Waterloo-Redfern and the Racism Rooted in Cities
Who are cities designed for? Resolution Productions/Getty Images This June, a statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, was…
Tag: Indigenous
Wildfire Archaeology and the Burning American West
As I type, the American West is ablaze with more than 100 devastating wildfires. Many of these are record-setting in both size and intensity. Several, including one in…
Reclaiming the Ancestors: Indigenous and Black Perspectives on Repatriation, Human Rights, and Justice
Over the last several centuries, Indigenous, Black, and other colonized peoples’ remains have been turned into objects of study for archaeologists, anthropologists, and other scientists. This ca…
Saving Ifugao Weaving in the Philippines
Paulette Crespillo-Cuison, president of the Kiyyangan Weavers Association, demonstrates weaving to the next generation. Marlon Martin One cloudy July afternoon in 2019, a group of arch…
Indigenous Cultures Have Archaeology Too
A resident burns off vegetation to clear his garden plot on lands that previously were part of an ancient village called Popo. Chris Urwin In late 2015, I…
Indigenous-led technology can boost biodiversity and ensure human rights
Simon Hoyte, Alice Sheppard, Marcos Moreu, Megan Laws & Jerome Lewis Extreme Citizen Science Research Group Over recent years there have been high profile legal challenges, investigative…
When Deafness Is Not Considered a Deficit
Music rattled the windows of the one-room schoolhouse that was now serving as a dance floor for nearly the entire village, a population of about 100 people. Masato,…
What Parsnips Taught Me About Nature
Growing and harvesting this food helped the author connect with nature. Stuart Lang As the rain fell on my hands, washing away the soil, I threw the last…
The FBI’s Repatriation of Stolen Heritage
The sewing kit above is one of multiple items from a massive private collection held in Indiana that the FBI helped repatriate. This particular item is now in…
Violence against land defenders
There is important new work on the violence against land defenders worth reading over the summer. Here is a recent article in Global Environmental Change and a write…
Is Celebrity Attention Helping or Hurting Amazonian Peoples?
Indigenous peoples in Brazil are dying from COVID-19 at twice the rate of the rest of the country’s population. Here, Indigenous nurses accompany an elderly woman for testing…
Rethinking Easter Island’s Historic “Collapse”
A row of massive anthropomorphic statues on Easter Island. Henrykkcheung/Flickr Easter Island’s colossal statues loom large—both literally and figuratively—in the popular imagination. The…
Why Capitalize “Indigenous”?
(no-caption) Alison Wright/Getty Images Ask SAPIENS is a series that offers a glimpse into the magazine’s inner workings. Some readers may have noticed that SAPIENS uses a capital…
Yoik
Deep in the Arctic Circle, in the far north of Scandinavia, people belonging to the Sámi ethnic group herd reindeer. Nowadays only a minority of Sámi people still…
When Marine Mammals Clash With Archaeological Heritage
Sea lion populations off the California coast bounced back after the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. NOAA/NOS/NMS/CINMS; National Marine Sanctuaries Media Library Off the southern C…
Native American Children’s Historic Forced Assimilation
Children arrived at school at different points in the assimilation process. Many still openly embraced their traditional cultures, including some of these Lakota children on the Rosebud Indian…
AES 2020 Abstract: Mediating Multispecies Relations Through Western and Indigenous Conservation
Western notions of modernity have situated human society apart from nature, which encompasses those spaces and beings that are unmodified and unsullied by human activity. The Western conception…
The Double Life of Coca
In Andean countries such as Peru and Bolivia, locals and tourists drink mate de coca, a tea made from coca leaves, to stave off altitude sickness. Calsidyrose/Flickr In…
Corporate “Sorcerers” Reveal the Magical Power of Capitalism
The destruction of forests contributes to widespread drought through atmospheric processes that can seem like sorcery. Pixabay/Pexels To Indigenous Marind communities living in West Papua…
Humans in 2019—From Discoveries to Disasters
This image shows various views of the pinky bone of a Denisovan-Neanderthal hybrid found in Siberia. Thomas Higham/University of Oxford Denisovan Deluge This year brought a host of…
How to Resurrect Dying Languages
Hawaiian language teacher Nako’olani Warrington instructs 9-year-old Maleka Benjamin at an immersion school in Honolulu. Lucy Pemoni/AP Photo In the 1970s, the Hawaiian language seemed po…
Restoring Dignity to Stolen Ancestors
A man stands on the farm in Sutherland, South Africa, where a medical student once unethically exhumed nine bodies for scientific study. Je’nine May/UCT Almost 100 years ago,…
Can This Indigenous Language Thrive in a Digital Age?
On any given day, people throng the busy market in Concepción, Paraguay. Shoppers peruse the multicolored array of fruits and vegetables and occasionally pause to chat with the…
The Hidden Color Code in Mimbres Pottery
The patterns in black-and-white Classic Mimbres pottery may have represented colors. phoca2004/Flickr Classic Mimbres pottery is famous and admired today for its beautiful, minimalist sty…