Oldest public library in the Americas has Catholic origins

By MARÍA TERESA HERNÁNDEZ

October 8, 2022

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The interior of Palafoxiana library in Puebla, Mexico, Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022. It is the oldest public library in the Americas, according to UNESCO. (AP Photo/Pablo Spencer)


PUEBLA, Mexico (AP) — It is, according to UNESCO, the oldest public library in the Americas, tucked away from the street front at a cultural center in the historic heart of this Mexican city. Those who enter the Palafoxiana Library for the first time — seeing the high, vaulted ceiling and gold-framed painting of the Virgin Mary — might think they’ve arrived at a chapel.

Indeed, the library owes its existence to one of Puebla’s early Catholic bishops, Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, who in 1646 donated his private library of 5,000 volumes to a local religious college — with the hope that anyone who knew how to read would have access to them.

In 1773, more than a century after Palafox’s death, the bishop of that era ordered the construction of a majestic library to house the collection. The walls were fitted with two tiers of wooden bookshelves; a third tier was added in the 19th century as donations flowed in from religious leaders and laypeople. There are now more than 45,000 volumes and manuscripts.

The books are organized according to principles of scholastic philosophy which held that the foundation of all knowledge is God and reason is subordinate to faith.

On the first floor, there are more than 11,000 Bibles, religious documents and theological texts. The second level is dedicated to the relationship between God and people — chronicles of religious orders and the lives of saints — and the third contains books on physics, mathematics, botany, language, architecture, even carpentry.

In effect, the overall collection navigates between two worlds — the word of God coexisting with the contributions of humankind.

“Everything that was imagined at that time is in the library,” said Juan Fernández del Campo, the library’s current manager.

Among the library’s greatest treasures are nine incunabula — books made between 1450 and 1500 with Gutenberg’s first printing techniques — and volumes by Galen and Vesalius, who are renowned for their contributions to the study of medicine.

Inside the library there are no explanatory texts that reveal the enigmas of the Palafoxiana to its visitors, but at the entrance there are always volunteer guides who recount its history to whoever is interested. Fernández del Campo said access to the materials is often prioritized for researchers who show a clear justification for their request.

Palafox’s passion for books is evident in a quote from him, written on a mosaic outside the library.

“He who finds himself without books finds himself in solitude without consolation,” it says.

Yet Fernández del Campo, from an office hidden behind the altar of the Virgin out of the eye of tourists, said those words from the bishop should interpreted within the context of his time.

“If you read what Palafox said and look back in the history of Mexico, you say: Wait a minute, no. This was not the time for Mexico to raise its wings toward freedom of thought,” the library manager said.

Indeed, the historical record suggests Palafox sought to assert the authority of Spain’s king and the Catholic Church hierarchy, putting him at odds with religious orders such as the Jesuits who questioned the royal authority.

Amid that friction, Palafox was transferred to Spain in 1653. The Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish Empire a century later; many of their books were added to the Palafox collection when the order abandoned Puebla.

According to the World Monuments Fund, the added weight of the books stored on the library’s third tier made the bookshelves more susceptible to damage when earthquakes struck Puebla in 1999.

Following the quakes, the fund participated in an extensive restoration project. Cracks in the walls and vaults were repaired and the bookcases were restructured.

The library reopened in 2002; two years later it was added by UNESCO to its Memory of the World Register.

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IF YOU GO: Puebla is about 80 miles (130 kilometers) by highway from Mexico City, easily reached by car or bus. In recent years the library has been open every day but Monday, with free admission on Sundays and Tuesdays and a modest entrance fee the other days.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

In Mexico, locals try to save traditional ‘Mexican caviar’

BY FABIOLA SÁNCHEZ

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Ahuautle, the eggs of the axayacatl, a type of an aquatic insect, are seen attached to pine needles before being harvested at Lake Texcoco, near to Mexico City, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2022. The tiny insect eggs known as "ahuautle" are parto of a culinary tradition dating at least to the Aztec empire that a few local farmers are trying to keep alive. 

(AP Photo/Fernando Llano)


CHIMALHUACAN, Mexico (AP) — In a shallow lake on the outskirts of Mexico City, a handful of farmers still harvest the eggs of an evasive, fingertip-size water bug in a bid to keep alive a culinary tradition dating at least to the Aztec empire.

Caviar is typically associated sturgeons swimming the Caspian Sea, but the Mexican version is made from the tiny eggs of the an aquatic insect of the corixidae family, also know as the “bird fly,” because birds like to eat it. Similar bugs are often known as “water boatmen” in English, because of the way they seem to row in ponds and streams.

The bug, which only occasionally surfaces before diving again in a trail of bubbles, would not look like food to most, but it was once important to the people of the Valley of Mexico.

For Juan Hernández, a farmer from San Cristóbal Nezquipayac, cultivating and collecting the tiny insect eggs known as “ahuautle” -- meaning water amaranth in Nahua -- is a way of life.

“For me, more than anything, it means tradition,” said the 59-year-old Hernández. He is one of only six people known to still harvest ahuautle, at least in the Texcoco area, they fear they may be the last.

The painstaking collection of “Mexican caviar,” known for its intense but delicate flavor, is threatened by the drying out of Lake Texcoco, development around the lakeshore and waning interest in the ingredient among younger generations, said Jorge Ocampo, agrarian history coordinator at the Center for Economic, Social and Technological Research on Agribusiness and World Agriculture in Mexico State.

Ocampo called the dish’s survival an example of “community resistance,” similar to the way in which inhabitants around Lake Texcoco — a shallow, saline lake that once covered most of the eastern half of the Mexico City valley — have managed to preserve other traditions, festivals and ceremonies.

For Hernández, it’s hard, dirty work that few are willing to do anymore.

Dressed in a hat, long-sleeved shirt, shorts and rubber boots, Hernández wades through the calf-high waters of Nabor Carrillo — a smallish lake formed from the remnants of Texcoco — to collect pine branches he had poked into the muddy lakebed the week before.

The branches serve as an anchor for the bird-fly bugs to deposit their eggs.

Under a blazing sun and accompanied by the calls of hundreds of herons, plovers and other migratory birds that stop at the lakes, Hernández gathers dozens of egg-coated sticks and lays them on a raft of styrofoam.

“We look for them along the edges of the lake, where the flies are more active,” Hernández said. He started as a young man, after a period of joblessness, joining about four dozen other local residents who used to work the lakes during the ahuautle season — the rainy period from June through September.

After about two hours, Hernández has gathered a heap of sticks covered with thousands of bird-fly eggs.

He returns to the edge of the lake to lay the sticks out to dry in the sun, which can take several hours or days, depending on the weather.

“Cleaning is a process that takes a lot of work,” said Hernández, as he rubs his hand over the sticks to remove the eggs, which he then places on a piece of cloth.

Later, he takes the eggs home and runs them through a sieve to remove any bits of pine bark or mud. Then he packs them in bags he offers for sale.

While Hernández takes care of collecting the eggs, restaurant owner Gustavo Guerrero serves them to customers at his eatery in the east-side borough of Iztapalapa.

One of Guerrero’s favorite recipes is to mix the ahuautle with breadcrumbs and bind them with eggs to form a croquette, which he then fries and serves with green tomatillo sauce, nopal cactus and squash flowers — all pre-Hispanic ingredients.

“Eating this is like revisiting the past,” said Guerrero, 61. He says the flavor of the ahuautle reminds him of his childhood, when his mother cooked the dish according to a recipe she learned from her grandmother.

But Guerrero acknowledges that “Mexican caviar” is at risk of disappearing because younger generations aren’t familiar with the dish, and ever-fewer people harvest it in the scarce remaining lakes where it is found.

Ahuautle is also at risk of becoming only a gourmet dish for the rich: A kilogram of the eggs can sell for the equivalent of $50 (roughly $25 a pound).

Insects, their eggs and larvae have been a part of Mexico’s cuisine for hundreds or thousands of years. Edday Farfán, an entomologist at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, said there are more than 430 species of edible insects in Mexico.

Farfán has been studying bird flies since 2016, and even has one tattooed on his arm.

Farfán said indigenous peoples living around the lakes adopted the insect eggs as a source of protein because prior to the Spanish conquest of 1521, they had few domesticated animals or livestock.

But now, Farfán said, the dish “is associated with the countryside, perhaps with poverty, as if it were an undesirable protein.”

Even those still familiar with ahuautle often consider the insects that produce it to be feed for chickens or turkeys, and may think of it literally as “for the birds.

With the odds stacked against it, there is no guarantee that Mexican caviar will even be a choice for future generations.

“There are a lot of kids, young people who don’t eat it anymore, they don’t like it,” Hernández admits.

