The observed taxonomic diversity highlights the potential contribution of Wild Edible Plants to food security, climate resilience, and sustainable livelihoods. A diverse wild food resource base can reduce dependence on a limited number of cultivated crops and provide alternative food sources during environmental stress, seasonal shortages, and crop failure64–67. Furthermore, the presence of edible species across multiple families and ecological niches increases resource availability across different habitats and seasons.

The findings also demonstrate the important role of indigenous knowledge in the identification, utilization, and conservation of WEP resources. The recognition and utilization of 50 edible species by local communities reflect a welldeveloped ecological knowledge system developed through long-term interactions with the surrounding environment.

Similar indigenous knowledge systems have been documented in other parts of Ethiopia and among indigenous communities worldwide68–72. However, increasing agricultural expansion, urbanization, market-oriented livelihood changes, and changing food preferences may threaten both WEP resources and associated traditional knowledge, emphasizing the importance of continued documentation and integration of indigenous knowledge into conservation and rural development strategies.

Among the most important findings in the study was the interconnectedness between reef and mangrove ecosystems for sustaining fisheries — an aspect long recognized in Bardi Jawi traditional ecological knowledge. The overall project and its findings also guided the design of both the IPA and marine park.

Federal prosecutors and the Public Defender’s Office have warned of an imminent risk of violent confrontation and possible genocide against the isolated Igarapé Ipiaçava people.

Since 2011, a series of temporary land-use restriction orders, which prohibit unauthorized individuals from entering Ituna/Itatá, protected the vulnerable population. Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Agency, Funai, renewed the precautionary measure in 2025.

by Michelle Cyca

Introduction:

Over the August long weekend in Alberta, a banner appeared on a fence northwest of Edmonton, proclaiming “The Indians have done nothing in 100 years and now they wanna tell us how to run Alberta.” No one was sure who put it up—a local separatist group contacted by APTN denied responsibility—or which “Indians” were supposedly giving the province unwanted advice. But the sentiment was clear, and emblematic of current attitudes toward Indigenous people across this country.

A decade ago, in the salad days of Justin Trudeau’s reign, truth and reconciliation were embraced as a necessary step toward a brighter future; understanding Canada’s shameful treatment of Indigenous people was key to addressing the persistent inequities facing First Nations, Metis, and Inuit communities. In 2021, there was a global outpouring of grief as several communities, beginning with Tḱemlúps te Secwépemc, announced they had identified hundreds of probable graves at former residential school sites. A new federal holiday was created to honour residential school survivors; Canadians bought orange shirts and began acknowledging that “every child matters.”

But today, many Canadians feel the pendulum has swung too far; acknowledgement of residential school history is one thing, but concrete measures to address injustices are quite another. It seems many Canadians believed residential schools were the only federal crime to atone for, perhaps because we don’t have a holiday commemorating illegal land expropriation or underpayment of treaty annuities.

Of course, there have always been Canadians who bristle at Indigenous people exercising their legal rights, but a wider shift is underway. A combination of factors—the flagging economy, the brain-rotting fumes of disinformation permeating social media, rising extremism in Canadian politics—are tipping the scales when it comes to public discourse on Indigenous issues. Many Canadians are aggrieved and anxious, and everywhere they look, they see reasons to blame Indigenous people for their problems. There’s a sense that the sputtering national project of reconciliation has taken something away from them and that Indigenous rights must be quashed to restore their sense of security and prosperity.

What initially drew me to Amazonia was the tendency of its Indigenous inhabitants to consider the forest and river where they lived as a delicate society populated by beings similar, in crucial respects, to humans. An ecology of persons. This is what led me to Andoque territory in 2018, and why I spent more than a year living with families like Rosa’s. I had set out as an anthropologist seeking to study their notions of power, and how this power is bound up with nonhuman persons – like dolphins. For the Andoque, these beings may wear the bodies of trees, plants, animals and insects, but they have wishes, thoughts, fears and cultural customs like humans do. What would power look like in such a world, I wondered. A deeper interest lay hidden within the word ‘power’ – hidden, back then, even from myself. I longed for a first-hand encounter with something truly powerful: the dangerous web of life and death that makes up the forest; the intricate wisdom of a people attuned to it. I wanted to bask in that power. I wanted to admire it, decipher it, crash against it.

But the world of the Andoque had been battered long before I arrived. Far from the postcard ‘isolated tribe’, they place relations with whites at the centre of their culture. ‘Whites’ is a term that, for them, refers not to skin colour but simply to anyone external to the forest and its ways. These outsiders are closely linked in Andoque mythology with the Caquetá river mouth, as it was from there, where the water meets the main Amazon River, that European merchants first arrived as early as the 17th century.

Those efforts paid off on June 18, 2026, when local fisherwoman Helen Asu showed up with two spinach pipefish she caught with her umben, a traditional hand net. She’d been out fishing for prawns on the Sepik River in Imbando, a village in East Sepik province.

Helen Asu, a local fisherwoman who caught the two spinach pipefish that made the rediscovery possible, with her umben. Image courtesy of New Guinea Binatang Research Centre.

A day later, the administration announced plans to slash protections for an important buffer zone surrounding Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, opening the land to, you guessed it, even more oil and gas leasing. If approved, the still-protected area of Chaco Canyon—which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a sacred ceremonial site for the Pueblo Peoples for over 2,000 years, and which contains evidence of human occupation dating back to 900 BCE—will sit directly next to these new extraction sites, causing irreversible damage. The zdministration's contention that Chaco Canyon, Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and surely future sites on the executioner's block, have no "historical significance" is false. They are important not only to our American history, but humanity's. To add insult to stupidity, the administration then limited the public commenting period on their decision to 14 days. To put this into perspective, the average commenting period is between 60 and 75 days. Boy, oh boy, do they want to lease that land, and boy, oh boy, did they anticipate that people would have something to say about it.

