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    Ancient Maya Genomes Sequenced for First Time

    Thousand-year-old DNA from Chichén Itzá offers eye-opening details of the religious rituals of ancient Maya.In the spring of 1967, workers building a small airport behind Chichén Itzá, the ancient Maya city in Mexico, ran into a problem: Their excavations had uncovered human remains in the pathway of the proposed runway. The airport was set to serve V.I.P.s who wanted to visit Chichén Itzá. But with the remains so close to a major archaeological site, the work had to be halted until the bones could be examined.Any hope for a quick resolution dissolved when archaeologists who were called to the scene uncovered a chultún — an underground rainwater-storage container that, in Maya mythology, was viewed as an entrance to the subterranean land of the dead. Connected to the cistern was a cave containing more than 100 sets of human remains, almost all belonging to children. In a push to finish the airport, researchers were given just two months to excavate and exhume the cache of bones.Nearly 60 years later, ancient DNA extracted from 64 of the children is offering new insights into the religious rituals of the ancient Maya and their ties to modern descendants. In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, an international cohort of researchers revealed that the children — sacrificial victims killed between 500 and 900 A.D. — were all local Maya boys that may have been specifically selected to be killed in sibling pairs.“These are the first ancient Maya genomes to be published,” said Johannes Krause, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The DNA work provided a previously unseen glimpse into the identities of the sacrificed children. “One feels quite moved by such a finding,” Dr. Krause said, noting that he himself has a young son.The search into the genome of the Maya boys did not start as an exercise in ancient Maya rituals. In the mid-2000s, Rodrigo Barquera — now an immunogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute — was hoping to discover the genetic legacy of Mesoamerica’s deadliest pandemic.In 1545, an outbreak of Salmonella enterica spread like wildfire across what is now Mexico. Over the next century, the disease killed up to 90 percent of the Indigenous population. Pandemics like these often leave their mark on the immune genes of survivors. To uncover this genetic legacy, Dr. Barquera and his colleagues needed to compare the DNA from the precolonial remains with that of people who were born after the calamity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Robert Pickton, Notorious Canadian Serial Killer, Dies at 74

    Convicted in the murder of six women (though he boasted of killing many more), he died of unspecified injuries after being assaulted in prison.Robert Pickton, one of Canada’s most notorious serial killers, whose crimes called attention to police and societal disregard for the violent deaths of Indigenous women, died on Friday after a fellow inmate attacked him in prison in Quebec, where he was serving a life sentence. He was 74.His death, in a hospital, was announced by Correctional Service Canada, which said he had been assaulted on May 19 at Port-Cartier Institution and had died of unspecified injuries. The announcement did not give a motive for the attack.In 2007, Mr. Pickton was convicted in the murders of six women, though he boasted to an undercover police officer that he had killed 49 in all.The remains of his victims were found at a ramshackle pig farm he owned outside Vancouver, where authorities conducted what at the time was the largest crime-scene investigation in Canadian history. After 18 months, they found the remains of 33 women.The victims were mainly members of Indigenous groups, and most were sex workers and drug addicts whom Mr. Pickton encountered in the Downtown Eastside, an underbelly of the scenic, affluent Vancouver.Mr. Pickton was able to continue killing for so long, according to an investigation by the provincial government of British Columbia, because of police bias toward the race and marginalized status of his victims.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Indigenous Artists Are the Heart of the Venice Biennale

