A Voice for Indigenous Issues, Concerns, Cultures and Customs

Sunday, January 10, 2010 at 2- 5 PM

Phil Greenspan Film Series
Fellowship of Reconciliation
http://www.forusa.org/
521 N. Broadway, Nyack, NY 10960
845-358-4601 ext. 32

Film screening and follow-up discussion with Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Lakota) - Host of First Voices Indigenous Radio on WBAI NY

Contact: Alan Levin, alevin@SacredRiverHealing.org

2009-2010 Changing Winds Winter Warmth Drive

Changing Winds Inc
PO Box 801
Fairfield, CT 06824
203-256-9720
A Native American Civil Rights and Education Agency and a 501C.3 nonprofit charitable organization

Did You Chop Your Wood Today?

Many people on Native/Indigenous reservations have no heat in the winter, and many communities rely solely on wood burning stoves for heat. Irony? In some places, even wood is hard to find.

Will your children be warm this winter?
Will they have a bed with sheets and blankets?
Three meals a day? Boots and gloves?

Many children on the reservations will have none of these things. Last year the first blizzard hit early in November, leaving thousands without food and electricity for weeks. The damage by the worst winter in 80 years left its mark: roofs fell in, black mold increased, and now, food banks have either closed or started to charge the hungry. This year for many will be even harder then the last. On Cheyenne River Lakota Reservation, food banks that fed the homeless and destitute have closed, now leaving families already in dire straits hungry without hope.

Our focus has always been on the children, and this year is no different. We continue to reach out to the Lakota children in the greatest need, and this year we are expanding our efforts into literacy and other inspirational enrichment programs that will help the children to focus on a hopeful, positive future.

Yes, there is good news. YOU ARE making a difference!

Tiokasin Ghosthorse, host and producer

Today many indigenous peoples are still excluded from society and often even deprived of their rights as equal citizens of a state.

Nevertheless they are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories and their ethnic identity. Self-identification as an indigenous individual and acceptance as such by the group is an essential component of indigenous peoples’ sense of identity. Their continued existence as peoples is closely connected to their possibility to influence their own fate and to live in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems.

Indigenous peoples have prior rights to their territories, lands and resources, but often these have been taken from them or are threatened. They have distinct cultures and economies compared to those of the dominant society. Indigenous peoples' self-identification as indigenous is a crucial part of their identity.

Indigenous peoples face serious difficulties such as the constant threat of territorial invasion and murder, the plundering of their resources, cultural and legal discrimination, as well as a lack of recognition of their own institutions.

First Voices Indigenous Radio and Tiokasin Ghosthorse urge you to stay informed and involved in protecting the rights of indigenous people and their culture.

FVIR Rebroadcasts