That’s when the United States went in and took over for 19 years.

Alain Martin’s grandfather was born and raised during that occupation, but never spoke about it with his grandson.

Martin came to the US as an adolescent, and after learning about the US occupation of Haiti in college, he decided to make a documentary about it.

Martin called it “The Forgotten Occupation: Jim Crow goes to Haiti,” and framed it as a letter to his grandfather, Brunel.

“Dear Papi,” the narration began, “I’m writing to let you know that I spent the last 10 years of my life making a movie about the US occupation of Haiti.”

Martin describes his “Papi” as being part of a better-off class in Haiti, who had a certain disdain for the poorer majority. 

As an adult, Brunel wasn’t alone in thinking Haiti would be better off if it came under US control again.

Martin said he feels a little guilty about making the film.

“This is a movie that’s going to be critical of the ideas you had about Haiti, about Haitians, about race, about class,” he said. “It’s going to be critical of the love affair that you had with the United States.”

The film actually took more than a decade to make. Martin spent much of it interviewing historians, writers and activists, reading their books and poring over papers and film in archives.

He learned about how, after the 1915 coup, the US moved into Haiti and stayed until 1934. 

The ostensible reason was stabilization, but the film shows there was much more to it. 

“The Monroe Doctrine claimed that the United States can intervene anywhere to maintain its own interests,” Simmons University’s Patrick Sylvain said.

That was President Theodore Roosevelt’s aggressive interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. It was adopted by his successors and used to justify military intervention in Haiti and other neighboring countries in the early 1900s.

Some Haitians — especially those who were better-off — welcomed the Americans at first, thinking they would bring stability and protect Haitian business interests. But Martin said there was a history behind the unrest that the Americans couldn’t solve. Instead, they took advantage of it.

“After slaves defeated Napoleon’s army in 1804, for France to acknowledge Haiti as a nation, it demanded that Haitians pay the slave masters they had defeated reparations,” he said. In short: “We fight; I kick your a–. I’ve got to give you money for losing.”

To pay France, Haiti had to take out loans. By 1915, some 80% of the Haitian government’s budget was still going to foreign banks.

As a result, Martin said, “there was very little money to develop the country, uplift the country, to invest in social programs, to invest in infrastructure. So, people were always upset, always rising up against the government.”

The US brought a form of stability, but in some ways, it also picked up where the French had left off. It took over Haiti’s finances, and National City Bank of New York — Citigroup’s predecessor — profited from its debt.

In the film, Hans Schmidt, a historian who wrote a book on the US occupation of Haiti, described how the US controlled and depleted Haiti’s finances.

“The US took over the customs receivership,” he explained. “They would collect all the revenues, and then hand them over, not to the government, but to pay off the debts first of the foreign investors, and if there was anything left over, then the government could have that.”

The Marines even restored a form of slavery, in which poor Haitians were forced to work for free on infrastructure projects.

Opportunities for exploitation kept growing.

“[You] have more and more American companies who are interested in Haiti to invest in, especially in agriculture,” said University of Virginia Professor Laurent Dubois. “From these guys’ perspective, Haiti was essentially a place that was just waiting to be kind of taken over and turned to profit.”

And that’s what happened when obstacles were removed.

“What is inherently radical about the Haitian Constitution, about a Constitution made by formerly enslaved people?” Haitian journalist Nathalie Cerin asked in an interview with Martin. “Of course there will be things in there that go against imperialist interests.”

The US forced changes to the Constitution, including its ban on foreign ownership of land. 

Americans were now able to take over large swaths of the country, setting up plantations served by cheap local labor, and displacing thousands.

Martin wanted to know — given the US’ history in Haiti — whether Haitians today would welcome the American military’s return, to stop the gangs.

He called his friends and asked, with the violence gripping the country today, if the US should occupy Haiti again.

He posed the question in various ways, pointing out to one friend that he wasn’t even able to attend his grandfather’s funeral. 

A couple of them said no to a US invasion or occupation. Then one after another said yes, some emphatically. 

Professor Sylvain explained that desperation erases memories of past wrongs. He used a Haitian expression, “Yo pran ou nan vant (They’ve got you by the belly)” to express how the one in power isn’t held accountable. “That’s what poverty does,” he said. “It erases dignity. You can’t stand up and say, ‘No.’”

That is why, he said, the past US occupation of Haiti is now largely “forgotten.”

Roxane Gay, a best-selling author, is the documentary’s executive producer. She said she knew nothing about this occupation before seeing a rough cut of the film — despite having Haitian parents and having written books about Haiti. Now, she thinks it’s out at the right time.

