Episode #4: Maori Sovereignty Issues - Part I
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for Part I of a two-part series on Maori sovereignty issues. Today’s episode features Maori filmmaker Moana Sinclair (Ngati Rangatahi, Kauwhata, Raukawa, and Maniapoto) and Sir Edward Taikahurei Durie (Ngati Kauwhata). They will discuss the documentary film written and directed by Sinclair, Justice Durie, about Durie’s contribution to the law in terms of Maori rights in Aotearoa New Zealand. Sir Edward “Eddie” Taihakurei Durie was the first Maori appointed as a Justice of the High Court of New Zealand and is regarded as leading legal expert on the Treaty of Waitangi. Moana Sinclair is a filmmaker whose works include the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Maori story. Her work includes several film scripts for TVNZ and Maori Television, and she heads Te Haa Productions. In addition, she is a human rights attorney working with her tribes. Sinclair worked at the Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues as a Human Rights Officer at the United Nations New York from 2001 to 2004. Original air-date: 8-09-10.

Episode #3: The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for an interview with Stacy Leeds (citizen of the Cherokee Nation) on The Tribal Law and Order Act, which passed the US Congress on July 21, 2010. The legislation was supported by key Democrats and Republicans who worked across party lines in the name of reducing crime on reservations. Supporters of the legislation, including tribal leaders, have cited illegal gang and drug activity, as well as the epidemic of rape committed against Native women that has gone unpunished and unabated due (in part) to a “jurisdictional maze” of federal, state and tribal laws that have resulted in countless cases falling through the cracks. President Obama has committed to signing the Act into law and sees it as, “an important step to help the federal government better address the unique public safety challenges that confront tribal communities.” What shape did the prolonged advocacy for this legislation take? What are the “unique public safety challenges” on reservations? What does the Act include and how does it increase tribal authority over crimes committed on reservations? Is further policing-with the boost of tribal and federal law enforcement-the answer? Leeds is currently the Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law at the University of Kansas School of Law, where she also directs the Tribal Law and Government Center. She as served as a tribal judge for several tribes, and is currently the Chief District Court Judge at Prairie Band Potawatomi and Chief Justice of the supreme Courts for both the Kaw Nation and the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma. She is the only woman to have served as a Justice on the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court. Original air-date: 7-27-10.

Episode #2: The Logic of Settler Colonialism
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui for an interview with Patrick Wolfe - one of the premier scholars of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism is a specific type of colonial process in which settlers seek to create a new society in a foreign territory through the conquest or elimination of the territory’s indigenous peoples. Patrick Wolfe is Charles La Trobe Research Fellow in the History Program at La Trobe University, Australia, as well as Charles Warren Fellow in US history at Harvard University. He has researched, taught, written and lectured on race, colonialism, Aboriginal history, theories of imperialism, genocide and the history of anthropology. He is the author of a path breaking book, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (published by Continuum 1999). In 2008, he was appointed to the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lectureship Program. He is currently working on a comparative history of settler-colonial regimes of race in Australia, the USA, Brazil and Palestine/ Israel. Original air-date: 7-13-10.

Episode #1: Keep Northern Coastal waters accessible to the California Coastal Tribes!
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui for an episode about the struggle to keep Northern Coastal waters accessible to the California Coastal Tribes. The issue has to do with the implementation of The Marine Life Protection Act of 1999 that is part of the California Fish and Game Code. The Marine Wildlife Protection Initiative is a public-private partnership established to help the State of California implement the Act, which requires California to reevaluate all existing Marine Protected Areas and potentially design new Marine Protected Areas that together function as a statewide network. Where do tribal nations fit into this state-driven scheme? What are the effects of the Act and its revised implementation on traditional shoreline access for California Coastal tribes? It seems that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) process threatens the religious, subsistence and ceremonial rights of coastal tribes. For thousands of years, tribal peoples have gathered seaweed, mussels, abalone and fish from the inter-tidal zone for subsistence and ceremonial purposes. On the show we will hear from three Kashia Pomo women based on the reservation at Stewart’s Point in northwestern Sonoma County, CA, who are leading the fight to keep the area open for tribal access. Guests include including two tribal elders: Violet Parrish (Kashia Pomo) and her sister Vivian Parrish Wilder (Kashia Pomo), and their niece and daughter (respectively), Violet Wilder (Kashia Pomo). Original air-date: 6-22-10

Episode #4: Vermont’s Legacy of Coerced Sterilization
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for an episode that focuses on a proposal being considered by the Vermont legislature to apologize for its 1931 Sterilization Act, which was part of a eugenics campaign that targeted persons of French Canadian and Abenaki ancestry, as well as other non-Anglos and individuals deemed mentally disabled. Our guests on the program include Nancy Gallagher, author of Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State, and Judy Dow (Abenaki) who sits on the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs. Original air-date: 2-23-10.

Episode #5:Tribal Sovereignty Part I: Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for an episode of “Indigenous Politics” that features two talks from a recent panel on tribal sovereignty held at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. Listeners will hear: John Echohawk (Pawnee) give a legal and historical overview of tribal sovereignty based on his work at the Native American Rights Fund; and J. Cedric Woods (Lumbee) discuss cultural sovereignty, and what sovereignty still means to tribes who have either been denied federal recognition, not received it, or been “terminated.” John Echohawk (member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma) was a co-founder of the Native American Rights Fund in 1970 and has been its Executive Director since 1977. The Native American Rights Fund has been involved in most of the major Indian rights litigation since 1970. In 1992, he served on the Clinton-Gore transition team for the Department of the Interior and in 2008 he served on the Obama-Biden transition team for the Department of the Interior. J. Cedric Woods, Ph.D. (citizen of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina), combines over a decade of tribal government experience with research and currently serves as the interim director for the Institute for New England Native American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. He has served in a variety of capacities for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, including: Director of Career Development, Research Analyst, Tribal Government Spokesman, and Deputy Chief Operating Officer. Original air-date: 3-23-10.

Episode #6: Tribal Sovereignty Part II: Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for Part II of a two-part episode featuring a panel on tribal sovereignty held at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. The show features three panelists who specifically focus on issues facing the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation: Betsy Conway an attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation; James T. Jackson, the Tribal Council Treasurer of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe; and Jackson T. King, Jr., General Counsel of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. Listeners will learn about a variety of legal and social issues relating to tribal governance including: assisting the Tribe’s Judicial Committee in drafting legislation; working with various tribal regulatory bodies including the Gaming Commission and the Mashantucket Employment Rights Office; and representing the Tribal Nation in various jurisdictional challenges including those related to taxation, labor and employment issues, and enforcement of tribal court judgments. Original air-date: 3-23-10.

Episode #7: Shattered Hearts: the commercial sexual exploitation of American Indian women and girls in Minnesota
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for an episode that focuses on a groundbreaking 2009 research report Shattered Hearts: the commercial sexual exploitation of American Indian women and girls in Minnesota that was commissioned by the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center (MIWRC) of Minneapolis, MN. The release of the Shattered Hearts report has generated national interest from legislators, policy makers and Tribal communities. Believed to be the first research in the country analyzing the scope of sexual exploitation against American Indians, the report provides a springboard to action for addressing widespread sexual victimization. The guests on the program will be: Dr. Alexandra (Sandi) Pierce, the principal investigator and author of Shattered Hearts, who is currently the senior consultant for Othayonih Research and Evaluation Services LLC; and Suzanne Koepplinger, M.A., the Executive Director of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center. The MIWRC is a 25 year old social service non-profit that provides direct service and empowering resources to American Indian families so that they can achieve a better quality of life. These services address the multiple issues impacting the Indian community, including homelessness, poverty, addictions, domestic and sexual violence, and need for family and children’s services. Original air-date: 4-12-10.

Episode #8: Indigenous Implications of Arizona SB 1070
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui for an episode focused on the implications for indigenous people(s) of the recent passage of Arizona State legislation SB 1070, which makes it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally, and requires local law enforcement to question people about their immigration status if there is reason to suspect they are in the country illegally. How does this new law affect those who are Native? Our guests on the show today include Jose R. Matus (Yaqui), Director, Indigenous Alliance Without Borders (Alianza Indigena Sin Fronteras), and Alex Soto (Tohono O’odham Nation) from O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective. At the center of a critical indigenous perspective on the new legislation is the recognition that the US nation’s boundaries are not tribal boundaries. This has dire consequences for the many tribal nations, especially those whose traditional lands divided by the US-Mexico border. In other words, those who are also seriously impacted by this offensive law descend from peoples who lived in the Sonoran Desert centuries the existence of the United States. Original air-date: 5-11-10.

Episode #9: Interview with Robert Warrior
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for an episode that features an interview with Professor Robert Warrior (enrolled member of the Osage Nation), Director of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is first and current President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and the author of several books: The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction, American Indian Literary Nationalism (with Craig Womack and Jace Weaver). Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (with Paul Chaat Smith) and Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions. Topics for discussion will include his concept of “intellectual sovereignty,” the Osage National Editorial Board and the free press, his endorsement of the US Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel, Palestine and Edward Said, American Indian activism, the co-founding of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and its upcoming conference in Arizona in the wake of the passage of SB 1070 (a bill that authorizes police to racial profile the general population for undocumented people) and HB 2281 (a bill banning ethnic studies). Original air-date: 5-18-10.