“Now we are just keeping ahuautle alive,” he said. “I hope it doesn’t disappear, because it is a source in income for those of us who live off the land.”

The Niger Delta: A People and Their Environment

Europe's plunder of the Niger Delta dates back to 1444.

Royal Canoe of the Kingdom of Bonny, 

painted by Edouard Auguste Nousveaux, 1890. via Wikimedia Commons.

Oronto Douglas
Ike Okonta
10 March 2018

Written in 2001 and published by Verso in 2003, Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas's Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil documents four decades of violence committed against against the people and the ecosystem of the Niger Delta by Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world's largest oil companies. "Royal Dutch/Shell is more than a colonial force in Nigeria," Okonta and Douglas write. "A colonial power exhibits some measure of concern for the territory over which it lords. This is not the case with this mogul, which goes for crude oil in the most crude manner possible."

Below we present the book's first chapter, which surveys the longer history of European plunder of the region.

And finally, on the immense scale of humanity, there were racial hatreds, slavery, exploitation, and above all the bloodless genocide which consisted in the setting aside of fifteen thousand millions men. — Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

The Niger has the third-largest drainage area of Africa's rivers. The delta into which it drains is a huge floodplain in southeastern Nigeria consisting of sedimentary deposits flowing down from the Niger and the Benue rivers and covering 25,640 square kilometers of the country's total land area. This floodplain is home to some seven million people, grouped into several nations and ethnic groups: the Ijo, Urhobo, Itsekiri, Isoko, Efik, Etche, Ibibio, Igbo, Andoni, Ikwere, Ogoni, Isoko, Edo, and Kwale-Igbo. Some of the ethnic groups are further divided into clans with their own distinctive languages. 1

Before the arrival of European traders in what is now modern Nigeria, the Niger Delta was inhabited mainly by the Ijo peoples, who lived in small creekside fishing villages ranging from two hundred to about a thousand inhabitants. The head of the village was the Amanyanabo (or Amakasowei), who in turn was elected by the heads of the various wards or patrilineages. With the advent of the slave trade, however, there was a rapid expansion of the population of the Delta. The hitherto small and idyllic Ijo fishing villages grew into powerful trading states like Bonny, Owome (New Calabar), Okrika, and Brass (Nembe), some of whose origins can be traced to the early sixteenth century. The Efik trading state of Old Calabar at the entrance of the Cross River, and the Itsekiri kingdom of Warri in the western Delta, also emerged at this time. 2

The slave trade brought with it great social and economic upheavals in the Niger Delta. 3 Before the arrival of the European slave traders, the Ijo and the other peoples of the Delta traded with the peoples of the hinterland — mainly the Igbo and Ibibio. The former exported dried fish and salt to their neighbors in exchange for fruit and iron tools. The trade in slaves brought an abrupt stop to this flourishing commerce, however. The slave traders brought with them salt, dried fish, and new consumer goods such as cloth and metal utensils. The consumer goods were often cheap and not necessarily well made, but since the slave traders also brought salt along with them, the Ijo and the other inhabitants of the Delta gave up the trade in fish, salt, and iron tools with the Igbo and Ibibio altogether and concentrated on the lucrative slave trade.

It is generally assumed that the exploitation of the peoples of the Niger Delta and the devastation of their environment began when crude oil was discovered in the area by Royal Dutch Shell in 1956. The truth is that Europe's plunder of the Delta, and indeed the entire continent, dates much further back, to 1444, when the Portuguese adventurer and former tax collector, Lancarote de Freitas, sailed to the West African coast and stole 235 men and women whom he later sold as slaves. 4 De Freitas's trip was to trigger the Atlantic slave trade, which, before it was displaced by the trade in palm oil in the 1840s, saw several million able-bodied young men and women taken from the Delta and its hinterland and shipped to the plantations of North America, South America, and the West Indies.

The slave plantations of the West Indies were the basis of much British wealth. The Barclay brothers, David and Alexander, actively engaged in the slave trade in the 1750s and later used the proceeds to set up Barclays Bank. William Gladstone's political career was funded by family wealth generated by his father's Liverpool trade and West Indies sugar plantations. In 1833, John Gladstone's assets included £296,000 (£15 million today) and £40,000 (£2 million) — or about $24 million and $3 million today — in Demerara and Jamaica respectively. William Gladstone's first speech in the House of Commons on June 3, 1834, was in opposition to the Slavery Abolition Bill, speaking as a West Indian representative. The staggering economic cost aside, slavery abruptly and catastrophically disrupted life in the Niger Delta and its hinterland, triggered interethnic wars, and led to the displacement of whole communities.

With the abolition of slavery in the first decades of the nineteenth century, there was a switch to the so-called “legitimate” trade in palm oil. But the pattern of trade remained unchanged — from the Niger Delta to Europe and back. Europe was at the height of its industrial revolution at this time, and the demand for palm oil, which was used to lubricate the machines of the factories and as raw material for soap and margarine, was high. The Delta traders played the role of middlemen between Liverpool merchants who anchored their ships on the coast and the cultivators of the palm oil in the hinterland.

At first this arrangement was satisfactory to all parties. Trade boomed. By 1850, British trading interests were concentrated mainly in Lagos, which provided access to the wealth of the forests of Yorubaland, farther west, and the Delta ports, which were the gateway to the interior of eastern Nigeria. Palm oil was now the chief export, as the European traders no longer found the trade in slaves profitable following the advent of the industrial revolution. Bonny, an Ijo town strategically located on the coast, gradually grew into the richest port in the Niger Delta, and by 1856 the port and its hinterland was exporting over 25,000 tons of palm oil a year, over half of the total quantity exported from Africa. 5

Consuls and Gunboats

While the European slave merchants were content to ply their ignominious trade mainly from their ships using the kings and chiefs on the coast as go-betweens, the Liverpool palm oil barons began to actively interfere in the politics of the Niger Delta, beginning in 1850, with the sole purpose of displacing the local middlemen and appropriating the enormous profits for themselves. The argument of the Liverpool traders was that the middlemen of Bonny, New Calabar, Brass, and Old Calabar, the main Delta ports at the time, were not hardworking enough, and that the rich palm oil farms of the hinterland were not being exploited to the maximum as a result. They also complained about the high prices of the middlemen and increasingly began to urge the British government to intervene. 6

Yet, as several chroniclers of trade and politics in the Niger Delta at the time have shown, it was actually the Liverpool merchants who were ripping off the coastal middlemen. They had a monopoly of the palm oil trade, and since there was not a standardized medium of exchange on the coast, they sold second-rate and sometimes worthless goods to the Africans. The historian K. O. Dike described trade practices at the time: “White supercargoes had managed to convince Africans that articles of clothing such as old soldiers' jackets and cocked hats bought at little cost at Monmouth Street, were a fair exchange for their raw materials.” 7 Moreover, some of the British merchants were in reality ruffians and thieves and would actually seize barrels of palm oil from the Delta middlemen without payment.

It was to curb the activities of these rogue traders that the king of Bonny instituted a Court of Equity in 1854 run by a joint committee of the British traders and coastal middlemen under his supervision. Erring traders were fined, and those who refused to pay up were cut off from the palm oil trade by the Delta middlemen, who, obeying the king's directives, refused to sell palm oil to them. The Court of Equity brought order to the hitherto chaotic trade and was so successful that it was introduced in such other places as Akassa, Benin River (Itsekiri), Brass, and later Opobo.

The British merchants (or supercargoes) were, however, not satisfied. The palm oil trade was becoming even more lucrative as the pace of industrialization accelerated in Europe, requiring greater quantities of palm oil to lubricate machine parts and to manufacture soap and margarine for the millions of industrial workers who flocked to the cities. The supercargoes wanted a direct access to the hinterland so they could get the palm oil virtually for free. They began by using the British-appointed local consuls on the coast to force unfavorable terms of trade on the Delta middlemen. Indeed, the activities of the British consuls between 1850 and 1856 was to lead to the breakdown of the monopoly of coastal trade held by the supercargoes and the African middlemen between them. This, in turn, led to a crisis in Niger Delta politics.

John Beecroft, who was appointed Her Brittanic Majesty's Consul for the Bights of Benin and Biafra in 1849, laid the foundation of British power in Nigeria and initiated the politics that was to characterize the consular period in Nigerian history. 8 Beecroft saw himself not as an administrator but as a pathfinder of sorts, expanding British trade in the Niger Delta. It is instructive that the new consul's first intervention in the politics of the Delta was in palm-oil-rich Bonny, against King William Dappa Pepple, whom the supercargoes bitterly resented because they saw him as the main obstacle to their designs to get at the palm oil fields in the hinterland.

