The White Earth Land Recovery Project (WELRP) is a nonprofit, grassroots organization that seeks to recover land for the Anishinaabeg people on the White Earth Indian Reservation in western Minnesota and develop programs to achieve sustainability and environmental preservation. The organization was founded in 1989 by tribal member and former vice presidential candidate Winona LaDuke.
WELRP says that less than 10 percent of the land of the White Earth Indian Reservation is held by the Anishinaabeg. It seeks to regain lands that were taken from the Anishinaabeg people through improper sales, property theft and treaty abrogations in the 19th and 20th centuries. The organization also seeks to prevent the deforestation of the traditional lands of the Anishinaabeg. [1]
According to its website, it seeks to 'build citizen participation involving environmental and cultural justice and preservation work, restoration of sustainable communities, renewable energy, media, and youth and leadership development programs.' It has led several conferences of indigenous communities on these issues, hosted and trained VISTA and other volunteers, developed school programs and curricula, and other initiatives.
Within these goals, WELRP has worked to revive cultivation and harvesting of wild rice, a traditional food of the people. It produces and sells traditional foods through its label, Native Harvest. The label currently offers wild rice, hominy, buffalo sausage, fry bread mix, chokecherry jelly, and raspberry preserves.
The non-profit was recognized by the International Slow Food Congress for its efforts to restore local food systems and preserve wild rice. [2]
The Tohono Oʼodham are a Native American people of the Sonoran Desert, residing primarily in the U.S. state of Arizona and the northern Mexican state of Sonora. The federally recognized tribe is known in the United States as the Tohono Oʼodham Nation.
Winona LaDuke is an American economist, environmentalist, writer and industrial hemp grower, known for her work on tribal land claims and preservation, as well as sustainable development.
Anishinaabe traditional beliefs cover the traditional belief system of the Anishinaabeg peoples, consisting of the Algonquin/Nipissing, Ojibwa/Chippewa/Saulteaux/Mississaugas, Odawa, Potawatomi and Oji-Cree, located primarily in the Great Lakes region of North America.
The Ojibwe, Ojibwa, Chippewa, or Saulteaux are an Anishinaabe people in what is currently southern Canada, the northern Midwestern United States, and Northern Plains. They are Indigenous peoples of the Subarctic and Northeastern Woodlands.
The Red Lake Indian Reservation covers 1,260.3 sq mi in parts of nine counties in northwestern Minnesota, United States.
An Indian reservation is an area of land held and governed by a U.S. federal government-recognized Native American tribal nation, whose government is semi-sovereign, subject to regulations passed by the United States Congress and administered by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, and not to the U.S. state government in which it is located. Some of the country's 574 federally recognized tribes govern more than one of the 326 Indian reservations in the United States, while some share reservations, and others have no reservation at all. Historical piecemeal land allocations under the Dawes Act facilitated sales to non–Native Americans, resulting in some reservations becoming severely fragmented, with pieces of tribal and privately held land being treated as separate enclaves. This jumble of private and public real estate creates significant administrative, political, and legal difficulties.
The Colville Indian Reservation is an Indian reservation in the northwest United States, in north central Washington, inhabited and managed by the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, which is federally recognized.
The Menominee are a federally recognized nation of Native Americans. Their land base is the Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin. Their historic territory originally included an estimated 10 million acres (40,000 km2) in present-day Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The tribe currently has about 8,700 members.
The Bad River LaPointe Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians or Bad River Tribe for short are a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people. The tribe had 6,945 members as of 2010. The Bad River Reservation is located on the south shore of Lake Superior and has a land area of about 193.11 square miles (500.15 km2) in northern Wisconsin, straddling Ashland and Iron counties. Odanah, the administrative and cultural center, is located five miles (8.0 km) east of the town of Ashland on U.S. Highway 2. The reservation population was 1,545 in 2020. Most of the reservation is managed as undeveloped forest and wetland, providing a habitat for wild rice and other natural resources.
