GROUNDWORKS travels from traditional acorn gathering spots to the studios where the “Groundworks” performance was rehearsed before being shared at sunrise on Alcatraz—nearly 50 years after the Indians of All Tribes occupied the island and brought attention to Native American rights. Originally initiated by contemporary dance company Dancing Earth Creations, the “Groundworks” project was designed to amplify the oft-forgotten Native presence everywhere in the Americas.
Groundworks weaves together four artists’ stories and their contemporary ways of sharing traditional Indigenous knowledge. By exploring their creative practices, it highlights these Native artists’ contemporary relationships to the Pomo, Ohlone, Tongva, and Wappo/Onastatis territories, languages and traditions. Their efforts to “re-story” the land through creative reclamation are important facets of the Land Back movement.
Bernadette Smith is a Pomo singer, musician, and playwright from the Point Arena Manchester Band of Pomo Indians. She is an activist leader involved with Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and brought her whole family to Standing Rock to protect water rights. She is currently working on reclaiming land traditionally used by her tribe for their acorn harvest, and on protecting the source of those acorns—the tan oak—from hack-and-squirt clearing to make way for managed redwoods.
Profiled in the documentary are Ras K’dee, Pomo, a musician with ties to multiple bands in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties; Bernadette Smith, singer and dancer from the Manchester-Point Arena Band of Pomo Indians; Kanyon Sayers-Roods, a multidisciplinary Ohlone artist from Indian Canyon, a sovereign Indian Nation outside of Hollister, California; and L. Frank, a Tongva-Acjachemen artist, tribal scholar, canoe builder, and language advocate.
We spoke with director, producer, writer and cinematographer, Ian Garrett, about his film, GROUNDWORKS, via Skype on May 16, 2023.
GROUNDWORKS will be screening at the Mendocino FilmFestival on June 4 at 3pm in the Festival Tent. A special program with Coastal Pomo dancers will open the program and a panel discussion will follow.
As a nation, we are in the throes of a re-examination of history, but whose history, and who gets to tell it, and how do we live today with various versions of our history, that were memorialized in the past? How do we best evaluate and live with the impacts of different versions of history and the potential harm and even re-traumatization that a particular version creates?
What role does art play in this process? whose art? and for whom?
These are among the questions addressed by the filmmakers, Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, in their documentary, TOWN DESTROYER, which screens on Friday, June 2nd, at 1:00 PM at The Coast Cinemas.
You may recall the furor over whether or not to destroy or cover up the 13 panels of the 1930s murals by Popular Front artist, Victor Arnautoff, THE LIFE OF WASHINGTON, at San Francisco’s George Washington High School. Snitow & Kaufman film students, parents, Native American activists, artists of different ethnicities, scholars, and museum directors, all against a background of vivid cinematography of the controversial panels, as well as many other relevant works of art, both at the high school, and elsewhere across the country.
Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman’s films include the award-winning “Company Town,” “Between Two Worlds,” “Thirst”, “Secrets of Silicon Valley”, and “Blacks and Jews.”
Alan was a producer at the KTVU-TV News, the Bay Area Fox affiliate, for 12 years. Before that, he was an award winning News Director at KPFA-FM. He has served on the Boards of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, Film Arts Foundation, California Media Collaborative, Food and Water Watch, and much more.
Deborah Kaufman founded and for 13 years was Director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the first and largest independent Jewish film showcase in the world. She has been a Board member of the California Council for the Humanities, the New Israel Fund, and Amnesty International USA. She has been a consultant, programmer, lecturer, and activist with a variety of human rights, multicultural and media arts organizations.
We spoke with Deborah and Alan on May 8, 2023 via Skype.
“Early Days” Pioneer Monument by Frank Happersberger, Installed 1894 in SF Civic Center Plaza
The documentary, BODY PARTS, traces the evolution of “sex” on-screen from a woman’s perspective, uncovering the uncomfortable realities behind some of the most iconic scenes in cinema history and celebrating the courageous individuals leading the way for change. It’s an eye-opening investigation into the making of Hollywood sex scenes, shedding light on the actors’ real-life experiences, and tracing the legacy of exploitation of women in the entertainment industry, as well as recent hard fought changes in that industry.
On May 1, 2023, we spoke with Director, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, and Producer, Helen Hood Scheer, about BODY PARTS, which will be screening at this year’s Mendocino Film Festival at Crown Hall on Sunday June 4 at 1pm.
