<nettime> Being Left - Activism On and Off the Reservation

[<David.Barsamian@bbs.thing.net> ar@orci.com]

David Barsamian interviews Winona LaDuke

Winona LaDuke is a leading spokesperson and activist for indigenous rights.
She is a founding member of Women of All Red Nations and the Black Hills
Alliance. She directs the Land Recovery Project on the White Earth
Reservation in Minnesota. She is president of the Indigenous Women's
Network. In 1996 she was the vice-presidential candidate of the Green Party.
Her new novel is Last Standing Woman.

BARSAMIAN: I want to know about your experience addressing the United
Nations when you were a teenager. What was that about?

Daunting. I was raised on the West Coast. I went to school on the East
Coast. I grew up in a very politicized family. I did some research for a
non-governmental organization to the United Nations called the International
Indian Treaty Council. It was the first native NGO at the UN. They asked me
to do some research on mining issues and multi­nationals on reservations and
to present it to the UN when I had just turned 18. I went over there. My
boss left a note saying that he was leaving and that I had to go meet the
AIM leadership.

That's the American Indian Movement.

There I was, looking at Russell Means, Bill Means, Vernon Bellecourt, Clyde
Bellecourt, and Phyllis Young. The launch of my political career was kind of
a baptism by fire process, which is pretty much linked to the rest of it. I
had the benefit of presenting the research I had done to the UN. Then I
asked if I could go and work in these communi­ties that were impacted. So I
began by working down in the Navajo reservation in the Southwest on uranium
mining, and then I moved up to South Dakota and worked there for some time.
Mostly on uranium and mining issues, trying to stop mines from opening up,
translating documents from academic government-ese into common English and
then into the local languages, Navajo, Hopi, or Lakota.

This was in your late teens, while you were still a student at Harvard?

I took a lot of time off from school. I went back and forth to Harvard,
wrote research papers, mostly on this. I have a degree in native economic
development and a masters in rural development. Pretty much all I know about
is reserva­tion economies and reservation development issues.

The term "a person of color" was not being used at that time. How was it for
you at school?

I grew up in Ashland, Oregon. It was a small town. I come from a bi­cultural
family. My Mom is a Russian Jew from New York and my father is an Ojibwe. So
it was a no-win situation. My parents were both very politi­cal. I was
raised in the middle of the Vietnam War. My parents were antiwar activists.
My stepfather was in the picture at that point in time. I was pretty much
across-the-board unpopular in my school. I was the only Indian in my school
at the time. When I went to Harvard I found that there were a lot of people
who were more like me. I became politicized over a period of time. I
realized that the fact that I was unpopular in my school didn't have to do
with being a bad person as much as it had to do with issues of race and
prejudice.

What about gender bias?

Gender bias, I would say, too, but all of these things. I had the benefit of
being with a lot of people of color at Harvard. I enjoyed that. It expanded
my horizons. It was also during the middle of the divestment campaign for
South Africa.

Did you get involved with that?

I sure did. I was with the American Indians at Harvard, which was a small
group. We were right there with the African American students. We worked on
that. It was a really good politicization process. At the same time I was
working on these issues of multinationals on the reserva­tions, the same
multinationals that are in Namibia and South Africa.

That divestment campaign in the 1980s, primarily on U.S. college campuses,
was quite successful and a good model.

It was a very good model. It was, I believe, the foundation for some of our
work on James Bay in northern Canada. A lot of the campaign we waged trying
to stop the big mega­dams up there on James Bay-that would flood an area the
size of Connecticut or impact an area the size of New Eng­land-was based on
this same model: You pay your tuition, you should have some say that your
tuition shouldn't go for violating other people's human rights.

To go to recent events, Iraq is denounced by many U.S. political leaders and
the media. They say it cannot be trusted to honor its agreements. What is
the U.S. record on agree­ments and treaties with native peoples?

Pretty dismal. Indian people find it so ironic that the U.S. is all about
Iraq keeping their agreements or bargains. The U.S. has no record of keeping
agreements with native people. I always find it ironic today, because Indian
people are saying, Our treaty rights need to be recognized. We're in court
and we'll have a court decision like in Minnesota that recognizes we have
the right to harvest in the northern third of the state outside our
reservation borders. The non-Indian people will say, Those are ancient
rights. That's how the press refers to it. I think to myself, Well, that
Constitution's pretty ancient, too, isn't it? There are certain things that
are the law, and those treaties between nations are the law. According to
the Constitution that's the law of the land.

