily operations of the lending businesses “to non-tribal members.” Mirroring allegations in other civil actions, the suit claims that LDF’s partnerships were exploiting sovereign immunity to make loans that otherwise would be illegal.

According to the plaintiffs, LDF Holdings entered into agreements that allow nontribal outsiders to handle and control most aspects of the lending businesses. That includes “marketing, underwriting, risk assessment, compliance, accounting, lead generation, collections, and website management for the businesses,” the suit said. For years, the president of LDF Holdings was a woman who lived in Tampa, Florida. She is a named defendant in the suit, which says she is not a member of the tribe.

Johnson told ProPublica that early on the tribe lacked expertise in the industry and that its partnerships were simply an example of outsourcing, “a standard practice in many American business sectors.”

His statement added, “Recruiting outside talent and capital to Indian country is a mission-critical skill in Tribal economic development.”

The amount of revenue that comes to the tribe is undisclosed, but the class-action suit says the contract with one of its partners, Skytrail Servicing, resulted in only “a nominal flat fee” for LDF.

The 2014 servicing agreement between Skytrail Servicing and LDF is sealed in the court record, and details about the arrangement are largely redacted. In one filing, Skytrail Servicing denies an allegation from the plaintiffs that the tribe received only $3.50 per originated loan.

In a separate filing in the suit, Johnson, the tribal president, said LDF’s lending profits are distributed to the tribe’s general fund, which helps pay for the tribal government, including essential services such as police, education and health care.

The legal strategy crafted by the Virginia consumer protection firm Kelly Guzzo PLC relied heavily on a 2021 federal appeals court decision that concluded that tribal lending was off-reservation conduct to which state law applied. The court found that while a tribe itself cannot be sued for its commercial activities, its members and officers can be.

The class-action suit alleges that tribal officials and their associates conspired to violate state lending laws, collecting millions of dollars in unlawful debts. “In sum, we allege that they are the upper level management of a purely unlawful business that makes illegal loans in Virginia, Georgia, and elsewhere throughout the country,” lawyer Andrew Guzzo said in a September 2022 hearing, referring to LDF officials.

“What I’m trying to say, in other words, is this isn’t a case that involves a lawful business, such as a real estate brokerage firm, that happens to have a secret side scheme involving a few rogue employees,” he said. “The people that are overseeing this are overseeing a business that makes unlawful loans and nothing else.”

The most consequential aspect of the settlement plan is the debt relief it would offer an estimated 980,000 people who were LDF customers over seven years — from July 24, 2016, through Oct. 1, 2023. Those who had obtained loans during that period and still owed money would not be subject to any further collection efforts, canceling an estimated $1.4 billion in outstanding debt.

Eligibility for cash awards is dependent on the state where borrowers live and how much they paid in interest. Nevada and Utah have no interest rate restrictions, so borrowers there aren’t entitled to any money back.

The tribal officials who are listed as defendants have agreed to pay $2 million of the $37.4 million cash settlement. The remaining amount would come from nontribal partners involved in five of the tribe’s lending subsidiaries.

That includes $6.5 million from Skytrail Servicing Group and Pruett, a Texas businessman who has been involved in the payday loan industry for more than two decades.

The largest portion of the settlement — $20 million — would come from unnamed “non-tribal individuals and entities” involved with LDF’s Loan at Last, the company that gave Brostek her loan.

The consumer attorneys are not done. They noted in a memorandum in the case that other LDF affiliates who did not settle in this instance “will be sued in a new case.”

Because tribal lenders are not licensed by states, there is very little public information about the size of the industry.

Bankruptcies give a rare window into the prevalence of the industry because when people file for bankruptcy, they must list all the creditors they owe money to. Bankruptcies are filed in federal court and are tracked in PACER, the federal courts’ electronic records system. But PACER charges a fee for every document viewed and cannot be comprehensively searched by creditor list, making it impractical to identify every bankruptcy case with a tribal lender.

Instead, we selected a random sample of 10,000 bankruptcy cases using the Federal Judicial Center’s bankruptcy database, which lists every case filed nationwide (but does not include creditor information). We looked at Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 cases — the types used by individuals — filed from October 2020 to September 2023. We then scraped the creditor list for each of these cases from PACER and identified which cases involved tribal lenders.

We ultimately identified 119 cases with LDF companies as creditors — 1.19% of our total sample, the most of any tribe. Extrapolating these figures across all 1.2 million Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy cases during these three years gave an estimated 15,000 cases involving LDF loans during this period (with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 2,600). That comes out to an estimated 4,800 cases per year, on average. Many factors can contribute to bankruptcy, and LDF loans were not the only debts these bankruptcy filers faced. Still, these figures showed that LDF stood out among other tribal lenders and had a substantial presence across bankruptcies nationwide.

We also looked at consumer complaint data that we acquired through public records requests to the Federal Trade Commission, which collects complaints made to various sources including the Better Business Bureau, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the FTC itself. We focused our requests on several categories we found to be related to lending products, such as payday loans and finance company lending. Our tallies are likely an undercount: Complaints against tribal lenders may have fallen under other categories, such as debt collection, though our explorations found this to be less common. We found more than 2,200 complaints about LDF companies since 2019, the most of any tribal lending operation.

We compiled hundreds of tribal lending company and website names that we used to search through the creditor and complaint data. However, due to the ever-shifting industry landscape in which websites often go offline while new ones pop up, it is possible that we did not identify every complaint and bankruptcy involving tribal lenders.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Megan O’Matz and Joel Jacobs.

Campaigners say they’re a graphic illustration of the urgent need to revoke all the logging licenses in the area, and recognize that the territory belongs to the Mashco Piro people, which Survival believes is the largest uncontacted tribe in the world.

More than 50 Mashco Piro people have appeared near the Yine village of Monte Salvado, in SE Peru, in recent days. In a separate incident, another group, of 17, appeared near the neighboring village of Puerto Nuevo. The Yine, who are not uncontacted, speak a language related to Mashco Piro, and have previously reported that the Mashco Piro angrily denounced the presence of loggers on their land.

Several logging companies hold timber concessions inside the territory that belongs to the Mashco Piro people. The nearest is just a few miles from where the Mashco Piro were filmed.

Mashco Piro men on the banks of a river near near the Yine village of Monte Salvado, in Southeast Peru. ©Survival

One company, Canales Tahuamanu, that operates inside the Mashco Piro territory has built more than 200km of roads for its logging trucks to extract timber. It is certified by the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) for its supposedly sustainable and ethical operations there, despite the Peruvian government acknowledging eight years ago that it is cutting down trees within Mashco Piro territory.

Survival International is calling on the FSC to withdraw its certification of the company’s operations. More than 8,000 people have already lobbied the FSC.

Alfredo Vargas Pio, President of local Indigenous organization FENAMAD said today: “This is irrefutable evidence that many Mashco Piro live in this area, which the government has not only failed to protect, but actually sold off to logging companies. The logging workers could bring in new diseases which would wipe out the Mashco Piro, and there’s also a risk of violence on either side, so it’s very important that the territorial rights of the Mashco Piro are recognized and protected in law.”

Survival International Director Caroline Pearce said today: “These incredible images show that very large numbers of uncontacted Mashco Piro people are living just a few miles from where loggers are poised to start operations. Indeed one logging company, Canales Tahuamanu, is already at work inside Mashco Piro territory, which the Mashco Piro have made clear they oppose.

“This is a humanitarian disaster in the making – it’s absolutely vital that the loggers are thrown out, and the Mashco Piro’s territory is properly protected at last. The FSC must cancel its certification of Canales Tahuamanu immediately – failure to do so will make a mockery of the entire certification system.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

“We’ve been through numerous droughts over the years,” Kenneth McDarmet said, who is a Tule River tribal member and former councilman. “It’s going to be wonderful to watch them do their thing.”

Around 80 percent of the Tule River Reservation’s drinking water comes from the Tule watershed. Because the area is so important for the health of the community, the tribe has been preparing the area since 2014, building man-made dams to help the new beavers adapt more quickly. 

Temperatures worldwide are expected to get hotter, increasing drought and creating conditions that make wildfires bigger and more deadly. In California, some of the worst wildfires on record have happened in the last five years partly due to drought. In 2020, three fires burned almost a million acres in the Sierra Nevada Forest, and in 2021 a wildfire burned an additional 1.5 million acres. Bringing beavers back may offer a break.

Prior to colonization, the North American beaver population was estimated to be around 200 million. But in the 1800’s, beavers were hunted for their pelts by settlers, decimating the population, while farmers and landowners viewed — and still view them — as pests. Today, the beaver population is estimated to be about 12 million. 

But in recent years there has been a growing interest in traditional ecological knowledge from tribes, and the beaver has become celebrated as an ecological engineer. 

In 2022, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, or CDFW, secured funding for the Beaver Restoration Program, a program designed to restore the beaver population and support conservation efforts. In 2023, the CDFW recognized beavers as a keystone species, an animal that affects other animals on the landscape like bison or bees, and thus influences the ecosystem in major ways. Their absence typically has negative effects on the landscape and its interconnected ecosystems. 

Today, the CDFW program partners with tribes, non-profit organizations, land-owners, and state and federal entities to restore beaver populations and habitats in an effort to improve climate change, drought, and wildfire resilience in California. 

“We expect better habitat conditions for native critters on the land,” said Krysten Kallum, a public information officer with the CDFW. “It creates a refuge for plants and wildlife.”

More water means more plants that can attract other types of animals to the area. The CDFW expects to see better habitat development for amphibians like the western pond turtles, southern mountain yellow-legged frogs, and southwestern willow flycatchers, which will help increase biodiversity. 

McDarment, of Tule River, said that tribal pictographs show beavers living in the area, and it’s good to see them here again.  

“My hope is to have beaver throughout the reservation,” he said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Tule River Tribe of California recruits an old ally in its fight against wildfires: Beavers on Jun 28, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Taylar Dawn Stagner.

One of the most senior politicians in Indonesia has said the government should protect an uncontacted tribe whose territory is being destroyed for the world’s largest nickel mine.

Senate Leader AA LaNyalla Mahmud Mattalitti, a close ally of President-elect Prabowo, said Hongana Manyawa people should be protected from nickel mining on their land. He urged the government to “immediately intervene to provide protection to the indigenous tribe.”

Up to 500 uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people live on Halmahera island, about 1,500 miles NW of Jakarta. They refuse interactions with outsiders and rely entirely on their rainforest for survival. Contact with outsiders can kill them through exposure to diseases to which they have no immunity. Their rainforest home sits on huge deposits of nickel and is being torn apart for mining. One of those mines – the largest nickel mine in the world – is run by Weda Bay Nickel, attracted by the global boom in nickel for electric car batteries.

Eramet’s Weda Bay Nickel mine on the territory of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people in Halmahera, Indonesia. © Survival

Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution specifically recognizes the protection of Indigenous tribes, LaNyalla said. He added that it’s vital to ensure the Hongana Manyawa can be “independent over all matters relating to their livelihoods.” He called on Halmahera’s North Maluku provincial government to revisit their land planning regulations to ensure the Hongana Manyawa would no longer be displaced by mining.

LaNyalla’s comments were prompted by the viral spread of a video showing uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people forced by the destruction of their rainforest home to beg for food from Weda Bay Nickel miners – the very people responsible for that destruction.

Uncontacted Hongana Manyawa appear at a Weda Bay Nickel mining camp.

The uncontacted Hongana Manyawa are becoming effectively forced to beg for food from the same companies destroying their rainforest home.

The mining operations are run by French company Eramet, which has known about the presence of uncontacted Hongana Manyawa in their concession since 2013, yet continues to mine on their territories regardless.

This is believed to be the first time the plight of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa has received the direct attention of the Indonesian central government. LaNyalla’s comments also follow Tesla’s recent announcement that the company is exploring the need for a mining no-go zone to protect the rights and territories of uncontacted Indigenous people in Indonesia. Tesla included the statement in its 2023 Impact Report, issued in May, after Survival International supporters sent more than 20,000 emails to electric vehicle companies, mining companies and the Indonesian government calling for a mining no-go-zone.

LaNyalla said: “Whatever form it takes, I ask that development does not displace the surrounding communities, especially the indigenous tribe who lives in the interior, where they depend on the forest.” There’s not much time. The recent video reveals the rapid destruction of the Hongana Manyawa’s rainforest home.

Survival’s Director Caroline Pearce said: “This is an unprecedented announcement and offers a lifeline to the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa. The solution is clear: Their territory must be protected and must be free from mining and other developments. Eramet and other companies must abide by international law and stop mining on these territories, where they clearly have no consent.”

Survival calls upon local and national governments in Indonesia to urgently demarcate and protect the territory of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa and establish a no-go zone to protect them against the catastrophic effects of mining and forced contact.

Pearce said: “Time is ticking for the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa. Their territory must be urgently protected, with a no-go-zone established before it’s too late.”

Notess:

1. Out of a total population of approximately 3,000 Hongana Manyawa people, between 300 and 500 are uncontacted, and could be wiped out. Mining destroys their rainforest home, and the mine workers bring diseases for which the uncontacted people have no immunity.

2. Survival is calling on all electric vehicle companies, including BMW, Volkswagen, and BYD, to commit to not source any materials from uncontacted tribes’ territories and for Tesla to make this their formal policy.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

One of the most senior politicians in Indonesia has said the government should protect an uncontacted tribe whose territory is being destroyed for the world’s largest nickel mine.

Senate Leader AA LaNyalla Mahmud Mattalitti, a close ally of President-elect Prabowo, said Hongana Manyawa people should be protected from nickel mining on their land. He urged the government to “immediately intervene to provide protection to the indigenous tribe.”

Up to 500 uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people live on Halmahera island, about 1,500 miles NW of Jakarta. They refuse interactions with outsiders and rely entirely on their rainforest for survival. Contact with outsiders can kill them through exposure to diseases to which they have no immunity. Their rainforest home sits on huge deposits of nickel and is being torn apart for mining. One of those mines – the largest nickel mine in the world – is run by Weda Bay Nickel, attracted by the global boom in nickel for electric car batteries.

Eramet’s Weda Bay Nickel mine on the territory of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people in Halmahera, Indonesia. © Survival

Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution specifically recognizes the protection of Indigenous tribes, LaNyalla said. He added that it’s vital to ensure the Hongana Manyawa can be “independent over all matters relating to their livelihoods.” He called on Halmahera’s North Maluku provincial government to revisit their land planning regulations to ensure the Hongana Manyawa would no longer be displaced by mining.

LaNyalla’s comments were prompted by the viral spread of a video showing uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people forced by the destruction of their rainforest home to beg for food from Weda Bay Nickel miners – the very people responsible for that destruction.

Uncontacted Hongana Manyawa appear at a Weda Bay Nickel mining camp.

The uncontacted Hongana Manyawa are becoming effectively forced to beg for food from the same companies destroying their rainforest home.

The mining operations are run by French company Eramet, which has known about the presence of uncontacted Hongana Manyawa in their concession since 2013, yet continues to mine on their territories regardless.

This is believed to be the first time the plight of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa has received the direct attention of the Indonesian central government. LaNyalla’s comments also follow Tesla’s recent announcement that the company is exploring the need for a mining no-go zone to protect the rights and territories of uncontacted Indigenous people in Indonesia. Tesla included the statement in its 2023 Impact Report, issued in May, after Survival International supporters sent more than 20,000 emails to electric vehicle companies, mining companies and the Indonesian government calling for a mining no-go-zone.

LaNyalla said: “Whatever form it takes, I ask that development does not displace the surrounding communities, especially the indigenous tribe who lives in the interior, where they depend on the forest.” There’s not much time. The recent video reveals the rapid destruction of the Hongana Manyawa’s rainforest home.

Survival’s Director Caroline Pearce said: “This is an unprecedented announcement and offers a lifeline to the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa. The solution is clear: Their territory must be protected and must be free from mining and other developments. Eramet and other companies must abide by international law and stop mining on these territories, where they clearly have no consent.”

Survival calls upon local and national governments in Indonesia to urgently demarcate and protect the territory of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa and establish a no-go zone to protect them against the catastrophic effects of mining and forced contact.

