Global Indigenous Peoples News Bulletin #8 (September 2025)
This bulletin devoted to Global Indigenous Peoples News, part of the Glocal Exchange project of Weave News, seeks to highlight some of the current issues from Indigenous communities in different parts of the world. The focus of the bulletin is aligned with the overall purpose of the Glocal Exchange project, which examines globalization through its impact from the perspective of local communities. It also supports the Weave News mission to “investigate and report about contemporary issues that are either underreported by establishment and other corporate media or reported in a way that excludes essential context, perspectives, and voices.” These are “issues that have a strong justice component and that reveal connections across communities, borders, struggles, and experiences.”
Indigenous Rights
Officials in Peru recently voted against a proposal to create Yavarí Mirim Indigenous Reserve. The reserve would have protected 1.17 million hectares (2.9 million acres) of Amazon Rainforest in the Loreto region, where the Matsés, Matis, Korubo, Kulina-Pano and Flecheiro Indigenous peoples live and face threats from logging, mining and drug trafficking. The decision will delay efforts to protect them and could lead to their displacement, critics said.
Members of ORPIO meet with the officials from the Ministry of Transport to discuss the proposed reserve. (Image courtesy of ORPIOAidesep via Mongabay)
A recent report to the 51st Session of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) Working Group of the Human Rights Council shows that “Nepal’s Indigenous Communities Face Systemic Rights Violations Amid Development”. Among the issues highlighted in the report are: a lack of political representation, displacement, Indigenous women facing discrimination and marginalization based on both their gender and their Indigenous identity, education policies failing Indigenous children, and Indigenous Persons with Disabilities facing marginalization due to a lack of disaggregated data to guide the policies to address their issues effectively. There are 60 legally recognized Indigenous Peoples, collectively known as Adibasi Janajati, who make up at least 35.08 percent of the total population in Nepal. “The report recommends that Nepal and the international community enforce proportional representation in governance, suspend the projects that don’t fulfill the FPIC, and recognize Indigenous Peoples’ right to land and resources,” writes Dev Kumar Sunuwar for Cultural Survival. “It also calls for disaggregated data collection, safeguards for victims who have been trafficked, and amendments to the Liquor Act to decriminalize traditional practices. It also calls for developing climate policies and strategies that integrate Indigenous knowledge and ensure the inclusion of IPWDs in development programs.”
In Colombia, the Wayuu Indigenous communities of Arroyo Guerrero have formally denounced “a pattern of structural environmental racism and systematic violations of their human and environmental rights.” The groups expressed their opposition to a “mega urban development project” through letters sent to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the Escazú Agreement Mechanism, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
A logging truck in the Mondulkiri Protected Forest, Cambodia (Image: Global Water Forum / Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Dialogue Earth)
Indigenous communities are also raising alarm bells in Cambodia, where the government plans to use wind farms to solve its growing power needs. Dialogue Earth reports that a lack of transparency related to the six new projects planned in Mondulkiri have left the Bunong people concerned for their sacred land. The forest-covered hills of Mondulkiri province have the highest population of Indigenous people in Cambodia and a complex history of land rights. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, Indigenous peoples and advocates have launched the “Defend Mindoro” campaign, which unites Indigenous peoples, youth, and rights advocates against militarization (aerial bombings), red-tagging, and the seizure of ancestral lands by corporations which endanger the country’s ancestral livelihoods.
Also in Dialogue Earth, Temwani Mgunda discusses how Indigenous women in Africa are protecting the environmental rights of their communities even if they are confronted by legal barriers and patriarchal norms. A new report by the International Indigenous Women’s Forum (FIMI) mentions that despite the challenges, from losing ancestral land rights to surviving disasters exacerbated by climate change, Indigenous women play a central role in the management of their territories. Their situations echo those of Indigenous women across many other parts of the world, such as the Aymara and Quechua of Peru and Bolivia, and the Bunong, Stieng, Thmorn and Kroal in Cambodia.
Indigenous Education
Ecuador’s first and only Indigenous university, Amawtay Wasi (which means “House of Knowledge” in Kichwa, Ecuador’s main Indigenous language), is preparing to honor its inaugural cohort of graduates.
Amawtay Wasi students make an offering to Pachmama, or “Mother Earth.” (Image: Michael Fox/The World)
Roughly 1,600 students from around the country are currently studying in courses such as tourism, education, sustainable development, community economy and agro-ecology. The courses are infused with Indigenous knowledge, culture, philosophy and cosmovision. According to an August 20 article in The World, “University directors say it’s a means of training thousands of future leaders with an Indigenous worldview.”
Indigenous Peoples and AI
As the world continues to grapple with the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, the implications for Indigenous communities are urgent and far-reaching. Writing for Grist, Miacel Spotted Elk notes that for the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, the United Nations emphasized that AI represents a new kind of extraction. AI systems are being trained on massive troves of online data, much of it collected without the consent of the communities involved. “For Indigenous peoples, this new form of extraction has raised questions about who controls their histories, languages, and cultural knowledge and whether the technology will erase or distort them entirely,” writes Spotted Elk, an Indigenous Affairs Reporting Fellow. “Taking this into account, tribes and nations have been making efforts to assert ‘data sovereignty’ — the right to control how information is collected and used.”
In Australia, for example, there have been “Calls to protect Indigenous intellectual property from AI 'cultural theft'.” Ngunnawal elder Jude Barlow, quoted in a recent ABC report, said that “AI can never understand all of First Nations culture because so much of it is handed down verbally through stories, giving in effect an incomplete data set and therefore false results. In our fight to do truth telling, that sort of stuff can really interfere with us telling our stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia.” The ABC also notes that “[l]aws to protect Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property are currently being considered by government, but it’s unclear if, or how this legislation would consider AI. But government and the AI industry move at very different speeds, meaning it could be years before regulation is introduced or amended, if it happens at all.”
In a blog post for the London School of Economics (LSE), Uyiosa Omoregie argues that Indigenous knowledge systems, such as Ifá, provide an alternative decolonial lens through which to understand AI computation and its impact on society. “Understanding Ifá as a form of Indigenous algorithmic knowledge opens space for broader, more inclusive definitions of what intelligence and computation can be,” writes Omoregie. “It also invites a conversation about epistemic justice and the recognition of how knowledge systems outside the West have shaped, and continue to shape, digital technology.”
