Nevada Public Radio is presenting an eight-part podcast series on the culture, issues, and perseverance of Nevada’s Indigenous Peoples. This series is made possible, in part, by the financial support of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians.Native Nevada was recently announced as a winner of a 2022 Regional Edward R. Murrow Award!Check out the list of winners!Production TeamRichard Boland, host, is Timbisha Shoshone. He’s devoted much of his life to Native issues, including a high-profile land reclamation effort you can read about here. Assistant producer Jarrette Werk is A’aniiih and Nakoda from Fort Belknap Montana and has been living in Northern Nevada since 2014. Jarrette is an independent journalist and photographer, who focuses on rewriting the narrative of Indigneous Peoples within the media. Read more here.Avory Wyatt, assistant producer, is Wašiw and Numu and grew up on the Hungry Valley Reservation in Sparks, Nevada. Avory is a land defender, water protector, and social justice activist who has worked closely with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.KNPR Senior Writer and Producer Heidi Kyser and KNPR News Director Joe Schoenmann produced the series.Sound editing, mixing and mastering are by Regina Revazova of Open Conversation.00000184-e4f0-d0a7-a3f5-e7f366aa0000Some music by Blue Dot Sessions
Native artivists draw on a long tradition of speaking truth to power. For KNPR’s Native Nevada podcast, a few of them talked about the messages of their predecessors and their own work
Jean LaMarr
Courtesy of Nevada Art Museum
Jean LaMarr told the Nevada Appeal in 2003, “The concerns of my life manifest in my art, which is about racism, stereotypes, wars, and the destruction of Mother Earth.” Great Basin Native Artists founder and curator Melissa Melero-Moose told KNPR about seeing LaMarr’s work when she was a student at the Institute of American Indian Art in the early ’90s: “My mind exploded. … She has a great story to tell about activism and going to school at (UC) Berkeley in the ’70s. I mean, she’s telling the story of women being exploited so badly over the years and stereotypes and just the sexism that was involved in not just females in history, but specifically Indigenous females. So, it spoke directly to me.”
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Sana Sana
Reno-based artivist Sana Sana works in many different media — drawing, painting, poetry, music — but always with a message. Here’s how he described it for Native Nevada: “What I’m attempting to do with my art is to have these conversations with people and have people feel what I feel, or feel what my community feels, or even feel things that maybe they weren’t aware that they were feeling as well. … I want to draw people back into a space to where we can understand our connection and our relationships to the earth, to the water, to the air, and to ourselves and each other.”
Fawn Douglas
Photo by Christopher Smith
“I like my art to project something, you know, to be able to change a mind and to educate those that see it on subjects they weren’t even aware of,” says Fawn Douglas, a Las Vegas-based artist, activist, and educator. “I’ve taken some old T-shirts from different protests … and repurposed them and given them more meaning … I wanted to be able to keep those shirts, but I also wanted to be able to reuse something, too. And so with that, it has that message of not creating more waste and also telling the story of what was going on within those traditional lands.”
Desert Companion welcomed Heidi Kyser as staff writer in January 2014. In 2024, Heidi was promoted to managing editor, charged with overseeing the Desert Companion and State of Nevada newsrooms.