Pearce said: “Time is ticking for the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa. Their territory must be urgently protected, with a no-go-zone established before it’s too late.”

Notess:

1. Out of a total population of approximately 3,000 Hongana Manyawa people, between 300 and 500 are uncontacted, and could be wiped out. Mining destroys their rainforest home, and the mine workers bring diseases for which the uncontacted people have no immunity.

2. Survival is calling on all electric vehicle companies, including BMW, Volkswagen, and BYD, to commit to not source any materials from uncontacted tribes’ territories and for Tesla to make this their formal policy.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

A map of the Tulare Basin from 1853.

“I am haunted by waters.”

– Norman Maclean

“We have to keep vision in place along with practical reflections.”

— Cornel West

In the spring of 2024, I met top members of the Tachi Yokuts Tribal Environmental Protection Agency at their offices on the Santa Rosa Rancheria near Lemoore CA. During the extremely wet winter a year earlier, the great Tulare Lake had once again overflowed its dams, dikes, levees and ditches, as it does every once in a while despite all the efforts of government and agribusiness, and spread to its full size of 800 square miles just south of the Rancheria, The return of the lake brought new faith and determination to these extraordinary people, who have lived here since long before the coming of the Europeans whom they have barely managed to survive.

I happened to have visited the Santa Rosa Rancheria long ago in 1966, when it consisted of a few shacks, most houses on wheels and cars on jacks on dusty dirt roads. The Yokuts people, composed of 60 tribes before Spanish arrival in the late 18^th century, had inhabited the entire San Joaquin Valley from the Sacramento Delta to the Tehachapi Range and a chunk of the Sierra foothills. Their language, part of the Penutian group, spread throughout Central California from the Southern Valley Yokuts to the Modocs on the Oregon border. An estimated 20,000 Tachi Yokuts lived around Tulare Lake, the largest lake west of the Mississippi, in what is now Kings County, an area about the size of Rhode Island, located between Fresno and Bakersfield, devoted for the last century to the production of cotton. Tulare Lake was the center of California Native religious life prior to the coming of the missions.

“We are the people of the lake,” Ken Barrios, Tachi tribal cultural liaison, told me.

After the Spanish arrived, the Tachi Yokuts suffered the common fate of California Indians: enslavement and suppression of culture and religion by the missions and haciendas,  and epidemics that killed most of their tribe; later, from the US settlers and goldminers, genocidal attack, removal from their homeland to the west side of the valley and to Fort Tejon for a time, and flight to the Sierra foothills as Yokuts villages throughout the San Joaquin Valley were destroyed by American yeomen farming families.

In 1921, the government gave 40 Tachi a 40-acre rancheria, where they lived below the poverty line, many “in tule huts, tin houses, old cars and chicken coops,” while they watched cotton growers drain their sacred lake. At that time, the average education was at the 3^rd grade level and most of the people were farmworkers. By the 1980s the rancheria had grown to 170 acres, 200 people were living there and the average education was at the 8^th grade level. With the arrival in 1988 of the federal Indian Gaming Regulation Act, the Tachi opened a bingo parlor that became quite successful and in 1994 the Tachi Palace Casino brought in slot machines. The casino now employs 1,500 people in a vast casino/hotel/restaurant complex and the average educational level in the tribe has risen to high school and college graduates.^.

Today, 750 Tachi and 150 non-Native residents of the Racheria look out on land that has subsided an average of six feet due to a century of agribusiness overdrafting of groundwater from the drained bottom of Tulare Lake.^2. However, now they confidently assert that they can control their destiny and bring back the lake, permanently.

“Before the white man,” Hank Brenard said, “California was tribes taking care of each other. They all had the same religion, and it came from the Yokuts; it was eradicated by churches in the Valley, but it stayed up north, with the Hupa, Karok, Yurok, and others.”

Brenard , director of the Tachi Environmental Protection Agency, is himself from the Bear River Band, located near Eureka. He was hired because of his expertise, gained in the decades’ long struggle of tribes along the Klamath River to remove a half a dozen hydroelectric dams to restore the native fishery.

“We are water people,” Barrios said. “We are people for Tulare Lake. The Tachi was in charge of the rituals on the lake in the old days, he added. “They ask us, ‘Who do you consider the people?’ The Tachi regards everyone as ‘the people.’ We hire everyone, we have over 2,000 employees. And the benefits (for non-tribal employees) are as good as our tribal members.”

“We put all people first,” Brenard added.

The first thing Brenard and Barrios wanted me to know was that there is a distinct tribal viewpoint: “If you had a lake, you wouldn’t have homeless, you’d have campers.

Your attitude toward a homeless person is ‘shame on you.’ Our attitude is ‘shame on us.’ We have a tribe.” Barrios added.

“We won’t leave. Everyone else will,” Barrios said.

“If it takes 50 or 500 years, this tribe can bring back life to the valley This valley has history that needs to be remembered.”

And the key to restoring life to the valley, he left no doubt, is the return of a permanent Tulare Lake.

“The people who live here welcome the tribe and its environmental management. The biggest difficulty is between Tachi and absentee agribusiness owners,” he said.

The two largest farmers in the Tulare Lake Basin are the Boswells, three generations of whom have resided in a mansion in Pasadena, and Sandridge Partners, whose owner, John Vidovich, lives on the San Francisco Peninsula.

The Tachis are the most local of all Kings County residents and contribute to the general welfare. To improve air quality, about as  bad as it gets in the state, the tribe is helping local school buses and electrical vehicle systems. They are applying for grants for electric vehicles to set up an electric bus station and to train mechanics for electrical vehicles.

Among other gifts, the tribe regularly contributes money to the police, but has yet to get acknowledgement for it.

“The County staff works well with the tribal staff,” a staffer said, “but not at the decision-making level.”

The Tachis own 3,600 acres of land in the Tulare Lake Basin, yet they don’t have a seat on any of the boards of the five water districts in the basin. The districts argue that because the land is owned by a sovereign government and half of it is in trust with the federal government, the tribe doesn’t meet their ownership criteria for voting membership.

It is nearly impossible for an old-time Anglo resident of the Valley to imagine dislodging the control of the corrupt combine of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, the State Water Project, the Army Corps of Engineers, and agribusiness oligarchs the size of the J. G. Boswell Co. (largest cotton grower in the world) and Vidovich.

Jim Boswell and Clarence Salyer (the former second largest grower in the Tulare Basin) by various means had compelled the federal Bureau of Reclamation to exempt the growers of their part of the San Joaquin Valley from the 160-acre limitation on contracts for federal water; they were major proponents of the State Water Project, which delivers water to the region without any acreage limitation; they were among the major successful opponents of the Peripheral Canal project for Sacramento River water to bypass the Delta; and they successfully promoted the Army Corps of Engineers rather than the BOR to build dams to drain the lake and store irrigation water on the four rivers that flow into the Tulare Lake Basin because the Army has no 160-acre limitation.^{3. 4.}

But today, Native Americans have laws on their side. The passage in the 1970s of the most important federal environmental laws – the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water and Clean Air acts – along with similar laws in California including the all-important California Environmental Quality Act, together with the  federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 that legalized casinos on reservations (now worth more than $40 billion a year to the tribes), have increased the tribes’ power and prestige in a number of ways. But before the casinos, Californians should recognize the heroic labors of Rupert and Jeannette Costo for decades of research against tremendous opposition from the Catholic Church and various local and state entities to write about genocide in the missions. ^5.

Brenard explained how the Tachi project is conceivable and even likely to come to pass. The vision for a permanent Tulare Lake rises on a scaffolding of new laws. There are declarations by governors Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom, which acknowledge the brutal treatment California Indians received at the hands of miners and their early governments, mandating that the tribes be included in environmental management decisions in their regions, even establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.^6.

There is also legislation that alters the California Environmental Quality Act to mandate that tribes be consulted on environmental impact statements on properties beyond their reservations yet in their traditional territories. A law that has been on the books since 1937, state Fish and Game Code 5937, is largely responsible for returning water to the San Joaquin River between the Friant Dam and the Mendota Pool for the first time in more than 60 years. Felix E. Smith, retired US Fish and Wildlife Service fish biologist (one of two who first discovered what heavy metals and pesticide residue drain water from Westlands Water District did to hatching waterfowl on Kesterson Wildlife Refuge) described the importance of state Fish and Game Code section 5937 in a report in 2014 to Save the Water Association.^7.

Brenard said that the state Department of Fish and Wildlife would be ready to take down the old hydroelectric dams on the Kings, Kaweah, Tule and Kern rivers that currently store water that would naturally flow into a permanent lake.

“Put the lake back, send water to who needs it, set up a new model. Water policy has to change. It could change here,” Brenard said.

Dr. Smith in the same report provided a description of the Public Trust Doctrine, the basis for the 1983 Mono Lake Decision, denying Los Angeles Department of Water and Power the right to all the water from creeks flowing to Mono Lake.

TheTachi EPA raises in the form of a vision the fundamental issue in Kings County and the rest of the San Joaquin Valley: Is water for people and their environment or for agribusiness crops, often largely for export (particularly cotton and almonds)? Is the water for small farmers who live on their farms (including their drinking water) and other rural residents? Is it for the townspeople of Kings County – its teachers, local business and professional people, farm-equipment dealers and mechanics, farm workers, cotton-gin workers, et al; or is it the property of absentee owned agribusiness corporations? Will the surface water and groundwater of Central California continue to be considered a commodity to be expropriated by agribusiness as property by whatever means possible, or will it come to be considered a natural resource to be intelligently managed, first for sustainable, environmentally viable permanent wetlands, suitable for inhabitants, as it was before agribusiness?

Should water be considered a cultural resource protected by the Public Trust Doctrine or the alleged private property of big growers to be sold to Southern California water districts?

“There used to be wetlands,” Ken Barrios said. “When they drained it, it changed the weather, no more tule fogs, the funguses on the trees gone, they used to be a food source, evergreen trees are dying because the water table dropped.”

When I told them I’d seen a young Magpie that morning, they said they thought that was probably because of the lake, too. There is still a lake of 60-80 acres left.

But Brenard added that his office had sunk a foot in the last year and his horse got sick on the water at his place to bring us back to the problem of how to realize the vision.

Another question the Tachi EPA panel is asking is: Could the tribe take the Tulare Lake Basin by eminent domain? Brenard cited cases where memoranda of understanding has been reached between tribes and state and federal resource agencies for the co-management of wildlands and fisheries.

A month before our first interview, the federal Department of Interior had announced a co-management agreement on the bi-state Klamath River: “The collaboration and cooperation reached today in the Klamath Basin is a critical step forward as we work to support healthy ecosystems and water reliability in the region for generations to come,” said Secretary Deb Haaland.”^.

The Yokuts region covers around 30 of California’s 58 counties, Brenard said, and that leaves lots of opportunities.  But the Tachis’ focus is on removing the Army Corps dams on the Kings, Kaweah, Tule and Kern rivers, and the one on Deer Creek in order to make a permanent lake possible by taking control of the water away from growers.

I’d asked earlier about the recent probation order the state Water Resources Control Board had imposed on the five water districts that control the Tulare Lake Basin. Initially, the order will require fees for pumping groundwater but if the districts fail to come up with a plan acceptable to the criteria of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014, the state may impose pumping limits. Shana Powers, the tribal historical preservation officer, showed us how the probation order is perhaps not as serious as it looks, though, because each of the water districts has a different accounting system and therefore it will be impossible for regulators to figure out how much water is actually being pumped out of the Tulare Lake Basin, This is a tactic the big growers figured out a long time ago.

The big growers will do all right because they have contracts for surface water with the state and the feds and they own large portions of the ditches that divey up Kings River water. But the smaller growers who rely mainly on groundwater will be squeezed hard, per usual, unable to compete with their larger neighbors for what groundwater is left at ever greater depths, more expensive to find and to pump.

So, the probation order is just a familiar bit of the jolly old agribusiness corruption around water we can chuckle about at the coffee shop as the whole Valley sinks and the water turns bad.

That’s why we need visions. What we get from the government are detailed analyses of the disaster, replete with results from all the latest methods and technologies of measurement, and too often corruption of its own regulations.

The post Triumph and Vision: the Tachi Tribe Environmental Protection Agency appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bill Hatch.

“In its own way, recycling is a form of decolonization for tribal members,” Johnson said. “We have to decolonize our present to make a better future for tomorrow.“

The Coushatta Reservation, in southern Louisiana, is small, made up of about 300 tribal members, and rural — the nearest Walmart is 40 minutes away. Recycling hasn’t been popular in the area, but as the risks from climate change have grown, so has the tribe’s interest. In 2014, the tribe took action and started gathering materials from tribal offices and departments, created recycling competitions for the community, and started teaching kids about recycling. 

Recently, federal grant money has been made available to tribes to help start and grow recycling programs. Last fall, the Coushatta received $565,000 from the Environmental Protection Agency for its small operation. The funds helped repair a storage shed, build a facility for the community to use, and continue educational outreach. But it’s not enough to serve the area’s 3,000 residents of Native and non-Native recyclers for the long haul. 

Typically, small tribes don’t have the resources to run recycling programs because the operations have to be financially successful. Federal funding can offset heavy equipment costs and some labor, but educating people on how to recycle, coupled with long distances from processing facilities, make operation difficult. 

But that hasn’t deterred the Coushatta Tribe.

In 2021, the European Union banned single-use plastics like straws, bottles, cutlery, and shopping bags. Germany recycles 69 percent of its municipal waste thanks to laws that enforce recycling habits. South Korea enforces strict fees for violations of the nation’s recycling protocols and even offers rewards to report violators, resulting in a 60 percent recycling and composting rate. 

But those figures don’t truly illuminate the scale of the world’s recycling product. Around 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have been manufactured since the 1950’s and researchers estimate that 91 percent of it isn’t recycled. In the United States, the Department of Energy finds that only 5 percent is recycled, while aluminum, used in packaging has a recycling rate of about 35 percent. The recycling rate for paper products, including books, mail, containers, and packaging, is about 68 percent.

There are no nationwide recycling laws in the U.S., leaving the task up to states, and only a handful of states take it seriously: Ten have “bottle bills,” which allow individuals to redeem empty containers for cash, while Maine, California, Colorado, and Oregon have passed laws that hold corporations and manufacturers accountable for wasteful packaging by requiring them to help pay for recycling efforts. In the 1960s, the U.S. recycling rate across all materials — including plastic, paper, and glass — was only 7 percent. Now, it’s 32 percent. The EPA aims to increase that number to 50 percent nationwide by 2030, but other than one law targeted at rural recycling moving through Congress, there are no overarching national recycling requirements to help make that happen. 

In 2021, Louisiana had a recycling rate of 2.9 percent, save for cities like New Orleans, where containers are available for free for residents to use to recycle everything from glass bottles to electronics to Mardi Gras beads. In rural areas, access to recycling facilities is scarce if it exists at all, leaving it up to local communities or tribal governments to provide it. There is little reliable data on how many tribes operate recycling programs.

“Tribal members see the state of the world presently, and they want to make a change,” said Skylar Bourque, who works on the tribe’s recycling program. “Ultimately, as a tribe, it’s up to us to give them the tools to do that.”

But the number one issue facing small programs is still funding. Cody Marshall, chief system optimization officer for The Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit, said that many rural communities and tribal nations across the country would be happy to recycle more if they had the funds to do so, but running a recycling program is more expensive than using the landfill that might be next door. 

“Many landfills are in rural areas and many of the processing sites that manage recyclables are in urban areas, and the driving costs alone can sometimes be what makes a recycling program unfeasible,” he said.

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The Recycling Partnership also provides grants for tribes and other communities to help with the cost of recycling. The EPA received 91 applications and selected 59 tribal recycling programs at various stages of development for this year, including one run by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma, which began its recycling program in 2010. Today, it collects nearly 50 metric tons of material a year — material that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill.

“Once you start small, you can get people on board with you,” said James Williams, director of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s Environmental Services. He is optimistic about the future of recycling in tribal communities. “Now I see blue bins all through the nation,” he said, referring to the recycling containers used by tribal citizens.

