Description of the Voices of Native Nations archive

The Bay Area has been a hub of Native American community, thought, activism and culture since the 1954 Termination Act when 20,000 Native Americans officially began relocation to the area joining another twenty thousand who unofficially relocated or were already members of San Francisco's diverse communities. In 1969 a number of forces merged with these multiple native cultures in San Francisco and the Bay Area became a defining hub of the efforts to reclaim native identity and assert indigenous rights.

Mary Jean Robertson arrived during this period and soon became involved with native community leaders and organizers. By 1972, she became part of the community radio movement when she was brought into the production collective of one of the first native radio programs in the country, “Red Voices.” Within twelve months, Mary Jean was joined by Barbara Cameron and Cheryl Graves and reorganized the collective as “Voices of the Native Nations.” Tevea Clarke, Carrie Orange, Dennis Jennings, and Sabrina Taylor also joined the production collective and over the ensuring thirty three years, Mary Jean has been the most frequent host and anchor of the ongoing program.

The shows prominence in the community is indicated by the fact that San Francisco was chosen as the site for the International Indian Treaty Council in large part because “Voices of Native Nations” was available as an affordable means of communication with the 40,000 native community members in the San Francisco area.

“Voices of the Native Nations” has become the longest running and so far as we know the most complete record of Native American thought created by members of the contemporary native community. The shows have included live performances, ceremonies, rallies, community events, interviews with leaders, authors, and activists and a thorough community calender of Bay Area and national native community events.

Throughout its thirty three year career, the show has aired first hand reports from nearly all of the critical events to the native community including the Trail of Broken Treaties, the occupation of BIA offices across the country and especially the national offices in Washington DC, the Nisqually River Delta Indian fishing rights struggle, the Pitt River tribal recognition and reservation struggle, continuing reports from Four Corners, from the Lakota nation including the AIM organizing in the Black Hills and at Wounded Knee, as well as holding a constant microphone to the views of the Treaty Council and their decades long struggle for indigenous rights at the UN, against nationalist and colonial wars and including the autonomous movements that in many ways connect the occupation of Alcatraz with the contemporary Zapatismo movement.

“I have been getting as much audio cassette tape of the radio programs as I can. And also interviews at benefits and other community events of people who can't come to the studio. So we have cassette tapes of benefits, for example of Ross Swimmer, Wilma Mankiller and Ted Means, Head of the Indgenous Environmental Network and so many of the people that helped start organizations, for example leading native activists on grave repatriation, the American Indian Child Welfare Act, the American Indian Heritage Commission and the “American Indian Religious Freedom Act”, leaders in different agencies and organizations on most of the major struggles in Indian Country for the last thirty years which has been a period of tremendous advances. At the same time, we are aware that all of these advances depend on informing the wider community. Radio programming has been the primary means and is likely to remain central to all continuing efforts.”

Frequent guests have included: Bill Wappapa with IITC, Phillip Dear, Creek medicine man, Mary and Carrie Dann of the Western Shoshone, Roberta Blackgoat of Big Mountain, Janet McCloud, probably every leader of AIM and the Inter-tribal Friendship house, Sara James, Leonard Crowdog, and Rashad field.

The shows have also included songs from native performers including from cds, lps, live performances and other copy protected sources. (We estimate this to amount to about 25% of the average show.) The programs have rarely showcased entire albums and generally offer musical sets that include a variety of songs from Native American performers such as John Trudell, Olallie and many others.

Authors have included: Paula Gunn Allen, Sherman Alexi, Vine Deloria, Lisa Katz, Simon Ortiz, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Tony Hillerman, John Trudell, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, and Winona LaDuke.

Musician guests have included: Floyd Redcrow Westerman, the Bad Dog Band, Quiltman, Joy Hardjo, Raskadi, Heith St. James, Abana Songbird, and including some from Alcatraz, New Zealand, Tona Sanchez, Hinni Jaurangi and others from Chile, Brazil, Napal and elsewhere.

Mary Jean and her associates have air checks of these shows preserved on audio cassette tape. Sadly, they have never had the resources to properly archive these, including preservation storage, indexing nor cataloging nor even listening to the over 3,000 hours of audio culture.

Mary Jean's participation as a volunteer during these thirty three years and the vast majority of the participants she has hosted rely on an informal, Creative Commons type culture. The native communities that she has showcased generally feel its correct to be paid for professional production time and that the results should be shared freely for educational purposes with the caveat that others shouldn't commercially profit from what they have been given freely. The Creative Commons license adheres nicely to this philosophy.(link) Part of this preservation grant will include seeking formal, Creative Commons licenses from as many of the performers and guests as possible.

Of particular historical significance will be many hours of tapes with Alcatraz organizers, activists and participants. The show was also a known organizing tool of the American Indian Movement which was a focus of energy that gave impetus to passing all of the legislation supporting native people. The activist work of these organizations provided the energy that helped us reject termination and build up our autonomous strength. All of these dimensions have been welcomed on Voices of the Native Nations.

Voices of Native Nations was present at the founding and ongoing efforts of DQ U, including interviews with and poetic ceremonial work of Rigoberta Manchu. The collection also includes tape of the Indigenous Medicine Man conference that came together at Stanford in 1978, including Phillip Deer, David Manocke, Arvil Lookginhorse, Wallace Blackelk and Shelby Whitebear. There is also an audio archive of the founding conference of the indigenous women in Elm Washington in 1981.