Snuneymuxw First Nation has acquired the remaining ownership stake in the Courtyard by Marriott Nanaimo, bringing the Downtown Nanaimo hotel property entirely under the First Nation’s control.

The acquisition was completed through Petroglyph Development Group (PDG), the First Nation’s wholly owned economic development corporation. The hotel had previously been jointly owned with Utah-based real estate investment firm PEG Companies.

Frequent travellers of a Guyanese ferry that sunk in July allege routine overloading, unsecured cargo and engine failures.

The MV Barima — an 87-year-old ferry owned and operated by the state of Guyana — recently sank off the country’s coast on its way from the country’s capital of Georgetown to Port Kaituma, a journey of about 18 to 24 hours.

Port Kaituma is a gateway to what’s known as the North West District that borders Venezuela, where outsider gold and manganese interests dominate Indigenous territory.

The ferry’s passengers — the majority are Indigenous people unable to afford the cost of speed boat or air travel — sleep on the floor among the cargo loaded for government and private-sector interests, or in hammocks slung wherever there is space.

In total, 76 passengers and crew survived, while 73 bodies were recovered before the government called off the search by French Navy divers for the estimated 30 to 50 people still missing.

Many of the passengers were Indigenous children returning home for school holidays.

“I think there is not only an interest in renewed ancestral recipes, but also there’s been this wonderful uptick in people figuring out their own way,” Terry said. “You know,

I don’t just have to eat wild rice with berries and maple syrup. I am capable of like elevating this or transforming it or there’s so much food science to be relearned about all of these ingredients. It’s actually an incredibly exciting time.”

The Indigenous food sovereignty movement has helped elevate awareness of the benefits and importance of traditional foods, Terry said.

In 2005, the statue was revealed and Po’pay became the first person represented in the National Statuary Hall Collection to be born on what would become American soil.

Fragua said each item near or on Po’pay symbolizes Pueblo culture and tradition.

“On his back are the scars that remain from the whipping he received for his participation and faith in the Pueblo ceremonies and religion,” Fragua wrote in the statue’s description.

The Djidji Ayokwe, a sacred "talking drum" which was looted by French colonial troops in 1916 and taken to France, arrived back in its home village in Ivory Coast on Friday.

The ceremony, on Ivory Coast's national independence day holiday, was the first time today's Ivorians were able to see it.

The imposing wooden drum, more than three metres (10 feet) long and weighing 430 kilogrammes, was used by the Ebrie tribe to transmit messages.

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It is one of hundreds of stolen artefacts Paris is preparing to send back to Africa, aided by the approval in May of a new French law.

With their numbers continuing to dwindle by the turn of the 21st century, the original creators of the cultural centre decided to choose a different approach.

“Instead of removing them and destroying their home, killing them and having fear of them, it was, ‘How about we start researching them? Figuring out how we can help them and support them?’” Bower said.

“It’s just nice to know that even way back in 2002, there was still that love and care for snakes.”

The resulting program has spent more than two decades studying the snakes and helping restore their place in public understanding. The centre was built within a living cultural landscape, she added, and its role was never limited to interpreting the past.

After lunch, a crew from the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s (ONA) kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ hatchery in Penticton, B.C., arrives with 1,500 sockeye fry in oxygenated tanks. ONA fisheries biologist Tyson Marsel tells Mongabay they loaded the truck at 5 a.m., before setting off on the seven-hour journey.

As the crew transfer the finger-length fry to buckets, Thomas brushes the assembled crowd with the sweet-smelling smoke, inviting each person to cleanse. After a few short words from some speakers on the importance of restoring salmon to the watershed, drummers from the Shuswap Band, a member of the Secwépemc Nation, start up again. To the sound of a traditional song, community members — elders, knowledge holders, youths, biologists, fisheries technicians, and others, Indigenous and non-Indigenous — line up to receive fry in plastic cups and, with a prayer, send them on their way.

“It’s all about reconnection, it’s all about advocacy … and understanding the importance of salmon to us as people and to the ecology,” Thomas, who is also a Shuswap Band councilor, tells Mongabay in a follow-up phone call.

This year, the Shuswap Band hosted ceremonial fry releases in two communities, reaching 300 students in addition to community members, while the Syilx-Okanagan Nation hosted fry releases in three communities within blocked areas in the Upper Columbia Basin. The Syilx-Okanagan also hosts fry releases in the Okanagan sub-basin, which the Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph dams have not blocked.

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Salmon reintroduction is feasible, Scott Cope, a recently retired biologist with the Shuswap Band, tells Mongabay, and has been demonstrated by technical studies undertaken by the Bringing the Salmon Home initiative.

Experimental releases by the initiative of tagged sockeye juveniles in the Upper Columbia Basin have shown smolts navigating downstream, past some dams, to the ocean.

Last summer, in another milestone, two tagged sockeye, released as juveniles in the Upper Columbia, returned to spawn. They were detected swimming back upriver near the Wells Dam in Washington state, just downstream of the Chief Joseph Dam.

The team has also tracked a small number of adult chinook moving into Canada, after being released upstream of Grand Coulee Dam by tribes, with some swimming as far as the first major dam. They have also translocated some Okanagan-origin adult sockeye to Arrow Lakes on the Upper Columbia River in Canada, with one seen moving into spawning grounds in 2024.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/68030