It’s been decades since Madonna Thunder Hawk last saw the valley she grew up in on the Cheyenne River Reservation. It lies buried under the Missouri River. The United States government sent the river rushing over the reservation’s largest town in 1960 as part of a series of post-war federal flood control projects.

In the history of Native American land dispossession in North America, the creation of the Oahe Dam is little more than a footnote. But for Ms. Thunder Hawk, it is her footnote. She couldn’t bear to watch the water consume the land. Then in her early 20s, she says she didn’t fully appreciate that, in various guises, this had been happening to her ancestors for centuries.

The dam wasn’t illegal, or even militaristic – though the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built it. As with the 370-plus treaties that tribes have negotiated with the government, Ms. Thunder Hawk’s father received some compensation. Like many of those tribes, he didn’t want the money. He wanted to preserve the land.

Ms. Thunder Hawk says she doesn’t know how much he got in compensation, or what happened to the money. What she knows is she will never be able to return to the land. She knows the story of that land is the story of Indigenous people around the world, which is to say it’s the story of colonization in America. A story of land taken with ruthless speed and the faintest of legal justifications.

Riley Robinson/Staff

A view of the Missouri River on the Cheyenne River Reservation, May 31, 2023, in South Dakota. Before the Oahe Dam was built in the 1960s, Madonna Thunder Hawk's father owned the land along the river shown here and refused to sign it over to the U.S. government. The Department of the Interior seized it anyway, using eminent domain.

The scale of land loss is hard to quantify. One study estimates that tribes have, on average, 2.6% of the land base they had before 19th-century forced migration. And the great irony is that members of the Sioux, like Indigenous peoples around the world, never viewed land as belonging to them. Like blades of grass on the plains, they consider themselves a natural extension of the land, and the land a natural extension of them. Land is not property in their eyes, which is why, some say, they lost so much of it so easily.

“We are this land,” says Ms. Thunder Hawk. “We have to stand and struggle for what we have left.”

American settlers, with a diametrically opposed worldview, drove westward. They forced Native tribes onto reservations (often on the least desirable land) and, over the generations, into boarding schools and cities. Families were separated and cultures erased, all with the intention of taking, and keeping, land that Indigenous people had called home for centuries.

Ms. Thunder Hawk, a Lakota great-grandmother, grew up with this history, connected to her culture and history only by gossamer threads. One of those threads was the land, and over decades of work as an activist, she has called for it to be returned.

Nowhere is this struggle more pronounced than in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The Supreme Court said in 1980 that the area, sacred to Native people for 12 centuries, was taken in such egregious fashion that the government owed the Sioux tens of millions of dollars in compensation.

But members of the Sioux – a confederation of seven primarily Dakota and Lakota tribes who now occupy some of the most impoverished counties in the country – have steadfastly refused the award, which is now worth over $1 billion. Generations of systemic poverty – and broad disparities in health, education, and criminal justice outcomes – cannot be repaired with money, they say. 

For people who view themselves as indistinguishable from the land, any efforts to right historic wrongs must be land-based. And the Black Hills has become the epicenter of those efforts – specifically the “Land Back” movement, a social justice campaign calling, broadly, for increased Indigenous sovereignty and equity.

“Tribal nations would like to have the land that they’ve called home since time immemorial returned to them. That’s a pretty big ask though,” says Kevin Washburn, a former assistant secretary of Indian Affairs and a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.

“I’m a realist, and I’m pragmatic,” he adds.

In some cases, physical land could be returned, but the practicalities of it are, in many ways, impractical. For some tribes, centuries of assimilationist policies have completely severed connections to their ancestral lands. For others, like the Inupiat in northern Alaska, the land has never really been lost. In recent years, the scope of Land Back has broadened. Advocates say concrete policies – from national parks co-management to investments in urban services – can achieve what Land Back is really about: forging a new, more equitable, relationship between America and Native peoples.

“There are a whole bunch of things that fall on the spectrum of Land Back that may not fully be [returning] land but nevertheless move the ball in the right direction,” says Mr. Washburn.

“One size doesn’t fit all,” adds Frank Pommersheim, an emeritus professor at the University of South Dakota. 

“The goal is to discuss things [that happened] in the past so we can go forward together to make a better history,” he says. “To me, that’s an incredibly worthy endeavor.”

Riley Robinson/Staff

Madonna Thunder Hawk stands May 30, 2023, near Bear Butte in South Dakota, a site sacred to the Oceti Sakowin and other Native people.

On Bear Butte

Unlike Mount Rushmore 70 miles south, Bear Butte has changed little over the centuries. Those who come here to fast and pray see largely the same quiet, rugged landscape ancestors like Red Cloud and Crazy Horse saw.

It’s one of the reasons Ms. Thunder Hawk likes to visit. One morning in May, she stands at the foot of the mountain, bathing in the sunlight, listening to prayer cloths and tobacco ties rustle in wind-tossed trees.

“It’s good to come back every once in a while,” she says. “It’s mostly reminiscing, remembering who was once here.”

This is where tribes of the Great Plains have always come to prepare for the Sun Dance, a sacred rite individuals carry out for healing and good fortune. Ms. Thunder Hawk would camp with family in the foothills, supporting relatives who were fasting and praying on the mountain for days.

“It’s a place of spiritual gathering,” she adds. “Our spirituality, it’s a family affair. ... That’s tradition, that’s the ways of our ancestors. Keep the family strong.”