Episode #10: Native Youth and Sexual Health
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui for an interview with Jessica Yee (Mohawk), the founder and Executive Director of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, an organization by youth and for youth. The Native Youth Sexual Health Network (NYSHN) is a North-America wide organization working on issues of healthy sexuality, cultural competency, youth empowerment, reproductive justice, and sex positivity by and for Native youth. Jessica Yee is currently serving as the first inaugural Chair of the National Aboriginal Youth Council at the Canadian Aboriginal AIDS Network, as well as the International Indigenous HIV/AIDS Working Group, and she is also the first North American youth representative at MenEngage International Alliance for Gender Equality. She is the 2009 recipient of the YWCA Young Woman of Distinction award, a 2009/2010 Role Model for the National Aboriginal Health Organization, and was recently named one of 20 International Women’s Health Heroes by Our Bodies/Our Blog and one of the Toronto Star’s People to Watch for 2010. Original air-date: 6-8-10.

Episode #2: Crisis in Peru: State-Back Massacre in Response to Indigenous Resistance
Join your host J. Kehaulani Kauanui for a special edition that focuses on the recent state-backed police massacre of indigenous peoples in the northern Amazon of Peru. On Friday, June 5th, which happened to be World Environment Day, some 600 riot police and helicopters attacked a peaceful indigenous blockade outside of Bagua a northern Peruvian Amazonian province. According to leader Miguel Palacin, president of Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indigenas (CAOI) or the Andean Coordination of Indigenous Organizations, the police killed at least 250 indigenous Peruvians and injured more than 150. Witnesses attest that the police fired live ammunition and tear gas into the crowd who were engaged in a peaceful blockade to protest oil and mining projects in the region as part of the Peru Free Trade Agreement with the United States. Reports in the U.S. state that over 30,000 indigenous people have been blockading roads, rivers, and railways to demand the repeal of new laws that allow oil, mining and logging companies to enter indigenous territories without seeking their prior consultation or consent. Our guest is Shane Greene who joins the show by telephone from Lima, Peru. Greene is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indian University where he is a Faculty Associate, Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change (ACT). He is the author of a book just released this year titled, Customizing Indigeneity: Paths to a Visionary Politics in Peru, which examines indigenous activism among the Aguaruna, an ethnic group at the forefront of Peru’s Amazonian Movement. Original air-date: 06-16-09.

Episode #3: For the Seventh Generation: American Indians, Youth, and Education
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui for an episode that will focus on the politics of education, representations, and youth. The first guests is Debbie Reese (Nambe Pueblo Tribe), publisher of an Internet blog and resource called American Indians in Children’s Literature that is used by parents, librarians, teachers, and college professors in Education, Library Science, and English Literature. Reese will offer critical perspectives of indigenous peoples in children’s books, the school curriculum, popular culture, and society-at-large. Reese is an assistant professor in the American Indian Studies program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches courses including: Politics of Children’s Literature, Introduction to American Indian Studies, and History of American Indian Education. Her current research projects include a book titled, Indians as Artifacts: How Images of Indians are used to Nationalize America’s Youth. The second guest is Loren Spears (Narragansett), the Founder and Executive Director of the Nuweetooun School, Rhode Island. Nuweetooun is a Native school open to all children that has a core curriculum of Native culture and history combined with environmental studies. Spears received her Masters in Education from the University of New England in 2002. She spent 12 years teaching under-served youth in Rhode Island public schools. She was a Narragansett Tribunal Judge, and is currently serving her people on Tribal Council. Original air-date: 06-23-09.

Episode #4: Militarization and Indigenous Women
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for an episode that will focus on the gendered effects of militarization on indigenous women. The first guest is Vivian Newdick, co-founder of the Comité pro-Reparaciones de para las Hermanas Gonzalez de Chiapas, which was formed in the Fall of 2008 by former volunteers at the Chiapas Women’s Rights Center, a Mexico-based nonprofit. The Comité is organizing to create political pressure on the Mexican government in support of the González sisters. On June 4th, 1994, in the town of Altamirano, Chiapas, three indigenous Tzeltal sisters, one of whom was a minor, were detained by members of the Mexican military, and were tortured and raped by the soldiers. The case was presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 1996, which led to a ruling from the Commission in 2001 that found the Mexican State had violated a range of fundamental human rights contained in the Convention. In March 2009, the OAS human rights commission has weighed in on the case. The Comité is committed to linking the Gonzálezes with US-based organizations that struggle against state violence against indigenous women. The second guest is Margo Taméz, co-founder the Lipan Apache Women Defense with her mother, Eloisa G. Taméz. The US government has seized their family’s land – held in title from an agreement with Spain in 1767—without consent or consultation for the US/Mexico border wall. The official government estimate for the wall is 7.5 million per mile. This is an 18-foot high cement and steel border scheduled to cross all 1,969 miles of the dividing line between Mexico and the US, 1400 miles of which is claimed by the Apache as traditional homeland. Taméz has been a guest on the show before and returns to give us an update on the case since Obama took office. Taméz is Lipan Apache and Jumano-Apache from two Texas-Mexico border communities. Original air-date: 07-14-09.

Episode #5: Decolonizing Indigenous Masculinity
Join your host, Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for an episode featuring Dr. Ty Kāwika Tengan (Kanaka Maoli), author of: Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai’i, published by Duke University Press. Native Men Remade is an ethnography of the Hale Mua (men’s group) that explores the ways in which Hawaiian warriorhood and masculinity have been re-articulated in the Hawaiian cultural nationalist movement. As a member of the group and an ethnographer, Tengan analyzes their practices in the context of indigenous decolonization, and Polynesian traditions. Tengan is from Maui and attended Kamehameha High School and Dartmouth College. He received his PhD in anthropology at UHM and currently holds a joint appointment as Associate Professor in ethnic studies and anthropology. Original air-date: 07-28-09.

Episode #6: Free Leonard Peltier
Join your host J. Kehaulani Kauanui for an episode featuring the ongoing struggle to free Leonard Peltier (Anishinabe, Dakota, and Lakota) from prison. On July 28th the U.S. Parole Commission in Lewisburg, Penn. reviewed the case of American Indian Movement activist who has been held in prison for over three decades. Peltier was convicted in 1977 and sentenced to two consecutive life terms for the murder of Special Agents Jack R. Coler and Ronald A. Wiilliams, killed in a June 26, 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Debate has continued since then over Peltier’s guilt and the fairness of his trial; supporters consider him a political prisoner. On the show we will learn about the ongoing work of The Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee, which has 37 branch support groups throughout the United States. Our guest is a man named Wanbli (descendant of Sioux Valley Dakota) who is the National Spokesperson for the Committee who will give us an update on the Peltier case. Original air-date: 8-11-09.

Episode #7: Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong- Paul Chaat Smith
Join your host J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Ph.D. for a an episode featuring Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) who will discuss his new book, Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong is a collection of essays written from 1992 to 2008, which chronicles the evolution of his views on the politics of being a Native American, beginning with his involvement as a committed activist within the American Indian Movement to his present employment with the federal government. Lowery Stokes Sims, Curator, Museum of Arts and Design, said of the book, “Paul Chaat Smith pulls no punches and delivers not a few body blows. Smith’s clear and at times sardonic voice expresses everything Indians might have wanted to say but up to now didn’t feel they could.” In 2001 Smith joined the National Museum of the American Indian, where he currently serves as Associate Curator. His projects include the permanent history gallery, performance artist James Luna’s Emendatio at the 2005 Venice Biennial, and Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian. He is currently organizing Brian Jungen: Strange Comfort, which opens in Washington in October, 2009. Back in the 1970s Smith was the founding editor of the American Indian Movement’s Treaty Council News, and in 1996, with Robert Warrior, he co-authored Like a Hurricane: the Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. Original air-date: 8-25-09.

Episode #8: Native Written Literacy, Resistance, and the Recovery of Native Space
Join your host, Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui for an episode featuring Dr. Lisa Brooks (Abenaki) on the program to discuss her new book, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. In The Common Pot, Brooks focuses on the role of writing as a tool of social reconstruction and land reclamation. She documents and analyzes the ways in which Native leaders-including Samson Occom, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, and William Apess-adopted writing as a tool to assert their rights and reclaim land. Brooks is an Assistant Professor of History and Literature and of Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, where she teaches courses in Native American literature, with an emphasis on historical, political, and geographic contexts. She also serves on the Faculty Advisory Board of the Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP). She co-authored the collaborative volume, Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (2008). She serves on the Editorial Board of Studies in American Indian Literatures, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Council, and on the Advisory Board of Gedakina, a non-profit organization focused on indigenous cultural revitalization, educational outreach, and community wellness in northern New England. Original air-date: 9-08-09.

Episode #9: Gedakina: Revitalizing A Native Way of Life
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for an episode featuring the community work of a non-profit organization called Gedakina (g’ dah keen nah), which means, “Our world, a way of life” in the Abenaki language. Gedakina is a multigenerational endeavor to strengthen and revitalize the cultural knowledge and identity of Native American youth and families that are rural, urban and reservation communities from across northern New England. Our first of two guests on the show will be Rick Pouliot (Megantiquois Abenaki), the Chair and Co-founder of Gedakina. Over the past sixteen years, he has focused on programs and initiatives that positively impact First Nations youth and families. The second guest will be Jesse Bowman Bruchac (St Francis/Sokoki band of the Abenaki), who has worked extensively over the past two decades in projects involving the preservation of the Abenaki language, music, and traditional culture. In 2009 Jesse launched http://WesternAbenaki.com –a website offering a keyword searchable database of the language, lessons and a variety show produced entirely in Abenaki. Original air-date: 09-22-09.

