Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond

Show #1: Exhibiting Race and Indigeneity
Explore the exhibit opening of “Race: Are We So Different?” at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. The exhibition is part of a larger public education project from the American Anthropological Association and is funded by the Ford Foundation and the National Science foundation. The exhibit, began its journey at the Science Museum of Minnesota, which helped to develop it, and also has appeared at the Charles H. right Museum of African American History in Detroit. Images and objects from the MPMRC’s collections have been incorporated into the visiting exhibit. Six text panels illustrated predominantly with images from the museums Popular Culture Collection for a section titled, “Race Matters in Indian New England,” and objects from the same collection are also displayed. Interviews with: Kimberly Hatcher-White (Mashantucket Pequot), Executive Director of the Museum; Dr. Kevin A. McBride, Director of Research; Trudie Lamb Richmond (Schaghticoke), Director of Public Programs; Project Director, Russell Handsman; Dr. Alyssa Mt, Pleasant (Tuscorora), Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University; and Dr. Sarah Croucher, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University.

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