That might connect with the invisibility of Native Americans in U.S.
culture. When you hear discussions, if people of color are mentioned at all,
it will be African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, but Native Americans
don't seem to register on that Richter scale.

My theory is that the mythology of America is about denial of the native.
That's the foundation of America, this whole idea of Manifest Destiny, the
great emptiness that is out there. You cannot discover some­thing if
somebody lives there. You create a mythology that it's this vast, untamed
wilderness and that nobody was there. The mythology of America says that
there were "a few" Indians, and those Indians died mysteriously. We had some
mistakes, like Sand Creek in Colorado or Wounded Knee, but most of the
mythology of the great expansion of America is based on the denial of the
existence of native people. America has been, for 500 years, in the process
of denial of holocaust. I don't say somebody's holo­caust is worse than
somebody else's, but I will say that we have to acknowledge that holocaust
occurred. But America has been in denial about that having occurred. So
today, over that period of time, native people have been totally removed
from the American psyche. We permeate America. A third of the country is
named in indigenous names, states, river systems. We are the food that
people eat, the technology, in all of these things, but at the same time we
get no intellectual property rights credit for that. I ask people all the
time, How many of you can name ten different kinds of native people? They
can't. Most people can't name four different kinds of Indian people. Why is
that? Because schools don't teach about native people. It's a totally
systematic process which denies our existence. Ask people what kind of
Indians they know, most people can name Indians from Westerns. What's
happened over time is that the image of the native person has become a
caricature.

Like the Lone Ranger's faithful and obedient servant Tonto, which
incidentally in Spanish means "stupid." Other Indians were like Cochise,
Geronimo, and Crazy Horse-menacing, threatening warriors.

You look now and the only two Indian women that we even know are Sacajawea
and Pocahontas. Why did they permeate America's consciousness and get in
there with Disney? Because they helped the white guys. Those are really not
the imagery of native people, native women. That is some of the issues we
need to con­front in terms of de-mythologizing.

One of the topics that you write and talk about is environ­mental racism.

Environmental racism links native people to other poor people of color. The
problem is that in the case of native people, this is a systemic issue. This
is the relation­ship between the settler and the native. This is the
relation­ship between an industrial society and an indigenous soci­ety. The
issues that occur in the native community today are not new. We have a
couple hundred years of environmental destruction which has occurred in the
Americas. The best example is the destruction of the buffalo. You can't
remove 50 million buffalo from the Great Plains, remove the single largest
herd of migratory animals that ever existed, and not have a huge
environmen­tal impact. That's part of the relationship between the native
people, because that was a military policy. So envi­ronmental racism is a
term used to talk about a disproportionate share of environmental problems
in communities of color. Few benefits, more impacts. And native people are
part of that as communities of color.

You had a rather stinging criticism of some portions of the establishment
environmental movement.

Which one?

You felt that parts of it were racist?

Of course they are. The environmental movement by and large, comes out of a
very white, middle-class preserve. In my gut, I want all American people to
engage with nature, to reestablish relationship with earth. Environmentalism
is a strange term. I think it is really about rediscover­ing your humanity
and how your humanity relates to life. What we have is a colonial society in
America which is trying to come to terms with the fact that it's run out of
frontiers. The depth of environmental­ism, the relationship of humans to the
natural world, is what we need to recover. Unfortunately, mainstream
environmental groups are still very much preoccupied in this centerpiece. My
experience with the big ten groups is first of all, you can't have boards
and the majority of your staff be all white, privileged, middle-class people
and expect that that group of people can make a set of decisions for the
rest of the world, or make a set of decisions that are reflec­tive of native
communities. Native communities today face environmental threats on most of
our reservations. Two-thirds of the uranium resources in the country are on
Indian lands. One-third of all Western low-sulfur coal. We have the single
largest hydroelectric project on our lands, the James Bay project. We have
nuclear waste dump proposals on reservations. Most of the mainstream
environmental groups do not deal with those issues. They want to save this
parcel or that parcel or fix this greenway. These issues are convenient to
those groups. By and large they do not engage in building partnership with
native communities or other communities of color.

You went to Chiapas and wrote an article for Indigenous Woman, the journal
of the Indigenous Women's Network, which you founded. You comment that
"Chiapas is a wealthy region in theory." This resonates with a lot of the
geography of North American native peoples as well: wealthy regions in
theory, but not in reality.