Episode #10: High Stakes Indian Gaming and Sovereignty
Join your host J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Ph.D. for a special episode featuring Jessica Cattelino who will discuss her new book, High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke University Press, 2008). In 1979, Florida Seminoles opened the first tribally operated high-stakes bingo hall in North America. At the time, their annual budget stood at less than $2 million. By 2006, their net income from gaming had exceeded $600 million. This dramatic shift from poverty to relative economic security has created substantial benefits for tribal citizens, including employment, universal health insurance, and social services. In High Stakes, Cattelino documents how this economic strength has also enabled renewed political self-governance that has transformed decades of U.S. federal control. At the same time, this development has brought new dilemmas to reservation communities and triggered outside accusations that Seminoles are sacrificing their culture by embracing capitalism. Cattelino is an associate professor of anthropology at UCLA. Her research and writing center on indigenous sovereignty in Native North America, the social meanings of economic action, environment, and settler colonialism. Her current research project explores citizenship and territoriality in the Florida Everglades, with focus on the Seminole Big Cypress Reservation and the nearby agricultural town of Clewiston. Original air-date: 10-13-09.

Episode# 11: Brothertown Indian Nation Rejected for Federal Recognition
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for an episode featuring an interview with Kathleen A. Brown-Pérez (Brothertown Indian Nation) who is the Chair of her tribe’s Federal Acknowledgment Committee and liaison to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Office of Federal Acknowledgment. On August 17, 2009, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) issued a “proposed finding against acknowledgment” of the Brothertown Indian Nation because, according to the office, “the petitioner does not meet five of the seven mandatory criteria for federal acknowledgment.” These seven criteria are part of the U.S. federal procedures for “Establishing that an American Indian Group exists as an Indian Tribe” and determining whether any petitioning group is an Indian tribe within the meaning of federal law. The BIA’s finding that the tribe was terminated by the 1839 act of Congress is the most controversial because one of the seven criteria is that the petitioning tribe must not have been terminated by Congress. The Brothertown Indian Nation was formed in 1785 by members of various eastern coastal nations-Mohegan, Pequot, Narragansett, Montauk, Niantic and Tunxis-who moved to Oneida territory in upstate New York where the Oneida Indian Nation had set aside land for them. The Brothertown was formalized in 1785, and later moved to Wisconsin where a majority of members still live. Kathleen A. Brown-Pérez teaches American Indian Studies at Commonwealth College, the honors college at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has a B.A. in political science from Augustana College (IL), and a Juris Doctorate degree and an MBA with a concentration in discrimination law, both from the University of Iowa. For three decades she has worked with her tribe, the Brothertown Indian Nation (Wisconsin), on their quest for federal acknowledgment. Original air-date: 10-27-09.

Episode #12: Hawaiian Independence and International Law
Join your host J. Kehaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli) for an episode that will feature two presentations from an event recently held at the Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai`i, in Manoa, called “`Ike: Historical Transformations: Reading Hawai`i’s Past to Probe Its Future.” The first is by Keanu Sai (Kanaka Maoli), and the second is by J. Kehaulani Kauanui. They each presented on a panel called, “International Routes: De-occupation, Decolonization, and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” The mission of the session was to discuss the modern trajectory of the Hawaiian Islands within the context of Hague Regulations on the law of occupation, the U.N. Decolonization Protocols, and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Keanu Sai earned his Ph.D. in Political Science specializing in Hawaiian Constitutionalism and International Relations. He is a founding member of the Hawaiian Society of Law & Politics. Sai served as lead Agent for the Hawaiian Kingdom in arbitration proceedings before the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, Netherlands, from November 1999-February 2001. He also served as Agent in a Complaint against the United States of America concerning the prolonged occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom, which was filed with the United Nations Security Council on July 5, 2001. Besides producing the radio show “Indigenous Politics” J. Kehaulani Kauanui is an associate professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Duke University Press, 2008). She is also the co-founder of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and was recently elected to a three year term on the governing council. Original air-date: 11-23-09.

Episode #13: Nahuacalli, Embassy of the Indigenous Peoples
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for an episode of “Indigenous Politics” featuring Tupac Enrique Acosta - general coordinator of the indigenous human rights organization, Tonatierra, which focuses on cultural education initiatives. He also serves as a custodian for the Nahuacalli, Embassy of the Indigenous Peoples, which supports “local-global holistic indigenous community development initiatives in accord with the principle of Community Ecology and Self Determination.” It has operated over the past eleven years from Phoenix, Arizona as an instrument of communication for and coordination of the Indigenous Peoples movement for self determination.
Original air-date: 12-08-09.

Episode #14: Indigenous Librarianship and Native Literacy
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for an episode that features Dr. Loriene Roy, Professor in the School of Information, the University of Texas at Austin. She is Anishinabe, enrolled on the White Earth Reservation, a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. Roy will discuss issues of indigenous librarianship, and how the role of cultural custodian is a key part of helping to preserve Native languages, memories, and lifeways. She will tell us about the current state of tribal libraries, and work as director of “If I Can Read, I Can Do Anything,” A National Reading Club for Native Children, a Native literacy project she founded in 1999. Roy is the former President for the American Library Association (2007-2008). Since 2001, she has served as member of the International Indigenous Librarians’ Council. She was given the 2009 Leadership Award, National Conference Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums. Original air-date: 12-22-09.

Episode #2: Crisis on the Schaghticoke Reservation
Join your host, Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui for an episode focuses on a crisis on the Schaghticoke reservation in Kent, CT. A non-Indian male intruder who claims to be the spokesman of an un-enrolled Schaghticoke woman who says she is the chief of the Schaghticoke Indian Tribe is bull-dozing land to create road, cutting down trees, and even desecrating sacred sites. The reservation land is held in trust by the state Department of Environmental Protection. However, state officials and even state police have refused to stop the non-Native trespasser. Guests will discuss the course of events, and the barriers they face in trying to get the attention of state officials who claim their hands are tied because of a “leadership conflict.” Hear from: Katherine Saunders, Chair of the Preservation Committee for the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation; esteemed Schaghticoke elder, Trudie Lamb Richmond, Connecticut Native American Heritage Advisory Council, and the Preservation Committee for the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation; Nicholas F. Bellantoni, the state archaeologist with the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History and Archaeology Center at the University of Connecticut; and the Chief of the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation, Richard Velky. Original air-date: 1-27-09.

Episode #3: The Constitutional Referendum in Bolivia and its Implications for Indigenous Peoples
Join your host, Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui for an episode that focuses on recent developments in Bolivia, where a national referendum held on January 25, 2009 passed after a long and contentious road in order advance a new constitution under the leadership of Bolivian President Evo Morales, the first Indian president of a South American country. On the show, we will hear from Dr. Victoria Bomberry (Muscogee) and Dr. José Antonio Lucero about the politics of the new constitution and its implications for the indigenous peoples of Bolivia, and the ongoing democratization project. Dr. Victoria Bomberry is an assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside where she teaches Native American Studies. She is the International Coordinator of Movimiento de Mujeres Originarios y Indigenas de Qollosuyu, Bolivia, and the Project Director of Abya Yala Women’s Circle. Dr. José Antonio Lucero is an assistant professor at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of a new book, Struggles of Voice: The Politics of Indigenous Representation in the Andes (University of Pittsburgh Press). Original air-date: 2-10-09

Episode #4: Hawaiian Case Before the US Supreme Court
Join your host, Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui for a special edition of Indigenous Politics that will examine the Hawaiian land case that will go before the US Supreme Court on February 25, 2009. The Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Hawaii v. Office of Hawaiian Affairs, et al, since the state of Hawaii has asked the Court to rule on whether or not the state has the authority to sell, exchange, or transfer 1.2 million acres of land formerly held by the Hawaiian monarchy as Crown and Government Lands. This land base constitutes 29 percent of the total land area of what is now known as the State of Hawaii and almost all the land claimed by the State as “public lands.” Prior to the state government’s appeal to the Supreme Court, the Hawaii State Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the state should keep the land trust intact until Native Hawaiian claims to these lands are settled, and prohibited the state from selling or otherwise disposing of the properties to private parties; and did so based on the 1993 Apology Resolution, in which Congress acknowledged and apologized for the United States’ role and affirmed, “the indigenous Hawaiian people never directly relinquished their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people or over their national lands to the United States, either through their monarchy or through a plebiscite or referendum.” The guest on the show is Dr. Jonathan Kamakawiwo`ole Osorio (Kanaka Maoli), an original plaintiff in the case who sued the state to prevent the sale of these lands. He is now a defendant in the appeal to the Supreme Court and will speak to the complex issues raised by the case including the origins of the lawsuit, land title from a pro-Hawaiian independence position, the politics of the Apology Resolution, and the Hawaiian Nation’s claim to these lands under international law. Osorio is an associate professor at the Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawai`i at Manoa, and author of Dismembering Lahui A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887. Original air date: 2-17-09.