King Dappa Pepple had signed a treaty with Consul Beecroft in October 1850, regulating conditions of trade on the coast. In return, the British government had promised to pay the king an annual subsidy to enable him to develop the palm oil trade even further. But an increasingly powerful and ambitious Beecroft ignored the treaty to which he himself was a signatory, and even refused to pay the king the promised subsidy. 9 In 1851, Beecroft took the decisive first step — in what was to become his open intervention in Niger Delta politics — when he deposed Kosoko, the king of Lagos, and installed Akitoye in his place. Beecroft's excuse was that Kosoko was a slave trader, a practice the British government had decreed illegal. There was, however, ample evidence at that time to show that Akitoye was himself financed by a well-known slave trader, Domingo Jose, and certainly would have indulged in slave trading were it economically and politically expedient for him to do so. What Beecroft really wanted was a friendly king in Lagos who would help British merchants get a secure foothold in the area, and he conveniently used the “slave trader” tag to get rid of the independent-minded Kosoko. 10

Beecroft employed similar tactics to do away with King Dappa Pepple of Bonny. He accused the king of sponsoring attacks on the ships of British traders on the New Calabar River, and, cleverly exploiting a trade dispute between Dappa Pepple and one of the royal lineages in Bonny, used the Court of Equity to deport him to Fernando Po in 1852. 11 After the removal of King Dappa Pepple, the British traders, in concert with the local consuls, accelerated the displacement of the Delta middlemen in the palm oil trade.

In 1855 some freed slaves from Sierra Leone who had converted to Christianity and settled in Calabar tried to help the local middlemen ship their palm oil directly to England, pointing out that the prices they got from the British supercargoes were ridiculous. The consul, Hutchinson, intervened, however, stopping the King, Eyo Honesty, when he tried to export a shipment directly to Liverpool. The consul claimed that the king owed £18,000 (about $30,000) to an English firm and so could not trade directly with the Liverpool commercial houses until he had paid it off.

A Commission of Inquiry later set up by the Foreign Office in London discovered that Hutchinson was corruptly enriching himself at the expense of the Niger Delta middlemen, and that he was in fact a commission agent in the employ of the English firm Hearn and Cuthbertson, to which he claimed the king of Calabar owed money. But this was after Hutchinson's predecessor, Consul Lynslager, had ransacked and destroyed the town of Old Calabar, claiming that he did so because the people practiced human sacrifice. Church of Scotland missionaries stationed in the town contradicted Lynslager, pointing out that the consul destroyed the town at the behest of British traders who wanted to teach the local middlemen a lesson for daring to trade directly with Liverpool. 12

The enormous riches to be derived from the Niger Delta and the other coastal towns opened the eyes of the British traders and, subsequently, of the government itself, to the possibilities of taking over the area entirely, by force if necessary. Thus, in 1861, the Foreign Office instructed the consul to annex Lagos, “to protect and develop the important trade of which their town is the seat; and to exercise an influence on the surrounding tribes ... " 13 Trade was growing by the day. The Niger provided an excellent highway for the British traders, who began to penetrate into the interior. They saw virgin forests brimming with agricultural produce. Fired by greed, they sent urgent dispatches to London. The Foreign Office, after ensuring that the area would not prove a financial liability to the government, but indeed the opposite, proclaimed the Niger Delta and its hinterland a British Protectorate in 1865, thus laying the foundations of what turned out to be modern Nigeria.

King Jaja and the Robber Barons

The story of King Jaja of Opobo and his epic struggle against the British merchants in the closing decades of the nineteenth century best illustrates the long-standing struggle of the peoples of the Niger Delta to protect their environment and its natural resources from the grasping hands of European mercantilists and their patrons in London, Paris, Hamburg, and Amsterdam. 14

Jaja, who dominated the politics of the Niger Delta for twenty years, was an Igbo ex-slave in Bonny. Through hard work and a display of business acumen, he rapidly rose through the ranks and became head of the Anna Pepple royal house. Following a kingship tussle in the town, which escalated into civil war in 1869, Jaja and his followers retreated into Andoni country in the hinterland, named their new town Opobo, and declared it independent of the rulers of Bonny. Opobo, strategically located near the oil markets of the hinterland, quickly grew into the chief port in the Niger Delta, attracting European traders from all over the coast and even surpassing Bonny in wealth and political importance.

The British traders on the coast were, however, not happy with King Jaja. He had made it clear from the onset that he would not allow them direct access to the oil markets in the Opobo hinterland and that they could buy palm oil only from his agents. Jaja explained that since the British traders had a virtual monopoly over trade with the Liverpool commercial houses, he and his people should control the trade with the producers of the palm oil in the Delta hinterland. 15 New developments on the coast also favored King Jaja. In 1852 the British government had subsidized a fleet of steamers owned by Macgregor Laird, a merchant who began to operate a regular service between Liverpool and West Africa. This dealt a death blow to the great Liverpool houses and their monopoly of the Niger Delta oil trade. The Liverpool merchants began to face increasing competition, and by 1856 there were over two hundred European firms operating in the Niger Delta. Consul Lynslager's destruction of Old Calabar was a last-ditch attempt to prevent the local people from joining their European counterparts in turning this new development in shipping to commercial advantage. However, a few brave African middlemen began to export their oil directly to Europe, using Macgregor Laird's steamers. King Jaja, expectedly, was in the forefront.

This did not go down well with the British supercargoes, and they began to plot Jaja's downfall and to also devise means to evade his agents and buy palm oil directly from the hinterland. Jaja retaliated by increasing the volume of his shipments to England. Following a series of skirmishes with the supercargoes on the coast, King Jaja signed a treaty with the local consul in 1884 that effectively placed his town under British protection. But he made sure that a clause was inserted in the agreement that explicitly stated that his people would control the oil markets in the hinterland, his contention being that the supercargoes on the coast still controlled the bulk of shipments to England and took all the profits. Oil prices had, however, risen in Europe at this time, and the British supercargoes were getting increasingly impatient with Jaja. There were enormous profits to be made in the hinterland, and Jaja was in the way. They urged the local consul, H. H. Johnston, to intervene, and in 1887 King Jaja was deported to the West Indies. When he was eventually allowed to return to Opobo in 1891, he died on the way, a lonely, broken man. 16

A similar fate was to befall Nana Olomu, a merchant prince and leader of the Itsekiri, who controlled the oil trade on the Benin River in the western Delta. Although Nana had signed a treaty with Consul Hewett in 1884, placing the Benin River, Warri, and some parts of western Ijo under British protection, he rebuffed attempts by the British to extend the powers of the new Oil Rivers Protectorate, which had been proclaimed in 1887, over his country. Nana correctly saw the new protectorate for what it really was: an attempt by the British traders on the coast to edge him out and take over the oil markets in his territory for themselves. But the supercargoes would brook no opposition. British gunboats were now in absolute control of the coast, the Niger River, and its tributaries. In September 1894, under the command of the acting consul, General Ralph Moor, they bombarded Nana's headquarters in Ebrohimie, ransacked the town, and carted away his goods. 17 Nana gave himself up a few months later. Thus was the last formidable obstacle to British imperialist designs in the Niger Delta removed.

Afterward, it was open season for the British merchants, most notably George Goldie Taubman, the “founder of modern Nigeria." 18 The scramble for Africa was going full steam when Goldie Taubman arrived in the Niger Delta. The French had set their eyes on the area, and Taubman decided that the only way to keep them out and secure the rich lands of the Niger basin for Britain was to wield the several British firms competing against one another in the Delta into a powerful trading bloc with total monopoly over the palm oil trade. The new firm that emerged from the merger was called the Niger Company. Taubman followed this up with a spate of “treaties” with the coastal kings, which he obtained literally at gunpoint. By 1884 he had obtained thirty-seven such “treaties.” Towns that demurred, like Brass, Patani, and Asaba, farther inland, were bombarded into submission. 19

When the conference of the European powers to divide Africa among themselves opened in Berlin in 1885, Taubman was the British government's official delegate. London was so pleased with his performance that his new company was granted a Royal Charter. In addition to the monopoly of the oil trade in the Niger districts that it already enjoyed, the company was given political authority over the area as well. Rechristened the Royal Niger Company, it set up its headquarters in Asaba.

The Birth of Nigeria

There is no doubt that George Goldie Taubman and the Royal Niger Company which he founded played a key role in bringing together the otherwise disparate nations and ethnic groups in the Niger Basin into what is now known as Nigeria. It must be pointed out, however, that Goldie Taubman's career as a monopoly trader in the Niger Delta and its hinterland was marked by looting, murder, and the mass sacking of whole towns and communities. 20 He was more a soldier than a trader — he came to the Niger Delta as a conqueror.