Williams’ department has cleaned up a dozen open dumps in the last two years, as well as two lagoons — an issue on tribal lands in Oklahoma and beyond. Illegal dumping can be a symptom of lack of resources due to waste management being historically underfunded. Those dumping on tribal land have also faced inadequate consequences. 

“We still have the issue of illegal dumping on rural roads,” he said, adding that his goal is to clean up as many as possible. “If you dump something, it’s going to hit a waterway.”

According to Williams, tribes in Oklahoma with recycling programs work together to address problems like long-distance transportation of materials and how to serve tribal communities in rural areas, as well as funding issues specific to tribes, like putting together grant applications and getting tribal governments to make recycling a priority. The Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma also partners with Durant, a nearby town. Durant couldn’t afford a recycling program of their own, so they directed recycling needs to the tribe. 

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This year’s EPA grant to the Muscogee program purchases a $225,000 semitruck, an $80,000 truck for cardboard boxes, and a $200,000 truck that shreds documents. Muscogee was also able to purchase a $70,000 horizontal compactor, which helps with squishing down materials to help store them, and two $5,000 trailers for hauling. Williams’ recycling program operates in conjunction with the Muscogee solid waste program, so they share some of their resources. 

Returns on recycled material aren’t high. In California, for instance, one ton of plastic can fetch $167, while aluminum can go for $1,230. Corrugated cardboard can also vary wildly from $20 to $210 a ton. Prices for all recycled materials fluctuate regularly, and unless you’re dealing in huge amounts, the business can be hard. Those who can’t sell their material might have to sit on it until they can find a buyer, or throw it away. 

Last year, Muscogee Creek made about $100,000 reselling the materials it collected, but the program cost $250,000 to run. The difference is made up by profits from the Muscogee Creek Nation’s casino, which helps keep the recycling program free for the 101,252 tribal members who live on the reservation. The profits also help non-Natives who want to recycle. 

The Coushatta Tribe serves 3,000 people, Native and non-Native, and they have been rejected by 12 different recycling brokers – individuals that act as intermediaries between operations and buyers – due to the distance materials would have to travel. 

Allie Johnson said she couldn’t find a broker that was close enough, or that was willing to travel to the Coushatta Tribe to pick up their recycling. “We either bite the cost,” she said, “or commute and have to pay extra in gas. It’s exhausting.”

Currently, the only place near them that’s buying recyclables is St. Landry Parish Recycling Center, which only pays $0.01 per pound of cardboard. A truck bed full of aluminum cans only yields $20 from the nearest center, 90 minutes away. That’s how much the tribe expects to make for now. 

Still, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana is not giving up.

With this new injection of federal money, they will eventually be able to store more materials, and hopefully, make money back on their communities’ recyclables. Much like the Muscogee Creek Nation, they see the recycling program as an amenity, but they still have hopes to turn it into a thriving business. 

In the meantime, the Coushatta keep up their educational programming, teaching children the value of taking care of the Earth, even when it’s hard. 

“It’s about maintaining the land,” Johnson said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Recycling isn’t easy. The Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana is doing it anyway. on May 28, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Taylar Dawn Stagner.

Within a thicket of the Big Cypress National Preserve, established a half-century ago to protect the marshes and sloughs here that make up a vital part of the Florida Everglades, a series of wells extracts oil from more than two miles underground.

The oil field is situated deep within a pine forest of the preserve — the first in the country — which channels more than 40 percent of the water flowing into Everglades National Park and shelters iconic and imperiled species like the fabled ghost orchid and Florida panther, the official state animal. The wells penetrate thousands of feet beneath an underground aquifer, an important drinking water source, and draw up oil from the so-called Sunniland trend, a reserve stretching across southwest Florida from Miami to Fort Myers, although most of the reserve is situated beneath Big Cypress.

For decades, oil production has endured in this corner of the fragile Everglades, a watershed that spans much of the peninsula and is the focus of a $21 billion federal and state restoration effort, one of the most ambitious in human history. Big Cypress is among some 10 percent of federally protected lands nationwide where the government owns the surface terrain while private entities retain the mineral rights underneath.

“Big Cypress National Preserve is very sacred to us,” said Talbert Cypress, elected chairman of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, a federally recognized tribal nation located in the Everglades. “We have a lot of ceremonial grounds that have been in Big Cypress National Preserve, burial grounds, places where we gather our traditional medicine. So just seeing that sort of damage in a place that really matters to us a lot, it’s sad to see it.”

Now the Miccosukee, longtime environmental stewards in Florida who notably helped steer stringent water quality standards for their sacred “river of grass,” have a plan for phasing out oil drilling within Big Cypress.  

The tribe has joined with WildLandscapes International, a nonprofit land conservation group, to engineer a multimillion-dollar deal with the Collier family, which owns the vast majority of the mineral rights beneath the preserve. If the agreement is finalized, the family would give up the mineral rights associated with some 465,000 acres to the federal government.

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“Unfortunately I cannot share. It’s under a non-disclosure,” said David Houghton, director of WildLandscapes International, when asked about the details. “The deal includes all the lands that the Colliers own the mineral rights on, minus what they currently have under lease.”

The proposal comes amid interest in expanding oil exploration and development within Big Cypress, even as rising global temperatures associated with fossil fuel emissions represent yet another threat to the Everglades, a watershed responsible for the drinking water of some 9 million Floridians. Most recently a Texas oil and gas company submitted a permit application to the National Park Service for two new sites within the preserve.

“We think we’ve got a deal here. We don’t know that, but we think,” Houghton said. “We’ll get a number, and that number either will work or it won’t — and I think it will.” 

Liquid tar

The Everglades are Florida’s most important freshwater resource. The watershed spans central and south Florida, encompassing the Kissimmee River, Lake Okeechobee, sawgrass prairies to the south, and Florida Bay. It includes several federal- and state-protected lands including the Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge, Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, Big Cypress National Preserve, and Everglades National Park. Various efforts over the last century to drain the Everglades, the largest steered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, have made modern Florida possible and left the river of grass drastically altered. 

The Humble Oil and Refining Company, a predecessor of Exxon Mobil, discovered oil in Southwest Florida in 1943, after the governor and cabinet at the time offered a $50,000 reward to those who first found oil in the state.

Today, Florida is responsible for less than 0.04 percent of the nation’s oil production, according to a report the Conservation Economics Institute, a nonprofit research organization, prepared for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The industry employs fewer than a thousand members of the state’s workforce and accounts for $25.4 million or 0.0002 percent of its gross domestic product. A separate study by the American Petroleum Institute concluded the oil and natural gas industry contributes nearly $22.1 billion to the Florida economy and supports nearly 266,800 jobs.

The vast majority of the state’s oil production occurs in the Panhandle, according to the Conservation Economics report. The two oil fields within Big Cypress, Bear Island and Raccoon Point, together were responsible for 585 barrels a day in 2020, about one-seventh of the state’s daily total. Oil was discovered at Bear Island, which is located partially within the preserve, in 1972, before the preserve was established, and production began a year later. At Raccoon Point, southeast of Bear Island, oil was detected in 1978. Production began in 1981, and the field was expanded in 1992.

Big Cypress was established in 1974. Two years later, the Collier family, for whom Collier County, where a large portion of the preserve is situated, is named, conveyed 76,790 acres to the National Park Service to help create the preserve, with the family maintaining the underground mineral rights. The Colliers can trace their family tree to the early 20th century advertising magnate Barron Gift Collier, at the time the largest landowner in Florida. In 1996, the family conveyed an additional 83,000 acres to the National Park Service to expand Big Cypress. Today, Big Cypress encompasses more than 700,000 acres, including much of the western Everglades.

In 2003, the federal government agreed to purchase the Colliers’ mineral rights for $120 million, but the purchase fell through. At the time, various appraisals valued their mineral rights beneath Big Cypress, the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, and Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge at between $5 million and $475 million.

The oil here is of the heavy-sour variety, with a consistency of liquid tar, according to a website of the Collier Resources Company, which manages the family’s mineral holdings. When refined, the oil is used in auto, aviation and diesel fuels, lube oils, and asphalt. Edward Glab, director of the Global Energy Security Forum in the School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University, characterized the oil as not high-grade or worth a lot of money. Multiple phone calls to the Collier Resources Company were not returned.

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“To me it makes no sense drilling for oil anywhere in the Everglades,” Glab said. “It just doesn’t because the reserves are simply not going to be there to justify that sort of investment.”

“It’s a lot of trouble for something that’s not producing a ton of oil, and it’s not like premium-grade oil. It’s like machinery oil, the kind used for heavy machinery,” said Cypress, chairman of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. “For us, when we see the amount of work that goes into the extraction, the damage that they do, it doesn’t seem worth it.”

Acidizing rather than fracking is more likely to be used in Florida to extract oil because of the state’s geology, which is characterized by porous limestone that harbors underground aquifers, according to the Conservation Economics report. Acidizing involves injecting the oil-bearing rock formations with a mixture of acid, water, and other chemicals, dissolving the formations and allowing the oil to flow more easily to the well. Some 93 percent of the state’s population depends on groundwater for drinking water, far more than any other state in the nation.  

Wastewater from such techniques can contain pollutants and threaten the groundwater, although the Collier family says multiple precautions are taken throughout the drilling process to protect the sensitive environment here, according to the Collier Resources Company website. For instance, to safeguard the aquifers, a series of steel casings and thick layer of cement surround all oil-producing wells. At the well sites a limestone pad is constructed with a berm around it to prevent stormwater runoff from carrying pollutants into the environment. The pads also include a liner to protect the groundwater. The Collier family website also says water sampling has revealed no evidence of groundwater contamination.

But spills have occurred. A spill at Raccoon Point in October 2018, caused by corrosion in a production well, released 2,000 gallons of wastewater mixed with oil. The operator at the time, under lease with the Collier family, said the fluids stayed within a bermed area, and most of the fluids were recovered, according to a Florida Department of Environmental Protection report.

“There’s just so many potential damages that can happen here, and when it’s such a small amount of oil that’s being produced it does not make economic sense,” said Evan E. Hjerpe, executive director of the Conservation Economics Institute and author of the report. “It’s kind of an antiquated or artifact of previous times, and it would benefit the public much greater to move forward without having these potential risks going on.”

“The reason we survived”

For hundreds of years, the Miccosukee people hunted, fished, and held religious ceremonies among the soaring cypress swamps and sweeping sawgrass prairies of Big Cypress. During the First and Second Seminole Wars, in the first half of the 19th century, they were pushed deep within the watery wilderness and found sanctuary on the tree islands scattered here.

“We have a mother-child relationship with the Everglades because it helped us survive the removal era as well as the termination era, and so without it we would not exist as a sovereign entity. We would have either been annihilated or removed to the West,” said Curtis Osceola, chief of staff for the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. “Our land is the reason we survived. It is the reason why we’re here, and so we have a duty to the land that once protected us. And so that’s what it is to be Miccosukee, is to serve and protect the lands of our environment.”

Today, most of the 600-member tribe lives on tribal lands within Everglades National Park, although some 100 to 200 Miccosukees, members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and other Native people of Miccosukee and Seminole heritage live in 15 villages within Big Cypress. About eight of the communities, as well as a school, are situated downstream from Raccoon Point, raising concerns that spilled oil could flow in their direction, affecting surface water and the underground aquifer, which some residents have tapped with residential wells. Osceola said back when Big Cypress was established and the Collier family maintained the underground mineral rights, the Miccosukees were left out of the negotiations.

“Part of our culture tells us that the land should rest, and those fluids beneath the land should go undisturbed. That includes natural gas, oil, things like that,” he said. “So the extraction of oil is a very unnatural act.”

Oil drilling within Big Cypress is the latest environmental issue the tribe has taken up. After the federal government sued the state in the 1980s over water pollution in Everglades National Park and the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, the Miccosukees got involved in the issue as defenders of the river of grass. The litigation led to a monumental state cleanup effort, which remains in progress today.

The tribe’s pending deal with the Colliers would halt all future drilling within Big Cypress, although existing production could continue at least for now. The agreement likely would upend a plan for two new sites in Big Cypress that Burnett Oil Co. Inc., an oil and gas company based in Fort Worth, Texas, is pursuing.

In 2017 and 2018, Burnett, under a lease with the Collier family, conducted an off-road seismic survey of 110 square miles of Big Cypress. The survey involved applying vibrating plates to the ground and sending seismic signals deep beneath the surface to map potential oil. To access the remote area, 33-ton vibroseis trucks were used. The hefty vehicles sank into the soft, water-soaked soils, leaving deep ruts, consequential in an ecosystem where the boundary between land and water is blurred and inches of elevation can mean vast differences in habitat. The effort also harmed slow-growing mature dwarf cypress trees. As many as 500 of the trees were cut down to allow the trucks to move through the area, according to a 2023 report by the National Parks Conservation Association.

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Six years later the landscape has not recovered, the report said. The survey left lasting scars including soil compaction and deep twisting furrows, and almost none of the felled cypress trees has shown signs of regrowth. The National Parks Conservation Association wants the National Park Service to compel Burnett to replant the trees and address the other problems. Burnett did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The two new sites Burnett is proposing would be similar to the one at Raccoon Point, according to the company’s permit application to the National Park Service. The document says the project is designed to minimize environmental impacts and avoid historical, cultural, and archeological resources, including Miccosukee and Seminole areas.

If the National Park Service were to approve Burnett’s plan, that would contradict the Biden administration’s demonstrated commitment to confront climate change, said Christina Reichert, senior attorney in the Florida office of Earthjustice, a nonprofit litigating environmental issues.

“It doesn’t match up to the promises that we’re hearing and the focus that this administration should be having on fighting the climate crisis. This would be creating brand new fossil fuel infrastructure in a time where we need to be transitioning away from that,” she said. “Wetlands are carbon sinks. One of the things they do is absorb carbon from the atmosphere and store it. So it doesn’t make sense to destroy wetlands and then build fossil fuel infrastructure.”

Hjerpe of the Conservation Economics Institute said closing an oil well can be difficult and costly, sometimes making it more advantageous to continue operating the well even when the oil is not of the highest quality. He said it is possible Burnett’s lease agreement with the Collier family mandated exploration plans or focused on increasing new development.

“When you see the path forward, and there’s certainly potential for a buy-out of your minerals and buy-out of your operations, then it completely makes financial sense to make sure that you are heavily invested in the area and that you keep producing and illustrating the value and increasing the value of your operations,” he said.

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Next steps

Climate change associated with fossil fuel emissions is poised to have a big impact on the Everglades. Rising temperatures will increase evaporation, stressing the watershed that already is pressured by explosive population growth and development. The hotter temperatures also will lead to precipitation changes, raising concerns about whether the water management infrastructure here, some of the most complex in the world, is up to future challenges.

The agreement involving the Miccosukees, Colliers, and WildLandscapes International includes three phases. Under the first phase, completed last year, the Collier family sold 11,141 acres, including the mineral rights, to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and South Florida Water Management District. The second phase, focused on the mineral rights beneath Big Cypress, still faces several steps, said Houghton of WildLandscapes International.

“The way the deal is set up we have a floor value, and if the appraisal meets that or above then the Colliers are obligated to sell,” he said. “If the appraisal is below, the Colliers could get out.”

If the agreement moves forward, Congress would appropriate the funding, which could take a few more years. The money would come from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a federal program that puts earnings from offshore oil and gas leasing toward land conservation. The third phase involves land near Everglades City, a small town outside of Big Cypress.

Cypress, chairman of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, said future plans go further. Eventually the tribe wants to stop all oil drilling within Big Cypress for good.

“Florida is going to need more freshwater, more drinking water, and we don’t have that without the Everglades,” he said. “It matters to everybody in Florida.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the Miccosukee Tribe plans to stop oil drilling in the Everglades once and for all on May 5, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Amy Green, Inside Climate News.

A ceasefire is expected on the battlefields of Wapenamanda in Papua New Guinea’s Enga Province that has claimed hundreds of lives and caused massive destruction to properties in three constituencies.

According to lead peace negotiator and Enga Provincial Administrator Sandis Tsaka, a ceasefire agreement is anticipated to be signed this week among three parties to solve the crisis.

These parties are the state and two warring tribal leaders to make way for the peace process to start.

