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TOPIC: indigenous peoples

LGBTQ Plus

Mayan And Out! Living Proudly As An Indigenous Gay Man

Being gay and indigenous can mean facing double discrimination, including from within the communities they belong to. But LGBTQ+ indigenous people in Guatemala are liberating their sexuality and reclaiming their cultural heritage.

CANTEL — Enrique Salanic and Arcadio Salanic are two K'iché Mayan gay men from this western Guatemalan city

Fire is a powerful symbol for them. Associated with the sons and daughters of Tohil, the god who bestows fire in Mayan culture , it becomes the mirror and the passage that allows them to see and express their sexuality. It is a portal that connects people with their grandmothers and grandfathers, the cosmos and the energies that the earth transmits.

Enrique and Arcadio say that they see in the flame of fire the light that illuminates their way to liberating their sexual orientation.

In the case of Enrique, from the age of 23, he decided to live his human experience from the perspective of Mayan spirituality: "I discovered an important difference. In religion, it is either white or black, but in Mayan spirituality, you live from what your heart and the fire tell you and you make that decision.”

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Russia Cuts Gas To Europe, Myanmar Protests, SpaceX Rival

👋 Yokwe!*

Welcome to Tuesday, where Europe braces for Russia turning off gas, an architect of Northern Ireland peace deal dies and a European rival to SpaceX is taking shape. Meanwhile, we look at what makes the Ukrainian port city of Odessa such a strategic and symbolic target for Vladimir Putin .

[*Marshallese, Marshall Islands]

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Indigenous Tribes Use High-Tech Tools To Unearth Buried Crimes Of The Past

Indigenous groups in the U.S. and Canada are using ground-penetrating radar to look for burial sites at former schools. The technology has the potential to help a reckoning with a dark chapter in the countries' histories.

Over four days last May, members of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc — a First Nations community in the interior of British Columbia — oversaw a site survey of around two acres of land surrounding the province’s former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Using an electromagnetic technology called ground penetrating radar (GPR), an archeology professor charted what appeared to be the grave shafts of 215 children lying below the ground. The technology furthered the long-held suspicion that there were remains of missing children hidden on the land of the school.

Former students at the school recall being woken at night to dig graves, for example, and a child’s rib bone and a juvenile tooth had surfaced in the area. Kamloops was the largest of the 139 government-sanctioned residential schools in the country that operated between the 1880s and 1990s. The facilities separated 150,000 Indigenous children from their families and educated them in English or French while banning native languages and indoctrinating them into Christianity.

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The Power Of A Child's Imagination To Bring The Amazon Back To Life

Illegal mining and deforestation are destroying parts of the Amazon and devastating indigenous people's lives. As laws and governments fail to protect the environment and vulnerable communities, locals have turned to the imagination of the future generation.

What do the children of the Amazon dream of? How do they observe the destruction of the forests around them? How do they imagine those areas if the situation were different? Ojo Público supported a local effort that brought together a group of children from the Awajún indigenous community in northern Peru to draw on photographs of devastated forests the elements that they imagined should be there.

Illegal activities are destroying the forests of the Amazon and polluting its rivers. On the landscapes destroyed by illegal mining and deforestation, they painted huge trees, plants, animals in the forest and fish in pristine rivers.

"The trees suffer," says Suely Apika, a 12-year-old Awajún girl, while she draws a hunting scene in the forest on top of a photograph of an empty terrain. Where there were once trees, now only a yellowish mud remains.

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Geopolitics
Pedro Stropasolas

The Kuikuro Beat COVID-19: Amazon's Indigenous Exception

An indigenous tribe in Brazil's Amazon region has seen plenty of coronavirus cases, but zero deaths.

The Kuikuro tribe lives in the southern Amazon region, near the headwaters of the river Xingu, an area where the tropical forest spreads across centuries of pre-Colombian civilizations. These villages were once completely shut off from the rest of the world, made impenetrable by the dense vegetation surrounding them. But here too, like in the rest of the Amazon, the coronavirus arrived .

Some 30,000 indigenous people of 156 different tribes have become infected with the coronavirus in Brazil in the last few months, according to the Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil (APIB). Across the Amazon, an estimated 800 indigenous people have died of COVID-19 .

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