Podcasts about American Indian Center

In this episode, we speak with BearPaw Shields from the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes. She is a Saint Cloud State University alumna and is currently the Indigenous Learning Community Program Coordinator at the University's American Indian Center.In her forties, she decided to go to college and get a degree so that she could make the change she wanted to see in the world. She does that now through her work at St. Cloud State's American Indian Center, helping Native students to succeed in school and connect with their culture through language, field trips and other experiences. As a board member with the Friends of the Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge, she had been instrumental in teaching park staff and visitors about the land's Native history. Last year, that included the opening of an amphitheater with art provided by Indigenous artists and the names of park animals provided in Dakota and Ojibwemowin.BearPaw Shields lives in Zimmerman where she likes to go on hikes and find her serenity at the nearby Refuge 

Ken interviews Gerome Warcloud of the American Indian Center, and the American Indian Movement on the struggles and concerns of North America's indigenous people. (1981) More at http://krobcollection.com

Chicago Tribune food critic Louisa Chu joins Lisa Dent to discuss the American Indian Center and their ‘Food is Medicine’ program which is bringing a plethora of brand new culinary options to the city of Chicago.

Kay Gibson and Valerie Badhorse are the co-chairs of the American Indian Center of Springfield. Kay's tribe is Cherokee and Valerie's tribe is the– Bois Forte Band (boys fort band) of the Minnesota Chippewa. They spoke a little about why they started the center in the first place.

The Minneapolis American Indian Center's two-year renovation is now complete. The redesign reflects both a sense of belonging and history and showcases ways the Minneapolis Indigenous community embraces its future. The happy chatter of excited visitors filled a large rotunda inside the center as executive director Mary LaGarde walked through the crowd to greet guests at a soft opening held last Thursday. “It's just really exciting for all of us — for community and just for everyone who has been involved in the project all along,” said LaGarde. The center's renovation cost $32.5 million and is the result of a decade-long process to bring people back into the center. Located on East Franklin Avenue in south Minneapolis, the center provides social services to the urban Native community and has served as a central gathering place — a place for boxing matches, basketball tournaments, powwows, conferences and more. Over the years, the building showed signs of aging. Water dripping through the roof had become a steady stream inside the center the year before renovation. Through a series of community listening sessions, LaGarde and her staff acknowledged the center was underutilized and needed repairs, so they began planning the organization's future.At the soft opening, elected leaders, civic leaders and community supporters applauded Mary LaGarde for her work in securing the necessary funding for the renovation. The center's board of directors and staff honored LaGarde with a star quilt for her dedication and leadership.  Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan was among the elected leaders who honored LaGarde's work. “This long-awaited grand opening sets the bar where it should rightfully and always be, because we are worthy and deserving of capital investments,” said Flanagan.  The expansion added 20,000 square feet to the building, for a total of over 66,000 square feet. The organization also expects the building to support 10,000 visitors a year, according to a fact sheet released by a spokesperson for the center.The heart of the community Architect Sam Olbekson said he was a 4-year-old kid living in the neighborhood when he attended the center's first grand opening in 1975. Today, Olbekson serves as chair of the organization's board of directors. As an architect working in collaboration with several partners, he helped to redesign the building to reflect the community's cultural identity. Just before the community gathered in a conference room for the afternoon's program, Olbekson stood inside the center's large, drum-shaped rotunda. He spoke to MPR News about how the rotunda's design speaks to the community's cultural identity. “It's intended purpose is to be the heart of the facility where people gather. It's off the new main entry. Every public space from the building opens up from the space.” He said all the center's public spaces, including the new café, the gymnasium and fitness center, the art gallery and meeting spaces and conference rooms are all visible from the rotunda. The center welcomes visitors through a main entrance through glass doors and a large bank of windows. The rotunda, along with other features, opens up to the street and, according to Olbekson, is intended to assert an urban Native American presence on Franklin Avenue. “We put this as a prominent form on the outside of the building too. This curved space has its expression on the outside,” said Olbekson. “So, people know the space is here, and it's for them, and they're welcome.”  There is also an emphasis on activities for youth and elders. The gym, along with a new teen tech center, will be used by youth for recreation and learning. Overlooking the gym is a new dining area for elders who eat lunch together daily at the center. The refurbished gym is dedicated to the memory of the late Frances “Frannie” Fairbanks, the center's former director. A plaque dedicated to Fairbanks is mounted on the wall. ‘A real modern feel to it' Charlie Stately is the owner of Woodland's Crafts and has operated his arts business for more than four decades. He began working for the original owner of the shop at age 21. Stately has now moved into his new location in the renovated center, in a space double the size of his original shop. “I am thinking about if we got more space, more things we can offer, more artists we can include. The gallery is right there. We have a door to the gallery,” said Stately. “People will be saying, ‘I am looking forward for this or that.' That's how we operate, we listen to our customers.” Bruce Savage, one of Stately's long-time vendors, dropped in as Stately's new shop was reopening. Savage said the newly renovated building speaks to the importance of the center to the future of the community — both local and national. “For some reason, we fixate on old architectural structures within Indian Country, but this building has a real modern feel to it,” said Savage.  The Minneapolis American Indian Center opens Wednesday to the entire community during the kickoff to Minnesota's American Indian Month. 

Mary LaGarde is the Executive Director of the Minneapolis American Indian Center (MAIC) and a member of the White Earth Nation. She was selected to lead the organization in June 2013 and has over 30 years of nonprofit experience in program services, including management and development. In 2008, LaGarde received the DreamMaker Award from the Ann Bancroft Foundation. In 2014, she was honored at the University of Minnesota's American Indian Student Cultural Center's Honoring of American Indian Women, and LaGarde was named a 2016 Local Public Health Hero by the City of Minneapolis Health Department. She received her B.A. in Sociology/American Racial and Multicultural Studies from St. Olaf College (Northfield, MN).  In this week's episode, we learn about the importance of community, family, and youth services as the center of many development goals at MAIC through the eyes of LaGarde. The renovated center will introduce the Boys and Girls Club, a new resource that will serve as an umbrella for some of the youth programming. Visitors can look forward to new volunteer opportunities and renovations of the fitness center, Two Rivers Gallery, and the Gatherings Café. A large celebration will kick off the grand re-opening of the Minneapolis American Indian Center in May of 2024.

The Minneapolis American Indian Center renovation project enters its final stages. For the past year, the Minneapolis American Indian Center has been undergoing major renovations- Travis Zimmerman has the story.IMAGE: Architectural renderings of the completed project, courtesy of the Minneapolis American Indian Center.

Who is Billie Topa Tate:Billie is a third-generation Mescalero Apache medicine woman who was mentored by her mother, grandmother, and elders. She is an active member of the American Indian Center in Chicago. She also owns and operates MSI Wellness, where she offers reiki and healing sessions as well as teaching classes that help others find their sacred journeys.What we discussed:-Billie's upbringing and mentorship by age 11.-The importance of learning ceremony and how that helps to bring someone closer to the unseen world. -Billie was taught by her grandfather that words are energy carriers. They carry medicine and vibration so it was important to her to put them down in book form.-Billie explains why she wrote a book about her teachings for anyone going through hard times and call upon help. -Billie's book for purchase ​Spirit Guide Invocations: Seeking Wisdom from Sacred Helpers​-How plants are very giving to us.-Billie's first encounter with an angel.-Understanding what a medicine woman is in the Mescalero Apache tribe and how it is a matriarchal society.-Understanding the power of dream time.-Energetic writings (aka invocations) that help call our spirit guides and helpers. The importance of all the invocations in the book.-Billie explains that you should do the invocation of your choice every day until the situation has resolved itself. She says it works EVERY TIME.-Billie demonstrates an invocation of new thoughts for all the listeners. Billie talked about when she was 12 and an elder asked her to do this invocation and think a new thought about herself once a day.-The difference between hearing your psychic abilities and your mind.Ways to find Jennifer:Instagram: ​@msiwellnesscenter​Website: ​msi-healing.com​Other ways to follow me:Instagram: ​wellness_matters_tribe​Facebook: ​wellness matters​Website:​ wellnessmatterstribe.com​My book: ​The Missing Piece​

On this edition of Rebel Music, host Karla López Owens talks with activist, writer, and community organizer Carolina Castoreno. Carolina identifies as both American Indian and Mexican Indian, She's a citizen of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, and a descendant of the Mescalero Apache, and Yaqui tribes. Carolina has served as executive director of the American Indian Center of Indiana. Her work is centered around the preservation of Native identity, decolonization efforts, and education for Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

On this edition of Rebel Music, host Karla López Owens talks with activist, writer, and community organizer Carolina Castoreno. Carolina identifies as both American Indian and Mexican Indian, She's a citizen of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, and a descendant of the Mescalero Apache, and Yaqui tribes. Carolina has served as executive director of the American Indian Center of Indiana. Her work is centered around the preservation of Native identity, decolonization efforts, and education for Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Drums like a heartbeat, voices rising in unison, dancers adorned with beads, feathers and bone. The Baltimore American Indian Center's 47th annual Pow Wow is this weekend. We get a preview from Christine Duckworth-Oxendine (Lumbee) and Louis Campbell (Blackfoot and Lumbee) both Northern Traditional dancers and educators at BAIC. Links: Baltimore American Indian Center 47th Annual Pow Wow Sat. Nov. 18, Baltimore American Indian Center, Holiday Sponsorship for Native Youth, Native American Lifelines Community Feast Potluck, Nov. 25.Do you have a question or comment about a show or a story idea to pitch? Contact On the Record at: Senior Supervising Producer, Maureen Harvie she/her/hers mharvie@wypr.org 410-235-1903 Senior Producer, Melissa Gerr she/her/hers mgerr@wypr.org 410-235-1157 Producer Sam Bermas-Dawes he/him/his sbdawes@wypr.org 410-235-1472

Sherburne County partnered with St. Cloud State University to offer a chance for Indigenous students to connect with both the land and their heritage. Reporter Chandra Colvin has the story. This is Minnesota Native News. I'm Marie Rock. This week, Sherburne County partnered with St. Cloud State University to offer a chance for Indigenous students to connect with both the land and their heritage. Reporter Chandra Colvin has the story.  In late September, indigenous students had the chance to connect to mother earth by planting sweetgrass at the Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge. These students are a part of a new program through the St. Cloud State University American Indian Center. This program is known as the Indigenous Learning Community or the ILC. Coordinator Bearpaw Shields, who is both Dakota and Nakota, explains: BEARPAW SHIELDS: The Indigenous Learning Community was created - this unique program that is grant funded. And it was designed to help, recruit, retain, and graduate our indigenous students. And so part of my role, as well, is to help mentor the students, and to help them succeed through the college role here at St. Cloud State University. Because a lot of times we get first time students, and it's really scary. They don't know a lot about college life. And I want to really help them stay on track, because it's so easy to fall into the wrong crowd. And then, they don't end up graduating. So I'm serving here as a mentor, and as a guide, basically a guide, if you want to put it that way. The ILC provides experiences to indigenous students both inside and outside of the classroom. Students can take culturally relevant classes as a cohort and spend time together in the American Indian Center on campus studying. Bearpaw Shields coordinated the sweet grass planting with Sherburne County's Park Director.   GINA HUGO: I'm Gina Hugo. I'm the parks director for Sherburne County. And we're here at the Big Elk Lake Parkland, where we have been working with several Minnesota tribal communities on a cultural landscape co management vision for a sacred landscape that's in county stewardship right now. And today, we're out with some amazing St. Cloud State students to expand a sweet grass meadow on the landscape.  Bearpaw Shields explains how this partnership came to be.  BEARPAW SHIELDS: I first met her probably about a few years ago. I was introduced to her because she was working on this property that we planted the sweet grass on. And she wasn't educated on American Indians. And so I took her underneath my wing, and educated her. And so she you know, talking to her about how there's not a lot of places for our people to whether it's harvest sweet grass, or sage or chokecherries or elderberries, things that are people traditionally used as medicines and for ceremonies. And so she then decided, you know what, I think this would be a great idea for this when they're going to do the park to have the sweet grass. So then our generations can come and harvest sweet grass, and so we can continue to use the medicines that our people have done for many years. Aria, a part of the Red Lake Tribe is a second-year medical laboratory science student. They share their experience on this opportunity:  ARIA: I decided to come here to kind of connect closer with my culture. I think that being able to plant sweet grass in itself is an amazing experience. And I feel like a lot of Native Americans should be able to have that experience to connect closer with their culture and be able to grow closer as a community in general. This is the first of several activities that the Indigenous Learning Community students at St. Cloud State University will experience this year. Planned activities include traditional crafts, such as ribbon skirt and shirt making, as well as visits from an Ojibwe elder. For Minnesota Native News, this is Chandra Colvin 

