Category: Excerpt

Excerpt from Corporate Nature

Posted on January 17, 2023January 12, 2023 by Riley Brown

January 17, 2023

In Corporate Nature, Sarah Milne delves inside the black box of mainstream global conservation. She reveals how big international NGOs struggle in the face of complexity—especially in settings where corruption and political violence prevail. She uses the case of Conservation International’s work in Cambodia to illustrate how apparently powerful NGOs can stumble in practice: policy ideas are transformed on the ground, while perverse side effects arise, like augmented authoritarian power, illegal logging, and Indigenous dispossession. Below read an excerpt from the book.

October 2002, Cardamom Mountains:
It’s my first trip into the forest, and I am a fresh Aussie volunteer—the kind that is full of hope, and even ambition, about what I might achieve in the year ahead. My job description is unusual, but somehow it chimes with my self made can-do style. Handed down the day before, in a single word, “WHAM.” The directive came from my enigmatic Australian boss, a Vietnam War veteran, and country director for Conservation International (CI) in Cambodia. Not understanding, I looked at him questioningly. “Winning hearts and minds,” he answered, as he handed me a pair of jungle-standard army boots. “We’ve been good at holding the line, keeping the forest intact, but not so good at working with the locals . . . that’s your job, the communities bit.”

With this in mind, I am now being ushered around the field site by my new Cambodian colleagues. Their language is so foreign, I grimace; the surrounding forest is so green that it’s unnatural, even sickly. Meanwhile, my head is full of ideas from Australia—Indigenous rights and self-determination—the language of my central Australian NGO job and desert home of just one week prior. But there are no outback horizons here. The rainforest on either side of the muddy track we’re following seems impenetrable, somehow claustrophobic. I’m also uncomfortable because, in this stage-managed tour of the field, I am being made into the quintessential foreigner. They call me barang—the Khmer word for Frenchman or white person, deriving from colonial times. It’s the only word I understand in the unfamiliar chatter. At least I know when they’re talking about me.

Blindly riding this wave of NGO teamwork, I find myself en route to a prearranged village event, which will involve us—CI—handing out large sacks of rice and parcels of salt to the local Indigenous people. “This is because they are hungry,” I’m told by my translator, “because the conservation project prevents them from doing slash-and-burn farming.” As we arrive at the local temple grounds, I’m horrified to discover a large crowd of villagers waiting for us. Squatting in the hot sun, they stare as we get off our motorbikes and organize our things—cameras, water bottles, sunglasses . . . too much stuff, in front of people who have nothing. This is the first time representatives from CI or any NGO have formally visited this village. Thus, there’s a sense of anticipation and expectation, plus awe at the sight of a foreign woman who is dressed rather like a man. I now feel doubly self-conscious, unbearably hot, and somehow oversized in my Australian outback field gear.

Even though this is the first official public engagement between villagers and the conservation project, it seems that the proceedings are scripted. Dignitaries like the village chief and the local Forestry Administration boss are greeted and thanked, monks arrive to bless the bags of rice piled high at our feet, and villagers applaud on cue. Then, to my alarm, I’m told that I must give a speech. Totally unprepared, I hesitate, but saying no is not an option. Cringing privately, I begin in English, with my translator standing ready beside me: “Hello, everyone, my name is Sarah, I’m here to help you.” As the conservation project’s new communities officer, I have now entered the story. I’m on stage, in what will become an intoxicating role play, one replete with its own offstage dynamics of fear, manipulation, and passion that I cannot yet imagine

***
Sarah Milne is a senior lecturer in environment and development at the Australian National University. She earned her doctorate in geography from the University of Cambridge. Milne is co-author of Conservation and Development in Cambodia: Exploring Frontiers of Change in Nature, State and Society. Milne has combined research and practice for more than twenty years in the fields of community development and nature conservation, mainly in Cambodia.

Excerpt from Lavender Fields

Posted on January 13, 2023January 12, 2023 by Riley Brown

January 13, 2023

In Lavender Fields, contributors use autoethnography to explore how Black girls and women are living with and through COVID-19. Essays center their pain, joys, and imaginations for a more just future as we confront all the inequalities that COVID-19 exposes. Today we offer an excerpt from reelaviolette botts-ward from her chapter “#BlackGirlQuarantine Chronicles: On Womanist Artistry, Sisterhood, Survival, and Healing.” Below read the excerpt.

By reelaviolette botts-ward
Kai hands me a large bottle of hand sanitizer from under her denim coat, sneaking me the high-priced liquid substance with the subtlety of a secret, as though making this exchange public could have deadly effects for the both of us. “You sure?” I asked as I hesitated to hold the bottle in my hand as my own. If anything, I thought she might need it more than I. An unhoused Black womxn living at the encampment on the corner, Kai was much more vulnerable to the coronavirus than me. I had told her how I’d just come from scouring every drugstore within a fifty-mile radius of West Oakland and found nothing. The news kept saying keep sanitizer in yo pocket, but where in the world was a girl gon’ get some from?! Kai leaned in close and whispered, “Girl, you see that box inside my tent? I’m good!” She pointed to a large cardboard container with a label that read 50 Piece Sanitizer. “You take this; I know you gon’ need it.”

