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.
Leigh Goodmark is the Marjorie Cook Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Frances King Carey School of Law, where she co-directs the Clinical Law Program, teaches Family Law, Gender and the Law, and Gender Violence and the Law. She also directs the Gender Violence Clinic, which provides direct representation in matters involving intimate partner abuse, sexual assault, trafficking, and other forms of gender violence.
Her earlier books include A Troubled Marriage: Domestic Violence and the Legal System, and Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence.
Her most recent book is IMPERFECT VICTIMS: CRIMINALIZED SURVIVORS AND THE PROMISE OF ABOLITION FEMINISM, published by the University of California Press. It’s the latest in their Gender and Justice Series.
Since the 1970s, anti-violence advocates have worked to make the legal system more responsive to gender-based violence. However, greater state intervention in cases of intimate partner violence, rape, sexual assault, and trafficking has actually led to the arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration of victims, particularly women of color and trans and gender-nonconforming people. In Imperfect Victims, Professor Goodmark argues that only dismantling the system will bring that unjust punishment to an end.
We spoke with her via Skype on March 7, 2023.
Articles referenced or pertinent to this interview:
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.
George Monbiot’s latest book is Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, published by Penguin Books.
Since the 1980s, he has traveled the world doing on-the-ground investigations of how global dominant systems destroy crucial wildlife habitats and displace peoples from their ancestral homelands, while contributing to catastrophic climate change. This has led to his being made persona non grata in seven countries, sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia in Indonesia, shot at, beaten up by military police, shipwrecked, stung into a coma by hornets, and pronounced clinically dead in Lodwar General Hospital in North-western Kenya from cerebral malaria.
From the first of his 13 books published in 1989, POISONED ARROWS: An Investigative Journey Through the Forbidden Lands of West Papua; to Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding; to his radio programs, and long standing weekly columns in The Guardian, he has informed us in delightful prose through the powerful lens of his political philosophy for social and ecological justice and sanity.
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.
The Bozeman Film Society begins their 2023 season of bringing outstanding films to Bozeman with the locally produced film, THE YEAR OF THE DOG, screening at the Ellen Theatre on Jan. 4th. We spoke with Rob Grabow, who wrote, produced, co-directed, co-edited, and starred in, this film.
A portion of the proceed benefits the Heart of the Valley Animal Shelter.
Rob landed his first movie role at 15 in the Oscar-nominated film starring Ethan Hawke, Snow Falling on Cedars. He’s been hooked since then. More recently, he has had speaking roles in the Syfy series Z Nation and the critically acclaimed film Mickey and the Bear, which premiered at Cannes and SXSW film festivals.
He wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the multi-award-winning short film Method, which premiered at the Chelsea Film Festival, where Academy Award-winning screenwriter Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) awarded Rob the Best Original Screenplay award. Rob was also nominated for Best Actor and Best Director at the Beaufort International Film Festival. He is an alum of the MFA Acting program at the Actor’s Studio Drama School in New York.
Some of Rob’s more esoteric life highlights include backpacking into Egypt two weeks before the war in Iraq, consulting Bhutan on its public advertising policy, and traveling to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake to write an article for Rolling Stone magazine.
Also featured is Michael Spears, the famous Lakota actor who has lived in Bozeman for 17+ years. Michael Spears’s role as Otter in Dances with Wolves (1990) catapulted him into film, music, and public speaking. Some of Spears’s career highlights since Dances with Wolves include his role as Dog Star in Spielberg’s 2005 miniseries Into the West and his role as Tenkill in Angels in Stardust (2014), for which he received critical acclaim in The New York Times. In 2014 and 2015, Spears played Savanukah in Colonial Williamsburg’s open-air stage production of The Beloved Women of Chota, the first Indigenous-centric production of its kind for Colonial Williamsburg. Spears also works in the film industry as a technical adviser for Native American cultures, soundtrack recording artist, and voiceover actor. When not filming, he travels as a keynote speaker on topics such as indigenous health and wellness, mental health, and Lakota spirituality.
Of course, one of Rob’s co-stars is Caleb, a rescue dog who had bounced between foster homes for years because he was reportedly “too much dog”—is there such a thing? He eventually landed in the loving care of Cathy and Gregg Pittman of the Performing Animal Troupe. His crucial performance as Yup’ik, in The Year of the Dog marks Caleb’s feature-film debut. Rumors of Brando reincarnated floated around set.
Jon Proudstar is a veteran actor of forty-two productions. He is currently a reoccurring character on FX/Disney’s Reservation Dogs. Jon had six big releases in 2021, which include Reservation Dogs, The Heart Stays, Wastelander, Deep Woods, and Mammoth. A product of the Sundance Institute’s 1997 Native American Writers Lab, Proudstar was chosen for the 2005 Directors Lab, where he worked alongside Ed Harris, Stanley Tucci, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Robert Redford. Some of Proudstar’s more notable films are Bodies, Rest & Motion (1993 Cannes Film Festival), Skinwalkers, Barking Water, and Four Sheets to the Wind. Jon trained at Los Angeles Theatre and with legendary acting coach Joan Darling.
Darwin Lumbattis is a Butte-based Army Veteran who served 16 years including active-duty combat in Iraq from 1990-1992 before retiring as a Calvary Scout. He is an avid dog-safety advocate and founder of the Rocky Mountain Working Dogs. Darwin served as a key advisor on all matters concerning weight pulling — he also proved his acting chops during an audition and landed a key speaking role in the film.
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Professor, Howard French, was awarded 2022’s Museum of African American History (MAAH) Stone Book Award as well as The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, for his latest book, BORN IN BLACKNESS: AFRICA, AFRICANS, and the MAKING of the MODERN WORLD, 1471 to the SECOND WORLD WAR, published by Liveright.
Before returning to academia, he was a New York Times foreign correspondent in West and Central Africa, as well as the Times’ bureau chief in the Caribbean and Central America, before becoming their Tokyo bureau chief and then their bureau chief in Shanghai, China. In addition to the New York Times, he has contributed to the New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Guardian Longreads and Foreign Policy.
His earlier books include A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa; China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants are Building a New Empire in Africa; and Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power.
We spoke with Howard French on December 20, 2022 via Skype, overcoming numerous technical difficulties.
We ended the 12/23/22 broadcast version of this program with the Ukrainian folk song, Shchedryk, from a recording by Helena Androsova singing all of the voices first with English then Ukrainian Lyrics. It is known in the U. S. as Carol of the Bells. You can hear/view her performance here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqeJ38DThVc
Forthright Radio 