Saving the World

Braiding Sweetgrass is a metaphor for Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer's weaving together her Potowatomie teachings with western scientific training and her own being as a human. Braiding is better done in concert with others. Dr. Kimmerer tells us, "For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children's future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it. To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language ... " Nick Vander Puy from the Superior Broadcast Network reports.

News from the Front: This was the first John Trudell (Santee Dakota) speech we ever heard. It was recorded in 1980 at the Black Hills Survival Gathering in South Dakota. Listening to it doesn't take a leap of the imagination to understand why the FBI gathered more than 17000 pages on this Native American patriot and described him as "eloquent and therefore very dangerous." John Trudell walked on Tuesday, December 8, 2015.

When Nitgizhigookwe, Ginoonde and I arrived at the Mississippi River in Minnesota we met a slobbering and grinding bull dozer. The D9 caterpillar was helping replace a 1097 mile pipeline running between Alberta and Minnesota, the largest project Enbridge has undertaken which carries 800 thousand gallons of filthy, corrosive tar sands oil everyday. Nick Vander Puy visits by the fire at the Water Protectors Center camp with Jim Northrup 111. Northrup has been travelling and serving the movement since Standing Rock. 

On July 1 bear hunters in Wisconsin, after dumping millions of gallons of confectionary bait, started running hounds on bears in the woods. This is not a kill season, although some bears undoubtedly die after being run in the hot, humid woods or fought before clawing their way up a tree. This  so called practice season which leads to conflicts with many citizens, property owners as well as wolves who kill canids entering their rendezvous territory. Come September a three to four week kill season commences.  About twenty five years ago another version of this story aired on NPR's "All Things Considered"  whcih led to me getting hired as a reporter for WXPR Public Radio in Rhinelander, Wisconsin.