IUCN Approves Sacred Natural Sites Motion
On September 12, delegates attending the World Conservation Congress in Jeju, South Korea, voted overwhelmingly to approve a motion aimed at strengthening protection for sacred places.
Taos Pueblo Tribe Regains Ownership of Sacred Hot Springs
As the sun set on the annual Taos Pueblo Powwow in Taos, N.M., on July 14, representatives of the Taos Land Trust, surrounded by dancers and tribal members from across the country, officially returned a sacred hot springs property to the Taos Pueblo Tribe…
CA Tribe Fights Wind Farm on Sacred Land
As bulldozers began clearing the site of a new wind-energy facility in the desert of western Imperial County, California — ripping up forests of ocotillo cacti, damaging sensitive wildlife habitat and threatening ancestral graves of the Quechan Tribe — tribal members and their allies stood outside the La Jolla corporate offices of Pattern Energy on May 15, demanding a halt to the project.
New Film Clip: Winona LaDuke on Redemption
I first met Winona LaDuke in 1977, when we were both working to expose the environmental injustice of uranium mining in Navajo land — radioactive tailings piled around homesteads, former miners dying of lung cancer, thousands of abandoned mines that small children played in and used for sheep corrals…
New Film Clip: Satish Kumar on “What Is a Sacred Place?”
We were shocked to learn that SLFP colleague Rogelio Mejia narrowly escaped death three months ago. Mejia, a leader of the northern Colombian Arhuaco tribe, survived an attack that riddled his car with 40 bullets…
PNG Court Rules in Favor of Nickel Mine
A court in Papua New Guinea this week cleared the way for the Chinese state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corp. to proceed with a $1.5 billion nickel-mining project, which had been blocked by injunctions over the environmental impact of the company’s plan to dispose of mine tailings in the ocean…
The Earth Quakes
A few days ago, late in the afternoon, I was editing footage of shamans in Siberia’s Altai Mountains when the phone rang and I heard the familiar voice of my old friend Jose Lucero of Santa Clara Pueblo calling from New Mexico. Jose said he recently received an audio tape in the mail containing an interview with Thomas Banyacya, the Hopi spokesman we both worked with in the 1980s and ’90s…
Tying It All Together
Our boat left Maui at dawn and headed south across calm water toward Kaho‘olawe. With a group of 60 Native Hawaiians, we floated our film gear through the surf — in watertight Pelican cases — to a rocky beach. Above us loomed eroding red slopes overgrazed by goats for a century and bombed by the U.S. Navy for 50 years before determined Hawaiian activists won the island back to native control in 1994…
SLFP Crew Detained by Police in Papua New Guinea
Still jet-lagged on Monday, April 12, in Madang, we arrived at the courtroom at 8 a.m. hoping to score an interview with James Wang, chief technical director of the Chinese government-owned mining company Ramu NiCo, a division of MCC, the China Metallurgical Group Corp…