“It feels prescient, and it feels in many ways like history could and might repeat itself,” she said. “And that’s always unfortunate when we recognize that not much has been learned.”

The question of whether or not the US should invade Haiti again is abstract, given that the Trump administration has announced no such plans.

The US presence is felt, however, in the deployment of gunboats to the bay of Port-au-Prince, as part of Operation Southern Spear, the US military buildup in the Caribbean. 

When asked if he has any ideas of how the current crisis in Haiti could be resolved, Martin said he doesn’t, but there’s one thing he’s sure of: The United States will have to be involved in some way.

The recent New York screening of his documentary was hosted by the nonprofit group Haiti Cultural Exchange at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.

The film will continue to be screened in the US, Canada and Haiti, and it’s now also available on streaming.

The post At a time of crisis for Haiti, a filmmaker reflects on past US intervention appeared first on The World from PRX.

But one family in Prague, in the Czech Republic, is changing things up with relaxed concerts right in their living room.

From our partners at Deutsche Welle, DW, Reporter Rob Cameron brings us the story.

Click on the player to hear the full story.

The post This family in Prague holds classical music concerts in their own living room appeared first on The World from PRX.

The project is led by a Ukrainian-Canadian singer and a young flutist who was rescued from abduction.

From our partners at Deutsche Welle, DW, Arts Journalist Breandáin O’Shea reports.

Click on the player to hear the full story.

The post Daughters of the Donbas group creates music remembering abducted Ukrainian children appeared first on The World from PRX.

The flight from Rio Branco, the capital of the state, to Jordão, a town with fewer than 10,000 people, takes almost two hours. By boat, it can take up to three days.

The journey to Italy is obviously much longer. But that’s where Acelino was two years ago, painting a huge mural that covered the façade of the last Venice Biennial with colorful parrots, crocodiles and fish. 

He is one of the original members of an Indigenous art group from the Brazilian Amazon called MAHKU, which stands for Movement of the Artists Huni Kuin. It has eight members today, most of them from the same family.

Huni Kuin are native to this area of Brazil, and the group is not only using art to share their Indigenous culture with the rest of the world, but also to gain recognition in their own state in Brazil.

Acelino goes back and forth between Jordão and their village, Chico Curumin, which is three hours away by fast boat. He bought his house with money from his art, and that’s also been one of the goals of MAHKU: to sell art to buy real estate.

“This canvas means we are calling for strength,” he said, showing a painting filled with fish, birds and Indigenous people in bright yellow, pink, orange, blue and green. A snake forms three long waves in the middle.

Art made with ayahuasca

All of MAHKU’s drawings and paintings represent their traditional songs. They create the art after drinking ayahuasca, an infusion prepared with plants from the Amazon. It has hallucinogenic properties, and the Huni Kuin people also use it for rituals and healing.

“My father was a storyteller and musician and I fell in love with the songs, I’m still enchanted with them today,” said Ibã Sales Huni Kuin, Acelino’s uncle and the founder of the group. “We don’t have writing, just memory. The [COVID-19] pandemic took so many of us, we have been killed since the first rubber cycle.”

He was referring to the boom of rubber production in the area in the late 1800s that killed many native people.

Today, there are about 1.7 million Indigenous people in Brazil — less than 1% of the country’s population. Since 1996, their land has been demarcated, but they don’t own it — the federal government does. 

Ibã is 62 years old and he started researching the songs of the Huni Kuin people in the 1980s.

“Ibã was very worried about the loss of their language,” said Kássia Borges, Ibã’s wife. “He thought that with the songs he would recover the language, and he has succeeded.”

Borges is Karajá, another Indigenous group, but she’s been part of MAHKU for the past eight years. Since 2018, Borges and Ibã have lived mostly in Uberlândia, in the state of Minas Gerais, where she is an art professor at the federal university. 

YouTube videos

Iba’s songs and drawings first grabbed international attention thanks to his work with anthropologist Amilton de Mattos.

Mattos, who is a professor at the Federal University of Acre, met Ibã in a training program for Indigenous educators in the late 2000s, and he started filming him.

“They were little videos, Ibã would sing and explain the song showing his drawings,” Mattos said.

Mattos ended up organizing a drawing workshop and then an exhibition with those illustrations in 2011. That was their first show.

Mattos posted images of the exhibit on his blog, and it got the attention of the Cartier Foundation, a contemporary art museum in Paris.

They came to Jordão and bought around 15 drawings for less than $5,000, according to Mattos. Today, each of MAHKU’s paintings sells for anywhere between $10,000 and $30,000.

“As you can imagine, it was a revolution in our lives,” Mattos said.