    Here are highlights of the range of work produced by Native artists in the pavilions and a central exhibition that proudly calls itself “Foreigners Everywhere.”Before visitors step into any gallery at the 2024 Venice Biennale, which opens April 20, Indigenous artists will have made their presence known.A collective of painters from the Brazilian Amazon, MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin), will cover the facade of the central exhibition hall with an intricate mural. Inuuteq Storch, the first Greenlandic and Inuk artist to represent Denmark at the international art festival, will erect a sign reading “Kalaallit Nunaat,” or “Greenland” above the pavilion’s entrance. (Greenland has been a self-governing country within the Danish Realm since 1979. )The Brazil Pavilion nearby has been renamed the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion — one of many terms that Indigenous people use to describe the territory that, after colonization, became Brazil. “There is a very political aspect to the Indigenous presence in an artistic space like the Venice Biennale,” said Denilson Baniwa, the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion’s co-curator. “Our aim is to rewrite history and add a new chapter to art history.”Beyond the United States Pavilion, which features the art of Jeffrey Gibson, the Venice Biennale offers a taste of the wide range of work produced by Indigenous, First Nations and Native artists around the globe. Here are some highlights.The Central ExhibitionMataaho Collective’s “Takapau” (2022), made of polyester tie-downs and stainless steel buckles. The first gallery at the Arsenale will host the monumental installation by a group of four Maori women known for making large fiber sculptures. Maarten Holl, via Te PapaIndigenous artists are at the heart of “Foreigners Everywhere,” the Venice Biennale’s central exhibition. As the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of this year’s Biennale, sees it, the Indigenous artist is “frequently treated as a foreigner in his or her own land.” The first gallery at the Arsenale, Venice’s former shipyard complex, will host a monumental installation by the Mataaho Collective, a group of four Maori women known for making large-scale fiber sculptures. The 331-artist lineup also includes the Native American artists Kay WalkingStick and Emmi Whitehorse; the Brazilian Yanomani artists Joseca Mokahesi and André Taniki; Indigenous Australian artists Marlene Gilson and Naminapu Maymuru-White; and Maori artists Sandy Adsett and Selwyn Wilson, considered one of the founders of Maori Modernism, who died in 2002.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Lawmaker Presses Loro Piana on Reports of Exploiting Indigenous Workers in Peru

    A freshman congressman is demanding answers from the fashion house Loro Piana, which sources wool from his native Peru and faces accusations of exploiting workers there. A $9,000 designer sweater made out of the ultrarare fur of a South American animal called a vicuña is not exactly a typical area of focus for a member of the U.S. Congress.But when Representative Robert Garcia, a first-term California Democrat and the first Peruvian-born person to serve in the House, saw reports that the luxury design house Loro Piana was not fairly compensating Indigenous workers in Peru who source the rare wool in some of its priciest knit clothing, he decided to use his position to make some noise.“As the first Peruvian American member of Congress and co-chair of the Congressional Peru Caucus, I write regarding concerning reports about the sourcing of vicuña wool by Loro Piana, a subsidiary of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton,” he wrote to company executives last month.He demanded that the fashion house — whose products including shirts, scarves and coats can cost anywhere from $500 to $30,000 — explain how it could raise its prices so steeply while steadily reducing the amount it was paying the people who harvest the raw materials for it.“While Loro Piana’s prices have increased, the price per kilo for fibers paid to the Lucanas community has fallen by one-third in just over a decade; and the villages’ revenue from the vicuña has fallen 80 percent,” Mr. Garcia wrote.A member of the Totoroma community in Puno, Peru, during a vicuña roundup and shearing in 2021.Carlos Mamani/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    In Move to Protect Whales, Polynesian Indigenous Groups Give Them ‘Personhood’

    Indigenous leaders of New Zealand, Tahiti and the Cook Islands signed a treaty that recognizes whales as legal persons. Conservationists hope it will lead to legal protections.For many Indigenous groups across Polynesia, whales hold an ancient sacredness and spirit that connects all life. Whales — or tohorā, as Māori call them — guided their ancestors across the Pacific Ocean. Today, those groups consider themselves to be guardians for the largest animals under the sea.But as of Wednesday, whales are not simply animals in this region.Indigenous leaders of New Zealand, Tahiti and the Cook Islands signed a historic treaty that recognizes whales as legal persons in a move conservationists believe will apply pressure to national governments to offer greater protections for the large mammals.“It’s fitting that the traditional guardians are initiating this,” said Mere Takoko, a Māori conservationist who leads Hinemoana Halo Ocean Initiative, the group that spearheaded the treaty. “For us, by restoring those world populations we also restore our communities.”Conservationists have good reason to believe they will succeed: In 2017, New Zealand passed a groundbreaking law that granted personhood status to the Whanganui River because of its importance to Māori, New Zealand’s Indigenous people.The treaty, or He Whakaputanga Moana, which translates to “declaration for the ocean,” was signed on Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands, in a ceremony attended by Tūheitia Potatau te Wherowhero VII, the Māori king, and 15 paramount chiefs of Tahiti and the Cook Islands.Tūheitia Potatau te Wherowhero VII, the Māori king, was among the Indigenous leaders who signed the treaty recognizing whales as legal persons. The ceremony took place on Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands.Josh Baker Films, via Conservation InternationalWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Restoring the Past Won’t Liberate Palestine