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan is an Associate Professor at UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film and Television, where she heads the MFA Directing Documentary concentration. She has been making documentary films that focus on gender and representation for nearly two decades, starting with a 1999 experimental documentary about a blow-up doll (which screened at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, among other venues). Guevara-Flanagan’s documentary and experimental films have screened at the Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, and HotDocs film festivals and the Getty Museum. Her work has been broadcast on PBS and the Sundance Channel, received numerous awards, and been funded by ITVS, the Sundance Institute, the Tribeca Institute, Latino Public Broadcasting and California Humanities.
Helen Hood Scheer is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, freelance producer, and associate professor at California State University Long Beach, where she spearheads the creative nonfiction track and serves as the internship advisor for students in the Department of Film and Electronic Arts. In 2023, she won CSULB’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Throughout her instruction, service, and professional work, Helen is a strong advocate for students. In 2020, she received the Advancement of Women Award from the CSULB President’s Commission on the Status of Women, and both Helen and her students were featured in Claiming the Director’s Chair, an article expressing the CSU’s commitment to preparing the next generation of female filmmakers for California’s multi-billion dollar entertainment industry.
You may recall the horrifying news that hit the airwaves on March 26, 2018 about a van that had driven off the 100 foot cliff on HWY 1 just south of Juan Creek between Rockport and Westport on the north coast of Mendocino County, CA. Bad as the initial reports were, as more was learned about what had actually happened and what led up to it, the horror only grew.
CA Highway Patrol
Texas based journalist, Roxanna Asgarian, began investigating the tragedy within a day. Her investigations since have resulted in her book, WE WERE ONCE A FAMILY: A STORY OF LOVE, DEATH, AND CHILD REMOVAL IN AMERICA, published in March, 2023 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
She writes it as the true crime story that it certainly is, but her primary goal was to uncover the untold stories of the birth families of the six Black children taken from their families, who did NOT want to give them up, and who were making efforts to keep them, when the deeply flawed child welfare system thrust them first into the foster care system, and then fast tracked them into out of state adoptions.
Roxanna Asgarian reports about courts and the law for the Texas Tribune. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Magazine and Texas Monthly, as well as other publications. She received the 2022 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for WE WERE ONCE A FAMILY: A STORY OF LOVE, DEATH, AND CHILD REMOVAL IN AMERICA. It goes well beyond the earlier, sensationalist reportage by the mainstream press and delves into the systems and history that allowed this murder/suicide to happen. We spoke with her via Skype on April 10, 2023.
Devonte Hart, seen in 2014 hugging a police officer at a Black Lives Matter protest. (Johnny Huu Nguyen/AP)
Tragic as this story of innocent children taken from their birth families by a Child Protection Service system which purports to protect children, it is but one aspect of our society that does NOT protect innocent children.
Once again, another mass shooting at a school ended in the murder and traumatizing of children, this one at the Covenant School in Nashville, TN, which led to protests at the State Legislature, the expulsion of two young black representatives, their unanimous reinstatement to represent their districts, and more diverse voices calling out the politicians only too happy to maintain the status quo.
One mourns the loss of the Hart children, particularly Devonte Hart, whose famous “hug heard around the world” – showing Devonte’s tear streaked face at the age of 14 hugging a white police officer during a tense demonstration protesting the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. He, with his “Free Hugs” sign, would have been 20 years old now. What might he have become, had his life not been cut short, his body never found?
The broadcast ended with Cheryl Wheeler’s song, “If It Were Up to Me,” which you can hear using this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op7agdIFOGY. It is sadly even more relevant than when she first recorded it in 1997.
In this edition of Radio Goes to the Movies, we inquire about a new documentary from Bozeman based Grizzly Creek Films with director, Eric Bendick, PATH OF THE PANTHER.
Drawn in by the haunting specter of the Florida panther, it follows a wildlife photographer, veterinarians, ranchers, conservationists, and Indigenous people, who find themselves on the front lines of an accelerating battle between the forces of renewal and the forces of destruction that have pushed the Everglades to the brink of ecological collapse.
Once ubiquitous in North and South America, but now perched on the edge of extinction, this perilously small, sole remaining population of the panther east of the Mississippi is an emblem of our once connected world. A vision of what could be again.
We spoke with the Emmy Award winning director of Path of the Panther, Eric Bendick, about his work and this powerful new film via Skype on April 5, 2023.
It will be premiering on the National Geographic/Disney+ channel on April 28, 2023.
Source: FloridaWildlifeCorridor.org; Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission.
Philip Bump is a national columnist for The Washington Post. Prior to that, he led politics coverage for The Atlantic Wire. He focuses on the data behind polls and political rhetoric, as well as writing a weekly newsletter, “How To Read This Chart.”