I was so grateful for her in that moment for having a homegirl neighbor who shows me what sisterhood feels like in the middle of a pandemic. As she wiped down all her possessions with bleach-drenched paper towels, I grabbed a cloth and helped her clean any potential trace of COVID germs from the half-broken wooden dresser. Kai had her quarantine care plan on lock. She let me know that she would be “cleanin’ and carryin’ on” as ritual in this pandemic. The ethic of care she modeled for the fragments of her homespace, precarious to airborne particles and to the unpredictability of fire that travels through wind, does not diminish the brutal fact that she is damn tired of being homeless.

The next week Kai invites me to protest on behalf of Black womxn who live at the encampment. We are demanding that the local motel allow them to stay in vacant rooms since COVID has prevented its normal flow of guests. My sign reads, “Black womxn deserve safe housing in a fuckin pandemic!” The motel refuses, as the owner calls the cops to dissipate the unassuming crowd. They arrive, tell us to go home, and gradually, we do.

I am saddened by the turnout. Nobody came ’cause nobody cared. Unhoused Black folks, and their particular vulnerabilities to the virus, never became central to communal conversations about the layered impacts of this disease. The intersection of race/class/gender/precarity never centered Kai and her needs. The violence of housing insecurity, and the impossibility of shelter in gentrified Oakland, is only exacerbated by this pandemic. The mockery of shelter in place is that Kai, and all my homegirl neighbors who live at the encampment on the corner, wasn’t never even sheltered, to begin with.

***

reelaviolette botts-ward is a doctoral candidate in the African Diaspora Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research is on Black women’s healing spaces, and she looks at the ways in which embodied, ancestral, spiritual, and creative healing occurs within and beyond the physical landscape of home. Her first book, mourning my inner [black/girl] child, was published with Nomadic Press in 2021. In her role as founder and CEO of #BlackWomxnHealing, she works closely with the California Black Women’s Health Project and Flourish Agenda to provide sister circle-style retreat opportunities for Black women across California.

Excerpt From Nuclear Nuevo México

Posted on December 19, 2022December 19, 2022 by Riley Brown

December 19, 2022

In Nuclear Nuevo México, Myrriah Gómez examines the experiences of Nuevomexicanas/os who have been impacted by the nuclear industrial complex, both the weapons industry and the commercial industry. Gómez argues that Los Alamos was created as a racist project that targeted poor and working-class Nuevomexicana/o farming families, along with their Pueblo neighbors, to create a nuclear empire. The resulting imperialism has left a legacy of disease and distress throughout New Mexico that continues today. Below read an excerpt from the book.

On June 20, 2008, my family and I gathered for my cousin Ricky’s funeral. Our large family occupied ten pews in Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe church in Pojoaque, New Mexico. Ricky—the second oldest of fifteen grandchildren—left behind a wife and two daughters. He was a lifelong employee at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was a victim of at least one nuclear spill that exposed him to radiation. Afterward, he suffered multiple-organ failure over the course of ten years. We buried him exactly one month before his forty-second birthday. When he was dying, Ricky revealed to our family that after one exposure incident, he had walked into the Los Alamos grocery store after work. The grocery store was shut down and decontaminated after his passage, yet no one came to Ricky’s house, or our neighboring houses, to check on our potential exposure with Geiger counters after Ricky came home. His obituary says that he died from an “undisclosed illness,” and the cause of death on his death certificate reads “unknown,” but we know what killed Ricky: Los Alamos.

My cousin Ricky was not the first member of our family whose life was claimed by “the Lab,” as northern New Mexicans call it. On December 23, 1977, my family buried my paternal grandfather, Ramón Gómez Sr., eight years before I was born. My grandpa and three of his four brothers—Pedro Ramón, Tobias, and José Margarito—all worked in Los Alamos at various times. Those four brothers died of cancer. My grandpa cleaned the tools that were used on plutonium and uranium; he died of colon cancer at age seventy-three.1 Their sister, María Felisita (Feliz), never worked at the Lab; she lived to be ninety-two years old. Grandpa Gómez passed away three decades before his grandson Ricky. Both died because of their jobs at Los Alamos.

I grew up in El Rancho, New Mexico, a rural community in the Pojoaque Valley. El Rancho exists within the traditional homelands of the Tewaspeaking peoples of Po’woh’geh Owingeh, known more widely by its colonial name of San Ildefonso Pueblo. Every Sunday morning my family and I attended Catholic Mass inside the pueblo. Every Feast Day (January 23) we shared a meal at my grandmother’s house, and we attended visperas at the pueblo the evening before. It is an Indo-Hispano community by definition and in practice, and it is also a community overshadowed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Lab has brought much pain to many residents of the Pojoaque Valley, including those who work(ed) on the Hill where the Lab is located.