    Amid the graphic images, fierce polemics and endless media criticism that have dominated my social media feeds since the war in Gaza began late last year, I noticed a seemingly bizarre subplot emerge: skin cancer in Israel.“You are not Indigenous if your body cannot tolerate the area’s climate,” one such post read, highlighting outdated news coverage claiming that Israelis had unusually high rates of skin cancer. (They do not.) Skin cancer, these posts claimed, was proof that Israeli Jews were not native to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea but are in fact white Europeans with no ancestral connection to the region, enactors of one of the worst crimes of the modern age: settler colonialism.On one level, the claims about skin cancer — like similar ones about Israeli cuisine and surnames — are silly social media talking points from keyboard warriors slinging hashtags, hyped up on theories of liberation based on memes of Frantz Fanon quotes taken out of context. In the context of the ongoing slaughter in Gaza — more than 28,000 people dead, mostly women and children — such posturing may seem trivial. But even, or maybe especially, at this moment, when things are so grim, the way we talk about liberation matters. And I find this kind of talk revealing of a larger trend on the left these days, emanating from important and complex theories in the academy but reflected in crude and reductive forms in the memes and slogans at pro-Palestine protests — an increasingly rigid set of ideas about the interloping colonizer and the Indigenous colonized. In this analysis, there are two kinds of people: those who are native to a land and those who settle it, displacing the original inhabitants. Those identities are fixed, essential, eternal.I have spent much of my life and career living and working among formerly colonized peoples attempting to forge a path for themselves in the aftermath of empire. The rapacious carving up of much of the globe and the genocide and enslavement of millions of people by a handful of European powers for their own enrichment was the great crime of early modernity. The icons who threw off the yoke of colonial oppression — including Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Fanon — were my childhood heroes, and they remain my intellectual lodestars. But I sometimes struggle to recognize their spirit and ideas in the way we talk about decolonization today, with its emphasis on determining who is and who is not an Indigenous inhabitant of the lands known as Israel and Palestine.A good deal of the antipathy toward Israeli Jews today is undergirded and enabled, I believe, by something that to some ears sounds progressive: the idea that people and lands that have been colonized must be returned to their indigenous peoples and original state. But that belief, when taken literally, is at best a kind of left-wing originalism, a utopian politics that believes the past answers all the questions of the present. At worst it is a left-wing echo to the ancestral fantasies of the far right, in which who is allowed to live in which places is a question of the connection of one’s blood to a particular patch of soil.Implicit in the emphasis on indigeneity is a promised restoration, albeit one of a very different sort from the imperial fantasies of Vladimir Putin or the gender obsessions of Ron DeSantis. Decolonization “is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes,” as the scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write in an influential academic paper published in 2012, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” More

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    Indigenous Australians Say ‘Reconciliation Is Dead’ After ‘Voice’

