On Monday June 29, The indigenous Kumeyaay people held a protest at the border wall between California and Mexico. Activists accused President Donald Trump of destroying ancient Native American burial sites while constructing the wall.

The Kumeyaay people are one of the main tribes who have lived in the region for thousands of years.

About 100 community members sang and chanted peacefully to voice their concerns about explosives being used to destroy...

Jessa Calderon initially felt numb watching the Junipero Serra statue topple to the ground as it was yanked from its platform with yellow rope tied around its neck.

Within minutes, she was in tears.

“I began to cry hysterically. It was like a sense of relief,” said Calderon, a descendant of Gabrielino-Tongva and Ventureño Chumash, who witnessed the toppling on June 20 in downtown Los Angeles.

Calderon and other California Native people prayed and left offerings, including medicinal herbs, at a makeshift altar before activists took down...

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has temporarily shut down the Dakota Access pipeline for the latest twist in what activists and religious leaders have called a “spiritual battle.”

Oil must stop flowing through the Dakota Access pipeline by Aug. 5, according to a decision...

The Trump administration’s rush to complete sections of a wall along the US-Mexico border before the November election is threatening to damage and restrict access to sacred and historic Native American sites in the region.

The border wall was a key promise of President Donald Trump’s election campaign, and in his bid to keep that promise, dozens of environmental laws, from the Endangered Species Act to the Clean Air Act, were suspended to fast-track construction.

On a frigid mid-February Saturday, a small crowd gathers in a silent, snow-covered clearing in the woods. The atmosphere was more reminiscent of a far-off forest in northern Michigan than urban Detroit’s Rouge Park.

The group convenes around Jerry Jondreau, owner of Dynamite Hill Farms, who explains the Anishinaabe sugarbush tradition of tapping trees and boiling sap to create maple sugar and syrup. Jondreau, who learned the process from his family, shows the group how deep to drill into the trees, how to insert...

The two Lummi Nation tribal members who have said they will sue to free an orca from the Miami Seaquarium and bring her home to the Salish Sea announced they now have legal representation from Earth Law...

A few winters ago, Sam Sage started getting strange phone calls. 

Families living in rural areas south-west of Counselor, New Mexico, were telling him they saw sickly bull snakes and near-death rattlers above ground during the snowy, winter months of the south. Sage, the administrator at the Counselor Chapter House, a Navajo local government center, was incredulous.

“In February? There’s no snakes in February,” he said.

Sage...

Michelle Tom stared into the screen. The Navajo doctor had just finished a grueling shift at the Winslow Indian Health Care Center urgent care facility in Winslow, Ariz., caring for Covid-19 patients. Now, she was spending her Friday night speaking via livestream to Native American youth about the pandemic.

“I’ve seen it hit everyone,” she said of the coronavirus. “But I have the strength of my ancestors, the strength of my prayers, and the strength of all of you. We have to keep talking about it, especially to our young people.”

In recent weeks,...

When Michigan State University graduate student Jared Gregorini studies in the forest, he often leaves a tobacco plant in it before he starts.

This is because Gregorini, also known as Leading Crow, is a Native American.

Before becoming a biological conservation researcher, he worked with the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians as an assistant biologist.  He is from Ontario, but his research focuses on Michigan’s eastern Upper Peninsula, an environment similar to Ontario’s.

The plant Gregorini gives to the forest is usually tobacco, which is...

It was 1970, the U.S. president was Richard Nixon and members of a small Native American community in northern New Mexico traveled to Washington to press their case for reclaiming a sacred alpine lake from federal control.

The story of the return of Blue Lake and 75 square miles (195 square kilometers) of surrounding national forest land to the people of Taos Pueblo — finalized with Nixon’s signature in December 1970 — is being retold 50 years later, as tribal leaders and state legislators look for ways to preserve documentation and memories of the landmark victory for...