The White Earth Indian Reservation is the home to the White Earth Band, located in northwestern Minnesota. It is the largest Indian reservation in the state by land area. The reservation includes all of Mahnomen County, plus parts of Becker and Clearwater counties in the northwest part of the state along the Wild Rice and White Earth rivers. The reservation's land area is 1,093 sq mi (2,831 km²). The population was 9,726 as of the 2020 census, including off-reservation trust land. The White Earth Indian Reservation is one of six bands that make up the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, their governing body for major administrative needs. It is about 225 miles (362 km) from Minneapolis–Saint Paul and roughly 65 miles (105 km) from Fargo–Moorhead.
The White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, also called the White Earth Nation, is a federally recognized Native American band located in northwestern Minnesota. The band's land base is the White Earth Indian Reservation.
The Big Pine Band of Owens Valley Paiute Shoshone Indians of the Big Pine Reservation are a federally recognized tribe of Mono and Timbisha Indians in California.
Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa is a band of Ojibwe Native Americans. The Red Cliff Band is located on the Red Cliff Indian Reservation, on Lake Superior in Bayfield County, Wisconsin. Red Cliff, Wisconsin, is the administrative center. Red Cliff is notable for being the band closest to the spiritual center of the Ojibwe nation, Madeline Island. As of November 2010, there were 5,312 enrolled members, with about half living on the reservation and the rest living in the city of Bayfield or the Belanger Settlement.
Reservations in the United States, known as Indian reservations, are sovereign Native American territories that are managed by a tribal government in cooperation with the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, a branch of the Department of the Interior, located in Washington, DC. There are 334 reservations in the United States today. As of 2008, almost a third of Native Americans in the United States live on reservations, totaling approximately 700,000 individuals. About half of all Native Americans living on reservations are concentrated on the ten largest reservations.
Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) describes indigenous and other traditional knowledge of local resources. As a field of study in Northern American anthropology, TEK refers to "a cumulative body of knowledge, belief, and practice, evolving by accumulation of TEK and handed down through generations through traditional songs, stories and beliefs. It is concerned with the relationship of living beings with their traditional groups and with their environment." Indigenous knowledge is not a universal concept among various societies, but is referred to a system of knowledge traditions or practices that are heavily dependent on "place". Such knowledge is used in natural resource management as a substitute for baseline environmental data in cases where there is little recorded scientific data, or may complement Western scientific methods of ecological management.
The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe is a federally recognized Native American nation in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The tribe is part of the larger Klallam culture, part of the Coast Salish people.
Native American politics remain divided over different issues such as assimilation, education, healthcare, and economic factors that affect reservations. As a multitude of nations living within the United States, the Native American peoples face conflicting opinions within their tribes, essentially those living on federally approved reservations. Interactions with the federal government and the overall American culture surrounding them influence day-to-day tribal life. Native American culture as a whole rests between the divide of the traditionalists and those who wish to trade the old ways for improved conditions.
The Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) is a coalition of indigenous, grassroots environmental justice activists, primarily based in the United States. Group members have represented Native American concerns at international events such as the United Nations Climate Change conferences in Copenhagen (2009) and Paris (2016). IEN organizes an annual conference to discuss proposed goals and projects for the coming year; each year the conference is held in a different indigenous nation. The network emphasizes environmental protection as a form of spiritual activism. IEN received attention in the news as a major organizer of the fight against the Keystone Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
The conservation of bison in North America is an ongoing, diverse effort to bring American bison back from the brink of extinction. Plains bison, a subspecies, are a keystone species in the North American Great Plains. Bison are a species of conservation concern in part because they suffered a severe population bottleneck at the end of the 19th century. The near extinction of the species during the 1800s unraveled fundamental ties between bison, grassland ecosystems, and indigenous peoples’ cultures and livelihoods.# English speakers used the word buffalo for this animal when they arrived. Bison was used as the scientific term to distinguish them from the true buffalo. Buffalo is commonly used as it continues to hold cultural significance, particularly for Indigenous people. Recovery began in the late 1800s with a handful of individuals independently saving the last surviving bison.# Dedicated restoration efforts in the 1900s bolstered bison numbers though they still exist in mostly small and isolated populations. Expansion of the understanding of bison ecology and management is ongoing. The contemporary widespread, collaborative effort includes attention to heritage genetics and minimal cattle introgression.#