This Week's Program: Monday, August 28, 2017
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- This Week's Program: Monday, August 28, 2017
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Host Tiokasin Ghosthorse catches up with Ben Carnes, a Native activist and organizer from Broken Bow, Oklahoma, in the Chahta (Choctaw) Nation. Ben's passion to stand for his people arose as a teen when he began to learn the truths about the U.S. government’s repressive treatment of the Indigenous people. This passion embarked him on a journey through prisons, Congress and the United Nations. Ben has worked with the Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee, League of Indigenous Sovereign Nations and the American Indian Movement and other national and local organizations. Ben is working toward a degree. He intends to graduate in May 2019, in time to file as a candidate for the public office of Chief of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. As a teen, Ben saw the importance of sovereignty, traditions and spirituality all being connected together to withstand the essence of assimilation. To achieve this lifelong goal would be Ben's contribution to the Chahta survival as a people.
In the second half-hour, Tiokasin welcomes back Alex White Plume. Alex White Plume, Oglala Lakota, was born on the Pine Ridge Reservation and grew up strongly connected to Lakota culture. He is a former Vice-President and Tribal President of the Oglala Lakota Nation, and is one of the founders of the Wounded Knee Bigfoot Memorial Ride, which began in 1986. Alex is also a farmer and from 2000 to 2002, he earned unwanted publicity when United States federal drug agents raided his farm and destroyed his crop of industrial hemp before he could harvest it for seed as he intended. On March 28, 2016 the U.S. District Court of South Dakota lifted an injunction that had been placed against Alex in 2004, which had prevented him from growing hemp. Much has happened since early 2016; and Alex will give an update of what has happened since that time (his last appearance on “First Voices Radio” was in April 2016).