In the 1940s military and scientific personnel chose the Pajarito Plateau to site Project Y (or Site Y) of the secret Manhattan Project, where scientists would develop the atomic bomb. My grandmother’s family and other Nuevomexicanas/os and Tewa people were forcibly dispossessed of their ranches and sacred land on the Pajarito Plateau with inequitable or no compensation. Beginning in the 1940s, Lab personnel directed Valley vecinos to bury contaminated everything in the Los Alamos canyon and nearby along the Rio Grande. The soil and the water that Nuevomexicanas/os once used to irrigate crops is now polluted with toxic chemicals and remnants of nuclear materials. Cancer, thyroid disease, and unexplained organ failure, among other illnesses, now plague our community.

***

Myrriah Gómez is a Nuevomexicana from the Pojoaque Valley. She is an assistant professor in the Honors College at the University of New Mexico.

Visualizing Genocide: An Excerpt

Posted on December 7, 2022December 6, 2022 by Savannah Hicks

December 7, 2022

Visualizing Genocide examines how creative arts and memory institutions selectively commemorate or often outright ignore stark histories of colonialism. The essays confront outdated narratives and institutional methods by investigating contemporary artistic and scholarly interventions documenting settler colonialisms including land theft, incarceration, intergenerational trauma, and genocide. The authors offer honest critique, but in so doing they give hopeful and concrete strategies for the future.

Below, read an excerpt from Visualizing Genocide:

In this volume, we undertake the difficult task of assessing, from Indigenous viewpoints, how histories of colonialism are commemorated in the creative arts and memory institutions—archives and museums. Our unique approach to these weighty issues avoids celebratory appraisals of Indigenous survival alone by examining closely the tools available to engage with the complexities of our collective histories, however contested. In pursuing the topic of visualizing genocide with our invited authors, we are aware that for some, the claim that genocide occurred under the colonial project of imperialism and expansion may be viewed as an extreme measure. Historian Jeffrey Ostler describes the identification of genocide in American Indian history as “contentious,” arguing for an “open-ended approach to the question of genocide that explores several phases and events” to avoid “quarrels about definitions.” While we agree with Ostler that the violence of the colonial project “varied considerably in different times and places according to the goals of particular colonial projects,” the authors included in this volume contribute their essays from the perspective that genocide is an accurate term to describe the imperialism they document through photographs, exhibits, archives, and art.

Our global reach (including essays from artists and writers originating in not only the United States but also Norway, Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean) attempts to identify central themes and tensions as artists and theorists examine responses to assimilation and extermination efforts. Massacres, disease, removals, abrogated treaties, religious intolerance, theft of land, relocation, the kidnapping and forced education of children, and the subsequent social crises of poverty, poor health, and political marginalization form the ground of discussions. Contributors do not seek an easy remedy for the massive upheavals they document, but rather their essays pull the reader into the specific times, places, and tremendously varied strategies of responses employed in an effort to make these truths available. In doing so, they make the “unknowable” accessible and ready for examination, contemplation, and discourse.

In an era characterized by fragmented knowledge, decontextualized sound bites, and instant access, how do we know with certainty the difference between truth and distortion when contemplating past atrocities? While more scholarly literature documenting historically specific events of genocidal processes is emerging, we employ an American Indian studies approach of a multidisciplinary lens—including art history, anthropology, studio arts, and visual culture. Our analysis contends that it is in the open registers of artistic practice and reinterpretation of archival holdings that facts previously considered “unknowable” can be clearly documented.

A primary premise at play in the chapters that follow is that many, if not most, prior assertions of neutrality in the archival records and historical accounts in museum exhibits are, in fact, biased and selective histories. Archivists Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook argue, “Archivists wield enormous power, loathe as many archivists are to admit this and reluctant as many academics are to acknowledge this.” These authors add, “Archival approaches to making records available (or not) . . . create filters that influence perceptions of the records and thus of the past.” Cultural specificity, author voice, and positionality are key factors in telling historical “knowns,” as are social practices such as storytelling, collective arts making, acknowledgment of land, and imaginative reconstructions of the past in performance, poetry, installation, and two- and three-dimensional contemporary arts.