Familiar with its spiritual significance, the U.S. government included the Black Hills in negotiating the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. In exchange for halting attacks on railroads and settlers, the government promised the Sioux tribes “the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of roughly half of present-day South Dakota. Six years later, an expedition led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer discovered gold. In 1877, with a gold rush in full swing, Congress claimed the land through eminent domain.

SOURCE:

Carl Sack, "Invisible Nation: Mapping Sioux Treaty Boundaries"; U.S. Census Bureau

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

The Sioux tribes never stopped fighting for the Black Hills. In 1975, they won – at least in court. 

“A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history,” the U.S. Court of Claims wrote, describing the Black Hills seizure. Upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980, the ruling entitled the Sioux tribes to over $100 million.

But to this day, the tribes have refused to take it.

“The Black Hills are not for sale,” says Frank Star Comes Out, president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. “Our tribes do not want the money. They want the land back.”

The Black Hills are also now a tourism hotbed. From Mount Rushmore to the Sturgis biker rally, visitors spent $1.8 billion in western South Dakota last year, according to the state tourism office. That’s roughly what the Sioux tribes are owed for the Black Hills. As of 2011, the award – held in a trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs – had increased to $1.3 billion.

But for the Oglala Sioux – located on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the second-poorest county in the U.S. – even $2 billion wouldn’t undo centuries of systemic neglect, says Ms. Thunder Hawk. If anything, it would do the opposite. The tribes would be selling out in the purest sense, investing in what the Black Hills have become, not what they believe it to be.

Riley Robinson/Staff

Prayer ties are seen on a tree May 30, 2023, at Bear Butte in South Dakota.

“What, you’re going to buy and sell your mother?” she says. “Once we do that, there goes our birthright.

“We would no longer be,” she adds. “We wouldn’t be who we are. Because that means we are for sale. They bought us.”

“A sense of setting things right”

But would getting land back do anything to repair centuries of harm and neglect? The outgoing mayor of Rapid City, the de facto capital of the Black Hills, thinks so. 

In 2017, Steve Allender began working with local officials and Native groups to effectively sell three parcels of land – which had been part of the site of the Rapid City Indian Boarding School, and which Congress had ordered be given to groups including “needy Indians” – and develop them in ways that would benefit local Native communities.  

In essence, a behavioral health center, a senior living community, and an activity center were to be converted into a Native American community center, headquarters for a Native economic development organization, and a permanent memorial for children who died at the boarding school.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

Tourists pose in front of Mount Rushmore National Memorial, on June 10, 2012, outside Keystone, South Dakota. The Black Hills that include the tourist site were stolen from the Sioux tribes, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1980.

Mayor Allender says he has always wanted to make some kind of investment in the city’s Native community. When you combine residents and day visitors, he notes, one-quarter of Rapid City’s daily population is Indigenous.

“We do a lot of talking about being equal and being one community,” he says. “But there’s really little in our actions to show we’re serious about that.”

But after years of discussions and disputes over land value, financing, and what the land should be used for – interrupted by the pandemic – the effort has largely ground to a halt. The children’s memorial is being built on the land, on what is believed to be unmarked grave sites.

Erin Bormett/Argus Leader/Reuters/File

Protesters blockade the highway leading to Mount Rushmore, July 3, 2020, in Keystone, South Dakota. The Black Hills now bring in about $1.3 billion annually in tourism dollars. The U.S. government took the Black Hills in 1877 after gold was found, violating the Treaty of Fort Laramie.

Speaking on the day Rapid City voters were picking his successor, Mayor Allender says he still hopes for a positive outcome.

“I’m just imagining that this can be good for all of us because we will live in an environment where we’re not afraid to go in the past and acknowledge something, not afraid to make a bold move forward,” he says. “That has benefits for everyone, in a sense of pride, a sense of community, a sense of setting things right.”

“There are folks that feel ignored, or feel cheated,” he adds. “Maybe this offers a glimmer of hope that it doesn’t have to be this way for eternity.”

A new beginning

There is more to the Land Back movement than physically returning land, however. South Dakota State University has been illustrating how.

After becoming the school’s president in 2017, Barry Dunn – an alumnus and member of the Sicangu Lakota – launched the Wokini Initiative (Lakota for “new life” or “new beginning”). 

Through the initiative, the university now publicly acknowledges the tribal land SDSU now occupies, and it works to provide greater access to higher education for Native Americans in the state. Recruiters visit high schools on the state’s nine reservations, more scholarships are being offered to Native American students, and a Native American student center has been built on campus.

Photo courtesy of South Dakota State University

Barry Dunn, president of South Dakota State University, meets with students at the 12,400-square-foot American Indian Student Center, which opened in 2020. The university acknowledges it sits on land stolen from tribes. It built this center and offers scholarships to Native students as part of its Land Back efforts, Mr. Dunn says.

For a public university created with land taken from tribal reservations by the 1887 Dawes Act, this is Land Back in action, says President Dunn.

“I don’t have the authority or responsibility to give it back, but I can make the decisions ... that we’ll take the proceeds we receive from our land every year and dedicate it to the American Indian students here on campus,” says President Dunn. 

“It’s poetic, and I think appropriate, that that’s how we address it,” he adds. 

When Marcella Gilbert, Ms. Thunder Hawk’s daughter, returned to the Cheyenne River Reservation after graduating college, she set to teaching communities about wild foods and their benefits. She later got a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree at SDSU studying the nutritional value of the reservation’s wild foods. The university later helped her get a grant so she could plant wild foods on the reservation and teach people how to grow their own food.