Episode # 5: Unkechaug Indian Nation and the Legal Battle with New York City
Join your host Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui for an episode that focuses on a legal battle being fought by the Unkechaug Indian Nation as the tribe fends off attacks by the City of New York. City officials claim that the tribe has become a “tax evasion haven” and a drain on the city’s coffers because it sells tax-free cigarettes at its Poospatuck Smoke Shop & Trading Post located on the Poospatuck Indian Reservation on Long Island, NY, which is part of the Sovereign Territory of the Unkechaug Indian Nation. The Bloomberg administration says the city and the state lose more than $1 billion a year in tax revenue because of what it calls bootleg cigarettes distributed on Indian reservations in New York. As part of their legal challenge, city lawyers have asked a federal judge to block the smoke shops from selling untaxed cigarettes to non-Indians without collecting state and city taxes from them. The show will feature an interview with Harry B. Wallace, Chief of the Unkechaug Indian Nation, who is an attorney and member of the New York State bar. He give background on the legal battle, historical context for this form of economic development, and a status report on the case. Chief Wallace suggests that this is simply an attack on legitimate Indian livelihood that is an exercise of tribal sovereignty, and the result of elected officials feeling the economic downturn and blaming the budget crisis on the smallest reservation in the state. Original air-date: 2-24-09.

Episode #6: Joy Harjo: Winding Through the Milky Way
Join your host, Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for an interview with Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), a poet, playwright, musician, and singer who will discuss her new CD, Winding Through the Milky Way. The program will include some musical selections from her new music, as well as news about the opening of her one-woman play, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, which opens later this month at the Wells Fargo Theater in Los Angeles. The interview will also include a discussion about the relationship between poetry and song in Harjo’s creative work, her journey to becoming a singer and saxophonist, the politics of cultural hybridity and Native music, and her ties to Hawai`i, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Harjo’s seven books of poetry include: She Had Some Horses, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and How We Became Human, New and Selected Poems. She has released three award-winning CDs of original music and performances: Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century, Native Joy for Real, and She Had Some Horses. Her poetry has garnered many awards including a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award: the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas; and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. A song from her forthcoming CD, Winding Through the Milky Way, just won a New Mexico Music Award. She has received the Eagle Spirit Achievement Award for overall contributions in the arts, from the American Indian Film Festival and a US Artists Fellowship for 2009. Original air-date: 3-10-09.

Episode # 7: Philip J. Deloria on Family, Scholarship, and Politics
Join your host J. Kehaulani Kauanui for an interview with Philip J. Deloria (Dakota Heritage) - a professor in the Department of History and the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan, where he has been instrumental in building a Native American Studies program. Deloria discusses his current book-length project, “Crossing the (Indian) Color Line: A Family Memoir,” which documents tensions surrounding a triangle of figures-his grandparents and great-aunt Ella Deloria, a pioneering Indian ethnographer-relating to “racial crossing, the authority of men and women, the preservation and recording of Native cultures, and the possibilities for reconciliation among histories and memories defined by the dispossession of Native North America.” Other topics for the interview include: his own personal and professional trajectory as a scholar; the political and intellectual legacy of his late father, Vine Deloria Jr.; the relationship between activism & politics and scholarship & Native American Studies; cultural politics and decolonization; and his utopian political dreams. Philip Deloria is the author of Playing Indian, which was the winner of a Gustavus Myers outstanding book award for the study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America, and, Indians in Unexpected Places, the 2006 winner of the John C. Ewers prize of the Western History Association. Among other honors, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1999. Original air-date: 3-24-09

Episode #8: The Court of the Conqueror
Join your host J. Kehaulani Kauanui for an episode that examines three recent U.S. Supreme Court cases, in which the opinions of the court ruled against the Native claims pertaining to: the Narragansett Tribal Nation (Carcieri, Governor of Rhode Island, et al v. Salazar, Secretary of the Interior, et al), a question before the court regarding Hawaiian lands (State of Hawa`i v. Office of Hawaiian Affairs, et al), and the Navajo Nation (United States v. Navajo Nation). The program features critical analysis of the latter two cases by Rebecca Tsosie (Yaqui), Professor of Law at Arizona State University, and two presentations on the history of the U.S. Supreme Court vis-à-vis Native Nations: the first by Steven Paul McSloy, Co-chair, Native American Practice Group, Hughes Hubbard & Reed L.L.P., and the other by Professor Robert Odawi Porter (Seneca), Professor of Law, Syracuse University. Tsosie, McSloy, and Porter all presented at a recent event hosted by the Harvard University Law School, “Tribal Justice: The Supreme Court and the Future of Federal Indian Law.” The gathering set out to examine the U.S. Supreme Court’s treatment of American Indians, and to assess a series of recent cases that signal to Native nations a disturbing paradigm shift to that of a judiciary now openly hostile to tribal interests. The conference brought together leading scholars and practitioners for a frank discussion regarding the impact the Roberts Court is having on Indian Country. Original air-date: 4-14-09.

Episode # 9: Indigenous Language Revitalization: The Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for an episode on with special guest jessie little doe baird, co-founder of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project which began in 1993/94. This is an intertribal effort between the Mashpee, Aquinnah, Assonet, Herring Pond, and Chappaquidick Wampanoag. The aim of the project is to reclaim Wôpanâak as a spoken language after there were no speakers of the language for six generations. little doe is a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and Wampanoag Women’s Medicine Society. She lives in Mashpee, MA. She also teaches Wôpanâak in Aquinnah and Mashpee. little doe received her Master of Science in Linguistics from MIT in 2000. She has completed a lay person’s grammar of the language as well as a curriculum for teaching and is currently working toward the completion of a dictionary and expansion of the curriculum. Currently she is also rebuilding the Pequot language and teaching at Mashantucket, CT. Original air-date: 04-28-09.

Episode #10: Part I - Palestinian Sovereignty and the BDS Campaign Against Israeli Apartheid
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui for Part I of a two-part series that explores Palestinian self-determination as question of indigenous sovereignty and the politics of Israeli occupation and settler colonialism with a specific focus on the Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement. This installment features interviews with Omar Barghouti, a founding member of the Palestinian campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, and Steven Salaita, an assistant professor of English at Virginia Tech and author of The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan, along with several other books. Barghouti will tell us about the conditions that compelled him to co-found the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). Salaita will address issues of settler colonialism in Palestine and how they compare to the colonization of Native North America. The BDS campaign against Israel is growing around the world. The Palestinian Campaigns have inspired similar campaigns in France, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Australia, South Africa, and the United States among other countries, ranging from boycotts of everything from Israeli produce to Israeli academic institutions. Tune-in to learn about the boycott of Israel - and hear answers to frequently asked questions: why “single out” Israel? Doesn’t an academic boycott create more barriers when we should be “building bridges”? What does the boycott entail? How does this relate to issues of academic freedom? How can we productively critique Israel and Zionism and stand firm against all forms of anti-Semitism? Israeli state violence against the Palestinians is fully supported by the US government through military aid and diplomatic oversight. But many people of conscience believe they have a moral obligation to speak out in solidarity with the Palestinian fight for nationhood and protest Israel’s illegal apartheid regime. As author Naomi Klein writes, “the best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.” Original air-date: 05-12-2009.

Episode #11: Part II - Palestinian Sovereignty and the BDS Campaign Against Israeli Apartheid
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui for Part II of a two-part program that explores Palestinian self-determination as question of indigenous sovereignty and the politics of Israeli occupation and settler colonialism with a specific focus on the Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement. This second installment features interviews with: Sherna Berger Gluck a founding member of the U.S. Committee for and Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, author of An American Feminist in Palestine: the Intifada Years, and producer and host of “Radio Intifada” (KPFK/Pacifica fm radio, Los Angeles); Katherine Fuchs, National Organizer for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a national coalition of more than 280 organizations working to change U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine to support human rights, international law, and equality; and Stanley Heller, Chairperson of the Middle East Crisis Committee and host of “The Struggle,” which is a TV news magazine shown weekly on 20 cable stations and on the internet. Original air-date: 5-26-09.

Show # 2: Winona LaDuke, Indigenous Thinking about a Post Carbon, Post Empire Economy”
This program features a talk by Winona LaDuke (Anishinabe), “Indigenous Thinking about a Post Carbon, Post Empire Economy” delivered for the 2008 student welcome at Wesleyan University to inaugurate the new academic year. Winona LaDuke is Anishinabe from the Makwa Dodaem (Bear Clan) of the Mississippi Band of the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota. LaDuke is the author of the novel, Last Standing Woman (1997), the non-fiction book, All our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999), and Recovering the Sacred: the Power of Naming and Claiming (2005), a book about traditional beliefs and practices. She is the Executive Director of Honor the Earth, an organization she co-founded with Indigo Girls in 1993. The Native-led organization’s mission is “to create awareness and support for Native environmental issues and to develop needed financial and political resources for the survival of sustainable Native communities. Honor the Earth develops these resources by using music, the arts, the media, and Indigenous wisdom to ask people to recognize our joint dependency on the Earth and be a voice for those not heard.” Original air-date: 9-9-08. This is Part One of a two-part episode. See below for the interview with LaDuke.

Show #3: Interview with Winona LaDuke
Join your host, Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui for an interview with Winona LaDuke (Anishinabe) - an internationally respected Native American and environmental activist who began speaking about these issues at an early age who continues to devote herself to Native and environmental concerns. LaDuke is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg who lives and works on the White Earth Reservations, and is the mother of three children. As Program Director of the Honor the Earth Fund, she works on a national level to advocate, raise public support, and create funding for frontline native environmental groups. She also works as Founding Director for White Earth Land Recovery Project. The mission of the White Earth Land Recovery Project is to facilitate recovery of the original land base of the White Earth Indian Reservation, while preserving and restoring traditional practices of sound land stewardship, language fluency, community development, and strengthening indigenous spiritual and cultural heritage. LaDuke also served as Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential running mate on the Green Party ticket in the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections. Original air-date: 9-23-08. This is Part Two of a two-part episode. Part-one featured a lecture by LaDuke delivered at Wesleyan University, “Indigenous Thinking about a Post Carbon, Post Empire Economy.” See above Show #2.

