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Tag: Indigenous groups

  • What to know about uncontacted Indigenous peoples and efforts to protect them

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    BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — From the depths of Brazil’s Amazon to Indonesia’s rainforests, some of the world’s most isolated peoples are being squeezed by roads, miners and drug traffickers — a crisis unfolding far from public view or effective state protection.

    A new report by Survival International, a London-based Indigenous rights organization, attempts one of the broadest tallies yet, identifying at least 196 uncontacted Indigenous groups in 10 countries, primarily in the South American nations sharing the Amazon rainforest. Released Sunday, the report estimates that nearly 65% face threats from logging, about 40% from mining and around 20% from agribusiness.

    “These are what I would call silent genocides — there are no TV crews, no journalists. But they are happening, and they’re happening now,” said Fiona Watson, Survival’s research and advocacy director, who has worked on Indigenous rights for more than three decades.

    The issue often receives little priority from governments, which critics say see uncontacted peoples as politically marginal because they don’t vote and their territories are often coveted for logging, mining and oil extraction. Public debate is also shaped by stereotypes — some romanticize them as “lost tribes,” while others view them as barriers to development.

    Survival’s research concludes that half of these groups “could be wiped out within 10 years if governments and companies do not act.”

    Who the uncontacted peoples are

    Uncontacted peoples are not “lost tribes” frozen in time, Watson said. They are contemporary societies that deliberately avoid outsiders after generations of violence, slavery and disease.

    “They don’t need anything from us,” Watson said. “They’re happy in the forest. They have incredible knowledge and they help keep these very valuable forests standing — essential to all humanity in the fight against climate change.”

    Survival’s research shows that more than 95% of the world’s uncontacted peoples live in the Amazon, with smaller populations in South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific. These communities live by hunting, fishing and small-scale cultivation, maintaining languages and traditions that predate modern nation-states.

    Why contact can be deadly

    Groups living in voluntary isolation have “minimal to no contact with those outside of their own group,” said Dr. Subhra Bhattacharjee, director general of the Forest Stewardship Council and an Indigenous rights expert based in Bonn, Germany. “A simple cold that you and I recover from in a week … they could die of that cold.”

    Beyond disease, contact can destroy livelihoods and belief systems. International law requires free, prior and informed consent — known as FPIC — before any activity on Indigenous lands.

    “But when you have groups living in voluntary isolation, who you cannot get close to without risking their lives, you cannot get FPIC,” Bhattacharjee said. “No FPIC means no consent.”

    Her organization follows a strict policy: “No contact, no-go zones,” she said, arguing that if consent cannot be obtained safely, contact should not occur at all.

    The Associated Press reported last year on loggers killed by bow and arrow after entering Mashco Piro territory in Peru’s Amazon, with Indigenous leaders warning that such clashes are inevitable when frontier zones go unpoliced.

    How the threats have evolved

    Watson, who has worked across the Amazon for 35 years, said early threats stemmed from colonization and state-backed infrastructure. During Brazil’s military dictatorship between 1964 and 1985, highways were bulldozed through the rainforest “without due regard” for the people living there.

    “The roads acted as a magnet for settlers,” she said, describing how loggers and cattle ranchers followed, bringing gunmen and disease that wiped out entire communities.

    A railway line now planned in Brazil could potentially affect three uncontacted peoples, she said, but the rise of organized crime poses an even greater risk.

    Across Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador, drug traffickers and illegal gold miners have moved deep into Indigenous territories. “Any chance encounter runs the risk of transmitting the flu, which can easily wipe out an uncontacted people within a year of contact,” she said. “And bows and arrows are no match for guns.”

    Evangelical missionary incursions have also caused outbreaks. Watson recalled how, under former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, an evangelical pastor was placed in charge of the government’s unit for uncontacted peoples and gained access to their coordinates. “Their mission was to force contact — to ‘save souls,’” she said. “That is incredibly dangerous.”

    Ways to protect uncontacted peoples

    Protecting uncontacted peoples, experts say, will require both stronger laws and a shift in how the world views them — not as relics of the past, but as citizens of the planet whose survival affects everyone’s future.

    Advocates have several recommendations.

    First, governments must formally recognize and enforce Indigenous territories, making them off-limits to extractive industries.

    Mapping is crucial, Bhattacharjee said, because identifying the approximate territories of uncontacted peoples allows governments to protect those areas from loggers or miners. But, she added, it must be done with extreme caution and from a distance to avoid contact that could endanger the groups’ health or autonomy.

    Second, corporations and consumers must help stop the flow of money driving destruction. Survival’s report calls for companies to trace their supply chains to ensure that commodities such as gold, timber and soy are not sourced from Indigenous lands.

