Three agreements laid groundwork for possible future land claims, reparations and centuries-long grievances for Métis nations

Growing up as member of Alberta’s Métis community, Audrey Poitras was always acutely aware of the unique struggle her people faced.

Sociological study finds pros and cons in a REDD+ carbon credit scheme in the Brazilian Amazon that rewards small-scale ecosystem service providers in local communities.

• To safeguard the almost 90 percent of its land still covered with forest, the small Brazilian state of Acre implemented a carbon credit scheme that assigns monetary value to stored carbon in the standing trees and rewards local “ecosystem service providers” for their role protecting it.

Dolene Miller, Elba Rivera and Francisca Ramirez have spent years defending the territories of the indigenous peoples, farmers and Afro-Nicaraguans. Here are their stories.

HAVANA TIMES – Defending their lands and the environment has cost the lives of many women around the world, especially in Latin America. The year 2017 was an especially lethal one for activists from 22 countries, according to denunciations filed last year by the British organization Global Witness.

Some see the ruling as a positive step toward equal access to land but others fear it undermines the traditional laws that have guided generations

KAPCHEBOI, Kenya, June 25 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A few months ago, the idea of coming home with a hoe in one hand and a sack of freshly harvested potatoes in the other was only a dream for Rachel Korir.

• The Hoti, Yanomami and Piaroa, isolated indigenous groups in Venezuela, are under threat on several fronts.
• Mining, legal and illegal, is disturbing their lands. Some have been forced to labor in the mining industry and others have decided to leave their territories and go deeper into the forest.
• The measles epidemic that has erupted in Venezuela has decimated the Yanomami, and the government has failed to set up health services in their territories.

This indigenous lawyer has made history as the first native woman ever to be elected to Brazil’s congress. She faces a host of obstacles – but is used to overcoming challenges

Joênia Wapichana was the first person in her family to go to university, the first to study law and the first to qualify as a barrister. Now she has become Brazil’s first indigenous congresswoman.

Indigenous peoples own or manage at least one-quarter of the world’s land surface – vast areas that overlap with 40 percent of global land-based government-protected areas, according to a unique mapping study that demonstrates the significant part Indigenous peoples are playing in safeguarding critical areas for conservation. The study took five years to complete and is the first of its kind, using geospatial data to estimate the size of this overlap.

ISLA JOVAI TEJU, Paraguay (Reuters) - Rumilda Fernández’s indigenous community has long tended its ancestral lands in Paraguay, marking boundaries with an ancient system of names for trees and streams. Now, squeezed by deforestation and farming, the community is going digital to defend itself.

Fernández, 28, is one of the group’s first technology-equipped forest monitors, traversing the narrow earthen tracks of the Isla Jovai Teju community’s land to map the area with a smartphone app and GPS.

MONROVIA –  The government of Liberia and major stakeholders in the forestland sector are developing guidelines for rural communities to accept and reject concessions targeted for their lands, a move advocates are hailing would curb land grab and strengthen the relationship between concessionaires and locals. 

Report by Mae Azango, New Narratives Correspondent

Indigenous communities in Nicaragua are facing violence and displacement, but agroecology is helping empower the Miskito people.

What do you do when your access to rivers, sacred sites, and forests, is cut off, especially when your whole identity has grown from a spiritual connection to nature?

When you face displacement from your native lands, discrimination, and human rights abuses, how do you survive?

This article was first published at The Lush Times.

MOST people have heard of the historic 1992 High Court Mabo Decision and the Native Title Act 1993.

However, many people may not be aware of the NSW State Government Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 (ARLA) and its impact.

Sometimes too, there is confusion between the two acts, but they are two very different pieces of legislation.