50 Years of Voices of the Native Nations with Mary Jean Robertson

This is part of a series of posts in partnership with the American Indian Cultural District to promote and document intangible and tangible American Indian cultural heritage in San Francisco. 

Compiled by Kerri Young from an interview with Mary Jean Robertson, September 2025.

San Francisco is a special place to everybody in the world. It’s where spirituality comes into from the creator to the planet. It’s been sacred for thousands and thousands of years. —Mary Jean Robertson

2026 marks over 50 years of “Voices of the Native Nations (formerly Red Voices)” a tri-monthly radio show on San Francisco-based KPOO-FM. Mary Jean Robertson (Cherokee), 77, has been its host for most of that run.

KPOO’s founding legacy of opening the airwaves to the disenfranchised and underserved is closely tied to Robertson’s show, which broadcasts American Indian news and issues on the premise that “any community group with something to say should be able start a low-powered radio station to serve that community.”

When Third World Liberation Front Media Collective members came together to found KPOO in 1974, Robertson was in her second year living in San Francisco and would soon become involved in a career spanning half-a century.

Starting a new life

Robertson was born in Schenectady, New York in 1948. When she was in high school, she moved with her family to the Bay Area,  where they lived near the Almaden mercury mines in San Jose. Her father, a former officer who supported the WWII codetalkers, worked at aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Corporation (later Lockheed Martin). After receiving her Associate of Arts degree at 21 at San Jose City College, she attended a party and became pregnant. Robertson made the decision to move out of her family’s home and try to make it on her own.

My family was pretty traditional. Everybody that I knew was married with a mother and a father. There was very little divorce at that time, and I didn’t know anybody who had raised a child by themselves by that point.

Traveling to San Francisco, she went to the Children’s Home Society, an organization that provides family support and adoption services. The choice was consequential, as the Home Society was one of the organizations participating in harmful “adoption sweeps” and removals that were part of the broader context of assimilationist policies targeting American Indian families. Throughout WWII and into the 1970s, with the assistance of organizations like the Home Society, the federal government encouraged the removal of Native children from their families and then their adoption by non-Native families.

However, the young Robertson was unaware of this at the time, and the Home Society persuaded her to give up her child for adoption:

 And I was going through counseling [with the Home Society], and they recommended that I give my child up for adoption because I wanted him to be raised in an intact family.

When she arrived in San Francisco, it was September of 1969, just a few months before the Indians of All Tribes began their historic 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island in protest of broken treaties. “[The Occupation of] Alcatraz happened in November of 1969. So it was the birth of a movement and the birth of my baby. I just see it that way.”

Being a part of something new

Establishing a new life in San Francisco, Robertson found a job for Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, located at 180 New Montgomery Street. As the activity coordinator’s secretary, she helped produce the company’s newsletter and put together employee vacation packages to places like Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm.

Wanting to receive her bachelor’s degree, in 1973, Robertson started taking American Indian Studies classes at San Francisco State after learning about the program from native activists involved with the Occupation of Alcatraz. An enduring legacy of the Red Power Movement, the American Indian Studies department was founded in 1969 under the College of Ethnic Studies, the first of its kind in the world dedicated to “respect for the diverse intellectual traditions and cultural expressions of scholars, activists, and artists of color and indigenous people throughout the United States.”

In order to take daytime classes, she took a job working midnight to 8 am at a computer center on 666 Folsom Street. Robertson described the path-breaking nature of these early American Indian Studies classes:

One of the classes I took was Dr. Barney Hoehner’s class. Now, because this was the very beginning of ethnic studies and the very beginning of American Indian studies, they were looking all over for someone who had a higher degree than the bachelor’s degree. So they found Dr. Bernard Hoehner, who was a large animal veterinarian. He was a Oglala Lakota from South Dakota, and he taught a class called American Indian Religion and Philosophy. The first day he says, “I cannot possibly teach you American Indian religion and philosophy because there are over 500 different religions and philosophies in each individual nation. So all I’m going to do is teach you about the Lakota religion and philosophy. So I learned about the 16 aspects of Tanka (parts of the soul) and I spoke more Lakota than I did Cherokee. It was bizarre. And wonderful too.

Little did she know that learning within this exciting new environment would introduce Robertson to a career spanning half-a-century.

