Cultural Freedom Fellowships
The purpose of the Cultural Freedom awards and fellowships is to recognize individuals whose work inspires their communities, domestic and international, that are struggling to uphold and defend their right to cultural freedom and diversity. As defined by the foundation, Cultural Freedom is a basic human right dependent on political, economic, and environmental justice.
Current Recipients for 2006:
David Barsamian awarded 2006 Cultural Freedom Fellowship
David Barsamian is founder and director of Alternative Radio, an independent award-winning weekly series based in Boulder, Colorado. He has been working in radio since 1978. In addition to his radio work he is an author and lecturer. His interviews and articles appear regularly in The Progressive and Z Magazine. His latest books are Original Zinn: Conversations on History and Politics with Howard Zinn; Imperial Ambitions with Noam Chomsky, and Speaking of Empire & Resistance with Tariq Ali. His earlier books include The Checkbook & the Cruise Missile with Arundhati Roy; Propaganda and the Public Mind with Noam Chomsky; Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire, and The Decline and Fall of Public Broadcasting.
The Institute for Alternative Journalism named him one of its “Top Ten Media Heroes.” Barsamian lectures in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, the Middle East, India and Europe on U.S. foreign policy, the media, propaganda, and corporate power. In 2003 he received ACLU’s Upton Sinclair Award for independent journalism, the Democracy Media Award, and the 2006 Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center Award.
...HidePratap Chatterjee awarded 2006 Cultural Freedom Award
Pratap Chatterjee is an investigative reporter, producer, and managing editor of CorpWatch, an organization that investigates and exposes corporate violations of human rights, environmental crimes, and fraud and corruption around the world. His work to support social justice causes over two decades has spanned many causes: from the continuing environmental and human rights tragedy of the Northern California Gold Rush to the occupation of Iraq and the war on terrorism. He is the author of “Iraq Inc.: A Profitable Occupation“ (Seven Stories Press, 2004), “Gold, Greed and Genocide: Unmasking the Myth of the 49ers“ (Project Underground, 1998) and “The Earth Brokers: Power, Politics & World Development“ (Routledge Press, 1994), on the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.
Under Chatterjee’s direction, CorpWatch has also produced investigative reports on the failure of reconstruction in Afghanistan and the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, as well as three alternative annual reports on Halliburton. He is working on a new report on Iraq, titled “Baghdad Bonanza: What Happened to Iraq’s Oil Money?“ (winter 2006) and another report on the privatization of intelligence (winter 2007).
A British citizen, Chatterjee grew up mostly in Calcutta and Darjeeling in India and has resided in Northern California for many years where he has been active in local media and politics.
...HideFernando Garavito awarded 2006 Cultural Freedom Award
“Fernando Garavito”:http://www.fernandogaravito.com/, now residing in the United States, is a journalist, writer, and professor who was forced into exile after being threatened for speaking out against government corruption in his native Colombia. In 2002, Garavito was a full-time professor in the department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Rosario in Bogotá when he wrote about Colombia’s drug cartels and right-wing paramilitary groups. He left for the United States with his family and found work teaching in Maine. Later, he was invited to join the International Cities of Asylum project, which provides refuge for threatened writers and their families. With help from PEN New Mexico, Garavito and his family relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico. He worked at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque as a lecturer and Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Latin American Studies.
Garavito is currently a Master’s candidate in Spanish, with an emphasis in Hispanic Literature, in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico. He writes a weekly column for the The Santa Fe New Mexican on politics and current affairs, and teaches Spanish to elementary school students.
...HideLeanne Hinton awarded 2006 Cultural Freedom Award
Leanne Hinton is a linguist and advocate for the perpetuation and revival of Native American languages. Dr. Hinton is chair of the Linguistics Department at the University of California at Berkeley and has been a professor in that department since 1978. She is a founding member of the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, whose mission is to assist California Indian communities and individuals in keeping their languages alive.
She strongly supports interdisciplinary approaches to linguistics and linguistic research that relates to community needs and interests, as well as to theory. Dr. Hinton has published 8 books and numerous articles on the state of indigenous languages. She co-developed a language learning technique for communities in which the only Native speakers are elderly and few in number. Called the Master Apprentice approach, this immersion method pairs an elder, fluent speaker with a younger non-speaker, where the language is taught and learned in a culturally meaningful setting. She also organizes the bi-annual Breath of Life Workshops at UC Berkeley, where California Indians with no living speakers of their Native languages use scholarly and other resources to reconstruct and start speaking their Native languages again.
