This episode is hosted by Frann Michel and features the following segments:
Vice President Kamala Harris faces renewed scrutiny as calls intensify for Joe Biden to step down from the presidential race. Whatever the outcome of DNC jockeying and the fate of Biden, Harris has clearly risen in stature and is subject to considerable speculation before the August convention in Chicago. In their Left and the Law segment, Mike Snedeker and Jan Haaken talk about the politics of Kamala Harris. They discuss her positions as a prosecutor in San Francisco and later Attorney General in California before winning a Senate seat. As an appellate attorney who for decades has represented people on death row in California, Mike shares his experience of working with Harris and his view of how her experience as a prosecutor shapes her politics.
The most contaminated place in the Western Hemisphere is right here in our backyard: the Hanford Nuclear Site in Eastern Washington, the global birthplace of both nuclear energy and nuclear bombs. During WWII, the area was confiscated from Native Tribes without their consent and without recompense. Long after the production of plutonium was decommissioned at the site, the soil and groundwater are still heavily contaminated with radioactive and toxic waste that threatens to leak into the Columbia River. But the clean-up process has been marred by massive cost overruns and unconscionable delays, as for profit enterprises continue to reap profits on the work that never quite gets done. Today it looks like the clean-up project is going to once again be delayed and the adequacy of the clean-up compromised. Patricia Kullberg speaks with Esteban Ortiz, a program coordinator with Columbia RiverKeeper to talk about what’s at stake with the new “holistic” agreement, which was crafted behind closed doors, in a process that once again excluded Native Tribes.
Criminalizing Columbia River Indians
Celilo Wy’am guest Mole Lana Jack interviews Yakama fisherman and fishing rights activist Andy Sohappy about resisting and navigating a gauntlet of colonial agencies, jurisdictions, and police that collectively criminalize, impoverish and imprison Native fishers exercising their treaty-protected rights on the Nc’wana, “the Big”–or Columbia–River. Sohappy reports that police with the Columbia River Intertribal Enforcement attacked the family camp on July 15 in the middle of the night, yelling and repeatedly tasing his 34-year-old son James in front of his 11-year-old daughter. Sohappy’s father David Sohappy, Sr. and his brother David, Sohappy, Jr. both served prison time in the 1980s when they were arrested for 28 salmon as part of an FBI multi-agency sting known as “Salmon Scam.”
- KBOO