All posts tagged: Indigenous people

Trump’s Threat to Take Over Greenland Bewilders the Island’s Population

Trump’s Threat to Take Over Greenland Bewilders the Island’s Population

Published by Sam

Christian Ulloriaq Jeppesen remembers how this all started. In 2019, during Donald J. Trump’s first term as president, Mr. Trump floated the idea of the United States buying the island of Greenland. At the time, most people in Greenland (and Denmark, the European country that controls it) thought his suggestion was a joke. “Everyone said, ‘Ha-ha, you can’t just buy a country, he doesn’t mean it,’” Mr. Jeppesen, a native Greenlander and a radio producer, said by telephone. “Obviously that was the wrong way to take it. Look at where we are today.” Now Mr. Trump has doubled down on his insistence that the United States needs to annex Greenland for security reasons. And that has Greenlanders asking the same questions as everyone else, but with a lot more uneasiness. Is Mr. Trump just being bombastic again, floating a fanciful annexation plan that he may know is a stretch? Or is he serious? Based on his comments in the past few weeks, Mr. Trump appears completely serious. Never mind that Denmark’s leadership has said the …

Uranium is being mined near the Grand Canyon as prices soar and the US pushes for more nuclear power

Uranium is being mined near the Grand Canyon as prices soar and the US pushes for more nuclear power

Published by skeptic

The largest uranium producer in the United States is ramping up work just south of Grand Canyon National Park on a long-contested project that largely has sat dormant since the 1980s. The work is unfolding as global instability and growing demand drive uranium prices higher. The Biden administration and dozens of other countries have pledged to triple the capacity of nuclear power worldwide in their battle against climate change, ensuring uranium will remain a key commodity for decades as the government offers incentives for developing the next generation of nuclear reactors and new policies take aim at Russia’s influence over the supply chain. But as the U.S. pursues its nuclear power potential, environmentalists and Native American leaders remain fearful of the consequences for communities near mining and milling sites in the West and are demanding better regulatory oversight. Producers say uranium production today is different than decades ago when the country was racing to build up its nuclear arsenal. Those efforts during World War II and the Cold War left a legacy of death, disease …

South Dakota tribe bans Kristi Noem from reservation over border comments

South Dakota tribe bans Kristi Noem from reservation over border comments

Published by skeptic

A South Dakota tribe has banned Republican Gov. Kristi Noem from the Pine Ridge Reservation after she spoke this week about wanting to send razor wire and security personnel to Texas to help deter immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border and also said cartels are infiltrating the state’s reservations. “Due to the safety of the Oyate, effective immediately, you are hereby Banished from the homelands of the Oglala Sioux Tribe!” Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out said in a Friday statement addressed to Noem. “Oyate” is a word for people or nation. Star Comes Out accused Noem of trying to use the border issue to help get former U.S. President Donald Trump re-elected and boost her chances of becoming his running mate. Many of those arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border are Indigenous people from places like El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico who come “in search of jobs and a better life,” the tribal leader added. “They don’t need to be put in cages, separated from their children like during the Trump Administration, or be cut up …

The Curious Rise of ‘Settler Colonialism’ and ‘Turtle Island’

The Curious Rise of ‘Settler Colonialism’ and ‘Turtle Island’

Published by skeptic

Recently, I stood on a windswept street corner in Brooklyn and watched a river of pro-Palestinian protesters move past, as police officers tracked their path. A number of demonstrators had heads swathed in kaffiyehs, and some wore face-obscuring black masks. They waved Palestinian flags and placards denouncing Israel in many different ways. Defund the settler-colonialist state demanded one. Another stated Land back!, echoing the Native American movement to reclaim lost territory in the United States. Two women held tight to a Decolonization from Turtle Island to Palestine banner as a gust tugged at it. Turtle Island alludes to the creation story of the Lenape tribe of the Northeast, and some academics and Native activists treat it as a de facto Indigenous name for the settler-colonialist U.S. Settler colonialism—academic jargon for the violent process by which colonial empires empower settlers to push out and oppress Indigenous inhabitants and form a dominant new society—is a term much in vogue among activists and academics on the left. To talk of settler states and oppressed Indigenous people, and claim …

America Lost Its One Perfect Tree

America Lost Its One Perfect Tree

Published by skeptic

Across the Northeast, forests are haunted by the ghosts of American giants. A little more than a century ago, these woods brimmed with American chestnuts—stately Goliaths that could grow as high as 130 feet tall and more than 10 feet wide. Nicknamed “the redwoods of the East,” some 4 billion American chestnuts dotted the United States’ eastern flank, stretching from the misty coasts of Maine down into the thick humidity of Appalachia. The American chestnut was, as the writer Susan Freinkel noted in her 2009 book, “a perfect tree.” Its wood housed birds and mammals; its leaves infused the soil with minerals; its flowers sated honeybees that would ferry pollen out to nearby trees. In the autumn, its branches would bend under the weight of nubby grape-size nuts. When they dropped to the forest floor, they’d nourish raccoons, bears, turkey, and deer. For generations, Indigenous people feasted on the nuts, split the wood for kindling, and laced the leaves into their medicine. Later on, European settlers, too, introduced the nuts into their recipes and orchards, …