Show #4: Revoke the 1493 papal bull “Inter Caetera”! Columbus Day, Burial Desecration, and Genocide
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui for an episode that will focus on the politics of Columbus Day and the Papal Bull, “Inter Caetera,” of 1493 . This decree was issued by Pope Alexander IV to Christopher Columbus by the Roman Catholic Church on his second voyage to the Americas along with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which sought to establish Christian dominion over the world and called for the subjugation of non-Christian peoples and seizure of their lands. The decree, which granted rights to land throughout North and South America to Spain, under girds much of international law today, as well as the Doctrine of Discovery that is enshrined in US federal Indian policy. This program includes interviews with Tony Castanha - a Jibaro activist with indigenous roots in Puerto Rico, who organized the event, and is project director of the indigenous peoples delegation that went to the Vatican in 2000 calling for the revocation of the 1493 papal bull “Inter Caetera.” As part of an anti-Columbus Day event honoring Indigenous Peoples resistance, Castanha organized an 11th annual Papal Bull burning in Hawai`i. This year’s event on October 12, 2008 took place in front of the Walmart in Honolulu to bring attention to the desecration of Native Hawaiian remains in a legal suit involving the construction of the store. Also hear from Paulette Ka`anohi Kaleikini who is a cultural descendant laying claim to these ancestral remains that are currently stored in boxes under the ramp of the store due to a lawsuit contesting their re-internment. Original air-date: 10-14-08

Show #5: Margo Taméz and the Lipan Apache Women Defense
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui for an interview with warrior woman Margo Taméz (Lipan Apache and Jumano-Apache) co-founder of the Lipan Apache Women Defense/Strength - an Indigenous People’s Organization of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues that was formed to protect sacred sites, burial grounds, archaeological resources, ecological bio-diversity, and way of life of the indigenous people of the Lower Rio Grande, North America. Margo Taméz and her mother, Eloisa G. Taméz, founded the group in response to the US Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to force their surrender of hereditary lands in El Calaboz, Texas for the US/Mexico border wall. The US department of Homeland Security had voided over 35 federal laws, including environmental laws and laws protecting American Indian cultural and burial places. However, South Texas Apache women took the lead, in December 2007 in organizing the most persistent, and to date most successful, constitutional law case against the United States Army, US Customs Border Patrol and the US Department of Homeland Security. On October 22, 2008, Taméz delivered testimony in Washington, DC before the Organization of American States (OAS) Inter American Commission on Human Rights. The Commission examines and monitors compliance by member States of the OAS, including the US, with human rights obligations established in international law. Taméz will explain to us how this crisis came about and how she is working to protect the lands of her people from being divided in a way that result in relocation-a forced Indian removal that would constitute a 21st century genocide. Original air-date: 10-28-08.

Show #6: Rigoberta Menchú Tum
Tune in this week, Tuesday, November 11th from 4-5pm for an episode of Indigenous Politics that features a lecture recently delivered by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Rigoberta Menchú Tum (Quiche-Mayan) at Quinnipiac University. Menchú is a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. She has dedicated her life to organizing resistance to oppression in Guatemala and advocating for the rights of indigenous peoples. Menchú was born to a Mayan peasant family and raised in the Quiche culture in Guatemala. Reform work by her and her family aroused opposition leading to the arrest, torture and death of her parents and brother. Menchú was prominent in a 1980 strike the Committee of the Peasant Union organized for better conditions for farm workers on the Pacific Coast. She later joined the radical 31st of January Popular Front to educate the Indian peasant population in resistance to massive military oppression. Menchú co-founded The Nobel Women’s Initiative in 2006 to support efforts for women’s rights. She formed the indigenous political party Encuentro por Guatemala in 2007 and ran for president of Guatemala that year. Menchú offers firsthand accounts about the war between the Guatemalan military and the Mayan population in the 1983 documentary “When the Mountains Tremble.” She has written two books about her life: I, Rigoberta Menchú in 1984, and Crossing Borders in 1998, both published by Verso Books. Original air-date: 11-11-08

Show #7: Wilma Mankiller on Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights
On Tuesday’s show, December 2nd, hear a talk recently delivered by Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee) at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. Her presentation was part of a daylong conference, “The Declaration of Human Rights 60 Years Later: A Look at Indigenous and Gender Issues.” Mankiller served as the first woman principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, who served from 1985 to 1995. She has authored two books: Every Day is a Good Day, published by Fulcrum Publishing in 2004, and Mankiller: A Chief and Her People, published by St. Martin’s Press in 1993. Original air-date: 12-2-08

Show # 2 Tribal and Non-Native Alliance-Building
J. Kehaulani Kauanui interviews Andy Mager, a staff person at the Syracuse Peace Council and one of the founders of Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation, a grassroots organization of Central New Yorkers that recognizes and supports the sovereignty of the traditional government of the Onondaga Nation. The Onondaga Nation is an Indian Nation, and a member of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee. The Nation’s present territory is south of Syracuse, New York. According to their tribal website, the Onondaga Nation is taking action to assert its legal rights to its homelands in Central New York, with the principal goal of achieving legal recognition of title to its homelands, but without suing individual land owners. Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation supports the right of native peoples to reclaim land, and advocates for fair settlement of any claims which are filed. Learn more about this organization and how it is distinctly different from the numerous anti-Indian organizations that are flourishing in this country who oppose tribal land rights and self-determination, whose anti-indigenous racism is thinly veiled behind the purported quest for “equality.” Original air-date: 2-05-08

Show # 3 Bio-Colonialism in Hawai`i
J. Kehaulani Kauanui addresses GMOS—genetically modified organisms–with a focus on the genetic modification of life forms in Hawai`i, and how this form of biocolonialism poses many threats far beyond the islands. Hear from two special guests–both of whom join the show by telephone from Hawai`i–Dr. Lorrin Pang, a Medical Doctor who has served as a Consultant to the World Health Organization since 1985, who has been at the forefront of challenging the GMO industry in Hawai`i, and Andre Perez, a Native Hawaiian activist who speaks to the links between the fight against GMOs in Hawai`i and the struggle for Hawaiian land, sovereignty and self- determination. The genetic modification of taro, known to Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) as kalo, forces an examination of cultural issues relating to this traditional Hawaiian food staple as it is subjected to a new form of biotechnology. Original air-date: 2-11-08

Show # 4 Beyond Conquest: Rewriting Native Connecticut
J. Kehaulani Kauanui interviews Dr. Amy Den Ouden, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she teaches courses on cultural theory, colonialism, gender and power, critical approaches to history and historiography in Native New England, contemporary political issues in Native North America, and indigenous rights and the law in global perspective. She is the author of Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England, a history of Native American peoples in southern New England from the seventeenth century to the present with a focus on the complex cultural and political facets of resistance to encroachment on reservation lands. Her important work also links how the current white American scrutiny and denial of local Indian identities is a practice with a long history in southern New England, one linked to colonial notions of cultural-and ultimately “racial”-illegitimacy that emerged in the context of eighteenth-century disputes regarding Native land rights. Original air-date: 2-19-08

Show # 5 Engaging Indigenous Critiques of Native New England History
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for an episode featuring selections from a recent symposium held at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, “Engaging Indigenous Critiques: Reconsidering Race, Gender and Politics in Native New England History.” The event was sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Native American Student Society at UMass Boston, in conjunction with Harvard University’s Native American Program and Plimoth Plantation sponsored. This panel discussion focused on the impact of racial hierarchy and discourses of race on Native American communities. Participants include: Dr. Amy Den Ouden, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UMass, Boston; Dr. Lisa Brooks (Abenaki), an Assistant Professor of History and Literature and of Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University; Dr. Daniel Mandell, Truman State University; Dr. Marge Bruchac (Abenaki), Tufts University; David E. Wilkins (Lumbee), Professor of American Indian Studies and Political Science from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; and Maurice Fox (Mashpee Wampanoag), Chair of the Commission on Indian Affairs in Massachusetts. Original air-date: 2-26-08

Show # 6 Why Indigenous Nations Studies?
This episode features a lecture by Dr. Michael Yellow Bird (Sahnish/Arikara and Hidatsa Nations), “Why Indigenous Nations Studies? Decolonizing Plasticities in Native American Studies.” His talk was the keynote delivered at Columbia University for a conference, “Transcending Cultures, Transcending Disciplines: Native American Studies Today,” on February 21- 22, 2008. Yellow Bird is the Founder and Director of the Center for Indigenous Peoples’ Critical and Intuitive Thinking and Associate Professor of Indigenous Nations Studies at the University of Kansas. Original air-date: 3-04-08

