The Red Nation Podcast

10/10. Recomended for fans of Yellowstone and Dances with Wolves. Great coverage of stuff you’ll barely hear about in other news outlets. Interesting analysis created by and made for indigenous people, but that is nonetheless valuable to everyone who cares to listen. Learn about beloved elder and political prisoner Leonard Peltier, the grim legacy of Indian boarding schools, and Palestinian and Native resistance and solidarity. If you listen to NPR you’ve already absorbed one side of these issues through the liberal lens of pods like Ear Hustle, Radiolab, and the news. Do yourself a kindness by expanding your horizons with Native media and perspectives. Most importantly get and stay yoted.

As a Lakota woman and granddaughter of the Red Power movement, I am absolutely floored by the Anna Mae Documentary episode. I have many grandparents who were involved in AIM, participated in fish-ins in the PNW, and went to the occupation of Alcatraz, and they have all openly discussed both the good and the bad of Red Power. It is possible to hold multiple, complicated views at once: we can acknowledge the critical importance of AIM and the discrepancies in the Anna Mae case while, simultaneously, admit that the movement had its faults (especially in regard to the exploitation and objectification of Native women). Nick is correct that we can’t reduce the movement to its worst tendencies, but to completely gloss over the very real misogynistic currents in AIM does violence to Native women and conceals the radical possibilities that can emerge when we critically reflect on a movement’s failures. If we are to tell a true radical history of our people, then we need to be willing to hold space for dissent and honest reflection. Additionally, the episode on the whole was also rather sexist and perpetuated misogynistic tropes about the naïveté and ignorance of women. Nick and the other podcast hosts rob Anna Mae’s daughters and Yvonne Russo (the Lakota director of the documentary) of all agency or purpose. Nick and the podcast hosts talk about Russo as if she is nothing but a pawn for the white, pro-FBI producers of the documentary. They don’t even mention Anna Mae’s daughters in any serious way until 1:06hrs into the podcast in the last ten minutes of the episode. Rather than situate the documentary into a larger conversation about MMIW, Nick and the podcast hosts present the documentary as pro-FBI propaganda. The entire issue of MMIW is barely even mentioned in the podcast episode itself, which is the whole point of the documentary.

Meh

Listening through a few but particularly the episode covering Venezuela you soon realize that this podcast is as extreme to the left as the far right “establishment” they abhor. Don’t waste your time, there’s a reason why few people listen to this garbage. Thank goodness the views here are only held by small group of intellectually challenged people.