Over the past century, South Africa’s gold mining industry has amassed immense wealth and global recognition, fueling the nation’s economy. . Yet, beneath the glittering surface lies a grim reality: a legacy of chronic illness, poverty, and death. The gold mining industry is built on the systematic exploitation of indigenous laborers from neighboring countries, shaped […]
Tag: indigenous
Decolonizing the Climate Crisis
Western society has become entrenched in finding solutions to climate change that fit into a colonized understanding of the world. Much of Western academia operates on the widely-held assumption that the Anthropocene Epoch has led to the current climate crisis and the solution to climate change lies in reverting the world to how it was […]
Playing Politics in America’s Pacific Territories
During the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) declared that America’s tax dollars should no longer be sent to “China, Russia, the Middle East, Guam – whatever, wherever.” However Guam, unlike the other places mentioned in her list, is fully American. For better or for worse, Guam’s American identity is […]
Guatemalan Maya Take the Country to Court
On February 9, Indigenous elder Rodrigo Tot testified before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) on behalf of Agua Caliente, a Q’eqchi’ Maya community. For the first time in history, in Maya Q´eqchi´ Indigenous Community of Agua Caliente v. Guatemala, Guatemala is facing judgment in international court for violating Indigenous collective land rights. The […]
Environmental Activism in Latin America Comes with a Deadly Cost
In December 2020, Indigenous Honduran environmental activist Félix Vásquez was killed in front of his family by a group of masked men in the village of El Ocotal. His assailants were armed with pistols and machetes, scarring his family forever. This attack was a response to Vásquez’s efforts to help protect the environment and advocate […]
The Lasting Harms of Toxic Exposure in Native American Communities
“They never told us uranium was dangerous. We washed our faces in it. We drank in it. We ate in it. It was sweet,” explained Cecilia Joe, an 85-year-old Navajo woman, in a recent interview. Joe’s experience illustrates the under-researched but extremely pervasive problem of environmental injustice on Native American reservations. Due to decades of […]
The Cocalero’s Legacy: What Evo Morales’ exit means for Bolivia
On November 10th, 2019, Bolivian President Evo Morales was pressured to resign at the demand of military leadership amid controversy around his re-election. The results showed a clear Morales victory without the need for a second-round runoff vote, but observers from the Organization of American States (OAS) had determined that Morales’s first-round win could not […]
The Stolen People: Australia’s Aboriginals
“They take your young from you and you have so many taken, you are not whole,” says Helen Eason, an indigenous Australian woman. The Stolen Generations, only brought to a halt in the 1970s, remains a traumatic and salient black mark on Australia’s history. As part of the government’s Child Removal Policy, Helen Eason had […]
Past Due: Queering the Democratic Party
In an inspirational feat this past summer, a lesbian Native American attorney bested five other Democrats to secure the Party nomination in Kansas’ 3rd district. Her background is nothing short of remarkable: a Cornell Law graduate raised by a single mother and Army veteran, Sharice Davids went on to be a key political player whose […]
Multiculturalism in Europe: The Sami
Indigenous: the very word brings to mind Native Americans or Australian Aborigines. It is quite difficult to disentangle this word from the notion of “non-indigenous” Europeans colonizing “indigenous” people on a distant continent. There is, however, a group of people in Europe who can claim to be indigenous: the Sami. These nomadic people from the […]