Indigenous Culture News

(This report by La Cola de Rata is part of their series entitled Especial Tierra de Resistentes, which can be viewed here)   Edith Lucía Taborda Guevara is an anxious…

INDRAGIRI HILIR, Indonesia — Customary leaders Patih Majuan, Datuk Manti and Datuk Mangku approach their scared forest with hands clasped in prayer. Other residents of the village of Talang Durian…

For years, seabird ecologist Jennifer Lavers longed to survey the colonies of short-tailed shearwaters on Figure of Eight Island off the coast of Western Australia. She’d identified this remote island…

The declining population of non-human primates, like monkeys, apes, tarsiers or prosimians, mainly due to deforestation and habitat loss, has long been a concern for researchers. At least 68% of…

Despite heavy-duty rain gear and Xtratuf Boots, I am soaked to the bone. But you can’t put money on a sunny day in the world’s largest temperate rainforest – the…

In the 1830s, the U.S. government removed the Muscogee Creek Tribe from their ancestral lands in modern-day Alabama and Georgia and gave the tribe’s farmland to settlers. Soldiers forced more than 14,000…

He’s called Bilibeu, Saint Bilibeu, or even Bilibreu. Carved of wood and painted with tar, this saint is said to bring fertility to the earth, to animals, and to women.…

RAROTONGA, Cook Islands – Every Saturday, a group of Cook Islands Māori youth slide into scuba gear, grab sticks from the ironwood trees (Casuarina equisetifolia) growing along Rarotonga’s beachfront, and…

KATHMANDU — On June 6, a 41-year-old woman was attacked by a tiger while she was collecting firewood in a forest in Nepal's Bardiya district, a key habitat for endangered…

GORO, New Caledonia – Known widely as the “Madagascar of the Pacific,” New Caledonia is coated in remnant Gondwana rainforest and surrounded by reefs rich in marine life that constitute one…

When is seaweed much more than seaweed? In the United States, seaweed farms are sprouting up all over the country, but on the east end of Long Island, New York,…

When plant systematist Elliot Gardner first began collecting samples of a fruit-bearing tree in Malaysian Borneo, he thought he was looking at just one species. Western taxonomists had long considered…

It was over twenty years ago when locals in Bolivia’s northern plains told archaeologist Heiko Prümers, with the German Archaeological Institute in Bonn, about mysterious mounds of earth in the…

In the 18th century, when European ships sailed into the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the Northwest coast of the Atlantic Ocean, they raved about the “wilderness” of the…

The Amazonian giant leaf frog, or kambô (Phyllomedusa bicolor) has bulging eyes and bright green skin. It’s perhaps best known for its skin secretion, a mucous substance with medicinal properties…

*UPDATE: On March 30, 2021, a press release announced that the Collegiate Court of Circuit in Work and Administration Matters had reversed the decision to suspend activity on Sections 1,…

On an island in the estuary known as Lagoa dos Patos, in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul state, an old lady kept a treasure in her fridge. For years, it…

AGUA BONITA CAMP, Colombia – Walking all day through the jungle to visit the encampments of friends and relatives is what Tumni Abtukaru misses the most about life before his…

Illegal miners expanded their footprint in Indigenous territories in Brazil by nearly 500% between 2010 and 2020, according to a recent report from the research collective MapBiomas. It also shows…

Our footsteps intermingled with the sounds of rain dripping through the canopy as my eyes examined the surrounding green vegetation, which was usually so vibrant, but was now subdued as…

RIPÁ, Brazil — One muggy morning last December, eight women and their chief drove out of the Indigenous Xavante village of Ripá across a forested savanna in the Brazilian state…

Protected areas and lands managed by Indigenous and traditional communities have been bulwarks of forest preservation and restoration in the Brazilian Amazon in recent years, a new study shows. It…

In February 2020, lightning struck Figure of Eight Island in Western Australia’s Recherche Archipelago, igniting a fire that burned through most of its vegetation in just a few days. While…

Patricia Gualinga takes a deep breath and pictures herself inside the rainforest in Sarayaku, Ecuador. “It’s hard to describe the smell of such pure air when you’re in the rainforest”,…

Ida Yellowman stood at the top of Muley Point, seeing memories in every cardinal direction. To the north was Bears Ears and the Abajo Mountains, rock-strewn landscape where she first…

Caribou are proudly displayed on Canada's 25-cent coin, but in the wild, their populations are on the verge of annihilation. Carmen Richter from the Saulteau First Nations is working to change that. She's…

VICHADA, Colombia — Nearly 13 years have passed since the Guahibo Indigenous community El Trompillo was allegedly forcibly relocated from their territory. Members report persistent hunger and overcrowding in makeshift…

CANELOS, Ecuador ­— An almost invisible trail snakes through thick buzzing forest leading to a chakra, an ancestral food garden in the Kichwa Cuya community located in Ecuador’s largest province,…

Traditional and Indigenous peoples in the Arctic are joining with scientists to successfully rewild mining-degraded peatlands and other sites.

The myth of a “demographic void” in the Amazon and of the “virgin forest” has been systematically debunked by a series of scientific studies showing that the rainforest has a…