Taking up the mic

And he came up to me and says, “Are you native?” And I go, “Who wants to know? What do you care?” He says, “I do a radio show on KPOO called Red Voices. And I would like you to see if you would like to read public service announcements, read news articles, and participate in the Red Voices collective.”

In her second semester at SF State, a long blond-grey haired man named John McClain came up to Robertson in class and invited her to try her hand at reading public service announcements on KPOO’s then-named “Red Voices” show. She remembered thinking that it would be fun:

I’m not afraid of the microphone because I’ve done theater. I love to read and thought well, if you’re just reading public service announcements, I could read well. And so I said let’s try this.”

This was 1974. “And I’ve been doing it ever since,” she said.

The freedom to say what you want to say

KPOO had its roots in the San Francisco State strikes of 1968-1969, when protesting students led by the Black Students Union and a multi-ethnic coalition known as the Third World Liberation Front demanded reform of both admissions practices and a curriculum that effectively excluded students of color.

Robertson spoke of how the Liberation Front’s Media Collective approached broadcaster Lorenzo Milam, who they knew had wanted the FCC to support community radio stations—including the handful of low-powered stations he owned like KPOO and KBOO in Portland or Washington. The collective asked him to make this a reality.

The Collective came in and said, you call yourself Poor People’s Radio Inc. and you are a fairly wealthy man. So it seems like it’s time for us to take over the station. And he goes, “This is what I want. I want community owned radio stations. I want this.”

In 1974, the operation of the station was turned over to a collective consisting of George Kelsey, Jose, Castellar, David Whitacker, Jahid Ashley, Terry Collins, and Karen Howze. These individuals became the first board—the first Black-owned radio station on the West Coast—after the transfer by the original founders.

This was the same year that McClain approached Robertson in class. “We were part of that,” she said.

The collective built a reputation fiercely defending their freedom of expression:

 If you don’t accept federal funds, you’re not beholden to the federal government in terms of what you say. You have that freedom to say what you want to say.”

Joe Rudolph, who became General Manager of KPOO in 1979 and was the driving force behind the station’s unique inclusive identity, said that “there will always be an Irish hour, a Palestinian hour, and an American Indian Hour on this radio program.” Each show still runs to this day, with Robertson leading “Voices of the Native Nation” every 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Wednesday of each month.

Robertson’s show follows a news magazine format, which she likes to think was the same conversational style that Will Rogers (who was Oklahoma Cherokee like Robertson’s parents) debuted on the radio back in 1923. “He was laid back and just talking—so I’ve been reading the papers, Akwesasne Notes, News from Native California. I like to do positive things.” This includes promoting regional pow wows, spotlights on native-led art projects, and playing native music from tribes across the country from her large library of CDs (listen to her recent music playlists here).

But it also includes delivering hard news—about people whose sacred lands are being mined, or have a pipeline going through their graveyards, or who are trying to get running water to their hogans. “It can’t all be positive, you have to tell the truth,” she said.

Infrastructure on the reservations has never, ever been fully funded. The treaties promise housing, education, and elder care in exchange for the land. This is a contract.”

From the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock Reservation to the protection of the Alaska Wildlife Refuge, Robertson feels lucky to speak to people protecting their cultural resources with dignity.

Preserving cultural memory

Beyond significant events within Red Power Movement, Robertson is proud to have not only covered other key events in San Francisco’s social and cultural history on her radio show, but participated in them as well. This includes the significant fight for Manilatown’s International Hotel on Kearny Street in 1977.

There were people from every single culture and there were native people standing in front of the I-Hotel to prevent the eviction of the elders. We stood together, and afterwards ate at [New] Woey Loy Goey (699 Jackson Street).”

The International Hotel also housed the Kearny Street Workshop, which was part of the Neighborhood Arts Program. Activists who conceived of the program demanded that the city’s Arts Commission support more than “just ballet, symphony, opera,” but programs like Kearny Street and the American Indian Arts Workshop that uplifted all residents across San Francisco’s neighborhoods. “I’m very proud to say that I was a part of that,” she said.

With the adoption of this city-supported program, Robertson said:

It was the first time [native artists] had a living wage to do art, to do beadwork, to do ribbon work, to do sewing, to do poetry, to do drumming and dancing and regalia making.”