These active interventions in the historic record are essential contributions to genocidal studies. We posit that the erasure and denial of atrocities in the historic record actually aid selective and often sanitized retellings. According to cultural anthropologist Gregory Stanton, denial is the tenth stage of what constitutes genocide globally. Denial is described as the final stage that lasts throughout and always follows genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide . . . deny that they committed any crimes, blame what happened on the victims . . . During and after genocide, lawyers, diplomats, and others who oppose forceful action often deny that these crimes meet the definition of genocide. They call them euphemisms like “ethnic cleansing” instead. They question whether intent to destroy a group can be proven, ignoring thousands of murders. They overlook deliberate imposition of conditions that destroy part of a group. They claim that only courts can determine whether there has been genocide, demanding “proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” when prevention only requires action based on compelling evidence.

Excerpt: Cornerstone at the Confluence

Posted on November 22, 2022November 22, 2022 by Abby Mogollon

November 22, 2022

This week marks the one hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Colorado River Compact. “The Compact,” writes Jason Anthony Robison in the introduction to the new volume Cornerstone at the Confluence, “is the cornerstone of a proverbial pyramid—an elaborate body of laws colloquially called the “Law of the River” that governs how human beings use water from the river system dubbed the ‘American Nile.’ ”

Robison is just one of a chorus of expert voices that emerge in this important new book, published this week. Today we offer an excerpt from Robison’s introduction to the work.

The American West is on fire—and, no doubt, it is not alone.

Not a day has gone by this summer without new media coverage of unrelenting drought, drained reservoirs, record-shattering temperatures, all-consuming forest fires, busted or busting farms, bullets-sweating cities, and so on down the line. Glancing at the U.S. drought monitor, a blood-red octopus hovers over much of the arid region’s heart—the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin—with elastic tentacles splaying hundreds of miles in every direction. And it’s not as though the news or drought monitor are needed to glean what’s going on. You can feel it—from suffocating afternoon rays trapped by urban heat islands to post-apocalyptic, smoky air jetting up in bomb-like plumbs over the ridgeline (or closer). It all feels smothering and smoldering. Something is off, beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Colorado River Compact’s centennial arrives in this surreal space. No fewer than forty million people have come to rely on the life-giving, prosperity-yielding flows controlled by this document. Signed in the colonial city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, on November 24, 1922, the Compact is the cornerstone of a proverbial pyramid—an elaborate body of laws colloquially called the “Law of the River” that governs how human beings use water from the river system dubbed the “American Nile.”

History was made with the Compact’s drafting a century ago. Never before had Western states finessed their tense, frequently contentious relationships over coveted interstate rivers via negotiations under the U.S. Constitution’s Compact Clause. Before the Compact’s drafting, the Supreme Court and its “equitable apportionment doctrine” had been the only place to go. The 1922 negotiations changed that game. And the Law of the River has amassed since.

It’s actually amassing right now, and in ways that will shape the Colorado River Basin and its vast environs for a generation, possibly longer. The Compact’s centennial could not be more serendipitous in timing. In 2000, the most severe drought in recorded history began in the basin. More than two decades later, it’s still here. “Drought” is too tame a word to be clear— “megadrought” or “aridification” better capture what’s happening—but the cause is the same regardless: climate change. Again, you can feel it. What it requires of human relationships with the river system is often difficult for our species. We have to adapt. We, too, have to change. The serendipity lies there. Spurred by the megadrought, new management rules for the river system are being negotiated as the Compact turns a century old—a process that must conclude by 2026. While it does not involve Compact renegotiation in a formal sense, the process nonetheless holds monumental importance for everyone connected to the river system.

And there have never been more of us, accounting for all of human history, than at the Compact’s centennial. The dependent population of forty million people entails a form of record breaking that parallels the climate related events setting new bars across the Colorado River Basin and the globe. The trends are inseparable. Not only does this population inhabit the 244,000-square-mile basin proper—including cities such as Phoenix, Tucson, and Las Vegas—it stretches into urban centers tens and hundreds of miles away. Witness twenty-first-century Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, Salt Lake, and Albuquerque. Extensive agricultural areas, too, flourish from the basin’s flows. Imperial Valley and Mexicali Valley irrigators turn the Sonoran Desert green year-round along the U.S.-Mexico border, and they have countless counterparts. And lest we forget those whose ancestors had been in the basin for centuries or millennia—since time immemorial— before the modern cities and farms sprouted: Native peoples. They consist of thirty federally recognized tribes, including the Navajo Nation residing on a 27,413-square-mile reservation slightly larger than West Virginia.

These people see the Colorado River system through different eyes. If we’re being honest, some don’t see it at all, tapping flows from vast, out-of sight hinterlands for daily use without any sense of where their water comes from. Its origin is a living river system. Whether we’re mindful of that connection or not, it exists, placing us in community—a “basin community” — a character as diverse as the Grand Canyon’s dynamic colors and landforms. There’s no universal vision within this community. Rather, peoples’ wide-ranging reasons for appreciating, enjoying, even loving the river system have broadened considerably since 1922. Our values are plural. That, too, defines the centennial year.