San Francisco has been a major crossroads of Indian life and “Voices of the Native Nations” has been able to work with nearly all of the tendencies and individuals who have made major contributions to it.
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Examples:
“I remember a show with a California native, a young flute maker who talked about making flutes, played them for us, and spoke about craftsmanship and how he learned to study the wood and go through the entire process of understanding the wood and its potential. A show that demonstrated an organic transformation of branch into flute into a California song.

“I was getting ready to figure out what I was going to do on the air and I didn't know exactly. When I arrived at the studio I saw Carrie Dann of the Western Shashone who had come by to tell us about the wild horses on their land and what the BIA was planning on doing: killing and capturing them.

“I came here to SF and began working for the phone company. I started working midnight to 8am. and I decided I would take some classes at SF state because they were doing some classes for the first time in Native history so I took a class called Native American Religion and Philosophy from Dr. Barney Honer, (who may have been the only Native with a Doctoral degree in California at that time. He was a veterinarian but as a doctor this allowed him to officially teach Native Philosophy and Religion at San Francisco State at that time.) One day during class John McLean was visiting and he asked me if i was Indian. I said, “as a matter of fact, I am.” He said, “I want you to come and see and read for this radio show. So I went and read a couple of public service announcements. It was a delight because I love reading and the energy of being on the air. It was such a high for me that I've kept going back every week for the rest of my life. I think I have only missed seven shows in 33 years.”

“SF State was going through a huge transition and the ethnic studies dept of the university was part of the free speech movement, the explosion of ethnic identity that was going on in the country at that period of time. We were lucky enough to have a retired vet who had a doctorate in Vet sciences and so was able to teach in the ethnic studies department (he was the chair of the dept for a decade. The first day of classes he said, “I cannot teach every native religion and philosophy all I can tell you is about Lakota religion and philosophy.” It was really a very special class it was the first that was taught in that department. It was a class that was very special because in a sense they opened that entire department with a prayer, justified on the basis that it was a religion and philosophy class. Which of course is how most Indians start anything. So it was part of what we did in starting the entire movement., I also took a music class from Don Patterson, who was one of the folks from Alcatraz.”

“We had weekly call ins from every location along the Trail of Broken Treaties. After the occupation of the Federal BIA office and the burning of John's family everybody went their separate ways.
“Then in Custer County, Westly Badheartbull was murdered by American Legionairs. (They made him dance for them out in the freezing snow until he probably had a heart attack.) Sara Badheartbull protested the trial over her husband's death at the courthouse as it was occurring. These events led to the re-concentration of activists in Lakota Territory. We were all urban Indians, “all these red niggers coming out of the wood pile” and the government and the clansmen couldn't figure out where we had come from. They just knew it wasn't any of the reservations.”

“Voices of the Native Nations covered all of these events. We were live on the air when the two FBI agents and Joe Stunts Killsright were killed, which became the basis for the accusations and eventually false imprisonment of Leonard Peltier. The FBI agents were killed in a fire fight. It was not a defensive action. We had a spiritual camp where the men were protecting the women and children to do some work and two white guys who didn't even identify themselves as FBI agents were killed. You have to know that this was after two years of the clan-like and federally supported GOON squad had been disappearing people on the Lakota Reservation, an organization that killed hundreds of people without raising the interest of law enforcement: ever.
Many of those who were at these events at the time called into our show and we all heard and responded to what they were saying.”

“An example of our breadth was our coverage of Attica from the viewpoint of the Mohawk prisoners.”

“The format of our shows have always been relaxed and open to reflection and insight on the spur of the moment rather than tightly drawn or prepared productions. It has been a kind of constant talking circle punctuated by songs, political flash points, creative insights and constant communication. Formats we broadcast have ranged from tapes of public presentations to rituals to interviews to gatherings to book readings, songs, live music and poetry.”

Our intention is to make this collection of approximately 3,000 hours of audio cassette tape available to everyone as an educational resource under a creative commons license. (http://creativecommons.org/). We expect the final step to be posting the archive with the Internet Archive (www.archive.org.)

Our research and contacts so far indicate that relationships with several institutions may be necessary to complete the process of full public accessibility. For example, it may be possible to reduce digitizing and cataloging expenses by partnering with the Oral History Project at California State, Fullerton who has an established digitizing program with student volunteers. Then, we can make the resulting digital archive accessible to researchers at the Native American Studies Collection at UC Berkeley by gifting them digital copies under a Creative Commons license. The original tapes could then be professionally stored with the Freedom Archives collections. Digital copies made available to the Native American Studies collection at UC Berkeley will make it possible to began the process of securing copy write permissions while the material remains under the control and ownership of the highly trusted, “Voices of Native Nations” program. As copy write permissions are secured, permitted archives could be widely shared at the Internet Archive.

We have taken the first step of digitally transferring selected tapes as a sample of the archive and preparing this general grant application which we will be able to use to apply to several possible supporters. We have secured the support of New College of California as a fiscal sponsor who will contribute in kind donations of student interns, work space and access to professional equipment as part of its new Native American Studies Center. We have purchased a Nagamichi Dragon cassette player, an Mbox and Pro Tools which together provide the highest quality cassette tape to digital transfer available.

We are excited to begin this work and are actively looking for additional supporters to get this project fully on the road.

Neil MacLean