Last week, a group of more than 500 villagers set up roadblocks in Orissa's Puri district to protest the construction of "Dev Sanskrati Vishwavidyalaya" (Divine Culture University) a project funded by the rather-unenlightened company we know as Vedanta Resources. The villagers are angry that the institution, which will apparently establish "a Cultural Renaissance" in India, [...]
Organizers, leaders, and spokespeople from Indigenous communities involved in land struggles with the Canadian and Provincial Governments have assembled in Winnipeg for the Defenders of the Land Gathering, to share strategies and ideas for how to best achieve land rights and self-determination. The gathering runs from November 12-14th, 2008, and will feature presentations by members [...]
On November 10th, the Association of Indigenous Couincils of Northern Cauca (ACIN) released an open letter to US President-Elect Barack Obama, hoping to shed more light on their struggle and foster a relationship that will ensure "Life... can never again be transformed into means for private accumulation of power at the service of greed." With [...]
The Dominion Paper, a Canadian-based Grassroots News Cooperative, is in the midst of putting together a special November issue on Canadian mining, titled State of Mine: An investigation of Canada’s extractive industries. The issue will consist of one original investigative article for every day of the month, and will provide a comprehensive look at all [...]
Broken Rainbow is a 1985 documentary film about the industry-led and government-enforced relocation of more than 10,000 Navajo from their traditional lands. On December 1974 Congress passed "The Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act" which authorized the partitioning of the Joint Use Area (JUA) of the Navajo and Hopi Nations, and established the Navajo-Hopi Indian Relocation Commission [...]
More than a dozen Tyendinaga Mohawks in southern Ontario are facing arrest for opposing an expensive new police station, paid for in part by the Federal Government of Canada, and for demanding the closure of a second landfill that is believed to be destroying and contaminating local water sources. An estimated 80 per cent of [...]
On October 17th, the Kelly Lake Cree Nation released a statement (below) denouncing the recent attempts to sabotage a nearby gas pipeline in northeast British Columbia. On October 11th and 16th there were two separate explosions directed at the pipeline, which is owned by the Calgary-based EnCana corporation. Neither explosion caused any serious damage to [...]