It may surprise people, Ms. Gilbert says, but Land Back efforts are needed not just on land taken by the government, but also on land given by the government.

“These reservation lands aren’t really ours,” she adds.

The Dawes Act authorized the U.S. government to break up reservation land into individual allotments. The ultimate effect was that private landowners purchased vast tracts of reservation land on decadeslong leases. As of 2014, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe owned only about half of its reservation land – with most of the most fertile land along the central Highway 212 in private hands.

The effects have been numerous, from entrenching poverty to eroding traditional practices like hunting and gathering wild foods. About a quarter of her tribe’s members still are hunter-gatherers, says Ms. Gilbert, but private lease-holders block access to their land, and widespread cattle grazing has led to the near eradication of wild fruits and vegetables.

“This is our land. We should be able to have access to food,” says Ms. Gilbert.

Riley Robinson/Staff

Marcella Gilbert holds up wild turnips gathered from the prairie at her home near the Cheyenne River Reservation, May 31, 2023. Native activists are working to obtain access to land for foraging for traditional foods as an aspect of the Land Back movement.

The National Parks Service, for its part, has been working to give tribes access to their ancestral lands.

The agency has cooperated with tribes at some national parks and monuments since at least the 1970s, but they have sought to boost those relationships in recent years. There are currently four parks where the agency has a co-management agreement with tribes. Last year the National Park Service released new guidance “to improve federal stewardship of national park lands and waters by strengthening the role [of tribal entities] in federal land management.”

On a morning drive into the Pine Ridge Reservation, Ms. Thunder Hawk witnesses this firsthand. Stopping at a Visitor Center for Badlands National Park – a section of which is co-managed with the Oglala Sioux Tribe – she notices two Native women in park ranger uniforms adjusting the daily “fire danger” sign.

“That never happened in the past, ever,” she says. “Now that’s a working relationship.”

Ms. Thunder Hawk would like to see those partnerships deepen. Indeed, as much as anything, the Land Back movement is about creating working relationships. It’s about a continuation of the movement, since the 1960s, away from assimilation and paternalism and toward Native self-determination and cooperation. Tribal governments, Native people, want sovereignty. This is to say they want the power to do things, not simply have things – like the seizure of the Black Hills, or the sale of reservation lands, or the construction of the Oahe Dam – done to them.

“When I think of Land Back that’s what I think of,” says Ms. Gilbert. “We haven’t been given that opportunity to participate.”

Riley Robinson/Staff

Marcella Gilbert (left) and her mother, Madonna Thunder Hawk, pose near Ms. Gilbert’s home, May 31, 2023, near the Cheyenne River in South Dakota.

On a warm May afternoon, she’s standing outside her home on the Cheyenne River Reservation, her youngest granddaughter sleeping in her arms. Two of her other granddaughters play in the grass and mud around her. Dogs sleep in the shade of her porch while breeze-tossed clothes dry on a washing line. 

Summer feels around the corner, the time of year when she and Ms. Thunder Hawk will take the young girls to the Missouri River a few miles away. There, they will play in the water high above land once filled with ancient cottonwood trees, land her grandfather once owned. They can never get those cottonwoods back, or her grandfather’s land.

But with the Land Back movement, Ms. Gilbert thinks they can get much more. Homes are gone, but they can build new, affordable, sustainable housing on reservations, as Ms. Thunder Hawk has helped do. The cottonwoods are gone, but with the help of an SDSU grant, Ms. Gilbert planted a grove of chokecherry trees. The sacred trees – used in ceremonies and arrow-making, among other things – flowered last spring.

Land Back “gives our people hope that we can be allowed to participate in the solution,” says Ms. Gilbert. “We do have something to offer.”

And while she laughs at the idea of closing Mount Rushmore or evicting homeowners and businesses – she struggles to imagine what would happen – one day they might even get the Black Hills.

She shakes her head at what that could look like.

“It’s not about kicking you off,” she says. “It’s about taking care of [the land] and bringing it back to its sacredness.”

This story was produced as part of a special Monitor series exploring the reparations debate, in the United States and around the world. Explore more.

The veteran schoolteacher will never forget the first time she broke Iranian law by venturing into public without her head covered, and felt the wind in her hair.

Widespread protests had been raging for three months, led by women and girls in an unprecedented wave of discontent that swept through scores of Iranian cities.

The catalyst was the mid-September death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been detained by Iran’s so-called morality police, allegedly for showing too much hair.

In response, Iranian women burned their headscarves in public and let their hair down. And – as the protests widened, with women and men together at the barricades facing a crackdown that reportedly left more than 500 dead and 20,000 detained – they demanded the toppling of the Islamist regime.

“I went to a mall [with] tears in my eyes,” says the primary school teacher, who gives the name Neda, recalling her first moments of breaking Iran’s strict hijab rules. “I can’t describe the feeling of air going through my hair.”

These days the 40-something professional routinely goes out with hair flowing: to the cafe, in the streets, and “everywhere.” “Now in my country it’s like feeling free, and brave,” Neda says. “A year ago, we even did not think it could happen at all.”

While the “Woman, Life, Freedom” street protests were largely snuffed out months ago, and stricter hijab rules have been enacted, legions of Iranian women like Neda are still refusing to wear hijab in public. That has left Iranian hard-liners scrambling to find ways to stanch and reverse this enduring defiance, which they deem an existential threat to the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Debate over enforcement

A new law now before Iran’s Majlis, or parliament, would impose heavier fines and add punishments like restricting access to bank accounts and confiscating vehicles, as well as up to three years in prison for breaking hijab rules. But the law, scheduled to be debated in July, also prohibits physical coercion on the street, something that has caused an uproar among hard-liners. They reject it as too lenient, though the law was drafted by the office of President Ebrahim Raisi and the judiciary, both of which are controlled by hard-liners.

