The first six months of 2026 have delivered real advances for Indigenous rights: Australia’s first Treaty with First Peoples taking effect; new recognition of Aboriginal title in Canada; and renewed demarcation commitments in Brazil. However, as the global rush for transition minerals increasingly encroaches upon Indigenous lands, the institutions designed to safeguard Indigenous rights find themselves facing funding cuts and weakening political will. The coming months will determine to what extent this year’s legal and political gains shape the energy transition – or whether the green economy will simply repeat the dispossessions of the old one.
Australia: Treaty in Victoria, a Reckoning in the Pilbara
Ben Carless
Australia’s first ever Treaty between a government and First Peoples, signed on 13 November 2025 by the State of Victoria and the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, moved from paper to practice in early 2026.
This Treaty transforms the First Peoples’ Assembly into a permanent, legislated body representing First Peoples, with decision-making powers within existing parliamentary and democratic structures. The Assembly forms one part of a new entity called Gellung Warl, meaning “tip of the spear” in Gunaikurnai, alongside an independent accountability body monitoring the government’s progress for First Peoples, and a truth-telling body continuing the work of the Yoorrook Justice Commission. Under the framework, Traditional Owner groups can now negotiate their own treaties with the state, and six have joined the Treaty Authority’s Negotiations Register since February.
Gellung Warl officially began operating on 1 May 2026, following the Assembly’s third election in March, which saw more than 80 candidates contest 22 general seats and four times more Aboriginal Victorians enrolled to vote than in the first election in 2019.
The right-wing Victorian Coalition, however, has pledged to abolish the Assembly and unwind the Treaty if it wins November’s state election, making the second half of 2026 crucial for the Treaty, and for First Peoples’ democratic rights in Australia.
Australia’s courts delivered a landmark ruling of their own in May, when the Federal Court ordered Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue to pay the Yindjibarndi people A$150.1 million for mining iron ore on their land without consent. This marks the largest native title compensation award in Australian history, almost three times the previous record. Since 2013, Fortescue’s Solomon Hub mines have generated tens of billions of dollars from Yindjibarndi Country in the Pilbara, while destroying or fencing off scores of cultural sites, resulting in “deep and visceral” harm to the community’s connection to their land. However, the ruling exposes the gulf between recognition and restitution. The Yindjibarndi had sought A$1.8 billion, equivalent to one per cent of the mines’ production value, and elders described the final figure as “peanuts” in comparison to earnings expected before the mines close in the mid-2040s.
United States: Land Back Amid Federal Retreat
Miro Vrlik
The same pattern of gains under pressure defines the year in the United States, where historic land returns have unfolded against a backdrop of federal withdrawal.
In Maine, the Mi’kmaq Nation more than doubled the land it owns with a 3,400-acre return near Bridgewater in June — the sixth parcel in an eight-year, roughly $50 million effort to restore some 50,000 acres to Maine’s five Wabanaki tribal governments, one of the largest returns of private land in US history. In May, a US federal appeals court ruled that the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska could reclaim the remains of two boys who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School more than 125 years ago, in the first appellate decision confirming that graves-protection law reaches children buried at government boarding schools.
However, these victories have come as the federal government retreats from its obligations. The administration’s 2026 budget proposed cutting $911 million, roughly a quarter, from core tribal programmes, including a 20% reduction in support for tribal law enforcement and a $187 million cut to school construction for a system already in disrepair. Even as Congress clawed back one round of cuts, the broader freeze on federal funding has kept tribal governments in fiscal limbo, while pressure has continued through other channels. Congressional Democrats put the value of frozen or blocked federal funding at more than $400 billion nationwide, including nearly $316 billion for national programmes that serve Indian Country and Native communities, among others. In April, the 2027 budget proposal sought, for the second consecutive year, to slash tribal college funding and eliminate the country’s only federally funded college for contemporary Native American arts. These economic effects have compounded the fiscal ones. Federal contracting through the long-standing 8(a) programme has fallen sharply, weakening one of the main pillars of many tribal economies.