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The leaders of both warring factions are currently involved in intense negotiations with the State Conflict Resolution team led by key negotiator and Chief Magistrate Mark Pupaka in Port Moresby.

The state negotiating team comprises Deputy Police Commissioner (Operations) Dr Philip Mitna; Assistant Commissioner of Police Julius Tasion; newly appointed Enga provincial police commander Chief Superintendent Fred Yakasa; Enga Provincial Administrator Sandis Tsaka and Chief Magistrate Pupaka.

The government negotiators are meeting and having discussions separately with each faction.

According to the state team, the roundtable conference was brought to Port Moresby because a ceasefire agreement and subsequently a Preventive Order issued in September last year failed.

Guerrilla-style warfare
The preventive order did not work when the tribal factions took up arms in guerrilla-style warfare.

The conference will ensure that both parties, including the allies of 25 tribes from Tsaka valley, Aiyale valley and Middle Lai constituencies, agree to an amicable resolution in consultations with neighbouring tribes.

The Yopo tribe’s leader Roy Opone Andoi of Tsaka valley apologised in a public statement to the state for damaging government properties and for the lives lost in the three-year tribal conflict.

Andoi said it was regrettable to see a “trivial” tribal conflict that started with his Yopo tribe and neighbouring Palinau tribe in Tsaka valley escalate to “unimaginable proportions”, displacing more than 40,000 people.

“I want to apologise to the state, rival tribes and neighbouring communities and the country for all the damage, including negative images portrayed through the media during the course of the conflict,” he said.

Andoi said he would like to take the opportunity to thank the government for appointing the state team, comprising Police Commissioner David Manning, Tsaka and Pupaka, to conduct roundtable discussions towards restoring peace and normalcy.

He said the government’s intervention came in following the latest casualties, including a massacre of more than 50 men from the Palinau allies by Yopo allies during an intensified battle on February 28 near Birip and Hela Opone Technical College on the border of Wapenamanda and Wabag districts.

Andoi said that with the help of the state team, he was hoping for a better outcome to bring back normalcy in the district and the province.

Republished from the PNG Post-Courier with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Barbara McQuade is a professor from practice at Michigan Law School. Her interests include criminal law, criminal procedure, national security, data privacy, and civil rights. From 2010 to 2017, Professor McQuade served as the US attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. As US attorney, she oversaw cases involving public corruption, terrorism, corporate fraud, theft of trade secrets, civil rights, and health care fraud, among others. She also serves as a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. Barbara McQuade is the author of Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America.

I think people are still bewildered about how to respond to Donald Trump. I think the media is bewildered because we've never seen anything like him—he's an absolute disruptor of how our system works. And so, he's a big bully who runs around and says all kinds of mean things and nobody knows how to deal with it. I think the media still struggles to decide how do you cover someone—when we've been trained to get both sides of an argument which presumes that both sides are engaging in good faith—when instead you have someone who is not engaging in good faith, engaging in lies, making inconsistent statements.

Barbara McQuade

We need to demand truth. We can't allow ourselves to engage in fiction, even if we believe it is to advance our ends. The ends can never justify the means. Our country is built on integrity in the rule of law and we need to demand truth if we are going to have a democracy and effective self-government.

Barbara McQuade

You don't want to go down in the mud with people. But when the national press begins and continues to be [Trump’s] bullhorn, verbatim, repeating it, repeating it, giving no right of reply, there's no way you can simply say, “I don't want to go to his level,” because the press has raised it to a level that is devastating to our democracy.

Ralph Nader

Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired U.S. Army colonel. Over his 31 years of service, Colonel Wilkerson served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff from 2002 to 2005, and Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993. Colonel Wilkerson also served as Deputy Director and Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia, and for fifteen years he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, senior advisor to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and co-founder of the All-Volunteer Force Forum. 

The media is an Israeli agent when they do give some kind of deference to “the other side,” as it were, it's always in words and terminology and short sentences that make you know that “they are balanced.” “They are fair and balanced.” They're about as fair and balanced as my left foot. That's the way it is. The purpose here is eradication, elimination, or expulsion, period. Eradication, elimination, or expulsion.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson

We all need to wake up, and we need to start taking actions such as we can locally—whatever's within our purview and power to do. Because we're losing this country. We're losing it to the moneyed oligarchy. We're losing it to the unprecedented amount of money, because of Citizens United, that's pouring into the political coffers of people who have no interest in what you want…These people are basing their decisions on money. Money—not you. They're not the people's representatives… They're the representatives of the deep state, which is the oligarchy. 

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson

It's all these people with these unprecedented amounts of money who can influence anything, anytime they want to with a few telephone calls. That's what's running your country. And the predatory capitalism that they're advancing is running the world into the ground.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson

In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis

News 3/6/24

1. Just before the Michigan primary, President Biden implied that a ceasefire in Gaza was imminent. However, many believed at the time that Biden was simply trying to blunt the potency of the “Uncommitted” vote in that contest. The promised ceasefire never materialized, apparently confirming those suspicions. Yet, with “Uncommitted” winning over 100,000 votes in Michigan, the administration has begun using ceasefire language – a major rhetorical shift, but seemingly one without much corresponding action. Phyllis Bennis, writing in Al Jazeera, argues that “Whatever the language of Washington’s proposed UN Security Council resolution and likely the possible temporary truce deal as well, the words of National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby continue to resonate as a better reflection of the Biden administration’s policy: ‘We’re going to continue to support Israel… and we’re going to continue to make sure they have the tools and the capabilities to do that.’”

2. Following the self immolation of Aaron Bushnell, activist Talia Jane has shared a letter from active duty U.S. Military personnel calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. In this letter, the anonymous signatories write “it is undeniably evident that the Israeli Defense Forces are repeatedly and systematically committing war crimes in Gaza. Support for the conduct of the IDF is unacceptable and inconsistent with our values in the US Armed forces.” Talia Jane reports that “over 100 active duty military across Air Force, Navy, Army, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, as well as reservists and National Guard, and their families, have endorsed this open letter.”

3. J Street, the preeminent liberal Zionist group, has finally begun using the word ceasefire – while still only supporting a temporary truce. In a note to their members, J Street wrote "This move is not a change in policy. It is a decision to begin using a word that is fraught with meaning and implications in the context of the Gaza War," Daniel Marans of the Huffington Post reports. J Street has deep ties to the administration, so whether they are taking their cues from the administration in characterizing a temporary truce as a ceasefire – or vice versa – it is significant that this is the new line from mainstream liberal Zionists.

4. Max Tani of Semafor reports that the NewsGuild of New York has sent a letter to the New York Times accusing the ‘Grey Lady’ of racially profiling their staff as they seek to hunt down the source of a leak exposing their shoddy – possibly completely false – reporting on sexual violence committed by Hamas. Per the letter, “Management’s investigators have questioned employees about their involvement in The Times’ internal Middle Eastern and North African Times Employee Resource Group (known as the MENA Collective), ordered them to hand over the names of all of the MENA Collective’s active members involved in group discussions, and demanded copies of personal communications between colleagues about their shared workplace concerns…The Guild intends to vigorously defend our members and their rights, and ensure that all our members are protected in a workplace free from harassment and racial profiling.”

5. According to NBC News, “The biggest labor union in Washington state endorsed voting ‘uncommitted’ in the state’s Democratic presidential primary next month, citing concerns about President Joe Biden’s political strength and his support for Israel’s war in Gaza.”  UFCW Local 3000 has over 50,000 members, making it the largest state chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. NBC also reports that “The Stranger, a prominent alt-weekly publication based in Seattle, also endorsed the idea of voting ‘uncommitted,’ expressing disappointment in the options of  Trump and Biden, whom it referred to as the ‘two genocidal geriatrics leading the polls.’”

6. Amid humiliatingly low poll numbers, Democratic-turned-Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema has dropped out of the 2024 Arizona Senate race, the Arizona Republic reports. Senator Sinema, you will not be missed.

7. In Manhattan, over two-thirds of houses sold last quarter were purchased in cash, rather than via mortgage, per the Financial Times. In other words, the preponderance of homes were purchased by the very rich. Pamela Liebman, the chief executive of real estate brokerage firm Corcoran, told the paper “High mortgage rates are creating a real void for people who don’t have the strong finances that are required to buy in cash…It’s driving people who would be home buyers in New York into renting.” This piece further notes that “rents rose to an all-time median high of $3,950 [per month].”

8. West Virginia News reports “Kroger union members have voted in favor of authorizing a strike at 38 stores in West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio.” As this piece notes, this vote gives the bargaining committee authorization to call a strike at any time, but the workers are not currently on strike. In a statement, UFCW Local 400 said “This vote has sent a powerful message to Kroger that they must do better if they expect us to ratify a contract…Now, we are ready to sit down with the company and negotiate an agreement that we can recommend for ratification. If not, we are ready to continue to do whatever it takes to get a fair contract. By sticking together, we will win.”

9. Family Dollar has been hit with a $42 million fine in a food safety case after the company was found to have been “storing food, drugs, and cosmetics in a rodent-infested warehouse in Arkansas,” according to More Perfect Union. An FDA investigation revealed “live rodents, dead and decaying rodents, rodent feces, urine, and odors, and evidence of gnawing and nesting throughout the facility.” Family Dollar had been aware of the infestation since 2020, and continued shipping merchandise – often eaten into by the rodents – to 404 stores throughout the region. This is the largest ever criminal fine in a food safety case.

10. Finally, on February 27th MyHighPlains.com reported that a nuclear weapons factory in Texas was forced to cease operations in light of the state’s massive wildfires. According to Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project of the Federation of American Scientists, “This is America’s main nuclear weapons factory. Nearly 20,000 plutonium cores are stored there [and] full-scale production of B61-12 bomb & W88 Alt370 warheads are underway.” While this critical situation was resolved without injury, it highlights the interrelation between climate change and national security. We urge military and civilian leadership to view this near-miss as a chance to finally take the climate crisis seriously.

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

For me, being Jewish was never about religion or Zionism. My holocaust survivor parents sent me to Jewish day schools and Zionist summer camps, but none of that stuck.

I haven’t set foot in a synagogue for decades and have always been critical of Israeli politics. But up till now, I still retained a strong Jewish identity and felt a bond with other Jews because of what I perceived we shared: a commitment to a key tenet of Judaism — that one’s role in life is to make the world a better place. Not that all Jews were social workers or social justice warriors, but I was proud that so many of us were willing to speak up and act against all oppression, not just our own.

But since October 7th so much has changed. Hamas’s sadistic attacks were calculated to trigger a sense of helplessness and shame, and to provoke a vengeful military overreaction. This is precisely what happened, quickly turning international sympathy into horror and aversion.

It’s been painful to watch so many American Jews call out their detractors as antisemites and insist that “context” is a dirty word, unwilling to acknowledge that 75 years of misery imposed by Israel on Gaza played any role in fostering Hamas. They deny the devastating impact of unrelenting carpet bombing and are enraged that Israel is being accused of genocide.

But in less than 100 days the IDF’s scorched-earth offensive has killed 24,000, injured more than 60,000, displaced 85 percent of the population, destroyed countless hospitals, schools, roads, religious sites, stores, and agricultural lands. People are dying from disease and starvation, suffocating under the rubble.

They have no food, water, sanitation, medicine, or anesthesia. If this is not genocide, it’s certainly too close for my comfort.

In an earlier essay, I wrote about how disturbing it was to hear some of my former high school classmates voice the quote attributed to Golda Meir: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. But we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.” Journalist Michelle Goldberg, in her recent New York Times op-ed, “America Must Face Up to Israel’s Extremism,” condemns this sentiment that “positions Israel as the victim even when it’s doing the killing.”

But at least, she says, “it suggests a tortured ambivalence about meting out violence.” Now, however, writes Goldberg, even this ambivalence has disappeared.

I see this reflected in my own social media feed which is filled with complaints that Jews are being unfairly singled out for what other nations have always done during wartime to defend themselves. Others write it off as Israel’s bad PR. “It’s awful. They make us look like baby-killers.” How did we become so willing to dehumanize the death of innocents?

When political commentator Van Jones appeared at the DC March for Israel rally in November to take a stand against anti-Jewish bigotry, his call for an end to the bombing was met with heckling and booing. There will be no ceasefire, said Netanyahu, until Hamas is eliminated.

But eradicating Hamas is not a realistic goal. The death of so many innocent Palestinians has only increased support for this terrorist group.

Not ending the war actually places Jews in greater danger. Israelis are now more vulnerable to attack from Iran than they have ever been before. And the rise of global antisemitism in response to this murderous war has made it more dangerous to be Jewish everywhere else.

Since writing my first essay on this subject, so many Jews have approached me to tell me they share my views but will only express them in private. A Jewish friend who is a therapist told me she wasn’t sure how much longer she could remain silent, but she chose not to say anything out of respect for the many friends in her circle she felt had experienced a form of PTSD from the events of October 7. Her viewpoint — that the trauma of the Hamas atrocities reopened deep psychic wounds, generating blind rage — is the only way I can start to understand why so many of my fellow Jews are unwilling to recognize Israel is no longer the victim in this war and in fact has become the transgressor.

Over the past few months, my high school classmates have been meeting to plan our upcoming 50th reunion that I had been looking forward to attending. But now I’m having second thoughts.

How will I feel standing alone as the rest of the group unites in their calls of Am Yisroel Chai, the rallying cry of support for the state of Israel. I worry that I may not be able to restrain myself from speaking up. I worry more that I won’t have the guts to.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rivera Sun.

The last of the Kawahiva are forced to live on the run from armed loggers and powerful ranchers. Still from unique footage taken by government agents during a chance encounter. © FUNAI

Ten years after Brazilian authorities released extraordinary footage showing the existence of an uncontacted Amazonian tribe, their lands have still not been fully protected – and loggers and land-grabbers surround them.

In 2013 Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Department FUNAI released video that they had filmed during a chance encounter with the Kawahiva people of Mato Grosso state, deep in the Amazon.

Award-winning actor Mark Rylance recording the narration for The Last of the Kawahiva. © Survival 2015

Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance later narrated a film about their plight, “The Last of the Kawahiva,” for Survival International.

A global campaign by Survival International, alongside Indigenous people, pressured the authorities to act, and in 2018 cattle ranchers and loggers who had occupied the Kawahiva territory were evicted.

But since then the land protection process has stalled – loggers and landgrabbers are surrounding their territory, and an illegal road has been built just 2km away.

A FUNAI team at a protection post nearby have been working to keep the loggers and ranchers out, despite the dangers – their post has been attacked several times.

Massacres and disease have already killed many Kawahiva – the only chance of survival for those who remain is if their territory is finally demarcated (legally recognized and marked out).

The government has already been given two deadlines to finish demarcating the Kawahiva territory: in 2013 – the year the video was first released – a Brazilian court ordered the demarcation to be carried out. Ten years on, this still has not happened, and in August of this year, Brazil’s Supreme Court gave FUNAI 60 days to finalize a plan for the definitive demarcation of the territory.

Eliane Xunakalo of Indigenous organization FEPOIMT (Federation of Indigenous peoples and organizations of Mato Grosso) said today: “It’s vital to finish the demarcation for our uncontacted relatives. The “Kawahiva do Rio Pardo” territory is coveted by outsiders, and it’s also extremely dangerous for the FUNAI employees who work on the protection post there. We will only be able to guarantee the survival of our uncontacted relatives if the territory is demarcated.

“It’s up to us to protect our relatives, to protect their way of life, because they are the resistance and resilience in the midst of all these threats and challenges that exist here in Mato Grosso,” she added.

This is one of the most crucial cases concerning uncontacted tribes anywhere in Brazil. The Kawahiva are survivors of countless genocidal attacks which have wiped out many of them; the land demarcation process has ground to a halt; and loggers and landgrabbers see the territory as open for business. We know that they have been active inside the Kawahiva’s forest, and any encounter between the Kawahiva and these outsiders, who are usually armed, could be deadly. The authorities must act now to finish the job, and legally protect the Kawahiva territory once and for all.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

In September 2020, the Hopi Tribe’s four-decade effort to secure its right to water culminated in a court proceeding. The outcome would determine how much water the arid reservation would receive over the next century and whether that amount would be enough for the tribe to pursue its economic ambitions. Under rules unique to Arizona, the tribe would have to justify how it would use every drop it wanted.