Civil Rights Undone – The Atlantic

Civil Rights Undone – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

In late 2020, even as the instigators of insurrection were marshaling their followers to travel to Washington, D.C., another kind of coup—a quieter one—was in the works. On December 21, in one of his departing acts as attorney general, Bill Barr submitted a proposed rule change to the White House. The change would eliminate the venerable standard used by the Justice Department to handle discrimination cases, known as “disparate impact.” The memo was quickly overshadowed by the events of January 6, and, in the chaotic final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, it was never implemented. But Barr’s proposal represented perhaps the most aggressive step the administration took in its effort to dismantle existing civil-rights law. Should Trump return to power, he would surely attempt to see the effort through. Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More Since the legislative victories of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, legal and civil rights for people on the margins have tended to expand. The Civil …

These Birds Got a Little Too Comfortable in Birdhouses

These Birds Got a Little Too Comfortable in Birdhouses

Published by skeptic

Whether it’s because we destroy their habitats, discombobulate them with city lights, or allow cats into their midst, most wild birds want nothing to do with humans. But purple martins—shimmery, blackish-bluish swallows native to North America—just can’t get enough. For centuries, the species has gradually abandoned its homes in the wild for birdhouses we’ve built. An entire subspecies of the bird now nests exclusively in human-made boxes; east of the Rocky Mountains, “there are officially no purple-martin colonies that exist outside of that,” says Joe Siegrist, the president of the Purple Martin Conservation Association. Modern martins have become downright trusting of people. Some will even let humans reach into their nest and pick up their chicks—an intrusion that would send other birds into a screeching, pecking rage. “They’re the most docile species I’ve ever worked with,” says Blake Grisham, a wildlife biologist at Texas Tech University. And the more we build birdhouses and interact with martins, the more they seem to thrive. “It’s totally the opposite of our default in wildlife management,” Grisham told me. …

The Moral Failure of Campus Hamas Apologists

The Moral Failure of Campus Hamas Apologists

Published by skeptic

Campus politics in America irrevocably changed this week when student groups that champion the noble goal of justice for Palestinians endorsed the evil means of war crimes in pursuit of it. Last Saturday, hundreds of gun-toting men stormed into Israel by land, air, and sea  with the express purpose of  killing as many Jews as possible. They succeeded in perpetrating a pogrom reminiscent of the Cossacks and the Nazis. They murdered civilians in their homes as their families watched. They massacred young people at a music festival. They kidnapped children. Across America, millions of people with wildly diverse opinions on the longstanding conflict between Israel and Palestine denounced those atrocities, because it is always wrong to deliberately target and slaughter civilians and it is always wrong to abduct, let alone kill, children. I naively believed that those were near-consensus beliefs on college campuses––that whether one sided with Israelis or Palestinians in the long and heartrending conflict between them, almost everyone could agree that certain actions were evil regardless of who took them. Then this week, …

Why Uncontacted Tribes Want to Stay Uncontacted

Why Uncontacted Tribes Want to Stay Uncontacted

Published by skeptic

About 10,000 people on Earth still live as members of what some anthropologists call “uncontacted tribes”: groups of hunter-gatherers in almost total seclusion from the outside world, many of them deep in the Amazon Basin. But no human community is more isolated than the inhabitants of tiny North Sentinel Island in the Andaman archipelago, far off the coast of India in the Bay of Bengal. The Sentinelese, as they are known to outsiders—no one has gotten close enough to learn what they call themselves, or even what language they speak—still hunt with bows, arrows, and spears. They also use these weapons to kill anyone who ventures onto their shore, including a persistent 26-year-old American Christian missionary, John Chau, in 2018. News of Chau’s demise on that remote beach swept across the international press and social media, surprising readers with the fact that such a terra incognita could exist in the 21st century. Since then, the Sentinelese, who likely number from 50 to 200, have become symbols of resistance to the seemingly inexorable forces of modernization …

Charles C. Mann Q&A: What Do You Know About 1491?

Charles C. Mann Q&A: What Do You Know About 1491?

Published by skeptic

In elementary school, I learned a rhyme about Christopher Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492. High school expanded that understanding to a still-simple narrative: Very few people lived in the undeveloped Americas, and the invading Europeans brought a disease that wiped out the few who did. Then, in college, I read the science journalist Charles C. Mann’s March 2002 Atlantic cover story, “1491,” which lays out a systematic challenge to every aspect of the lesson that I, and so many other kids, were taught in school. Could the pre-16th-century population of the Americas have rivaled that of Europe? Had waves of lethal diseases wiped out far more people than was previously known? What if the people who lived in the Western Hemisphere were, as Mann writes, “so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind?” Mann and I spoke ahead of today’s holiday. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Shan Wang: Take us back to when the …