Canada: The Courts as a Battleground
Izzy E, Unsplash
A major legal question is being asked in Canada this year: can Aboriginal title be declared over land that is now privately owned? On 28 May, the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear an appeal from the Wolastoqey Nations in New Brunswick, leaving intact a lower-court ruling that it cannot; although First Nations may still pursue compensation from the Crown for historic grants of their territory.
In British Columbia, a court reached the opposite conclusion in the Cowichan case, finding Aboriginal title to be a senior interest even over fee-simple land. Two Canadian courts have now answered the same question in contradictory ways, and British Columbia’s appeal of the Cowichan decision has become the vehicle likely to force a national resolution, with implications that may reverberate across the common-law world.
In other areas, Canada’s courts and cabinet have pulled in opposite directions. Even as the judiciary expanded Indigenous title, including an April ruling by BC’s Court of Appeal recognising Aboriginal title for the Nuchatlaht Nation over roughly 210km2 of Nootka Island, overturning a lower-court reading of what counts as “sufficient occupation”, the Carney government moved to accelerate resource development over Indigenous objections. In May, Ottawa unveiled proposals to fast-track federal approval of major projects such as pipelines, power lines, and mines this year, building on 2025’s controversial Building Canada Act. The government insisted the timeline would not weaken its duty to consult, but the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs warned that the streamlining “repeats the same colonial patterns First Nations have challenged for generations.” In June, facing a volume of submissions from First Nations and others, the government was forced to extend its consultation window; a small concession within the wider context that Indigenous leaders fear restricts their rights in the name of speed.
Brazil: Demarcation Won, but Land Rights are Under Attack
Building on commitments made at COP30 in Belém, where the Brazilian government announced the demarcation of 10 Indigenous territories and pledged to secure 59 million additional hectares of Indigenous land within five years, Indigenous movements have so far spent 2026 holding Lula to his word.
With an estimated 76 Indigenous Lands ready to be ratified and awaiting President Lula’s signature, in April more than 7,000 people marched through Brasília during the annual Free Land Camp (Acampamento Terra Livre) with the rallying cry: “Demarcate, Lula!”
Earlier in the year, mass mobilisation had delivered a concrete win when the government revoked Decree 12,600, which had placed stretches of three Amazonian rivers — the Tapajós, Madeira and Tocantins — under a national privatisation programme, opening them to dredging to expand the river transport of soy and corn for export markets without consulting the Indigenous communities in their path. The Munduruku and their allies blockaded Cargill’s grain terminal at Santarém for a month, during which time numbers grew from around 50 people to nearly 2,000. They came from four river basins, refused partial offers and held out for full revocation. On 23 February, the government backed down, scrapping the decree and reaffirming its obligation to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) under ILO Convention 169.
In May, the Supreme Court gave fresh momentum to the long-contested Ferrogrão railway by upholding a law that would remove 862 hectares from Jamanxim National Park – just a day after Congress voted to shrink the neighbouring Jamanxim National Forest. The planned 933-kilometre railway was a major point of contention at COP30, where Indigenous groups including the Munduruku protested the project, citing threats to their territories, deforestation, and a lack of prior consultation.
There was more positive news in June, when, following a request from the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), a federal judge ordered Brazil’s land reform agency to act against ranchers who have illegally encroached upon the Cachoeira Seca Indigenous territory in Pará. Last year, an investigation by Human Rights Watch traced links between illegal cattle ranches in the Cachoeira Seca and JBS, the world’s largest meat company.
Whose Green Transition?
If one question has come to define 2026, it is whether the transition away from fossil fuels will dismantle old forms of dispossession, or simply reproduce them with different minerals. An estimated 54% of the world’s energy transition mineral projects extracting copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel and rare earths are located on or near Indigenous Peoples’ lands.
