This week on
System Check we are saying farewell to 2020 and hello to 2021 with our first System Check Book Club. Your hosts Melissa and Dorian first aired this Book Club as a Live Event on YouTube and Facebook just in time for holiday reading. While the original show was over two hours long, for our podcast this week we decided to share with you some of the highlights from the live event.
First up is Maria Hinojosa, journalist , storyteller, and founder of Futuro Media Group. She is the host and executive producer of the brilliant and informative weekly NPR show
December 18, 2020
A nurse displays the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine at a Veterans Affairs long-term care facility on December 17, 2020 in Vancouver, Washington. (Nathan Howard / Getty Images)
President-elect Joe Biden has made history: This week, he announced that Representative Deb Haaland would be his pick for head of the Interior Department, the first Native American person ever to hold a cabinet-level position, which would make Biden’s cabinet the most diverse in history. This kind of representation is important, but it’s not enough, because far from Washington, Native Americans are dying at disproportionate rates from the coronavirus pandemic. In October, the death rate from Covid-19 on the Navajo Nation was higher than in any state. In South Dakota, the Cheyenne River Lakota reservation is fighting to keep roadblocks up to prevent the spread of the virus, despite the order from the state’s governor to take them down. And Neshoba County, Miss., home of the Mississippi Band of