The Sound of Social Revolution: Inside the Black Panthers' R&B Band

Oakland’s Wahpepah's Kitchen Reclaims Native Dishes Crystal Wahpepah wanted to be a chef since she was 7 years old. Like her grandfather and mother, Wahpepah is a registered member of the Kickapoo tribe of Oklahoma. She remembers learning to make fry bread with her aunty and grandmother — and picking berries with her grandfather on the Hoopa Reservation where she spent time as a child. But while growing up on Ohlone land in Oakland, Wahpepah was struck by the Bay Area’s lack of Native restaurants, despite the region’s large Indigenous population and palette for diverse cuisine. So she decided to change that. It wasn’t just a matter of culinary representation, it was a matter of reclaiming Native food sovereignty. KQED’s Bianca Taylor brings us her story as part of our ongoing series Flavor Profile, which features folks who started successful food businesses during the pandemic. Round Valley Residents Hope Pedestrian Path Saves Lives Round Valley is located in one of the farthest reaches of Eastern Mendocino County. At its center sits the small town of Covelo, a remote community way up in the hills, with Highway 162 running through the middle of town. There’s no public transportation here, so locals, many of them members of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, have to walk on the highway, which has almost no shoulder. Residents have been hit and killed over the years, so the community has been pushing authorities for more than a decade to build a pedestrian path. Reporter Eileen Russell lives near Covalo and tells us what’s held the project up for so long. Coast Miwok Group Buys Marin Property, a Piece of Their Ancestral Land When Joe Sanchez was 8 years old, his grandmother asked him to make a promise to never forget his California Indian heritage. He’s spent his life living up to that charge, studying the history of his people and volunteering in the community. In July, he and the Coast Miwok Tribal Council of Marin purchased a 26-acre piece of land in the rural Marin County community of Nicasio, once Coast Miwok territory. It’s believed to be the first modern “Land Back” effort in Marin County, part of a growing movement across California to get land back to the original indigenous people who lived on it. KQED's Vanessa Rancaño reports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

25 Aug 202330min

When the Castle Fire started burning in August of 2020, it ripped through Sequoia National Park, burning for months and with an intensity that has become increasingly normal during wildfire season. Just one year later, the KNP Complex fire devastated this same region. Together, these two massive fires burned grove after grove of giant sequoias, thousands of the largest trees on earth. Trees found only in California. Sequoias are adapted to fire, but decades of fire suppression and hotter, drier conditions from human-caused climate change have led to infernos that even these magnificent trees can’t weather. Since 2020, up to one fifth of the state’s sequoias have died from severe fire. Sometimes, the cones that hold their seeds have been incinerated too. Some scientists are worried there will be no sequoias in Sequoia National Park in the future. Now, national park scientists are proposing a plan to harvest surviving sequoia seeds, nurture them into seedlings in a protected environment, and then replant them in the wilderness. But critics say that proposal goes against the very definition of wilderness. At the heart of this debate are some big questions: What is natural? And how much should humans intervene? KALW reporter Marissa Ortega-Welch explores both sides of the issue while hiking out to see the damage done to a sequoia grove in the middle of a wilderness area in the national parks. This story was brought to us by KALW Public Radio, and made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

18 Aug 202330min

Latinos helped build the city of San Jose, though its a history largely forgotten or ignored. This week, we’re highlighting the impact Mexican-Americans have had on the Bay Area's biggest city, through the lens of one Chicana trailblazer. And we'll hear how this activism is helping guide those hoping to keep a fixture of the city's immigrant communities alive, as vendors at the Berryessa Flea Market fight for its future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

11 Aug 202330min

This week we’re featuring a story from our friends at Code Switch. It’s the little known history of Japanese Americans who were living in Japan during World War II. Recently, reporter Kori Suzuki found out that his own grandmother, who he’d always thought was born in Japan, is a Kibei Nisei, a second generation American who returned after living through the war in Japan. In this story, he explores his grandmother’s memories and discovers new aspects of himself along the way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

4 Aug 202330min

This week we’re featuring the Los Angeles Times’ podcast, “Foretold.” It’s the story of a young mother, Paulina Stevens, who was raised in a Romani American family on the Central Coast. Paulina shared her story with reporter Faith Pinho as she sought to leave the sometimes stifling culture she’d grown up in and the life of fortune telling prescribed for her in her teens.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

28 Juli 202329min

One of the biggest stories in hip-hop right now is set to play out in a courtroom later this year, when Atlanta rapper Young Thug goes on trial for gang-related activities. One of the key pieces of evidence cited in the indictment are his lyrics. The phenomenon of rap songs being played in court dates back to the early ’90s, with an early example happening in the Bay Area during the trial of one of the region’s most famous rappers, Vallejo’s own Mac Dre. There’s a lot of lore around Mac Dre’s trial, so as part of That’s My Word, KQED’s yearlong project on Bay Area hip-hop history, reporter Jessica Kariisa set out to discover what really happened. Plus, there’s all kinds of slang that comes out of hip hop, but that doesn’t mean we’re always using it the right way. Pendarvis Harshaw, host of the KQED podcast Rightnowish, has some opinions about how to use “slap.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

21 Juli 202329min

In 2018, the Woolsey Fire burned nearly 97,000 acres in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. It was one of the most destructive fires in Southern California history. Among the stories that emerged from the fire was one that seemed made for Hollywood: a group of Malibu surfers who stayed behind and helped save their town from the flames. In the new podcast Sandcastles, host and producer Adriana Cargill explores their story and tells us what we can learn from them about living safely in wildfire country. Plus, there were many things Julie Menter loved about her Oakland home when she first moved there in 2017. Chief among them were the three towering redwood trees in her backyard. Last year, one of the trees started to look sick. It had lost almost all of its leaves and, despite Menter watering it, it wasn’t bouncing back. She’s noticed, not just in her backyard but all around Oakland, redwood trees are looking dry and scraggly. So our friends at the Bay Curious went to find out what was going on with these iconic coast redwoods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

14 Juli 202329min

This week we’re bringing you one of our favorite stories from 2022. You’ve probably heard of Bobby Seale and The Black Panthers. Or Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement. But what about Kartar Singh Sarabha and the Ghadar Movement? Or Kala Bagai and the fight against redlining? This week we dive deep into the hidden history of early South Asian activism in our state. How Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other South Asian immigrants and their children laid the groundwork for social movements that still resonate today in California. Host Sasha Khokha teams up with KQED politics correspondent Marisa Lagos, and they meet a couple who created the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

7 Juli 202330min