The angry debate in the hard-line camp illustrates the depth of the challenge that the defiance poses to the Islamic Republic. First, by women’s widespread repudiation of what hard-liners see as the core revolutionary ideal of hijab. Then, more broadly, by rejection of intrusive social control over all aspects of life that the regime has exercised for 44 years.

“The impact of these laws remains to be seen,” says Tara Sepehri-Far, a Washington-based Iran researcher for Human Rights Watch.

AP/File

In this Sept. 19, 2022, photo obtained by the AP outside Iran, women run away from riot police in downtown Tehran.

“There seems to be a debate within the establishment about how to enforce them in a way that doesn’t cause a lot of friction with the general public, the way that resulted in the death in custody of Mahsa Amini and the whole protest – but also keeps this [hijab] stranglehold, because this is very much a core issue for hard-liners,” says Ms. Sepehri-Far.

While the authors of the new “chastity and hijab” law aim to strike a balance that avoids igniting more protests, others demand more “robust” deterrence that would include physically painful forms such as lashing.

Hard-line lawmaker Alireza Abbasi, for example, called June 10 for the hijab law to be written so “no one would dare to remove their headscarves.”

Indeed, in mid-June uniformed and plainclothes security forces again raided coffee shops in several cities and beat customers over hijab rules. And the police chief of a northern resort province was filmed telling a subordinate, “Break the neck of anyone who breaks the [hijab] norms ... and I will take responsibility.” 

One argument put forward by hard-liners is that the defiance plays into the hands of Iran’s external enemies who, in the words of one influential ayatollah, want “to rob us of the rule of religion.”

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei set the tone in early April, when he declared that rejecting hijab was religiously and politically “forbidden.” The “majority” of women who removed their headscarves, he said, were simple-minded and unaware that foreign spy agencies are operating “behind the scenes.”

“Those [anti-hijab] campaigns seek to preoccupy the minds of our youths with sensual urges,” warned Mr. Abbasi, “so that they will have no room to pursue missiles, the nuclear program, and knowledge-based technology.”

Still, protesting Iranian women from the start have rejected such claims of foreign meddling, just as they say any new law is incapable of reversing the achievements of their push for greater freedoms.

“This is a losing battle”

The scale of hijab rejection varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city. But support for compulsory hijab has been dropping at least since 2018, when the Center for Strategic Studies, under then-President Hassan Rouhani, a relatively moderate cleric, surveyed women and men about their views.

Officials and hard-liners with access to data “are likely more aware than us about how much of a losing battle this [hijab] has been,” says Ms. Sepehri-Far. “This is a downward trend; this is a losing battle.”

Middle East Images/AP/File

In this photo obtained by The Associated Press, Iranians protest in Tehran, Oct. 1, 2022, against the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was detained by the morality police.

And for women who continue to refuse to wear the hijab in public – up to 70% in some districts of Tehran, according to anecdotal accounts – their reasons range from displaying discontent toward the regime to reclaiming agency over the dress code.

“It is much more nuanced and multilayered than just refusing to wear hijab. ... [It’s] against a patriarchal society as well as a very abusive state,” says Ms. Sepehri-Far. “What has changed and transformed is a very precious gain and understanding that I very much doubt can be reversed through these laws.”

Stepping into the debate was the reformist former president, Mohammad Khatami, who sought to lessen hijab as an all-or-nothing revolutionary issue.

“Hijab differs from chastity,” Mr. Khatami told reformist women in Tehran. “We do endorse a chastity-oriented society, but that does not mean that we should equate chastity with hijab, and impose the latter.”

Those words sparked the ire of Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the hard-line Kayhan newspaper, who is appointed by the supreme leader and who lambasted Mr. Khatami as an “ignorant, hateful, and populist cleric.”

“Not wearing the hijab is equal to nudity, as it cannot end in removing the headscarf alone,” wrote Mr. Shariatmadari.

“Change ... takes time”

Such framing could not be further from the experience of women like Neda, who remains in awe of the scale of change she has witnessed. In a single week this month, the teacher has received three official warnings by text message to cover up, owing to traffic cameras that now flag license plate numbers with long-haired vehicle occupants.

“I can see these teen girls from the school near our house; they take off their hijab when they come out of school,” says Neda. “Some families don’t want to change and force their daughters to wear hijab. ... [But] you cannot find a place where all women have hijab or don’t have it. They have just learned to be in the same place with each other.”

And she adds, “I believe the younger generation is brave enough to change things, but it takes time.”

Vahid Salemi/AP/File

Two women at the old main bazaar of Tehran, one without the mandatory headscarf, Oct. 1, 2022.

That generation includes Nazanin, a 30-something architect who admits it is “really getting harder” to not wear a headscarf, “because it has become a symbol of civil disobedience, and you are not safe. All the time I feel like someone will come from behind my back and catch me.”

She ticks off the risks for women, which include fines or arrest, being banned from leaving the country, and deprivation of the rights of citizenship, such as a license. Cars are threatened with confiscation. And Nazanin was recently refused a ride by a taxi driver, who said he would be fined if she rode without covering her hair.

But she also takes heart in the profound experience of the protests – and the hijab disobedience they solidified.