In this episode of Cuadros Corner #27 I was able to sit down with a Rio Grande Valley artist who passionately loves art. He spoke to me about how the strokes from his brush is therapeutic as he slides his colorful wet paint on the canvas; truly expressing his inner most feelings. . . . His bio is as follows: . . "Born in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley (Weslaco, Texas), Jason Ray Perez is a self-taught, South Texas, mixed media and pyrography artist. His artistic styles range from modern/neo contemporary expressionism to street art, to traditional Mexican pyrography folk art. . . Perez initially made his introductory public appearance as an independent artist in 2009, by curating and promoting his first solo exhibit titled "Only in Dreams". Since then, Perez has remained an active supporter of the South Texas art scene, he has participated in numerous group exhibits internationally, nationally and throughout the state of Texas; including, three gallery level solo art exhibits titled "Alas De Mis Angeles" (2011), "Illicit Visions" (2013) and "LACONISM" (2016). . . In 2017 several of Perez' artworks were recognized by District 40, state of Texas Representative Terry Canales, and are currently exhibited in The Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas. In 2023 one of Perez' paintings titled "Shinaai" (brothers), a memorial homage to his late best friend Max Moreno (lead singer of Costello), was inducted to one of the oldest and largest Native American museums in the United States, the American Indian Center in Chicago, Illinois, for permanent display. . . Perez has been dubbed "The Patron Saint of Valley Art", has curated countless exhibits for many reputable visual artists and is a major socialite amongst the RGV's thriving art and entertainment scene. Perez continues to create art, he is the founder of the McAllen Art Crawl, former co-founder and former curator of the Phoenix Art Gallery and is the art director for several establishments located in McAllen's Art District where he both exhibits his art works and hosts art exhibits for local and visiting artists." . . . Thank you for coming to my podcast Jason, I truly felt your story and hope you accomplish all your goals. . . . You can follow him on social: . . his Facebook: . . https://www.facebook.com/jason.perez.7311?mibextid=LQQJ4d . . his Instagram: . . https://instagram.com/jperez_art?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== . . Thank you to our sponsor Backdoor Modern Vintage in Weslaco, Texas at 907 W Business 83 . . You can find their instagram in the link below: . . https://www.instagram.com/backdoor_modernvintage/ . . . thank you for listening to yet another episode of Cuadros Corner - a podcast in which I make it easy for the RGV community to share their story. . . From your local content creator & solar consultant, Carlos J. Cuadros. . . Click The Link Below for More Information . . https://linktr.ee/storystormaker . . . #artist #mixedmedia #weslaco #rgv956 #cuadroscorner --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/cuadroscorner/support

Episode 20 of our podcast Enrichment Today, hosted by Dr. Amy Blansit and our special guest Kay Gibson from the American Indian Center of Springfield!Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrewLewisFoundationhttps://www.facebook.com/americanindiancenter1https://www.facebook.com/EnrichmentTodayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/drewlewisfoundation/https://www.instagram.com/enrichmenttoday/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DLFSGFWebsite: https://drewlewis.orghttps://drewlewis.org/aics/

Last week I was honored to meet Valerie Falcon, a Local Native American hard at work to resurrect the American Indian Center, 1127 N Broadway, Springfield MO. I was unable to get the podcast edited and uploaded that day to share the event they had scheduled for Saturday, but we both agreed to work harder next year and get the AIC info out there quicker! Who knows, maybe Valerie will come on board the Coming Out Of the Kitchen podcast and give a monthly or weekly show, fingers crossed. Valerie has made it so easy to connect with the AIC program with your questions, ideas, suggestions and or donations so lets go over her contact info: FB American Indian Center of Springfield, and you can PM her there. email: Springfieldindiancenter1@gmail.com Phone 417-880-1570 Here are some upcoming events that everyone is invited to: Nov. 29, 2022 - Indian Hand Game, at the Plaster Student Hall, Missouri State Univ. (MSU) 7-10 pm Dec 5, 2022 - Tea Time at the Plaster Student Hall on the Missouri State Univ. (MSU) 3-5pm Dec. 17, 2022 - Holiday Party and Toy Drive with Dinner and Games Jan/Feb. Starting new classes at the Drew Center, 1127 N Broadway, Spfd MO. Mar. is the Spring Pow Wow Jun. Pow Wow Email Valerie to get updates and get on her mailing list for future events. Email Cass: comingoutofthekitchenpod@gmail.com with your questions, Ideas, suggestions or comments --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/coming-out-of-the-kitchen/message

Heather Miller is the museum's first director of tribal relations. She previously served as executive director of the American Indian Center in Chicago. She's also a member of the Wyandotte Nation.

CCTV visited the Pow Wow and recorded "The Brothers" and their explanation of the dancing stick. 

