Shell Play, with Toni Jensen

Fireside with Blair Hodges

Toni Jensen grew up around guns. As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father. As an adult, she’s had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. Toni is a Métis woman, with mixed European and Indigenous ancestry. She's no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies and lands of Indigenous people, especially women, and the ways violence is hidden, ignored, forgotten.

This episode was incidentally recorded on May 24, 2022, the day of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. It is dedicated to the memory of those destroyed by gun violence.

Transcript available: firesidepod.org/episodes/jensen.

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