09/24/23 - Resmaa Menakem (Repeat)

09/25/23 • 58 min

For this week's show, we're digging into the First Voices Radio archives and revisiting Host Tiokasin Ghosthorse's conversation with author, Justice Leadership coach, organizational strategist, and master trainer Resmaa Menakem. Tiokasin and Resmaa discuss grief, trauma, Indigeneity, reclamation of cultures, and autonomous practicality separate from "identity" and history.

Resmaa coaches leaders and people to rise through suffering’s edge. His work focuses on making the invisible, embodied and visible. Resmaa Menakem is a healer, a longtime therapist, and a licensed clinical social worker who specializes in the healing of racialized trauma. He is also the founder of the Cultural Somatics Institute, a cultural trauma navigator, and a communal provocateur and coach. Resmaa is best known as the author of the New York Times bestseller “My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies,” and as the originator and key advocate of Somatic Abolitionism, an embodied antiracist practice of living and culture building.

Resmaa has served as the director of counseling services for Tubman Family Alliance, a domestic violence treatment center in Minneapolis; the behavioral health director for African American Family Services in Minneapolis; a domestic violence counselor for Wilder Foundation; a divorce and family mediator; a social worker for Minneapolis Public Schools; a youth counselor; a community organizer; and a marketing strategist.

Find Resmaa on Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn. His website is https://www.resmaa.com/.
Production Credits:
Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Lakota), Host and Executive Producer
Liz Hill (Red Lake Ojibwe), Producer
Karen Ramirez (Mayan), Studio Engineer, Radio Kingston
Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Audio Editor
Kevin Richardson, Podcast Editor

Music Selections:
1. Song Title: Tahi Roots Mix (First Voices Radio Theme Song)
Artist: Moana and the Moa Hunters
Album: Tahi (1993)
Label: Southside Records (Australia and New Zealand)
(00:00:22)

2. Song Title: Come and Take It
Artist: John Németh
Album: Stronger Than Strong (2020)
Label: Memphis Grease Records
(00:26:07)

3. Song Title: Freedom
Artist: Mau Power Feat. Archie Roach
Album: The Show Will Go On (2014)
Label: Aylan Styles
(00:55:00)

AKANTU INTELLIGENCE
Visit Akantu Intelligence, an institute that Tiokasin founded with a mission of contextualizing original wisdom for troubled times. Go to https://akantuintelligence.org to find out more and consider joining his Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/Ghosthorse

2. Song Title: Come and Take It
Artist: John Németh
Album: Stronger Than Strong (2020)
Label: Memphis Grease Records
(00:26:07)

3. Song Title: Freedom
Artist: Mau Power Feat. Archie Roach
Album: The Show Will Go On (2014)
Label: Aylan Styles
(00:55:00)

Previous Episode

09/17/23 - Chasity Salvador

Chasity Salvador is a young farmer and traditional seed keeper growing food and seed for her family and community. She is a full-spectrum doula, Indigenous breastfeeding counselor and birth keeper providing birth work services to her community. Chasity is a scholar, writer, and organizer on Pueblo women in agriculture, and Indigenous food and seed sovereignty.

She is a poet that tells the story on how all these lines of work contribute to the wellbeing and healing of Pueblo women and children from the impacts of ongoing settler colonialism, unsettling capitalism, the medical industrial complex, and the environmental destruction and injustice from extractive projects that occur near and on her homeland of Acoma Pueblo. Chasity’s latest line of work has been helping Pueblo communities navigate the climate crisis, generate food and seed sovereignty awareness among her Pueblo, and restoring and working with medicinal plant knowledge in Acoma Pueblo for her birth work clients/families and community members with chronic illnesses and conditions.

She is a graduate of Stanford University where she completed her Bachelors of Arts in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. In her free time she likes to teach her nieces and nephews how to farm and save seed, write poetry and fiction, make medicine for community and complete her creative writing projects including her book of essays and poetry.

Special thanks to Lucy Rain Simpson, Executive Director, and Marquel Musgave, Covid T.A. Specialist, at the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center (NIWRC) in Lame Deer, Montana, for helping us reach out to Chasity and invite her to appear on the show. NIWRC organized a webinar on September 15, 2023, titled “Collective Healing: Plant Medicine Allies to Support Long Covid Survivors and Collective Grief Now and Into the Future” that featured Chasity as the presenter. NIWRC is a Native-led nonprofit organization dedicated to ending violence against Native women and children. The organization provides national leadership in ending gender-based violence in tribal communities by lifting up the collective voices of grassroots advocates and offering culturally grounded resources, technical assistance and training, and policy development to strengthen tribal sovereignty.

Visit niwrc.org for more information.

Production Credits:
Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Lakota), Host and Executive Producer
Liz Hill (Red Lake Ojibwe), Producer
Karen Ramirez (Mayan), Studio Engineer, Radio Kingston
Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Audio Editor
Kevin Richardson, Podcast Editor

2. Song Title: In the Land of the Blind
Artist: Cy Curnin
Album: Lockdown (2020)
Label: cycurninmusic
(00:26:10)

3. Song Title: Prophecy
Artist: Joanne Shenandoah
Album: Orenda (1998)
Label: Silver Wave Records
(00:46:48)

4.Song Title: Star People
Artist: Indian City
Album: Code Red (2021)
Label: Rising Sun Productions, Inc., Winnipeg, Ontario, Canada
(00:51:10)

5. Song Title: Red Flags
Artist: PLEX feat. Aleah Belle
Album: Who Am I To Judge (2022)
Label: Merilainen Music Inc.
(00:55:00)

Next Episode

10/01/23 - John Trudell (From 1980)

“First Voices Radio” digs deep into our 30-year-old archive. The words of the late John Trudell are from 1980 but his observations have stood the test of time and still ring true. John (1946-2015) was a poet, a fighter for Native American rights, an agitator, and many other things.

But if you were to have asked him which of these descriptions best suits him he would have refused to be pinned down. “Actually I don’t consider myself to be any of those things. They’re things that I do...but they’re parts of me. They’re not the total.” I

ndeed, Trudell was the complex sum of all that he saw, endured and accomplished during his 69 years, a time when he experienced more than most people might in several lifetimes. More information about John Trudell can be found at https://www.johntrudell.com/.

Production Credits:
Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Lakota), Host and Executive Producer; Liz Hill (Red Lake Ojibwe), Producer; Karen Ramiriez, Studio Engineer; Kevin Richardson, Podcast Editor
Music Selections:
1. Song Title: Tahi Roots Mix (First Voices Radio Theme Song)
Artist: Moana and the Moa Hunters
Album: Tahi (1993)
Label: Southside Records (Australia and New Zealand)
(00:00:22)

2. Song Title: Caravan of Fools
Artist: John Prine
Album: The Tree of Forgiveness (2018)
Label: Oh Boy Records
(00:02:15)

3. Song Title: The Cleansing / Red Earth Song
Artist: John Trudell
Album: Tribal Voice (1983)
Label: Effective Records
(00:29:10)

4. Song Title: Wildseed
Artist: John Trudell - KWEST
CD: Through the Dust (2014)
Label: Dialect Records
(00:44:50)

5. Song Title: The States I’m In
Artist: Bruce Cockburn
Album: Bond on Bone (2017)
Label: True North
(00:49:50)

6. Song Title: Tell Me a Tale
Artist: Michael Kiwanuka
Album: Home Again (2012)
Label: Polydor Records
(00:55:17)

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