Cornerstone is anchored in this soil. A body of writing about the Compact would be fitting based on its centennial alone—again, a pathbreaking document, warts and all. As fate would have it, however, this milestone arrives at an epic confluence. Climate change and the ongoing megadrought are the elephant in the room—unprecedented in recorded history and forcing that often anxiety-inducing thing for human beings: change. That applies in full force to negotiations over new management rules for the river system during the next several years. An inflection point of generational significance, these negotiations involve dynamics as challenging as any the basin community has faced. Never before have forty million people depended on the river system. Never before has the Law of the River amassed its existing girth and complexity. And never before has the river system been valued for so many diverse, potentially irreconcilable reasons. In a nutshell, there is the centennial itself, and there is the uncanny confluence of events merging with the centennial. Both considerations point in the same direction. . . .

The time is ripe for conversations about the Compact and broader Law of the River.

***

Jason Anthony Robison is a professor of law at the University of Wyoming. Reflecting his deep love of the American West, Professor Robison’s writing and teaching revolve around water, public lands, and Native peoples. He was lead editor of the sesquicentennial volume, Vision and Place: John Wesley Powell and Reimagining the Colorado River Basin, and he authors the long-running treatise, Law of Water Rights and Resources.

Excerpt from ‘Children Crossing Borders’

Posted on September 13, 2022September 13, 2022 by Abby Mogollon

September 13, 2022

In the new work Children Crossing Borders, contributors explore the different meanings of the lives of borderland children in the Americas. This volume draws much-needed attention to the plight of migrant children and their families, illuminating the human and emotional toll that children experience as they crisscross the Americas. Exploring the connections between education, policy, cultural studies, and anthropology, the essays in this volume navigate a space of transnational children’s rights central to Latin American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today we offer an excerpt of this important new work:

***
This book on children on the borders in the Americas was planned and structured before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it has been completed and will be published in a changed world, one in which considerations of the health and well-being of children in the Americas have become even more relevant and in which inequalities related to race, citizenship, ethnicity, social class, and gender have become even more intense and unavoidable. In 2020 millions of children in Latin America and the Caribbean suffered poverty, violence, and a lack of adequate health services. Over 154 million children in Latin America and the Caribbean were out of school during 2020. Serious consequences ensued for the most vulnerable, who depended on schools to access food and sanitary services as well
as psychosocial support (UNICEF 2020a). Many have been denied their
minimum needs and rights, such as food and adequate housing. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), owing to the impact of COVID-19, the number of children living in poor households will increase by 21.7 percent, from 71.6 million to 87.1 million children (UNICEF 2020b). At the same time, even those that enjoy relatively better economic positions suffer depression, isolation, and loneliness as rising unemployment, inflation, and the loss of millions of lives take a toll on all families across the Americas. Hate speech, racism, and intolerance have risen, too, amplifying the reverberation of racist and xenophobic discourses online as well as off-line (UN 2019). As a result many children in the Americas have experienced the same physical and psychological instability that migrant children suffer.

Migrants and refugees across the region have been particularly exposed to the virus, as practicing social distancing is challenging for vulnerable communities. At the same time, border closures and increasing xenophobia have left many migrant families and children stranded when they are in need of protection and humanitarian assistance. Just like migrant families, children experiencing this pandemic have lost their sense of security, challenged by economic, political, spatial, or educational instabilities.

This book intends to reflect on children on the borders in the Americas through theoretical as well as empirical perspectives; it seeks to serve as a toolbox for those who work with children on the borders and to point out and challenge ways in which the media, literature, legislation, public policies, and everyday practices construct and deconstruct migrant childhoods. We seek to provide theoretical and practical tools for better understanding the way in which refugee and immigrant children are represented in different kinds of cultural and literary productions. One of our goals is to offer tools to help educators, social workers, policy makers, and advocates accompany
immigrant children in their journeys of self-recognition, their searches for empowerment, and their struggles for rights and citizenship. We examine the way education, legislation, public policies, literature, and culture are potential tools for combating racism, nationalism, sexism, and xenophobia and for providing opportunities for children and their families to become aware of the experience of immigrants and refugees.

A Decolonial Perspective on Migrant Childhoods in the Americas

In this volume we approach migrant childhoods in the Americas through a decolonial perspective—that is, by considering the structure of social and economic inequalities that go back to the history of European imperialism and colonialism, which have shaped the circulation of children throughout the region at least since colonial times (Mignolo 2002; Rabello de Castro 2020). The main implication of this decolonial perspective is that we resist erasing differences between North and South or adhering to a notion of a prototypical (white, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class), definitive model of American or Latin American childhood against which other children would be compared. Our decolonial perspective on childhood migration in the Americas means that we seek to articulate North and South America through the unifying theme of migrant children, looking at children at the crossroads between colonialism and postcolonialism, diversity and oppression, invisibility and othering, and reappraising difference in migrant childhoods in the Americas in structural power relationships.

