On the night of October 11, 1997, a teenager was found, badly beaten, on a street corner in downtown Fairbanks, AK. Nobody saw what happened to 15-year-old John Hartman, but he died the next day from his injuries. Seventeen years later, the investigation into who murdered him continues to divide the city.

This story aired on SOTRU’s Alaska episode. Hear the whole hour here.

Tulsa, Oklahoma sits at a crossroads of American identities. In a special episode of SOTRU, we travel to the middle of Middle America to see what happens when these identities collide. We explore one of the country’s deadliest race riots, an incident that the city spent a long time trying to forget; visit a lovingly-crafted museum dedicated to spreading poetry to rural Oklahoma; and — in two special stories produced by This Land Press — visit two churches, one struggling mightily to integrate and another building a shrine for undocumented immigrants in a state with some of the harshest immigration laws in the nation.

Riba DeWilde grew up in a small Native community in Alaska. They hunted, trapped, and lived almost entirely off the land. Now, as an artist, Riba draws on those skills, but she takes them even further. She hunts for her food, then uses the bones of animals she’s killed to create jewelry and sculptures that have been featured in museums across the state and country. She’s rooted in Native Athabascan traditions. But as a woman carver, she breaks them too.

This story aired on SOTRU’s Alaska episode. Hear the whole hour here.

The United States has the world’s largest prison population. There are currently over 2 million people in American prisons or jails — and even more under some kind of “correctional supervision.” In fact, if you added up all the people in America in prison, on probation, or on parole, it’d total about 6 million — just a little smaller than the population of New York City. The system is vast, but how well is it working?

In this episode of State of the Re:Union, we explore how a group of families in Albuquerque, NM raised troubling questions about the local police department’s use of lethal force; how a legal loophole left Native women vulnerable to domestic abuse; how a program at San Quentin State Prison is encouraging men to take responsibility for their crimes; and more.