Global Indigenous Understanding: Issues

An appeals court in Botswana has ruled that indigenous Bushmen can drill wells for water in the Kalahari desert.

The charred ruins of burned huts tell of long-running tensions in the area surrounding Apaa village, northern Uganda, where families who claim the area as ancestral land are pitted against the government, which has declared it a wildlife reserve.

Australia is the only Commonwealth country never to make a treaty with its indigenous peoples. Why has it proven so difficult? Kathy Marks looks at the vast challenges in Victoria alone - a state that is working towards a national first.

"Land rights for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples refers to the ongoing struggle to gain legal and moral recognition of ownership of lands and waters they called home prior to colonisation of Australia in 1788. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ laws and customs and ways of knowing and being in the world are intimately connected to the land and waters. Connection to land is therefore essential to the continued cultural survival of Indigenous Australians as well as their economic and social development." (AIATSIS, n.d.)

History was made when the New South Wales Government passed the nation's first Aboriginal languages legislation.

With our digital world dominated by English, minority and endangered languages struggle to be seen and heard.

Eleven years of negotiations between Finland, Norway and Sweden were successfully brought to an end as a unified Nordic agreement on indigenous Sámi rights and culture was signed on 13th January.

Speaking at the 100 years anniversary of the first Sámi congress, Prime Minister Erna Solberg said the policy of «norsification» had forced many Sámi to abandon their culture and languages.

The Sami population of the village of Girjas in Northern Sweden has won a historic case against the state in a long-running battle over land rights.

Few places are experiencing the effects of climate change as vividly as the Arctic. Scientists say temperatures in the far north have risen by more than two degrees Celsius since the industrial revolution, twice the global average.

Thousands of people protested in New Zealand on Saturday against a proposed housing development on land seen as sacred to the indigenous Māori people, despite efforts by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to calm the dispute.

The mountain is a temple to native Hawaiians, offering a connection between "creation and creator", said Kealoha Pisciotta, president of the Mauna Kea Anaina Hou, one of the main groups opposing the TMT.

Heavily armed gold miners have invaded a remote indigenous reserve in northern Brazil and stabbed to death one of its leaders, officials say.

Thousands of indigenous people have protested in the Brazilian capital, Brasília, to defend hard-won land and cultural rights that they say are under threat from the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

President Michelle Bachelet asked for forgiveness from Chile's Indigenous Mapuche people on Friday for the "errors and horrors" committed by the state, and announced plans to give them more power and resources.