The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre’s 2026 Transition Minerals Tracker recorded 329 allegations of human rights abuse linked to transition-mineral mining in 2025 — a 73% rise on the previous year — including a 50% increase in attacks on defenders. The rush for these materials comes at a time when the safeguards intended to protect Indigenous Peoples and territories face erosion. The newly proposed global mining standard threatens to weaken recognition of the right to free, prior and informed consent. Meanwhile, IWGIA’s Indigenous World 2026 warns that the transition has entered a newly dangerous phase, whereby critical minerals are recast as strategic security assets, with extraction justified in the name of defence supply chains and placed further beyond the reach of scrutiny and consent.
Carla F, Unsplash
Nowhere is the pattern clearer than in South America, and particularly the ‘Lithium Triangle’ of the Andean salt flats of Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, which hold roughly half of the world’s known lithium reserves. Representatives of Aymara, Quechua, and Atacameño communities travelled to the UN Permanent Forum in May to denounce water depletion and ecosystem collapse related to lithium mining in the region, as well as the near-total absence of genuine consent. In Ecuador, the National Assembly passed a law in February stripping out environmental licensing requirements to accelerate investment tied to the country’s IMF programme. In Brazil, APIB has warned that the new National Policy on Critical and Strategic Minerals poses “concrete risks” to Indigenous communities, including “increased pressure on their territories, lack of effective participation in decision-making processes, and weakening of the right to consultation.”
The pattern is not confined to the Global South. Amnesty International documented similar patterns in Nevada, where lithium mining is accelerating without the free, prior and informed consent of affected tribes. In Sápmi, four years after Norway’s Supreme Court found the Fosen wind farms violated Sámi rights, the substitute grazing area offered in settlement has itself become contested, while EU mineral demand drives fresh mining across Sámi lands in Sweden and Finland. These pressures have been compounded by the militarisation of the Arctic, where, as IWGIA reports, security-driven decision-making is squeezing Indigenous participation out of governance structures. In the Philippines, mining companies operate with impunity amid escalating violence against Indigenous peoples: killings, red-tagging and forced displacement are documented year after year. Regardless, communities continue to demand Manila replace the 1995 Mining Act with a rights-based alternative that has languished in Congress. And in West Papua, the Moi and neighbouring peoples face the twin expansion of oil palm and nickel extraction without consent, as Indonesia races to feed the same battery supply chains driving dispossession elsewhere.
Yet 2026 has also seen Indigenous Peoples set the terms of an alternative. In April, the first International Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels convened in Santa Marta, Colombia. Here, Indigenous Peoples, frontline communities, and social movements united to deliver a People’s Declaration calling for an immediate and equitable transition away from fossil fuels, grounded in self‑determination, reparations for harm, and respect for collective rights. As Amazon Watch puts it: “There is no just energy transition built on Indigenous dispossession or ecological sacrifice zones.”
Institutions Under Strain
The pressure on Indigenous rights is not only economic and legislative; the international institutions built to defend those rights are themselves being hollowed out.
As Grist reported, the trust fund that supports the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has collapsed from more than $300,000 in 2021 to under $50,000 this year, with only three member states still contributing. This has resulted in fewer staff, shorter sessions, and less interpretation for delegates who travel across the world to speak at forums. An internal assessment concluded the Forum has struggled to convert more than a thousand recommendations into action, with some fearing that this may be weaponised by those who want the body consolidated or eliminated in the UN’s broader restructuring.
Civil society is pushing in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, more than 100 Indigenous, Afro-descendant and civil-society organisations from over 55 countries used the OECD’s Responsible Business Conduct week in June to demand binding corporate accountability measures such as mandatory due diligence and the right to free, prior and informed consent as a condition of OECD membership.
Evictions Linked to Conservation
Extraction is not the only driver of dispossession. Across Africa, conservation itself continues to be used as grounds for removing Indigenous peoples from their lands.
