THIS IS INDIAN COUNTRY With Billy Frank Jr.

This special looks at Native American nicknames among sports teams,  many selected with the best intentions of honoring the courage and tenacity of America's first nations, but ultimately running directly into an evolving social consciousness that demanded change. Some fought change, like the NFL's Washington Redskins, Others like the Cleveland Indians were named in 1914 to honor the first-ever Native American Major League baseball player. Still, they've changed to the Guardians. This special explores the fine line between honoring tribes and objectifying them, and how some teams are proving it's possible to bring people together and do the right thing. 

This special was close to Billy Frank Jr.'s heart, and in fact one that he was working on with another great leader who like Billy passed away 10 years ago, the late U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye. Countless programs have traveled to Hawai’i; this may be the first to actually visit The Nation of Hawai’i, exploring the splintered but determined push by Indigenous Islanders to restore sovereignty to a people whose country was stolen from them. It’s an extraordinary journey to paradise, and a look at how that paradise was lost… and how people like Bumpy Kanahele and Emmett Aluli are fighting to find it again. 

The Miccosukee number only about 550 members, but their influence resounds throughout the region, notably in their tireless efforts in preserving and protecting their sacred Pay-Hay-Okee, the critically endangered Everglades. And much of that important work was set in motion by the great nation builder and planet saver, the late Chief William Buffalo Tiger. Like the Arctic and Pacific Islands, rivers of grass like this are the frontline of the climate crisis, where sea levels are rising and traditional lifeways threatened. The solutions found here may save us all.

This special traces the trials and tribulations of a remote Indian tribe in the northwesternmost part of Washington state determined to save its culture. The Makah Nation is the only whaling people in the Lower 48, a treaty right secured in 1855 in exchange for much of what is now the spectacular Olympic National Park. 

Low-stakes gambling has always been a part of American Indian culture. Now, the stakes are as high as they come. Indian gaming is now a $25 billion-a-year industry that has transformed some impoverished tribes into major financial and political players in their communities. This unique, introspective special explores both the promise and peril of this new economic development in Indian Country, and how in the end it could be our best bet to help save the planet from the climate crisis.

This truly unprecedented special takes viewers to the el fin del mundo, the very end of the Earth, the southernmost human-inhabited place on the planet, the last frontier of Chile and Argentina. This is a tale of genocide most people have never heard, looking at the systematic destruction of the Fuegian people, the last of which shot by settlers, who were awarded a bounty for each Native killed. While most First Nations in the world were decimated equally by European diseases, the People of Fire were simply murdered in cold blood, shot as vermin, pushed to the very last part of South America and then wiped off the planet. It is heart-wrenching recounting, sometimes hard to watch, but a story that needs to be told, so it never happens again.

This final installment in the THIS IS INDIAN COUNTRY With Billy Frank Jr. series was perhaps the most interesting that Billy and his team had on the books -- because the idea originated when we all met, at the December 2004 Exoneration trial of the illegally hanged Nisqually leader Leschi, an ancestor of Billy, executed by then-Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens when he wouldn't agree to his people being forced to move from their ancestral lands to a federal reservation. Leschi was winning the "Indian Wars," routing his enemy in battle after battle, until he was at last brought down by the betrayal of a nephew, and institutionally murdered. Today he's a hero among people in the Pacific Northwest, both Native and non-Native, with Seattle schools and a neighborhood named after him. It's a very special history lesson that Billy wanted very much to tell. As a Nisqually Indian, Billy lived his whole life hearing about the great warrior hero Leschi who, instead of being arrested and tossed in jail for fighting for his rights as Billy and the Fish Warriors were, was sent to the gallows. Billy's request on "How to Unhang an Indian" was that his team allow him to recreate the famous 1855 Battle of Conner's Prairie, to ride a war horse in an attack on Stevens' militia, a great victory for the tribes. Our septuagenarian host never got to play Leschi on a war horse, but he made us promise we would one day do this special. We will.