Under-Told: Verbatim

To his supporters, he’s an Indigenous rights activist and political prisoner unfairly targeted by the U.S. government for his involvement with the American Indian Movement. To his critics, most from the FBI, he’s an unrepentant killer of two agents in 1975, a charge he denies. Now, at 81, and after 49 years in prison, Peltier lives under home confinement on North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Reservati...

Thetis White’s class is diverse—filled with students from different races and backgrounds, who are all taught by a Black man. That’s not uncommon at Monroe Elementary in Brooklyn Park, a diverse suburb of Minneapolis, but it is rare in Minnesota as a whole, where fewer than one percent of teachers are Black men.  Experts say the low number of teachers of color contributes to wide educational...

Buying a home is a rite of passage, a life-changing step—but in the Twin Cities especially, this crucial key to accumulating and passing down wealth is much harder to come by if you are Black. Just 25 percent of Black residents of Minneapolis and St. Paul own their homes. That’s far below the national average, especially considering the Twin Cities are widely regarded as one of the country’s...

Especially in the United States, many think of racism as a black and white issue—but less talked about is colorism, the preference for lighter skin within communities of color. Safiya Mohamed is a Somali American journalism student at the University of St. Thomas, where our Under-Told Stories Project offices are based. Our PBS NewsHour report on the global desire for lighter skin and the potential...

Minnesotans, now more than ever, are waking up to the realities of racial inequity in their communities. In St. Paul, activists with ReConnect Rondo have a new suggestion: they want to build a land bridge over Interstate 94 to rejoin the old Rondo neighborhood, which was destroyed decades ago by the construction of the freeway. In this episode, our intern Emily Haugen interviewed those leading the...

It’s April  2021—the COVID-19 pandemic has been omnipresent for more than a year, and vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson are rolling out across the United States. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve reported on essential workers, focusing especially on some of the most overlooked employees - in the U.S. some 50,000 meatpackers have had COVID-19 and about 250 lost their lives. This...

Lisa Clemons is a former Minneapolis police officer who founded a non-profit called A Mother’s Love—a brigade of people in bright pink t-shirts trying to bring back the metaphorical village they say it takes to raise a child. Clemons dreamed of being a cop since she was young, but left the department 20 years ago for a broader advocacy. Our correspondent, Fred de Sam Lazaro, spent a cold Nove...

Charging Buffalo is the first butchering facility on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota - the economic development alone is welcome in one of the poorest communities in the United States, but a place that treats the sacred animal with honor and respect means something more. Bamm Brewer is a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe. He runs the meat house, plus his own ranch and buffalo herd. Our...

In the Bangkok restaurant Cabbages and Condoms, rubbers are everywhere: on sculptures, lanterns, even a condom Santa Claus at Christmastime.  The place has become an icon for what’s widely regarded as one of the world’s most successful family planning programs.  Bringing a little humor to a taboo-laden topic is the trademark of Mechai Viravaidya—or as he’s known in his native Thailand: t...

After police killed George Floyd on May 25, Minneapolis and St. Paul saw weeks of protests that spread across the world. Never before has such a clear demand emerged from the demonstrations: defund the police. The Minneapolis City council unanimously advanced a proposal at the end of June to create a new Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention—their next goal was to amend the city c...

Our team actually lives in St. Paul and Minneapolis...which, on a fateful day in late May, became the epicenter of a protest movement that’s swept the world since: the death of George Floyd. We’ve been on the frontlines of this story for the PBS NewsHour.  Alongside NewsHour producers Mike Fritz and Sam Lane, we produced an in-depth piece on inequality in the Twin Cities, how ‘Minnesota Nice’ only...

Molly Melching arrived in Senegal in the 70s as a student for what was supposed to be just six months, but instead spent the majority of her life working through the organization she founded, Tostan—which means “breakthrough” in the Wolof language, to convince more than 8,000 communities across eight West African countries to abandon female genital cutting, or FGC. The success she’s found is rare—...

George McGraw and his organization, Dig Deep, used to bring water access to communities in Africa.  A few years ago, he turned his attention to the United States —he now works in the Navajo Nation.  The native reservation spans twenty seven thousand square miles across parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, where 40 percent of the homes lack running water or sanitation. Many are in such...

Somaliland, a region of Somalia that lay in ruin from years of war, suffers some of the world’s highest rates of infant and maternal mortality. But 15 years ago, Edna Adan fulfilled a lifelong dream by building a nonprofit hospital and nursing school to address the health needs of women. In this episode, we hear Edna, the former first lady of Somalia, describe her path toward achieving that dream...

The Monk Doctor: 72, shaved bald and draped in flowing maroon robes, Barry Kerzin gently presses his stethoscope to the neck of an elderly Tibetan man. He’s just as gentle with this patient as he is with a much more famous one: his holiness the Dalai Lama.  The Tibetan spiritual leader now calls Kerzin, a tall, white California native, his messenger to the medical world – a journey that took a cla...

In 1994, Nelson Mandela’s election marked the end of apartheid and the beginning of democracy in South Africa. But the scars of racial segregation haven’t healed yet. Infrastructure designed for 5 million white South Africans has failed to support the majority black population of over 56 million power outages and water shortages are a part of daily life. Zola Nene was 10 years old when apartheid e...

Rebecca Letven is the Cambodia country director for the UK based Mines Advisory Group, or MAG, a non-governmental organization that works to clear explosives and return land to communities. These deadly remnants of the Cambodian civil war were planted in the late 1960s and early 70s by both the genocidal Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Vietnamese forces. They also include thousands of unexploded bom...

While training as a chef, Sean Sherman learned French, Italian and other western styles of cooking, but he had no way of knowing what his ancestors ate. So he decided to find out himself. His cookbook, “The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen,” won a James Beard award in 2018. Today, he and his partner Dana Thompson run “The Sioux Chef,” a project to revive indigenous traditions in the kitchen and enc...

Jimmy Carter was President of the United States from 1977 to 1981, but he dove into humanitarian work as soon as his term was over. He’s worked to eradicate neglected tropical diseases and mediate age-old conflicts around the world including Sudan and South Sudan--two nations carved out of one after a bitter war that Carter helped end. In this episode, Jimmy Carter reflects on his foreign aid meth...

In 2005 there were about 150 orphanages in Cambodia, but that number grew to more than 400 in 2019. But an estimated 80 percent of kids in Cambodia's orphanages aren't actually orphans. Sebastien Marot’s Friends International social enterprise is working with the larger campaign to remove children from orphan care. In a courtyard near a busy Phnom Penh street, he explained the business of orp...

In 2005 there were about 150 orphanages in Cambodia, but that number grew to more than 400 in 2019. But an estimated 80 percent of kids in Cambodia's orphanages aren't actually orphans. Evangelical Pastor Ted Olbrich runs one of the largest providers of orphan care in Cambodia. Foursquare Children of Promise is an explicitly Christian organization in a largely Buddhist country. He’s pushed ba...