    “Public opinion and pressure are essential,” Watson said. “It’s largely through citizens and the media that so much has already been achieved to recognize uncontacted peoples and their rights.”

    Finally, advocates say the world must recognize why their protection matters. Beyond human rights, these communities play an outsized role in stabilizing the global climate.

    “With the world under pressure from climate change, we will sink or swim together,” Bhattacharjee said.

    Governments’ uneven response

    International treaties such as the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169 and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirm the right to self-determination and to remain uncontacted if they choose. But enforcement varies widely.

    In Peru, Congress recently rejected a proposal to create the Yavari-Mirim Indigenous Reserve, a move Indigenous federations said leaves isolated groups exposed to loggers and traffickers.

    In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has sought to rebuild protections weakened under Bolsonaro, boosting budgets and patrols.

    And in Ecuador, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled this year that the government failed to protect the Tagaeri and Taromenane peoples who live in voluntary isolation in Yasuni National Park.

    Watson warned that political forces tied to agribusiness and evangelical blocs are now working to roll back earlier gains.

    “Achievements of the last 20 or 30 years are in danger of being dismantled,” she said.

    What the new report calls for

    Survival International’s report urges a global no-contact policy: legal recognition of uncontacted territories, suspension of mining, oil and agribusiness projects in or near those lands and prosecution of crimes against Indigenous groups.

    Watson said logging remains the biggest single threat, but mining is close behind. She pointed to the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa on Indonesia’s Halmahera Island, where nickel for electric-vehicle batteries is being mined.

    “People think electric cars are a green alternative,” she said, “but mining companies are operating on the land of uncontacted peoples and posing enormous threats.”

    In South America, illegal gold miners in the Yanomami territory of Brazil and Venezuela continue to use mercury to extract gold — contamination that has poisoned rivers and fish.

    “The impact is devastating — socially and physically,” Watson said.

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    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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  • Vatican will return dozens of artifacts to Indigenous groups in Canada as part of reconciliation

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    VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican is expected to soon announce that it will return a few dozen artifacts sought by Indigenous communities in Canada as part of its reckoning with the Catholic Church’s troubled role in helping suppress Indigenous culture in the Americas, officials said Wednesday.

    The items, including an Inuit kayak, are part of the Vatican Museum’s ethnographic collection, known as the Anima Mundi museum. The collection has been a source of controversy for the Vatican amid the broader museum debate over the restitution of cultural artifacts taken from Indigenous peoples during colonial periods.

    Negotiations on returning the Vatican items accelerated after Pope Francis in 2022 met with Indigenous leaders who had traveled to the Vatican to receive his apology for the church’s role in Canada’s disastrous residential schools. During their visit, they were shown some objects in the collection, including wampum belts, war clubs and masks, and asked for them to be returned.

    Francis later said he was in favor of returning the items and others in the Vatican collection on a case-by-case basis, saying: “In the case where you can return things, where it’s necessary to make a gesture, better to do it.”

    The Canadian Catholic Conference of Bishops said Wednesday it has been working with Indigenous groups on returning the items to their “originating communities.” It said it expected the Holy See to announce the return. Vatican and Canadian officials said they expected an announcement in the coming weeks, and that the items could arrive on Canadian soil before the end of the year.

    The Globe and Mail newspaper first reported on the progress in the restitution negotiations.

    Most of the items in the Vatican collection were sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for a 1925 exhibition in the Vatican gardens that was a highlight of that year’s Holy Year.

    Doubt cast on whether the items were freely given

    The Vatican insists the items were “gifts” to Pope Pius XI, who wanted to celebrate the church’s global reach, its missionaries and the lives of the Indigenous peoples they evangelized.

    But historians, Indigenous groups and experts have long questioned whether the items could really have been offered freely, given the power imbalances at play in Catholic missions at the time. In those years, Catholic religious orders were helping to enforce the Canadian government’s policy of eliminating Indigenous traditions, which Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called “cultural genocide.”

    The return of the items will follow the “church-to-church” model the Vatican used in 2023, when it gave its Parthenon Marbles to the Orthodox Christian Church in Greece. The three fragments were described by the Vatican as a “donation” to the Orthodox church, not a state-to-state repatriation to the Greek government.

    In this case, the Vatican is expected to hand over the items to the Canadian bishops conference, with the explicit understanding that the ultimate keepers will be the Indigenous communities, a Canadian official said Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity because the negotiations are not concluded.

    What happens after the items are returned

    The items, accompanied by whatever provenance information the Vatican has, will be taken first to the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. There, experts and Indigenous groups will try to identify where the items originated, down to the specific community, and what should be done with them, the official said.

    The official declined to say how many items were under negotiation or who decided what would be returned, but said the total numbered “a few dozen.”

