By Mackenzie Miller
World Youth Skills Day is celebrated every year on July 15th with the aim of highlighting the importance of skills and competencies in the development and success of youth. This initiative seeks to promote the acquisition of relevant skills for employment, entrepreneurship, and active participation in society.
For more than a century, the Kankanaey and Ibaloy Peoples of Itogon, Benguet province in the Cordillera region of Northern Luzon in the Philippines have been waging a struggle against the injustices of large-scale corporate mining. As they continue to fight to reclaim their land, lifeways, and resources, they vow to keep fighting as long as it takes—generations, if necessary—until they are successful.
The 21st century demands global efforts that provide solutions to multiple social and environmental crises that negatively impact economies.
Every year around the 23rd of June, Mixtec people from the municipality of San Juan Mixtepec gather to celebrate their patron saint. The music echoes between their respective gathering places in Oaxaca and Lamont, California.
While governments continue their linguicidal practices, Indigenous communities around the world are taking charge of their linguistic future with projects designed according to their own values and the level of endangerment of their native languages.
The $20 billion Maya Train project in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico has sparked division among locals, who, while eager for the promised economic benefits and increased tourism revenue, are also deeply concerned about the environmental destruction that will come with the railroad’s construction. The four-year megaproject has eschewed Environmental Impact Assessments and ignored scientists who say the railroad and the trainline will have harmful environmental consequences.
Demarcation of ancestral lands is a crucial factor for Indigenous Peoples’ survival worldwide. Indigenous territories offer communal protection of the people living there and are essential to food sovereignty. They are also a protection against cultural extinction, as ancestral land cannot be separated from Indigenous Peoples’ past, present, and future. For the Siekopai Peoples of the western Amazon along the Ecuador-Peru border, the meaning of Pë’këya, their ancestral land, is no different.
Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabeg) says racism is alive in the USA and it fuels hate towards Indigenous Peoples and Mother Earth, making it easy for radical alt-right arguments to enter into politics and take away any idea of environmental protection and put business first. Now, the current U.S. Administration is supporting pipelines for Enbridge but made promises to help Ojibwe Peoples.
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that we are headquartered on Massachusett land, in Cambridge, MA, and we thank the past, current, and future Indigenous stewards of this territory.