By Lucas Kasosi (Maasai, CS Intern)
If you ever find yourself in a remote Samburu village at night, you might stumble upon a scene that feels straight out of a centuries-old tradition women huddled around a bonfire, their voices rising and falling in conversation as the fire flickers against their beadwork and shukas.
By Brandi Morin (Cree/Iroquois). Photos by Ian Willms
Around the world, mining operations have deepened poverty in Indigenous communities and destroyed traditional livelihoods, leaving environmental devastation in their wake.
By Hartman Deetz (Mashpee Wampanoag)
By Human Rights Watch and ACLU
(Washington D.C., February 6, 2025) – The United States government’s decision to permit Lithium Americas to mine at Thacker Pass in Nevada violated Indigenous people’s rights, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU said in a report released today. The 18,000-acre mining project is under construction and will extract lithium from one of the world’s largest known deposits.
By Press Release by Native American Rights Fund
(WASHINGTON D.C., 2/2/2025)—A coalition of Tribal organizations, representing Tribal Nations and their citizens and communities, is calling on the Administration to ensure that recent executive actions do not undermine the unique sovereign political status of Tribal Nations as sovereign nations with which the federal government has trust and treaty obligations, or disrupt federal funding that flows from those relationships for essential Tribal programs.
Cultural Survival strongly condemns the violent attack on Indigenous students and Indigenous Peoples’ rights activists’ protests on January 15, 2025, against the removal of the term "Adivasi" (Indigenous in Bangla) from school textbooks in Bangladesh.
Come learn about international human rights mechanisms, including the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and how they can aid in your advocacy efforts and put pressure on the U.S. government, both locally and nationally, to respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights.
We invite Tribal members and community advocates in preparation for the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Third Universal Periodic Review of the United States in November 2025.
By John McPhaul
Faced with President Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations, two Miskitu Indigenous leaders are part of a Nicaraguan delegation asking the United States government to let Nicaraguans who are in the U.S. in exile stay with an extension of Temporary Protection Status (TPS) due to the human rights abuses meted out by the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murrillo.
By Ellen Moore. Reposted from Earthworks.
By Xiting Tong (CS Intern)
“Resisting the ‘avalanche’-like encroachment of the lithium mining industry is not only a collective fight in the community, but most importantly, it is a fight in one’s own heart and mind,” says one of the participants of the agricultural projects in Girau.
Cultural Survival and our partner organizations in Nepal, including Nepal Tamang Women Association, Newa Misa Daboo, Sunuwar Women Society, Indigenous Women's League Nepal (IWL Nepal), and National Indigenous Disabled Women Association Nepal (NIDWAN), submitted an alternative report on the situation of Indigenous women’s rights in Nepal for the 90th session of the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which will take place in Geneva from February 3rd to 21st, 2025.
The Mapuche Tehuelche community of the Lof Pailako in Chubut, Argentina, are facing forced eviction from their ancestral lands.
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.