Patty:  So we're here talking Deondre Smiles about Indigenous geographies. And I took like grade 10 geography that was the extent of my geography training, which means I learned about glacial movement and labeling rivers and all of that stuff. But I mean, first off, just the idea of Indigenous geographies from a land bank perspective is really interesting. Because colonial borders are one thing biozones are another thing. And so it's just seemed like a real this really fascinating topic that I know almost nothing about. So why don't you introduce yourself? Explain a little bit about your work and then and then we'll get into kind of what what we mean when we're talking about Indigenous geography.Deondre:  Sure, I'd be happy to. So my name is Dr. Deondre Smiles.  I use he him pronouns as well as the Ojibwemowin general pronoun win.  I am a citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, I'm of Ojibwe, Black, and settler ancestry is specifically Swedish. On my mother's side, my mother was Ojibwe and Swedish. My father was African American man from Oklahoma. And so I am currently an assistant professor of geography at the University of Victoria. I'm out on the west coast of BC, Canada. Some other interesting facts about me, I'm originally from Minneapolis, did a did a bachelor's degree in geography at a tiny little State University that probably noticed nobody's heard of in Minnesota, I did a master's degree in global Indigenous Studies at the University of Minnesota and did a PhD in geography at Ohio State where I also did a postdoc for a year as a, as a history postdoc. Well, they're kind of interesting things about me, I tend to not think of myself as a super interesting person. So usually, I'm at a loss about this. I also, also sometimes, trying to talk about myself is really hard, but that's perfectly alright.Probably the coolest thing about me are probably, you know, the people surrounding me right? Married to a wonderful woman for almost two years now we have a cat so um, that's probably what I'm, besides posting a lot of things about Indigenous geographies, on Twitter. I'm also well known for posting photos of my cat um, quite often. So I do that. I live out in Victoria. Most of the time, I'm actually talking to you tonight from Columbus, Ohio, where my wife is still here doing a doctoral degree at OSU. Back for our reading break, and doing some doing some other kind of appointment type of things. Avid musician. Yeah, that's pretty much that's pretty much me in a nutshell.I mean, obviously, there'll be far much more that we'll talk about here in this interview. But specifically when it comes to Indigenous geographies, because that's what I really describe myself is, my interests in that work are multifaceted, to say the least. And so there's kind of a couple of key strands of my work that I really have drawn upon. And the first one is what we would call critical Indigenous geographies, right? Like bringing the way that Indigenous peoples engage with space and place into conversations with power and race and economics and capitalism and colonialism and all these things. The other strand is what what we would call in the United States like tribal cultural resource preservation, probably north of the border in Canada would be you'd probably use a term of, you know, Indigenous resource management or a cultural resource management.And so a lot of my work over the last, oh, six years of my, my education and in my academic career have been focusing on the ways that tribal nations in the US and First Nations in Canada and Indigenous nations around the world have found very creative and unique ways to protect on cultural sites such as burial grounds against development and disturbance. That's been that was the focal point of my dissertation. And what I'm doing now at UVic is bringing in some of my other interests that such as science and technology studies, political ecology, or the studies of how politics and power engage with the natural environment. In an Indigenous research ethics in exploring the ways that these Indigenous nations are now using the lessons that they learn from defending the dead and applying that to more than human relatives such as you know, the land, water animals, plants, especially in an era of anthropogenic climate crisis that it seems like we as Western global northern society seem to have the throttle down, like at full in our hurdling ourselves straight into this.And I think it's important with that where you see a lot of discourse nowadays about oh, well, the world is ending we need to look at you know, colonizing space. And you know, what are we going to do when the world ends, and I draw upon really, really awesome scholars like Kyle White, and other Indigenous scholars, especially a lot of Indigenous women and Two Spirit and queer thinkers that say, well, Indigenous peoples have already lived through the apocalypse, right? Like we have already seen, the apocalypse happened on our lands, and in the ways that colonialism and capitalism seeks to sever us from those connections. And so maybe if folks actually listened to Indigenous peoples, we might be able to offer something about how we can deal with Apocalypse, and how it's not necessarily the end of the world, but maybe an opportunity for us to reframe how we are in relation with the world.And so that's the work that I do. I'm starting up a lab, a geography lab at UVic. In that regard, we call ourselves the Geographic Indigenous Futures lab, or GIF lab for short. While I say we have labs, mainly me right now, but I'm recruiting graduate students to work with me and work in the lab. So, if you're an Indigenous student who's really interested in space and place, and you want to go get a master's in geography, I'll make sure to drop my contact information here with the host some definitely come talk to me, I'm recruiting for fall 2022. Now, so I'll leave it there. Because otherwise I could do the time honored Ojibwe tradition of kind of going on and on and talking for a while, but we have, I'm sure you'd have some some questions you want to throw my way. And I'd love to just have a conversation with both of you. So thank you for having me.Kerry: You know, it's interesting, I just left the shores of BC. On Saturday, I was on the west side, visiting my family, my daughters out there. And the one thing that I will say about being in BC, especially in the Vancouver area, we were right in Burnaby. North Vancouver, like we were around places there is that you you pick up, the land speaks you know, there's there is no doubt that there is a sense about the space of BC that feels old and nurtured and loved. And that energy, that space of being in that can only have been curated by those who have known and understood this land.And interestingly enough, I was I was there spending time with my granddaughter. And I you know, Halloween was coming up. And she mentioned the idea of a zombie apocalypse. And so I thought it was so funny when you mentioned how we understand the land because what I had turned to her and said Is she was like, what if there's a zombie apocalypse Nanny. And I said to her, let me tell you something. We are people of Indigenous and of color. We've been there and done that. We don't, no nothing about the apocalypse is gonna sway us. And so she looked at me and she was like, Wow, is that true? And I said, look at where we are. This land is eons old, it has existed before us, and it will exist after us. And there are some of us that do understand this space.So with that, Deondre.  My question for you is, are we listening anymore? Do you believe and it sounds like you know, I kind of feel that you may go this way that the the ears are now right, to truly hear the voices that are have always been an understood meaning out.Deondre: So yeah, that's a really, really great question. Kerry, I think that we are definitely in a position where the ears are more open than they were probably a generation or two ago. I mean, one of the things that I deal with as an Indigenous geographer is still this, this this overarching kind of thought that well, you know, why do you study Indigenous geography? You know, are there Indigenous people left?  I think about in my PhD program, being at a departmental happy hour. Having fellow grad students decided that I was going to be the person to try to sharpen their theoretical claws on and say, you know, why do you do Indigenous geographies? Didn't didn't colonialism win?  And I'm you know,  I'm like, well, it didn't because I'm standing here right in front of you right now, you know, right likeBut, you know, these are the things that we have to deal with. I think that in the current political climate that we find ourselves here in North America, particularly, I think that people are starting to realize that Indigenous peoples have a lot to say about how to live in relation with the environment. And it's becoming more than the romanticized  “Oh, yes, Indigenous peoples are these like, you know, very deeply spiritual folks that are out there, you know, living in community with the, with the, with the animals and things like that,” you know, this very kind of pseudo spiritual environmentalist BS that really infantilizes Indigenous peoples and kind of places us as part of, of the environment.And what they're starting to realize is, oh, no Indigenous peoples have, you know, these really complex systems of environmental stewardship, um in particular, some that my colleagues do really, really great work on, you know, ecologies of fire management and stewardship, or lands, you know, stewardship, that are based upon, you know, long standing, you know, worldviews and ontologies and epistemologies that have predated colonization, right.Um, you know, in particular, in BC, you know, having just dealt with the, you know, these massive fires that burned across the province this summer, I had a pyro geographer, who's from a tribe in California, come into my class just a couple of weeks ago. And he talked about fire. And he said, yet when I go around, and I talk to people about fire, for example, right, their first inclination is like, fire in forest and fire in the environment is bad, right? Like, you don't want wildfires and things like that. He says, No, if you actually do it, right, and you actually do do it properly, and you don't just you know, it isn't just some out of control fire, but it's done with an eye on the ecosystem and things like that, based on these cultural values that other tribal nations have have thought about, you can find that fire is like a really beneficial thing, for example, and it blew my students minds.I think the obstacle that we are facing right now, though, with this kind of opening of the ears, it's not that people aren't willing to listen, what we oftentimes have to deal with is that we still have to deal with ideas of theft of Indigenous knowledge, for example. So right now, I think we're kind of we go in and out of this, this framework where settler academics and settler policymakers, governmental leaders, like all of a sudden, you know, and I've noticed this in Canada, more than the United States, right? Where all of a sudden, it's really fashionable to be down with Indigenous issues, right? Where it's like, you know, oh, yes, we actually want to listen to you. But the type of listening that they do is based upon Okay, so how can I use this knowledge to help further my career? How can I use this knowledge to take it and I can use it to get grant funding or I can use it to get accolades that don't go back, that don't trickle down to the communities that did this, right. How can I listen? In the case of some academics, how can I listen so that I can use it against them and kind of shoot back at them? Oh, well, you know, your, your forms of knowledge are not scientifically rigorous, right? Like, you have to think about the science.I think the challenge is going to be actually listening and mastering the art of listening without preconceived thoughts about how you're going to respond and how you're going to act. Right, right, listening and actually taking what people have to say in mind. And you know, not thinking, Oh, well, I'm just going to listen and then I'm going to get a word in after that, but thinking okay, maybe I might have to sit with what they've said, especially if it's things that make people uncomfortable, I think we as as Western, a Western quote, Western global northern society are really, really quite bad at sitting with discomfort, like, we it's something that we want to get rid of. And a lot of times that discomfort is what you have to sit with. And that's actually where true growth kind of comes out of right? When you deal with those. Those awkward moments or the moments where you kind of feel like how the community is kind of taking me to task here, right? Like, I think we all kind of know that. Right?Like, I think about, I think about the times when my mother like you know that this strong Anishinaabekwe definitely let me know what's up. I mean, she she raised me with tough love sometimes. And you know, when I was a kid, I was like, Oh, this doesn't feel really good. And now that I'm still, you know, I just turned 31 this year, and I still feel like I'm still pretty, you know, I still have so much left to left to learn in life. I'm like, I'm really glad she did that. Because those are the moments we're actually kind of through and kind of learn things right. And so I think that that's going to be the next step for listening is you know, you listen not to capitalize or to exploit you don't listen just for you know, your kind of ego’s sake, but you actually listen and you almost towards a point where you kind of pass the mic to these communities to these Indigenous peoples and you allow them to start kind of guiding the conversations going forward.Patty:  I wanted to start with your essay on George Floyd. Yes, just because it's it's an interesting way of thinking about Indigenous geographies and urban spaces, because we think of Indigenous places, we always think of rural spaces. So, you know, so I kind of wanted to start there, it's an urban space, it's a way of thinking about the way that the state acts on our bodies. And then you had another essay about autopsy. And those two put to those two reading one after the other was kind of really interesting things in my brain. Just because they and then the last one about radio just just seems like a nice place. It feels like life. Plus, it's kind of what Kerry and I do. It's not really radio, but it's independent Indigenous media. So yeah, so that George Floyd piece was really, I didn't realize that you were actually from, from Minneapolis.Deondre: Yep. Born, born and raised for the first few years of my life. As a matter of fact, the the apartments that I spent the probably the longest time in in South Minneapolis is about four blocks north of where George Floyd was murdered. One of those things and so I remember you know, the little convenience store, Cup Foods that he was killed in front of I remember that is a little kid passing by that. And I know that intersection quite well.And in kind of another another sort of panel that I talked about, about this, I was like, it's actually quite funny kind of taking a look at that apartment, because in 1994, right, my, my single mother was able to afford the rent in that apartments, I mean, we were, we were pretty poor, right? I think there was one bedroom and so I got the bedroom and my mom and then my dad when he was around, slept on an air mattress in the living room. And we were lucky enough that we were right next to Powder Horn Park, which is a major center for South Minneapolis as far as like recreation and things like that. I took a look at that apartment now. I can't, I can't figure we paid more than probably 500 or 600 bucks a month for it back then in the early 90s. And now it's it's pushing like $2,000 a month. And there's like a laundry list of all these requirements, right? That you have to make so much of this income and you can't do this and you can't do that. And I'm like, man, it's some shitty ass apartment in South Minneapolis. Right? And you're, you're acting like this is like, you know, a condo in Vancouver or something like that, because it now it's across from a park. And, you know, all of a sudden, you know, Minneapolis is now cool, again to folks to live in, right?You know, it's like I grew up in Minneapolis in the mid 90s. Like, we were like the most kind of like Wonder Bread like Midwestern city. I mean, it was cold all the time. And Minneapolis was not cool back then. I mean, it was cool for a lot of reasons, right? But kind of dominant society kind of us as “oh that Midwestern city.” And then, you know, around the time, unfortunately, I think like when Prince passed away and things like that, all of a sudden people are like, oh, yeah, Minneapolis might actually be a really kind of trendy place. And now you see that gentrification, but that's all kind of an aside of just kind of the changes that have happened. But yeah, my family's my family. My grandmother moved her kids down from the rez, from Leech Lake in the 19, late 1960s, early 1970s. And they've there's been members of my family that have lived in Minneapolis ever since. So if you have any, any viewers or listeners from South Minneapolis, we have many generations of South Highschool Tiger alumni in my family. So yeah.Kerry: I love thatPatty: To build on what you said, you talked about gentrification, you talk about the way certain places are framed as safe and dangerous. Depending on how the dominant society sees them, right, because there are neighborhoods, so we know how to live in them. And then even is like, you know, Ibram Kendi talks about this. And in one of his books, that even though he was from a neighborhood that the dominant culture may have thought was dangerous. He thought it was safe, and it was this other neighborhood …Kerry:  And that is such an interesting sentiment everywhere we go. Because, once again, taking it back to being in BC last week. What I thought was fascinating is that parts of Burnaby in BC is, or parts of Burnaby are considered not necessarily the best areas. And when I drove through what vague, what's considered the hood in Burnaby, I was I just couldn't fathom this. That most a lot of those places had Land Rovers and Mercedes Benz outside, even though in the lot, you know, like outside in everybody's driveways, there was nothing that would have been like the stereotypical markers of what we would consider a hood. And so for me, what it really created in my space was this, this, you know, taking an inner look at how we take these perceptions of what we do call hood, versus what the reality is. And so I think it fits really well into the question that you're asking Patty, this idea of how, you know, the bigger culture can create these ideas or these lines, these red lines that make certain areas supposedly distasteful? I could not, I'm talking beautiful, you know, houses on a couple of acres, neighborhoods, it just it made no sense to me. But this was considered the hood. Couple of shootings that happened and all kinds of things. Very interesting demographic or way of thinking about it.Deondre: It really is, in terms of Minneapolis, right? I mean, in my lifetime, I've seen neighborhoods that were used to be considered gritty becomes suddenly these really hip places, right. For example, northeast Minneapolis, or as, as a lot of kind of hipsters like to call it nordeast Minneapolis. I mean, back in the 1990s, right, this was kind of an industrial neighborhood, kind of gritty, really blue collar. You know, there's nothing sexy about northeast Minneapolis. You know, fast forward 20 years now you have craft breweries and yoga studios, and places where you can buy kombucha and things like that, and now everybody wants to live over there.You know, the kind of the biggest thing when I talk about the Twin City is that people, they shake their heads, even in Minnesota, when I talked about it is, I always I always kind of bring up on like it during the era of Jim Crow segregation in the south, the worst segregation in the United States often was not in cities like Birmingham, or Atlanta, or Charlotte or places like that. The worst segregation, oftentimes were in cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul, because it had that veneer of being in the north, where, you know, the North fought against slavery in the Civil War, and kind of the, you know, the American mythos. And, you know, the North with, you know, through the Great Migration and things like that the North was viewed as this is by white Americans is like, Oh, yes, see, we're opening our doors to these Black Americans from the south.They would get to the north to find racist covenants in real estate deeds, and redlining, and things like that. You know, one of the biggest, the biggest proponents of segregation in the United States was Robert Moses right? One of these great urban planners that we hold up as I looked at all these things he did in New York City. Well, what he did in New York City, and other cities is designed highways to run right through Black neighborhoods and to divide white neighborhoods from Black neighborhoods. Right? It was like the 20th century version of the railroad tracks like the other side of the freeway. In St. Paul, in particular, the Rondo neighborhood, probably one of the most vibrant Black neighborhoods in Minnesota. found itself under under the under the bulldozer in the 1960s. When they decided, well, interstate 94 Need to go someplace, we're going to build it right through the middle of this neighborhood. There's nothing left of Rondo besides some street signs saying where it was, um,And so yeah, it, you know, North Minneapolis, which is probably you know, the area of Minneapolis that is identified the most with Blackness and also has this reputation of all this, that's where all the shootings happen, right. You don't want to be in North Minneapolis. I'm like, Well, you know, what, what happened was that, you know, these processes of segregation and things like that ended up instigating race riots, right. And then White Minneapolitans kind of said, well, we're moving out to the suburbs because North Minneapolis used to be one of the wealthiest areas of the city and then after these race riots that were caused by you know, neglect and all of these in all these different things white Miinesotans white, Minnesota said Okay, so we're gonna move out to these new suburbs and leave Black Mineapolitans in North Minneapolis, which then became kind of economically segregated and left and left largely to its its own plan kind of obsolescence right anytime. You know, though, the city will be really quick to take any credit for like any kind of, you know, major positive developments in North Minneapolis saying, oh, yeah, you see, Minneapolis is super diverse, super welcoming city and a lot of times is like no, that happens at a community to grassroots level,right.It's the kind of a funny story that I think I told in the article is around you know, around the time of the protests right, in Minneapolis or on the police precincts you you see it you saw a lot of folks from rural Minnesota in the suburbs, kind of jump on Facebook and say Oh, see, look how it look at those, look at those, quote, thugs rioting down there, right? Like, that's why that's why I'll never go to Minneapolis even though you know, these are the kind of folks that go to country music concerts at the baseball stadium, like once a year, and then like, leave and don't come to the city otherwise, and it's it, but that drives the dominant narrative, right?So people, my mother lives in North Minneapolis, and people are like, Isn't she like, you know, isn't she like, scared of living there? Like, isn't that dangerous? I'm like, No, it's not dangerous, right? It's like any other big city like you, you go there, you you, you handle your business. Um, you know, it's, you know, I can if I wanted to go, if I'll put it this way, right, it's like, you, if you go looking for trouble, trouble is going to find you. And it's going to find you, whether that's in North Minneapolis, or that's in 50th and France, which is like the fanciest neighborhood in Minneapolis, right southwest Minneapolis. But it just comes down to kind of the ways that you know, white settlers, quite honestly kind of paint these kind of narratives.Kind of one example that I don't think I talked about in that paper is, you know, the fact that Minneapolis is Dakota land. And when they talked about renaming Lake Calhoun Bde Maka Ska. It was it was kind of that moment, for the first time where people kind of saw how much masks could come off in then this moment, right. You had these people that live next to the lake, that was, you know, it's called Lake Calhoun. And it was named after a politician who was a major proponent of the system of slavery in the United States and help to, you know, support it and strengthen it in the in the early 1800s. You saw people kind of coming out saying, Why, why do we really need to rename this? Right? Why do we need to re rename it to Bde Maka Ska. Stop focusing, oh, it's gonna bring down our property values, right like that, that time honored, like, you know, dog whistle for oh, it's going to it's, you know, if it's viewed as anything other than white American, it's gonna, it's gonna hurt us.And people are like, wow, those people are being are being like, super racist. And folks like me are saying, those are the same people that that would be, you know, flying pride flags out in front of their house and having, you know, Black Lives Matter signs in their front yards, and saying, like, everyone is welcome here. You know, because they are in a neighborhood where they don't have to confront diversity, right? Diversity is something that is far away from them. And they're like, Oh, yes, it can stay over there. Like, we'll support it, but we wouldn't actually want it coming into our neighborhood.And then when you know, something as simple as a name change, you know, is threatening enough to them that they can be like, Oh, well, you know, if that's going to bring down the neighborhood, we don't want that. And so, I think kind of the whole kind of saga. And really what I tried to kind of attest to in this is that, well, you know, this really kind of ripped away kind of that veneer of the North, in the minds of a lot of people's being this really kind of a non-racist place, right? I'm like, it's just as racist as the South. And that if we understand that, and we and we think about those kinds of geographies of race as being something that is nationwide versus just, you know, just focused on the South, then we can actually really understand quite honestly kind of how fucked it is in the United States for a lot of folks and how we can really take concrete steps to try to push back against that, just like the the people that went out there on the streets in Minneapolis, I'm really, really tried to do Minneapolis and many other cities as well.Kerry: In it, when I think about, you know, all of what you just said, You're it what comes to mind, I think about this whole year I've been I've been spending some time doing some reflection on like cycles. How I see things cycling in and cycling out, right. And I really feel when you mentioned that pulling back the curtain like that idea of the veneer being stripped away. I think that's very profound. Ove, over the last couple of years, I think we've all had to go internally, and and or you can't gaze at the scenery, and not recognize that there is much that is not what it seems and as much as we may have settled in some complacencies about the way that we have viewed the relationships that we have with each other or that we've even had with the land because nobody can say that Mother Earth is not saying something back to us now.You know, what you started with a sense of we must listen, we must pull it back and really be willing to see it for all the dirt and grime that exists. And it, Are we ready now to add some soap and water hopefully it's environmentally sound and start to wipe away. Start to wipe away at some of this dirtiness that exists. And with that, like what? Where do you Where do we fit as people who, who may have this different viewpoint? Because we've been mired in some of that grime for a long time. Where do you think we can move ourselves? Or show up? You know, we're