Bands of Turtle Island

Hosted by Sungmanitou Tanka and P'ajiji, two people from the Lakota Nation.

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Sungmanitou Tanka is of the Oglala Lakota Nation. His mother being Lakota, and his dad being an evangelical irish/french person. In his early life he was raised by AIM radicals and his father had been adopted into the tribe, but would be separated from his indigeneity because of divorce until he moves out as a teenager. His Indigeneity would shape his political journey, and decolonization would be at the very core.

 

After attending DAPL protests as a liberal social democrat, he would radicalize and begin reading Indigenous history and books like Black Elk Speaks, The Heart of Everything That is, and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Then reading Marx, Engels, Mao, Minh, Sakai, Luxembourg, Lenin, and Stalin as well as Kropotkin, Huey Newton, WEB DuBois, Fanon, and Chomsky. This diverse study of history, theory, as well as listening to podcasts, he now would say for ease he is a Marxist Leninist, but would rather say Marxist-Sitting Bullist if we’re turning names into political ideologies.

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P'ajiji is from the Sicangu Lakota nation, but was raised states away from the reservations in South Dakota. After a class on Native history in the Americas, they began to ask more questions to reconnect with family history. She has family on his father's side with heavy ties in South Dakota, and so she started there and ran with it. 

 

Her politics are based heavily around ethicality, personal and shared experienced, and historical accounts from Indigenous peoples. P'ajiji sees the world through a lens of a disabled, queer, and Two-Spirit individual, and uses any pronouns interchangeably. He doesn't ascribe to any particular label for politics, but if asked says Anarcho-Communism is the closest thing right now.

 

This podcast is intended as a space to educate settlers and create a space that uplifts and focuses on Indigenous voices first and foremost. We will have a multitude of guests and aim to use our platform as a means of financial, social, and communal support of Indigenous peoples.

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Please let us know your thoughts in a respectful manner. Anything that is threatening or otherwise harmful will not receive a response.