Precedent setting Supreme Court decision on interpretation of the 'Free exercise' clause of the first amendment to the US Constitution which supposedly protects freedom of religion. An organization representing Native groups in northwestern California which exists to protect ceremonial sites and cemetaries sought to block the expansion of a road for logging because it would decimate religious sites. About 15,000 Native peoples live in the area, including Tolowa, Yurok, Wiyot, Hupa, Karok, Modoc, Klamath and Shasta peoples. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association was founded in 1970 to respond to both grave robbing by settlers as well as to help assist Native peoples trying to block development or other desecration including by archaologists of burial grounds. Their organization has many wins worth celebrating but this case is considered an important precendent setting loss. The proposed road went through an area known as Chimney Rock which is sacred. The US Forest Service Environmental Impact Statement found that the damage done to the land would be severe and irreparable and advised against the road and the logging. The EIS rejected the recommendation and wanted to go forward with the project so the Native group and the state of California sued for an injuction against the project and won. The Forest Service appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court who decided in their favor in this landmark case. Their decision held that the destruction did not violate the Constitution, because it would not force tribal members to violate their religious beliefs or punish them for practicing their religions. This precedent is important to many currently pending cases today and enshrines the basic idea central to the United States which is that Native people's religions and cultural practices are less than that of Euro-Americans. It explicitly allows the wholesale destruction of ceremonial and sacred sites. From the ruling: "Whatever rights the Indians may have to the use of the area, however, those rights do not divest the Government of its right to use what is, after all, its land"

Born today in 1944, Marie Smallface-Marule was a Kainai Nation member, Indigenous rights activist and lifelong anti-colonial worker. She did work in Africa and across Canada against colonialism and for community development and education. She was an important early worker for National Indian Brotherhood and helped found the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. An instructor at University of Lethbridge for decades, she was also the President of Red Crow College, the first tribally controlled community college in Canada.

Tuaiwa Hautai Kereopa (known as Eva Rickard) was a Māori activist for land rights and for women's rights within Māoridom. Her methods included public civil disobedience and she is best known for leading the occupation of the Raglan golf course in the 1970s. Tuiawa belonged to the Tainui hapū of Whāingaroa, referred to during the land struggle of later decades as Tainui Āwhiro. In 1972 Tuaiwa began petitioning the government for the return of Te Kōpua, which was supposed to have been returned when it was no longer required as an airstrip. In 1976, Tuaiwa and members of Tainui Āwhiro and Te Matakite o Aotearoa fenced off the urupā on the golf course, and performed karakia to protest the desecration of tapu. In 1978 Tuaiwa invited tohunga and supporters from across the country to gather at the Te Kōpua urupā, where a ceremony would be performed on the day of the golf club’s annual tournament. Before the ceremony could take place, Tuaiwa and 16 other activists were arrested for trespass. This incident became the defining moment for Tuaiwa in the struggle to get Te Kōpua returned. On 30 November 1983, after numerous court cases and negotiations, Te Kōpua (excluding the airfield itself) was returned with conditions. Tuaiwa refused to compromise her principles and settle, but in 1991, when the Crown withdrew its demand for payment for the land, the property was finally vested in the Te Kōpua Trust. She is buried at Te Kōpua in the urupā where she had once been arrested.