Report from Standing Rock – Bay Area Native American journalist Rose Aguilar joins us by phone from near the Standing Rock encampment. Rose arrived in North Dakota on Friday, one day after water protectors were violently evicted from the Highway 1806 camp, where they were attempting to block construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline. Rose reports that many of those in the Standing Rock encampment were traumatized by the attack, but they are determined to remain through the winter. Find out how you can support the Standing Rock protectors.
Toxic Isn’t Tasty. Oil in their water is what the Standing Rock protectors are hoping to prevent, but we don’t have to wait for the Dakota Access Pipeline to break to know what that might mean. California citrus growers are irrigating their crops with oil wastewater. Alyssa Figueroa of Breast Cancer Action says “everyone including state regulators is asleep at the wheel,” as 43% of the chemicals used in oil and gas operations have been shown to pose health and environmental risks. This “Breast Cancer Awareness Month,” Breast Cancer Action’s annual “Think Before You Pink Campaign” has been bringing attention to two large citrus growers, Bee Sweet and Wonderful Citrus, who bedeck their products with pink ribbons while using oil wastewater for irrigation. One day left to take action to stop this practice.
Cancer Fighter Corliss Watkins. We also talk to a woman who has survived cancer by refusing to take no for an answer. Corliss Watkins was given a death sentence by her doctors when they discovered that her pancreatic cancer had metastasized to her liver. Everyone told her she was not a candidate for a transplant, but Corliss refused to give up or give in. She found a donor, got her transplant, and is currently cancer free, although she knows she is not out of the woods.
Want to learn about the genocide against Native Americans?
American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World Revised ed. by David E. Stannard
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (ReVisioning American History), by Roxann Dunbar-Ortiz
An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (The Lamar Series in Western History), Benjamin Madley
Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846-1873, Brendan C. Lindsay