Show # 7 A Native American Affairs Commission in Connecticut?
J. Kehaulani Kauanui examines legislation currently before the Connecticut state Committee on Environment: HR 5141, an Act Concerning a Commission on Native American Indian Affairs. The state of Connecticut already has state commissions such as the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women, the Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission, and the African-American Affairs Commission. Dozens of states across the United States have Native American Affairs Commissions, and New England is no exception with the Maine Indian Tribal-State Commission, the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs, and the Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs. Given that Connecticut is rapidly earning a reputation for its anti-Indian hostility, many people suggest that a Commission could help turn the tide of fear, racism, and ignorance regarding the state-recognized Native Nations and other Native American residents, including the increasingly diverse population of Native Americans from tribes across the country moving here for employment and educational opportunities. This episode will feature a range of perspectives on the politics of this proposal in interviews with L. Mixashawn Rozie (Mahicanu), Mikki Anganstata (Eastern Cherokee), Sherman Paul (Maliseet), Ruth Garby Torres (Schaghticoke Tribal Nation), Trudie Lamb Richmond (Schaghticoke Tribal Nation), and Cedric Woods (Lumbee). Original air-date: 3-11-08

Show # 8 Native Humor and the Uses of Irony in Decolonization
J. Kehaulani Kauanui interviews installation and performance artist, James Luna (Luiseno, La Jolla band of Mission Indians). His work speaks to the fraught nature of indigenous cultural politics as his art engages histories of colonialism, representation, and decolonization through the use of irony and humor. Luna was selected by the National Museum of the American Indian for the 2005 Venice Biennale for his installation-exhibit, “Emendatio,” a project that collapses time between 1834 and 2005, and the space between Italy and California. With its homage to Pablo Tac (a Luiseno Indian) who came to Rome from the San Luis Rey mission to study for the priesthood in 1834, “Emendatio” claims Venice as part of American Indian history. “Emendatio” is currently on exhibit at the George Gustav-Heye Center in New York City, which is part of the National Museum of the American Indian through April 20, 2008. Listen in to this conversation about Luna’s artistic trajectory, his process, the interventions his work intends, and what we can anticipate in the future. Original air-date: 3-18-08

Show # 9 The Christian Roots of the Doctrine of Discovery
J. Kehaulani Kauanui interviews with one of the top legal scholars on indigenous issues, Steven Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape), who is the indigenous law research coordinator at the Sycuan education department of the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation in San Diego County, California. Newcomb is the author of a newly released book, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, which provides a provocative challenge to U.S. federal Indian law and policy. His book draws upon major findings in the theory of the human mind (cognitive theory) as a framework for challenging the presumption that the United States has any legitimate claim to “plenary power” over originally free and independent Native nations. Newcomb argues that U.S. federal Indian law and policy are premised on Old Testament narratives of the chosen people and the Promised Land, as exemplified in the 1823 Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. McIntosh that the first “Christian people” to “discover” lands inhabited by “natives, who were heathens,” have an ultimate title to dominion over these lands and peoples. Newcomb is the co-founder and co-director of the Indigenous Law Institute, a fellow with the American Indian Policy and Media Initiative at Buffalo State College in New York, and a columnist with the newspaper Indian Country Today. Original air date: 3-25-08

Show # 10 Tuscarora Song and the Politics of Decolonization
J. Kehaulani Kauanui interviews with Jennifer Kreisberg live in the studio. She is Hartford-based Tuscarora woman with roots in North Carolina who defines herself as a Mother, Singer, Composer, Producer, Teacher, and Activist. Kreisberg comes from four generations of Seven Singing Sisters through the maternal line, and has been singing since she was young. For the past 18 Years she has toured with the world-renowned trio Ulali, which was formed in 1987. Blending their strong traditional roots with contemporary musical sensibilities, which included southeast choral singing (pre-blues and gospel) and pre-Colombian (before the borders) music, Ulali redefined Native American Music. Kreisberg is now a solo artist who has shared the stage with performers such as Buffy Saint-Marie, Bonnie Raitt, and Jackson Browne. In 2007, she was among a diverse group of independent musicians named as winners of the 7th Annual Independent Music Awards. Additionally, Kreisberg was awarded a Genie (Canadian Oscar), and a NAMMY (Native American Music Award). Original air date: 4-1-08

Show # 11 Aboriginal Australia and Settler Colonialism
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for a live in-studio interview with Dr. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Quandamooka), Professor of Indigenous Studies at Queensland University of Technology. She is a Geonpul woman from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay) in Queensland, Australia. Moreton-Robinson has advocated for Indigenous rights at local, state, national and international levels and worked for a number of Indigenous organizations. Moreton-Robinson’s activist and scholarly work theorizes settler colonialism and white possession in Australia. She is author of Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism; Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism; as well as Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters. She will discuss contemporary indigenous politics in Australia, especially in light of the Prime Minister’s recent Apology to Aboriginal peoples, and the Australian government’s recent military invasion of the Northern Territory in the name of “protecting” Aboriginal children.
Original air date: 4-15-08

Show # 12 Chamorro Self-determination and the US Colony of Guam
J. Kehaulani Kauanui examines Chamorro self-determination in the US colony Guam and throughout the Chamorro diaspora. Guam is an island that is part of the chain of the Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific Ocean. It is an organized unincorporated territory of the United States-one of five US colonial territories with established civilian government. Guam is listed on the UN list of non-self-governing territories; the island and her people are still eligible to decolonize from the USA under international law. This episode will include interviews with three different Chamorro activists: Julian Aguon (Chamorro) is a writer, human rights activist and speaker throughout the Asia and the Pacific region. He is the author of Just Left of the Setting Sun (2005), The Fire This Time: Essays on Life Under US Occupation (2006), and the just-released What We Bury At Night: Disposable Humanity (2008). He is currently a law student at the University of Hawaii-Manoa and a fellow with the East West Center. Michael Lujan Bevacqua (Chamorro) is PhD student in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, the editor of the Chamorro zine, Minaghet, and a co-founder of the Chamorro activist organization, Famoksaiyan. Sabina Flores Perez (Chamorro) is a cultural activist in Guam and in the Bay Area who has helped organize several the trips of several Chamorro delegations to testify before the United Nations in New York. Original air date: 4-22-08

Show #13 American Indians and US Federal Law
Join your host, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, for an interview with Professor Bruce Duthu (Houma), an internationally recognized scholar on Native American issues, including tribal sovereignty and federal recognition of Indian tribes. Duthu is an enrolled member of the Houma Tribe of Louisiana. We discuss his new book, American Indians and the Law (Viking Press 2008), which is part of The Penguin Library of American Indian History series. He teaches at Vermont Law School, where he been a faculty member since 1991, and will take up a professorial position at Dartmouth College in fall 2008. Original airdate: 4-29-08

Show #2 American Indian Urban Communities and Transnational Citizenship
Host Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui interviews with Dr. Renya Ramirez (Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska), Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who discusses her new book, Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond, which investigates how urban Native Americans negotiate what she argues is a transnational existence. The vast majority of Native Americans in the United States live in cities. Learn about activism in this region and how urban Indians have pressed their tribes, local institutions, and the federal government to expand typical notions of citizenship. Original air-date: 09-25-07

Show #3 Indigenous Oral History and Archeology
Trudie Lamb Richmond (Schaghticoke) delivers a talk titled, “Oral Histories at Schaghticoke: Shared Stories- Shared Histories-One People.” Richmond is an esteemed elder of the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation, and is a renowned a storyteller who has performed at hundreds of festivals. From 1974-1986, she was Assistant Director of American Indians for Development in Meriden, CT, while serving on the Connecticut Indian Affairs Council. In 1987, Connecticut Governor William O’Neill appointed her to a task force on Native American issues. From 1988-1996, she was the Assistant Director for Public Programs, and then the Director of Education, at the Institute for American Indian Studies in Washington, CT. In 2003, she became the Mashantucket Pequot Museum’s Director of Public Programs. Original air-date: 10-02-07

Show #4 The Schaghticoke Tribal Nation’s Ongoing Legal Battle for Federal Recognition
Host Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui interviews with Richard Velky, Chief of the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation, who details the tribe’s appeal of the Bureau of Indian Affair’s unprecedented decision to strip the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation of its federal acknowledgment. The tribe recently filed a motion for summary judgment for its claim that the loss of its federal status resulted from unlawful political influence by powerful politicians and a White House-connected lobbyist, who violated federal laws, agency regulations, congressional ethics rules and court orders to have the BIA decision reversed. Despite the fact that the Tribe had painstakingly followed the process and achieved Recognition on their 30,000 page petition’s merits, political opponents launched a PR campaign accusing the Tribe of politically manipulating the process to gain Federal Recognition - then they launched their own secret campaign to politically manipulate the process to reverse that decision. The lobbyist group, Barbour, Griffith & Rogers BGR is named in the tribe’s law suit, where they are charged with harmful and unlawful interference with the tribe’s recognition. BGR’s communications regarding the STN reach to the governor of CT, White House staff, Interior officials, the anti-Indian group One Nation United, and even former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who is a resident of Kent, CT. Original air date: 10-16-07

Show #5 Taino Identity and the Politics of Columbus Day
Host Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui examines the politics of Taino identity. The Tainos are the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean Islands. When Columbus landed at Hispaniola while trying to find an alternative route to India, he named the inhabitants “Indians.” Today, many Taino-identified Caribbean people are challenging the official doctrine that has declared the Tainos extinct. Listen to Dr. Marianela Medrano-Marra (Taino) delivers a lecture, “The Divine Feminine in the Taino Tradition.” This program also features an interview with Jorge Estevez (Taino from Aiskeya, also known as the Dominican Republic), and Valerie Nana Ture Varges (Taino). from Boriken (also known as Puerto Rico) on the politics of Columbus Day and indigenous identity.
Original air date: 10-23-07