normally the ones that do we come with the grit? You know, what did they call the, you know, the Mr. Clean Magic, magic chalks or whatever we normally come in to do that deep cleaning. When do you think we fit in for that?Deondre: So yeah, so so people, so people like us, right, that are used to really kind of doing that deep cleaning, and kind of, you know, doing that kind of labor. I think that I really points to the next generation of really badass, Indigenous and Black and other, you know, scholars of color, activists of color, community members of color. You know, I feel like with every succeeding generation, we say, you know, we're aren't we're becoming more visible and we're become we're, we're ending up in places that we were not intended to be right.I think about as an Indigenous geographer. I think about 20 years ago, you would not see any of us in tenure track positions in institutions, I think, maybe, you know, I think for Black geographers that are better doing equally, if not more badass work, they would be the same thing, right? I think that you wouldn't see us it might be one or two in some vision, you know, very forward thinking visionary kind of departments. But you know, in my own departments, where I feel very, very fortunate to be it took a decade to do an Indigenous hire, right. And there they are so happy to have one but you know, we geography in particular, like we can be such a such a kind of a backwards kind of looking discipline and where we're constantly kind of tied to the past and kind of still trying to maneuver how to bring bring geography into the present.And you know, when that when those conversations happen, I'm like, Well, what does the future of geography look like I always kind of say, look to like the Black, the Indigenous and the other scholars of color, especially the ones from the Global South, right? They are the ones, we are the ones I try not to use weeks, I'm like, it's gonna be all these people that are in school right now that are going to really use the work that we've done as a launching pad to really do some really, truly exciting things. And I think that happens outside of academia as well. You know, the saying that often gets put in, you know, you see it on memes on Facebook, and you also see it on Twitter a lot, you know, you know, these Indigenous students, these Indigenous children are, you know, quote our ancestors, wildest dreams. I'm like, you know, it might sound kind of hokey, but I'm like, that's actually really super tricky, right? It's the truth,Kerry: hey, I have a bought my T shirt yet, but I so want one, I so want one because that state saying being our ancestors’ wildest dreams is the truth. And you touch something that I think is so important, and I just wanted to spend maybe a second here is, you know, Deondre, tell us what brought you to geography. And you know why, I was speaking to my husband recently. And we were talking about, you know, some of the rappers that are existing like the King Vons of the world, and, you know, some of the spaces where, you know, we've seen Black folk show up in what has been our traditional ways out of being, and yet you said something to me that I thought was so profound when you mentioned that, you know, being a Black geographer, has been, you know, you're trailblazing in certain ways.You're, you're creating and showing up in ways that you may not have been able to before. And I think that message is so important. For those of us coming up, though, not us. I'm a little more seasoned, but those coming up like my grandchildren's generations coming up, to recognize that there are these opportunities that you don't got to be in the NBA, and, you know, a mumble rapper, to be able to show some semblance of success. Could you tell us a little bit about how you did it? What brought you there? You know, cuz geography, you know what, it’s geography?Deondre: So that's a great that's a great question. Sorry, to sorry to interrupt. There I am. Yeah, I resonate with that. There's a lot of really, really good basketball players in my family. Actually, I was not one of them, I was a swimmer in high school, actually. So I've always kind of been that person that's kind of kind of walked a bit of a different path. And so there's two people, well, really one person and then a community that I really want to credit with kind of inspiring me to take the path that I that I've taken and so the first one is, is my mother.So why I really like geography is my mother from a very early age. She, she was always really big on education, it was something that she she felt very strongly about. You know, one of the things that she would do when I was in high school is she said, there was no question of like, Oh, what am I going to do when I when I graduate high school? She's like, No, you're going to college, right? You're, you're going to go to college. And so she would wake me up every morning. And she would say, like, oh, you know, good morning, kid who's going to go to college, right.But that, the framework of that started when I was two or three years old, and she would bring me to the library in South Minneapolis, right. And I would check out books and I would read the newspaper on my, I was reading from a super early age. And I would get maps, right, I also would like look at maps. And I really, really enjoyed maps, because it was always it was always really fun to look at them. And imagine that I was going places, right, like tracing the roads and kind of thinking, what would it be like to go here? What's this place like, it really inspired a curiosity about different places.You know, growing up in growing up, as we did, you know, I didn't really get a lot of opportunities to travel. But when we did, I always really enjoyed it. I remember we went out to went out to an Indigenous march in Colorado Springs in like the mid-1990s right about, you know, honoring treaty rights and things like that. And I really, really loved it. Um, I remember having my map kind of tracing the path that we were taking and learning, you know, seeing the new cities on street signs and things like that. Um, and it's just something that I always kind of picked up because of that, because she exposed me to it at an early age. I found that geography classes in elementary and middle school in high school, were the classes that I got easy A's in right?  Um, the one story that I often tell on Twitter is, I almost got into trouble in high school because I wrote a paper about South Africa, and I had researched it so thoroughly that the teacher thought I plagiarized it, it was like, it was miles beyond what a high schooler would write, was expected to write. And so it was one of those things when it came time to go to college. You know, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't a question of, if I was going to college, it was like, Okay, where are you going to college? Because like, my mom wasn't gonna, wasn't gonna just let me not go.But also, you know, when I thought about the majors, right, I was immediately like, Nope, I'm going, I'm going into geography. That was actually the big determining factor in where I applied to school. I was like, does it have a geography program? If it doesn't? I'm not, I'm not applying here. If it does, then then I am. And so that was, that was what led me to it.And then when I got to school, I kind of thought, Well, what do I want to do with a geography degree? And I kind of thought, well, maybe I want to do like land surveying, or maybe I want to be a cartographer. But the American Indian Center at my school, we would do this yearly Spring Break service trip, and we would go out, they had a relationship with the Northern Cheyenne Nation in Montana, and we would go out there. And so the year that I went, we went out there. And they took us on a tour of the communities.And they told us a story of the Northern Cheyenne people. And one of the big stories, big, big parts of their history is they said, Well, we our homeland is here in Montana, in the mountains. And these foothills, we were relocated down to the Great Plains by the US during, you know, the era of of treaty making and treaty breaking and relocation and things like that. And they said, Well, what we did is we we loved our homeland so much that we, you know, we as a people took off and fled back to Montana, and the US military chased them. And there was a there was a series of military conflicts, right, like the Battle of the Little Bighorn of the battle Greasy Grass happened not very far from the Northern Cheyenne homeland. And it was kind of part of the history and they said, We, you know, because of the resistance and the bravery that we, we showed up, the US decided that they would allow us to stay here in our homelands.And they talked about, you know, having conflicts over resource extraction, that, you know, companies want to come in and mine coal on the reservation. And they they've said, Well, we as a community have, you know, a lot of us have are the feeling that we would rather live in our homelands and be and be poor, and be economically disadvantaged, versus allow them to basically tear our land apart for any kind of short term, like economic gain. And it kind of was something that really inspired me and I was like, This is a story. This is a story about a story about a love for a place love for land rights.And I was like, well, geography is about space and place, but we often don't bring the emotion into it. We don't, we don't bring these Indigenous perspectives. And so that pretty much was like okay, so I want to bring Indigenous perspectives into geography. And then, you know, pretty much any hope for me to do any kind of other type of geography was pretty much on me down the drain at that point, and that's really kind of led me on the the the work that I do to the present day,Kerry: A couple of things I have to say, first of all, I know your mom has got to be proud of you. Your mom has got to be so proud of you. You know, you you're just an exemplary young man. And and I know that as a grandmother as a mother, I could be totally doing the ups for you. So that's first.Second is what I really love about your story and your retelling of it, is how you followed your passion. I think it's so important to point out that every one of us, I think, as you take your journey, we have something that is a spark, and, and really tapping into what that interest is. And then following that space, is the key to your freedom, it is the key to being able to be and living in your best space. And I know this is a little aside, but to me, it almost is about a geography. Because even our personal journeys is marked with a path, it's marked with a set of markers that allow us to be in our highest space. And so, life imitates our passions and our arts.Patty: Yeah, no, I love I love that because that's clear in you know, kind of in the papers that you write the the layering over, of Indigenous perspective on on this space. And I was just because that was the advice that I gave to my kids, you know, if you're going to go to university study something you love, if we're, if you're going to spend that money, study something you love, because there are careers and opportunities and things that you don't even know exist right now. And they will either they will cross your path, as you walk it you know, as as as you get there like Mariame Kaba, when she talks about abolition, you know, we walk this path of abolition and the opportunities, possibilities that we don't even know about, well, you know, we will build the world we want by walking this path.But I also want to remember that not everybody has the ability to do that. Right? That there's, I mean, privilege might be the wrong word. But opportunity. There's also you know, there's also certain necessities, right? Sometimes, you know, people may have obligations or things that, you know, so we also need to think about creating this world where people can follow their passions in this beautiful way. Because like I was making the world a better place when we can do this, when we're not getting our soul sucked out of us. Because we have to do this thing that pays the bills.And that's, I think, where this generational stuff comes in, you know, the Deondre, you had talked about, you know, what are the you know, are the children of today kind of being our ancestors’ wildest dreams? Because I think about that, whenever I go to powow, my favorite thing, about pow wow? You know, and I don't know, Kerry, maybe, maybe the parallel is, you know, watching watching people play spades, I don't know, when the old ones are dancing with the young ones. And I look at the old ones and I think you remember, when this was illegal, when our ceremonies were illegal, when, you know, when you sang hymns in church to cover up the organizing that was happening in the basement, because our gatherings unless we were gathering in church, it was illegal, you know, we weren't allowed to gather together. But the young ones, they don't know that world. Right? So my generation, kind of the sandwich generation, we have the trauma from our parents, and then the push through of our generation of trying to, you know, blaze this path or make this path even possible.You know, and then, you know, Deondre, you are the next generation, I'm afraid because I'm 56. So your generation behind me, you know, kind of emerging into these possibilities. And then these ones who are coming next, they don't even know, this is all just normal to them. Being able to be an Indigenous geographer, and to layer Indigenous realities over these colonial spaces that are themselves layered over Indigenous reality. So there's just that's just really cool to me.And we've kind of gone off of my plan for the conversation which is like totally fine. That's that's a much better conversations. But I do want to end with your with your piece about listening to native radio, just because that's just so hopeful and beautiful talk and it made me think of Smoke Signals. Have you ever seen the movie Smoke Signals? I'm dating myself now. He starts off with a good day to be Indigenous, It’s A Good day to be an Indian. So, what prompted this article about listening to native radio as, as an Indigenous geographer to think about Native radio? Because I loved it.Deondre: So that is an awesome question. And it actually speaks to the importance that I place on working with people from different academic backgrounds is me and thinking about things in a different way. I think a lot of times in the spaces that I that I'm in, I get this reputation as somebody that thinks a little bit outside the box, where it's always people are always like, well, that's not that's not possible. And I'm like, well, that's not possible, if you think about it in the way that you're thinking about it. But you know, how can we make it possible.And so in my master's degree, I was really, it was a wonderful interdisciplinary degree. My, the program director of that of the Master of Liberal Studies program at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, which is what it's, it's kind of shifted to something else now. But he was a rhetorician. And he does a lot of Media Studies things. And so he was really good, or he's really good at at many things. Back then probably the thing he was the best at was irritating me because he would always ask, well, what is geography? And I tell him all these things, and I would say, Well, you know, it's really wide, wide, ranging and multifaceted. And you'd be like, Well, if that's the case, then is there really such a thing as geography, right? If geography can do everything, then what is geography? And I'm like, no, no, we have disciplinary boundaries.And of course, now I really kind of come around to the thinking of like, Yeah, we actually really don't have for a, for a field that really focuses on maps and political spaces and things like that, you know, among other things, we are, we really have rather porous boundaries, and we're always in the risk of kind of like, falling away from each other, which, you know, maybe that's what geography might do in the next few generations is maybe we might turn into something else as we, which, you know, may or may not be a bad thing.But anyways, because of his interest in rhetoric, he had me do a lot of media related stuff. And so one of the projects that I did was I there's this television show produced by the PBS affiliate in Duluth, called Native Reports, um probably one of the best television shows out there about Native American and Indigenous culture. Um, you can actually watch it on on YouTube, if you live away from Duluth, which I'm assuming 99% of the of the listeners and viewers probably do. But he had me analyze that. And so I watched like, two seasons of Native Report. And I went through and I was like, here's all the things they talk about, here's the geographic locations, here's all these things. And I did that for a project paper.And then I started kind of a sequel to it where I'm like, Okay, so there's, there's the Indigenous radio stations as well. And I kind of want to kind of, and those, those things are more accessible on those, they've been around a lot longer than these television shows. So so let's see what they do. And I kind of started the project. And then I moved on to other things. And I graduated with my master's and I kind of left it alone. And then we fast forward, you know, three years after I get my master's, you know, this old, this old mentor and program director is like, Hey, I'm pulling together this special issue on listening, your radio piece is basically really close to being ready for publication, you should put it out. And so I sat down, and I kind of, I did more content analysis. And so I actually listened to a bunch of tribal radio stations in Minnesota, I spent like, half a summer doing that just sitting there when I was doing work, listening to the radio is like a really kind of it was really a really relaxing form of data collection, it kind of brought me back to being a little kid listening to you know, listening to the radio when I was growing up, right, I actually I did that I didn't watch a whole lot of TV, but I listened to talk radio a lot and things like that.And so I listened. And I was like, you know, what kind of music are they playing? What kinds of messages are they saying Are there are any kind of geographical references, all these things. And by the time I got done with with listening and looking at reports about things, I took a look and I'm like, Man, this is actually a really, really good paper that ties together geography and community, right kind of saying, here's the ways that these radio stations can foster a sense of community and foster a sense of connection between Indigenous and non-Indigenous listeners. And so I submitted it. To my surprise, they got accepted, right? That was like my second ever published article.But you know that paper, I really felt that as like, this is a really, really good way of talking about how community can be formed in some some of the most everyday kind of ways and how things as mundane as weather reports, or public service announcements, or even just the basic news can really tie people together in these really kind of enduring ways. And so it's one of my, it was one of my favorite articles to write. And I'm really glad that I'm glad that it's still picking up traction, right? I never imagined two years after writing that, that I'd be, I'd be talking about it on a on a major, you know, on a major program about some, you know, Indigenous issues and things like that. SoKerry: The ties that we create, when we allow ourselves to just go into our own spaces, and I, I, I'm really, really loving all parts of this conversations, even the parts we veered off on, because I think what I'm really going to walk away from this conversation with is how deeply we are tied to our passions. Like we we can create these unique medicines, these unique ways of, of looking at some of these enormous problems or what feels like they are enormous problems, when we come in it come at it from these unique perspectives. And with an open mind and our creative hearts. That's what's really going to tap away at some of these problems that exists. So thank you, Deondre for being such a reminder of that space. You're right, that thinking out of the box. That's your superpower, I would agree with you. It's definitely a superpower. And we're into those here. We're into those here.Patty: Yeah, that was that was really neat. Because when I when we think about it, because we think sometimes, you know, but you know how great social media is. And it is I mean, that's how I connect with you know, there’s so many, that's how I found you found each other on Twitter, and I find so many interesting people that way. But these are corporations, right? Like, they're corporations with algorithms, and they exist to make money. And the fact that, you know, my husband and I were just talking about this a few weeks ago, you know, he's talking about Google, and how Google, you know, just gives all this stuff away for free, you know, with the maps and the searching and everything and I’m like, that's right. Because if you're not paying for the product, guess what, you are the product. So there's limits to you know, kind of how great social media and these things can be.And we were talking about, you know, so we were just talking about, you know, how we form connections. And then, you know, looking at your paper, it's, it's these, these smaller, independent things that we do, because we've got like national radio and national this and national that, but it's these small local connections and, you know, in podcasts to you, because we form kind of smaller communities, and we're talking to each other. Right. So we're not as like, like, there's no code switching. I'm not concerned about my white audience. And what my white, I'm always surprised that white people listen to this. Because I'm not concerned about their feelings. I'm not concerned, I'm concerned about having Indigenous conversations about Indigenous things. I'm concerned about listening, you know, to Black voices, and to Afro Indigenous voices, because that's a world that I don't walk in, that's not my worldview, I need to listen and I need to cede power when necessary. You know, I need to pay attention to when I don't know things, and be willing, be willing to listen to that.So. So that reminder that these things, these, you know, native radios, and zines and podcasts and all of these ways that we communicate amongst ourselves, how important these things are. Because we live in diaspora, right? We have a homeland here on this continent, but we still but we're still in diaspora I do not live, it's a 24 hour drive. And I'm still in Ontario. If I want to go home, I drive for 24 hours, I'm still in Ontario, I'm going up and around Lake Superior. I don't live at home. I'm connected to them through various ways. And I'm connected to that geography through various ways. So thank you, thank you for this conversation and reminding us that geography isn't what I thought it was in grade 10. It's not labeling that some coloring rivers blue, it's …Kerry: Longitude and latitude, that’s what I remember.Patty: it's, it's our lives, our lives, our connection to each other into place. And that's really beautiful. And thank you, thank you so much.Deondre: It's, it's absolutely my pleasure. Yes. As a matter of fact, the experiences that you talk about, I mean, we I get, I get so many students that talk about like, Oh, I didn't know that geography could be all these things because the way that that you're taught it in grade school is such a limited kind of way. And that's where sometimes I kind of push. And I say, hey, we, you know, in geography, we're like, why is it that so many students come to us from other other departments? Right? It's like geography is one of those great majors in the university that it's, it's something that people kind of come to, there's very few people like me that come into come into college or university thinking, Oh, I'm going to do geography. A lot of times they happen to take a class for their Gen Ed's, or things like that. And they say, Oh, hey, this is actually really, really cool.And I and that's when I kind of pointed on …  we need to be bringing this perspective, to a holistic kind of viewpoint, we're right away. And in elementary school, and we're teaching children about maps and things like that. We're also teaching them about the ways that geography is really tied to our everyday kind of lives. Right? That's what that's one of the big themes of every single class that I teach is I say, well, geography is not some abstract thing that you kind of put away and you don't deal with it.I mean, there's, you know, in particular, when I teach a world regional geography, which I'll be doing again, this spring at UVic, I do an assignment where I say, Okay, I want you to tell me your daily routine, right? Where do you go? What you know, when you commute to school? What routes do you take, what buses do you take? Do you drive? What route do you take to your campus? Like, where do you go to eat? Where do you go to shop? Where do you go, you know, when you're hanging out with your friends, if you're taking, you know, taking somebody out on a date, if you're going for a swim when you're doing all these things, and I tell them start writing that down? Let's make a map of your daily life. And I'm like, That's geography right there. It is not like What's the capital of BC? Or what latitude is Valparaiso, Chile on, right, it is how do you relate to space in place?And I think that if we do that, um, you know, people are going to well, more people will come around to geography, but also, I think that may be some of the horror story that I hear so much are people in their high school geography classes or elementary school geography classes. My wife has told me some of her is actually, actually she's a she's an audiologist. So she's about as far away from geography as you possibly can be, except I'm always one that's like, oh, no, we can do things that are audiology and geography, I think of a good colleague of mine, um, Arianaa Planey, at the University of North Carolina, and badass Black geographer who she's in a, she's in a public health program. Now, she's done things related to, you know, geographic access to audiologists and things like that. And so, like, Hey, we're pretty much everywhere. Right? Geographers have fingers in pretty much every single academic pie that's out there. You just gotta, you just gotta know where to find us and kind of look for our hallmarks of who we are and in what we're doing. So yeah ..Kerry:  I really appreciate this for the creativity of it. You know, sometimes when you think about, you know, being an academic or being in a space of puts us in a box, and you know, staying in that, you know, curvature of that well, there's not a curvature, keeping it in the perimeter of that box. This conversation, lets us know that everything can be in the flow. And I like that rhyming. So I'm going to stop right there, Deondre, and say, Thank you so much thank you for all that you brought to the show. I appreciate you so much.Deondre: Thank you very much. It's been an honor and a pleasure. Hence, you know, I can't even believe that we've been talking for an hour. It's like, I feel like we've just been going for ten minutes.Patty: I know, these hours go by so fast.Kerry: They do.Patty: Alright, well, thanks again. And yeah, I guess you're on the list to come back.Kerry: Right. You know, what I was really thinking I would love to have you back with the our archaeologist and let's have a conversation about how, you know, geography may have shifted and changed and what has happened in the spaces of those I would kind of be interested …Patty:  Do you mean Paulette? Paulette Steeves.  You knew Paulette right?Kerry:  Yes Paulette.Deaondre: Paulette yup.Patty: Because yeah, cuz we had Paulette and then last time we chatted was with Keolu Fox and You've done work with Keolu, like these three know each other so .. we’ll figure something out. We gotta go. It was lovely talking to you. See you on twitter!Deondre: Yes, this was a great time, thankyou very much, I look forward to the next time I get to see you all.  Kerry: Good byePatty Good byeDeondre: Good bye This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit medicinefortheresistance.substack.com