Our decolonial approach also has strong implications for our political
economy of knowledge production: we incorporate theories and scholarship written in languages other than English and situated in North and South, as we reject essentializing difference and avoid reaffirming preferences, themes, and concepts that already circulate in international knowledge markets. We seek to create an egalitarian, collaborative space in which horizontal political and epistemic relations are possible regarding the international division of scientific labor. Our book strives to create bonds where long-standing structural and imperial divisions between North and South America exist, ones that have separated and interconnected these parts of the world. Thus, we assume the costs of dissenting and producing theory on children from within North and South.

***

Alejandra J. Josiowicz is professora adjunta and Prociencia Fellow (2021–2024) at the Institute of Languages and Literatures of the Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). She earned her MA and PhD from Princeton University and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Social Sciences of the Getulio Vargas Foundation (CPDOC-FGV) in Brazil. She has published articles, chapters, and a book on childhood studies, children’s literature, and Latin American cultural studies.

Irasema Coronado received her bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of South Florida. She has an MA in Latin American studies and a PhD in political science from the University of Arizona. She is director of the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University and co-author of Fronteras No Mas: Toward Social Justice at the U.S.-Mexico Border and Políticas: Latina Public Officials in Texas.

An Excerpt From ‘Postindian Aesthetics’

Posted on July 18, 2022July 15, 2022 by Mari Herreras

July 18, 2022

Postindian Aesthetics: Affirming Indigenous Literary Sovereignty, edited by Debra K. S. Barker, and Connie A. Jacobs, is a collection of critical, cutting-edge essays on Indigenous writers who are creatively and powerfully contributing to a thriving Indigenous literary aesthetic. This book argues for a literary canon that includes Indigenous literature that resists colonizing stereotypes of what has been and often still is expected in art produced by American Indians.

The book’s foreword from Robert Warrior, gets to the heart of Postindian Aesthetics, and the importance of the scholarship and joy from Indigenous literature:

Veterans of those decades of literary and critical work have become adept at admitting that the attention we as scholars have paid to five or six incredibly accomplished and talented contemporary authors can create a misimpression that those five or six writers are the only ones worthy of scholarly attention. In pulling together this book, Barker and Jacobs have provided page after page of engaging examples of some of what we have been missing.

For instance, I have been a big fan of Heid E. Erdrich’s work for a long time but realized in Denise Low’s essay about her poetry that I had never read an article that gives me a deeper understanding of what makes Erdrich’s work so powerful. Low explicates Erdrich’s richly rendered poems in a way that for me became an invitation to be in dialogue with both the critic and the poet, luxuriating in the poet’s love for language and exquisite crafting and also the critical insights that Low educes in her chapter.

Something similar is true of Susan Scarberry-García’s chapter focused on Luci Tapahonso’s poetry. The chapter shows how Tapahonso brings together a deliberate sense of craft, intense quotidian images, spare language, and straightforward, yet often raw, emotion. Scarberry-García focuses on poems Tapahonso has called “traveling songs,” showing the depth, delicacy, and generosity that she argues are hallmarks of the poet’s work. Similar to my response to Bitsui’s book, reading this chapter had me looking for A Breeze Swept Through, my favorite of Tapahonso’s books. Scarberry-García doesn’t write about it, but nonetheless the chapter had me remembering how I had been mesmerized by A Breeze Swept Through when I first read it and returned to it over and over for well over a year. My search for my copy ended with me realizing it is in my campus office, which because of COVID I have barely spent any time in over the past year. The next time I am there, I am going to find it and bring it home to read.
I could go on and on about these essays, but will let you find your own gems among them, and I will hope that you will also find yourself looking for work by the terrific authors featured here when you are done.

Beyond the salutary work these essays do of showing us how much wonderful work by Native authors remains for readers, critics, and students to read, study, and enjoy, I would be remiss not to add something about the important intervention the book makes in addressing what have been some-times contentious arguments in Native literary studies. In a smart and wel-come way, Barker and Jacobs and the other scholars in this book demonstrate that close readings of literary texts that highlight their formal and stylistic qualities and readings that emphasize the social and political contexts from which these texts emerge are not necessarily at odds.

This important aspect of the book is evident, of course, from its title, in which the terms “aesthetic” and “sovereignty” both appear. The editors do more than propose a truce between partisans of these two critical orientations or suggest that the argument has been much ado about not that much. Instead, the authors of these chapters show us how much we as readers and critics of Native writing need to be able to pay attention to their transcendent language and beautiful crafting while also understanding the importance of the particular contexts from which Indigenous literature transcends. The critical essays collected here do an excellent job of showing how sometimes we can learn more about a particular poem, novel, or essay by paying primary attention to the way its author put it together, while other times we won’t be able to understand where it transcends from without some careful contextualization.
To return to where I started, what I admire and appreciate most is that Barker and Jacobs have managed to make this critical intervention while also giving us an entire volume of essays by readers and for readers. So, if you have grown weary of trying to locate yourself within current debates with Indigenous literary studies, run out of explanations for how Indigenous literature works, or have surrounded yourself with stacks of critical, historical, and other academic books and articles and are starting to feel hemmed in, do yourself a favor and keep turning these pages and reading what these scholars have to say. As you go, make some new stacks of books and a list of new books to look for. Most of all, keep reading.