    The aim is to get the items back this year, the official said, noting the 2025 Jubilee celebrating hope, and the centenary of the 1925 Holy Year that was the reason for the items to be brought to Rome in the first place.

    The 1925 exhibit is now so controversial that its 100th anniversary has been virtually ignored by the Vatican, which celebrates a lot of anniversaries.

    The Assembly of First Nations said some logistical issues need to be finalized before the objects can be returned, including establishing protocols.

    “For First Nations, these items are not artifacts. They are living, sacred pieces of our cultures and ceremonies and must be treated as the invaluable objects that they are,” National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak told Canadian Press.

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    Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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  • New Mexico Environment Department approves LANL plan to vent radioactive gas

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    Los Alamos National Lab Team Leader for Radioactive Air Emissions Management Dave Fuehne in front of an air monitoring system addresses members of the media May 28, 2025, during the Wildfire Preparedness tour with members of the media. Lab officials will be allowed to release a radioactive gas into the air as soon as this fall, following approval from state environment officials on Sept. 8, 2025. (Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory)

    New Mexico environment officials on Monday gave permission for Los Alamos National Laboratory to vent a radioactive gas within the next six months.

    The decision came on the heels of federal officials urging the state in a recent letter to make a decision, and pushback from anti-nuclear and Indigenous groups about the proposal.

    Specifically, LANL aims to vent four waste containers filled with tritium and hazardous waste that it packed in 2007 and left at the lab’s disposal site, called Area G. In 2016, LANL officials discovered the drums were building pressure and could potentially explode. In a worst-case scenario modeled for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency —  which the lab said was unlikely — a rupture of all four containers could expose people to a dosage of 20 millirem, double the airborne radiation limit that LANL is allowed to release for all operations for a whole year.

    Tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, can be naturally occurring or a byproduct from nuclear research. The EPA characterizes the gas as a lower threat, emitting radiation that often cannot penetrate the skin, and is only considered hazardous in large quantities from inhalation, skin absorption or consumed in tritiated water – a replacement of one of the hydrogen molecules with tritium.

    Rick Shean, Resource Protection Division director for the New Mexico Environment Department, told Source NM that state officials and U.S. Environmental and Protection Agency officials will be onsite during the planned venting across 12 to 16 days during weekends.

    “We will be there, us and the EPA, [so] if something does go wrong, there’s a discussion with [U.S. Department of Energy] that we can observe,” Shean said. “We’ll step in and stop it if we have to.”

    Among several provisions in a Sept. 8 letter from the environment department to the National Nuclear Security Administration and the lab’s contractor, environment officials will require LANL to keep the release below 6 millirems as a “hard stop limit,” which is lower than the 8 millirems LANL proposed. Shean noted that a typical release of tritium throughout the year from the lab is between zero to 1.5 milirems.

    Indigenous groups including Tewa Women United, Honor our Pueblo Existence and anti-nuclear groups have raised concerns that federal limits for tritium exposure levels of a of 10 millirem were based on men, not pregnant women or young children.

    Shean said the department’s mandate takes the concern raised by the groups into consideration.

    “We do understand the concern around thresholds being put out there, the standards being based on typically male adults,” he said. “That was one of the reasons guiding our decision to lower the threshold to this event to six milirems.”

    In addition to the concerns about exposure levels, anti-nuclear activists and Indigenous groups also recently raised objections about what they described as restrictions on public participation and transparency at a recent meeting on the proposal. The state environment department previously set four conditions for NNSA and Triad to meet for approval, including a public meeting and tribal consultations.

    The Sept. 8 letter concludes with an admonishment from state officials, saying the operation is necessary because of LANL’s “failure to properly manage hazardous waste at the time of generation followed by almost a 20-year disregard of compliance obligations under state laws and rules,” the letter said.

    In a statement Monday, National Nuclear Security Administration Public Affairs Specialist Toni Chiri said laboratory officials will be in contact with Congressional, state, local and tribal governments to release the dates for the tritium venting expected this fall and will ensure the venting does not overlap with Pueblo Feast days or other events.

    “This operation will be conducted with the utmost considerations for safety to LANL employees, the surrounding communities, and the environment,” Chiri said. “LANL engineers have done careful analysis of the controlled depressurization process and will monitor it in real-time to ensure safety.”

    Emails requesting comment from the nearby Pueblos of San Ildefonso and Santa Clara went unreturned as of publication.

    Joni Ahrends, executive director at Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, called the release a “pattern of practice,” saying that LANL has been contaminating air, land and water in the more than 80 years since the Manhattan Project.

    “Who’s going to pay the price? The people of Northern New Mexico,” she said. “And there’s never an answer to the question: ‘when is it going to stop?’”

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