“There is no beginning and there is no end, and this drum is a big part of who we are as people…I use my drum when I sing to people and I refer to this drum as the Heartbeat of Mother Earth”. (If you're curious about how this episode got its name and/or the full context of our conversation with Ronnie Preston, Cultural & Education Programs Director at the American Indian Center in Chicago, make sure to tune in to this episode's Brown Breakdown!)At the core of “Heartbeat of Mother Earth”, KSB is taking a look at the colonialist policies that have affected Indigenous communities, and how Indigenous people have fought against oppression to be present in the making of futures where they reclaim their rights and space, and rewrite the narratives of who Indigenous people are. Thanks for joining us KSFam, we hope you enjoy this episode ⭐️_________________________________This Episode's Host: Fernanda Ponce and Narvella SefahJoin the KSFam! We saved you a seat at the table. Link up with us on all available social media platforms: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kindasortabrown/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kindasortabrownFacebook: https://facebook.com/kindasortabrown/ For further inquiries, email us: kindasortabrown@gmail.com Audio transcriptions of KSB episodes are here! Access this episode's transcription PDF using this folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1XNBWRGMWaP5l2FzmHItG3ap-p0AOEkpM Lead Contributors: Lena Diasti (Executive Producer), Hope Houston (Production Manager), Jon Brooks (Social Media Coordinator), Dinah Clottey (Outreach Manager), Chase Leito (Audio Engineer), and Fernanda Ponce (Content Creator). Supporting Contributors: Narvella Sefah (Front-End Team), Nicole Maria Mateo (Audio Team), Glen McGuire (Content Team), Zara Salman (Content Team), Memphis Cutchlow (Audio Team), Aaron Dyas (Audio Team), and Sam Herrera (Front End Marketing Team)Out of 4,000 GLOBAL submissions, KSB was chosen as a WINNER of the SPOTIFY NEXT WAVE PODCAST COMPETITION!! See us on the Spotify Student Hub page here: https://open.spotify.com/genre/student-page KSB was a TOP 10 FINALIST for NPR's 2021 College Podcast Competition! Check out our entry “PWI-ing While Black” on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-306628760/pwi-ing-while-black Kinda Sorta Brown is a University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast, as shown here: https://www.uc3p.org/kindasortabrown

