Saltwater Soundwalk: Indigenous Audio Tour of Seattle
Today on Making Contact we present “Saltwater Soundwalk”: Indigenous Audio Tour of Seattle. Produced by Jenny Asarnow and Rachel Lam, this rhythmic, watery audio experience, streams of stories that ebb and flow, intermixing English with Coast Salish languages. Indigenous Coast Salish peoples continue to steward this land and preserve its language, despite settler colonialism, industrialization and gentrification. Part story, part...
Ninety Seconds to Midnight
A new philosophy steeped in the ideas of Artificial Intelligence, space colonization, and the long-term survival of the human species is gaining ground among the wealthy. However, there are reasons to question its goals and its ethics. Longtermists believe that not only could we colonize space and create simulated humans in giant servers around stars, but that we must. Anything short of a trillion-year multi-planetary...
The Fight Over the Indian Child Welfare Act Is Not Just A Custody Battle
It’s a lesser-known case in the docket for the Supreme Court, but if The Indian Child Welfare Act is overturned, it could have massive implications for the laws that govern Indigenous sovereignty in the United States. We talk with author and activist Rebecca Nagle about the case of Baby O and the Librettis and how their story led to Halaand v. Brakeen. But, we also investigate the money and interests behind the lawsuit....
Upstream: Worker Cooperatives
On today’s show we learn about worker cooperatives: what are they and can they offer an alternative to the dominant capitalist mindset? Our partner podcast Upstream brings us to a bike and skate shop in Richmond, CA that’s providing a much-needed service to its community, while also empowering its own workers. A version of this story was originally aired in 2018. Image Credit: Artwork by Phil Wrigglesworth Like this...
70 Million: Punished and Persecuted for Being Unhoused, Part 2
More than a quarter of the people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. live in California. Nowhere is the unhoused crisis more visible than in the city of Los Angeles, where almost 30,000 people camp out on sidewalks and in parks every night. On today’s episode we continue to follow a community of unhoused people in Echo Park in Los Angeles, that was forcibly evicted by police despite an enormous show of support from...
70 Million: Punished and Persecuted for Being Unhoused, Part 1
On this Making Contact, we hear a story from our podcast partner 70 Million about a community of unhoused people in Echo Park in Los Angeles and how they were forcibly evicted by police despite hundreds of protestors who showed up to support them. We’ll hear from people on the front lines about how people experiencing homelessness are criminalized for simply trying to survive on the street in this edited version of...
