If you weren’t following Intercontinental Cry this year, there were a lot of great victories and milestones you probably missed. Indigenous peoples quashed more than five dozen mining concessions that threatened their territories. Four pipeline projects were stalled–including Canada’s wildly controversial Trans Mountain pipeline and the Keystone XL pipeline in America’s heartland. At one point, a community in the Philippines used a map to physically block a mining company from entering their lands.

With the rights of nature gaining more legal traction this year, we also began to see a much deeper respect for the powerful role that Indigenous peoples play as guardians of 80 per cent of the world’s biodiversity. We saw this most notably with the formation of a major coalition that plans to mobilize billions of people of faith in defense of the rainforests and their protectors.

As with every year, we also saw a seemingly endless line of Indigenous Nations take bigger and bolder steps to protect their lands and languages, their food ways, their medicine practices, their legal systems and, of course, their models of self-governance.

Read on for some of the uplifting stories that we loved in 2018.

If you want to see more stories like these in 2019, be sure to