The monthslong ordeal in Arizona’s Superior Court unfolded in video calls over shaky internet connections.

Chairman Timothy Nuvangyaoma called it “the fight of our lives.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1908 that reservations have an inherent right to water. In the rest of the country, courts grant tribes water based on the amount of arable land on their reservations, relying on a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court precedent. But in 2001, Arizona developed its own method that was ostensibly more flexible to individual tribes’ visions for how they wanted to use their water by examining their culture, history, economy and projected population.

This new standard offered tribes an opportunity to shape their plans for economic development and growth beyond farming. But the Hopi case, the first adjudicated under this process, showed it also came at a high cost with uncertain outcomes.

Court records show that at the trial, experts brought in by the tribe, state and corporate water users argued over how many Hopi had lived in the area going back centuries and how much water they had used for crops and livestock. They debated the correct fertility rate of Hopi women and the viability of the tribe’s economic projects. And the court examined lists of sacred springs — sites the Hopi traditionally kept secret to preserve them — to decide how much water could be drawn from them for future religious ceremonies.

The legal battle, one of the tribe’s largest expenses in recent years, resulted in May 2022 with the court awarding less than a third of the water sought by the Hopi Tribe. That was the amount needed, the court said, “to provide a permanent homeland.”

“I would define it as modern-day genocide,” Nuvangyaoma said. “Withholding water, which is life for the Hopis, until an undetermined time is really a position to kill off a tribe that’s been here since time immemorial.”

The trial and decision carry profound implications for other Colorado River Basin tribes seeking water, especially in Arizona, where 10 out of 22 federally recognized tribes have outstanding claims. Water awarded to these tribes often comes out of the allocation states can use, leading to inherent conflict between tribes and states over the scarce resource. If the Hopi decree survives the tribe’s planned appeal, other tribes will be subjected to the same scrutiny of their way of life, said Rhett Larson, a professor of water law at Arizona State University.

“It’s a big deal for the history of water law in the United States of America and what it means to be a Native American tribe,” Larson said.

“To provide for our existence”

The Hopi Tribe has inhabited villages in northeastern Arizona for more than 1,100 years. In the time since white settlers arrived, the Hopi Tribe’s water supply has been decimated by drought and coal companies’ unchecked groundwater pumping.

The reservation, established by the U.S. government in 1882, is entirely surrounded by the Navajo Nation. Both tribes use the same aquifer, with wells reaching thousands of feet into the ground. Three-fourths of the Hopi citizens living on the reservation rely on well water tainted with high levels of arsenic, according to tribal leaders and studies conducted with the Environmental Protection Agency. A heavy metal that leads to increased risk of developing cancer, cognitive developmental disorders and diabetes, arsenic is naturally present throughout Arizona, but pumping can increase its concentration in groundwater.

According to Dale Sinquah, a member of the Hopi Tribal Council, concerns about the aquifer make it hard not only to find drinking water, but they also limit the construction of new homes and businesses allowing the community to grow.

The only other available water on the reservation is inconsistent, running in four major streambeds that are dry most of the year. Those four washes, which empty into the Little Colorado River, have likely been impacted by drought, with two showing a “significant decreasing trend” in recent years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

“We need another source of water off-reservation to provide for our existence in the future,” Sinquah said.

The case involving Hopi water rights began in 1978, when the Phelps Dodge mining company filed suit against the state and all other water users to protect its claims in the Little Colorado River watershed. Under Arizona law, the only way to quantify a single water claim was to litigate all regional claims at once. Soon, the Hopi Tribe and thousands of others with claims became parties to the case in the Superior Court of Arizona.

The tribe put the court case on hold twice as it attempted to get water through out-of-court settlements. Those talks though would have required compromising with other users making claims to that water, including the Peabody Western Coal Co., which until 2019 pumped groundwater from the aquifer for its mining operations. Between 1965 and 2005, Peabody accounted for 63 percent of the water pumped out of the aquifer, and 31 percent between 2006 and 2019, according to the United States Geological Survey. Peabody did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2012, the Hopi Tribe appeared on the brink of a settlement with the state that would have provided the tribal nation with $113 million for pipelines and other infrastructure to bring groundwater to communities on the reservation. But that effort fell through when Hopi leaders refused to sign off on a guarantee in the settlement allowing Peabody continued access to the aquifer until 2044.

“We don’t think that’s feasible for you”

Unable to reach a settlement, the Hopi Tribe’s pursuit of water for its homeland continued in court through Arizona’s untested legal process.

Due to the large number of parties and the underfunding of both the state courts and Arizona’s Department of Water Resources, the case moved at a snail’s pace. The department filed a key technical report on water availability in 2008. It took until 2015 for the department to finalize it for the court.

By then, the case had been overseen by four judges. They appointed three separate special water masters, who are key to producing a proposed decree for the court. Susan Ward Harris, the water master who delivered the 2022 decree, was appointed in 2015. Harris did not respond to requests for comment.

When its day in court finally came, the Hopi Tribe explained it wanted water for an economically vibrant future with farms, cattle operations, coal mines and power plants.

More than 90 witnesses testified. They included a long line of experts — for the tribe; the federal government; the state; the northern Arizona city of Flagstaff; and the Little Colorado River Coalition, which represented small cities, utilities, ranchers and commercial interests. They discussed the tribe’s projected population, argued over the accuracy of the census count of the Hopi and offered predictions of what the numbers would be in the future.

In the end, the court went with the lowest population projections put forward by Flagstaff and the state, and it decided to only include people living on the reservation full time.

The reservation’s population, currently about 7,000, would peak at 18,255 by 2110, Harris decided.

She also decreed the tribe would get water to only irrigate 38 percent of farmland it planned to. It was denied water for a cattle operation, saying it “would not be feasible, practical, or provide economic benefits,” based on the court’s assessment of the current market. Harris also declared the coal operations were not “economically feasible.” Some $10 billion in economic development projects, presented in detail to the court, were deemed unrealistic.

Water for ceremonial and subsistence gardens was also denied. The court publicly listed nearly 100 sacred springs with limits on how much water the tribe was entitled to use for religious ceremonies.

In total, the tribe had requested at least 96,074 acre-feet a year of water, and the Arizona water master recommended awarding just 28,988 acre-feet, all of it from the same depleted, contaminated aquifer and seasonal streams the Hopi already use. After four decades, they ended up in the same precarious position they’d started.

Nuvangyaoma said the decree suggested the state and non-Native parties believed the tribe was incapable of carrying out its ambitious economic plans. It closed the door on future growth and, overall, was “insulting.”

By refusing to count members who live part time on the reservation as part of the population, the court ignored the connection many Native Americans have with their land, even when they don’t live there permanently, he said. Many leave so they or their children can pursue an education; for work; or to live in homes with reliable electricity and water. In short, Nuvangyaoma said, they seek the very things Hopi leaders hoped that the settlement would help bring to the reservation, and that the tribe needed water to do. But the court said that because the reservation was not growing at the speed the tribe claimed it could, it couldn’t have the water — a circular logic that hobbles the Hopi.

“It’s very frustrating that you’re told that your population will peak at a certain amount when we don’t see it that way,” Nuvangyaoma said.

Even with Harris’ decree on the books, the Hopi Tribe still faces a long road to access its allotted 28,988 acre-feet of water. Funding for dams, pipes and other infrastructure will likely require congressional action and involve more negotiation with other water users, including the Navajo Nation, which draws from the same groundwater. “I suspect I will not be alive when it comes to fruition,” Sinquah, the tribal council member, said.

Nuvangyaoma said the tribe will still pursue its plans for economic development, but with the understanding it cannot look to the state or federal governments for support.

Cities across the Southwest have, with government support, pursued economic development and growth in the ways they want, he said, whether it’s coal mining, raising cattle or farming the desert using water brought from far away.

“So why are we putting limitations on Hopi and making a decision for us saying, ‘Oh, well, we don’t think that’s feasible for you all?’” Nuvangyaoma asked. “Who has that right to tell us what is and what is not feasible for us?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Arizona water ruling, the Hopi tribe sees limits on its future on Jul 22, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Umar Farooq, ProPublica.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In September 2020, the Hopi Tribe’s four-decade effort to secure its right to water culminated in a court proceeding. The outcome would determine how much water the arid reservation would receive over the next century and whether that amount would be enough for the tribe to pursue its economic ambitions. Under rules unique to Arizona, the tribe would have to justify how it would use every drop it wanted.

The monthslong ordeal in Arizona’s Superior Court unfolded in video calls over shaky internet connections.

Chairman Timothy Nuvangyaoma called it “the fight of our lives.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1908 that reservations have an inherent right to water. In the rest of the country, courts grant tribes water based on the amount of arable land on their reservations, relying on a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court precedent. But in 2001, Arizona developed its own method that was ostensibly more flexible to individual tribes’ visions for how they wanted to use their water by examining their culture, history, economy and projected population.

This new standard offered tribes an opportunity to shape their plans for economic development and growth beyond farming. But the Hopi case, the first adjudicated under this process, showed it also came at a high cost with uncertain outcomes.

Court records show that at the trial, experts brought in by the tribe, state and corporate water users argued over how many Hopi had lived in the area going back centuries and how much water they had used for crops and livestock. They debated the correct fertility rate of Hopi women and the viability of the tribe’s economic projects. And the court examined lists of sacred springs — sites the Hopi traditionally kept secret to preserve them — to decide how much water could be drawn from them for future religious ceremonies.

The legal battle, one of the tribe’s largest expenses in recent years, resulted in May 2022 with the court awarding less than a third of the water sought by the Hopi Tribe. That was the amount needed, the court said, “to provide a permanent homeland.”

“I would define it as modern-day genocide,” Nuvangyaoma said. “Withholding water, which is life for the Hopis, until an undetermined time is really a position to kill off a tribe that’s been here since time immemorial.”

The trial and decision carry profound implications for other Colorado River Basin tribes seeking water, especially in Arizona, where 10 out of 22 federally recognized tribes have outstanding claims. Water awarded to these tribes often comes out of the allocation states can use, leading to inherent conflict between tribes and states over the scarce resource. If the Hopi decree survives the tribe’s planned appeal, other tribes will be subjected to the same scrutiny of their way of life, said Rhett Larson, a professor of water law at Arizona State University.

“It’s a big deal for the history of water law in the United States of America and what it means to be a Native American tribe,” Larson said.

The Hopi Tribe has inhabited villages in northeastern Arizona for more than 1,100 years. In the time since white settlers arrived, the Hopi Tribe’s water supply has been decimated by drought and coal companies’ unchecked groundwater pumping.

The reservation, established by the U.S. government in 1882, is entirely surrounded by the Navajo Nation. Both tribes use the same aquifer, with wells reaching thousands of feet into the ground. Three-fourths of the Hopi citizens living on the reservation rely on well water tainted with high levels of arsenic, according to tribal leaders and studies conducted with the Environmental Protection Agency. A heavy metal that leads to increased risk of developing cancer, cognitive developmental disorders and diabetes, arsenic is naturally present throughout Arizona, but pumping can increase its concentration in groundwater.

According to Dale Sinquah, a member of the Hopi Tribal Council, concerns about the aquifer make it hard not only to find drinking water, but they also limit the construction of new homes and businesses allowing the community to grow.

The only other available water on the reservation is inconsistent, running in four major streambeds that are dry most of the year. Those four washes, which empty into the Little Colorado River, have likely been impacted by drought, with two showing a “significant decreasing trend” in recent years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

“We need another source of water off-reservation to provide for our existence in the future,” Sinquah said.

The case involving Hopi water rights began in 1978, when the Phelps Dodge mining company filed suit against the state and all other water users to protect its claims in the Little Colorado River watershed. Under Arizona law, the only way to quantify a single water claim was to litigate all regional claims at once. Soon, the Hopi Tribe and thousands of others with claims became parties to the case in the Superior Court of Arizona.

The tribe put the court case on hold twice as it attempted to get water through out-of-court settlements. Those talks though would have required compromising with other users making claims to that water, including the Peabody Western Coal Co., which until 2019 pumped groundwater from the aquifer for its mining operations. Between 1965 and 2005, Peabody accounted for 63% of the water pumped out of the aquifer, and 31% between 2006 and 2019, according to the United States Geological Survey. Peabody did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2012, the Hopi Tribe appeared on the brink of a settlement with the state that would have provided the tribal nation with $113 million for pipelines and other infrastructure to bring groundwater to communities on the reservation. But that effort fell through when Hopi leaders refused to sign off on a guarantee in the settlement allowing Peabody continued access to the aquifer until 2044.

Unable to reach a settlement, the Hopi Tribe’s pursuit of water for its homeland continued in court through Arizona’s untested legal process.

Due to the large number of parties and the underfunding of both the state courts and Arizona’s Department of Water Resources, the case moved at a snail’s pace. The department filed a key technical report on water availability in 2008. It took until 2015 for the department to finalize it for the court.

Low groundwater levels contributed to increased arsenic concentrations, forcing the tribe to fight for new water resources.

By then, the case had been overseen by four judges. They appointed three separate special water masters, who are key to producing a proposed decree for the court. Susan Ward Harris, the water master who delivered the 2022 decree, was appointed in 2015. Harris did not respond to requests for comment.

When its day in court finally came, the Hopi Tribe explained it wanted water for an economically vibrant future with farms, cattle operations, coal mines and power plants.

More than 90 witnesses testified. They included a long line of experts — for the tribe; the federal government; the state; the northern Arizona city of Flagstaff; and the Little Colorado River Coalition, which represented small cities, utilities, ranchers and commercial interests. They discussed the tribe’s projected population, argued over the accuracy of the census count of the Hopi and offered predictions of what the numbers would be in the future.

In the end, the court went with the lowest population projections put forward by Flagstaff and the state, and it decided to only include people living on the reservation full time.

The reservation’s population, currently about 7,000, would peak at 18,255 by 2110, Harris decided.

She also decreed the tribe would get water to only irrigate 38% of farmland it planned to. It was denied water for a cattle operation, saying it “would not be feasible, practical, or provide economic benefits,” based on the court’s assessment of the current market. Harris also declared the coal operations were not “economically feasible.” Some $10 billion in economic development projects, presented in detail to the court, were deemed unrealistic.

Water for ceremonial and subsistence gardens was also denied. The court publicly listed nearly 100 sacred springs with limits on how much water the tribe was entitled to use for religious ceremonies.

In total, the tribe had requested at least 96,074 acre-feet a year of water, and the Arizona water master recommended awarding just 28,988 acre-feet, all of it from the same depleted, contaminated aquifer and seasonal streams the Hopi already use. After four decades, they ended up in the same precarious position they’d started.

Nuvangyaoma said the decree suggested the state and non-Native parties believed the tribe was incapable of carrying out its ambitious economic plans. It closed the door on future growth and, overall, was “insulting.”

By refusing to count members who live part time on the reservation as part of the population, the court ignored the connection many Native Americans have with their land, even when they don’t live there permanently, he said. Many leave so they or their children can pursue an education; for work; or to live in homes with reliable electricity and water. In short, Nuvangyaoma said, they seek the very things Hopi leaders hoped that the settlement would help bring to the reservation, and that the tribe needed water to do. But the court said that because the reservation was not growing at the speed the tribe claimed it could, it couldn’t have the water — a circular logic that hobbles the Hopi.

“It’s very frustrating that you’re told that your population will peak at a certain amount when we don’t see it that way,” Nuvangyaoma said.

Even with Harris’ decree on the books, the Hopi Tribe still faces a long road to access its allotted 28,988 acre-feet of water. Funding for dams, pipes and other infrastructure will likely require congressional action and involve more negotiation with other water users, including the Navajo Nation, which draws from the same groundwater. “I suspect I will not be alive when it comes to fruition,” Sinquah, the tribal council member, said.+

Nuvangyaoma said the tribe will still pursue its plans for economic development, but with the understanding it cannot look to the state or federal governments for support.

Cities across the Southwest have, with government support, pursued economic development and growth in the ways they want, he said, whether it’s coal mining, raising cattle or farming the desert using water brought from far away.

