Environmentalists From Our First Nations

Like the other books in the First Nations Series for Young Readers, this books offers ten short and engaging biographies of First Nations/Native activists who advocate not only for the environment but for Native rights. Their stories are full of highs and lows, triumphs and setbacks. Environmental trailblazers, these men and women are role models for children everywhere.

Follow the journeys of ten talented musicians from the Native community as they make their way to the top. All of them bring their own cultural traditions to their music.

The 1970s witnessed the emergence of a global environmental movement in response to rampant resource extraction. This moment gave rise to a celebrated 'green-black alliance' between environmentalists and Indigenous groups in Australia. However, in recent years, this relationship has come under increased critical scrutiny, spurred in part by the global mining boom and continuing concerns about the effects of climate change. This edited collection brings together leading anthropologists, social scientists, activists, and writers to subject the Indigenous-environmentalist relation to rigorous, empirical inquiry, and to explore noted controversies, campaigns, and key issues, such as: the Wild Rivers Act and James Price Point, mining, native title rights, 'feral' species, forestry, national parks, and payment for environmental services. The insights generated here have relevance beyond Australia as scholars investigate the politics of indigeneity in the present moment, and consider the economic future of Indigenous minorities. Significantly, the collection involves both Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors, subjecting environmentalists to a kind of anthropological analysis. [Subject: Environmental Studies, Politics, Indigenous Studies]

Environmental Activism on the Ground draws upon a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship to examine small scale, local environmental activism, paying particular attention to Indigenous experiences. It illuminates the questions that are central to the ongoing evolution of the environmental movement while reappraising the history and character of late twentieth and early twenty-first environmentalism in Canada, the United States, and beyond. This collection considers the different ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists have worked to achieve significant change. It examines attempts to resist exploitative and damaging resource developments, and the establishment of parks, heritage sites, and protected areas that recognize the indivisibility of cultural and natural resources. It pays special attention to the thriving environmentalism of the 1960s through the 1980s, an era which saw the rise of major organizations such as Greenpeace along with the flourishing of local and community-based environmental activism. Environmental Activism on the Ground emphasizes the effects of local and Indigenous activism, offering lessons and directions from the ground up. It demonstrates that the modern environmental movement has been as much a small-scale, ordinary activity as a large-scale, elite one.

The revised edition adds two new and exciting young basketball players to the roster of outstanding Native athletes already included in the book. Shoni Schimmel, a tribal member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in eastern Oregon, has earned the nicknames “The Umatilla Thrilla” and “Showtime” in the world of women's basketball. To people in Indian Country, Shoni is an absolute hero. Kenny Dobbs, aka “The Dunk Inventor,” is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and has toured the globe with the National Basketball Association as a celebrity dunker for sold-out shows. The biographies of all thirteen athletes describe the hard work, determination and education it took to accomplish their dreams and become the champions they are.

"With connections to traditional homelands being at the heart of Native identity, environmental justice is of heightened importance to Indigenous communities. Not only do irresponsible and exploitative environmental policies harm the physical and financial health of Indigenous communities, they also cause spiritual harm by destroying the land and wildlife that are held in a place of exceptional reverence for Indigenous peoples. Combining elements of legal issues, human rights issues, and sovereignty issues, Indigenous Environmental Justice creates a clear example of community resilience in the face of corporate greed"--

Originally titled: Land and spirit in native America, 2012.

Beginning with the nineteenth-century expeditions, Northern Australia has been both a fascination and concern to the administrators of settler governance in Australia. With Southeast Asia and Melanesia as neighbors, the region's expansive and relatively undeveloped tropical savanna lands are alternately framed as a market opportunity, an ecological prize, a threat to national sovereignty, and a social welfare problem. Over the last several decades, while developers have eagerly promoted the mineral and agricultural potential of its monsoonal catchments, conservationists speak of these same sites as rare biodiverse habitats, and settler governments focus on the “social dysfunction” of its Indigenous communities. Meanwhile, across the north, Indigenous people have sought to wrest greater equity in the management of their lives and the use of their country. In Wild Articulations, Timothy Neale examines environmentalism, indigeneity, and development in Northern Australia through the controversy surrounding the Wild Rivers Act 2005 (Qld) in Cape York Peninsula, an event that drew together a diverse cast of actors—traditional owners, prime ministers, politicians, environmentalists, mining companies, the late Steve Irwin, crocodiles, and river systems—to contest the future of the north. With a population of fewer than 18,000 people spread over a landmass of over 50,000 square miles, Cape York Peninsula remains a “frontier” in many senses. Long constructed as a wild space—whether as terra nullius, a zone of legal exception, or a biodiverse wilderness region in need of conservation—Australia’s north has seen two fundamental political changes over the past two decades. The first is the legal recognition of Indigenous land rights, reaching over a majority of its area. The second is that the region has been the center of national debates regarding the market integration and social normalization of Indigenous people, attracting the attention of federal and state governments and becoming a site for intensive neoliberal reforms. Drawing connections with other settler colonial nations such as Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand, Wild Articulations examines how indigenous lands continue to be imagined and governed as “wild.”