Impact of Climate Change Mitigation on Indigenous and Forest Communities

Book Review:

Impact of Climate Change Mitigation on Indigenous and Forest Communities.

How scientists are working to partner with indigenous communities for genomics research: SING

From Illinois Public Media News: Christine Herman, reporting:

How scientists are working to partner with indigenous communities for genomics research

Many scientists are interested in studying the DNA of Indigenous populations in an effort to reveal the "human migration story" and contribute to our understanding about the genetic basis of disease.

But many in the Indigenous community feel these scientific pursuits have a history of being exploitative, achieved without consideration of the needs or interests of the people who have contributed their DNA for science.

The result is a lack of trust between Indigenous people and scientists, said University of Illinois anthropologist Ripan Malhi.

“There's a long history (of) anthropologists and scientists going to Indigenous communities, getting what they need, leaving and never coming back,” Malhi said. “I learned early on that that was the norm in science and anthropology up until recently.”

Summer Internships for Indigenous People in Genomics

Landmark: A world map of Indigenous Lands

From Medium:

This Alternative to Google Maps Aims to Protect Indigenous Land


Even high tech often ignores indigenous lands, but an ambitious mapping project called LandMark is helping communities stake their claims

Japan to recognize Ainu as "an indigenous people" reversing 1899 non-recognition law

Japan prepares law to finally recognize and protect its indigenous Ainu people https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/japan-prepares-law-to-finally-recognize-and-protect-its-indigenous-ainu-people/2019/02/15/2c85a0d8-3113-11e9-ac6c-14eea99d5e24_story.html

Japan finally began to acknowledge the existence of the Ainu as an ethnic group in recent decades, under domestic and international pressure. The 1899 law was repealed in 1997, and funds were provided to promote Ainu culture, helping to revive their language, dance and music.

In 2008, Japan’s two houses of parliament passed a joint resolution recognizing the Ainu for the first time as “an indigenous people with a distinct language, religion and culture.”

The new draft bill aims to give some legal weight to that symbolic gesture.

It recognizes the Ainu as an indigenous people for the first time in legislation and lists its objective as “realizing a society that will respect the pride of the Ainu as an ethnic group.” It sets aside money to promote Ainu culture and makes it easier for Ainu people to log in state-owned forests and catch salmon in rivers, NHK reported.

Ancient nuclear genomes enable repatriation of Indigenous human remains

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/12/eaau5064

Abstract

After European colonization, the ancestral remains of Indigenous people were often collected for scientific research or display in museum collections. For many decades, Indigenous people, including Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians, have fought for their return. However, many of these remains have no recorded provenance, making their repatriation very difficult or impossible. To determine whether DNA-based methods could resolve this important problem, we sequenced 10 nuclear genomes and 27 mitogenomes from ancient pre-European Aboriginal Australians (up to 1540 years before the present) of known provenance and compared them to 100 high-coverage contemporary Aboriginal Australian genomes, also of known provenance.

We report substantial ancient population structure showing strong genetic affinities between ancient and contemporary Aboriginal Australian individuals from the same geographic location. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of successfully identifying the origins of unprovenanced ancestral remains using genomic methods.

Article continues http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/12/eaau5064