“So why are we putting limitations on Hopi and making a decision for us saying, ‘Oh, well, we don’t think that’s feasible for you all?’” Nuvangyaoma asked. “Who has that right to tell us what is and what is not feasible for us?”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Umar Farooq.

At least a self-contained shelter is enough to attract international eco-tourists to Papua New Guinea, say tourism operators.

David Van, an international tour guide operator, told the Bena tribe in Eastern Highlands province that international tourists had not experienced local life.

The tribe nurtures the 217ha Yasina Nature Park at Megabo in ward seven of the Upper Bena Local Level Government area in Unggai-Bena District, Eastern Highlands.

• READ MORE: Megabo community showcase unique cane swallowing ritual
  
• Yasina Park takes in animals
• Tree kangaroo of the year 2023 at Port Moresby Nature Park

Van said he would work with them starting with self-contained shelters where the tourists can enjoy privacy for days and appreciate exposure to such experience.

Yasina Nature Park director Paul Pake said Van would help the park improve one of the existing guest houses with sanitary kits and bed fittings.

“He [David Van] told us to build more guest houses, so we will start erecting structures now,” Pake said, adding that Van would help them as well, like he did with the Asaro Mudmen and 11 self-contained guest houses.

David Van, a Belgian operating out of Thailand organising photo tourism in Asia, said Papua New Guinea had a big potential in tourism.

‘Best country’ for photo travel
“I always do a lot of photo travel in the world, including Vietnam, Myanmar, but Papua New Guinea is the best country with different cultures compared to the world.”

He said that at least a decent shelter in the local communities with friendly environment was enough for international tourists from big cities to see where their food came from.

“They have been living in the big cities,” Van continued. “When they come here to Papua New Guinea, they will stay in hotels, come here, spend one hour and go back.

“They will not appreciate the real local life fully. Tourists would like to stay with the local people.”

Van said they would have to provide decent shelters where the tourists could enjoy their privacy while they mingled with the local life.

He assured them that he would expose Yasina Nature Park and others internationally.

“There is good potential here because the Bena tribe is not known, not many people know about it,” Van said.

“What I will do is take more pictures.

Organising Yasina tours
“When I go back I will contact many people throughout the world, organise their tours and guide them to this place.”

He said the tour duration depended on the number of activities the park could organise for the tourists.

“If you can take them for a walk to see some waterfalls, do some farming, they would love to sweep soil away and pull sweet potatoes out of the ground,” Van said. “That is really  local life.

“That’s what they want to see because they live in big cities — 20 floors up in the big buildings — and have never seen where their food comes from, how they are farmed.

“They have never even seen pig killing too.”

He said those were some areas where they could work around to develop tourism products.

Van has been in Papua New Guinea since last week.

He plans to visit other cultures and environment conservation sites in the Highlands region and help them develop tourism products.

Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

‘Screen Mix’, an entertainment and media portal from the Middle East,  made the same claim while sharing this video. This tweet has been viewed more than 60 lakh times. (Archived link)

Quoting Screen Mix’s tweet, Pakistani lawyer Mian Omar wrote that such traditions should be discouraged. Urging the United Nations to take cognizance of it, he added that such rituals were against humanity. (Archived link)

Jordan-based news agency ‘خبرني Khaberni’ also made the same claim while amplifying the footage. (Archived link)

A user named Abu Mohammad (ابومحمد) also tweeted the video with the same claim. (Archived link)

The clip is widespread on social media platforms.

Fact Check

Since this video is in Arabic, Alt News performed a search on Twitter using Arabic keywords related to the viral video with the help of Google Translate. We found a tweet by a user named ‘(إياد الحمود) @Eyaaaad‘, contradicting the viral claim and claiming that the clip was of a wedding being held following the traditions and customs of some tribes in the Baihang district of Nepal. The tweet also featured screenshots of some clips containing the TikTok username @laxu.sapkota.

Since TikTok is banned in India, we accessed the content of the (@laxu.sapkota) account with the help of a VPN. We found that the viral video was uploaded by this account recently.

Laxu Sapkota had included a link to a YouTube channel in his bio on TikTok. When we explored this YouTube channel, we found that the viral video had also been uploaded here on June 6, 2023. The title mentions that this is a video of a traditional wedding ceremony in Nepal.

[Video unavailable]

Laxu Sapkota has also uploaded this video on his Instagram account and added that this was a video of a traditional wedding ceremony in Nepal in which the girl is crying while leaving her home after the wedding.

Upon searching keywords related to the farewell on a palanquin in a Nepali wedding on YouTube, we found one such video in which a ritual similar to the viral video is being performed. In this video, the bride is being sent off in a palanquin.

To sum it up, several social media users shared the video of a traditional wedding ceremony in Nepal with the misleading claim that it is from a tribe in India where the wife is buried alive along with her husband when he passes away.

The post Indian tribe practises ritual similar to ‘sati’? Nepal wedding video shared with false claim appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

After meeting with congressional leaders at the White House Tuesday afternoon, U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters he has been "considering" invoking the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to avert a catastrophic default, but he also suggested that doing so won't solve the current battle with House Republicans.

With Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and others warning that the U.S. could face its first-ever default as soon as June 1, some legal experts and members of Congress have promoted unilateral action by Biden—such as minting a $1 trillion coin or citing the 14th Amendment, which says in part that the validity of the public debt "shall not be questioned," to justify continuing to pay the nation's bills even if GOP lawmakers won't raise the official borrowing limit.

"I have been considering the 14th Amendment" and Laurence Tribe "thinks that it would be legitimate," Biden said Tuesday evening, describing the Harvard University professor emeritus as "a man I have enormous respect for" and "who advised me for a long time."

"But the problem is, it would have to be litigated," the president said of the strategy, which Tribe advocated for in an opinion piece for The New York Times on Sunday. Biden later added that "I don't think that solves our problem now."

The president signaled that he is looking into asking the federal judiciary to weigh in on the 14th Amendment debate "months down the road," after settling the ongoing dispute with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

House Republicans last month passed their so-called Limit, Save, Grow Act, which would raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion or until March 31, 2024, whichever comes first, but also impose dramatic spending cuts that would affect working families. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has called the legislation "dead on arrival."

Both McCarthy and Schumer were at the White House for Biden's 4:00 pm ET meeting, along with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Biden, who unveiled his budget blueprint in March, said that "I told congressional leaders that I'm prepared to begin a separate discussion about my budget and spending priorities, but not under the threat of default."

Schumer said after the meeting that "we explicitly asked Speaker McCarthy, would he take default off the table. He refused. President Biden said he would; Leader Jeffries said he would; of course, I said I would, but he wouldn't take it off the table."

"The bottom line is very simple: There are large differences between the parties," he continued, flanked by Jeffries. "If you look at what President Biden had proposed and you look at what Speaker McCarthy has proposed, they're very, very different. We can try to come together on those, in a budget and appropriations process, but to use the risk of default—with all the dangers that has for the American people—as a hostage and say it's my way or no way, or mostly my way or no way, is dangerous."

McConnell claimed that "the United States is not going to default; it never has and it never will," but also made clear that Senate Republicans aren't interested in a clean debt limit increase and stressed that Biden and McCarthy must reach an agreement.

McCarthy, meanwhile, said that "everybody in this meeting reiterated the positions they were at. I didn't see any new movement."

According to Biden, the meeting attendees' staffs will continue to communicate this week and another meeting is set for Friday.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

As congressional leaders prepare for a Tuesday meeting at the White House, Congressman Jamie Raskin, a constitutional scholar, affirmed Sunday that if GOP lawmakers won't raise the debt ceiling without major spending cuts, President Joe Biden can invoke the 14th Amendment to keep borrowing and avert a catastrophic first-ever U.S. default.

Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says in part, "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law... shall not be questioned."

Asked whether the president could and should use that part of the amendment to combat Republican efforts to hold the global economy hostage, Raskin (D-Md.) told MSNBC's Jen Pskai—Biden's former press secretary—that "I think he has that authority under these circumstances, absolutely, because the Congress has put him in a constitutionally untenable position."

"If he decides to default for the country, he's... violating the Constitution, because the 14th Amendment says you can't do that," Raskin said of Biden, pointing to a New York Times opinion piece by Harvard University professor emeritus Laurence Tribe.

Tribe—whose previous students include Raskin along with former President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Elena Kagan—detailed why he has changed his mind on the debt limit argument.

"The question isn't whether the president can tear up the debt limit statute to ensure that the Treasury Department can continue paying bills submitted by veterans' hospitals or military contractors or even pension funds that purchased government bonds," he wrote Sunday. "The question isn't whether the president can in effect become a one-person Supreme Court, striking down laws passed by Congress."

Tribe continued:

The right question is whether Congress—after passing the spending bills that created these debts in the first place—can invoke an arbitrary dollar limit to force the president and his administration to do its bidding.

There is only one right answer to that question, and it is no.

And there is only one person with the power to give Congress that answer: the president of the United States. As a practical matter, what that means is this: Mr. Biden must tell Congress in no uncertain terms—and as soon as possible, before it's too late to avert a financial crisis—that the United States will pay all its bills as they come due, even if the Treasury Department must borrow more than Congress has said it can.

Praising Tribe's piece for the Times, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) tweeted early Monday: "The Treasury has the [constitutional] obligation to pay our debts and spend the money Congress has already directed it to do. It really is that straightforward."

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned in a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) last week that "our best estimate is that we will be unable to continue to satisfy all of the government's obligations by early June, and potentially as early as June 1."

Appearing on ABC's "The Week" Sunday, Yellen confirmed the timeline she laid out for the speaker is "still our current thinking" and explained that "we've been using extraordinary measures for several months now, and our ability to do that is running out."

While acknowledging that Biden said Friday he was not yet ready to invoke the 14th Amendment, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Yellen if it was still a possibility. She would not explicitly address whether the White House is considering the move, instead stressing that "our priority is to make sure that Congress does its job."

"There is no way to protect our financial system and our economy other than Congress doing its job and raising the debt ceiling and enabling us to pay our bills," Yellen said. "And we should not get to the point where we need to consider whether the president can go on issuing debt. This would be a constitutional crisis."

Led by McCarthy, House Republicans last month passed their so-called Limit, Save, Grow Act, which would raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion or until March 31, 2024—whichever comes first—but also impose dramatic cuts that would notably impact lower-income households. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has repeatedly called the bill "dead on arrival."

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and fellow Democrats are working on a "discharge petition" effort to force a vote on a clean bill raising the debt limit, but doing so would require support from at least five Republicans, which is unlikely.

In a Monday letter to Schumer, 43 GOP senators made clear that they are "united behind the House Republican conference in support of spending cuts and structural budget reform as a starting point for negotiations on the debt ceiling."

Meanwhile, Schumer, Jeffries, and other Democratic leaders on Monday released an updated version of their recent report warning that Republicans forcing a default would be catastrophic, "but even the threat of breaching the debt ceiling can have serious economic consequences for families."

Biden is set to meet with McCarthy, Jeffries, Schumer, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) Tuesday "for what he called a separate negotiation on fiscal policy—even though it is effectively linked to the debt limit drama," the Timesnoted Monday.

The newspaper added:

White House officials said this weekend that Mr. Biden has been publicly and privately adamant that he will not bargain with Republicans over raising the limit. "Let's get it straight: They're trying to hold the debt hostage to get us to agree to some draconian cuts, magnificently difficult and damaging cuts," Mr. Biden told a meeting of cabinet members and other economic officials on Friday.

Citing three unnamed sources with knowledge of internal conversations, The Washington Postreported Monday that White House officials see unilateral actions—from invoking the 14th Amendment to minting a platinum coin worth $1 trillion—as "risky choices that could cause lasting economic damage" but also "do not want to take the proposals completely off the table."

The National Association of Government Employees (NAGE), which represents about 75,000 federal employees, cited the 14th Amendment in a federal lawsuit filed Monday that seeks to have the debt limit law declared unconstitutional.

NAGE's complaint, which names Biden and Yellen as defendants, argues the debt limit statute "is unconstitutional because it puts the president in a quandary to exercise discretion to continue borrowing to pay for the programs which Congress has heretofore duly authorized and for which Congress has appropriated funds or to stop borrowing and to determine which of these programs the president, and not the Congress, will suspend, curtail, or cancel altogether."

The filing adds that NAGE "seeks to protect all its members from additional extraordinary measures as well as major spending-related actions that will necessarily be taken without approval of Congress and that result in layoffs, furloughs, requirements for unpaid work, and loss of funding of the pensions and retirement plans of its members."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Some of this is indulgent, narcissistic craving – you deserve what you get if you plug your name into an AI generator, hoping for sweet things to be said about you. Things get even comical when the search platform is itself riddled with inaccuracies.

One recent example stirring interest in the Digital Kingdom is a threatened legal suit against the OpenAI chatbot. Brian Hood, Mayor of Hepburn Shire Council in the Australian state of Victoria, was alerted to inaccurate accusations about bribery regarding a case that took place between 1999 and 2004. It involved Note Printing Australia, an entity of the Reserve Bank of Australia. Hood had worked at Note Printing Australia and blew the whistle on bribes being made to foreign authorities. He was never charged with the crime itself. However, answers generated by ChatGPT suggested otherwise, including the claim that Hood was found guilty of the said bribery allegations.

In a statement provided to Ars Technica by Gordon Legal, the firm representing Hood, more details are given. Among “several false statements” returned by the AI bot are claims that Hood “was accused of bribing officials in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam between 1999 and 2005, that he was sentenced to 30 months in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of false accounting under the Corporations Act in 2012, and that he authorised payments to a Malaysian arms dealer acting as a middleman to secure a contract with the Malaysian Government.”

James Naughton, a partner at Gordon Legal, is representing Hood. “He’s an elected official, his reputation is central to his role,” stated the lawyer. “It would potentially be a landmark moment in the sense that it’s applying this defamation law to a new area of artificial intelligence and publication in the IT space.”

In March, Hood’s legal representatives wrote a letter of concern to OpenAI, demanding that they amend the outlined errors within 28 days, threatening a defamation action against the company in the event they refused to do so.

The question here is whether ChatGPT’s supposedly defamatory imputations might fall within the realm of liability. The bot’s functionality on generating facts is currently sketchy, and any user should be familiar with that fact. That said, opinions on the subject of reputational liability remain mixed.

Lawrence Tribe of Harvard Law School does not regard the notion as outlandish. “It matters not, for purposes of legal liability, whether the alleged lies about you or someone else were generated by a human being or by a chatbot, by a genuine intelligence or by a machine algorithm.”

Robert Post of the Yale Law School looks at the matter from the perspective of the communication itself. Defamation would not take place at the point the information is generated by the bot. It would only happen if that (mis)information was communicated or disseminated by the user. “A ‘publication’ happens only when a defendant communicates the defamatory statement to a third party.”

Not so, claims RonNell Andersen Jones of the University of Utah. “If defamatory falsehood is generated by an AI chatbot itself, it is harder to conceptualise this within our defamation law framework, which presupposes an entity with a state of mind on the other end of the communication.”

In terms of defaming a public figure, “actual malice” would have to be shown – something distinctly at odds in the ChatGPT context. Jones points us in a possibly different direction: that the function, or otherwise, of such a system could be seen through the prism of product liability.

Those based in the US might resort to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, that most remarkable of provisions that provides internet service providers immunity from legal suits regarding content published by third parties on the site. The appeal of the section is evident by how many attacks have been made against it, be it from campaigning liberal celebrities with bruised reputations or Donald Trump himself.

But the original drafters of the law, Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, and former Rep. Chris Cox, a California Republican, are of the view that chatbot creators would not be able to avail themselves of the protection. “To be entitled to immunity,” Cox suggested to The Washington Post, “a provider of an interactive computer service must not have contributed to the creation or development of the content at issue.”

When Ars Technica attempted to replicate the various mistakes supposedly generated by ChatGPT, they came up short. Ditto the BBC. This might suggest that the generated errors have been corrected. But over the next few weeks, if not months, expect a number of thick, all-covering disclaimers to ensure that AI bots such as ChatGPT are not subject to liability.