That's right. It's just like the question of why Indian people are poor.
They have the poorest socioeconomic statistics, the worst health statistics.

Who asks that question?

Why Indians are poor? People don't usually ask that ques­tion. I don't
preach to the choir. Most of the time, I'm trying to engage with the Chamber
of Commerce in Detroit Lakes or businesses in border towns to my
reservation. I talked to the Rotary Club in the town of Park Rapids one day.
They said, You Indians are all up there on welfare and you're lazy. If you'd
just go get yourselves a job, you'd be okay. You'd have a lot more
self-respect and you wouldn't be so poor. I believe that that is a statement
that is not isolated to that little border town. Some people say, Why don't
you Indians just get a job? Get with the program. Pull yourselves up by the
bootstraps. I'm talking to a room entirely of men, 50 middle-aged men. I
said, The problem is that you guys got our boots. We can't find our
bootstraps because you have our boots. You control all the land on my
reservation. Ninety percent of it is held by non-Indian landowners.

@GUIDE BODY = Indian people are poor because of structural poverty.
Structural poverty means you don't actually control your land, your economy.
We don't have a multiplier. That is to say that a town like Boulder has a
multiplier of seven. A dollar comes in and it's spent over and over, unless
you get a Wal-Mart, then you're kind of screwed. Up in our reserva­tion, a
dollar comes onto the reservation, it's spent the next day in the border
town, because we don't have a retail sector. That's structural poverty. You
can't fix that until you restructure your economy. You control your land and
you control your economy.

You make a direct connection between land and political power.

Land is the basis of political power. Why do you think the U.S. government
is the largest landholder? If land wasn't power they would have turned it
all over, wouldn't they?

What did you find on your trip to Chiapas?

I interviewed four women about my age. They were all Zapatista comandantes.
They wore ski masks. There were armored personnel carriers and tanks around.
I asked, Why is it that you stand up and fight? Why do you take up arms
against the Mexican government? Look at all the force they have on their
side. One woman said to me, Because we're tired of being animals. We're
treated like animals. We have no health care. Our children are dying of
diseases. Things you could prevent. They take our corn. They take our land.
We can't live like this. We're tired of living like animals. We want our
dignity. We demand our dignity. This is how you get your dignity. You have
to stand up. They don't give it to you. You have to fight for it.

The Indigenous Women's Network, which was founded in 1985, says that it
"works in rural and urban communities applying indigenous values to resolve
contemporary prob­lems." What are those values?

Each of our communities has our own instructions, our cultures. Our
cultures, like minobimaatisiiwin, a term in Ojibwe, talks about what's
called "the good life." An alterna­tive translation is "continuous rebirth."
It talks about how you're supposed to live to respect all that's around you.
Honor your elders. Listen to your teachings. Care for your family. Women are
the center of our nations, the mothers of our nations. These are some of our
teachings. Those are not teachings from the dominant society. Those are
teachings from our cultures. In our cultures we have prophecies. Each
community has its own prophecies. The Indigenous Women's Network believes
that you have the wellspring for healing your community within the cultural
framework and spiritual practice of your com­munity. The instructions are
not about going back. It's about taking and learning from your traditions,
carefully reflecting on them as you make your decisions for now, for your
life way. That's what they call it in our community, the life way. It's our
path. There's so much pressure on us to assimilate, to become commodi­fied,
to buy your life at The Gap. The challenge we face in this most confusing of
times is to take that which is ours and use that as the framework from which
we make our decisions for the future. That's what the Indigenous Women's
Network is about.

You travel around the U.S. and the globe. Do you feel a connection over the
chasms of culture and language?

