6 Indigenous Podcasts For Your Listening Pleasure
It’s Indigenous Peoples Day in the U.S.
Today is an opportunity for us to help amplify the talent and work of indigenous creators in podcasting. We have created a list of podcasts we hope to bring to your attention and encourage you to support these creators as much as you can.
Share their work, subscribe to their shows, join their Patreon, leave them a positive review, send them an encouraging DM, follow them on social, and CashApp or Venmo them if you can.
We have curated a list of shows that share the richness of history, thought, culture, and experiences of indigenous creators who are working hard to share themselves and their culture in a world that often fails to see them.
Today’s list is one small way we hope will help shine a light on the depth of talent of our indigenous colleagues in podcasting.
We have created a shareable Spotify playlist of recommended episodes from each podcast. Listen Here.
The Aboriginal Outlaws
Description: The comedic ramblings of The Aboriginal Outlaws. Three indigenous comedians from Akwesasne Mohawk Nation Territory share a unique take on local happenings and global affairs in an uncensored and sometimes downright offensive voice.
Our Take: Check out the episode titled, The Aboriginal Outlaws Go On Vacation. The short 4-minute episode is what we would call an “out-of-office interlude,” a fresh approach to telling your audience you’re about to take a podcasting break while leaving them wanting more.
The episodes are a bit raw in form and definitely with language (parental advisory), but this crew is funny, while also telling real-life stories about the realities of modern indigenous life.
Tales From Aztlantis
Description: A podcast that explores Mesoamerican pseudohistory, new-age nonsense, archaeological misconceptions, and other tales of adventure! In each episode, we investigate how these very topics have helped inform Chicano/Chicana/Chicanx identity, and have resulted in a distorted view of our collective Indigenous past. Your hosts Kurly Tlapoyawa and Ruben Arellano Tlakatekatl invite you to join them on a fascinating journey through Mesoamerica's past, present, and future!
Our Take: The podcast is a unique approach to decolonizing history. It’s part documentary film critique part humor. If Roger and Ebert (google them, they were huge in the 90s) were history professors and Brown guys with a podcast, this is the podcast they would make.
Start with Episode 11: Sal Castro and The Chicano Blowout
Hawai’i Rising
Description: Hawaiʻi Rising is a new podcast series from the Hawaiʻi People‘s Fund featuring its 2021 grantees: 30 grassroots organizations at the forefront of progressive movements in Hawaiʻi. Hawaiʻi Peopleʻs Fund has helped to support, build capacity, and amplify the impact of grassroots social change movements in Hawaiʻi since 1972. We are dedicated to the most creative, passionate, and radical visions of community, bravely navigating the intersections of indigeneity, environment, race, class, labor, gender, art, technology, mental health, incarceration, food, and other crucial issues we face.
Our Take: Hawai’i is much more than a vacation destination and this podcast is here to make sure everyone understands that fact. This podcast does a great job of amplifying the histories and stories of indigenous Hawai’ians, while educating us on the critical issues faced by indigenous Hawai’ians today.
Start with episode 28, Hui Iwi Kuamo‘o: Restoring the Ancestral Foundation. It’s a truly eye-opening education on the fight to repatriate and rebury iwi kūpuna (ancestral Hawaiian bones), moepū (funerary possessions) and mea kapu (sacred objects) to Hawai’i.
Warrior Kids Podcast
Description: This is an Indigenous podcast for kids and families that celebrates everything Indigenous to inspire kids of all backgrounds to be warriors for social justice and earth justice and help make the world a better place!
Our Take: Each episode of this award-winning podcast is designed to be accessible to kids and families. With the help of the adorable, Ernie, the boston terrior sidekick, host, Pam Palmater, teaches everything from connection to the environment to Mi’kmaw words (the First Nation Peoples of the Northeastern woodlands of Quebec, Canada, and Maine).
Start with the Quiet Time, episode. It’s an accessible lesson for children on how to use quiet time as a way to process difficult emotions. Frankly, a lot of adults could benefit from listening to this episode.
Toasted Sister Podcast
Description: Toasted Sister is a show about Native American food because it came a long way. Traditional indigenous foodways were lost, found, redefined, and modernized in the last few hundred years. And here it is today, in the hands of Native chefs and foodies who work to keep their traditional flavors and ingredients alive. I'm Andi Murphy and I'm talking to as many Indigenous foodies as I can.
Our Take: Both a live radio show and podcast the show won the 2022 1st Place for General Excellence in the Radio/Podcast Pro Division by the Native American Journalist Association. Everything about this show is high-quality, including the new very cool cover art - what’s not to love about a corncob that looks like a rockstar?
Give episode 75, Jacob Torres — Space Chile Guy, a listen. It’s a fascinating interview with NASA technical and horticulture scientist, Jacob Torres, who’s figuring out how to get New Mexico green chiles on the next space mission.
Everyone deserves good chile in our opinion, even in space.
Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s
Description: Last May, investigative journalist Connie Walker came upon a story about her late father she'd never heard before. One night back in the late 1970s while he was working as an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he pulled over a suspected drunk driver. He walked up to the vehicle and came face-to-face with a ghost from his past—a residential school priest. What happened on the road that night set in motion an investigation that would send Connie deep into her own past, trying to uncover the secrets of her family and the legacy of trauma passed down through the generations.
In Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's, Connie unearths how her family's story fits into one of Canada's darkest chapters: the residential school system.
Our Take: In this Spotify by Gimlet Media, host, Connie Walker, invites the audience on a deeply personal journey. The story is equally vulnerable and beautiful, allowing the audience to gain a meaningful understanding of the trauma the residential school system inflicted on indigenous communities. The rich storytelling brings the listener into a secondary journey in which Connie uncovers everything she never knew about her father.
Start from the beginning on this one.