The palm oil wealth of the area provided Taubman the financial muscle with which the company now began to push forward into the hinterland, navigating the Niger up to Bussa in the north and opening new trading centers on its banks. Taubman, however, was not content with merely draining the Delta of its natural resources. He also embarked on trading practices that cut off the once flourishing Delta ports from the outside world, which plunged the populace into unprecedented penury from which it has never been able to recover. Indeed, it can be said that the basis of the underdevelopment of the Niger Delta, following the forcible integration of the area into the world of international finance capital in the nineteenth century, was laid by Goldie Taubman and the Royal Niger Company in the 1890s. 21

Following the granting of a Royal Charter to the company in 1886, Taubman decreed that such towns as Brass, the chief port of the Nembe Ijo, which were outside the Royal Niger Company's territory, were “foreigners.” The people of Brass were therefore forced to pay fifty pounds (about eighty dollars) a year for a trading license and another ten pounds for each company station they traded in. Trade in alcoholic spirits had also grown in importance, and Taubman imposed an extra hundred pounds (equivalent to about $8,000 today) tax on any Brass merchant who desired to trade in the commodity. 22 In the 1880s this was a lot of money. Perhaps the people of Brass might have endured this hardship in silence if the Royal Niger Company had not taken its monopoly practices further by preventing them from shipping their palm oil directly to England, insisting that all such exports be routed through Akassa, the company's port. The company also undercut the Brass traders by journeying into the hinterland to buy palm oil directly from the producers.

Faced with increasing poverty and hardship, the Brassmen revolted. In 1895 they attacked the company's port at Akassa and took sixty-seven men hostage, insisting that they would not be released until the company gave them access to their old markets in the hinterland. The Consul General of the newly established Niger Coast Protectorate sent a naval force to Nembe Creek, attacked the town, and razed it to the ground. 23 Two thousand unarmed people, mostly women and children, were murdered. The ancient kingdom of Benin farther west was to be subdued and brought under British rule two years later.

In 1894, Captain Frederick Lugard, a veteran of the East African campaign, arrived to help extend the British empire on the Niger coast, accelerating the pace of the “pacification” of the peoples of the Niger basin. The French were pushing aggressively from the Borgu area north of the Benue River, grabbing whatever territory they could lay hands on. In April 1898, London was sufficiently worried to ask Lugard to set up an armed unit to protect all the territory then under the control of the Royal Niger Company. Thus was born the West African Frontier Force, a battalion of soldiers that Frederick Lugard used to bring the vast Sokoto Caliphate under British control a few years later. 24

In 1898, London withdrew the charter from the Royal Niger Company and set up structures to administer direct imperial control on her new domain. The palm oil trade alone was worth almost £3.4 million a year to Britain (£175 million today, or $280 million), and it was felt that the Niger basin was too valuable to be left to a commercial firm to manage. West of the Niger, Sir Gilbert Carter, the governor of Lagos, had by now brought the Yoruba states and kingdoms, which had been at war with one another for a hundred years, under British suzerainty. During his trek of 1893, Carter had used a mix of diplomatic cunning and force of arms to subdue the states and kingdoms.

On January 1, 1900, Britain's new domain was restructured under three administrative zones: the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria; the Lagos Colony; and the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria. The name “Nigeria” was chosen for it. It was left to Lugard to bring the Sokoto Caliphate to heel, and this he achieved between 1900 and 1906. The Aro, the only remaining obstacle to British colonialism in the Igbo heartland in the east, was conquered in 1901, but it took a little longer-well into the 1920s-before the entire area was “pacified" and brought under British rule. In 1914 the southern and northern protectorates were amalgamated under a single administrative unit and a new country was born. 25

One Country, Many Nations

Nigeria, it must be remembered, began life as a loose collection of nations, ethnic groups, clans, and villages brought together under one roof by British force of arms. As the late politician Obafemi Awolowo put it, “It was [the British] who created Nigeria out of a welter of independent and warring villages, towns, and communities, and imbued the various Nigerian national groups with an overriding desire for the unity of the entire Federation.” 26

Before the 1914 amalgamation, Nigeria consisted of two distinct colonial territories, separately ruled and administered. The Sokoto Caliphate, founded by the Islamic warrior and scholar Uthman Dan Fodio in 1817, was a theocratic state — at least in theory — and was administered along lines outlined by its founder in his book Kitab al-Farq. The Caliphate was more closely linked to North Africa and Saudi Arabia, culturally and commercially, than with its neighbors west and east of the Niger, who were mainly Christians and traditional religion practitioners and had had contact with Europe dating back to the fifteenth century.

The interests of British trade were paramount, however, and the dictates of commerce, coupled with the financial difficulties of administering the various nations and ethnic groups as separate entities, compelled the colonial administrators, from Frederick Lugard onward, to treat the country as a single unit, using a system of “indirect rule” in the North and “direct rule” in the South. While the northern emirs who held unchallenged sway over their subjects were allowed to administer their territories with minimal interference from the colonial residents, Lugard discovered that this system of indirect administration could not apply in the more egalitarian south, where the ruler's authority was circumscribed by a large number of checks and balances. The South was therefore ruled directly through courts and a “warrant” system whereby certain individuals were raised to positions of authority specifically to dispense justice and collect taxes as the emirs did in the North. 27 The British were, however, determined to rule the country as two separate political units, employing the infamous tactics of divide-and-rule that they had perfected in India to keep the various indigenous groups constantly at each other's throats.

The 1922 Constitution, introduced by Lugard's successor as Governor General, Sir Hugh Clifford, provided for the first time for elected African members in a legislative council. The 1930s and early 1940s witnessed rapid social and political changes in colonial Nigeria. The Eastern and Western regions were created out of the old Southern Nigeria by administrative fiat in 1939, while the Northern Region was left intact. A small but educated and articulate indigenous elite had emerged. The Second World War also saw Nigerian soldiers serving alongside their European counterparts on an equal footing, and this further accelerated political consciousness among the population. Led by Western-educated journalists and politicians, they began to agitate for greater participation in the administration of the country. The Richards Constitution, which became effective in January 1947, was the colonial government's attempt to accommodate the demands of the nationalists by attempting “to secure greater participation by Africans in the discussion of their own affairs." 28 Governor Arthur Richards's constitution united the northern and southern parts of the country in one central legislature for the first time. Richards, though, made provisions for regional councils, thus ensuring that the North enjoyed a degree of autonomy and was not “contaminated” by the southern politicians, whom the colonialists generally looked down upon as upstarts and political agitators. The Richards Constitution thus helped lay the foundation of tribalism in Nigerian politics and proved a most effective counterfoil to the nationalistic, pan-Nigerian outlook of the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons, which Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe founded in August 1944, with the aim of driving the colonialists from the country. 29

Arthur Richards also established the basis for an unequal and unwieldy federation, with the northern region twice the size of the East and West. Like his predecessors, Richards refused to listen to wise counsel from C. L. Temple, Lugard's lieutenant governor of the North, and restructure the country into seven or eight provinces, generally corresponding with the geographical space occupied by the various ethnic nationalities. 30

Richards had hoped that his constitution would last for nine years. But this was not to be. As soon as a new governor, Sir John Macpherson, was appointed in April 1948, he announced that he would give the country a new constitution that would further widen the participation of the people in the political process. The Macpherson Constitution, which replaced Richards's in January 1952, put in place a federation with a central legislature and executive, but at the same time the regional assemblies were enlarged and given legislative and financial powers. Perhaps this was Macpherson's attempt to widen the democratic space at the regional level. The North, however, was given half of the seats in the central legislature of 148 members, ensuring its near total dominance of the nascent country's politics. It is instructive that such regional and ethnic-inspired political parties as the Action Group and Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) emerged in the West and North respectively, at this time.

The series of constitutional conferences that were later to culminate in independence for the country on October 1, 1960, under an NPC-led government were attempts by Nigeria's political leaders to fashion a federal constitution that would work smoothly “to promote efficiency in, and harmonious relations and unity among, the constituent parts of the Federation.” 31 This laudable goal proved difficult to achieve, however, partly due to the lopsided nature of the federation the British left behind, and partly due to corruption, intolerance, and abuse of office on the part of the politicians. The breakdown of law and order in the Western Region in late 1965, orchestrated by the NPC — which wanted to crush the Action Group, the party of the opposition — triggered a chain of events culminating in a military coup led by Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, a young major, in January 1966. Several politicians and military officers were killed, among them the Prime Minister, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.

