Indigenous People
Maryville University
St. Louis, Missouri
Other
Collections are versatile, powerful and simple to create. From a customized course reader to an action-guide for an upcoming service-learning trip, collections illuminate themes, guide inquiry, and provide context for how people around the worls are responding to social challenges.
Indigenous tribes are protecting natural resources and land from harmful practices by passing Rights of Nature laws. These laws set the framework to file legal claims to hold those violating the protections accountable.
Read MoreIndigenous youth activists are using social media, online organizing, and art to mobilize intergenerational protests against the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalachia. After the Inflation Reduction Act undermined court successes that had stopped the project, the movement is putting pressure on legislators to stop it, with some key senators saying they won't vote for the side deal negotiated to keep the pipeline moving forward.
Read MoreIn October of 2019, the city of Eureka, California returned stolen lands to the Wiyot Tribe, the region’s Native American people. This was done over a decade after a brutal massacre on the land, which is an island that had slowly become overgrown and deemed uninhabitable. The Wiyots worked every weekend for years cleaning up the land, and now, with a clean bill of health and the property rights, they can start to heal as a community together again.
Read MoreOver 1000 community members gathered to demand officials keep a 2016 promise to give a vacant publicly-owned fire station to the Africatown Community Land Trust. The station is in a historically Black and quickly gentrifying neighborhood and the trust wants to turn it into a resource center to develop the next generation of Black entrepreneurs. As citywide protests for racial equality spread, the city abruptly agreed to turn it over. The group also wants more unused properties turned over to Black community ownership and for the city to develop an anti-gentrification land acquisition fund.
Read MoreIn the Phillipines, the Agregarian Comprehensive Reform law passed in 1988 opened up the doors for farmers to own the land they worked, giving way to communal farms. Communal farms are a type of business model in which many farmers own and manage the land. One of those farms is the Minoro Isabel Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries Association. In 2016, the communal farm made a profit of $3.28 million, 90 percent of that was reinvested into the group.
Read MoreThrough partnerships with conservation organizations and donation-based rent and land tax programs, Native peoples and tribes are reclaiming land stolen from them hundreds of years ago and raising funds for these efforts from non-Native residents still occupying Native territory. The LANDBACK movement has helped recover parcels such as a 10,000-acre plot in the Seattle area that was returned to the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation via a conservation organization.
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