Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond

Show #1 Cherokee Nation, Freedman Descendants, and African American Protest
Host Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui interviews Taylor Keen (Cherokee), former Councilor-At-Large on the tribal council of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, who lost his seat in the June 2007 re-election due to his vocal support for the enfranchisement of Freedmen descendants. Listen in and learn more about the complicated political history of this issue and the social and legal implications of the Cherokee vote to disenfranchise the descendants of the Freedman that has recently caught the attention of the Congressional Black Caucus, The NAACP, and the National Congress of Black Women. The program examines the the vote in terms of tribal sovereignty, federal intervention, and cross-racial solidarity. Original air-date: 09-18-07

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