As a matter of fact, ChatGPT already has one: “Given the probabilistic nature of machine learning, use of our Services may in some situations result in incorrect Output that does not accurately reflect real people, places, or facts. You should evaluate the accuracy of any Output as appropriate for your use case, including by using human review of the Output.” Whether this satisfies technologically illiterate courts remains to be seen.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Reutersreports U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Hovland—an appointee of former President George W. Bush—issued a preliminary injunction against the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule after 24 states sued the Biden administration.

"This ruling readily bows to the forces in this country that have been trying for years to gut the Clean Water Act, throwing science under the bus and disregarding water safeguards for downstream communities and tribes," Janette Brimmer, an attorney for the green legal advocacy group Earthjustice who is defending the WOTUS rule on behalf of four Indigenous tribes, said in a statement.

"We will not give in to these forces; we will double down and fight along with our partners to ensure the law and science prevail and the will of the vast majority of citizens for clean water is carried out," Brimmer added.

Last month, Texas and Idaho were granted a separate injunction against the rule by U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey Brown, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump.

According toProgressive Farmer, Hovland's ruling means that the WOTUS rule—which establishes protections for wetlands and seasonal streams—is now on hold in 24 more states: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

States shaded in red will be affected by a federal judge's temporary injunction against the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule. (Image: Earthjustice)

In 2020, the Trump administration rolled back WOTUS, which originated during the tenure of former President Barack Obama. The Biden administration revived the rule and last December it was finalized by the EPA.

Earlier this month, President Joe Biden vetoed legislation passed by Republicans and corporate Democrats in Congress that would have eviscerated the administration's ability to enforce WOTUS.

Hovland stopped short of issuing the nationwide injunction against WOTUS sought by the American Farm Bureau Federation and other agriculture industry interest groups. Still, Big Ag and Republican politicians in affected states overwhelmingly welcomed the injunction against what they say is a major act of government overreach.

Indigenous leaders, however, slammed Wednesday's ruling.

"Clean water is essential to tribal citizens' spiritual, physical, mental well-being, and survival."

"Clean water is essential to tribal citizens' spiritual, physical, mental well-being, and survival" Gary Harrison, traditional chief of the Chickaloon Native Village in Alaska, said in a statement. "Removing vital clean water safeguards will harm wetlands and streams that sustain tribal citizens, including myself."

G. Anne Richardson, chief of the Rappahannock tribe in Virginia, said that "the court's order threatens to strip vital protections from the network of waters that have been the lifeblood of the Rappahannock Tribe since time immemorial."

"Without the Clean Water Act," she added, "projects that would destroy important wetlands and streams could get rammed through without any opportunity for the tribe to object."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Indigenous and environmental activists on Wednesday decried the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' denial of an emergency injunction sought by conservation groups to block a proposed northern Nevada lithium mine that opponents argue was approved illegally and will harm the land and wildlife in the delicate desert ecosystem.

The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit denied a bid by the Western Watersheds Project (WWP) that would have stopped Lithium Nevada, a subsidiary of Canada-based Lithium Americas, from breaking ground on the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine in Humboldt County near the Oregon border.

Last month, WWP filed an emergency motion for injunction in the the U.S. District Court of Nevada after a federal judge ordered the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to review part of its approval of the mine but allowed construction to proceed in the meantime. That request was denied last Friday.

"It's a truly unfortunate outcome for the land, wildlife, and cultural resources of this area," WWP staff attorney Talasi Brooks said in a statement. "This massive open-pit mine has been fast-tracked from start to finish in defiance of environmental laws, all in the name of 'green energy,' but its environmental impacts will be permanent and severe."

Opponents argue the Thacker Pass project—which would tap into the largest known source of lithium in the United States and was approved during the final days of the Trump administration—was unlawfully authorized and will irreparably damage lands and wildlife.

Three Native American tribes—the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, Burns Paiute Tribe, and Summit Lake Paiute Tribe—are also suing in a bid to block construction of the mine, claiming that claimed BLM withheld key information from the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office and misrepresented how much the agency consulted with tribes prior to approving the project.

Thacker Pass—or Pass PeeHee Mu'Huh, which means "rotten moon" to all three tribes—is the site of a September 12, 1865 massacre of dozens and perhaps scores of Northern Paiute men, women, and children by U.S. Cavalry troops. The three tribes want all of Thacker Pass listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

"It is a disappointment to see valuable biological, cultural, and visual resources sacrificed for a stripmine that has been greenwashed to be good for the environment."

"It is a disappointment to see valuable biological, cultural, and visual resources sacrificed for a stripmine that has been greenwashed to be good for the environment," said Kevin Emmerich, co-founder of the advocacy group Basin and Range Watch.

"In reality, the mine will impact Great Basin wildlife and hydrology for centuries or more," Emmerich added. "We will not see any kind of recovery of this region in our lifetime."

Katie Fite of WildLands Defense said after Wednesday's ruling that "Thacker Pass lithium mining will deal a major blow to a critical sage-grouse population."

"BLM's rushed mine approval exposed that it continues to treat the West's irreplaceable sagebrush wild lands and cultural landscapes as sacrifice zones to industry," Fite added. "It's absurd for officials to greenwash this dirty lithium mine. We'll continue working to expose the ecological travesty taking place."

While global demand for lithium is surging, extraction of the metal can have harmful consequences, including the destruction of lands and ecosystems and water contamination.

Thacker Pass is believed to hold enough lithium to supply the needs of more than 1.5 million electric vehicles every year for 40 years, according to Lithium Americas.

"There are no other U.S. alternatives to Thacker Pass to provide lithium at the scale, grade, or timeline necessary to begin closing the gap between the lithium available and the lithium needed to achieve the U.S.' clean energy and transportation goals," lawyers for the company argued.

However, numerous lithium mining experts have asserted that the technology is not green—and comes with high environmental and social costs.

Lithium extraction, noted a 2021 Nature editorial, globally "requires large quantities of energy and water. Moreover, the work takes place in mines where workers—including children as young as seven—often face unsafe conditions."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

The first thing that comes to mind is the feeling of starting from behind. You don’t realize that you’re starting from behind until you meet people who haven’t started from behind, or you meet people who have started a few steps ahead of you. You hear these terms like, “Pulling yourself up from your bootstraps,” but if you don’t have bootstraps to pull yourself up from, it’s pretty difficult. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia in the south side of the city, which was notorious and still is. A lot of the people that I grew up around had never left a few block radius. Not even to go to another city, not even across town. So you were in an environment where there weren’t a lot of new ideas, there wasn’t a lot of creativity.

I remember being super young and being interested in the arts. I loved art, theater, and music. And I loved different types of music, not just hip hop and R&B. I remember getting teased for that when I was a kid, and feeling this pressure to assimilate into what was accepted. One of my biggest challenges as I got older was finding who I really was inside and being comfortable with that person, and not trying to live my life in a way that was accepted in this very small bubble of a world. I go home a lot of times and the same guys are still on the block smoking a blunt, doing the same things they were doing 20 years ago, and it’s like, “Wow.” I feel like I’m stuck in time.

So I think that was the biggest challenge. And it’s a challenge for so many people who come from socioeconomic areas where they don’t get a lot of opportunity or aren’t around people who have the ability to really see and know different things. Being able to have the wherewithal to say, “Hey, I want to see something different. I want something different for myself.” I think that was the first major hurdle for me.

How did that experience affect the path you took to become an entrepreneur?

I had no blueprint. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have any mentors—outside of my mom. There weren’t role models or anyone to teach me the ropes. I didn’t have a blueprint so I had to create my own, and I had to fail a lot, make a lot of mistakes. I feel very fortunate that even though there were times I messed up and made mistakes, I was able to keep pushing along.

But that’s really hard. When you don’t have a blueprint or someone that can educate you on how to do certain things, it’s really difficult. I didn’t know how to start my own company. The business side of being a creative and an entrepreneur—I didn’t know how to do any of that stuff. I remember getting in trouble with the IRS because I was like, “Oh, I owe taxes? What? This is how this works?” Or selling my first company and thinking I made a lot of money when I actually didn’t.

You mentioned your mother, but were there other people, maybe a little later along in your life, who helped you see that the road you chose was open to you?

I was homeless my senior year of high school, and I would go to the local public library to use the computers there. I’d read the news online and I remember coming across Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. These guys were in their twenties starting these billion dollar companies, and I was like, “Yo, that’s so crazy.” For me, coming where I’m from, you either played ball, you rapped, or you sold drugs. That was it. And those weren’t viable options for me. I couldn’t rap—my bars were pretty trash. I was really good at basketball, but not good enough to be a professional. And I didn’t want to sell drugs because so many men in my family had gone to jail or were dead over drugs.

So I was like, “Whoa, this tech stuff is cool, but I’m not white and from privilege.” But then I discovered this guy Q, who started the website World Star Hip Hop. It sounds crazy now because that site is horrible in a lot of ways, but for me, at the time, it was like, “Wow, someone who looks like people from the hood is out there doing this stuff. If this guy can do it, then I can do it.” That was my first time seeing somebody that looked like me and talked like me doing something in the internet and tech space. It inspired me to apply to Virginia Tech and try to pursue a career in tech.

The second thing I would say is that in my mid-twenties I had been grinding, grinding, grinding. I moved to LA and started to meet people in tech and music and art—young Black people who were making moves. It was really inspiring for me. It’s really important to find inspiration from your peers and people that you can lean on for different things. I didn’t have that at the beginning, in the first part of my career. I started my first company at 19. So the first five, six years of my career was really me trying to blaze a path. It was really important to start meeting all of these different people in different spaces that were going through similar things as me.

How do you make sure you don’t burn yourself out? How do you think about self care?

It’s just conscious decision making. Last night I got back from Paris and I was exhausted, jet lagged. And it was still pretty early—maybe eight or nine. I could have done emails and got to some work. But I made the conscious decision to say, “No, I’m going to go rest.”

When you’re just completely on all the time, you don’t think you have the option to take care of yourself. A lot of times when we overwork ourselves or go overboard with things, it’s with stuff that could wait. We only have one life to live. I used to just work, work, work, work. I didn’t enjoy my evenings. My evenings were work. And now I have a social life. Now I have built a community of people, especially through the art world, which has been one of the biggest things that has helped my mental health.

I like to call myself a creative entrepreneur. And, when your head’s down, it really stifles creativity. When you’re not able to take a step back and smell the roses and live life—that’s where the inspiration comes from. It’s about being conscious of the decisions we have and making the right decisions to take care of ourselves. It’s like, hey, your body’s hurting? Go get a massage. Oh, you’re exhausted? We’ve all been there where we’re damn near falling asleep in meetings. You should just go take a nap. If you have meetings all day and you’re like, this is going to kill me—move some of those meetings. Just understand that you have that option.

You mentioned the phrase “creative entrepreneur.” When I was younger, the relationship between art and commerce was looked at a little more skeptically, I think, than it is now. There was a real focus on what was indie, what was mainstream, and there was maybe more cynicism about the influence of money on art. As someone who has been working at the intersection of creativity and business for a while, how have you seen that relationship change? And what do you think creative people can learn from those changes?

Being a creative does not mean you have to be broke. I feel for some of these creatives that have found success. Sometimes their own community can turn on them because they see money as something that’s bad. I think it’s a beautiful thing to be able to get paid for something you’re passionate about. I think that’s one of the most beautiful things in the world. And it’s a privilege. A lot of people don’t realize how much of a privilege it is.

The world is changing. Big brands and companies are embracing creatives and looking for collaborations and partnerships more than ever, especially in a time where ads are performing worse and people are being oversaturated with content. Creatives have become this new avenue for a lot of brands to really reach people in a genuine way and to really do positive and cool things. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

But I do think the minute you sacrifice who you are is the moment you have to step away. If there’s something that’s asked of you that’s a clear step across the line and makes you change who you are, then it’s not worth it. But if you’re able to still be yourself and express yourself freely and do the things that you love and get paid for it, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

When you’re getting ready to start a project, do you have any tried and true ways that you approach moving things forward? You said you started a company when you were 19. What did you do to get started on making your idea for a company actually become a real company? I remember talking about a lot of ideas I had when I was 19, but making something actually happen is a different thing.

I wasn’t as intentional with my first company. I was working a minimum wage job and I would buy lunch and I was like, “Wow, half my day’s pay is gone.” I needed to take care of myself and my family. So it was more driven by a sense of survival. As I’ve gotten older though, I realize that there are a few things that are tried and true for me. Number one is really, really getting to know my audience in the space. Before I even took the job at Artsy, I’d put years of time into learning the art world and making connections and seeing what was needed in the space.

Number two is having product market fit. It’s about going beyond just learning the audience, and making sure there’s both an audience and product market fit for anything I want to create and put into the world. Whatever you’re putting into the world, whether it’s music, whether it’s design and technology, a comic, a game, whatever it may be, it’s so important to make sure there are people out there that actually want to consume it.

And I think the last piece is faith. I’ve gone through a lot of stuff in my life, but I just have an overwhelming sense of faith in myself and my ideas. Man, it’s rough to create and put something out there. And if you don’t believe in yourself, what do you have? You’ve got to have faith that it’s a possibility. If you have a cynical or pessimistic nature, that stuff tends to manifest itself. An overwhelming faith in myself has really served me well.

How do you keep your creative side fulfilled while you’re working? And where do you look for inspiration?

Honestly, recently, it’s been looking at projects on Kickstarter. I’ll tell you, I wasn’t looking at Kickstarter too much before I took the job here. I would go to Kickstarter sometimes if a friend of mine was doing something. But wow, you can literally go on Kickstarter any day of the week and see so many cool things. I just went on the site today and I found this French woman who’s making a magazine highlighting old hip hop album covers from the 2000s. I was like, “Whoa, that’s my childhood.” I’m looking at her video and I can’t understand what she’s saying, but the fact that she found this niche level of creativity that brought so much nostalgia back to me—it’s really cool. It inspires me so much to see different people around the world chasing their dreams and trying to put things out into the world.

The second thing I would say is talking to my friends and my tribe and my community. I get more happy and excited about my friends’ projects than I am about my own. Having people in your life that really inspire you and do really cool things—that fills my cup.

The last thing is having creative outlets for yourself. I love to write, I love to paint sometimes. I love to sing when no one’s watching. And art obviously has such a special place in my life, and it’s been my escape in so many ways, whether it’s creating art or going to see art. I feel like art saved my life.

You’ve talked about the importance of your tribe, and the need to find inspiration in the group of people you connect with. How do you build a tribe?

So, I’m a loner. I know that about myself. I’m also an introvert—a lot of people don’t think that I am because they see the personal brand. But I’m very much an introvert and a loner. I remember leaving Los Angeles and feeling like, wow, I don’t know if I’ve made one real genuine friendship. It’s crazy. I lived here for years. I was like, “If I was locked out of my house, who would I call?” “If I needed something, who would I reach out to?” When you start thinking about these hypothetical questions and you’re drawing a blank on people, that’s a problem.

I moved to New York right before the pandemic hit. It was very tough, but I feel like people here showed me how much they cared about me and I finally started to pay attention to it. I don’t think I’d ever actively paid attention to that before, and that had been my problem.

That’s deep.

Yeah. Once you start to pay attention, you start to realize who the people are that you want to hold close, and who the people are that truly, genuinely have your back. I think that’s how I’ve built my tribe here. I started to be in spaces that inspired me, the art world. And I started to listen. I started to pay attention to the love that people showed for me without the need for reciprocity. And that really changed things. People accepted me for who I am, good and bad. Just spending time with people, just being like, “Yeah, I just want to be around these people.”

It’s been a process. It’s very new to me, but it feels really, really, really good. I started to really pay attention and also invest in relationships. It sounds so simple to invest in relationships, but it’s not simple. Being with people just for the sake of who they are and not because you need something is so important. That’s a very foreign concept for a lot of people.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Eric Steuer.

Activists and conservationists worldwide mourned Monday following news that a man believed to be the last of a remote Brazilian tribe was found dead after years of resisting all efforts by the outside world to contact or interfere with him.

