Posts Tagged: indigenous

Opinion

Community-based organizations address health inequities  

A young girl in Oakland, a key member of a community targeted for health inequities. (Photo: Roots Community Health Center)

OPINION: Much attention has been focused on the barriers and challenges to accessing health care, highlighted by a pandemic that disproportionately harms Black, Latinx, Asian American Pacific Islander, and Indigenous communities. Barriers to technology or lack of broadband impeded access to MyTurn and other scheduling tools. Barriers to transportation made it impossible or difficult for folks to access mega-sites and wait in hours long lines for the vaccine.

Opinion

Joining hands on climate change: Brazil, California

In the Amazon rain forest of Acre, Brazil. (Photo: Andre Dib, Shutterstock)

OPINION: Protecting our climate is very important to the indigenous people of the Amazon. In the Brazilian state of Acre, where I live, we’re already seeing terrible heat, floods and droughts that we never used to experience. That’s why cooperation with California to protect our forests is important to people here.

Opinion

The fallacy of forest ‘offsets’

Banana trees in the forest at Agua Azul waterfall, Chiapas, Mexico. (Photo: Elisa Loco)

OPINION: When it comes to reducing California’s climate emissions, should we allow companies to pollute our local communities, while paying our neighbors in Mexico to clean up the carbon? Should we gamble our climate policies on saving trees in other countries that can easily be destroyed by forest fires, just so that we can indulge in our own emissions instead of reducing them responsibly?

News

Indigenous farm workers have scant access to mental health services

Irene Gomez, manager of a domestic violence and mental health outreach program for indigenous farmworkers in Oxnard, helps a client. (Photo: Scott Erickson.)

Although many counties have programs that provide at least some medical care to this population, access to mental health services is extremely limited in most parts of the state. This is despite the fact that indigenous farmworkers are believed to face higher amounts of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder than the general population.

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