After the drawings were shown in Paris, Ibã, Acelino and others formalized MAHKU as a group in 2013.

Marc Pottier, an independent art curator who works in Brazil, saw MAHKU’s drawings at the Cartier Foundation. “I thought it was absolutely superb. I loved it,” he said. 

In 2014, Pottier commissioned the group to paint the walls of an old hospital in the city of São Paulo. They made huge snakes walking through the room in their very first mural. 

Pottier believes that, despite MAHKU’s success, Indigenous culture is still under-valued in Brazil.

“They don’t realize how important it is to preserve such a culture, to preserve people who are taking care of nature,” he said.

Pottier explained that the art world can also bring a lot of pressure for native people as they are exposed to greedy collectors and an opaque market.

“It’s very frightening, because you enter the worst of civilization. It’s something you feel like you’re trapped in. It’s another sort of prison,” he said.

Inside museums in São Paulo and alongside cattle in Acre

The Museum of Art of São Paulo has brought the members of MAHKU to the institution around 10 times over the past years, and today, it owns around 70 of their pieces.

Guilherme Giufrida, a MASP curator, said that, at first glance, people might see MAHKU’s work as simple: They draw and paint colorful figures. But he explained that it is just an entry-point. 

“It’s like the tip of the iceberg. But there’s a whole iceberg for you to discover. And then you’ll dive into a philosophical, mythical and very fascinating universe,” he said.

Giufrida said the art market can be greedy and exploitative, and he believes a museum needs to think in a different way.

“The museum is dealing with what we expect to be a collection that will last for centuries — even longer. So, we have a responsibility that goes beyond the immediate demands of the market,” he said.

Despite MAHKU’s success inside museums in Brazil and abroad, they are not very well-known in their own state. 

“There’s a denial of Indigenous culture as the basis for local traditions,” said Fabiana Chaves, a culture producer at the Federal University of Acre. “On the other hand, there’s a lot of appreciation for country culture from the cattle industry that was brought here.”

Cattle were brought to Acre in the 1970s during the military dictatorship years and it’s now the largest industry there. 

Art as advocacy, at home and abroad

In the past few years, two of Ibã’s daughters have been more active with MAHKU: Rita Huni Kuin and Yaka Huni Kuin. They both see a strong connection between their art and advocacy.

“My voice is not only to speak about my culture, but it’s a form of protest, because we Indigenous people are seen as invisible,” said Rita, who is also a leader for Indigenous women.

“We want our work to get as far as possible, to bring respect for Indigenous people, so that we can hold on to our native land with our art,” Yaka said.

Their father, Ibã, shares their sentiment. He’s currently looking for a bigger gallery that can represent them abroad.

“Lately we are not selling a lot of work, our canvases are gathering dust and our members need the money,” he said.

MAHKU will paint a mural at a museum in Denver in November — it will be their first in the US.

Ibã said he hopes international collectors will understand that what they do is not just art, it’s much more than that.

Support for this project was provided by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York.

The post How a Brazilian Indigenous group uses art to fight for survival appeared first on The World from PRX.

The city plans to host more than 3,000 cultural events throughout the year. Parts of the 2026 culture program will also reflect Oulu’s industrial past.

From our partners at Deutsche Welle, DW, Lars Bevanger takes a look at what visitors to the northernmost shores of the Bothnian Sea can hope to see.

Click on the player to hear the full story.

The post Finnish city of Oulu is European Capital of Culture for 2026 appeared first on The World from PRX.

In a midtown Manhattan studio with mirrors and ballet barres, it took no time to get Nakagawa up and dancing.

“Tap dance is my life,” Nakagawa said, laughing. The slim, energetic dancer sported a black turtleneck and gray cargo pants, and her feet created complex rhythms, in a way that seemed effortless.

The 28-year-old from Tokyo has been tap dancing almost her entire life, starting when she was 6 years old. She said she was immediately hooked.

“When I took the tap dance class for the first time I felt like ‘oh, it is very interesting,’” she recalled, “because I can create a rhythm by myself and I can introduce my own rhythm to the other people.”

Nakagawa moved to New York in 2021 to study in the international program at the Broadway Dance Center, which is when she began creating short videos set to hip-hop and contemporary pop music in streets and parks around the city.

“The speed and clarity of her footwork, of her choreography, is remarkable and fascinating. I mean, it draws you in,” said Ryan P. Casey, who profiled Emiko Nakagawa in Dance Magazine’s “25 Dancers to watch in 2026.” It’s a list of the 25 up and coming dancers to watch from the entire dance industry – including ballet, modern, Broadway – from all over the world.