Show #6 Indigenous Peoples and International Law
Host Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui offers a critical exploration of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that was recently adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. The program features an interview with Tonya Gonnella Frichner (Onondaga Nation, Snipe Clan), founder and president of the American Indian Law Alliance, which is an indigenous, non-profit organization that works with Indigenous nations, communities and organizations in the struggle for sovereignty, human rights, and social justice. Topics for discussion will focus on the politics of indigenous self-determination under international law, the distinction between minorities and Indigenous peoples, and the decades-long struggle to draft and pass the Declaration, as well as the opposition by New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States (the only four States that voted against it).
Original air-date: 10-30-07

Show #7 Decolonizing Navajo History
Host Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui interviews Dr. Jennifer Nez Denetdale (Diné), Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Denetdale discusses her new book, Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita, in which she seeks to rewrite Navajo history. Reared on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico and Arizona, Denetdale is the great-great-great-granddaughter of a well-known Navajo chief, Manuelito (1816-1894), and his nearly unknown wife, Juanita (1845-1910). Stimulated in part by seeing photographs of these ancestors, she began to explore her family history as a way of examining broader issues in Navajo historiography. Reclaiming Diné History has two primary objectives. First, Denetdale interrogates histories that privilege Manuelito and marginalize Juanita in order to demonstrate some of the ways that writing about the Diné has been biased by non-Navajo views of assimilation and gender. Second, she reveals how Navajo narratives, including oral histories and stories kept by matrilineal clans, serve as vehicles to convey Navajo beliefs and values. Original air-date: 11-6-07

Show #8 Journalism in Native New England
Host Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui interviews Gale Courey Toensing, journalist and correspondent for Indian Country Today, who covers Native American struggles in New England and Long Island. Toensing is a woman of Palestinian and Lebanese descent who is a member of the National Arab American Journalists Association, as well as the Native American Journalists Association. In this program, she draws on some of the parallels between Native American and Palestinian struggles, anti-Indian groups in New England and throughout the US, the problems with mainstream media coverage of indigenous sovereignty struggles in Connecticut, anti-Black racism used against tribal nations, and how the state governments of the region are suppressing indigenous self-determination. Original air-date 11-13-07

Show #9 Reconsidering the Origins of Thanksgiving
What are the origins of the Thanksgiving holiday in the US? Some Americans commemorate a harvest feast celebrated in 1621 at Plymouth between the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims. Then, there is the 1637 proclamation by Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop, who claimed an official “a Day of Thanksgiving” to celebrate the colonists who massacred the Pequots at Mystic, Connecticut. How are these different narratives alternately celebrated and erased? How was the creation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday a way of solidifying American national identity? This show explores the politics of Thanksgiving with interviews that provide two very different perspectives. Join your host, Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui, and guests, Ramona Nosapocket Peters (Mashpee Wampanoag), cultural worker and artist, and Moonanum James (Aquinnah Wampanoag), co-leader of the United American Indians of New England, who hosts an annual “National Day of Mourning,” on Cole Hill, MA, as an alternative. Original air-date: 11-20-07

Show #10 The 2008 Presidential Platforms and Indian Country (Not Recorded)
This program highlights issues rarely examined in presidential elections: the unknown and ignored facets of presidential political platforms that relate to the state of Native America and the US policy on nation-to-nation relations. Whatever your take on the presidential office, and the overwhelming evidence of rampant electoral fraud and malfeasance during the last two presidential elections, all presidential candidates should obligated to publicly address where they stand on the US trust doctrine vis-à-vis tribal nations, treaties, federal trust lands, the role of the judiciary in interpreting indigenous rights, and state powers. Where does Rudy Giuliani stand on issues of tribal sovereignty? What did Hillary Clinton have to say in her speech to the before the National Congress of American Indians earlier this month? What is her Native American Agenda? What did Barak Obama have to say in his open letter to tribal leaders? Who are “First Americans for Obama”? Who is on Bill Richardson’s National Native American Advisory Council? Has Dennis Kucinich maintained the Comprehensive American Indian Policy he proposed when running for re-election to Congress? John Edwards has made public statements regarding issues affecting African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, LGBT people, women, and people with disabilities-where does he stand on Native American issues? In the 2004 presidential election, the GOP in South Dakota intimidated Native American voters by writing down their license plate numbers. A court decision in a South Dakota lawsuit documents how county officials purposely blocked Native Americans from registering to vote and from casting ballots. In 2006, the INDN’s List Education Fund (ILEF) was founded to leverage the power of Indian voters by mobilizing and organizing in key battleground states, and by calling attention to this influence as political candidates build campaign operations and formulate their respective visions for their constituents and the US public. Original air-date: 11-27-07 (this program was not recorded)

Show #11 Boston Coalition of Indigenous Students
Host Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui engages in a conversation with three of the founders of the Boston Coalition of Indigenous Students: Shanadeen Begay (Diné), Jonathan Ramones (Mi’kmaq), and Mose Herne (Akwesasne Mohawk). This new coalition seeks to: provide a means for academic, social, cultural, and spiritual exchange among its members; foster the expression of a unified voice aimed at raising awareness of the rights and struggles of Native/Indigenous nations and communities in the Americas; create a forum from which the voices of indigenous peoples can be heard by furthering scientific understanding and creating progressive public policy initiatives through collaborative efforts and educational programming across institutional barriers; and promote cross-cultural understanding by highlighting the indigenous cultures of North and South America and thus to recognize indigenous diversity and presence. Shanadeen Begay is a third year as a doctoral student in Chemistry at Boston University studying theoretical Chemistry. Jonathan Ramones is a fourth year student at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, as a Criminal Justice Major with a Concentration in Alcohol and Substance Abuse with a Minor in Psychology. Mose Herne is a doctoral candidate in the School of Public Health, Environmental Health department at Boston University, and serves as faculty at both Metropolitan College Psychology department, and also on the faculty at Fitchburg State College. He is currently employed as the Associate Director for Behavioral Health with the North American Indian Center of Boston (NAICOB). Original air-date: 12-04-07

Show #2: Richard Velky (Schaghticoke), Chief of the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation on the politics of their struggle for federal recognition and the role of the state of Connecticut in opposing them. Original air date: 2-12-07

Show #3: Randolph Lewis, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Oklahoma University, on his book, Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmmaker, the first devoted to any Native filmmaker. Original air date: 2-19-07

Show #4: J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Ph.D. (Kanaka Maoli) offers an overview of Hawaiian sovereignty politics and the contested
terrain of federal recognition and proposed legislation to confine Kanaka Maoli to a domestic dependent nation. Original air date: 2-26-07

Show #5: Robert J. Miller (citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma), Associate Professor, Lewis & Clark Law School, discusses his book,
Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, and Manifest Destiny. Original air date: 3-5-07

Show #6: David Cornsilk (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma), journalist and activist, discusses the recent vote at Cherokee Nation to disenfranchise the Freedman descendants and the history of Cherokee slave holding, citizenship, and sovereignty issues. Original air date: 3-12-07

Show #7: Ned Blackhawk, Ph.D. (Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone), Associate Professor of History and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on his book, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Original air date: 3-19-07

Show #8: Richard Anguksuar LaFortune (Yup’ik), Director of 2SPR: Two Spirit Press Room, a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Native media
& cultural literacy project. Original air date: 3-26-07

Show #9: Dale Turner, Ph.D. (Temagami First Nation in Northern Ontario, Canada), Associate Professor of Government and American Indian
Studies at Dartmouth College, discusses his book, This is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy. Original air date: 4-09-07

Show #10: Brian Baguck Wescott, Ph.D. (Koyukon and Yup’ik nations), co-producer, filmmaker, and actor discusses his docudrama, “We Are Still Here,” an educational biopic about Cahuilla elder Katherine Siva Saubel from Banning, CA, and a new documentary series in development, tentatively titled “The 20th Century Indian Show,” which will be written by novelist Thomas King, and directed by Chris Eyre. Original air date: 4-23-07

Show #11: Host J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Ph.D. (Kanaka Maoli) offers an overview of current political issues facing tribal nations in New England and the role of the states in opposing their quest for sovereign recognition. Original air date: 4-30-07 (RECORDING UNAVAILABLE)

Show #12: Sarah Deer (Muscogee) attorney, Victim Advocacy Legal Specialist for the Tribal Law & Policy Institute in Saint Paul, Minnesota, discusses a report just released by Amnesty International USA on April 24, 2007, titled, “Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women From Sexual Violence in the USA”. Original air date:5-7-07

Show #13: J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Ph.D. (Kanaka Maoli), Ph.D. discusses “the Akaka bill,” a flawed and federally driven legislative proposal awaiting a vote in the US Senate for the federal recognition of Native Hawaiians as a domestic dependent governing entity. Original air date: 5-14-07

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Why should Native Hawaiians who have never relinquished their inherent sovereignty settle for the lesser status of federal recognition that is being put forward in the ”Akaka Bill”?

They shouldn’t, says J. Kehaulani Kauanui.

Kauanui, a Native Hawaiian and an assistant professor of anthropology and American studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, presented a short history of Hawaii/U.S. relations and her views of the Akaka Bill in a talk called ”The Politics of Native Hawaiian Self-Determination: U.S. Federal Policy v. International law” at Yale University on April 4.