An Excerpt from ‘A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back’

Posted on June 29, 2022June 28, 2022 by Mari Herreras

June 29, 2022

In 1981, Chicana feminist intellectuals Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa published what would become a touchstone work for generations of feminist women of color—the seminal This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. To celebrate and honor this important work, editors gloria j. wilson, Joni B. Acuff, and Amelia M. Kraehe offer new generations A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back.

Here’s an excerpt from the book’s introduction that’s part of a larger Q&A interview the editors did with each other that shares details of the book, and more specifically here, why Love Letters:

AMY So why create a collection of love letters? What is the significance of that framing?

GLORIA Perhaps it’s because I grew up listening to stories my mother told about my father writing so many love letters to her during their courtship! It signifies deep commitment to human-being and living.

AMY gloria, that sounds so intimate.

JONI It’s very intimate. Meaning, it takes more time and effort. When you think about a love letter, you don’t think about somebody typing something out on a computer. You think about a handwritten letter, in cursive. It’s a romanticized representation of something mundane. It is illustrative of how something so simple can be presented in a profound way. Crafting a love letter is time- consuming, it takes effort and intentionality, and it also takes patience. It’s a different kind of energy, meaning that it’s an opportunity to be vulnerable in ways one might not be face-to-face.

AMY The intimacy that’s conveyed and captured in a love letter can, like you said, Joni, be about quotidian happenings, but life’s texture and complexity are contained in the everyday. So much insight can come from sharing the small bits of life. Those bits are passageways to deeper levels of understanding of another person and their condition. They are symbolic spaces for relationship, and those spaces are opportunities to touch or come into the presence of another being.

gloria, you said that your dad wrote love letters to your mom. We now have digital technologies that allow people to engage with each other very quickly all the time through text and social media, but a love letter is a classic form that has existed across time and in different geographic and cultural locations. It is inflected culturally and differently depending upon who is writing and the tradition that they come from, but it endures as a classic form of dialogue. I think that is important here. This book is in conversation, a deep, committed kind of conversation with the original Bridge authors, and with thousands of other folks. If we look at the number of Google citations for This Bridge Called My Back, it is in the thousands, and they keep climbing every day. That is just citations, to say nothing of the incalculable numbers of other readers who thumb the book’s pages each day. So A Love Letter is in conversation not only with the original Bridge writers but also with every-one who is reading that text and, like us, is passionate about theory in the flesh, sensing and making sense through aesthetic forms of philosophy, knowledge, communication, and collectivity. That is exciting to me, and maybe it is only possible through a love letter.

GLORIA Yeah. You know, as I was thinking about this question, I was thinking that one has to be vulnerable. So when I think of a love letter, I think of it as a radical act of care. It’s like humbling yourself to someone else, opening yourself wide and performing an act that is so private and personal. You know, a love letter is not intended for the world to witness, necessarily, although there are examples of public pronouncements of love. In all, it’s intended for the recipient in a very direct manner.

When I think about love letters that I have written, I recall including traces of myself in the form of swatches of fabric from clothing or artwork, with the intent of distilling, suspending, or cementing a memory. In the case of this Love Letter anthology, my desire was to offer an extension of the sentiments tied to the expression of a love letter, and yet I felt the need to share a space and record it collectively and in material form—record it with others for whom the original book has made an impact. In doing this, the question I thought with and attempted to answer was: What opportunity might be created as an acknowledgement of thanks for each of these women, for their work and its impact on my life because it may not be possible to do so in person?

My response was to attempt a collective love letter, as an insistence for radical love for women of color in the wake of forced silences and settlements via colonialisms and imperialisms; it is an aesthetic pronouncement—an outward declaration of gratitude. But in excess of this, to create an archive of collective voice. Moraga and Anzaldúa would refer to the contributors to This Bridge as “women from all kinds of childhood streets,” who speak to past, present, and current conditions of life in and into the afterlives of containment, migration, silencing, diaspora. For the contributors of the original text, This Bridge Called My Back, who are still present in this life and for those who exist with us in the afterlife— this book serves to express that I am thinking about and with them; thinking with their thoughts and sentiments and creative pronouncements, which reveal the conditions of their existence forty years ago. This Love Letter might illuminate traces of what is still occurring and what might emerge as contemporary conditions and our current moment. And that’s what is, in my opinion, the most radical act of care, like we said in the beginning. Like Joni said, it’s something that you put energy into, writing it out.