“Those days are not something that I can ever forget, a combination of sadness and fear, at the same time with a sense of hope, courage, and love for people,” says Nazanin. The strangest thing, she says, was a first-ever feeling that the regime was “defeatable” and that “people can still be influential.”

“The most enjoyable part is that, despite all these brutalities, I see and experience so much courage,” says Nazanin. Still, the problems are not solved, “so there’s no reason for protests to end,” she says.

“People who become aware will not go back. ... The one who has experienced freedom cannot go back,” she says. “If there was no hope for change, so many people would not have risked their lives for it.

“The fire is just under the ashes, and ignites with the smallest spark.”

An Iranian researcher contributed to this report.

Matias Delacroix/AP

An employee hands a gun to a customer at a shooting club in São Paulo, Brazil, in October 2022. Many gun owners in Brazil are concerned that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is trying to curtail access to guns, which was expanded under former President Jair Bolsonaro.

Clad in protective goggles and pink earmuffs, Brenda Provesi looks straight into the camera and gushes about the semi-automatic, .40-caliber rifle she’s cradling in her arms.

“The trigger on this one is really nice,” says Ms. Provesi, who lives in the southern Brazilian city of Navegantes and runs Gunpowder and Blush, a YouTube channel for gun enthusiasts.

She pulls the trigger with a manicured finger, pumping bullets into a pink paper target a few meters away. “It’s a great weapon to start out with – for your wife, your daughter, your girlfriend,” she says.

Not long ago, few Brazilians could lay their hands on firearms like the one Ms. Provesi reviewed. But thanks to dozens of legal changes under the government of former President Jair Bolsonaro, it’s become far easier for civilians to legally buy powerful weapons once reserved for the army or police.

“Before Bolsonaro, people thought anyone with a gun was bad. Things are different now,” says Ms. Provesi.

Private gun ownership in Brazil has tripled to nearly 3 million over the past four years, according to data from Instituto Sou da Paz, a public policy group whose name means “I’m from peace.” About 2,000 new clubs for recreational shooting – with names like “The Bullets” and “American Shooting Club” – have opened across the country.

But Brazil’s new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is trying to unwind his predecessor’s gun policies, based on his belief that more guns in Brazil will only worsen an already high homicide rate.

In January, just a day after taking office, he signed a temporary decree freezing the sale of heavy weapons and the licensing of new shooting clubs. Now, his government is counting how many guns are in circulation, while mulling taxes on firearms and limiting the arsenals that civilians can own.

Changing course on guns in Brazil could prove challenging for Lula, as the leftist leader is commonly called. Brazil’s nascent gun culture is flourishing, and a political movement has started taking root around gun rights.

The Bolsonaro government “armed our society from an ideological point of view too,” says Ivan Marques, a specialist from the nonprofit Brazilian Public Security Forum. “It’s hard to backtrack from that.”

An American import?

In a country where public support for stringent gun control has long hovered around 70%, Mr. Bolsonaro worked tirelessly to transform Brazil into a place where owning a firearm is a symbol of freedom and security.

“Bolsonaro became the poster child of the gun industry,” says Bruno Langeani, manager of Instituto Sou da Paz.

Eraldo Peres/AP

At rallies and speeches, like this one in Brasília in 2022, former President Jair Bolsonaro used his trademark gesture of waving around finger guns.

Access to guns is limited in Brazil, one of the most violent countries in the world. It registered 40,800 homicides in 2022, about three-quarters of which were gun deaths, figures from the Brazilian Public Security Forum show. The per capita rate of violent deaths in Brazil is more than three times higher than in the United States, according to 2020 data.

Unlike the U.S., Brazil does not enshrine gun ownership in its constitution, and anyone who wants to buy a weapon here must go through a rigorous licensing process, which includes a psychological evaluation and a police assessment. Obtaining permission to carry outside the home is even more difficult.

Yet, echoing U.S. gun advocates, Mr. Bolsonaro argued Brazilians should have the right to protect their families from the eye-watering levels of crime here. He insisted that putting more guns in the hands of “good citizens” was the solution. At rallies and speeches, his trademark gesture became a finger gun.

Through a series of presidential orders, Mr. Bolsonaro allowed civilians to purchase assault rifles, doubled the duration of gun licenses to 10 years, and raised the number of firearms sport shooters could legally own from 16 to 60. “I want everyone armed,” Mr. Bolsonaro famously said last year.

This is “part of a political strategy,” says Erika Robb Larkins, a professor at San Diego State University, who researches violence and security in Brazil. “It’s a way to speak to conservative constituents.”

Although the country’s homicide rate remains one of the highest in the world, it has dropped by more than a quarter since 2017, falling to its lowest level in 16 years in 2022.

Experts link that dramatic drop in homicides to a mix of factors, including better policing and peace deals between drug gangs, rather than access to more guns. But Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies were quick to take credit for the decline, citing it as proof that more lenient gun laws curb violence.

That has bolstered Brazil’s pro-gun lobby and will likely make it more difficult for Lula to tighten restrictions, says Alan Fernandes, a former military police officer and a public security expert at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a think tank.

“This weakens the argument against guns,” he says.

Yet there are signs of fresh problems brewing. Last year, femicides hit record levels, with some experts pointing to the rising number of guns in Brazilian homes as a key factor. School violence, which is rare in Brazil, is also on the rise, with the deadliest attacks carried out with firearms.

“We’re only beginning to see the impact of these hundreds of thousands of new weapons that entered into circulation,” says Mr. Langeani. “We are going to feel their impact for generations to come.”

