Native American Heritage Month Programming

This November Austin PBS is celebrating the many contributions and sacrifices of our Indigenous citizens during Native American Heritage Month. Tune in to Austin PBS and WORLD to watch these important stories.

Children's programming can be found at the end of the list.

Without A Whisper: Konnon:Kwe
This is the untold story of how Indigenous women influenced the early suffragists in their fight for freedom and equality. Mohawk Clan Mother Louise Herne and Professor Sally Roesch Wagner shake the foundation of the established history of the women’s rights movement in the United States. They join forces on a journey to shed light on the hidden history of the influence of Haudenosaunee women on the women’s rights movement, possibly changing this historical narrative forever.
Monday, November 1 at 10:30 p.m. on Austin PBS

La Loche
In January 2016, a school shooting in the remote Canadian aboriginal community of La Loche, Saskatchewan took the lives of four students and injured seven others. In the aftermath, a caring teacher, worried about eight boys directly affected by the shooting, contacted a TV celebrity the students admired. She hoped that Survivormanstar Les Stroud might spend time with the students. Stroud, the eight young Dene men, and several community and school elders then go on a wilderness adventure, in which they canoe down a 100-mile river path that their ancestors used to traverse. With one camera, a paddle and a desire to help, Stroud uses this trek to encourage the young men to open up and tell their own stories.
Tuesday, November 2 at 6 p.m. on WORLD

America ReFramed: On A Knife Edge
This coming-of-age story follows George Dull Knife, a Lakota teenager growing up on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation. We watch George's path to activism, inspired by his family's long history of fighting for justice for Native Americans. His focus: shutting down the liquor stores in Whiteclay, a tiny town nearby that exists only to sell beer to the reservation's vulnerable population. With 5 million cans sold a year, the devastating results include public drunkenness and violence.
Tuesday, November 2 at 7 p.m. on WORLD

Chasing Voices
From 1907 until his death more than 50 years later, ethnologist John Peabody Harrington crisscrossed the U.S., chasing the voices of the last speakers of Native America's dying languages. Moving from one tribal community to the next, he collaborated with the last speakers to document every finite detail before their languages were lost forever.
Tuesday, November 2 at 10 p.m. on Austin PBS

Native America: From Caves to Cosmos
Combine ancient wisdom and modern science to answer a 15,000-year-old question: who were America's First Peoples? The answer hides in Amazonian cave paintings, Mexican burial chambers, New Mexico's Chaco Canyon and waves off California's coast.
Sunday, November 7 at 2 p.m. on Austin PBS

Saving The Sacred
The Koi and Habemetol Pomo have called the majestic Clear Lake basin home for 14,000 years. However, rapid urbanization and the looting of artifacts for sale on illegal markets has threatened to erase their long history and rich culture from this unique landscape. In an effort to protect these sacred sites, the tribes unite with their local governments and communities to preserve their priceless culture and past. They honor their ancestors by fighting to preserve what has been left behind. So much has already been taken from this country's native people. We cannot let looters take what little remains. The Pomo are descended from some of the earliest inhabitants of North America. Preserving their past is preserving our future.
Monday, November 8 at 10:30 p.m. on Austin PBS

America ReFramed: Blood Memory
For Sandy White Hawk, the story of America's Indian Adoption Era is not one of saving children but of destroying families and tribes. As an adoption survivor, Sandy sets out to reclaim the missing pieces of her stolen past and discovers that her's was not an isolated case.
Tuesday, November 9 at 7 p.m. on WORLD

Trauma to Triumph - The Rise of the Entrepreneur: Survivors of War
Profiling a Native American who voluntered for Vietnam and a Holocaust Survivor. They experienced battle, PTSD, genocide, the Mob, anti-semitism and family loss. Sam and Bill found their inner power to create and own their futures.
Tuesday, November 9 at 10 p.m. on Austin PBS

Native America: Nature to Nations
Explore the rise of great American nations. Investigate lost cities in Mexico, a temple in Peru, a potlatch ceremony in the Pacific Northwest and a tapestry of shell beads in upstate New York whose story inspired our own democracy.
Sunday, November 14 at 2 p.m. on Austin PBS

America ReFramed: Sisters Rising
Native American women are 2.5 times more likely to experience sexual assault than all other American women, and 86% of the offenses are committed by non-Native men. This film showcases six women who refuse to let this pattern of violence continue in the shadows. Their stories shine an unflinching light on righting injustice on both an individual and systemic level.
Tuesday, November 16 at 7 p.m. on WORLD

Searching for Sequoyah
This documentary spans two countries and three Cherokee nations, leading viewers on a journey through the life and death of Sequoyah. Viewers learn about Sequoyah through the written language he created for the Cherokee people, interviews with his descendants, cave writings depictions and more.
Friday, November 19 at 9 p.m. on Austin PBS

Native America: Cities of the Sky
Discover the cosmological secrets behind America's ancient cities. Scientists explore some of the world's largest pyramids and 3D-scan a lost city of monumental mounds on the Mississippi River; native elders reveal ancient powers of the sky.
Sunday, November 21 at 2 p.m. on Austin PBS

Defending The Fire
Follow the journey of the Native Warrior as he (and she) continue conflict resolution in order to survive and secure resources and culture. The answer to "Why Fight" requires a complex look at the truth through hundreds of years of stereotypes and misperceptions. Remarkably, the answer has stayed the same, to Protect and Defend - the cohesive thread that connects generations and tribes. Vietnam war veteran and actor Wes Studi (Geronimo, Last of the Mohicans) narrates and appears in the film.
Tuesday, November 23 at 8 p.m. on Austin PBS

Independent Lens: Home from School - The Children of Carlisle
Northern Arapaho tribal members travel to Pennsylvania to retrieve the stories and the remains of children who died at Carlisle Indian boarding school in the 1880s. More than a century later, will these Native American boys finally come home?
Tuesday, November 23 at 10 p.m. on Austin PBS

PBS KIDS debuts new episodes of Molly of Denali in November!
New episodes air at 6 a.m. on Austin PBS. Check our online schedule for repeat showings.

11/01 - "Molly & Elizabeth/Uqiquq (Throw Party)"
11/02 - "Mouse in the Treehouse/Leader of the Pack"
11/03 - "Butterflies and Bunny Babies/Every Meow and Again"
11/04 - "Come Back Birdie!/Winter is Coming"
11/05 - "Trini’s Super Coop/Trini’s Winter Warm Up"

Our spotlight episode is "Molly & Elizabeth." This story highlights Elizabeth Peratrovich, an Alaska Native civil rights leader who led the enactment of the nation’s first state or territorial anti-discrimination law in 1945. Peratrovich inspires Molly, who worries she's not "Native enough," to stand up to a group of tourists who make stereotypical assumptions about Alaska Native People.