In the Navajo Nation—a sweeping landscape of red-rock canyons and desert that takes in the Four Corners—water is not taken for granted. Here, more than 1 in 3 Diné, as Navajo people call themselves, must haul water to their homes, often across long distances. The Diné use the least amount of water per person of anyone in the U.S., and pay the most.

The problem, as old as the land itself, was predicted. The hydrology of the Colorado River Basin is highly variable, a fact that was not fully appreciated (or was flatly ignored) by those who drafted the foundational policy that governs water use in much of the West—the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Despite warnings from experts, the compact based the amount of water to be divided among its signatories on a brief period that proved to be one of the wettest in history. This flaw was compounded by tremendous population growth, Indigenous dispossession, competing values, procrastination, and deadlocked disputes over how water is used.

On paper, the Navajo Nation is drenched in water. Under the “first in line, first in right” principle that defines water use in the West, the Diné have first dibs on the same declining supply that serves Washington County, which has roughly as many people on one-tenth the land: the Colorado River, its tributaries, and two underlying aquifers. Yet little of it reaches them. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Arizona v. Navajo Nation, that the federal government has no obligation to provide water to the Navajo Nation. But by the time of the ruling, a crucial exercise of “first rights” was already in peril.

The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project aims to deliver treated water from the San Juan River to 240,000 people via 300 miles of pipes. Conceived in the 1960s and begun in 2009, the $2.1 billion project must be completed by Dec. 31 or the Navajo Nation loses its right to that water. It's far from done. Its fate resides in U.S. House Bill 3977, which would extend the deadline to 2029 and appropriate $689.45 million to finish the job.

Washington County isn’t the cause of the Navajo -Nation’s thirst. The water gap is an enduring legacy of manifest destiny; the infrastructure, and legislation, that came with it still largely define how water is used. In the American West, irrigated agriculture uses a whopping 86% of fresh water consumed—the largest share by far going to animal-forage crops like alfalfa. Privately, a St. George resident told me, “Why should I compromise the things that bring me enjoyment when alfalfa is still being grown? I hate to say that out loud, but that’s the reality.” On the other hand, since 2002, water--strapped Southern Nevada, including Las Vegas, cut its use by 26% while adding 750,000 people—proof that measures like the Post-2026 Operational Guidelines really matter.

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In 1876, Canada adopted the Indian Act. The legislation established which Indigenous people were legally recognized through the Indian status system and implemented colonial structures like the reserve system, which restricted First Nations people to lands “reserved” for them to live on, a fraction of their ancestral territories.

The Indian Act still dictates much of Indigenous people’s lives, including many land rights. Only a status “Indian” has the constitutionally protected right to hunt, fish, harvest and live on reserve lands, the last of which is no longer mandatory.

The more status “Indians” there are, in other words, the more people for whom Canada is legally obligated to uphold treaty promises, including to share lands and resources. Which is why, from the beginning, “Canada was very clear that the goal of the [Indian Act] was ultimately to assimilate all First Nations individuals,” Vancouver lawyer Ryan Beaton says.

To expedite assimilation, Indigenous people were pushed to accept enfranchisement, which meant renouncing Indian status in order to gain Canadian citizenship. Although enfranchisement was framed as voluntary, coercive policies outlined in the Indian Act would suggest otherwise. Status holders couldn’t own property off reserve, buy alcohol or vote. Indigenous men were automatically enfranchised if they got a university degree or became priests.

Indigenous women had even less choice regarding assimilation, because of gender discrimination in the Indian Act. If an Indigenous woman married a non-status or a non-Indigenous man, she lost her own status and was no longer recognized as a member of her First Nation. If she married an Indigenous man with status in a nation other than her own, she lost her own status number and band membership, becoming legally recognized through her husband’s First Nation and seen as an entity attached to his status number. And if an Indigenous man was enfranchised, his wife and children lost their status too.

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Evil supermen? thats so 2020's

As the helicopter approached Caas Tl’aat Kwah (also known as Serb Creek), a 1,600-hectare (about 3,953-acre) watershed, the forest became a blanket of deep green, cleaved only by yellow-green wetlands threaded with glacial blue streams.

“We want to conserve it for future generations,” said Charlotte Euverman, the Wet’suwet’en woman leading a fight to save this area, which includes a traditional feasting site. “We have to leave them something.”

Like most First Nations here, Wet’suwet’en never signed treaties with the Canadian or provincial governments. Nevertheless, the latter took the land and leased forested acreage to logging companies. Today just 20% of British Columbia’s old-growth forests remain.

In 2020, after decades of activist pressure, the province identified about a quarter of the remaining old growth as at high risk for logging and recommended a pause while deciding their fate. Yet today, logging has been deferred in less than half of the high-risk area

Now Caas Tl’aat Kwah is in the crosshairs of a debate over the scope of First Nations’ agency, biodiversity loss and protection – and the role industrial logging plays in amplifying Canada’s forest fires, the effects of which are being felt across the globe.