His first book, THE AFTERMATH: THE LAST DAYS OF THE BABY BOOM AND THE FUTURE OF POWER IN AMERICA, looks at the overlap of the end of the baby boom and the upheaval in American politics and the U.S. economy.
After our interview with Philip Bump, we share excerpts from a conversation with former Congresswoman, Pat Schroeder, from 2014 at the Library of Congress.
At the age of 31 and the mother of two young children, she defeated an incumbent Republican congressman in 1972, and then was re-elected 11 more times before leaving Congress in 1997, disgusted with the obstructionist shenanigans of Newt Gingrich. In 1988 she ran for president of the United States.
Born in 1940, she would be designated as being in The Silent Generation, but she was anything but silent. It was she, who designated Ronald Reagan as the “Teflon President.” She served on the House Armed Services Committee, and you may be surprised by what she has to say about NATO. The final excerpt is from the end of an hour long conversation, responding to a question from the audience asking if she were president, what five things would she do immediately.
Dennis Baron is Professor Emeritus of English and Linguistics at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the technologies of communication; language legislation and linguistic rights; language reform; gender issues in language and more.
Among his earlier books are Grammar and Gender; A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers and the Digital Revolution; and What’s Your Pronoun: Beyond He and She.
His latest book, YOU CAN’T AWAYS SAY WHAT YOU WANT: THE PARADOX OF FREE SPEECH, is published by Cambridge University Press. We spoke with him via Skype on February 21, 2023.
Thanks to Roy Zimmerman for permission to share his music.
Henry Giroux, author, journalist and public intellectual, is the internationally acclaimed Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy and Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest at McMaster University.
He has written more than 56 books since his first book, Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling was published in 1981. He has been generous with us over the years with his time, insights and analysis, as he published books such as Zombie Politics in the Age of Casino Capitalism; Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories, and the Culture of Cruelty; The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine; Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle; America at War with Itself; American Nightmare: The Challenge of US Authoritarianism; and The Terror of the Unforeseen.
His latest book is INSURRECTIONS: EDUCATION IN AN AGE OF COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS, just published by Bloomsbury Press. We spoke with him via Skype on February 8, 2023 about the multiple crises with which we are faced.
Seattle photographer, Nate Gowdy, has documented over 340 political events and protests across 25 states. He flew from GA to Washington, D.C. the night before January 6, 2021 to cover the much publicized so-called “Stop the Steal” Rally on the Ellipse.
He was about a mile away and heading to that rally along the national mall, when a couple of hundred Proud Boys marched toward him and the US Capitol from the Rally at 10:45am – hours before Trump was scheduled to speak. Having photographed many political events and demonstrations, he recognized some of them, and made the decision to turn and follow them, soon becoming swept along the growing flood of extremists to the very steps of the Capitol.
“10:43:47 am I recognize Ethan Nordean, a notorious Proud Boys brawler from the Seattle area known as ‘Rufio Panman,’ holding a bullhorn. To his left are Zach Rehl of Philadelphia and Joe Biggs of Florida. The three Proud boys lieutenants, each of whom is later charged with seditious conspiracy, lead chants of ‘Fuck Antifa!’ as they trek across the otherwise sparsely populated National Mall.”
His photographic compilation, Insurrection, not only documents the events of that day when our democracy hung by the thinnest of blue lines, but contributes to the art form of war photography in the highest traditions of Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White and Matthew Brady. We spoke with him via Skype on January 11, 2023.
“3:35:18PM – ‘Cowboys for Trump’ founder, Couy Griffin, incites the mob in insurrection. In September 2022, a New Mexico state judge rules that, under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the Otero County Commissioner is disqualified from public office. The decision is the first of its kind since 1869, and the first time that any court rules the events of January 6th, 2021, an insurrection. In August 2022, I travel to Santa Fe to serve as the plaintiffs’ eyewitness in the landmark two-day trial.”
Professor Clarence Lusane is the interim Chair of Howard University’s Department of Political Science and current Director of the International Affairs program. For more than 40 years he has written about, and been active in, national and international human rights, anti-racism politics, democracy building, and social justice issues such as education, criminal justice, and voting rights. Among his books are The Black History of the White House; Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice: Foreign Policy, Race, and the New American Century; and Pipe Dream Blues: Racism and the War on Drugs.
We spoke with him about his most recent book, Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Struggle for Racial Justice and Democracy, published by City Lights Books.
Nate Gowdy’s book, INSURRECTION, of photos he took on January 6, 2021, as he was swept by a mob of Proud Boys and Three Percenters onto the steps of the US Capitol Building came to my attention. In the second part of today’s Forthright Radio, we share excerpts from an extended interview with Nate Gowdy about his work, and what he experienced that day.
Forthright Radio 