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and it's been downhill for New World peoples ever since.  Today we look at residential schools, the occupation of Alcatraz by Indians of All Tribes, the Oka crisis (aka the Mohawk resistance), and Sacheen Littlefeather's Oscar speech. YBOF Book; Audiobook (basically everywhere but Audible); Merch! Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs  .Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. Support the show Music by Kevin MacLeod, Steve Oxen, David Fesliyan.   Links to all the research resources are on our website. Late summer, 1990.  The protest had been going on for two months; tensions were escalating.  Soldiers had been dispatched to enforce the government's will, but the Kahnawake Mohawk weren't going to give up another inch of their land.  14 year old Waneek and her 4 year old sister Kaniehtiio were there with their activist mother when the violence started.  Waneek tried to get little Tio to safety when she saw a soldier who had taken her school books from her weeks prior...and he stabbed her in the chest.  My name's...   One of my goals with this podcast is to tell the stories that don't get told, the stories of people of color and women.  It's not always easy.  Pick a topic to research and it's white men all the way down.  But, even when I haven't been struggling with my chronic idiopathic pulmonary conditions, as I've been for the past three acute months, I've dropped the ball.  Mea culpa.  So let me try to catch up a little bit here as we close out November and Native American Heritage month.  And since the lungs are still playing up a bit, I'm tagging past Moxie in to help, though I've done with I can to polish her audio, even though I lost more than 100 episodes worth of work files when I changed computers and deleted the hard drive on my right rather than the hard drive on my left.     Today's episode isn't going to be a knee-slapping snark fest, but the severity of the stories is the precise reason we need to tell them, especially the ones that happened relatively recently but are treated like a vague paragraph in an elementary school textbook.  Come with me now, to the 1960's and the edge of California, to a rocky island in San Francisco bay.  Yes, that one, Alcatraz, the Rock.     After the American Indian Center in San Francisco was destroyed in a fire in October 1969, an activist group called “Indians of All Tribes” turned its attention to Alcatraz island and the prison which had closed six years earlier.  I'm going to abbreviate Indians of All Tribes to IAT, rather than shorten it to Indians, just so you know.  A small party, led by Mohawk college student Richard Oakes, went out to the island on Nov 9, but were only there one night before the authorities removed them.  That didn't disappoint Oakes, who told the SF Chronicle, “If a one day occupation by white men on Indian land years ago established squatter's rights, then the one day occupation of Alcatraz should establish Indian rights to the island.”   11 days later, a much larger group of Indians of All Tribes members, a veritable occupation force of 89 men, women and children, sailed to the island in the dead of night and claimed Alcatraz for all North America natives.  Despite warnings from authorities, the IAT set up house in the old guards' quarters and began liberally, vibrantly redecorating, spray-painting the forboding gray walls with flowers and slogans like “Red Power” and “Custer Had It Coming.”  The water tower read “Peace and Freedom. Welcome. Home of the Free Indian Land.”  And of course I put pictures of that in the Vodacast app.  Have you checked it out?  I'm still getting the hang of it...  The IAT not only had a plan, they had a manifesto, addressed to “The Great White Father and All His People,” in which they declared their intentions to use the island for a school, cultural center and museum.  Alcatraz was theirs, they claimed, “by right of discovery,” though the manifesto did offer to buy the island for “$24 in glass beads and red cloth”—the price supposedly paid for the island of Manhattan.     Rather than risk a PR fall-out, the Nixon administration opted to leave the occupiers alone as long as things remained peaceful and just kinda wait the situation out.  The island didn't even have potable water; how long could the IAT stay there?  Jokes on you, politicians of 50 years ago, because many of the occupiers lived in conditions as bad on reservations.  They'd unknowingly been training for this their entire lives.  Native American college students and activists veritably swarmed the island and the population ballooned to more than 600 people, twice the official capacity of the prison.  They formed a governing body and set up school for the kids, a communal kitchen, clinic, and a security detail called “Bureau of Caucasian Affairs.”  Other activists helped move people and supplies to the island and supportive well-wishers send money, clothes and canned food.    Government officials would travel to the island repeatedly to try, and fail, to negotiate.  The IAT would settle for nothing less than the deed to Alcatraz Island, and the government maintained such a property transfer would be impossible.  The occupation was going better than anyone expected, at least for the first few months.  Then, many of the initial wave of residents had to go back to college and their places were taken by people more interested in no rent and free food than in any cause.  Drugs and alcohol, which were banned, were soon prevalent.  Oakes and his wife left Alcatraz after his stepdaughter died in a fall, and things began to unravel even more quickly.  By May, the sixth month of the occupation, the government dispensed with diplomatic efforts and cut all remaining power to Alcatraz.  Only a few weeks later, a fire tore across the island and destroyed several of Alcatraz's historic buildings.  Federal marshals removed the last occupiers in June of the second year, an impressive 19 months after they first arrived, six men, five women and four children.  This time, when laws were passed after an act of rebellion, they were *for the rebels, which many states enacting laws for tribal self rule.  When Alcatraz opened as a national park in 1973, not only had the graffiti from the occupation not been removed, it was preserved as part of the island's history.   People gather at Alcatraz every November for an “Un-Thanksgiving Day” celebrating Native culture and activism. RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL   The American government took tens of thousands of children from Native families and placed them in boarding schools with strict assimilation practices.  Their philosophy - kill the Indian to save the man.  That was the mindset under which the U.S. government Native children to attend boarding schools, beginning in the late 19th century, when the government was still fighting “Indian wars.”   There had been day and boarding schools on reservations prior to 1870, when U.S. cavalry captain, Richard Henry Pratt established the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.  This school was not on a reservation, so as to further remove indigenous influences.  The Carlisle school and other boarding schools were part of a long history of U.S. attempts to either kill, remove, or assimilate Native Americans.  “As white population grew in the United States and people settled further west towards the Mississippi in the late 1800s, there was increasing pressure on the recently removed groups to give up some of their new land,” according to the Minnesota Historical Society. Since there was no more Western territory to push them towards, the U.S. decided to remove Native Americans by assimilating them. In 1885, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price explained the logic: “it is cheaper to give them education than to fight them.”   Off-reservation schools began their assault on Native cultural identity as soon as students arrived, by first doing away with all outward signs of tribal life that the children brought with them.  The long braids worn by boys were cut off.  Native clothes were replaced with uniforms.  The children were given new Anglicized names, including new surnames.  Traditional Native foods were abandoned, as were things like sharing from communal dishes,  forcing students to use the table manners of white society, complete with silverware, napkins and tablecloths.  The strictest prohibition arguably fell on their native languages.  Students were forbidden to speak their tribal language, even to each other.  Some school rewarded children who spoke only English, but most schools chose the stick over the carrot and relied on punishment to achieve this aim.  This is especially cruel when you consider that many of the words the children were being forced to learn and use had no equivalent in their mother tongue.   The Indian boarding schools taught history with a definite white bias.  Columbus Day was heralded as a banner day in history and a beneficial event for Native people, as it was only after discovery did Native Americans become part of history.  Thanksgiving was a holiday to celebrate “good” Indians having aided the brave Pilgrim Fathers.  On Memorial Day, some students at off-reservation schools were made to decorate the graves of soldiers sent to kill their fathers.   Half of each school day was spent on industrial training. Girls learned to cook, clean, sew, care for poultry and do laundry for the entire institution.  Boys learned industrial skills such as blacksmithing, shoemaking or performed manual labor such as farming.  Not receiving much funding from the government, the schools were required to be as self-sufficient as possible, so students did the majority of the work.  By 1900, school curriculums tilted even further toward industrial training while academics were neglected.   The Carlisle school developed a “placing out system,” which put Native students in the mainstream community for summer or a year at a time, with the official goal of exposing them to more job skills.  A number of these programs were out-right exploitive.  At the Phoenix Indian School, girls became the major source of domestic labor for white families in the area, while boys were placed in seasonal harvest or other jobs that no one else wanted.   Conversion to Christianity was also deemed essential to the cause.  Curriculums included heavy emphasis of religious instruction, such as the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes and Psalms.  Sunday school meant lectures on sin and guilt.  Christianity governed gender relations at the schools and most schools invested their energy in keeping the sexes apart, in some cases endangering the lives of the students by locking girls in their dormitories at night.     Discipline within the Indian boarding schools was severe and generally consisted of confinement, corporal punishment, or restriction of food.  In addition to coping with the severe discipline, students were ravaged by disease exacerbated by crowded conditions at the boarding schools. Tuberculosis, influenza, and trachoma (“sore eyes”) were the greatest threats.  In December of 1899, measles broke out at the Phoenix Indian School, reaching epidemic proportions by January.  In its wake, 325 cases of measles, 60 cases of pneumonia, and 9 deaths were recorded in a 10-day period.  During Carlisle's operation, from 1879 and 1918, nearly 200 children died and were buried near the school.   Naturally, Indian people resisted the schools in various ways. Sometimes entire villages refused to enroll their children in white schools.  Native parents also banded together to withdraw their children en masse, encouraging runaways, and undermining the schools' influence during summer break.  In some cases, police were sent onto the reservations to seize children from their parents.  The police would continue to take children until the school was filled, so sometimes orphans were offered up or families would negotiate a family quota. Navajo police officers would take children assumed to be less intelligent, those not well cared for, or those physically impaired.  This was their attempt to protect the long-term survival of their tribe by keeping healthy, intelligent children at home.     It was not until 1978, within the lifetime of many of my gentle listeners. that the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act that Native American parents gained the legal right to deny their children's placement in off-reservation schools.   Though the schools left a devastating legacy, they failed to eradicate Native American cultures as they'd hoped. Later, the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the U.S. win World War II would reflect on the strange irony this forced assimilation had played in their lives.  “As adults, [the Code Talkers] found it puzzling that the same government that had tried to take away their languages in schools later gave them a critical role speaking their languages in military service,” recounts the National Museum of the American Indian.   In addition to documentaries, I'd like to recommend the movie The Education of Little Tree, starring James Cromwell, Tantu Cardinal and Graham Green, about a part-Charokee boy who goes to live with his grandparents in the Tennessee mountains, but is then sent to an Indian school.   There are a number of off-reservation boarding schools in operation today.  Life in the schools is still quite strict, but now includes teaching Native culture and language rather than erasing it.  Though they cannot be separated from their legacy of oppression and cultural violence, for many modern children, they're a step to a better life.  Poverty is endemic to many reservations, which also see much higher than average rates of alcoholism, drug use, and suicide.    For the students, these schools are a chance to escape.   OKA   Some words are visceral reminders of collective historic trauma. “Selma” or “Kent State” recall the civil rights movement and the use of military force against U.S. citizens. “Bloody Sunday” evokes “the Troubles” of Northern Ireland. Within Indigenous communities in North America, the word is “Oka.”  That word reminds us of the overwhelming Canadian response to a small demonstration in a dispute over Mohawk land in Quebec, Canada, in 1990. Over the course of three months, the Canadian government sent 2,000 police and 4,500 soldiers (an entire brigade), backed by armored vehicles, helicopters, jet fighters and even the Navy, to subdue several small Mohawk communities.  What was at stake?  What was worth all this to the government?  A golf course and some condos.   The Kanesetake had been fighting for their land for centuries, trying to do it in accordance with the white man's laws, as far back as appeals to the British government in 1761. In 1851, the governor general of Canada refused to recognize their right to their land.  8 years later, the land was given to the Sulpicians, a Catholic diocese.  In 1868, the government of the nascent Dominion of Canada denied that the Mohawk's original land grant had even reserved land for them, so it wasn't covered under the Indian Act. In the 1910's, the he Mohawks of Kanesatake's appealed all the way to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Canada's highest appeals court at the time, who ruled that official title to the land was held by the Sulpicians.  By the end of the Second World War, the Sulpicians had sold all of their remaining land and had left the area. Surely the Mohawk could have their land back now!  Nope.  The Mohawk of Kanesatake were now confined to about 2.3mi sq/6 km sq, known as The Pines, less than 1/10th of the land they once held.  The Mohawk people of Kahnawake, Kanesetake and Akwesasne asserted Aboriginal title to their ancestral lands in 1975, but their claim was rejected on the most BS possible reason -- that they had not held the land continuously from time immemorial.  And on and on.   So you can understand why they'd be a little miffed when plans were announced to expand a golf course that had been built in 1961, expanding onto land that was used for sacred and ceremonial purposes and included a graveyard.  Again, the Mohawk tried to use the proper legal channels and again they got royally fucked over.  That March, their protests and petitions were ignored by the City Council in Oka.  They had to do something the city couldn't ignore.  They began a blockade of a small dirt road in The Pines and they maintained it for a few months.  The township of Oka tried to get a court injunction to order its removal.  On July 11, 1990, the Quebec provincial police sent in a large heavily armed force of tactical officers armed with m16s and tear gas and such-like to dismantle this blockade.  The Mohawks met this show of force with a show of their own.  Behind the peaceful protestors, warriors stood armed and ready.     Let me try to give this story some of the air time it deserves.  April 1, 1989, 300 Kanesatake Mohawks marched through Oka to protest against Mayor Jean Ouellette's plan to expand the town's golf course.  On March 10, 1990, --hey, that's my birthday!  the day, not the year-- After Oka's municipal council voted to proceed with the golf course expansion project, a small group of Mohawks barricades the access road.  With a building.  They drug a fishing shack into the Pines and topped it with a banner that read “Are you aware that this is Mohawk territory?” and the same again in French, because Quebec.  There's a picture on the Vodacast app, naturally, as well as a photo called Face to Face is a photograph of Canadian Pte. Patrick Cloutier and Anishinaabe warrior Brad Larocque staring each other down during the Oka Crisis. It was taken on September 1, 1990 by Shaney Komulainen, and has become one of Canada's most famous images.  It really should be more famous outside of Canada, like the lone protestor blocking tanks in Tiananmen Square or 1968 Summer Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos staged a protest and displayed a symbol of Black power during their medal ceremony.  Check it out on Vodacast and let me know if you agree, soc. med.   during the summer of 1990 the Mohawk warrior society engaged in the 78 day armed standoff with the s.q Provincial Police and the Canadian Armed Forces in order to protect an area of their territory from development known as the pines near the town of oka.   This area was used as a tribal cemetery along with other tribal activities important to the Mohawks.  The oka crisis or also known as the Mohawk resistance was a defensive action that gained international attention,  taken by Mohawks of the Kanna Satake reserve along with other Mohawks from the nearby communities of Kanna waka as well as the Aquosasne on a reservation on the American side of the u.s. Canadian colonial border.  It was one of the most recent examples of Native armed resistance that was successful in stopping construction and development on to tribal lands.  So what was being developed that led to this armed confrontation leading to the death of an sq SWAT officer during that hot summer?  Golf.  The town of oka and investors wanted to expand a nine-hole golf course at the Open Golf Club into an 18-hole course as well as build around 60 condominiums into Mohawk territory.  Since 1989 the Mohawks had been protesting these plans for development by the town of oka and investors of the Golf Course expansion.  Seeing that the local courts were not of any help in recognizing Mohawk claims of the land under development, Mohawk protesters and community members held marches rallies and signed petitions.   Eventually the Mohawks set up a barricade blocking access to the development site on a gravel road.  Later on it was occupied mainly by Mohawk women and children OCA's mayor jean wallet one of the nine hole golf course expanded and filed the injunction against the Mohawks. He went into hiding during the oka crisis. [sfx clip] I will occupy this land for what it takes he has to prove it to me that it's his and I will prove it to him that's mine.  Oak is mayor had stated the land in question actually belonged to the town of oka and did not back down from the issue, but instead filed an injunction one of many that had been issued prior to remove the Mohawks from the area and take down the barricades by force if necessary.  if I have to die for Mohawk territory I will but I ain't going alone are you armed no the Creator will provide in anticipation of the raid by the sq mohawks of knesset Aki sent out a distress call to surrounding communiti.  In the Mohawk warrior society from the Aquos austenite reservation and the American side of the Mohawk reserve as well as kana waka have begun filtering into the barricade area with camping gear communications equipment food and weapons.  It's difficult to pin down just who makes up the Warriors society. the leaders an organization you each depending on the circumstances.  the member roles are  treated like a military secret, which is fitting since many or most of the Warriors were veterans, with a particular persistance of Vietnam Marines.   why the Warriors exist is easier to answer   mohawk have closed off the Mercier bridge sparking a traffic nightmare.  Provincial police arrived at dawn secure position in case of Mohawk until 8:00 to clear out.  The natives stood their ground the battle for the barricade started just before nine o'clock on one side heavily armed provincial police bob tear gas and stun grenade power [sfx reporter] a 20-minute gun battle ensued dozens of rounds of ammunition were shot off and then the inevitable someone was hit a police officer took a bullet in the face which proved fatal that seems to turn the tide the police has been advancing until then turned tail and fled leaving six of their vehicles behind.  The Mohawk celebrated when the police left celebrated what they called a victory over the qpm.  Most of the Mohawks each shot that the raid had taken place they said they were angry - angry that a dispute over a small piece of land had ended in violence.  [sfx this clip but earlier] I mean the non-indians that initiated this project of a golf course and then and then trying to take the land away because it's Mohawk clan it's our land there's a little bit left they're sucking the marrow out of our bones.  [sfx this clip, little earlier] we've kept talking in and saying you know what kind of people are you there's children here and you're shooting tear gas at us we're not we're on armed and you're aiming your weapons at us what kind of people are you.     The police retreated, abandoning squad cars and a front-end loader, basically a bulldozer.  They use the loader to crash the vehicles and they push them down the road, creating two new barricades, blocking highway 344.  The Mohawk braced for a counterattack and vowed to fire back with three bullets for every bullet fired at them.  due to the inability of the SQ to deal with the heavily armed Mohawks   The Canadian government called in the Royal Canadian Armed Forces to deal with the Mohawks. As the army pushed further into the Mohawk stronghold there was a lot of tension with Mohawk warriors staring down soldiers getting in their faces taunting them challenging them to put down their weapons and engage in hand-to-hand combat.   this is how the remainder of the siege would play out between the Warriors and Army as there were thankfully no more gun battles. [Music] as the seige wore on and came to an end most of the remaining Warriors as well as some women and children took refuge in a residential treatment center.   instead of an orderly surrender as the army anticipated warriors simply walked out of the area where they were assaulted by waiting soldiers and the police.  50 people taken away from the warrior camp including 23 warriors, but that means right over half the people taken into custody were non-combatants.   by 9:30 that night the army began to pull out, at the end of their two and a half months seige  a number of warriors were later charged by the sq.  5 warriors were convicted of crimes included assault and theft although only one served jail time.  during the standoff the Canadian federal government purchased the pines in order to prevent further development, officially canceling the expansion of the golf course and condominiums.  Although the government bought additional parcels of land for connoisseur taka there has been no organized transfer of the land to the Mohawk people. investigations were held after the crisis was over and revealed problems with the way in which the SQ handled the situation which involved command failures and racism among sq members.   Ronald (Lasagna) Cross and another high-profile warrior, Gordon (Noriega) Lazore of Akwesasne, are arraigned in Saint-Jérôme the day after the last Mohawks ended their standoff. In all, about 150 Mohawks and 15 non-Mohawks were charged with various crimes. Most were granted bail, and most were acquitted. Cross and Lazore were held for nearly six months before being released on $50,000 bail. They were later convicted of assault and other charges. After a community meeting, it was the women who decided that they would walk out peacefully, ending the siege. With military helicopters flying low, spotlights glaring down and soldiers pointing guns at them, Horn-Miller carried her young sister alongside other women and children as they walked to what they thought was the safety of the media barricades.  They didn't make it far before violence broke out. People started running, soldiers tackled warriors, fights broke out and everyone scrambled to get to safety. Up until that point Horn-Miller said she was able to keep her older sister calm by singing a traditional song to her.   LITTLEFEATHER on the night of 27 March 1973. This was when she took the stage at the 45th Academy Awards to speak on behalf of Marlon Brando, who had been awarded best actor for his performance in The Godfather. It is still a striking scene to watch.  Amid the gaudy 70s evening wear, 26-year-old Littlefeather's tasselled buckskin dress, moccasins, long, straight black hair and handsome face set in an expression of almost sorrowful composure, make a jarring contrast.  Such a contrast, that is beggered belief.   Liv Ullman read the name of the winner and Roger Moore made to hand Littlefeather Brando's Oscar, but she held out a politely forbidding hand.  She explained that Brando would not accept the award because of “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry.”  Some people in the audience applauded; a lot of them booed her, but she kept her calm.  Here, you can listen for yourself.  [sfx clip]  At the time, Wounded Knee, in South Dakota, was the site of a month-long standoff between Native American activists and US authorities, sparked by the murder of a Lakota man.  We're used to this sort of thing now, but on the night, nobody knew what to make of a heartfelt plea in the middle of a night of movie industry mutual masturbation.  Was it art, a prank?  People said Littlefeather was a hired actress, that she was Mexican rather than Apache, or, because people suck on several levels at once, that she was a stripper.  How did this remarkable moment come to pass?   Littlefeather's life was no cake-walk.  Her father was Native American and her mother was white, but both struggled with mental health.  Littlefeather had to be removed from their care at age three, suffering from tuberculosis of the lungs that required her to be kept in an oxygen tent at the hospital.  She was raised by her maternal grandparents, but saw her parents regularly.  That may sound like a positive, but it exposed her to domestic violence.  She once tried to defend her mother from a beating by hitting her father with a broom.  He chased her out of the house and tried to run her down with his truck.  The young girl escaped into a grove of trees and spent the night up in the branches, crying herself to sleep. r   She did not fit in at the white, Catholic school her grandparents sent her to.  At age 12, she and her grandfather visited the historic Roman Catholic church Carmel Mission, where she was horrified to see the bones of a Native American person on display in the museum. “I said: ‘This is wrong. This is not an object; this is a human being.' So I went to the priest and I told him God would never approve of this, and he called me heretic. I had no idea what that was.”  An adolescence of depression and a struggle for identity followed.   Fortunately, in the late 1960s and early 70s Native Americans were beginning to reclaim their identities and reassert their rights.  After her father died, when she was 17, Littlefeather began visiting reservations and even visited Alcatraz during the Indians of all Tribes occupation.  She travelled around the country, learning traditions and dances, and meeting other what she called “urban Indian people” also reconnecting with your heritage.  “The old people who came from different reservations taught us young people how to be Indian again. It was wonderful.”  By her early 20s Littlefeather was head of the local affirmative action committee for Native Americans, studying representation in film, television and sports.  They successfully campaigned for Stanford University to remove their offensive “Indian” mascot, 50 years before pro sports teams like the Cleveland Indians got wise.  At the same time, white celebrities like Burt Lancaster began taking a public interest in Native American affairs.  Littlefeather lived near director Francis Ford Coppola, but she only knew him to say hello.  Nonetheless, after hearing Marlon Brando speaking about Native American rights, as she walked past Coppola's house to find him sitting on his porch, drinking ice tea.  She yelled up the walk, “Hey! You directed Marlon Brando in The Godfather” and she asked him for Brando's address so she could write him a letter.  It took some convincing, but Coppola gave up the address.   Then, nothing.  But months later, the phone rang at the radio station where Littlefeather worked.  He said: ‘I bet you don't know who this is.'  She said, “Sure I do.  It sure as hell took you long enough to call.”  They talked for about an hour, then called each other regularly.  Before long he was inviting her for the first of several visits and they became friends.  That was how Brando came to appoint her to carry his message to the Oscars, but it was hastily planned.  Half an hour before her speech, she had been at Brando's house on Mulholland Drive, waiting for him to finish typing an eight-page speech.  She arrived at the ceremony with Brando's assistant, just minutes before best actor was announced.  The producer of the awards show immediately informed her that she would be removed from the stage after 60 seconds.  “And then it all happened so fast when it was announced that he had won.  I had promised Marlon that I would not touch that statue if he won. And I had promised [the producer] that I would not go over 60 seconds. So there were two promises I had to keep.”  As a result, she had to improvise.   I don't have a lot of good things to say about Marlon Brando --he really could have had a place in the Mixed Bags of History chapter of the YBOF book; audiobook available most places now-- but he had Hollywood dead to rights on its Native Americans stereotypes and treatment, as savages and nameless canon fodder, often played by white people in red face.  This was a message not everyone was willing to hear.  John Wayne, who killed uncountable fictional Natives in his movies, was standing in the wings at that fateful moment, and had to be bodily restrained by security to stop him from charing Littlefeather.  For more on Wayne's views of people of color, google his 1971 Playboy interview.  Clint Eastwood, who presented the best picture Oscar, which also went to The Godfather, “I don't know if I should present this award on behalf of all the cowboys shot in all the John Ford westerns over the years.” In case you thought fussing out an empty chair was the worst we got from him.  When Littlefeather got backstage, people made stereotypical war cries and tomahawk motions at her.  After talking to the press --and I can't say I'm not surprised that event organizers didn't spirit her away immediately -- she went straight back to Brando's house where they sat together and watched the reactions to the event on television, the ‘compulsively refreshing your social media feed' of the 70's.   But Littlefeather is proud of the trail she blazed. She was the first woman of colour, and the first indigenous woman, to use the Academy Awards platform to make a political statement. “I didn't use my fist. I didn't use swear words. I didn't raise my voice. But I prayed that my ancestors would help me. I went up there like a warrior woman. I went up there with the grace and the beauty and the courage and the humility of my people. I spoke from my heart.”  Her speech drew international attention to Wounded Knee, where the US authorities had essentially imposed a media blackout.  Sachee Littlefeather went on to get a degree in holistic health and nutrition, became a health consultant to Native American communities across the country, worked with Mother Teresa caring for Aids patients in hospices, and led the San Francisco Kateri Circle, a Catholic group named after Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint, canonized in 2012.  Now she is one of the elders transmitting knowledge down generations, though sadly probably not for much longer.  She has breast cancer that metastasized to her lung.  “When I go to the spirit world, I'm going to take all these stories with me. But hopefully I can share some of these things while I'm here.  I'm going to the world of my ancestors. I'm saying goodbye to you … I've earned the right to be my true self.”   And that's...Rather than being taken to the hospital for the stab wound a centimeter from her heart, Waneek and the other protesters were taken into custody.  Thankfully, she would heal just fine and even went on to become an Olympic athlete and continued her activism.  And little Tio?  She grew up to be an award-winning actress, best known in our house for playing Tanis on Letterkenny.  Season 10 premier watch party at my house.  Remember….Thanks...       Sources: https://www.history.com/news/how-boarding-schools-tried-to-kill-the-indian-through-assimilation http://www.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=airc_hist_boardingschools https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17645287 https://hairstylecamp.com/native-american-beard/ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/03/i-promised-brando-i-would-not-touch-his-oscar-secret-life-sacheen-littlefeather https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/reflections-of-oka-stories-of-the-mohawk-standoff-25-years-later-1.3232368/sisters-recall-the-brutal-last-day-of-oka-crisis-1.3234550 https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/oka-crisis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOIdwcj2w8 https://www.history.com/news/native-american-activists-occupy-alcatraz-island-45-years-ago  