“She consistently churns out these speedy, intricate, mesmerizing videos, oftentimes on a small tap board, which is also intriguing because the limitation of space is such an interesting factor,” Casey added.

Nakagawa creates this magic on a foldable wooden board, just a little bigger than a doormat. And the videos are shot from below, so viewers can see, not just her feet, but her whole body and her location.

“I really love to show my people who follow me on my Instagram both the beautiful New York view and my tap dance style,” Nakagawa explained.

She developed her style by studying traditional American tap dance techniques in Tokyo with a teacher who rigorously trained her. Her technique is unique because she knows old-style tap, but her choice of music and movement is contemporary.

“I just want to do the street style to move a little bigger, like widely, with my tap dancing,” she explained. “I just want to combine hip-hop, like, street style and tap dancing. This is my style.”

Her first Instagram hit was set to Eminem’s “Godzilla,” followed by dances to Kendrik Lamar, Michael Jackson and Diana Ross, among others. 

“What I admire so much about Emiko at this point in her journey is she’s extremely technically capable, but she’s also very interested in style,” said Caleb Teicher, a Bessie Award-winning dancer. They first came across Emiko Nakagawa on Instagram — and have since become a mentor and collaborator.

“She doesn’t just make a lot of sounds and those sounds aren’t just clean,” Teicher explained,“ but she is formulating a personal expression, a personal perspective through tap dance. When I see Emiko dance, I know it is Emiko dancing, even if I didn’t see her face or the outline of her body, I would know it’s her way of dancing.”

She may be young, but Nakagawa has already danced with tap superstars like Michelle Dorrance, in places like the Joyce Theatre and Jacob’s Pillow. And she says she has big dreams: dancing on Broadway one day.  But she doesn’t want to stop there.

“One of the biggest dreams for me is to be a bridge between other countries and Japan,” Nakagawa said, “because the Japanese tap dance community is very small, so it needs to be inspired by other countries’ artists. So, I really want to bring the tap dance spirit of New York.”

Spirit is a word Emiko Nakagawa uses a lot. And it’s something she finds hard to contain. When she speaks, she is soft-spoken and still. But when she dances, she is electric.

“She has a long journey ahead of her,” Teicher said. “She’s still quite young, and even though she’s done a lot and has amassed a great following and has some great credits to her name, she has a lot more she can do as a dancer and choreographer, a tap dance artist. So, I’m excited to see what she does.”

The post This tap dancer from Japan uses New York City landmarks as her backdrops appeared first on The World from PRX.

The play is set on a rock by what is now called Sydney Cove, where six Aboriginal elders and one young man meet to decide whether to welcome people from the eleven ships in the harbor or tell them to go away. Playwright Jane Harrison, who is a descendant of the Muruwari people of New South Wales, said she got the idea to write an Australia Day play almost twenty years ago.

“There hadn’t been a play about the Aboriginal’s perspective on that event,” Harrison recalled, “and so, I thought it’s time for us to get our voice out there.”  

The play premiered in 2013, was part of the Sydney Festival in 2020, and was revived in 2023, when it won a Sydney Theatre Award for best new work. Harrison has turned the play into both a novel and an opera.

Harrison imagines her characters debating how to handle the new arrivals off their shores. Some want to fight the intruders. Others want to welcome them. Harrison said she was very influenced by the Paddy Chayefsky play, “Twelve Angry Men,” about a jury debating to convict or acquit a murder suspect.

Also, she added “I wanted to give my characters western names but kind of slightly old-fashioned names like Walter, et cetera.”

In fact, Wesley Enoch, who’s directed three plays by Harrison, said the playwright wrote a stage direction on how to costume these characters.

“What Jane wrote in the play was they, ‘must wear suits as if they’re at a board meeting,’” he explained, “because contemporary Australia, in this case, the contemporary world, must give status to these characters; that they are not infantilized natives sitting on a rock, you know, that you can say is in the history. The story is absolutely made contemporary.”

Harrison says she’s playing with time. 

“There’s an Aboriginal concept of time which is the past, the present and the future co-existing together,” she said, “and that’s what I really wanted to bring to the fore. That idea that you know we live with the past; it’s in our bodies. The bodies hold the score of colonization.”

Enoch said Australia Day is quite contentious for the Aboriginal community.

“Because we go, yes, it’s the beginning of the colonial project in this country, but it also is the beginning of our oppression as Aboriginal people,” he explained. “Within two years of the colony being established, two-thirds of the Aboriginal population of the region died from smallpox, from frontier wars [or] even just the common cold.  And what Jane does is just subtly bring a lot of those elements into the play. And what I’m interested in is, is this notion of how the retelling of history can tell us something new about ourselves today.”