Sofia Zubiria
In Tanzania, two presidential commissions recommended in March that the eviction of Maasai communities from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) and Lake Natron continue. President Samia Suluhu Hassan has said she will act on the recommendations, with the government signalling its intention to drastically reduce Maasai presence in the NCA and relocate what it calls “non-conservation activities” outside of the area. Critics, including Survival International and the Oakland Institute, argue the relocations are designed to clear the way for expanded tourism, noting the lack of Maasai representatives in decision-making processes, and the fact that the plans directly contravene 1959 legislation enshrining the right of the Maasai to live and graze cattle in the designated conservation area. Within weeks of the recommendations being submitted, park rangers had reportedly begun harassing communities in parts of the conservation area through beatings, arrests and fresh eviction notices.
The pattern extends across the continent. Kenya’s National Commission on Human Rights reported this year that Indigenous communities in resource-rich regions face widespread land dispossession; the African Court’s judgments recognising the Ogiek’s right to their ancestral Mau Forest remain unimplemented years after mass evictions; and the ruling ordering the DRC to restore the Batwa to the Kahuzi-Biega forest, from which they were expelled to create a national park, has yet to be honoured, while violence against Indigenous women escalates in the east of the country.
“Paper Does Not Stop Bullets”
March 2026 marked ten years since the murder of Berta Cáceres, the Lenca leader and Goldman Prize winner killed in her home in Honduras for leading resistance to the Agua Zarca dam. The anniversary brought fresh evidence in the case, with a final report by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), convened under the auspices of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, concluding that her murder was both foreseeable and preventable, and identifying serious omissions in the official investigation that obstruct the pursuit of justice to this day. Ten years on, the gunmen and the dam company’s former manager have been convicted, whilst those who ordered the killing have never been held to account. On this anniversary, Amnesty International condemned this “partial justice” and urged Honduran authorities to pursue the GIEI’s leads and end the decade of impunity for those responsible.
In January, there was a rare moment of judicial reckoning when five men went on trial in the northern Peruvian Amazon over the 2023 killing of Quinto Inuma Alvarado. The Kichwa leader from Santa Rosillo de Yanayacu was shot dead in his boat after years of denouncing illegal logging on his community’s land. Prosecutors have identified both the gunmen and the alleged masterminds, and are seeking Peru’s first life sentences for the murder of an Indigenous defender. The case has raised broader questions about the effectiveness of protection measures for defenders — Inuma was murdered despite being formally under state protection. In the words of Matías Pérez Ojea del Arco, advocacy coordinator for Peru at Forest Peoples Programme: “Paper does not stop bullets.”
At least 35 Indigenous leaders have been murdered in the Peruvian Amazon over the past decade, almost all with impunity. Global Witness documented 146 land and environmental defenders killed or disappeared globally in 2024, roughly a third of whom were Indigenous. Colombia was the deadliest country for the third year running. And where killing has declined, criminalisation has risen in its place, with anti-protest and anti-terror laws, and strategic lawsuits against public participation, now being turned on defenders in the US, UK, Australia and across the EU. The organisation’s next report, covering 2025, is expected in September.
Indigenous Rights, Looking Forward
The second half of 2026 will not resolve these tensions, but several moments may indicate which way the ground is shifting: the verdict in the Quinto Inuma trial; the Cowichan appeal in British Columbia; Victoria’s November election, in which the future of Australia’s first Treaty is at stake; Global Witness’s report on defenders killed in 2025; and the outcome of the UN’s restructuring for the Permanent Forum.
What the first half of the year has made clear is that no single front decides these outcomes. Gains won in courtrooms have been countered by legislatures that fast-track approvals and narrow protections. Commitments made at summits are honoured only when movements force the issue; rights recognised on paper are vulnerable to budgets and economic pressures. Where legal protections do exist, the tragic cases of Quinto Inuma and Berta Cáceres are reminders of what happens when states fail to uphold them.
Pascal Bernardon
Facing this, Indigenous peoples have spent the year holding ground and, on occasions, taking some back. As Aluki Kotierk, chairperson of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, told delegates in May: “There is no health without land.” The coming months will determine to what extent this year’s legal and political gains shape the energy transition — or whether the green economy will simply repeat the dispossessions of the old one.
Activists Without Borders calls for recognition and justice for Indigenous peoples globally in their fight for territorial rights, self-determination, and environmental protection.