She began with thanks to the event sponsors - the Yale Group for the Study of Native America and the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration - and acknowledged the land now known as New Haven as the original homeland of the Quinnipiac people.

A heated debate about Hawaiian sovereignty now centers on the proposed Hawaiian federal recognition bill reintroduced into Congress by Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, in January after six years of defeat in the Senate, Kauanui said.

The Hawaiian sovereignty movement is split between those who support federal recognition and those who want full independence from the United States based on decolonization and de-occupation under international law, Kauanui said.

”At the heart of this division between federal recognition and independence is the debate as to whether or not, and if so, how Native Hawaiians fit into U.S. policy on Native American governing entities,” Kauanui said.

A compelling argument against federal recognition is how federally recognized tribes are treated now, Kauanui said.

”You have a backlash against tribal nations in this area who are absolutely entitled to federal recognition and you have the state bearing down on them, and the courts continue to erode tribal sovereignty. So the challenge for me, intellectually, legally and politically, has been how to formulate my critique of federal recognition for Hawaiians without it ever being misinterpreted as something that can be used against tribes here, because I support the federal recognition of tribes here,” Kauanui said.

But the central argument against federal recognition rests on ”the particularity of the Hawaiian claims given the legal history of the Hawaiian kingdom,” Kauanui said.

Those particularities are embedded as facts in Public Law 103-150 - an apology to the Hawaiian people that was signed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton.

The apology acknowledges the illegality of the U.S. government’s military-backed regime change of ”the sovereign Hawaii nation” in 1893 and its support for the illegally created ”provisional government” in violation of treaties and international law. The insurgents were wealthy American and European financiers and colonists who owned sugar plantations.

The key statement in the apology reiterates Hawaii’s continuing independence: ”The indigenous Hawaiian people never directly relinquished their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people or over their national lands to the United States, either through their monarchy or through a plebiscite or referendum.

”This legal genealogy makes the current push for federal recognition as reflected in the Akaka Bill extremely problematic,” Kauanui said.

The word ”people” itself puts Hawaiians in line with international law that says all peoples have the right to determine their political structures.

”When you say ‘people,’ you’re saying a nation. A people is not an ethnic group,” Kauanui said, quoting Lumbee legal scholar David Wilkins, who outlined four elements that set American Indians apart from racial minorities.

”Indians are nations, not minorities,” Wilkins said, because they were the original inhabitants of the land; their pre-existence necessitated the negotiation of political compacts, treaties and alliances with European nations and the United States. As treaty-recognized sovereigns, Indian peoples are subject to U.S. trust doctrine, which is supposed to be a unique legal relationship with the federal government that entails protection; and, stemming from the trust relationship, the United States asserts plenary power of tribal nations, which it deems exclusive and pre-emptive.

Native Hawaiians who want to pursue self-determination through international law contest this U.S. use of the ”doctrine of discovery” to indigenous peoples’ lands and U.S. assertion to legal title to those lands while only recognizing tribal nations’ use of the land, Kauanui said.

The ”provisional government” ceded 1.8 million acres of Hawaiian lands to the United States in 1898, but those lands have never fallen into private hands.

”These are lands the U.S. government accepted from the people that stole them from the Hawaiian monarchy. Never has a penny exchanged hands and never has a case about the legal title of these lands ever been adjudicated so this is a major outstanding land claim - 1.8 million acres of some of the most expensive real estate in the world and one of the most militarized place in the world,” Kauanui said, referring to the massive U.S. nuclear base in Honolulu, which is the central command for U.S. military interests in the Pacific Ocean.

Supporters of federal recognition say there is nothing in the Akaka Bill that would compromise or foreclose Hawaiian national claims under international law, but U.S. actions in asserting its plenary power to keep tribal nations both domestic and dependent belie that claim, Kauanui said.

Hawaiians may not be able to realize their independence right now, ”but just because you can’t see it come to fruition right now doesn’t mean you throw it down the toilet. You protect the claims. I’d rather stick with the status quo for the moment and work on cultural sovereignty, get the people stronger and work on educating people about their political rights,” Kauanui said.

Under the Akaka Bill, Hawaii could never have casinos, never have criminal and civil jurisdiction, never petition the secretary of the Interior Department to take land into trust and never be able to make land claims under the 1790 Non-Intercourse Act, which would mean ”there goes those 1.8 million acres,” Kauanui said.

No competing Hawaiian sovereignty group would have legal standing in any domestic court or at the United Nations. The Native Hawaiian government would be formed by a commission appointed by and answerable to the Interior secretary, unlike federally recognized Indian tribes who determine their own leadership and membership. And Hawaiians could not have their own civil or criminal jurisdiction.

”Why should we do that? It seems a more critical time than ever for Hawaiians and all U.S. citizens to critically question why there should not be a Hawaiian embassy in Washington, D.C. Instead of negotiating with the Department of the Interior, Hawaiians have the un-extinguished right to negotiate instead with the U.S. Department of State,” Kauanui said.

The show, titled ”Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond,” was launched Feb. 5 from the Wesleyan-based radio station. J. Kehaulani Kauanui, assistant professor of anthropology and American Studies, is the producer and host of the program.

The multi-media program airs shortly after 5p.m., right after the “Jive at Five” community calendar, and runs until 6 p.m. each Monday with a live streaming Web cast on www.wesufm.org. ”Indigenous Politics” features interviews with political leaders, community activists, filmmakers and artists, and cultural authorities, as well as academic scholars whose work addresses cultural politics and sovereignty struggles.

Kauanui, a Native Hawaiian, says most guest speakers are indigenous or local to Connecticut and the New England area. She opens her show saying “We are here in Middletown, Connecticut, also known as Mattabessett—the traditional homeland of the Wangunk tribe.”

“I really want to privilege the voices of Native New England,” Kauanui says. “The show is also Native New England and beyond but, first and foremost, I think we need to educate local listeners of the struggle going on right here.”

Kauanui’s first show featured an in-depth interview with Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee and a poet, writer and policy advocate who has helped Native peoples recover more than 1 million acres of land. The second program featured Richard Velky, leader of the Kent, Conn.-based Schaghticoke Tribal Nation since 1987, who discussed his tribe’s legal battle in response to the Bureau of Indian Affairs reversal of their federal acknowledgement after state officials intervened. The follow week, Kauanui interviewed Randolph Lewis, assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Oklahoma, who discussed his new book, Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmmaker.

Kauanui hopes to include future shows on Hawaiians and the politics of federal recognition; Native feminisms; same-sex marriage bans in Indian country; indigenous environmental issues; U.S. militarism and indigenous peoples’ service; domestic violence and restorative justice; indigenous language revitalization; sports teams and Indian mascots; the U.S. presidential election and American Indian voters; indigenous peoples and the prison industrial complex; contemporary land rights; Indian gaming and the politics of casinos; and indigenous youth movements.

Ben Michael, WESU 88.1 general manager, expects Kauanui’s new show to be a national success. Already, WESU transmits to sections of Connecticut, Massachusetts and the Long Island area of New York. But, since the scope of Kauanui’s program is regional and national, Michael hopes to eventually syndicate it nationally through the station’s affiliation with Pacifica Radio. This would create a potential audience of millions of people.

“WESU has a mission to serve as a resource for underserved communities by providing access the radio airwaves for mass communication. Kehaulani’s program accomplishes this in an educational and professional format,” Michael says. “It’s very fulfilling to see WESU being utilized in such positive and effective manner. This is why community radio exists and is such an asset.”

Kauanui was tapped for the radio program by Ken Weiner, the station’s public affairs director. Like any other student or community volunteer wanting to be an on-air host, she took a six-week training course. In addition, she completed two internships and community service hours before taking a practical and written exam on the station.

Kauanui said she is motivated by several key issues affecting nations across the country, most notably the fact that many tribes do not have ”basic” federal recognition. Historically, she explains, recognition differed between state-recognized tribes from the original 13 colonies and the ‘treaty tribes’ in the Western states.

“More recently, the backlash against casino development has been instrumental in the opposition to federal recognition. The conflation of federal recognition with the specter of Indian casinos indicates that most non-tribal residents in these states refuse to uncouple questions of tribal economic development - a question of a nation’s political economy - and the social justice issue of honoring the U.S. trust doctrine,” Kauanui says.

The 21st century’s ”most notorious cases” involve two Connecticut tribes - the Eastern Pequot and Schaghticoke tribal nations, Kauanui says.

In addition to hosting the radio show, Kauanui is teaching two courses this year, “US in the Pacific Islands,” and “Methodologies in Ethnic Studies,” and is continuing her research on white settler colonialism and indigenous self-determination. She is currently co-editing a book with Andrea Smith, Native Feminisms: Without Apology, and embarking on two new book monograph projects: one on Native Hawaiian feminist decolonization and the other on Hawaiians in New England in the early 19th century. Her first book, Long Division: Genealogy, Hawaiian Blood Quantum, and the Question of Sovereignty is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2007.

Her radio program has already had mentions in Hawaiian Independence Blog, Arizona Native Net, and Indian Country Today, an American Indian news source based in Canastota, N.Y.

Kalia Lydgate ‘07, Raffi Stern ’08, Liz Love `07, and Amelia Dean Walker ’07 help Kauanui produce the show.

By Olivia Bartlett, Wesleyan Connection editor. Segments of this article were adapted from a Feb. 19 article titled “Native Radio/Web Program Launched” by Indian Country Today writer Gale Courey Toensing.