Data Engagement Editor Praveena Somasundaram guest narrates to discuss the response of the North Carolina Asian American community in the wake of the Atlanta shootings. Host Evely Forte talks to University Desk reporter Samuel Garzon about UNC’s American Indian Center and the lack of financial support its members say the center has received from the University. Episode hosted by Evely Forte and produced by Praveena Somasundaram. Supervising producers are University Desk Editor Maddie Ellis, Digital Managing Editor Will Melfi and Editor-in-Chief Anna Pogarcic.

Data Engagement Editor Praveena Somasundaram guest narrates to discuss the response of the North Carolina Asian American community in the wake of the Atlanta shootings. Host Evely Forte talks to University Desk reporter Samuel Garzon about UNC's American Indian Center and the lack of financial support its members say the center has received from the University. Episode hosted by Evely Forte and produced by Praveena Somasundaram. Supervising producers are University Desk Editor Maddie Ellis, Digital Managing Editor Will Melfi and Editor-in-Chief Anna Pogarcic.

Part 6/8 Christopher Columbus Series with Ms. Heather Miller & Carla Simonini. Ms. Heather Miller is the Executive Director of the American Indian Center of Chicago. Carla Simonini is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Paul and Ann Rubino Italian American Studies Program at Loyola University Chicago. We discuss the Pro and Con Voices. Recorded: October 2020 Running ... Read More

Part 6/8 Christopher Columbus Series with Ms. Heather Miller & Carla Simonini. Ms. Heather Miller is the Executive Director of the American Indian Center of Chicago. Carla Simonini is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Paul and Ann Rubino Italian American Studies Program at Loyola University Chicago. We discuss the Pro and Con Voices. Recorded: October 2020 Running ... Read More

Fawn Pochel, Education Coordinator, American Indian Center, joins Anna to weigh in on the controversy surrounding the use of Indian imagery at Lane Tech.

MNN June 10MARIE: Headlines. This week on Minnesota Native News, primary results are in for members of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe - and expressions of hope after a week of protests. Producer Laurie Stern has those stories.#1 Four of the six bands in the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe had contested primaries for chair. At Grand Portage, Bobby Deschampe will be the new chair after winning a majority of votes over incumbent Beth Drost. Incumbent Faron Jackson will be the chair at Leech Lake, and Incumbent Mike Fairbanks won a majority at White Earth. The Mille Lacs Band will have a runoff between incumbent Melanie Benjamin and Carolyn Beaulieu. The general election is set for August 18, when committee member races will also be decided.#2 thank you aim[ambi painting] That's the sound of young people creating something new.   In this case it's a mural on the front of Franklin Library down the street from the American Indian Center in Minneapolis.  My  name is Missy Whiteman, I belong to the Northern Arapaho and Kickapoo nations. And I am here on Franklin Avenue at the library. And we're working on a thank you mural for AIM and for the native community for protecting the avenue.Missy Whiteman is an artist and filmmaker and the recipient of many awards including the 2020 McKnight Media Artist Fellowship. it's really important to have indigenous voices right now, especially when we're talking about rebuilding, and we're talking about, you know, coming into the new world, because we've been a part of, you know, seeing system  seeing, you know, society seeing structures that aren't sustainable crumble. And, you know, the best metaphor that I've heard and seen in this movement is the Phoenix. And so we see like murals all around,  the Twin Cities, we see that metaphor, because it's like, well, things are crumbling, they're, they're, you know, projects like this,  just small, you know , one day projects that are give me think thanks to community, people are coming together and, you know, are helping.#3 Migizi [migizi ambi]A phoenix rising from the ashes suits what's happening down on Lake Street at Migizi. Migizi supports Native youth as they claim their heritage and find their creativity. The building burned during the protests, but donors and volunteer are stepping up – and recently there was a unity celebration…[more ambi]. That's where I met Angelica Deloria, and asked her to file this report:[Angelica's story 1:04] Hello, my name is Angelica Deloria. Migizi has kind of been a second home for me just because my brother worked there when he was in high school. And I've known the people for a long time. I really think that the current events that have happened with George Floyd are going to highly impact us here at Migizi. Not only do we have to rebuild our current site, which was burned down, but we also have to help our brothers and sisters within the native community who have been impacted some way either be physically or emotionally during this time. I personally have been reaching out to both my family members and friends who currently are still living on the south side of Minneapolis, making sure that they're okay and staying safe. I grew up in that same neighborhood. So I'm doing everything in my power to help both Migizi and my neighborhood rebuild and thrive during this time of much needed change. : buzu Jennifer indigent casca kabhi con and Dune Jabba Hello everyone, my name is Jennifer. I'm 16 and I'm from the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. I am also a use a part of the Ikidowin  acting ensemble. We do theater activities and plays around our communities. On Monday they decided to draw a mural and George Floyd's name on their building. I got to be a part of this really cool opportunity. And it was super fun to experience. We got there at four in the afternoon and got back at six or seven. And we're going back on Thursday to finish the job. We painted this mural to show that we support the Black Lives Matter movement, and that we stand with you and we support you. My piece was black lives matter. I made it in different and bold colors to catch people's eyes. I wrote matter in red handprints. I felt that that was pretty powerful to write it like that. It shows that how the police department have blood on their hands. And we aren't getting the justice. It was a good atmosphere to be around. And that's what I was up to this week.Marie tag: Minnesota Native News is eager to hear from more youth. If you have a story to share, leave us a message on our Facebook Page or at  612 430 9368.

Wattz up! is produced by Yollocalli Arts Reach youth and broadcast live through Lumpen Radio, WLPN 105.5FM Chicago. **Wattz Up! is practicing staying home and social distancing, so the youth broadcasted live straight from the comfort of their couches! In this edition, the youth presented a Special Book Discussion about The Round House by Louise Erdrich as part of The Big Read, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts, to broaden our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book. They raised conversations about Native American culture and laws, violence against women and family matters. Featuring Frankie Pedersen, activist, artist and staff at the American Indian Center and Andrea Carrillo, Sexual Assault Community Educator at Mujeres Latinas en Acción. Enjoy!