Indeed, as the elders debate whether to let the visitors in, an ancient custom is invoked.  

“’Welcome to country’ is a ceremony that Aboriginal people participate in, to this day,” Harrison said. “And it involves an elder welcoming the people gathered there in the place and they often talk about ‘you’re welcome to this country from the tops of the trees to the roots of the trees.’ And I think it’s such an act of generosity.” 

Even as the play demonstrates this Aboriginal generosity, Enoch said not all members of the cast were able to get visas to perform the play in New York.

“We had really big issues with visas getting into the United States,” he noted. “The kind of systemic criminalization of Aboriginal people over, you know, centuries has meant that there’s a lot of things in our communities that when we go to get a visa to come to the United States now — even if it’s something we did as kids — we can’t come, you know? And it’s one of those things that is a real shame.”

So, to perform the play in the US, Enoch had to bring in some new Aboriginal actors and leave others behind. Still, he added, “Our stories actually do resonate. We can teach each other how to be better human beings by listening to other people’s stories.”

“The Visitors” will be at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York City through February 1^st.

The post New play reimagines Australian history from Aboriginal viewpoint appeared first on The World from PRX.

They work in home-based workshops using a traditional papier-mâché technique.

Typically, they have to hustle to fill orders, but this year, because of US tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, demand has significantly dropped.

Syed Shahriyar visited some of these artisans in the city of Srinagar and gathered images of their work.

Click on the player to hear the story.

The post Demand for Christmas ornaments hand-crafted in Kashmir drops amid US tariffs appeared first on The World from PRX.

But one thrift store in Canada got a donation that’s so old — it may be ancient. It was a set of jewelry that came from an anonymous donor, which was made up of two medallions and 11 rings.

“The rings did not look like they were in good shape, they just looked old,” said Sandy Parker, manager of The Thrifty Boutique in Chilliwack, British Columbia.

The items looked so old that an employee did some research to see if they had any kind of historical significance.

“You feel like it could be special. We do have an advantage today with Google Images and all that sort of thing. But it doesn’t do everything we need,” Parker explained.

A few months of digging resulted in no real clues, so the store put the set up for sale for $30. Shortly thereafter, a customer noticed the jewelry set and echoed the staff’s initial thinking. So, the thrift store employees sent an email to the archaeology department at nearby Simon Fraser University (SFU).

“I don’t normally respond to these kinds of emails,” said Sabrina Higgins, an associate professor of global humanities and archaeology at SFU. “We get a lot of emails, where people ask us to give them an evaluation on objects. This one was intriguing to me, though, because it came from a thrift store, which is not something I’ve ever experienced in my career.”

After conducting some initial, visual analyses, Higgins and her colleagues believed the items may very well be ancient. The thrift store then donated them to the university for further research.

“There are some really, really, really good forgers out there who know how to make things look ancient,” said Cara Tremain, an assistant professor in the archaeology department, who is part of the team examining the pieces. “But it didn’t look, to me, like these were deliberately made to look old,” Tremain, an expert at identifying forgeries, said.

Despite being donated together, Higgins thinks some of the items actually came from different time periods.

“My earliest estimate is probably the 4th or 5th century CE, and then you know, up into the medieval period,” Higgins said.

The team is also trying to figure out where the items came from.

“They’re very likely from the region that once encompassed the Roman Empire,” Higgins added, “but whether or not all of them come from somewhere in the Balkans or somewhere in Northern Europe, that’s unclear because a lot of this material culture was really translatable across those regions.”

To nail down those details, Higgins said they need to do more research and testing. They’re even recruiting students to help with that by designing a new course around the items at SFU. Tremain is also leading the course and said students will learn how to tackle the ethical questions surrounding this work, too.

“Why did we decide to accept [these items]?” Tremain posed. “And then how can we retrace the steps of the provenance by really not knowing anything about them?”

In fact, Higgins said, as archeologists and museum professionals, her team has a duty to make sure that artifacts like these are returned to their country of origins.

“If we were able to repatriate those, that would be, I think, the best outcome that this course could have,” she said. “And it would probably lead us to an entirely different course in which we would teach the students about repatriation processes and how we engage in that on the ground, and actively doing it.”

The new course is set to start in September of 2026.

The post A thrift store donation in Canada may turn out to be priceless ancient artifacts appeared first on The World from PRX.

The knock-on effect has been that wool has gone from being a valuable resource to a waste by-product for cheese and meat-producing sheep farmers.

Reporter Dany Mitzman, from our partners at Deutsche Welle, DW, has the story.

Click on the player to hear the full story.

The post Italian wool is starting to go out of fashion appeared first on The World from PRX.