Known by defenders of Indigenous rights as "Indian of the Hole" or "The Man of the Hole" (Índio do Buraco)—a name given due to pits he dug for shelter, concealment, and possibly hunting—he was the only inhabitant of Tanaru Indigenous Territory in Rondônia state, in the western Brazilian Amazon. First encountered 26 years ago, the man—believed to be approximately 60 years old at the time of his death—lived reclusively in the remote region after other members of his tribe were thought to have been poisoned by ranchers who wanted to develop the land where they lived.

OPI, the Observatory for the Human Rights of Uncontacted and Recently-Contacted Peoples, issued a statement (translated here into English) bemoaning that "another Indigenous person, the last representative of his people, has died."

"In the recent past," the group continued, "he was the victim of an atrocious extermination process, as a result of the installation of large state-sponsored farms. He witnessed the death of his people, lost his territory to pastures and was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a small portion of forest interdicted by justice, surrounded by large farms in the region of the Corumbiara River in Rondônia."

"For resisting with extreme determination to any endeavors of contact," OPI added, the man "died without letting know which ethnicity he belonged to, nor the motivations of the holes he dug inside his house."

As The Guardian reports, "Officials know very little about the man, but his determined independence and evident solace helped create a mystique around him that captured the attention of activists and media across Brazil and around the world."

Survival International, which advocates for Indigenous rights and autonomy in Brazil and elsewhere around the world, called the death of the man—whose remains were recently found in a state of decomposition in the Tanaru territory—a symbol of genocide against the Amazon's Indigenous peoples. The group called the region where he lived as "a small island of forest in a sea of vast cattle ranches, in one of the most violent regions in Brazil."

Fiona Watson, research and advocacy director for Survival International who visited the man's territory in 2004 with a government monitoring team, commented on the man's passing.

"No outsider knew this man's name, or even very much about his tribe—and with his death the genocide of his people is complete," said Watson. "For this was indeed a genocide—the deliberate wiping out of an entire people by cattle ranchers hungry for land and wealth."

What the man symbolized, said Watson, was "both the appalling violence and cruelty inflicted on Indigenous peoples worldwide in the name of colonization and profit, but also their resistance. We can only imagine what horrors he had witnessed in his life, and the loneliness of his existence after the rest of his tribe were killed, but he determinedly resisted all attempts at contact, and made clear he just wanted to be left alone."

Watson also invoked the policies of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro who is notorious for his antagonism toward the Indigenous people of Brazil and his wanton destruction of the Amazon rainforest by backing the logging, cattle, and mining interests who have sought massive profits from the region's land and natural resources.

"If President Bolsonaro and his agribusiness allies get their way," warned Watson, "this story will be repeated over and over again until all the country's Indigenous peoples are wiped out. The Indigenous movement in Brazil, and Survival, will do everything possible to ensure that doesn't happen."

According to government officials with Funai, which monitored the man from a distance, it appeared the man had prepared for his death and that neither foul play nor a violent end was suggested. A forensic doctor with the nation's federal police is expected to carry out an autopsy and anthropologists and other researchers are expected to try to learn more about how he lived.

Following the man's death, OPI renewed its called for the Tanaru reserve where he lived his final years to be permanently protected as a memorial to Indigenous genocide.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jon Queally.

Rappahannock Tribe members were joined by conservation leaders and U.S. officials — including Interior Secretary Deb Haaland — on Friday to commemorate the return of a 465-acre parcel of land that was seized by European settlers in the 17th century. The return of the land, which has been restored to its original name of Pissacoack, is “a historic victory for conservation and racial justice,” the tribe said in a statement.

The news marks the culmination of a yearslong collaboration between conservationists and tribal members to protect the area and restore it to its original owners. Besides its reputation as one of the Chesapeake Bay’s most beautiful places, the region’s bluffs and wetlands provide important habitat for fish and migratory bird species — some of which have cultural and religious significance to the Rappahannock. Bald eagles, for example, descend upon the area by the hundreds each year as part of their annual migrations.

“You can sometimes see 40 eagles in the span of a couple hours,” said Joel Dunn, president and CEO of the nonprofit Chesapeake Conservancy.

Dunn’s organization helped lead efforts to restore Rapphannock ownership of the land following multiple threats that it would be developed into residential subdivisions or a sprawling resort complex with an 18-hole golf course. The organization and its allies in the tribe feared development would decimate wildlife habitat and irreparably harm the land.

“The river is life to us,” said Anne Richardson, chief of the Rappahannock Tribe. She described the resplendent landscape as the tribe’s “grocery store” — home to some 250 or more species of plants and animals that the tribe gathers to eat or use for craft and medicinal purposes. Some of these species have long served as staples for the tribe — including the blueback herring, whose populations have fallen dramatically due to urbanization and agriculture. Richardson said it has been painful to watch their decline. “It’s difficult to lose those things,” she said.

Thanks to a massive fundraising effort that included donations from a wealthy family and a grant from the nonprofit National Fish and Wildlife Foundation sponsored by Walmart, by February 2022 the Chesapeake Conservancy had collected enough money to buy a 465-acre tract of land and donate it to the Rappahannock Tribe. As part of the deal, the land was placed into a conservation easement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Rappahannock Tribe, which will manage the land, now intends to place the land in trust with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which will give it additional protections and make the tribe eligible for federal conservation funding.

Dunn said he hopes the land transfer will inspire more conservation partnerships across the country. “I really hope this becomes a model,” he said, “to share the challenge we have to protect our environment for current and future generations.” Indeed, the last few years have seen growing success for the landback movement, which seeks to restore stolen land to Indigenous ownership. Tribes from the Esselen near Big Sur, California, to the Passamaquoddy on Pine Island in Maine have regained millions of acres through land purchases, donations, and legal victories.  

On the Chesapeake Bay, Richardson said the restoration of the Rappahannock Tribe’s land would heal her people and the natural world. “To help preserve and restore everything that’s been depleted — that’s my goal,” she said.

The tribe is planning to develop an Indigenous conservation education center on the river, where students and the public can learn about the tribe’s history and ecological knowledge. “Hopefully we can transform the children and young people who will become our senators into leaders in conservation,” Richardson said. “We have valuable things to teach this society at a time when our planet is in crisis.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rappahannock Tribe gets 465 acres of land back on the Chesapeake Bay on Apr 4, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

Indigenous students from West Papua studying at universities across Aotearoa are defying an order from the Indonesian government to return home.

In January, more than 40 students were told that Indonesia would no longer be funding autonomous West Papuan scholarships so they had to pack up and leave.

Laurens Ikinia of the Hubula tribe and fellow student Esniel Mirin of the Kimyal tribe, both from the central highlands of West Papua, say they have been stripped of their dream for a brighter future.

• READ MORE: Overcoming trauma, Papuan students in NZ now face new challenge
• Other West Papuan student articles
• WATCH: Te Ao Māori News video

“The government has terminated about 42 students here in Aotearoa New Zealand who are the recipients of Papua provincial government scholarships and I am one of the students who was terminated and this is really worrying me,” Ikinia said.

Ikinia and Mirin have both been struggling to support themselves since the scholarship decision was made. Living costs are rising and tuition fees are high for overseas students here.

“What we are trying to do just to survive is do some part-time jobs as long as we can but, unfortunately, some students cannot work because of their visa conditions. I don’t know how long it’s going to take us but that’s what we are doing just to survive,” Ikinia said.

Mirin said he found it hard to talk about the issue as he was not able to support himself and not able to work.

“I’m trying to communicate with my close friends from the campus or the churches I attend and they help me a lot,” he said.

“We are calling the Indonesian President, Joko Widodo, to respond to our request so in the future we can continue our programmes and success because this is kind of Indonesians trying to manipulate our education rights.”

The Indonesian embassy gave a written response to Māori Television’s request for comment, stating that the scholarships were wholly managed by Papua’s democratically elected provincial government. The embassy also said:

“These students are part of a total of 593 students from Papua province receiving the ‘Papua Special Autonomy Scholarship’… only those who have exceeded the allocated time of the scholarship and those who cannot meet the academic requirements are being recalled.

“The decision to repatriate certain students does not impact on those students who remain on track with regards to their studies abroad.

“The assessment is also conducted to ensure other eligible students from Papua province also obtain the same opportunity in pursuing their studies.”

The embassy also said it had tried to resolve various aspects of the issue including possible outstanding tuition and living fees.

But for students such as Ikinia the suggestion he is being sent home because he has been failing, has no foundation.

“I came to New Zealand in 2016, I did my New Zealand language programme for five months and then I studied my international contemporary studies, bachelor programme, I studied in 2017 and then I finished in 2019 in three years and then I studied for my master’s programme in 2020,” he says.

“I’m just about to finish and then they put my name on the list and then they claim that I’m not making any progress, which is baseless. This is something that we have written a letter to the government to clarify — the evidence that the government used to categorise all these 42 students not making progress.”

Ikinia is reaching out to institutions, organisations and communities for their support on behalf of the Papuan Students Association of Oceania.

“We humbly request the people of Aotearoa, New Zealand to open your arms to welcome us as a Pacific family.

“It’s been a long, long time where West Papuans, indigenous peoples have not spoken about our education rights and we are calling for the sake of humanity.”

• For more information, readers can visit the Papuan Students Association Oceania social media pages to learn how to offer support:
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Email: papuanstudentsoceania@gmail.com

Marena Mane is a Te Ao Māori News reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

For Stanley and Silliboy, the focus was not so much the hemp they were growing as what it was doing. Their farm, once part of the Loring Air Force Base, is also a Superfund site — an area so polluted it’s marked high-priority for federal cleanup. Later, when the Aroostook Band of Micmacs took over the site’s ownership, they found its soil was rife with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS, cancer-causing compounds that are so difficult to break down they’re commonly known as “forever chemicals.” 

Because of their ability to bind to proteins, PFAS tend to bioaccumulate — building up in soil, water, and even human bodies. Under typical environmental conditions, they can persist for hundreds, even thousands of years. But there is hope at Loring: In 2020, researchers discovered that the Micmacs’ hemp plants were successfully sucking PFAS out of the contaminated soil. This practice, known as phytoremediation, could guide farmers across the country who have had to shut down after discovering their soil is tainted with the ubiquitous class of chemicals. 

Sara Nason, one of the project’s lead researchers from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, called their results “conservatively promising.” Other researchers see the potential too. David Huff, a senior scientist at the environmental consulting firm Nutter & Associates Inc., said, “At the end of the day, the data support phytoremediation as a viable approach and definitely established proof of concept.”

PFAS were once considered to be human-made miracle compounds. Due to their oil- and water-repelling properties, they were long used in all kinds of products from firefighting foam to stain-resistant carpets to nonstick pans. They’ve been linked to a host of health problems, including kidney and testicular cancer, liver damage, and suppressed immunity. 

Although some companies have voluntarily decided to phase out the use of PFAS in their products and packaging, the chemicals are already ubiquitous, pervading farms and military sites alike. In states like Maine and New Mexico, where PFAS have been detected in soil, milk, and vegetables, they have been traced to “biosolids” — byproducts from sewage treatment plants that are sometimes used as fertilizers. In former military bases like Loring, the main source is thought to be firefighting foam. Indeed, part of the land that the Micmac obtained in 2009 was previously used as a firefighting testing area.

Loring has undergone years of cleanup since the base closed. In 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency deemed it ready for reuse, albeit with limits due to contamination that persists at the site. According to the EPA, the Air Force has confirmed the presence of PFAS in the groundwater, surface water, and soil, and promised future study.

The tribe sought the land for economic development, but it is “unhealthy,” Silliboy said. It’s the latest in what he sees as the Micmac’s long history of obtaining poor land. He pointed to reservations on swamps and steep hills, land where no one can garden. “When the tribe is given any property for reservation land, it’s not prime property,” he said. So when Stanley, seeking a site to test hemp’s ability to pull PFAS out of the ground, approached him about a partnership, he was eager to work together. “Protecting the land is part of the Micmac beliefs,” said Chief Edward Peter-Paul of the Aroostook Band in a report on the project. “Anything we can do to contribute to making the environment better, we want to be a part of.”

In the spring of 2019, the Micmac Nation, Upland Grassroots, and their research partners began their experiment. They collected data on three plots (others didn’t survive a drought). Two years later, they reported early signs of success: The hemp lowered PFAS in the soil. 

Phytoremediation is an attractive option for cleaning land of certain types of contaminants because it’s relatively affordable and limits disturbances to soil. In addition to PFAS, plants have been used to leach lead from abandoned mines and pesticides from retired orchards. While people have long used plants to help clean soil and water, the term was coined in 1994 by Rutgers University biologist Ilya Raskin. Raskin’s early experiments involved using mustard to extract heavy metal pollutants half a mile from Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which unleashed catastrophic amounts of radioactive material when a reactor melted down in the mid-1980s. 

Hemp is a good candidate for phytoremediation because it grows fast across much of the United States. Its roots are deep and profuse — the better to uptake pollutants from soil. Stanley believes their success using hemp to remove persistent contaminants like PFAS holds promise for many other farmers. Before hemp’s widespread legalization in 2018, “huge companies could excavate or do these very intrusive processes” to deal with polluted land, she said. “But there was nothing the layperson could really do to clean land.”

Nason, the researcher with Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, agreed the practice has potential, though she was more cautiously optimistic. “It’s a possibility, but I think we still have a lot to learn,” she said. It’s still unclear how much of the chemicals hemp can remove. Although the Loring project successfully extracted some PFAS, plenty remained in the soil. Also unclear is how many rounds of hemp planting it would take to return levels to a “safe” baseline — something that doesn’t technically exist yet without national standards from the EPA.

The team lacked good control data to measure their efforts because “pretty much everywhere has some amount of PFAS,” Nason said. 

Assuming phytoremediation of PFAS breaks out of its experimental phase, it should shine in cost comparisons to other removal techniques, according to David Huff, the environmental consultant. Currently, the standard approach to PFAS cleanup involves excavating the affected soil. The costs can be astronomical: One estimate for the contaminated soil on a 100-acre dairy farm in Maine ran upward of $25 million. Using plants, Huff said, can cost 75 percent less at least. That’s not to say plant-based PFAS removal comes cheap exactly: Soil testing can cost anywhere from $250 to $600 per sample. And for any given field, samples at multiple points across the field are needed to measure progress, especially as PFAS levels can vary from spot to spot within the same parcel of land.

Huff, who has studied various grasses and trees’ ability to extract PFAS, said plants work best when the contaminant levels are lower and the cleanup area is larger — around two acres or more. By that measure, most farms would be considered large projects. 

And size isn’t the only limitation — phytoremediation takes more time compared to other approaches. 

Leah Penniman, co-director and manager of the community farm Soul Fire Farm in New York state, wrote about using plants like geranium or sunflowers to clean lead-contaminated soil in her book Farming While Black. “It takes at least one year and very careful monitoring, so it’s not for everyone,” she wrote. After the first year, if tests still indicate high lead levels, it may take another round of planting (or two or three). Developers might prefer the expensive, quicker route of excavation over a long wait. But faced with steep costs, small farmers may have no choice besides a plant-based approach.

For farmers hoping to put plants to work, there are other challenges ahead. If a farm’s soil is polluted, odds are the water will be too. That was the case at Loring, so the EPA doesn’t allow the use of the water supply, Stanley said. She and Silliboy had to truck in water each week for their hemp, which limited how much they could grow. Some states are already addressing these needs; the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, for example, installs filters for farm wells that exceed a certain level of contamination.

Future studies will also need to develop guidelines for how people should dispose of the PFAS-laden plants once their job is done. That could entail drying first to reduce the sheer mass, Huff said. The key is safely discarding waste to avoid creating another mess. 

Meanwhile, the work at Loring continues. A new water tank will help Stanley and Silliboy plant more hemp this year. The research effort has gained a new partner, a chemical engineer from the University of Virginia interested in using enzymes to break down PFAS. 

The Aroostook Band of Micmacs is considering plans to build a campground, once the land proves clean. The woods have grown back over the years and run with bears, moose, and deer. Although, Silliboy said, state officials have recently cautioned against consuming wild venison — there’s PFAS in it.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A tribe in Maine is using hemp to remove ‘forever chemicals’ from the soil on Feb 22, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lina Tran.