Hector Canonge discusses his studio home MODULO 715 in NYC, and the residency program he organized in the space. Faced with a fire that destroyed the building, he had to restart everything (once again). What is an audio performance? The first answer in our series comes from Tamara Al-Mashouk, who asks among other things: “Where are you from?” Next, we invited participants in our residency in Nairobi (Kenya) to discuss: how do you understand transformation in flux? How are materials (and their transformations) part of your art, activism, and research practice? Our group of conversants include artist Laura Porter (Paris/France), artist Wambui Collymore (Nairobi/Kenya), artist/organizer Dennis Kiberu, (Nairobi/Kenya) and photojournalist Adam Sings In The Timber (Providence/USA). We finish off with Dutch sound artist Zeno Van Den Broek’s interpretation of Conversations From The Center, through an audio composition of voices from the future. Portions of this program were recorded at the AfroQueer podcast studios in Nairobi, Kenya.Hector Canonge (@hectorcanonge)Hector Canonge is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and cultural producer based in New York City. His work incorporates various forms of artistic expression: Performance Art, Dance, Multimedia Production, Installation, and Social Practice to explore and treat issues related to constructions of identity, gender roles, and the politics of migration.Tamara Al-Mashouk (@tmraalm)Tamara Al-Mashouk was born in Saudi Arabia in 1988. She graduated from Wellesley College with a major in architecture (2010) and holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Art at Tufts University (2016). Through video, performance, and architectural installation, Al-Mashouk examines the movement of people across societal and national borders with specific focus on the intersectional body and conversely this body’s relationship to institutional systems. She has founded an all-female fine art gallery at a music and arts festival in upstate New York. She produces single and multi-channel video works for the gallery and public sphere- a five-channel video installation for a solo show in Boston, a two-channel video installation in Beijing, and a three-hour multi-channelAdam Sings In The Timber (@signsinthetimber) Adam Sings In The Timber is an enrolled member of the Crow Nation in Montana, USA. Adam was born in Montana and grew up in the Midwest of the USA. He studied photojournalism at the University of Montana, Missoula. Currently based in Providence, RI, his work captures the beauty and complexities of Native American culture without shying away from the realities of poverty, addiction and abuse. His photo making process ethically portrays Indigenous communities through art and documentation. Sings In The Timber’s work, combining documentary photography and portraiture, will be featured in an upcoming exhibition at the Field Museum in Chicago. Previous exhibitions include First Voice Art Gallery at the American Indian Center, Chicago; Paramount Theatre Gallery, Seattle; Montgomery Ward Gallery, University of Illinois-Chicago; Harold Washington Library, Chicago; Gallery OTR, Cincinnati, Ohio; and King Street Station, Seattle, Washington. His photojournalism has been published in The Guardian, Indian Country Today, Indian Peoples Magazine, USA Today and the New York Times, among others. He has lectured widely on the importance of Indigenous people documenting their own culture at institutions including Bowling Green State University, Northwestern University, Brown University, and the University of Colorado Boulder. Laura Porter (@_laura.porter_) Laura Porter is an American artist who lives in Paris, France. She has a practice-based PhD in Fine Arts from École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts / SACRePSL. Through installation, sculpture, and video, her work considers modes of value production. With particular attention to the genesis of objects and tools as well as the role of the body in disposable economies, her works appear as small technological/nutritional economies or systems in the pro- cess of becoming animated. Laura Porter’s work has been presented at Centre Pompidou (Paris), Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon (Sète), Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (Reims), Woluwe Park (Brussels), In extenso (Clermont-Ferrand), and Bandjoun Station (Cameroon). Wambui Collymore (@wambuikamiru) Born in 1982, in Kenya, Wambui Wamae Kamiru Collymore has been developing artwork around the theme of colonialism, identity, and independence in Africa. She is the Founder of The Art Space – an online contemporary gallery with alternative show spaces, based in Nairobi. Through her own work in contemporary art – mainly simulated experiences, Wambui tackles history, politics and social issues. Originally a painter, Wambui now creates installations with various mediums. She is currently intrigued by pattern, its repetition, and memory. Wambui Kamiru holds an MSc.in African Studies with a focus on Kenyan History from the University of Oxford. Her dissertation focused on the attempt to create collective memory around Kenyaʼs Mau Mau War and the family of Field Marshall Dedan Kimathi. With this background, Wambui tells stories about the passage of time, through her artwork. Her most recent exhibition, Wakariru (#Wakariru) was an exhibition about the destruction of language for everyday things and the accompanying loss of orally documented knowledge. It looked at memory and the forgotten history of the role of women in the Mau Mau war. It was shown at One Off Galleryʼs Space at Rosslyn Riviera. Akili Ni Nywele (#AkiliNiNywele) was created as part of Sensing Nairobi, a group exhibition that sought to describe Nairobi – the capital city. This exhibition focused on modern perceptions of womenʼs beauty and femininity in relation to hair and how “urbanized” women are increasingly wearing fake hair to enhance their beauty and femininity. It asked where this perception came from and what it means to us, both male and female. It was shown at the British Institute East Africa (BIEA) and at the Kenya National Museum. To see more of her work visit: www.wambuikamiru.com Dennis Kiberu (@denniskibbz) Dennis Kiberu is a radio presenter, PR practitioner, music producer, disc jockey and photographer originating from and based in Nairobi, Kenya. He has studied Journalism and minored in Film at the Multimedia University of Kenya, with a focus on broadcast media and photography. In 2013 after finishing high school, he became a self-taught disc-jockey and went on to perform at events in Mombasa and Nairobi, where he later ventured to music production. In 2015, He was the Assistant PR Officer for the Ministry of Tourism. In the same year he ventured into commercial photography working with fashion designers, art studios, live concert performances and festivals. In 2016 he was a producer at Homeboyz Radio Kenya. Since 2016, he has been producing and presenting live a comical mid-morning Saturday show ʻSato Vybzʼ in Multimedia University Radio. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Boozhoo! Join us for a fun conversation with Chef Benjamin Shendo (Cochiti and Jemez Pueblo), the Café Manager of Gatherings Café, at the American Indian Center in south Minneapolis. When the pandemic hit, Benjamin and his team moved quickly to deliver daily meals to Native elders sheltering at home. Gatherings Café serves fresh, locally grown foods that are Indigenous and prepared in healthy ways. Way to go Chef Benjamin Shendo!

In early February, the UNC Board of Trustees approved the creation of an Asian-American Center on campus. On this week’s Carolina Connection podcast, we discuss physical spaces for minority students on UNC's campus. Brian Keyes joins us this week to talk about his visits to the Carolina Latinx Center, American Indian Center, and the Black Student Movement.

The Psychosemantic Podcast: Join host Daeron and a revolving door of guests in discussing politics, movies, and political movies. In This Episode: Desmond of Desmond's Flicks stops back in the bomb shelter to discuss the 1990 Paul Verhoeven film ‘Total Recall', the source material short story ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ by Philip K Dick , and other things. The Intertribal Friendship House of Oakland https://www.ifhurbanrez.org/ The American Indian Center of Chicago https://www.aicchicago.org/ Psychosemantic Twitter: @PoliticalMovies  Instagram: Psychosemanticast Psychosemantic: facebook.com/groups/Psychosemanticast/ Desmond's Flicks: https://legionpodcasts.com/desmonds-flicks/ Psychosemantic Pod on iTunes : itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-psychosemantic-podcast/id1191732198?mt=2 Psychosemantic Pod on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5ldiDwbAHyfNJblqmWhwLn?si=mRBQOd1BSlaGiD0bLC3ufQ  Psychosemantic Pod on Legion: http://www.legionpodcasts.com/podcasts/the-psychosemantic-podcast/ ….and all your other favorite podcast places.

The Psychosemantic Podcast: Join host Daeron and a revolving door of guests in discussing politics, movies, and political movies. In This Episode: Desmond of Desmond’s Flicks stops back in the bomb shelter to discuss the 1990 Paul Verhoeven film ‘Total Recall’, the source material short story ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ by Philip K Dick , and other things. The Intertribal Friendship House of Oakland https://www.ifhurbanrez.org/ The American Indian Center of Chicago https://www.aicchicago.org/ Psychosemantic Twitter: @PoliticalMovies  Instagram: Psychosemanticast Psychosemantic: facebook.com/groups/Psychosemanticast/ Desmond’s Flicks: https://legionpodcasts.com/desmonds-flicks/ Psychosemantic Pod on iTunes : itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-psychosemantic-podcast/id1191732198?mt=2 Psychosemantic Pod on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5ldiDwbAHyfNJblqmWhwLn?si=mRBQOd1BSlaGiD0bLC3ufQ  Psychosemantic Pod on Legion: http://www.legionpodcasts.com/podcasts/the-psychosemantic-podcast/ ….and all your other favorite podcast places.

Join Daeron and a revolving door of guests in discussing politics, movies, and political movies……. In this episode: Director Mike J Marin joins Daeron to talk about his documentary ‘Cinema Red: Natives & Horror’ as well as other things. Cinema Red is gong to be shown at the First Nations Film and Video Festival in Chicago. There will also be a screening for ‘The Party's Downstairs’ on Halloween night 2019 at the American Indian Film Festival at the Brava Theater in San Francisco . The program is from 7pm – 10pm. The Intertribal Friendship House of Oakland is one of the oldest Indian-focused urban resource and community organizations in the United States. Founded in 1955 https://www.ifhurbanrez.org/ The American Indian Center of Chicago https://www.aicchicago.org/ United American Indian Involvement, Inc. Home Established in 1969, the Southern California Indian Center, Inc. (SCIC) http://www.indiancenter.org/ California Indian Manpower Consortium http://www.cimcinc.org/ PSYCHOSEMANTIC: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-psychosemantic-podcast/id1191732198?mt=2 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5ldiDwbAHyfNJblqmWhwLn?si=XSqp4U4gRnKnnDX_gL3agQ Legion Podcasts: legionpodcasts.com/podcasts/the-psychosemantic-podcast/ Other Podcast places Psychosemantic Podcast: facebook.com/groups/Psychosemanticast/ Psychosemantic Podcast Social Media: Twitter: @PoliticalMovies Instagram and Flick Chat App: Psychosemanticast

Join Daeron and a revolving door of guests in discussing politics, movies, and political movies……. In this episode: Director Mike J Marin joins Daeron to talk about his documentary ‘Cinema Red: Natives & Horror’ as well as other things. Cinema Red is gong to be shown at the First Nations Film and Video Festival in Chicago. There will also be a screening for ‘The Party’s Downstairs’ on Halloween night 2019 at the American Indian Film Festival at the Brava Theater in San Francisco . The program is from 7pm – 10pm. The Intertribal Friendship House of Oakland is one of the oldest Indian-focused urban resource and community organizations in the United States. Founded in 1955 https://www.ifhurbanrez.org/ The American Indian Center of Chicago https://www.aicchicago.org/ United American Indian Involvement, Inc. Home Established in 1969, the Southern California Indian Center, Inc. (SCIC) http://www.indiancenter.org/ California Indian Manpower Consortium http://www.cimcinc.org/ PSYCHOSEMANTIC: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-psychosemantic-podcast/id1191732198?mt=2 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5ldiDwbAHyfNJblqmWhwLn?si=XSqp4U4gRnKnnDX_gL3agQ Legion Podcasts: legionpodcasts.com/podcasts/the-psychosemantic-podcast/ Other Podcast places Psychosemantic Podcast: facebook.com/groups/Psychosemanticast/ Psychosemantic Podcast Social Media: Twitter: @PoliticalMovies Instagram and Flick Chat App: Psychosemanticast

Craig Dellimore talks with Field Foundation official Hilesh Patel about the organizations program to identify "Leaders for a New Chicago." Then, two of the awardees join the spirited discussion about leadership and making change in the City: Tonika Lewis Johnson, a Visual Artist and Heather Miller, with the American Indian Center.

3 years ago reports showed that Chicago was doing a terrible job at recycling. The mayor got angry and made changes. But nobody ever followed up, and we’re now officially the worst recyclers of all major American cities. Only 9% of our potential recyclable material gets recycled. We talk to an investigative reporter from the Better Government Association about what she found-and didn’t find-when it comes to recycling in the city. Plus after a long fight, American Indian youth have procured 3 adjacent lots in Albany Park for a garden and a safe space for indigenous youth. We talk to one of the young people who spearheaded that battle, and the Executive Director of the American Indian Center.

In the state of Illinois, it is illegal to institute rent control but recently Chicago voters have repeatedly expressed their support for lifting that ban. On this week’s episode of the podcast we spoke to Simone, a landlord and lifelong Chicagoan, who supports lifting the ban. We also talked to Heather McClaren about Chicago DSA’s work as a member of the Lift the Ban Coalition. We touch on the history of powerful real estate interests in Chicago, recent trends in gentrification, how the coalition hopes to move forward and the arguments that are often made against rent control. The “Lift the Ban” coalition is led by the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, Lugenia Burns Hope Center, Northside Action for Justice, and Pilsen Alliance. Current membership includes: Action Now Institute, American Indian Center, Autonomous Tenants Union, Chicago Democratic Socialists of America, Coalition for Equitable Community Development, The Community Law Project, Lawyers Committee for Better Housing, Little Village Community Development Corporation, Metropolitan Tenants Organization, Northwest Side Housing Center, ONE Northside, People for Community Recovery, SEIU HCII, Somos Logan Square, 33rdWard IPO, 25th Ward IPO, United Working Families, and Westside Health Authority.

Carolina is the Executive Director of the American Indian Center of Indiana and has her perspective on the DC situation

The city is more than $250,000 behind in bills to Cargill, Inc., a snow salt company, for last winter's supply, the city's finance director has warned. And Gary will not see a single granular of road salt this year from the company until they are paid in full, City Controller Angela Hayes said. On Tuesday, the Gary’s Finance Department offered a solution by seeking council approval to move around more than $250,000 in the budget. That would pay down old bills owed to Cargill Inc. “Cargill will not allow us to order more salt until we pay prior bills,” City Controller Angela Hayes said Tuesday night to the council’s Finance Committee. The move ensures the city will have the necessary supply of road salt from Cargill and keep roads passable during snowstorms. If approved, the city administration would shift $274,000 within the city’s General Services budget to pay down the old bills from the 2017-2018 winter season. The ordinance, reviewed Tuesday night by the Gary City Council’s Finance Committee, transfers money from the capital budget to the streets and sewer materials line item, bringing the grand total to $734,000. Hayes said the Gary Community Schools Corp. is negotiating a deal with the city’s Public Works Department to provide space where the salt supply would be housed. A few options are being explored, she said. Council President Ronald Brewer said it's critical they find a location that will protect the city's supply before winter. The tent city — located near the American Indian Center — has been called "The Wall of Forgotten Natives" because many of its residents are Native American. "They came to an area, a geography that has long been identified as a part of the Native community. A lot of the camp residents feel at home, they feel safer," Robert Lilligren, vice chairman of the Metropolitan Urban Indian Directors, told NBC News. In late September, the Minneapolis City Council approved a site in south Minneapolis for a temporary "navigation center" that will provide services environment for people living at the encampment. City staff will work with community and government partners to establish the center at 2109 Cedar Avenue, a 1.25-acre site that includes parcels owned by the Red Lake Nation and the city. The goal is to open the center this fall. Until the center opens, there are no plans to close the encampment.

This week, we talk pumpkins-- giant pumpkins. Randi R. Byrd serves as the Community Engagement Coordinator for the American Indian Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and facilitates the Healthy Native North Carolinians Network. She is also an award-winning grower of giant pumpkins. Although Randi always had a green thumb, she only connected her interest in agricultural practice to her fascination with pumpkins in 2009. Growing a 700-pound pumpkin is a difficult feat that often requires the support of family and friends. Randi talks about the community she found not only in fellow growers of giant pumpkins but also in the local Indigenous community as well as her online friends that encouraged her pursuit, performed ceremony on the land with her, and physically tilled the soil from which actual magic could grow. About South is produced by Gina Caison, Kelly Vines, and Adjoa Danso. Lindsey Baker is our Marketing Director. Music is by Brian Horton. You can find his music at www.brianhorton.com. Learn more at www.aboutsouthpodcast.com.