Rodrigo Tot is a 60-year-old farmer and an indigenous land rights activist from Guatemala. He represents an isolated, small Q’eqchi farming and fishing community of about 270 members in the long-running fight to secure legal ownership over their communal lands.

Tot and his community stood up to the government and nickel miners expanding into their land in Agua Caliente.

And now he's won one of the world's most prestigious activism awards, the Goldman Environmental Prize.

ASOLOKOBAL, Indonesia — Laurensius Lani’s footsteps can be heard at dawn alongside the traditional honay thatched-roof houses of the Baliem Valley, here in the archipelago country’s eastermost Papua province.

There was a “worrying lack of transparency” around the Federal Government’s funding model for programs targeting Indigenous Australia, aid agency Oxfam said in a report released this month.

Oxfam Australia said under the Indigenous Advancement Strategy, the Federal Government was increasingly looking to mainstream services and programs to meet Indigenous Australians’ needs.

It said the move was at the expense of Indigenous-specific organisations.

Among its key findings, Oxfam said:

Federal police in the Mexican state of Michoacan killed four Indigenous campesinos Wednesday, entering their homes and shooting them on site, Ruptura Colectiva reports.

The four victims, whose names have yet to be released, were members of the Arantepacua Communal Property Collective, a grassroots organization that fights for Indigenous land rights in Michoacan. Eight members were left injured and 40 more were arrested, Mexico News Daily reports.

Witnesses also claim police threatened women and children who arrived at the scene of the murder with violence.

Indigenous Peoples and community advocates in Brazil, Guatemala, Kenya, Taiwan, and 21 other countries to take action for community land rights, April 22-29 (Earth Day)

New research provides yet more evidence that granting indigenous and other local communities formal title to their traditional lands can be a boon to efforts to conserve forests.

Deforestation is responsible for as much as 10 percent of total global carbon emissions, which means that finding effective means of keeping forests standing is crucial to global efforts to halt climate change.

Disputes over Brazil’s farmland are growing increasingly violent, pitting farmers against the original residents of the area

UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz [official website] called [press release] Friday for the US to adopt a consistent approach to indigenous land rights in pipeline projects.

The Tapajós River Basin lies at the heart of the Amazon, and at the heart of an exploding controversy: whether to build 40+ large dams, a railway, and highways, turning the Basin into a vast industrialized commodities export corridor; or to curb this development impulse and conserve one of the most biologically and culturally rich regions on the planet.

Shortly after a visit from an EU delegation last week, Kenya Forest Service (KFS) guards based at Tangul, Kipsitono and Maron KFS camps carried out intensive evictions according to Sengwer witnesses, with KFS allegedly having since burnt down over 90 Sengwer homes and destroyed their property.

Elizabeth Apolinar enjoys her job as a lawyer in the bustling center of Bogotá these days. But now and then she misses the traditional life she used to lead deep in the heart of the Colombian jungle.

Apolinar is originally from a community called the Sikuani. The Sikuani people are a pueblo indigena, an indigenous people, one of about 100 indigenous ethnic groups in Colombia. These groups are represented by Apolinar’s employer: La Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia (ONIC), or the National Organization of Indigenous Peoples in Colombia.

After three years of working with local governments and indigenous communities, the Provincial Council of Pastaza established the Pastaza Ecological Area of Sustainable Development in the center of the Ecuadorian Amazon region. The area covers more than 2.5 million hectares (about 6.2 million acres) and occupies about 90 percent of the area of ​​the province of the same name.