I feel a connection with indigenous women from a small village in the
Philippines. I feel a connection with indigenous women from Rwanda. The
closer they are to experiences which resonate with mine, that in their heart
they struggle on the same issues, I understand that. They can be all colors.
I believe that the Creator made all colors of people, and they're all
beautiful. There is an immense amount of beauty in each of us. What compels
me, and what I find most beautiful, is when people struggle to regain their
humanity, do not take what was handed to them by the society, do not just
accept blindly. I want to be a feminist and I want to be better than a white
man. Why would you want to do that? That's my question. Why would you want
to compete? Why would you want to be in the military? That's the question I'
ve got to ask. Those are value questions. I embrace and am inspired by all
kinds of people. Father Roy Bourgeois, who fights the School of the
Ameri­cas, is a great inspiration to me. I met him 20 years ago. He said
something I will never forget. He and I were at an Exxon stockholders
meeting in Chicago. It was an inter­esting place to be. I had a resolution
there trying to get Exxon out of the Navajo reservation. They all looked at
me like I was from outer space. I sat down, and Father Roy Bourgeois stood
up and went to the microphone. He said, I'm a Mary­knoll priest. I don't
have a resolution. I've been living in Latin America for the past ten years,
in El Salvador. He said, I don't have a resolution, but I've got a question.
The people in El Salvador gave me this question to ask you. They want to
know if there's a direct relationship between their poverty and your wealth.
That's all he said. That's what it's about. That relationship between their
poverty and their wealth.

In your new novel, Last Standing Woman, published by Voyager Press, you
trace the life and times of seven genera­tions of Anishinabe. Why is seven
such a key number?

Seven is an important number in a lot of our spiritual practices. In this
case, it happened to be the same time that I was writing about. The book
commences around 1862, with the Sioux uprising in Minnesota and the impact
of that on our community and the relationship between these two women and
ends in 2018, which is about seven generations later.

Tell me what goes on in the Honor the Earth tours you do with the Indigo
Girls. You just did 21 concerts.

Our tours are to raise money and political support for Native American
issues. We try to reach out to a section of people who probably wouldn't
hear about these things. We launched the most recent tour in upstate New
York at the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation. Then we moved across the East
Coast. We raised about $200,000, which we gave away to grassroots native
organizations. It's also about trying to change consciousness, because, as
you can imagine, people who go to an Indigo Girls concert are probably not
familiar with native environmental issues. For example, we were interested
in talking about this law they are trying to pass. The Nuclear Waste Policy
Act proposes to move nuclear waste from 108 nuclear reactors in the U.S. to
Yucca Mountain in Western Sho­shone territory. The young people who go to
these concerts, and everybody else, are going to face a huge public health
hazard. They are going to move that nuclear waste from those nuclear
reactors and transport it on highways. They're talking between 80,000 and
90,000 shipments of nuclear waste on America's highways.

Is this from Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Rocky Flats?

All of those, but it's much more. It's from places like Sea­brook, Millstone
Three, Maine Yankee, and Indian Point. Most of these nuclear reactors have
only so much storage space. They want to continue to operate as long as they
can, although they're pretty much economically a disaster. They want to move
that nuclear waste. They billed it in America as one nuclear dump. They
said, We don't want to have 100 nuclear dumps like we have now. Rocky Flats
is a nuclear dump, as is Oak Ridge, as is any place that government and
industry have made a nuclear mess. They said, We want to just have one. That
will make it easier. It's a total misrepre­sentation, because what we're
going to have is 109 nuclear dumps. They want to move it across the country
within half a mile of 50 million Americans. We're going to move between
30,000 and 90,000 shipments of nuclear waste. Each cask is well over the
capacity of a Hiroshima bomb. On the high­way.

@GUIDE BODY = The nuclear industry is lobbying for this bill. I believe that
decision-making in this country is not a democracy. Corpora­tions make most
decisions, whether it's evidenced through financing of campaigns and
elections and special interest money, or whether it's just how public policy
is shaped and formed. How do these guys all get to be special interest
groups, to have little hearings? Right now in northern Minnesota you've got
the deer hunters special interest groups. They're trying to get the wolf off
the Endangered Species List in northern Minnesota. Somehow deer hunters have
equal standing with the wolf. Equal standing with native people who have
lived all these years with the wolf. They get to be in the policy-making
arena, as stakeholders. Fifty of the largest econo­mies in the world today
are not nations but corporations.

That intersects with Ralph Nader's analysis. What did you learn from running
with Nader in the 1996 campaign?

What you learn from Ralph is tenacity. That guy fights for all these years.
A lot of people say, Oh, I think I'm tired of this cam­paign. I'm going to
bag it for a while. A lot of people are like, It's so big. Look at that man.
The fact is that most laws in this country today that are consumer laws,
airline safety laws, workers rights laws, are because of Ralph and people
like him. Not Ralph alone. Workers are the ones who got workers rights. What
you have to remember is that any rights we've got in this country today is
because someone fought for them. No one ever handed us anything. That's what
Ralph reminds you of, that you've got to go out there and have your voice
heard. He stood up in the last election.