Attempts by the new military Head of State, General Johnson AguiyiIronsi, to introduce a new unitary constitution in May 1966 sparked a mutiny by young Hausa-Fulani military officers, who claimed that the January coup was an attempt by the Igbo to take over the political leadership of the country. Ironsi was killed in a countercoup in July, and the killing of Igbos and other easterners began in northern towns and cities. There was a massive exodus of the latter to the Eastern Region, and when Ironsi's successor, Colonel Yakubu Gowon, proved incapable of stopping the genocide in the North, the military governor of the East, Colonel Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, called on his fellow easterners in other parts of the country to return home. A new constitutional arrangement making for a loose confederation of the three regions was worked out for the country by the two sides in Aburi, Ghana, as a last-ditch effort to stave off civil war and the subsequent disintegration of the country. But Gowon reneged on this agreement after realizing that the Aburi Accord effectively gave the Eastern Region political autonomy. On May 27, 1967, he announced that the country would henceforth be divided into twelve states. Ojukwu saw this as an attempt to bury the Aburi Accord, and he responded three days later by proclaiming the former Eastern Region as the sovereign Republic of Biafra. The federal government declared war on Biafra on July 6, a bloody carnage that did not stop until Nigerian troops forcibly brought the East back into the federation in January 1970. An estimated two million people, the bulk of them Biafran children, lost their lives in this conflagration.

People of the Niger Delta Today

The bulk of the inhabitants of the Niger Delta live in three states in present-day Nigeria — Rivers, Delta, and the newly created Bayelsa. These states take up about 80 percent of the area. The rest are scattered in such other states as Cross Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Imo, and Ondo.

The years of slavery, palm oil trade, and subsequent colonial conquest brought with them massive migrations and intermingling of ethnic groups in the Delta. The rapid growth of Port Harcourt, the area's biggest city, in the decades leading to independence also encouraged intermarriage and resettlement of whole communities. As a result, today the Niger Delta is a fascinating collage of ethnic nationalities, clans, and language groups that, while still relatively distinct, nevertheless have many cultural similarities.

The Niger Delta has substantial oil and gas reserves. Oil mined in the area accounts for 95 percent of the country's foreign exchange earnings and about one-fourth of Gross Domestic Product. The bulk of Nigeria's proven oil reserves, currently estimated at twenty billion barrels, is located in the area, although exploration is also going on in the state of Bauchi and the Lake Chad Basin. Rivers, Bayelsa, and Delta states alone currently produce three-fourths of the country's crude oil. 32 Besides its great mineral wealth, the Niger Delta also has fertile agricultural land, forests, rivers, creeks, and coastal waters teeming with fish and sundry water creatures. Clearly, the Niger Delta is, at least for the moment, the goose that lays Nigeria's golden egg.

Yet, in spite of its considerable natural resources, the area is one of the poorest and most underdeveloped parts of the country. Seventy percent of the inhabitants still live a rural, subsistent existence characterized by a total absence of such basic facilities as electricity, pipe-borne water, hospitals, proper housing, and motorable roads. They are weighed down by debilitating poverty, malnutrition, and disease. While decades of corruption and mismanagement in the echelons of power have plunged the country's GNP per capita to an all-time low of $280, annual incomes in the Niger Delta are still far below the national average. The area also has one of the highest population densities in the world, and annual population growth is currently estimated at 3 percent. Rapid population growth is increasingly exerting pressure on cultivable land, a good part of which is in any case prone to flooding almost all year. The population of Port Harcourt and the other major towns is literally exploding. The ensuing scenario — urbanization without the economic growth that would ordinarily generate more jobs — has resulted in the human ecologist's ultimate nightmare: a growing population that, in a bid to survive, is destroying the very ecosystem that should guarantee its survival.

Historically, the people of the Niger Delta have always been at the mercy of greedy outsiders who plunder their natural resources without giving them anything in return, from the days of slavery to the present day. The civil war, however, was a watershed in the political and economic development of the peoples of the Niger Delta. It created the conditions for the accelerated exploitation of their resources and the devastation of their environment. Following the takeover of the Shell oil terminal in Bonny from Biafran troops, the Gowon regime enacted the Petroleum Act in 1969, which transferred all oil revenue to the Federal Military Government, which in turn was expected to disburse the money to the various states, partly on the basis of need. This decree and the subsequent legislation enacted by the military government in Lagos was to transform Nigeria from a genuine federation to a de facto unitary state.

But the unitary state that General Gowon and his military-dominated cabinet imposed on Nigerians did not have room for the peculiar needs of the minority people of the Niger Delta, even though they produced all the oil. The revenue went straight to the coffers of the Federal Military Government, the bulk of which was spent to finance the expensive lifestyle of the indolent and unproductive elite. Oil revenue and the corruption it engendered brought great wealth to this parasitic economic class. By 1976, Nigeria had become the seventh-largest producer of oil in the world, exporting two million barrels of crude a day. Federal revenue had risen to a staggering $5 billion per annum, compared to $590 million in 1965. The oil boom was in full swing, and members of the political and economic elite began to live it up, acquiring an unrivaled taste for imported Western luxuries.

Notes

1. Kenneth O. Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta 1830-1885. An Introduction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 1956), 21.

2. Michael Crowther, The Story of Nigeria (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 59.

3. Ibid., 60.

4. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade. The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 21-22.

5. Dike, Trade and Politics, 101.

6. Crowther, The Story of Nigeria, 123.

7. Dike, Trade and Politics, 112.

8. Kenneth O. Dike, “John Beecroft 1790-1854: Her Britannic Majesty's Consul to the Bights of Benin and Biafra 1849-54, in Crowther, The Story of Nigeria, 314.

9. See Dike, Trade and Politics, Chapter Seven, for details of Beecroft's career.

10. J. F. Ade Ajayi, “The British Occupation of Lagos 1851-1861," Nigeria Magazine, No. 69, August 1961, 96-105.

11. See Chapter Seven of Dike, Trade and Politics.

12. Foreign Office. F.O. 84/1117, No. 112, Class B, F.O., Russel to Hutchinson, September 4, 1860.

13. Foreign Office. F.O. 2/34, Minutes on Captain Washington's report, Palmerstone, April 22, 1860.

14. Dike, Trade and Politics, 198.

15. Foreign Office. F.O. 84/1630, Opobo Town, Ja ja to Lord Granville, April 3, 1882.

16. Foreign Office. F.O. 84/1630, F.O. 84/1617, F.O. 84/1634.

17.Obaro Ikime, Niger Delta Rivalry (London: Longmans, 1969), 69.

18. Dike, Trade and Politics, 213.

19. Foreign Office. F.O. 84/1617, No. 16 and its enclosures, Hewett to Granville, November 8,
1882.

20. Dike, Trade and Politics, 210.

21. Dike, ibid., 209-215.

22. Alan C. Burns, History of Nigeria (London:Allen and Unwin, 7th edition, 1956), 157-158.

23. J. E. Flint, Sir George Goldie and the Making of Nigeria (London: Macmillan, 1960), 187-215.

24. Foreign Office. Annual Report for Northern Nigeria, 1902, Appendix 111;105.

25. Crowther, The Story of Nigeria, 191.

26. Obafemi Awolowo, Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution (Ibadan University Press, 2nd edition, 1966), 14.

27. Frederick Lugard, Reports on Amalgamatton, 14-15, cited in Crowther, Story, 200.

28. Proposals for the Revision of the Constitution of Nigeria (London, 1945), 6. Cited in Okechurkewu Nebolisa, Nigeria and the Crisis of Constitutionalism (Enugu, Nigeria: Stone Press), 78.

29. Kenneth O. Dike, One Hundred Years of British Rule in Nigeria 1851-1951 (Lagos, 1957), 43.

30. Crowther, Story, 197.

31. Obafemi Awolowo, Thoughts, 26.

32. See Alexander Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafra War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1980), for a full account of the civil war.

Wild horse rights advocates say 14 horses killed in Arizona

yesterday

SPRINGERVILLE, Ariz. (AP) — Wild horse rights advocates are calling on authorities to prosecute whoever is responsible for the reported killing of more than a dozen wild horses in northeastern Arizona.

U.S. Forest Service officials announced Friday that they were investigating the horse deaths, but didn’t release any details.

Phoenix TV station KTVK reported Saturday that witnesses told them 14 horses were found in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest with fatal gunshot wounds to the abdomen, face and between the eyes.

“The person or persons responsible for this act of premeditated, vicious animal cruelty poses a very real danger to people and animals,” Scott Beckstead, director of campaigns and equine welfare specialist for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for a Humane Economy, told KTVK. “We hope to see swift and aggressive action by federal, state, and local law enforcement.”