    The rejection of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament is likely to lead to an irreversible shift in the nation’s relationship with its first peoples.The result of the referendum was decisive, and at the same time, divisive. It bruised Indigenous Australians who for decades had hoped that a conciliatory approach would help right the wrongs of the country’s colonial history. So, the nation’s leader made a plea.“This moment of disagreement does not define us. And it will not divide us,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, visibly emotional, said this month, after voters in every state and territory except one rejected the constitutional referendum. “This is not the end for reconciliation.”But that was a difficult proposition to accept for Indigenous leaders who saw the result as a vote for a tortured status quo in a country that is already far behind other colonized nations in reconciling with its first inhabitants.The rejection of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament — a proposed advisory body — was widely anticipated. Nonetheless, it was a severe blow for Indigenous people, who largely voted for it. With many perceiving it as the denial of their past and their place in the nation, the defeat of the Voice not only threatens to derail any further reconciliation but could also unleash a much more confrontational approach to Indigenous rights and race relations in Australia.Supporters of the “Yes” campaign in Sydney this month.Jenny Evans/Getty Images“Reconciliation only works if you have two parties who are willing to make up after a fight and move on,” said Larissa Baldwin Roberts, an Aboriginal woman and the chief executive of GetUp, a progressive activist group that campaigned for the Voice. “But if one party doesn’t acknowledge that there is even a fight here that’s happened, how can you reconcile?”She added, “We need to move into a space that is maybe not as polite, maybe not as conciliatory and be unafraid to tell people the warts-and-all story around how dispossession and colonization continues in this country.”For Marcia Langton, one of the country’s most prominent Aboriginal leaders, the consequences were obvious. “It’s very clear that reconciliation is dead,” she said.For decades, Ms. Langton and others championed a moderate approach to Indigenous rights. They worked within Australia’s reconciliation movement, a broadly bipartisan government approach aimed at healing and strengthening the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.One visible sign of this effort is the flying of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags next to the Australian flag in most official settings. Many public events start with an acknowledgment of the traditional owners of the land the event is held on.But activists have long said that these displays can be tokenistic, and the focus on unity can come at the expense of agitating for Indigenous rights. And the referendum has shown that wide schisms still persist in how Australia views its colonial past — as benign or harmful — and over whether the entrenched disadvantages of Indigenous communities result from colonization or people’s own actions, culture and ways of life.“We are very much behind other countries in their relationships with Indigenous people,” said Hannah McGlade, a member of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, who is an Aboriginal woman and a supporter of the Voice.A rally against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament in Melbourne last month.James Ross/Australian Associated Press, via ReutersIn countries like Finland, Sweden and Norway, the Sami people have a legal right to be consulted on issues affecting their communities. Canada has recognized First Nations treaty rights in its Constitution, and New Zealand signed a treaty with the Maori in the late 1800s.British colonialists considered Australia uninhabited, and the country has never signed a treaty with its Indigenous people, who are not mentioned in its Constitution, which was produced more than a century after Captain Cook first reached the continent.To rectify this, more than 250 Indigenous leaders came together in 2017 and devised a three-step plan for forgiveness and healing. The first was a Voice, enshrined in the Constitution. A treaty with the government would follow, and finally, a process of “truth-telling” to uncover Australia’s colonial history.But some Indigenous activists argued that forgiveness shouldn’t be on offer. And other Australians were rankled by the suggestion that there was something to forgive.“The English did nothing wrong. Neither did any of you,” one author wrote for a national newspaper earlier this year. Another columnist argued that any compensation paid to Aboriginal people now would be “by people today who didn’t do the harm, to people today who didn’t suffer it.”Some Aboriginal leaders opposed the Voice but by and large, polls showed, the Indigenous community was in favor of it.Aboriginal residents in Jimbalakudunj in a remote part of Western Australia.Tamati Smith for The New York TimesBut for many opponents, “this was cast as a referendum about race, division and racial privileges, special privileges — it really failed to grasp or respect Indigenous people’s rights and the shocking history of colonization, which has devastating impacts to this day,” Ms. McGlade said.For decades, the country has gone back and forth on how improve Indigenous outcomes. The community has a life expectancy that is eight years shorter than the national average, and suffers rates of suicide and incarceration many times higher than the general population.Although many Indigenous leaders and experts have said the repercussions of and trauma from colonization are the root cause of this disadvantage, governments — particularly conservative ones — have been resistant to this idea. The remedy, some former prime ministers have said, is to integrate remote Indigenous communities with mainstream society.During the debate about the Voice, this view was echoed by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, an Aboriginal senator who became a prominent opponent of the Voice, and who said that Indigenous people faced “no ongoing negative impacts of colonization.” Aboriginal communities experienced violence “not because of the effects of colonization, but because it’s expected that young girls are married off to older husbands in arranged marriages,” she added.Such arguments helped galvanize opposition to the Voice.“A significant chunk of the Australian public has been able to find legitimacy in that opposition to not to come to terms with that past,” said Paul Strangio, a professor of politics at Monash University.Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia and the minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney, delivering statements on the referendum results in Canberra this month.Lukas Coch/EPA, via ShutterstockIn April, the main opposition party, the conservative Liberal Party, said it would vote against the Voice, all but sealing its fate — constitutional change has never succeeded in Australia without bipartisan support. Its leaders argued that proposal was divisive, lacked detail, could give advice on everything from taxes to defense policy, and was a politically correct vanity project from Mr. Albanese, the prime minister, that distracted people from issues like the high cost of living.This stance, Mr. Strangio said, appealed to a sense of “economic and cultural insecurity” among many voters, particularly those outside big cities.The particulars of the Voice, Mr. Albanese and other supporters said, would have been hashed out by Parliament if it succeeded. But the lack of concrete details gave rise to misinformation and disinformation, the sheer volume of which shocked experts. In such a climate, any pursuit of more forceful politics by Indigenous activists may bring a more combative response. On Friday, Tony Abbott, a former conservative prime minister, said Australia should stop flying the Aboriginal flag next to the national flag, and acknowledging traditional place names.The defeat of the Voice, Mr. Strangio said, is likely to emboldened the conservative opposition to continue with “the politics of disenchantment, of cultural and economic insecurity, that taps into that grievance politics.”He added, “We are in for a polarized, divisive debate.” More