Produced by:
KBOO
Program::
Air date:
Mon, 11/24/2025 - 9:00am to 10:00am
Decolonizing Thanksgiving: Views and Interviews from a Socialist-Feminist, Anti-racist, Anti-colonial and LGBTQ-positive Perspective
Desiree Hellegers hosts this decolonial Thanksgiving week show, featuring an all Indigenous line up of musicians and the following segments:
- “We need to dismantle settler colonialism in the United States. What Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank shows the world that settler colonialism only speaks the language of violence,” observes Diné (Navajo) Prof. Melanie Yazzie, in excerpts from a wide-ranging reading and talk entitled “Decolonization or Extinction: Reclaiming Our Humanity Through Our Love for the Earth.” We reprise Yazzie’s talk from WSU Vancouver’s April 2024 conference on “Extraction, Militarism, and Climate Collapse,” Yazzie, co-host of the Red Power Hour podcast, draws on a November 2023 speech at the March on Washington for Palestine. And she reads excerpts from The Red Deal and Red Nation Rising, works that consolidate insights from more than 25 Indigenous organizers and intellectuals with The Red Nation media collective. Landback, she explains, is the “soundest environmental policy for a planet teetering on the brink of total ecological collapse.”
- We hear excerpts from the suppressed 1970 Thanksgiving Day speech which Wampanoag elder Wampsutta (Frank James) planned to deliver to unsuspecting white settlers, declaring the date an annual Day of Mourning and reflection on the history and ongoing genocide of Native America.
- And finally, we hear reflections from student organizers with the Collective for Social and Environmental Justice (CSEJ) and Native American Programs at WSU Vancouver on learning and dispelling the myths about Thanksgiving.
Genre(s):