In summer 2023, more than 150,000 sq km (58,000 sq miles) burned across the country, an all-time record, carrying smoke across the continent and air pollution all the way to Europe and China.

Caas Tl’aat Kwah is not yet accessible by road, so the helicopter ride was the first opportunity for Nation member Sandra Harris to see it, despite the fact that her great-grandfather, Jack Joseph, once had a cabin there. The pilot set the helicopter down upon a boggy meadow, and DeWit, who is acting director of the Office of Wet’suwet’en, led the way through the trees to a newer cabin, where he gave a framed photo of Joseph pride of place.

Harris explained the significance of seeing the land, saying: “We have a lot of stress in our lives with racism, working with colonial systems that are so unkind to our ways.” The land is healing, she said.

“Today, we can feel our ancestors,” Harris said. “We remember our stories when we are able to put our feet on the land … There’s lots of good medicine there for us.”

Conventional wisdom has long held that increased fire severity is due not just to climate change but also dense overgrowth from fire suppression. The prescription has been to thin forests and set controlled burns. But a growing number of scientists now say that approach fails to recognize the role of industrial logging in increased fire severity: it kills complex communities of life that stabilize the water cycle.

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The highest peak at Great Smoky Mountains National Park is officially reverting to its Cherokee name more than 150 years after a surveyor named it for a Confederate general.

The US Board of Geographic Names voted on Wednesday in favor of a request from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to officially change the name Clingmans Dome to Kuwohi, according to a news release from the park. The Cherokee name for the mountain translates to “mulberry place.”

“The Great Smoky National Park team was proud to support this effort to officially restore the mountain and to recognize its importance to the Cherokee People,” Superintendent Cassius Cash said in the release.

“The Cherokee People have had strong connections to Kuwohi and the surrounding area, long before the land became a national park. The National Park Service looks forward to continuing to work with the Cherokee People to share their story and preserve this landscape together.”

Kuwohi is a sacred place for the Cherokee people and is the highest point within the traditional Cherokee homeland, according to the park. The peak is visible from the Qualla Boundary, home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Great Smoky Mountains National Park closes Kuwohi every year for three half-days so that predominantly Cherokee schools can visit the mountain and learn its history.

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The name was changed from a confederate brigadier general to a native name so its a double win

"It was different because there wasn't a lot of education [about] our people," she said. "So I only learned my history through my family members."

Years later, Tenasco is learning much more about her culture and her ancestors at a different kind of school — a federally-funded Indigenous archeological field school called Anishinabe Odjibikan.

The school brings together young members of the Algonquin communities of Kitigan Zibi in Quebec and Pikwakanagan in Ontario to dig up, clean and sort items used by their ancestors thousands of years ago.

Tenasco and her fellow Anishinabe Odjibikan participants learn how to document layers of earth and rocks, identify materials and determine if they're local to the area, use surveyor's tools and clean and reassemble pottery pieces found at a dig site.

Anishinabe Odjibikan is part of a growing trend in archaeology of involving the Indigenous peoples whose lands are being excavated — with the work either being led by Indigenous people, done collaboratively or carried out with their consent.

According to Cree/Métis archaeologist Paulette Steeves, the last century of archaeology has invalidated the pre-contact history of the Americas — and the people who lived there for thousands of years.

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I wish i knew who were this 2 guys, if only ben had named them

Mexico=Indochina

Cuba= Phillipines

: Steppe Horde

“It’s not that they’re mismanaging everything, but their management philosophy and scheme do not align with ours,” said Tony Incashola Jr., the director of tribal resources for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, or CSKT, as he looked out the window of his Jeep at the landscape. “Their tactics sometimes don’t align with ours, which in turn affects our capability of managing our land.”

State trust lands, on and off Indian reservations, make up millions of acres across the Western United States and generate revenue for public schools, universities, jails, hospitals, and other public institutions by leasing them for oil and gas extraction, grazing, rights of way, timber, and more. The state of Montana, for example, manages 5.2 million surface acres and 6.2 million subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other underground resources, which distributed $62 million to public institutions in 2023. The majority of that money went to K-12 schools — institutions serving primarily non-Indigenous people.

States received many of these trust lands upon achieving statehood, but more were taken from tribal nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through a federal policy of allotment, in which reservations were forcibly cut up into small parcels in an effort to make Indigenous peoples farmers and landowners. The policy allowed for about 90 million acres of reservation lands nationwide to move to non-Indigenous ownership. On the Flathead Reservation, allotment dispossessed the CSKT of a million acres, more than 60,000 of which were taken to fund schools.

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By Mossa

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This is the tweet that started it

I dont really get the strategy here, Sean O’Brien is a white supremacist yea, but the teamster presidential poll shows most of its members want trump over Kamala, the leadership deciding not to back any candidate its good for the dems since if they back anyone it would be trump

Anyways