A political force

During his first two terms in office, between 2003 and 2010, Lula took a hard stance against guns. In a sweeping push to disarm the country, he asked Brazilians to turn in their firearms in exchange for a small reward. In 2005, he tried to ban civilians from owning guns. The bill failed, but lawmakers still passed some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world while Lula was in office.

Many working-class Brazilians have historically looked to government authorities to address the violence plaguing their neglected neighborhoods, not to guns.

“In communities living with high levels of urban crime, most people’s experiences with guns are not positive,” says Dr. Larkins. “They’re not necessarily dying to get their hands on a gun.”

But there are signs that Mr. Bolsonaro’s pro-gun rhetoric has had an impact: In a poll following last year’s elections, 37% of Brazilians said greater access to guns could help curb violence, up from 28% in 2021.

As powerful weapons have become accessible to civilians, authorities are having a harder time keeping them away from organized criminal groups. Last year, Rio police caught members of a notorious group with 26 rifles purchased legally by a licensed sports shooter.

“Criminal groups have always been able to get powerful guns,” says Mr. Fernandes. “But it has just become easier and cheaper.”

Ms. Provesi, the YouTube gun enthusiast, fired her first shot when she was 15 years old. Two years later, when she was attacked on the street, she decided that owning a gun was key to her safety.

Brazil’s limits on guns are too rigid, she says. “We have to face the reality of our country,” she says in a telephone interview. “The state is not able to ensure our security. So don’t restrict me from ensuring my own security.”

The political influence of pro-gun groups representing the views of Brazilians like Ms. Provesi is growing, too. In last year’s elections, 23 legislators aligned with pro-gun interests were elected, forming a small but influential block dubbed the “Bullet Lobby.”

Although the sway of these lawmakers is still limited, Mr. Marques, from the Brazilian Public Security Forum, says they could leave a legacy through legislation that slowly chips away at Brazil’s remaining regulations.

“This group is still not strong enough to change the laws around gun control,” says Mr. Marques. “But they could plant very, very dangerous seeds.”

Thomas Peter/Reuters/File

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit by the World Health Organization team tasked with investigating the origins of COVID-19, in Wuhan, China, Feb. 3, 2021.

New leaks and a declassified intelligence report have revived debate about how the COVID-19 pandemic started, and renewed calls for greater transparency not only from China but also the U.S. government.

Earlier this month, news reports citing unnamed U.S. officials – including in the intelligence community – said that a key coronavirus researcher in Wuhan, China, was hospitalized with COVID-19-like symptoms in November 2019. The revelation heightened speculation that the pandemic may have started with an accidental lab leak, and put new pressure on the Biden administration to share what it knows.

The director of national intelligence, mandated by Congress this spring to provide “any and all information” on links between the Wuhan lab and the pandemic’s origin, issued a 10-page summary on Friday. The document adds little to what was already known, however, reflecting either the intelligence community’s inability or unwillingness to make precise determinations about what sparked a costly global pandemic. In particular, it lacks key details Congress had asked for, including the names, roles, and symptoms of several of the lab’s researchers who were reportedly hospitalized.

A classified annex with some additional information will be provided to Congress, in order to protect agencies’ sources and methods. But some lawmakers say it’s not just them but the American people who deserve answers.

“President Biden should follow through with what Congress has required: to declassify all information we need to help answer one of the most important public health questions of our lifetime,” said GOP Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, who chairs the House committee overseeing public health agencies. “Doing so is critical to holding China accountable for its cover-up of the virus’ origin and being prepared to prevent the next pandemic. The American people deserve it.”

While the main push for transparency has come from those advocating further examination of the lab leak theory, some who believe the spillover most likely occurred naturally also say more information should be released. The challenge in the wake of a divisive pandemic is how to pursue that transparency in a way that doesn’t further politicize the issue and undermine the already eroded trust in public health officials. Whatever is uncovered could have major implications for not only U.S.-China relations, but also funding for scientific research and future pandemic prevention.

“I want the facts,” said Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan at the first hearing held by a new select committee on COVID-19 origins this spring. She noted that she had been among the first in the early days of the pandemic to call Robert Redfield – a virologist and former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who testified at the hearing that he believed a lab leak was most likely – about what had happened in Wuhan.

But many Democrats distrust the motives and approach of Republicans, particularly those who have vilified top figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose agency oversaw grants for virology research, including in the Wuhan lab. He has been accused of directing public attention away from the lab leak theory, including by misleading Congress on the nature of U.S.-funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“We cannot go down a dangerous path by pushing unfounded conspiracies about Dr. Fauci and other long-serving career public health officials,” added Congresswoman Dingell, pointing to statements by him and others supporting the investigation of both COVID-19 origins theories.

A divisive debate

Early on in the pandemic, U.S. public health officials and scientists in related fields dismissed the hypothesis that the pandemic could have originated in a Chinese lab as a xenophobic conspiracy theory. That largely shut down debate on the issue.

But in the ensuing months, a band of independent researchers, small nonprofits, and a handful of journalists began investigating whether the pandemic may have started at the Wuhan lab.

Among the information they unearthed via requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act were private communications among public health officials and scientists that showed that initially, they had more questions and concerns about a possible lab leak than they had let on publicly.

Researchers also found a 2018 grant proposal to the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) which, though rejected, showed that U.S. researchers and their collaborators in Wuhan had the interest and ability to manipulate coronaviruses to make them more contagious to humans.