...HideCharles Kernaghan awarded 2006 Cultural Freedom Award
Charles Kernaghan is the director of the National Labor Committee, an independent, non-profit human rights organization focused on the protection of worker rights—especially those of the young women in Central America, the Caribbean, China and other developing countries, who assemble garments, shoes, toys, and other products for export to the U.S. Kernaghan became involved in the struggle to defend international labor rights after participating in a peace march through Central America in December 1985. He became the director of the NLC in 1990. Pre-1985, Kernaghan taught at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and at SUNY’s Harry Van Arsdale Labor College in New York City. He has worked as a photographer, furniture mover, carpenter and shop steward (Carpenters Union Local 608), and as a cab driver.
Under Kernaghan’s directorship, the National Labor Committee has played the leading role in bringing the issue of sweatshop abuses and child labor before the American people, and placing it squarely on the national agenda. Kernaghan has led numerous fact-finding missions to Central America and the Caribbean—most recently bringing a delegation of U.S. university students to investigate working conditions in the free trade zones. He and the NLC have hosted U.S. tours of workers from Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti and China, made several videos, written numerous research reports, and run a number of highly successful international solidarity/corporate campaigns, which have gained enormous media attention and helped the NLC to develop one of the best social justice networks in the country. The NLC now works with over 10,000 religious, labor, student, women’s, human rights, solidarity, and community groups across the country.
...HidePatricio Martin awarded 2006 Cultural Freedom Award
Paricio Martín is a staff attorney for the Mexican Center for Environmental Law, a non-governmental organization (NGO) founded in 1993 that works to protect Mexico’s environment and natural resources. Based in Cancun, Patricio is the only staff attorney working to protect the fragile coral reef ecosystems of the region from threats by high-density hotel development, urban sprawl, and other forms of environmentally destructive economic development. Martín provides legal support for NGO’s, other social organizations, individuals, public officials, and members of the private sector who are working on protecting the natural resources of the state of Quintana Roo. He organizes conferences, workshops, and press events, and writes informational materials to increase the public’s awareness of the importance of mangrove protection, the consequences of over-growth of the tourist destinations, and how to keep abreast of the complex environmental situation of the Mexican Caribbean.
A significant project that Martín is working on is the protection of Cayo Centro, a three-mile long barrier island in the Banco Chinchorro Biosphere Reserve, the Caribbean’s largest atoll, whose healthy and breathtakingly varied ecosystem is currently threatened by the cruise-ship industry. Martín and other antidevelopment activists hold workshops at fishing cooperatives and schools, encourage residents of the island to speak out, to learn zoning laws, and to expose violations by the developers.
...HideHugo Morales awarded 2006 Cultural Freedom Award
Hugo Morales is the Executive Director of Radio Bilingüe, Inc. In 1976, Mr. Morales and an all-volunteer staff of farmworkers, former farmworkers, and artists founded Radio Bilingüe, which began radio broadcast operation over the entire San Joaquin Valley in California, on July 4, 1980, to affirm the First Amendment free speech rights of Latinos.
Radio Bilingüe is a transnational satellite community radio service in Spanish, English and Mixtec (an indigenous Native American language in Mexico) that serves Latino radio audiences in the Northern Hemisphere. It has its headquarters in Fresno, CA. Regional offices are in Salinas, Lamont and El Centro. The national production studios are in San Francisco. Radio Bilingüe is the recognized national Spanish-language radio service for the public radio system in the United States. It serves over half a million listeners with its pioneering daily Spanish-language national talk show, Línea Abierta, its independently produced news service, Noticiero Latino, and its rainbow of Spanish-language folk music for its national Latino audiences. The entire 24-hour daily operation is devoted to informing hard-to-reach, low-income, Latino populations in California and across the U.S.
Mr. Morales is a Mixtec Indian from Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. He was raised in Oaxaca until the age of nine when his family immigrated to California. Throughout his youth he was a farmworker. After graduating from high school in 1968, he went on to graduate from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. In 1994, he became the first resident of the San Joaquin Valley to be a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
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