Don Whistler

Don Whistler (1894-1951) was born into the Sac and Fox Nation, where he would go on to serve as chief between 1938 and his death in 1951. In 1941, he started the Indians for Indians Hour radio program at University of Oklahoma station WNAD, which he hosted weekly for the rest of his life. Before returning to Oklahoma territory, Whistler, who also went by the name Kesh-ke-kosh, worked at the University of Pennsylvania Museum as a curator and a performer-lecturer. Historian Josh Garrett-Davis writes that Whistler’s “diligent effort to build an archive, for which he favored ‘real Indian’ music, adapted but fundamentally transformed the ‘salvage ethnography’ practiced by the anthropologists at the museum. And his work on behalf of new forms of tribal and intertribal sovereignty underlay the social and political functions of the show.” The Indians for Indians Hour continued into the 1970s, attracting large groups of participants and listeners from among the many Indigenous groups it served within its broadcast radius.

Reference: Josh Garrett-Davis, The Intertribal Drum of Radio: The Indians for Indians Hour and Native American Media, 1941–1951, Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 49, Issue 3, Autumn 2018, Pages 249–273, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/why051

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