On May 28, 2023, the body of Martín Morales Martínez was found floating in the Gama River in Triunfo de la Cruz, Honduras. Morales Martínez was Garifuna—a people descended from enslaved Africans, Arawak, and Carib Indians. He was also a respected land rights activist who devoted his life to fighting the theft of Garifuna coastal lands by corporations, investors, and state authorities. His was the most recent in a series of murders of Black and Indigenous land defenders in the country that show how violence, economic development, and race are colliding there—and how little progress international efforts are making in building a more secure, equitable Latin America.

The Garifuna have a long history of insecurity and displacement in Honduras. Since the arrival of U.S.-owned fruit corporations in the 19th century, their communities have endured successive waves of resource extraction—from bananas to sumptuous beachside resorts—and have seen their rights, including collective property rights, increasingly eroded. In recent years, with the support of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), the Garifuna have turned to international courts to hold the country accountable. But despite significant judicial and electoral victories at a moment when the country’s human rights record should be improving, the violence against them has only worsened.

Murders of Black and Indigenous land defenders in Honduras started during the 1990s, after the country adopted economic policies designed to fuel development in tourism, industrial agriculture, and mining. The lush, water- and mineral-rich Caribbean coastline, which is home to 46 Garifuna communities, garnered the attention of investors in beach resorts and African palm plantations, including some of Honduras’s most prominent families. Land defenders fought back by retaking stolen lands and advocating, with surprising efficacy, for the legal recognition of their rights to the territory they have historically occupied. They achieved many successes, but even gaining title to their lands did not ensure they held them securely.

Tensions inflamed dramatically after the June 2009 coup d’état against President Manuel Zelaya, which thrust Honduras into a period of intensive, state-sanctioned resource plunder. Following his ouster, the government acted swiftly to overturn a moratorium on mining, passed legislation to hasten hydropower development, and in 2013 pushed through a law to incentivize foreign investment in the creation of semi-sovereign “start-up” cities in purportedly unpopulated areas of the country. Over the next decade, Honduras experienced widespread corruption at the highest levels of government and a rapid deterioration of human rights.

Amidst this political upheaval, two cases pertaining to Garifuna land rights disputes—one in Triunfo de la Cruz and the other in Punta Piedra—went to trial at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In both cases, Garifuna accused the government of violating property titles, failing to investigate and prosecute the political persecution of land defenders, and noncompliance with judicial decisions that established the communities’ prior claims over disputed lands.

In 2015, the court ruled in favor of the communities, affirming that the state had failed to protect Garifuna collective property rights. It called for several significant reparations, including returning illegally privatized land to the community and compensation for past harms. The communities were optimistic that justice would be served.

Yet the state has failed to comply with the court’s recommendations. Instead, the policies designed to foment investment and development remain largely intact. Violent attacks against land defenders have multiplied as well.

In 2019, at least 16 Garifuna people were murdered. In 2020, four community leaders from Triunfo de la Cruz were brutally abducted by men dressed in police uniform, leading many in the community to suspect direct state involvement. One of the disappeared men, Snider Centeno, was a member of OFRANEH and the acting president of the communal governing council. Meanwhile, the swelling violence and increasing death threats against activists further weakened the confidence of Garifuna in state institutions. Last year, two more land rights activists were killed in Triunfo de la Cruz—Morales Martínez and Ricardo Arnaúl Montero.

The election of left-wing president Xiomara Castro in 2021 was supposed to bring change. She ran on an anti-corruption and pro-democracy agenda that resonated among a large segment of the population—including many Black and Indigenous voters. But little has changed, underscoring the entrenched corruption within state institutions and the political and economic power of a handful of oligarchic families.

On August 29, 2023, the Inter-American Court again found Honduras responsible for the violation of Garifuna territorial rights in another significant victory. But like previous judgments, the court’s decision lacks an enforcement mechanism. Its implementation requires political will on the part of the Honduran government. That means it has not produced greater protections for Black and Indigenous Hondurans’ rights.

Due to their visible Blackness, the Garifuna people continue to be treated as non-native inhabitants without rightful claim to the lands they have resided on for hundreds of years. Change will not happen in Honduras until the state complies with the court rulings—and until the murders of Martín Morales Martínez and other Garifuna leaders are investigated and prosecuted.

The stakes are high, and global: Many Garifuna have fled to the U.S. searching for a stable future that is increasingly hard to imagine back home. Our thirst for infinite economic growth is not only fueling our climate and biodiversity crisis, but also the displacement of and violence against environmental defenders in Honduras, Latin America, and around the world. From Standing Rock to Triunfo de la Cruz, Black and Indigenous activists are often on the front lines of fights against the expansion of extractive industries and the destruction of ecosystems. The Garifuna peoples’ struggle to defend their territories is just one theater in a shared global struggle over the future of the planet and who gets to share in it.

