Last week, while the rest of Panama was celebrating Carnival, Ngöbe people from across the country gathered to elect a new president of the Ngöbe Bugle Congress, Panama’s largest Indigenous organization.
Last week, while the rest of Panama was celebrating Carnival, Ngöbe people from across the country gathered to elect a new president of the Ngöbe Bugle Congress, Panama’s largest Indigenous organization.
First, let's celebrate a victory! For the second time in the last six months, last week Indigenous Ngöbe protesters forced Panama's president and legislature to revoke a law that threatened their lands and rights.
By Kate Hoshour, IAP Senior Research Fellow
Roughly 2,000 protesters united to blockade a highway in the Phulbari region this week and demanded that the government honor a six-point agreement, signed on August 31, 2006.
Panama’s president Ricardo Martinelli announced today that he would revoke a reform to the country’s mining law that provoked thousands of Ngöbe Indigenous people to protest by blocking major highways over the past weekend.
On Feb. 15 some 5,000 members of Panama’s Ngöbe-Buglé Indigenous group held
a day of national protests against changes to the Mining Resources Code that
they said would encourage open-pit mining for metals by foreign companies.
The protests, organized by the People’s Total Struggle (ULIP), started at 10
am in San Félix, in the Ngöbe-Buglé territory in the western province of
Chiriquí.
The World Bank has stepped in to support the dumping of toxic waste from the Ramu nickel mine into the seas off Papua New Guinea after the European Union decided to pull its funding.
The on-again-off-again Belo Monte dam has been halted once again by a judge in Brazil after being the go-ahead by Brazil's president last year. The gigantic dam would flood some 190 square miles of rainforest and displace multiple Indigenous communities, who have been protesting the dam for years. The judge's ruling cited environmental concerns rather than the human rights issues, but if the ruling holds (previous injunctions have been overturned), it will still benefit the Indigenous Peoples of the area.
In a referendum on February 18, 99 percent of the population of the San Juan Ostuncalco municipality in Guatemala—a mostly Mam Mayan community—voted to oppose two mining concessions granted by the government on their territory. The people voting in the referendum demanded that the government cease issuing new mining concessions and revoke the existing ones.
An Ecuadoran court has order Chevron to pay almost $10 billion to Indigenous plaintiffs who, the court found, have been damaged by decades of contamination from oil operations there. The oil operations, originally conducted by Texaco, which merged with Chevon in 2001, included some egregious behavior, leaving oil sludge in open pits and rivers, conducting almost no remediation, and contaminating huge areas of rainforest. The plaintiffs--30,000 Indigenous people and farmers--claim very high rates of cancer and other diseases related to exposure to toxins.
This Saturday, February 12, at 2pm, Âs Nutayuneân will be screening at the Big Sky Film Festival in Missoula, MT. Filmmaker Anne Makepeace will be in attendance.
More than 400 grant recipients from tribal government programs and educational nonprofit organizations from across the U.S., Alaska, Hawai’i, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands attended last month’s Administration for Native Americans (ANA) three-day grantees conference in Washington, D.C.
Spend two weeks this summer in Washington, D.C., studying your Native language, or mentoring a language advocate!
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that we are headquartered on Massachusett land, in Cambridge, MA, and we thank the past, current, and future Indigenous stewards of this territory.