The program’s Arts Workshop hosted movie nights, a gallery of art, and poetry readings at Mission Cultural Center. “So we as the American Indian Arts Workshop, we helped support those cultural centers, we helped run them. And I don’t anyone knows that institutional memory.”

This is why what happens in San Francisco is so important, because we have this history of working with one another, supporting one another.”

Keeping it going

Robertson eventually got a job at the San Francisco Superior Court to support her “radio habit,” working there for 23 years before retiring. But her work on the mic continues.

She feels a sense of responsibility:

 Somebody’s gotta do it. Somebody has to show up. And I’m not alone. Joe Orozco up in Hoopa runs a radio station. Peggy Berryhill in Gualala runs a radio station. There were people along the way that ran radio programs like Jen Hewitt down in Cupertino, all these are native people all over the country.

Robertson also understands that her location in San Francisco is critical to helping share information to those in areas with fewer resources:

 All over the country there are people that are doing radio shows and building stations that are being directly threatened by the closure of the CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting).

These are the programs that are able to reach out to a community that’s threatened with a flash flood or a blizzard, and they can announce this on the air in the languages of the people who are listening. It is an emergency response network. And if we close them down, people are going to die.

So I keep telling people, being in a media hub like San Francisco, I have a responsibility to uplift the people who are out there on the reservations without the same media coverage that we have to encourage all of the wealthy people out there to adopt a native radio station so they can continue to be on the air to serve their community…See what they need. Whatever it takes.”

Looking to the future

Robertson has dedicated her life to making sure that Native voices are accessible on the radio, and knows that she needs to look to the next 50 years. To that end, she is working on building a digital archive:

 I’m working with Sarah Mancado and several other people to start archiving all the tapes and transcribing them into digital formats so that they can be publicly accessed. And San Francisco State University has tentatively agreed to house that archive.

 She is also reaching out to young hosts interested in what has become this generation’s form of talk-radio: podcasting.

I’m always reaching out to young people who are interested in doing podcasting. And I say, “I’ll tell you what, why don’t you listen to one of these old tapes from the seventies and eighties and pick them randomly, ask me questions.” What was it like during that time? Who was around? To have a podcast that’s run by the young people,  some of them are very powerful.”

Robertson is also seeing a new generation take up the work that her and others have done to preserve and protect American Indian civil rights, cultural practices, and community spaces. She applauds the work of the American Indian Cultural District (AICD), founded in 2020 as the first cultural district of its kind in the world, for doing the much-needed work of preserving institutional memory. This is the type of important work that Robertson says often falls by the wayside:

Most institutions do not bother to recall any of their institutional memories. As a result, they don’t even know [the history of what] was housed in the building that they’re working in.”

Today, Robertson serves on AICD’s Leadership Council, so that she may help in their memory work and pass along something meaningful. She understands a little bit about that from half-a-century doing her radio show, and sharing a sense of pride. “Even by just codifying what happened to all of these people in San Francisco, you can find something about someone who is important to your nation and your tribe.”

What has kept Robertson going all these years? “I’m crazy.”

“Voices of the Native Nations” episodes are available for streaming for a limited time after they air. View the list of episodes and listen to Robertson’s music playlists here. Special thanks to Mary Jean Robertson and Sharaya Souza for their assistance and encouragement on this post.

Sources:

“About Us.” March 26, 2012. Accessed on September 25, 2025. https://kpoo.com/about

Woodard, Stephane. “Native Americans Expose the Adoption Era and Expose Its Devastation.” December 6, 2011. Accessed November 14, 2025. https://ictnews.org/archive/native-americans-expose-the-adoption-era-and-repair-its-devastation/

“Broadcasting Native Voices: Mary Jan Robertson.” Accessed on November 12, 2025. https://osiyo.tv/broadcasting-native-voices-mary-jean-robertson/

“Remembering the Strike.” Fall/Winter 2008. Accessed on November 10, 2025. https://magazine.sfsu.edu/archive/archive/fall_08/strike.html

“The Longest Walk, 1978.” Accessed on November 9, 2025. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/longest-walk.htm

“What Will it Take to Tackle Water Scarcity on Navajo Nation.” September 26, 2024. Accessed on November 17, 2025. https://www.nrdc.org/stories/what-will-it-take-tackle-water-scarcity-navajo-nation