Native American Environmental Leader Tom Goldtooth: Climate Change Bill Fails to Address Indigenous Rights

DemocracyNow.org
May 22, 2009

Tom Goldtooth is executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network headquartered at Bemidji, Minnesota. For over thirty years, he has been an environmental and economic justice leader in the Native American community. He joins us to talk about the congressional climate change bill and Native American efforts to address the resource extractions causing environmental degradation in their communities...

As Requirements Change, Just Who Is An Indian?

by Brian Bull
National Public Radio

Morning Edition, May 11, 2009 · Many Native American communities are struggling with a basic question: just who is an Indian? As tribal numbers dwindle, many are reexamining how they define what it means to be a member. But lowering the blood requirement for membership has both political and economic impacts for many groups...

Pullman Porters Helped Build Black Middle Class

National Public Radio

Morning Edition, May 7, 2009 · Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown were descendants of Pullman porters — that distinctive and distinguished figure from yesteryear — the uniformed African-American train worker, who forged his way into the middle class.

As part of this year's National Train Day celebration on Saturday, Amtrak is honoring the legacy of Pullman porters in Philadelphia. The porters served first-class passengers traveling in the luxurious Pullman sleeping cars, and the safe, steady work that allowed tens of thousands of African-Americans access to middle-class life.

The legacy of Pullman porters is complex, author Larry Tye tells NPR's Steve Inskeep...

Breaking the Bonds of People and Land:

TITLE: Breaking the Bonds of People and Land: Native American Removal in the United States and Mexico

SPEAKER: Claudia Haake
EVENT DATE: 06/12/2008
RUNNING TIME: 62 minutes

The lecture drew some general conclusions from an investigation of two cases of Native American forced migration: the Delawares in the United States and the Yaquis in Mexico. Although the basic intention behind the removal policies was the same in both countries, the ways in which they were carried out were oftentimes different. In both the Delawares and Yaquis examples, greed and land hunger on the part of the U.S. and Mexican governments appears to have been the main reasons for the forced migration of these indigenous people.

Yet, variations in method, circumstances, and legality occasionally disguised the reality. While the Delaware tribe was/is a so-called domestic dependent nation and the Yaquis were at least nominally Mexican citizens, both removal policies are illustrative of colonialism in action--indigenous peoples were forced from their proprietary homelands. Clearly, the rise of the nation-state as well as periodic nation building or re-building in both countries was instrumental in bringing about the removal. Both Mexico and the United States were advancing technologically, and improvement in communications and transport contributed to the successful removal of these two tribes in a number of different ways. However, a closer look at the two cases in question suggests an increasing awareness on the part of both the U.S. and Mexican governments was the determining factor in bringing about the forced migrations.

Speaker Biography: Kluge Fellow Claudia Haake is from the University of York in the United Kingdom.