Simone Netherlands of the Salt River Wild Horse Management group in Arizona said the horses “are not protected by federal government, not protected by state laws, so it’s sickening that someone can just come here and kill them.”

The dead horses were found near Forest Road 25 on the Alpine and Springerville Ranger Districts, according to the Forest Service, which said in a statement that they are “coordinating with the appropriate officials in support of the investigation.”

Meanwhile, a $20,000 reward continues to being offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever killed five wild horses in eastern Nevada late last year.

The Bureau of Land Management announced last week that the National Mustang Association pledged to double the previous $10,000 reward in the case.

It’s unknown if the Nevada and Arizona cases are related.

Authorities said five mortally wounded horses were discovered Nov. 16 in Jakes Valley, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) west of Ely.

They said the horses all were located within 600 yards of each other about 2 miles (3 kilometers) south of U.S. Highway 50, and an aborted fetus was attached to one of the dead animals.

The BLM is investigating and prosecuting the killings as part of the enforcement of the Wild Horses and Burro Act of 1971.

California tribes will manage, protect state coastal areas
By SOPHIE AUSTIN

yesterday

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 Sea lions are shown on the northwest coast of San Miguel Island, Calif., on Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009. The California Ocean Protection Council voted Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022, to provide $3.6 million to support the Tribal Marine Stewards Network, a collaboration between five coastal tribes and state government to protect marine ecosystems. 

(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)


SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Five California tribes will reclaim their right to manage coastal land significant to their history under a first-in-the-nation program backed with $3.6 million in state money.

The tribes will rely on their traditional knowledge to protect more than 200 miles of coastline in the state, as climate change and human activity have impacted the vast area.

Some of the tribes’ work will include monitoring salmon after the removal of a century-old defunct dam in the redwood forests in the Santa Cruz mountains and testing for toxins in shellfish, while also educating future generations on traditional practices.

The partnership comes three years after Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom apologized for the state’s previous violence and mistreatment against Indigenous peoples. Newsom said the state should allow for more co-management of tribes’ ancestral lands.

Megan Rocha, who’s on the Tribal Marine Stewards Network’s leadership council, said these coastal areas hold cultural significance for various tribes, making the partnership monumental.

“It’s focused on tribal sovereignty,” she said. “So how do we build a network where it provides for collaboration, but again, it allows each tribe to do it in the way that they see fit and respects each tribe’s sovereignty.”

The network plans to create agreements between tribes and with state government for managing these areas.

Rocha is also executive director of Resighini Rancheria, a tribe of Yurok people that is part of the network.

She worked with other tribal leaders, members of nonprofit groups and the state’s Ocean Protection Council, which coordinates activities of ocean-related state agencies, to develop a pilot program for the network that was years in the making.

In 2020, Ocean Protection Council staff recommended the agency set aside $1 million toward the pilot program to support the network in conducting research, reaching out to tribes and creating plans for the future.

The council voted Thursday to provide an additional $3.6 million which will support the groups in their continued efforts to monitor coastal and ocean resources, offer educational opportunities to tribal members, and pass along cultural knowledge to younger generations.

Taking inspiration from similar partnerships in Australia and Canada, the groups said they hope other networks bloom across the United States.

Leaders plan to expand the network to include more tribes throughout the state, Rocha said. California has 109 federally-recognized tribes, the second highest number in the country behind Alaska. But there are also many tribes that aren’t federally recognized.

Multiple tribal leaders referenced Newsom’s public apology in explaining part of why the network’s public launch is happening now. In recent years, U.S. officials have committed to collaborating with tribes on managing public lands.

Creating a network of tribes to steward areas with the backing of state government money and nonprofit support breaks new ground in the United States, said Kaitilin Gaffney of the nonprofit Resources Legacy Fund.

“I think we’re going to look back in 20 years and be like, ‘Oh, we were there. That was where it was started. Look what’s happened since,’” she said.

Some tribes in California and around the nation have had their rights to ancestral lands restored under the Land Back movement.

About 60 attendees from nonprofit groups, tribal nations and the Ocean Protection Council gathered in Sacramento to commemorate the network’s public launch last week. Leaders thanked experts, advocates, tribal leaders and public officials who made the launch possible.

Valentin Lopez, chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, which is part of the network, said climate change has forced governments with a history of exploiting Indigenous lands to acknowledge tribes’ deep-rooted knowledge of protecting ecosystems.

“We’re in the crisis mode,” he said.

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Sophie Austin is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow her on Twitter.

Early data indicates Idaho wolf population is holding steady

By KEITH RIDLER

October 6, 2022

 A wolf is shown in Yellowstone National Park, Wyo., in this file photo provided by the National Park Service, Nov. 7, 2017. Idaho's wolf population appears to be holding steady despite recent changes by lawmakers that allow expanded methods and seasons for killing wolves, the state’s top wildlife official said Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022. (Jacob W. Frank/National Park Service via AP, File)


BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Idaho’s wolf population appears to be holding steady despite recent changes by lawmakers that allow expanded methods and seasons for killing wolves, the state’s top wildlife official said Thursday.

Idaho Department of Fish and Game Director Ed Schriever told lawmakers on the Natural Resources Interim Committee that preliminary data on human-caused and natural wolf mortality looks similar to three previous years.

He also said the agency is using changes in wolf hunting laws that could lead to killing more wolves in areas with livestock conflicts or where elk herds are below population goals, potentially through a wolf-killing reimbursement program for skilled trappers and hunters.

“I think the best way to describe Idaho’s population right now is that it’s fairly stable, and it’s fluctuating around 1,250,” he told lawmakers. “Part of the year it’s below that; part of the year it’s above that. But the population is fluctuating around 1,250.”

Schriever, in a graph presented to lawmakers, showed the state’s wolf population from 2019 to 2021 fluctuating with a high of more than 1,600 in May when wolf pups are born down to a low of about 800 in April as wolves die through natural mortality, hunting or trapping.

Schriever said that the same pattern with potentially similar numbers could be repeated this year. But the agency won’t have a solid estimate for the 2022 wolf population until January when it analyzes additional information and millions of photos taken by remote cameras.

The agency in previous years picked August as the date to set the wolf population, putting it at about 1,500. The 1,250 estimate is a snapshot of the wolf population in November, at about the midpoint of the annual population fluctuation.

Idaho lawmakers in 2021 approved a law backed by ranchers that greatly expanded wolf killing in what some lawmakers stated could reduce the wolf population by 90%. Backers said it would reduce the wolf population and attacks on livestock while also boosting deer and elk herds.

Idaho wildlife officials also last year announced the state would make available $200,000 to be divided into payments to hunters and trappers who kill wolves in the state.

However, there has been concern the new rules could overshoot the mark because if the state’s wolf population were to fall below 150, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could take over management of wolves from the state.

“If you go below that (150), that’s bad news,” Schriever told lawmakers.

Schriever cited a 2009 Fish and Wildlife Service rule delisting northern Rocky Mountain gray wolves. The rule was blocked by a federal court but took effect when approved by Congress in 2011. Schriever noted the rule has a wolf population for Idaho fluctuating around 500, with a potential high of about 650 and a low of about 350.

“I think there are a whole bunch of us that would be happy if we could get to what’s described in the federal delisting rule as a population fluctuating around 500,” Schriever said.

Getting there could be challenging because wolves, Schriever noted, get wary when hunted.

He gave a breakdown of 389 wolves killed last year by some 50,000 hunters and trappers, noting only 72 hunters and trappers killed more than one wolf, accounting for 236 wolves in all that year.

“Those people are very important in the concept of managing the wolf population,” Schriever said, suggesting the reimbursement program could be a key component to target wolves in specific areas of the state.

“The reimbursement program may, in fact, be very important in keeping some of these highly skilled people engaged in this for a longer period of time,” he said.

Besides setting up the reimbursement program, the law passed in 2021 also expanded wolf killing methods to include trapping and snaring wolves on a single hunting tag, no restriction on hunting hours, using night-vision equipment with a permit, using bait and dogs and allowing hunting from motor vehicles. It also authorized year-round wolf trapping on private property.

Montana lawmakers also changed their laws to expand wolf killing. That prompted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service late last year, at the request of environmental groups, to announce a yearlong review to see if wolves in the western U.S. should be relisted and again receive federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. Such a move would take away Idaho’s management of the species.

On another front, a U.S. District Court judge in August rejected a request by conservation groups to temporarily block Idaho’s expanded wolf trapping and snaring rules. Environmental groups said Idaho’s expanded wolf-killing regulations violate the Endangered Species Act because they will lead to the illegal killing of federally protected grizzly bears and Canada lynx. Schriever said Thursday that no grizzlies have so far been caught in a wolf trap.