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I started working in repatriation efforts before I even knew what the term meant.

But repatriation—bringing our ancestors home—is in my blood. I grew up in a Cherokee community in Chewey, Oklahoma, in the foothills of the Ozarks. Sometimes I’ve wondered how my extended family could be as fortunate as we were, remaining isolated from the nearby towns, with a river running in front of us and a small creek behind. My relatives would tell me how much it was like our ancestors’ original home in the East, with mountainous terrain, ample water, and lush vegetation.

Over a century, my relatives fought for this Oklahoma home, traveling thousands of miles to push back against U.S. government overreach. Today, I continue the tradition by teaching a new generation of tribal officials how to work with the federal government to preserve what is ours. As a former “tribal historic preservation officer,” or a THPO, who reviews federal undertakings, it has been my job to step in when such projects threaten our sacred sites or our tribal interests.

My family’s land—where my grandmothers raised us—was a parcel that the U.S. government designated for individual Cherokees through the allotment process created by the Dawes Act of 1887. In the 19th century, allotment was presented as a way to “domesticate” us. I believe the real idea was to divide up families and scatter us about.

My great-grandfather, Osie Hogshooter, understood this. He had a significant role in an uprising against the allotment system, joining forces with Chief Redbird Smith, leader of the Keetoowah (Gi-du-wa) Nighthawks. The Nighthawks were traditionalists, full-blooded Cherokees who had made their way to Arkansas after ceding southeastern territory to the U.S. government in the late 1700s. They were distinct from the emigrant Cherokees who came to Indian Territory later, by way of the Trail of Tears, though both groups experienced forced displacement.

The Keetoowah Nighthawks knew that dividing our community would weaken our families, and the communal way of life that had sustained us through traumatic removals in the past. So a group of leaders, including my great-grandfather, who served as secretary, accompanied Chief Redbird Smith on a widely publicized journey to Washington, D.C., where they met with President Taft.

Unfortunately, the Nighthawks were not able to stop this moving freight train.

I learned about Osie’s participation in the Nighthawk campaign from my mother, Marie Bird, the only living person in our family who remembers him today, if vaguely, from when she was a little girl. She often spoke to me of the Nighthawks and all that they stood for. Osie refused his allotment, she told us, never living on it. When people filed to claim the land through squatters’ rights, we asked her, what do we do? She said, we do nothing—we stay away, just as Osie had. She always told me to stand up, and not to be afraid to speak my voice.

It wasn’t a stretch for me to get involved in a movement of my own, but I didn’t know what sort of movement it would be. I attended and graduated from an Indian boarding school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma; married, had three kids, worked taking care of my family.

As a young adult, I looked around our tribal communities and saw how divided we had become. Not just from family but from municipality. We didn’t have libraries. We didn’t have internet access. The rivers and creeks can only do so much for you, and we had to work for wages, but our job options were limited—chicken farms, manufacturing, any place within 30 miles each way. We shared rides, so you went to work where your neighbor did.

Stories about the Nighthawks lay dormant in my mind as I went through life’s struggles. If Osie, whose genes I shared, could educate himself about government and become a part of a movement to protect what is sacred to us, I could do the same.

Once my youngest child was a high school senior, I quit my job to enroll in the native studies program at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, something I had wanted to do since I was 18. I wanted to understand how the American government took over Cherokee lives and lands. I wanted to be able to explain why we were where we are, and how we got here, to my people back home. I wanted to continue the resistance.

A portrait of Osie Hogshooter, probably taken during his Washington, D.C. visit with the Keetoowah Nighthawk delegation. From The History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folk Lore by Emmet Starr (1921) / Author collection.

In college, I learned about sovereignty, and about federal Indian law. In 1966, Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act, a law designed to protect “our cultural footprint” during construction. But the Act excluded the tribes. Which was one of the reasons why, in the name of progress, the federal government routinely flooded valleys where our people had lived since time immemorial in order to build dams. Our bones have interstates on top of them now. Anything found during construction got whisked away and placed on museum shelves. Institutions held our ancestors in collections, against their will. Who would choose to be in a box, far from your homeland?

I graduated from college in 2012, and then began to work within and sometimes against the complicated system that was emerging to bring our culture and people back home. Things had begun to change—slowly. In the early ’90s, Congress amended the National Historic Preservation Act to include consulting tribes. It also passed the Native American Graves Protections and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which allowed us to recover our ancestors’ remains from faraway institutions.

