Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) Mole Julian Ankney hosts this Indigenous People’s Day show which features the following segments:
Indigenous Food Sovereignty
In September, WSU Vancouver broke ground on two new campus gardens–one a student community garden, the other centering Indigenous Traditional Ecological Cultural Knowledge. Julian Ankney speaks with Lakota-Cheyenne activist Roben White about the role of the gardens in revitalizing Indigenous First Foods and about the importance of honoring the Indigenous history of and continuing connection to land grant campuses capitalized by the 19th century Morrill Land Grant Acts, rooted in the appropriation and alienation of more than 11 million acres of Indigenous land.
Salmon Scam
In a continuation of the “Fish Wars” of the 1960s and 70s, a 1982 federal sting operation scapegoated and criminalized Columbia fisher people for diminishing salmon runs. This segment, which originally aired in May 2023, we feature commentary from Wanapum fishing rights activist David Sohappy, Jr..; Bruce Jim, enrolled Warm Springs; and Wilbur Slockish, Jr., the Hereditary Chief of the Klickitat, who were convicted in federal court and spent years in prison for exercising treaty-protected rights to fish in their usual and accustomed places. The segment also features commentary from Andy Sohappy, defense attorney Tom Keefe, and Celilo Wy'am activist Lana Jack, who organized the panel for SJCON, WSU’s annual social and environmental justice conference, in April 2023.
Indigenous-Palestinian Solidarity
“We need to dismantle settler colonialism in the United States. What Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank shows the world that settler colonialism only speaks the language of violence,” observes Diné (Navajo) Prof. Melanie Yazzie, in excerpts from a wide-ranging reading and talk entitled “Decolonization or Extinction: Reclaiming Our Humanity Through Our Love for the Earth.” We reprise Yazzie’s talk from WSU Vancouver’s April 2024 conference on “Extraction, Militarism, and Climate Collapse,” Yazzie, co-host of the Red Power Hour podcast, draws on a November 2023 speech at the March on Washington for Palestine. And she reads excerpts from The Red Deal and Red Nation Rising, works that consolidate insights from more than 25 Indigenous organizers and intellectuals with The Red Nation media collective. Landback, she explains, is the “soundest environmental policy for a planet teetering on the brink of total ecological collapse.”
Photo by Robbt, CC BY 2.0, cropped, via Wikimedia Commons.
- KBOO