The greatest challenge to transparency has been China’s refusal to share data, samples, and lab records. But some critics at home started to question why the U.S. government was not taking a more proactive role in determining what it could about the lab leak hypothesis – either to put it to rest, or to pressure China for answers.

“Why do we need FOIA lawsuits to learn basic facts about what research the U.S. government has been funding?” asks Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, who led The Lancet COVID-19 Commission that faulted numerous governments for a lack of transparency and urged further scientific investigation of both COVID origins hypotheses in its September 2022 report. Professor Sachs, who initially favored the natural origins theory but now sees a lab leak as a more likely hypothesis, has been criticized for dismissing from the commission scientists whom he said had conflicts of interest.

“It’s clear that the U.S. government lied repeatedly when it downplayed or even denied the possibility of a lab leak,” he says. “There has been no transparency of the government, which knows a lot more than it has so far told the public.” 

Until Friday, the Biden administration had produced only one report on COVID-19 origins: an inconclusive 17-page intelligence assessment published in October 2021. Several agencies assessed (with low confidence) that the pandemic had a natural origin, while one assessed (with moderate confidence) that it began with a lab leak, and others others were undecided.

Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, says he had pushed for greater transparency from intelligence agencies, particularly after FBI Director Christopher Wray came out in late February and confirmed reports that the FBI was the agency that leaned toward the lab leak hypothesis. His confirmation came days after a report that the Department of Energy – which has an intelligence wing – had changed its assessment from natural origin to lab leak.

Weeks later, Congress unanimously passed a bill requiring the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to declassify “any and all information” relating to potential links between the Wuhan lab and COVID-19 origins within 90 days. President Joe Biden signed the bill into law on March 20, giving the intelligence community a deadline of June 18.

Intelligence report

In May 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that according to a previously undisclosed intelligence report, three unnamed scientists working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been hospitalized with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 or seasonal illness in November 2019. Part of Congress’ 90-day mandate for ODNI was to provide information on their names and roles at the lab.

A June 13 report on the Substack “Public,” which was independently confirmed by the Wall Street Journal a week later, identified one of those scientists as Ben Hu, “who had done extensive laboratory research on how coronaviruses infect humans” – including on U.S.-funded projects. Lab leak proponents pointed to that as a smoking gun. 

The June 23 intelligence summary dismisses that, however. It says that four agencies see a natural origin as more likely, with two favoring a lab leak, and two undecided. All agencies assess that both hypotheses remain plausible. The report does not identify any of the three researchers, or their roles, but says that their hospitalizations do not support or refute the lab leak theory, because their symptoms could have been caused by a range of illnesses and there are “no indications” that they were hospitalized because of the coronavirus-like symptoms.

Mr. Hu, in an email to Science magazine, denied that he was ill in late 2019. 

The intelligence summary also noted that a 2021 report from the World Health Organization said that Wuhan lab employee samples all tested negative for antibodies that would show they had had COVID-19.

It did not mention that the WHO report was conducted jointly by China, and that the only American allowed to participate in that effort was funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars in U.S. grant money to the Wuhan lab for research on the potential of bat coronaviruses to jump to humans.

“I don’t think [the new intelligence report] advances our understanding one way or another,” says Professor Gostin, who concludes that the intelligence agencies have done what they can. “I would love to see China have a change of heart and allow an independent international investigation, even if it’s late in the day. But that’s unlikely.”

Ayda Suadioğlu’s fingers move as if they are extensions of industrial kitchen machinery.

She tears off pieces of dough, her hands drenched in olive oil, then flattens those pieces, rolls them into tubes, and twists them up in one breathless sequence.

Ms. Suadioğlu is making kaytaz böreği, pastries typical of Antakya in southern Turkey, topped with meat and pomegranate molasses. Next, she turns to içli köfte, or stuffed meatballs. Her hands mold each shell, composed of meat, bulgur, and spices, so nimbly they too look flawless. Both dishes will join a table of tabbouleh – this version with tomato and pepper pastes and pomegranate, to be scooped up with lettuce leaves – and lebeniye, a meatball and yogurt soup.

It is food for a feast, except the occasion isn’t festive. Ever since the Feb. 6 earthquake wiped out Ms. Suadioğlu’s catering company, she has been invited into private homes around Istanbul to cook the delicacies typical of the affected region, which, in a country famous for its gastronomy, is itself famous. Around today’s table sit those, like the chef, displaced by the earthquake, or with deep connections to the Turkish province at the border with Syria.

“When we cook, we feel like we are back home,” says Ms. Suadioğlu. “This is a way for the diaspora to feel they are surviving.”

Antakya, historically called Antioch, has been a crossroads of civilizations for over two millennia, and its cuisine is the perfect reflection of that melting pot. In 2017, UNESCO named Antakya, once a center of the spice trade along the historic Silk Road, a “Creative City of Gastronomy.” “It is said that 13 world civilizations have influenced and shaped its gastronomic identity with cuisines from the Middle East, Anatolia, and the Mediterranean,” noted UNESCO. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A few shops have reopened in the Long Bazaar in Antakya's old town, including this bakery. The bazaar was heavily damaged, and parts of it were destroyed, by the earthquake.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that in Antakya today, one of the worst-hit cities where the vast majority of buildings have fallen, it’s food that has budded as the first sign of the city’s rebirth, bringing color to a landscape overwhelmed with the drabness of rubble and ruins.

