Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • Door-to-door campaign helps Guadalupe turn the tide against COVID

    After becoming a COVID-19 hotspot, Guadalupe built partnerships and built trust among community members to effectively track cases, dispel misinformation, and increase vaccinations. The Town Council partnered with Pascua Yaqui tribal leaders, the broader Maricopa County, Native Health, and a COVID-19 response team composed of faculty, staff, and students at Arizona State University to lower infection rates. A combination of at-home testing, contact tracing and, eventually, vaccination events helped, as did the use of promotoras – community health workers who talk with residents to help ease anxiety.

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  • Room for everyone: Tribal college expands its reach

    Tohono O’odham Community College in Arizona shifted its courses online during the pandemic and offered them for free to any Native student, expanding the tribal college's reach beyond the Tohono O’odham Nation for the first time. The college saw its enrollment jump by 96 percent — the largest increase of any tribal college in 2020 — and now serves students representing 55 tribal nations.

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  • 'Indigenous DNA': Native voters help turn Arizona blue, led by grassroots workers

    Indigenous communities across Arizona organized grassroots efforts to register Native voters and increase voter turnout in 2020. Members of indigenous communities were able to move on-the-ground efforts forward in a way that outside organizations could not. While just 6% of the state’s voting population identifies as Native American, President Biden won by just 10,000 votes, making the larger turnout across Native nations more relevant. Efforts involved going door-to-door and setting up information booths in central areas and voters responded to canvassers taking the time to talk with people.

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  • Areas hard hit by B.C. drought now the target of bottled water corporations

    The Merville Water Guardians, the Canadian Freshwater Alliance, and K’ómoks First Nation successfully prevented rezoning that would allow water to be drawn from shared aquifers, bottled, and sold for private profits. Protests at District board meetings, letter writing campaigns, petitions, and door-to-door campaigning led the District board to vote against the rezoning and sign an historic agreement to collaboratively manage and conserve water with the K’ómoks First Nation.

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  • By boat, by motorbike, by foot

    IPSI Palaima is working to vaccinate Indigenous families who live in hard-to-reach areas of La Guajira, where there are no paved roads, electricity, or running water and staff must use cars, boats, and motorbikes to reach them. A team of nursing assistants and a doctor spend 15 days at a time at a local outpost and travel by motorbike to surrounding communities, carrying vaccines in cooler bags. The organization was founded by an Indigenous woman who grew up in the area. Many of the staff members speak the local language, which can ease the communities’ vaccine hesitation and mistrust of authorities.

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  • How decades of stopping forest fires made them worse

    Prescribed burning or controlled burning is an ancestral indigenous practice in which specific sections of a forest are burned. Controlled burning also happens naturally like when lightning strikes a forest. Controlled burning is good for a forest, it gets rid of dead areas, leads to healthier soil by clearing the ground, and minimizes the strength of large fires. However, due to U.S. laws that criminalized controlled burns the practice was discouraged in the U.S. Now, due to climate change and larger fires, prescribed burning is making a come back.

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  • Grassroots movements fight a broken system

    "Land defenders" from the Six Nations blocked a planned housing development on contested land by swiftly moving to occupy the site, even after a police raid in which nine protesters were arrested. In place of the now-canceled development, the community erected a dozen tiny homes and a communal kitchen. The protest serves as a model for another occupation by members of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation at Kahnawake, whose 75-day holdout protests a planned 290-unit housing development on land that is subject to the nation's unresolved claim.

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  • Tribal Solar Projects Provide More Than Climate Solutions

    Indigenous groups are establishing energy sovereignty on tribal lands while simultaneously providing economic development. The transition to solar power has environmental, political, and financial benefits for indigenous communities.

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  • How to give the land back

    In California, the Wiyot tribe and the city of Eureka are forming a Community Land Trust to return to their ancestral land to the Wayat tribe. The trust ensures the Wayat tribe keeps decision-making powers concerning the land. Prior, to that the tribe raised $200,000 and purchased portions of Tulawat Island. In 2004, a tribal chairwoman requested a transfer of land back to the tribe that was unanimously approved by Eureka's city council. In 2019, the city returned an additional 200 acres.

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  • For Navajo, crowded homes have always been a lifeline. The pandemic threatens that.

    Multigenerational homes allowed indigenous families to pass down culture and language for thousands of years but living in crowded homes left them more vulnerable to COVID-19. Navajo teams have built 300 8-by-15-foot “tiny homes” to provide extra space for the most vulnerable or most exposed family member to isolate. Government-sponsored hotel rooms also provide spaces for those with the virus to quarantine safely. An aggressive vaccination campaign also got nearly half of those living within the Navajo Indian Health Service Area fully vaccinated, further reducing risk in crowded households.

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