@GUIDE BODY = The Europeans that came to this country had no framework for
democracy. They came out of monar­chy and feudalism. They fled looking for
religious freedom. So where did Ben Franklin go? Up to the Six Nations
Iro­quois Confederacy to get the idea of representational gov­ernment. Those
guys were all up there, follow­ing around the Iroquois Nation. So they
founded their ideas on that Iroquois Confederacy. Missed major, essential
points, though. For instance, one-man-one-vote. That had to do with only
white men who owned land. That was a big missing point. Actually, in the
Iroquois Confederacy the interesting point is that it is women who appoint
the chiefs. It is women who have the last word. Interesting point. Missed
essential point.

What are your views on casinos on Indian land?

It's a difficult issue. I support the right of Indian people to have
casinos. I think it's a huge problem, though. The problem that Indian people
have is that I don't think as an economist I would hang my development
policy on a casino. The problem is the federal government says to Indian
people, I'm going to recognize your sovereignty if you either want to have a
nuclear or toxic waste dump or a casino. That's pretty much the only way you
get your sovereignty recognized as Indian people. Let me be clear about
this: we are sovereign. I don't care if the federal government recog­nizes
me, my nation, and my people. That's of little conse­quence to me in the
long-term picture. The federal govern­ment, as far as I'm concerned, is by
and large illegal. Most transactions are illegal. It's like being recognized
by a bunch of hoodlums. But under the law, they recognize your sovereignty
in those two things, a dump or a casino. So Indian people are in this ironic
situation that our choices for economic development are so limited. In
Minnesota I see two examples. I see a reservation like Mille Lacs. They have
two casinos. They built schools, houses, roads, clinics, and community
build­ings. They bought land. Nobody was going to do that for them. No
federal appropriation was going to be given to those Indian people to do
that, although their land was mostly taken from them. The federal government
is supposed to provide those things for them. That's not going to happen, so
they did that with their casino, and that's right. They're making some
long-term investments that are smart. They don't think those casinos are
going to last forever, but they're doing the right thing. My reserva­tion's
a bad example. We're poor. My last tribal government was so corrupt they
spent all their time skimming the top of the casino money. It never got down
to our community. So it's a mixed bag. I support that we have the right to
have them, but I think it's an unfortunate situation. As long as we have
structural poverty in our community, we're always going to have these
problems. You cannot change that situation unless you address the issue of
land economy.

Perhaps a program of decolonization?

I'm big on that decolonization program. That's the way to go. It's not only
for native people. I think the challenge for American people is decolonizing
your mind. Letting go of the imagery you have of how you relate to native
people, of how to relate to the land, the idea of a frontier mentality. The
Great Plains is a perfect example. We have this whole mythology of the Great
Plains based on the yeoman farmer out there tilling the soil that should
never have been tilled. You had 50 million buffalo out there and you had 250
species of plants and a totally different biodiversity. Today you've got 45
million cattle out there and the single largest loss of life of any biome in
North America. You have loss of topsoil. The Oglala Aquifer, the great
freshwater area that underlies the Great Plains is drying up. That's going
to be gone in 30 years. Then what are they going to do with all that
agriculture they've got on the Great Plains? That Great Plains, that farmer
facing the wind, that is the mythology on which America is based. The idea
that the rights of cattlemen are sacred. Jeremy Rifkin talks about that in
his book Beyond Beef. Beyond sacred is what it is. The rights of
cattlepeople and the rights of the beef industry and the rights of
corporations to federal rangeland in the West. The chal­lenge in America is
decolonizing. Not just native people, but decolonizing federal policy,
decolonizing the assumptions of what is America. Deconstructing America from
patriotism to a flag to patriotism to a land.

When you said the Great Plains was the site of the greatest single loss of
life, you meant the buffalo herds?