I found my movement, and made this struggle my cause.

In 2015, I became the first-ever tribal historic preservation officer, or THPO, for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. I created a process to give us a voice on the 300 projects the federal government proposed every month that posed a threat to our cultural footprint. When the federal government proposed selling leases to build a transmission line through Cherokee and other tribal lands, for instance, we figured out a path through the regulatory thicket to prevent the project. It never got built.

Across the U.S., THPOs have figured out ways to save our cultural heritage. Working with other tribes, for instance, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma developed a tribal monitoring policy for construction projects. Now, on certain projects, we accompany archaeologists working in historic preservation when they come in to determine what to save before a project. Things that signify a burial site for us might not be obvious to them. You take notes on what you see, we tell them, and we’ll take notes on what we see, and together we’ll come up with an agreement on how we’ll proceed with the project.

After two years, I left the Cherokee Nation to become a consultant to other tribes, to help them do this work. THPOs come from a wide range of backgrounds—we found our way here through different journeys, stumbling upon a job that we hadn’t even known was available. We are often overwhelmed by our workloads, by an alphabet soup of technical and legal acronyms we have to digest, by blanket U.S. government policies, and by the sheer number of projects that threaten to deplete our tribes’ cultural footprints.

Social media has lent a hand, creating a way for us to pool our experiences, but we have trouble communicating and educating on a broader scale. I searched high and low for a better way, and finally settled on a podcast to bring our tribal interests and landscapes together. “THPO Talk,” which I launched in the spring of 2022, connects preservation officers’ voices. We talk with federal partners, or any interested party who wants to understand our goals. Repatriation, international repatriation, historic preservation—we touch on it all. We support one another, and hope that in doing so, we will honor our ancestors, and assure our survival.

Our ancestors paid the ultimate cost, and paved the way for us to be resilient in this work. We’re telling our stories. We’re telling our grandchildren about the past and also about how to protect our future.

It wasn’t until I became a THPO that I went to Washington myself, to testify before a commission. While I was there, I found a Washington Post article that described my great-grandfather’s journey with the Nighthawks, more than a century earlier.

I wore moccasins that I had made myself. I looked down at my feet and I thought, I could be walking the same path Osie did.

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The story seems impossible to believe: A low-budget traveling slideshow kept oil drills out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But Indigenous leaders from the Arctic, environmental advocates on Capitol Hill, and grassroots activists across the United States all insist it’s true.

If you haven’t heard of The Last Great Wilderness, you’re not alone. During its many years on the road, the multimedia slideshow was not covered by the national media. Its photographs never became iconic. The people behind it remain unsung. And yet this humble work of activism, shared in such unassuming venues as college lecture halls, public libraries, and church basements, exerted an enormous impact on one of the biggest environmental fights in North American history. Its surprising success reminds us of the power of grassroots action to enact real change.

The Last Great Wilderness was born in response to the Ronald Reagan administration’s scheme to drill in the Arctic Refuge. Tucked away in the northeastern corner of Alaska, much of the refuge was protected as permanent wilderness in 1980, but its coastal plain was left in legislative limbo. Considered sacred by the Gwich’in Nation and called the “biological heart” of the refuge by scientists, the coastal plain provided critical, life-sustaining habitat for caribou, polar bears, and a stunning array of migratory birds. The oil industry, the state of Alaska, and powerful politicians, however, argued that the land should instead be slated for fossil fuel extraction. Congress was left to decide its fate: grant the coastal plain wilderness status or allow oil development there.

Caribou Migration I, Coleen River valley, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska, 2002. Photograph by Subhankar Banerjee

As the debate raged, an aspiring photographer and former jazz drummer by the name of Lenny Kohm traveled in 1987 from California to Alaska, hoping to document the controversy for Audubon magazine. When Kohm arrived in the Arctic, he found himself awestruck by the spectacular wildlife he saw in the refuge and angered by the environmental devastation he witnessed in the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay. But it was the time he spent in two Gwich’in communities—Arctic Village, Alaska, and across the border, in Old Crow, Yukon—that completely changed his life. From the Gwich’in, Kohm learned that the media coverage of the refuge debate had left out a crucial part of the story. The framing was always a question of wilderness versus oil: Should the refuge’s vast coastal plain be protected as wild nature or handed over to the fossil fuel industry? This ignored what was at stake for the Gwich’in—their food security and cultural survival.

