Greetings all,

Catherine, Clamor’s Media Section editor here. This is my very first experience as a blogger and I’m looking forward to sharing tales from Central New York and hearing from all you Clamor friends out there, old and new, young and old. As a radio news producer, many interesting stories come my way and I’ll do what I can to share them, probably throwing in some opinion here and there.

There’s a large native community in Upstate New York and last weekend I went to the Haudenosaunee Friendship Festival (Haudenosaunees are a confederation of Onedias, Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Mohawks, and Tuscaroas). Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons spoke on the mainstage inbetween music and dance acts, making some really poignant remarks about the “murky future.” He said there used to be a time when you could see ahead seven generations, and that’s how you lived. Not for yourself or your children or your grandchildren, but for the seventh generation ahead of you. But, Lyons said, the current leadership has created such a fog that we now can’t even see a year ahead. I produced a short piece on the festival which includes an excerpt of Lyons’s speech for Independent Native News. It can be heard here today:

www.kuac.org/inn/news.htm

It should be available in the archives for a few days if you don’t have a chance to access it today. Lyons also spoke about the annual meeting of the elders happening this week, a gathering of people from all over the continent in the Turtle Mountain region of North Dakota and Manitoba. He said at previous gatherings, “runners” from as far away as Greenland and Alaska came to share urgent stories of their land succumbing to global warming. This was to be one of the main topics at this year’s gathering too.

And as many of you may have heard or read, both presidential candidates are courting native populations right now, one more successfully than the other. Kerry was welcomed by Navajos in Arizona this week. And Bush, in fine form, explained his version of tribal sovereignty to native reporters at the UNITY Conference in DC. You can hear a hilarious excerpt of this on Tuesday’s Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org.

Well, that’s about it for now. This morning I went to a conference on “youth culture.” All the workshops were devised and led by youth, with some coordination help from adults. Topics included gangs, racism, violence, sex, hiv/aids, healthy relationships, serving on boards, and how adults can work better with youth. Got a lot of great sound, and now I need to produce a story for the evening news. This is one of my favorite types of stories to cover, not only because the youth voice is neglected or discounted by much of the media, but also because their words are much more meaningful and inspiring than the measured responses of politicians and media spokespeople.

Signing off.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 11th, 2004 at 2:46 pm by Keith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.