I meant the whole thing. You have no biodiversity left on the Great Plains.
You go from 250 different species of grass in the natural Great Plains that
existed in the indigenous prairie grass patch, not to mention all those
other critters that were out there. You go down to a Nebraska wheat field
and you've got one variety. One seed on there, mono-crop­ped. That is what
the problem is. If the winter of 1996 didn't teach Americans that you lose,
I think they lost over 400,000 cattle. In October 1997 they lost 15,000
cattle right outside of Denver. Why is that? Because cattle do not belong in
this ecosystem. Frank and Debra Popper, demographers from Rutgers
University, have a proposal called the "Buffalo Commons Proposal." They talk
about the fact that what occurred in the Great Plains in terms of the whole
rise and fall of the farming culture in the Great Plains is the result of
the largest economic and ecological miscalculation in American history.
Interesting phrase, but it's true. The fact is that the Dust Bowl was only
about the fourth decade of that problem. You had a continuing crisis on the
Great Plains that is not going to get solved until you deal with the fact
that what America has done to the Great Plains is what America has done to
the continent. That is not ecologically sustainable and is never going to
sustain American agri­culture.

Poverty amidst isolated islands of great wealth. You've talked about this
disparity and paradox.

Coming from the poorest community in the country, we observe the wealth on
the other end. Our one percent observes the other one percent with great
interest.

So you don't quite live in a gated community on White Earth.

Is that like the suburb with the little gate? I don't want to misrepresent
my situation. I like my community. I like my reservation. I like the land I
live on. I do a lot of harvesting. It's a good quality of life. I choose my
life there. I don't choose material life. I have cultural wealth that far
sur­passes any material wealth that I could ever buy. But also, my community
suffers great hardship. The crime rate is probably on the scale of Detroit
about 20 years ago. They're talking about epidemic suicide rates on Indian
reservations these days. You have a decrease in crime rates in the major
cities, but you have a 50 to 70 percent increase in crime over the past 3 or
4 years on the reservations.

Are you visited by sociologists and anthropologists who describe the social
pathologies of native peoples?

I had some anthropologists show up about a year ago be­cause they were
working on this land issue. They happened to walk into my house just as I
was butchering a beaver on my kitchen table. It was like an anthropologist's
heaven. They could not believe their good fortune. I had to laugh. It just
happened someone had dropped this beaver off at my house. I'm a carnivore, I
eat all those things. Beaver tastes really good to me. So I was butchering
this beaver in the middle of my kitchen table. But of course I had to draft
them, because that's a big job. One of them was kind of squeamish, but I got
one of them right up there to his elbows in that process, kind of a
participatory anthropologi­cal study.

Is a member of society someone who goes to the mall and consumes things?

That is becoming what it is to be a member of American society. It's a
consumer culture. But that's the difference maybe between society and
community. As a member of my community, I am responsible for my community.
Society is so much more amorphous. But you are responsible for your
community. I could sit and bellyache about my tribal government, who did
what to me, but ultimately I am responsible for my community, for my
children.

How are your children doing?

My children are doing quite well. My child is in a tribal school. My
fourth-grader came home from school one day with the Bering Strait theory to
discuss.

And the Bering Strait theory is ...?

This is the American mythology about how Indian people got here. We refer to
it as the BS theory.

They took a Greyhound bus from Asia?

We took a Greyhound bus from Asia and partied all the way. In our community
in a tribal school all full of Ojibwe people, we have a whole story of how
we got here. We followed a shell from the eastern seaboard. We stopped at
these different places. We have a map. A shell that appeared in the sky. Is
that inter­esting, or what?

A creation myth.

We all have our stories. I believe that our children should know that before
they know that BS theory.

You're recovering the land on the White Earth reservation in Minnesota
parcel by parcel, acre by acre. How can people find out more about your
work?

They can write to us, the White Earth Land Recovery Project, Route 1, Box
291, Ponsford, MN 56575; Tel.: (218) 573-3448; Fax: (218) 573-3444; E-mail:
WELRPeot.com. It's a small, community-based effort to recover our land,
culture and environment. I believe that everyone should try to do something
in their own community. You've always got to keep your eye on the big
picture, though. People make bad decisions sometimes that affect you, but
also you make your own community a good place to live, because that's who
you'll be related to for the rest of your days.

You're writing a book for South End Press.

It's on grassroots native environmental work on the conti­nent and a little
bit into the Pacific. I have seven or eight chapters done. The title is
Voices from the Front. It's about different people who do really valiant
work, and how they've changed their communities and what they struggle with.
I've really enjoyed writing it. It's different than writing a novel. It's
been great getting to know these communities. <S>Z

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David Barsamian is the founder of Alternative Radio. For information about
obtaining cassette copies or tran­scripts of this or other programs,
contact: Alternative Radio, PO Box 551, Boulder, CO 80306; e-mail:
ar@orci.com.

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