We arrive at the Long Bazaar, the city’s marketplace and the heart of Antakya with its brisk trade in spices, carpets, silk, and jewelry. Today, piles of rubble line the alleyways. Because most of the roof covering has been damaged, puddles form when it rains. And yet store owners have opened their doors in defiance of the destruction, hanging strings of dried eggplant and red pepper at their entranceways. Butchers, breadmakers, and artisans specializing in cookware have reopened. Chefs making künefe, a famous Antakyan dessert, monitor the sizzling strips of dough, as thin as spaghetti, that they will top with cheese, chopped pistachios, and syrup. It is then baked in a round copper dish and sliced into triangular pieces. The dessert is the pride of Antakya. In one shop, a man who recognized foreign visitors insists on buying us one.

He fails in his efforts – we have just been fed a giant meal with endless plates of mezze including hummus, baba ghanouj, and various types of cheeses and yogurts. Even so, it’s an early window into how the cuisine here is not just about the food, but the rituals of hospitality that surround it.

As travelers to many lands, Monitor photographer Melanie and I have had a front seat to human generosity, which is truly universal. But Turkey seems to take that beyond. It started after I was connected via email to a man originally from Antakya – who insisted, despite not knowing me at all, that he pick me up from the airport and take me to his home in Istanbul to first ... eat. Ever since, I have felt like I’ve known Iskender and Eda Azaroglu my entire life.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Correspondent Sara Miller Llana helps herself to food put out by families she’s interviewing in Antakya, Turkey. People insist on sharing food or tea with visitors – no matter how poor or desperate their situation.

That kind of hospitality intensified as we traveled to the earthquake zone. When we slept in a local businessman’s prefabricated container on our first night in Antakya, we arrived to a lunch, then a dinner, and then a breakfast – which all rank among the best meals of my reporting life. After every interview, residents with no home offered to prepare food. At one point, we visited with a group of women living in tents. One insisted on serving us coffee with little chocolates. As our conversation dragged into a second and third hour and we moved into her damaged home next to where she is sleeping with her family on the sidewalk, she pulled out flatbread and yogurt drizzled with olive oil. “I apologize,” she said as I, starving, graciously accepted her offering. She explained that since the earthquake they could no longer access fresh fruits and vegetables. “You are living in a tent,” I reminded her. 

Ms. Azaroglu, who organized a humanitarian effort in the quake’s aftermath and ended up accompanying us on our trip, lost 10 family members in the quake. Her husband lost his childhood best friend, Kemal Tolu. On our last day she stopped by the home of a woman to whom she had provided a tent and stove in those freezing early days. The woman, now living in a container next to her damaged apartment, insisted on thanking her. So she stuffed Ms. Azaroglu’s bag with pounds of grape leaves, flatbreads with pepper, and stuffed meatballs. It was all so heavy the bag broke.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Women prepare "gözleme," a flatbread similar to a quesadilla with fillings like cheese, spinach, or meat, in a small cafe on the Bosporus waterfront in Istanbul.

By that point, I shouldn’t have been surprised – by those with nothing who share everything they can. It was apparent from the very start, at the table that Ms. Suadioğlu prepared. She lost five industrial ovens in the earthquake, 285 pounds of prepared food, and her home.

But she smiled as she cooked, contemplating restarting a new business, at least at this phase of transition. And the people around this boisterous table smiled too – not in joy so much as grace, unified in shared grief but also in shared culture and a deep appreciation for it.

“It tastes like the sun,” says Ms. Suadioğlu. “Somehow the sun gets inside of our food.”

AP

Muslim worshipers offer Eid al-Adha prayers next to the Dome of the Rock shrine at the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City, June 28. Muslims celebrate the holiday to mark the willingness of the Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham to Christians and Jews) to sacrifice his son.

When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel and the Palestinian territories at the start of the year, he asked leaders to “take positive steps that could create a better path forward,” not simply avoid actions that would “add fuel to the fire.” To make his point, he promised financial relief and 4G cellular networks to the Palestinians.

Since then, the West Bank has experienced the deadliest violence in nearly 20 years with almost 200 people killed, including civilians attacking civilians.

It would be easy to condemn the causes of this spike in violence in hopes condemnation might change a decadeslong problem in the Middle East. Yet something happened this week that harks back to Mr. Blinken’s call for positive action.

On June 27, Israel’s ceremonial president, Isaac Herzog, placed a telephone call to Mahmoud Abbas, his counterpart in the Palestinian Authority, to express his concern over recent attacks by “extremist” Jewish settlers on innocent Palestinians and the need to bring them to justice. He emphasized the need to thwart terrorism on both sides to prevent harm to good neighborliness.

In addition, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called one of his counterparts, Hussein al-Sheikh at the Palestinian Authority’s General Authority of Civil Affairs. He likewise expressed concern at the “rioters” among Jewish settlers and the need to bring justice. Later he said Israeli Jews “cannot behave like our enemies” in terrorizing civilians.

These public gestures of concern are, of course, merely gestures. Yet they suggest a step toward moving forward, staying connected, and treating each other as equals, not as enemies. The calls, with their tone of contrition, also might help bolster a very weak Palestinian Authority, which remains the seed for a Palestinian state, while showing a softer side to the hard-right Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The world is watching this tense crisis and asking for solutions. On Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council “called on all parties to refrain from unilateral actions that further inflame tensions.”

Conciliatory phone calls may not be enough. But in the Middle East, any humility is a start. During his call, Defense Minister Gallant wished Mr. Sheikh a happy Eid al-Adha (a Muslim holiday) and hoped the holiday “will serve as an opportunity to strengthen security and stability in the region.” Both sides cannot afford to miss an opportunity to create an opportunity.