It’s not clear when the court will make a ruling on the merits in that case.

‘Forever chemicals’ in deer, fish challenge hunters, tourism
By PATRICK WHITTLE

October 5, 2022

A 10-point white-tailed deer walks through the woods in Freeport, Maine, on Nov. 10, 2015. Wildlife agencies are finding elevated levels of PFAS chemicals, also called "forever chemicals," in game animals such as deer, prompting new restrictions on hunting and fishing in some parts of the country. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Wildlife agencies in the U.S. are finding elevated levels of a class of toxic chemicals in game animals such as deer — and that’s prompting health advisories in some places where hunting and fishing are ways of life and key pieces of the economy.

Authorities have detected the high levels of PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, in deer in several states, including Michigan and Maine, where legions of hunters seek to bag a buck every fall. Sometimes called “forever chemicals” for their persistence in the environment, PFAS are industrial compounds used in numerous products, such as nonstick cookware and clothing.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched an effort last year to limit pollution from the chemicals, which are linked to health problems including cancer and low birth weight.

But discovery of the chemicals in wild animals hunted for sport and food represents a new challenge that some states have started to confront by issuing “do not eat” advisories for deer and fish and expanding testing for PFAS in them.

“The fact there is an additional threat to the wildlife — the game that people are going out to hunt and fish — is a threat to those industries, and how people think about hunting and fishing,” said Jennifer Hill, associate director of the Great Lakes Regional Center for the National Wildlife Federation.

PFAS chemicals are an increasing focus of public health and environmental agencies, in part because they don’t degrade or do so slowly in the environment and can remain in a person’s bloodstream for life.

The chemicals get into the environment through production of consumer goods and waste. T hey also have been used in firefighting foam and in agriculture. PFAS-tainted sewage sludge has long been applied to fields as fertilizer and compost.

In Maine, where the chemicals were detected in well water at hundreds of times the federal health advisory level, legislators passed a law in 2021 requiring manufacturers to report their use of the chemicals and to phase them out by 2030. Environmental health advocates have said Maine’s law could be a model for other states, some working on their own PFAS legislation.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed a bill in September that bans the chemicals from cosmetics sold in the state. And more than 20 states have proposed or adopted limits for PFAS in drinking water, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

More testing will likely find the chemicals are present in other game animals besides deer, such as wild turkeys and fish, said David Trahan, executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, a hunting and outdoors advocacy group.

The discovery could have a negative impact on outdoor tourism in the short term, Trahan said. “If people are unwilling to hunt and fish, how are we going to manage those species?” he said. “You’re getting it in your water, you’re getting it in your food, you’re getting it in wild game.”

Maine was one of the first states to detect PFAS in deer. The state issued a “do not eat” advisory last year for deer harvested in the Fairfield area, about 80 miles (129 kilometers) north of Portland, after several of the animals tested positive for elevated levels.

The state is now expanding the testing to more animals across a wider area, said Nate Webb, wildlife division director at the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. “Lab capacity has been challenging,” he said, “but I suspect there will be more facilities coming online to help ease that burden — in Maine and elsewhere in the country.”

Wisconsin has tested deer, ducks and geese for PFAS, and as a result issued a “do not eat” advisory for deer liver around Marinette, about 55 miles (89 kilometers) north of Green Bay. The state also asked fishermen to reduce consumption of Lake Superior’s popular rainbow smelt to one meal per month.

Some chemicals, including PFAS, can accumulate in the liver over time because the organ filters the chemicals from the blood, Wisconsin’s natural resources department told hunters. New Hampshire authorities have also issued an advisory to avoid consuming deer liver.

Michigan was the first state to assess PFAS in deer, said Tammy Newcomb, senior executive assistant director for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

The state issued its first “do not eat” advisory in 2018 for deer taken in and near Oscoda Township. Michigan has since issued an advisory against eating organs, such as liver and kidneys, from deer, fish or any other wild game anywhere in the state. It has also studied waterfowl throughout the state in areas of PFAS surface water contamination.

The state’s expanded testing also has proven beneficial because it helped authorities find out which areas don’t have a PFAS problem, Newcomb said.

“People like to throw up their arms and say we can’t do anything about it. I like to point to our results and say that’s not true,” Newcomb said. “Finding PFAS as a contaminant of concern has been the exception and not the rule.”

The chemical has also been found in shellfish that are collected recreationally and commercially. Scientists from the Florida International University Institute of Environment sampled more than 150 oysters from around the state and detected PFAS in every one, according to their study in August. Natalia Soares Quinete, an assistant professor in the institute’s chemistry and biochemistry department, described the chemicals as “a long-term poison” that jeopardizes human health.

Dr. Leo Trasande, a professor of pediatrics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine who has studied PFAS, said the best way to avoid negative health effects is reducing exposure. But, Trasande said that’s difficult to do because the chemicals are so commonplace and long-lasting in the environment.

“If you’re seeing it in humans, you’re likely going to see the effects in animals,” he said.

Wildlife authorities have tried to inform hunters of the presence of PFAS in deer with posted signs in hunting areas as well as advisories on social media and the internet. One such sign, in Michigan, told hunters that high amounts of PFAS “may be found in deer and could be harmful to your health.”

Kip Adams, chief conservation officer for the National Deer Association, said the discovery of PFAS in states like Maine and Michigan is very concerning to hunters.

“With the amount of venison my family eats, I can’t imagine not being able to do that,” Adams said. “To this point, everything we’ve done has been about sharing information and making sure people are aware of it.”

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Follow Patrick Whittle on Twitter: @pxwhittle

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.


This photo provided by the National Wildlife Federation shows a sign warning hunters not to eat deer because of high amounts of toxic chemicals in their meat, in Oscoda, Mich., March 26, 2021. Wildlife agencies in some parts of the country are finding elevated levels of PFAS chemicals in game animals such as deer, prompting new restrictions on hunting and fishing. (Photo by Drew YoungeDyke, National Wildlife Federation via AP)

FASCIST WORLD FRONT

Trump speaks via video at rally of global far-right in Spain
By JOSEPH WILSON and ALICIA LEÓN

yesterday

Spain's Vox party leader Santiago Abascal speaks to supporters during a rally in Madrid Spain, Sunday Oct. 9, 2022. Former U.S. President Donald Trump has thrown his weight behind Spain's far-right in a video shown at a rally in Madrid that also featured messages Italy's Giorgia Meloni and Hungary's Viktor Orban. The annual rally comes just weeks after Abascal and the rest of Europe's far-right celebrated the victory of Meloni's neo-fascist Brothers of Italy Party. (Jesus Hellin/Europa Press via AP)

MADRID (AP) — Former U.S. President Donald Trump threw his weight behind Spain’s far-right Sunday in a video shown at a rally in Madrid that also featured messages by the leading stars of Europe’s populist right like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

In a recording that lasted under 40 seconds made while Trump was on a plane, Trump thanked Spain’s far-right Vox party and its leader Santiago Abascal for what he called the “great job” they do.

“We have to make sure that we protect our borders and do lots of very good conservative things,” Trump said. “Spain is a great country and we want to keep it a great country. So congratulations to Vox for so many great messages you get out to the people of Spain and the people of the world.”

Vox captured national attention on Spain’s political landscape in 2019 when it became the third-largest force in Spain’s Parliament after an election that led to a national left-wing coalition that still holds power. Vox’s messages include zero tolerance for Catalan separatism, disdain for gender equality, diatribes against unauthorized immigration from Africa and embracing both the “Reconquista” of medieval Spain from Islam as well as the legacy of Gen. Francisco Franco’s 20th-century dictatorship.

Abascal returned the flattery when he took to the stage at the outdoor venue after more video messages by European and South American right-wing politicians and an in-person speech by Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.

“My thanks for President Donald Trump, a visionary in the fight for sovereign nations, a visionary in the fight for secure borders, who has had to suffer (attacks) from the most powerful establishment in the world and the largest media attack that any world leader has had to face in recent memory,” Abascal told the crowd of several thousand, many waving red-and-yellow Spanish flags.



Despite its spectacular rise, the party led by Abascal failed to meet the expectations it set for itself in regional contests this year and had suffered its first serious bout of in-fighting among its leaders. Vox is now eyeing regional and municipal elections next year as it battles to surpass Spain’s traditional conservatives.

The annual rally came just weeks after Abascal and the rest of Europe’s far-right celebrated the victory of Meloni’s neo-fascist Brothers of Italy Party.

Meloni’s recorded message lasted several minutes and was focused on her priorities as she prepares to become Italian premier: pushing for a price cap on energy in the European Union and recovering economic self-reliance.