Since time immemorial, the Gwich’in people have stewarded Arctic lands and formed relations of responsibility with the caribou. Their stories, their spirituality, and their way of being in the world had always been tied to the Porcupine caribou herd. This herd, which currently numbers over 200,000 animals, journeys every year from its wintering grounds in northwestern Canada and northeastern Alaska, crossing steep mountains and icy rivers until the caribou reach the Arctic coastal plain, where they have their young. But the place where the caribou go to replenish their population was the exact place that the Reagan administration sought to turn into an oil field. This act, the Gwich’in explained to Kohm, would devastate the herd and lead to cultural genocide.

Kohm, who had never been involved in political organizing before, returned home to California and threw himself into activism, forming a small grassroots group called the Sonoma Coalition for the Arctic Refuge. The following year, he returned to Alaska. He did not come as a salvage ethnographer, seeking to create a visual record of a culture he believed was doomed to extinction. Instead, he sought to work with Gwich’in communities dotted across Alaska, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories to bring their voices to the forefront of the refuge struggle.

The Last Great Wilderness paired almost 250 slides taken by Kohm and 15 other photographers with a soundtrack and narration, and employed what was then considered cutting-edge technology—a fade-dissolve unit—so that the slide from one projector would fade out as the slide from the next projector would fade in. For the next two decades, from 1988 to 2008, Kohm and Gwich’in representatives took their show on tour, giving as many as 200 presentations a year. Their aim was not only to educate but also to empower—to turn spectators into activists.

Every event began the same way: Kohm would turn out the lights, and as the room darkened and as the projectors began to cast images on the screen, spectators could imagine themselves embarking on a journey to a distant land. But by the end of the show, many audience members would recognize how this remote place was entangled with their own lives. They would feel a sense of obligation to the photographed subjects—and to the Gwich’in representative standing before them. They would want to join this campaign to ensure the protection of Arctic ecosystems.

The title slide from The Last Great Wilderness, with caribou image likely photographed by Lenny Kohm. Courtesy of author.

Unlike the iconic “Crying Indian” commercial and the repeated media emphasis on recycling, individual action, and green consumerism as the answer to environmental problems, The Last Great Wilderness struck a chord with audiences because it addressed them not as consumers but as citizens—and sought to enlist them in this collective project to defend the Arctic Refuge. Running contrary to its name, The Last Great Wilderness also changed conventional perceptions of wilderness. Here the Arctic was presented not as some remote, faraway place, disconnected from human society, but as land stewarded for millennia by Indigenous peoples—and still vital to their culture, spirituality, and food security. This helped audience members grasp the urgent human rights issues at stake.

The Last Great Wilderness subscribed to the “trickle-up theory of politics,” where refuge activists believed that by galvanizing citizen voices and local media coverage, their political will would “trickle up” to national media outlets and policymakers in D.C. And while there were many close calls and tense moments when it seemed that Arctic drilling proponents would prevail during the two decades that the show toured, this approach staved off development time and again, often by convincing fence-sitting politicians to vote against oil drilling. Beyond the Beltway and outside the national media spotlight, The Last Great Wilderness cultivated networks of participation and action that lasted long after the show ended. Though the slideshow alone did not save the Arctic Refuge, without the people-first political movement it built, the coastal plain’s fate would have been sealed.

In our image-saturated, social media-dominated culture, the story of an analog slideshow no doubt seems quaint, a throwback to a very different era. Yet The Last Great Wilderness was remarkably prescient in its activism, which was built upon sincere listening and learning, and sharing power and authority with Indigenous nations. Its legacy carries on through to the present, as the Gwich’in, in the face of new threats from the oil industry, continue to share their story with the public to inspire more permanent protection for the Arctic Refuge.

Take what happened in 2017, when the election of Donald Trump, together with the ongoing radicalization of the Republican Party, dealt a blow to refuge defenders, with the approval of Arctic Refuge drilling as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Nevertheless, the first-ever oil and gas lease sale of the refuge—held on January 6, 2021, at the same time that insurrectionists were storming the Capitol—turned out to be a bust. The lackluster sale resulted, in large part, from banking and corporate campaigns led by the Gwich’in alongside Iñupiat and environmental allies who made many industry leaders decide that drilling there would be a bad investment.

The Last Great Wilderness is a reminder of how slow, patient coalition work can turn the tide by activating and informing voters and helping them realize their voices really do matter. By bringing non-iconic images and Indigenous testimony to colleges, churches, and other grassroots venues across the country, a rambling activist, Gwich’in spokespeople, and local organizers took on the power of special interests and won. In the process, they established a model for how to transform a traditional wilderness battle into something else entirely: a struggle for Indigenous rights and environmental justice.

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