Caleen Sisk-Franco & Christina Aanestad: Puberty Rights of the Winnemem Wintu

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In this edition of Radio Curious, our assistant producer Christina Aanestad is the guest host in a conversation about puberty rights for young women within the Winnemem-Wintu tribe in Northern California. This visit with Caleen Sisk-Franco, the Spiritual Leader and Chief of the Winnemem-Wintu was recorded near Mt. Shasta, California in August 2010. In the last few years, the tribe has revived an ancient ritual, the Puberty Ceremony-which honors and celebrates a girls transition into womanhood.

The “Middle Water People” are a small tribe near Mount Shasta, in Northern California. During World War 2, they were relocated and their homeland was flooded to make the Shasta dam. Nearly 80 years later, the tribe has reinvigorated one of its ceremonies, there, called the Puberty Ceremony, which honors a girls transition into womanhood. For 3 days and nights, men sing and dance on one side of a river, while the women, pass on traditions to girls on the other side.

But holding a ceremony on stolen land can be a challenge. The forest service refuses to grant the tribe private access to their ancestral land along the McCloud river, because they are an “unrecognized” tribe. Their ceremony is held with recreational boaters driving by, and camping as the tribe holds it’s right of passage. Under the guidance of their Chief and Spiritual Leader, Caleen Sisk Franco, the Winnemem-Wintu have sued the federal government to protect their rights and their ancestral land. She describes the puberty ceremony and it’s importance to their way of life.

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Funk, Indigo: One Student’s Response to Gun Violence

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Our guest in this edition of Radio Curious is Indigo Funk, a 2018 graduate of Ukiah High School, here in Ukiah, California. Funk, who will begin his college career at Brown University in Providence Rhode Island, in the fall of 2018, caught my attention when I heard him speak, rather eloquently, at the March 24, 2018, Ukiah version of the national student March For Our Lives, organized here by Ukiah High Students.

When Indigo Funk arrived the Radio Curious studios on June 15, 2018, to record this interview, I asked him if he’d like to read Frank Bruni’s Op-Ed column entitled “How to Lose the Mid-Terms and Re-elect Trump,” that had been published two days prior in the New York Times. Bruni’s article challenges the effectiveness of Robert De Niro’s “profanity-laced comment about President Trump, for which he received a standing ovation at the June 10, 2018, Tony Awards ceremony in New York City.

Bruni shares De Niro’s anger but challenged his expression.  In his Op-Ed piece, Bruni wrote:
“When you answer name-calling with name-calling and tantrums with tantrums, you’re not resisting him. You’re mirroring him. You’re not diminishing him. You’re demeaning yourselves. Many voters don’t hear your arguments or the facts, which are on your side. They just wince at the din. You permit them to see you as you see Trump: deranged.”

Bruni then posed the question: “Why would they (the voters) choose a different path if it goes to another ugly destination?”

When Indigo Funk finished the Bruni Op-Ed piece, he said he had just been thinking about that issue. So we began our conversation when I asked him to share his thoughts.

The book Indigo Funk recommends is “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League,” by Jeff Hobbs.

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Ron Gross as Socrates: Socrates in Athens, in Conversation

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Socrates of Athens, who lived before the Common Era, is respected as one of the greatest independent thinkers of all time. Socrates himself refused to be recognized as a teacher. Instead, Plato, his well-known student and reporter of Socrates’ dialogues, tells us he asked to be seen as a “midwife of ideas.” Socrates’ passion to achieve self-understanding, and the proper ways to live, continues to be studied and emulated to this day.

Chataquan scholar Ron Gross portrays Socrates in this archived interview, recorded in January 2003. We began our conversation when I asked him to describe the process of self understanding.

The book Socrates recommends is “The Trojan Women,” by Euripides. Ron Gross recommends “The Clouds,” by Aristophanes.

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Silha, Stephen: The Puckish Whimsical Life of James Broughton

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The puckishly whimsical life and times of poet and film maker James Broughton is the topic of this edition of Radio Curious in a visit with Stephen Silha, the producer and director of “Big Joy,” a biographical film of the life and times of James Broughton.

Broughton believed that in order to live an authentic life we each should follow our own weird. He says:
“I don’t know what the left is doing said the right hand,
But it looks fascinating.”

And:
“I may be infecting the whole body
said the Head
but they’ll never amputate me.”

Stephen Silha and I visited by phone from his home near Seattle, Washington on Mother’s Day, 2014. He began our conversation by telling us what drew him to make a film about his friend James Broughton.

The book Stephen Silha recommends is “The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon,” by Tom Spanbauer.

The music in this weeks edition of Radio Curious is “Twril” by Norman Arnold, from the movie, “Big Joy.”

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