The win by Meloni has worried European Union leaders that Italy, the bloc’s third-largest economy, could put national interests first, like Hungary and Poland are doing.

“We are not monsters, the people understand that. Long live Vox, long live Spain, long live Italy, long live Europe patriots,″ Meloni said. “Only by winning in our countries can Europe become a political giant that we want, and not a bureaucratic giant.”

Vox and its supporters are hoping that Meloni’s surge in Italy can spill over to Spain.

“Meloni’s victory has given us reasons to believe that this is possible and that our side is not as demonized in Europe as some want to make us believe,” said Francisco Hermida, a 25-year-old entrepreneur attending the rally.

Trump and others leading figures of the world’s popular right have been trying for years to weave together networks of support in what they describe as a winner-take-all struggle against the political left. Orban was in the U.S. recently to speak to leading conservatives there and met with Trump.

The Vox rally also featured video appearances by former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, Chilean right-wing politician José Antonio Kast, the daughter of former Bolivian interim President Jeanine Añez, and U.S. Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

“On the one side, there is the global elites and the global left, that is growing evermore thuggish and violent, on the other side are conservative populist, who share the values of God, and country and family and freedom,” Cruz said. “Sometimes the left scores dangerous victories, as we saw in Colombia. Sometimes the good guys win, like we saw in Italy.”

Cruz said he is looking forward to a landslide Republican win in the U.S. congressional midterm election next month. Trump has been campaigning for right-wing candidates in the Nov. 8 election and is pondering another presidential run for the 2024 vote.

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Wilson reported from Barcelona, Spain. AP writer Colleen Barry contributed to this report from Milan, Italy.

UNDERFUNDED PUBLIC EDUCATION

Kids with disabilities face off-the-books school suspensions

By MEREDITH KOLODNER and ANNIE MAOctober 4, 2022

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Lisa Manwell works on school work with her son John Jinks, 12, at their home in Canton, Mich., Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022. Manwell says her son was improperly removed from his classroom last year because of behaviors that stemmed from his disability. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)


The phone call from her son’s school was alarming. The assistant principal told her to come to the school immediately.

But when Lisa Manwell arrived at Pioneer Middle School in Plymouth, Michigan, her son wasn’t sick or injured. He was sitting calmly in the principal’s office.

John, who has ADHD and finds it soothing to fidget during class, had been removed from the classroom after he refused to stop using a pair of safety scissors to cut his cuticles.

When she asked why he couldn’t stay for the rest of the day, Manwell said the school told her they would call child protective services if she didn’t take him home.

REACTION TO AP'S REPORTING– Senators call for stronger rules on off-the-books suspension

The call was just one of a dozen that Manwell received last fall telling her John couldn’t stay in school because of behaviors she says stemmed from his disability, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Many schools have promised to cut down on suspensions, since kids can’t learn as well when they aren’t in class. But none of these pickups was ever recorded as suspensions, despite the missed class time.

The practice is known as informal removal, defined by the U.S. Education Department as an action taken by school staff in response to a child’s behavior that excludes the child for part or all of the school day — or even indefinitely.

Excessive use of informal removals amounts to a form of off-the-books discipline — a de facto denial of education that evades accountability, advocates and legal experts say. It has special implications for kids with disabilities: Informally removing these students circumvents federal law that protects them from being disciplined or barred from class for behaviors related to their disability.

Since the pandemic began, parents of disabled kids say the practice is on the rise, denying their kids their legal right to an education.

“This is a repeat issue that we see in enforcement across the country, over years,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, assistant secretary for the department’s Office for Civil Rights. “And that means that the practice has taken hold in a way that is dangerous for students and needs to be addressed.”

In July, the department issued guidance on discriminatory practices in discipline for students with disabilities. Lhamon said the guidance included informal removals because of how frequently they appeared in the office’s investigations of complaints against school districts.

Informal removals can happen through frequent parent pickups, shortened school days or hours spent in “time-out” rooms.

The Associated Press and The Hechinger Report interviewed 20 families in 10 states who described being called repeatedly and at all hours of the school day to pick up their children. In some cases, parents were called less than an hour into the school day. Others said they had to leave work to get their child so frequently they lost their jobs. Many felt they had no choice but to change schools, or even districts.

Because the removals aren’t recorded, there’s no way to quantify how often they happen. But the National Disability Rights Network says it has seen an increase during the pandemic.

Teacher shortages mean there are fewer staffers available to do evaluations and provide services for disabled students, creating “more of an incentive or more of a push for getting kids with behavioral needs out,” said Dan Stewart, the organization’s managing attorney for education and employment.

Students of color with a disability appear to be disproportionately affected based on anecdotal reports to the network from disability rights advocates around the country.

“It’s pervasive,” said Ginny Fogg, an attorney at Disability Rights North Carolina, “and the reason for that is that most parents don’t know their rights and the consequence for the school system is not enough to make them not do it.”

“The remedy isn’t, ‘You just can’t go to school,’” she added. “The law was enacted 50 years ago to prevent this very outcome — that students with disabilities aren’t allowed to go to school and participate in an education.”

Manwell said the calls from her son’s school felt relentless.

“They would be calling my personal phone, my work phone. They were calling my husband, who works nights,” said Manwell, a resource planner at Ford Motor Co. “It was impossible. I couldn’t function. I never knew when they were going to call or what was going to happen.”

An official from the Plymouth-Canton Community Schools district in Michigan where John goes to school said he couldn’t comment on specific student issues, citing federal student privacy law.

Federal law protects disabled students from being repeatedly disciplined or removed from school for behaviors related to their disability. If they are suspended for more than 10 days, families are entitled to a meeting with the school to determine whether the behaviors are a result of the child’s disability. If they are, then the school must offer adjustments instead of suspension. For example, if a child’s disability makes it difficult for them to focus in a loud classroom with dozens of other children, the parent has the right to request a quieter classroom or one with fewer children.

The Education Department’s July guidance made clear that children who are informally removed have the same rights, such as reviews of whether the student’s behavior was a result of their disability, as those who had been officially suspended.

Tricia Ellinger says she would have requested a hearing to make sure her 10-year-old daughter was getting appropriate services and support, had she known that her frequent removals from the classroom amounted to suspensions.

One day last spring, she received three phone calls in rapid succession, telling her to immediately pick up Cassie from Kenneth J. Carberry Elementary School in Emmett, Idaho. When she arrived, her daughter was sitting quietly in the school’s resource room eating a snack. She says a school staff member told her that Cassie was refusing to do her work and needed to go home.

“When I got her in the car, I asked her, ‘Cass, what happened? Did you tear up your notebook? Did you throw your pencil?’” Ellinger recalled. “She said, ‘No, it was just hard. Math is hard.’”

The call was one of about 20 Ellinger says she got last year from the school, which is designed specifically to educate students with disabilities. She says her daughter was also taken out of class repeatedly and kept in a room by herself. None of the removals was recorded as suspensions.

Emmett School District Superintendent Craig Woods said he couldn’t comment, citing federal student privacy law.

Families often do not know what grounds they have to lodge a complaint, Lhamon said. Sometimes they aren’t aware their child should not have been suspended in the first place.

“That is so concerning when schools are excluding students for reasons that are unlawful,” she said. “We want our kids to be in class, learning with other students, fully participant and respected as learners. We do not want our school communities to be sending a message that there’s some category of kids who can’t be there.”

Manwell said most of the calls she got last year from her son’s school were a result of bullying. On the fourth day of school, John got shoved in the locker room, and she got a call to pick him up. Another time, he went to the bathroom and another student threatened to beat him up.

Because of his disability, John was supposed to be granted access to a quiet room so he could recover from difficult incidents. But often, she said, either there wasn’t a room or when he didn’t want to return to class, she’d get a call to come pick him up.

“It was just the stress of never knowing what I was sending my kid into each day. I was worrying the whole time he was gone,” said Manwell. “I could see the damage.”

“He was withdrawing. He started talking about hurting himself,” she said, her voice breaking.

In January, she made the difficult decision to switch John to homebound instruction, sending him to a tutoring center every day for a couple of hours and rearranging her work schedule. It made her life more predictable, she said, and John began to act like his old self.

She said she’d like to send him back to school but doesn’t trust what will happen.

“You want to protect your kids, right?” she said. “I just can’t send him to a school where he won’t be safe.”

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Parents, has your child been removed from class, especially because of a disability? We want to hear from you. Visit: https://hechingerreport.org/informal-removals/

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More coverage of the pandemic’s impact on back-to-school: https://apnews.com/hub/back-to-school

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This story was produced by The Associated Press and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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The Associated Press’ reporting around issues of race and ethnicity is supported in part by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.