AMY Along the same lines as This Bridge, a collection like this one can be healing for so many people. Many contributors returned to the idea of bridges and bridging. Can a love letter be a bridge? Here I’m thinking not only of connection but also healing. Love letters heal in ways that may be different from bridges. Bridges enable us to move and transition. They connect one realm to another because they are liminal spaces, in- between spaces. But love letters might do something else. So in that sense, A Love Letter does not seek to replicate This Bridge. It is not an addition to a series or an attempt to replicate the original text. It is intending something different and for a very different moment in time.

***

gloria j. wilson is co-founder and co-director of Racial Justice Studio and an assistant professor in the School of Art at the University of Arizona. Her research centers cultural studies and Black studies engagements with theories of racial formations, anti-racism, and critical arts-based praxis.

Joni B. Acuff is an associate professor in the Department of Arts Administration, Education, and Policy at The Ohio State University. Acuff utilizes frameworks such as critical race theory, critical multiculturalism, Black feminist theory, and Afrofuturism to develop and disseminate pedagogical and curriculum strategies that activate critical race knowledge in art education.

Amelia M. Kraehe is associate vice president for equity in the arts, co-founder and co-director of Racial Justice Studio, and an associate professor in the School of Art at the University of Arizona. She researches and teaches about intersectional anti-racism, the arts, and creative agency. She is co-author of Race and Art Education and co-editor of Pedagogies in the Flesh: Case Studies on the Embodiment of Sociocultural Differences in Education and The Palgrave Handbook on Race and the Arts in Education.

Birds of the Sun: An Excerpt

Posted on March 30, 2022March 30, 2022 by Savannah Hicks

March 30, 2022

Birds of the Sun explores the many aspects of macaws, especially scarlet macaws, that have made them important to Native peoples living in this region for thousands of years. Although macaws have been noted and marveled at through the decades, new syntheses of early excavations, new analytical methods, and new approaches to understanding the past now allow us to explore the significance and distribution of scarlet macaws to a degree that was previously impossible. The expertise offered in this stunning new volume, which includes eight full color pages, will lay the groundwork for future research for years to come. The volume is edited by Christopher W Schwartz, Stephen Plog, and Patricia A. Gilman, and includes contributions from leading experts in their fields. Enjoy this excerpt from the book’s foreword, which was written by Charmion R. McKusick:

George H. Pepper was the first trained archaeologist to excavate Pueblo Bonito. Little could he have imagined that the macaws he placed in neatly labeled brown paper bags in 1896 would be removed seventy years later for species identification, aging, and illustration of pathologies; and then, fifty years later, they would be reanalyzed using current scientific methods, as part of this study. This examination illustrates the way in which avian studies can contribute to ongoing research. Pepper’s Room 38 macaws were unusual in that they had deeper crania and longer wings than the main body of archaeological macaws, and they appear to have been inbred. The available data suggest that at Chaco Canyon, a special group of humans bred scarlet macaws for some important purpose, over a long period of time.

Although the question of the relationships among Mesoamerica and the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico (SW/NW) has a long history in archaeological research, various studies in the twenty- first century have sought to trace the provenance of objects and materials that originated in Mesoamerica and were acquired and circulated interregionally. The study of scarlet macaws (Ara macao) and, to a lesser extent, military macaws (Ara militaris) and thick- billed parrots (Rhynchopsitta pachyrhyncha; plate 1) has received a particular emphasis due to their multifaceted significance, which stretches throughout the Americas. The presence of living macaws and other parrots in settlements of the SW/NW for months and occasionally years not only requires us to understand the cultural significance of these birds but also allows us to address key questions using new analytical techniques that target skeletal material. Some of these studies employ previously underutilized analytical techniques such as isotopic analyses (Schwartz 2020; Schwartz et al. 2021; Somerville et al. 2010), radiocarbon dating (Gallaga et al. 2018, 2021; George et al. 2018; Watson et al. 2015), and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis (Bullock 2007; Bullock and Cooper 2002; George et al. 2018).

New research on macaws is not limited to these types of analyses, however. Others have reviewed the historical issues in SW/NW macaw studies, focusing on key matters such as reassessing the likelihood of macaw breeding at Paquimé and determining the ages at which each macaw from archaeological deposits died (Abramson 1995; Crown 2016; Whalen, this volume). Still other analyses have examined previously gathered collections of macaws and other parrots to identify skeletal pathologies (Fladeboe and Taylor, this volume), clarify frequencies of the macaws and parrots in particular museum collections, and determine whether complete or only partial birds were recovered (e.g., Bishop 2019; Gilman, this volume; Lyons and Crown, this volume; Plog et al., this volume; Schwartz, this volume; Szuter, this volume), or explore the spatial distribution of macaws and parrots within sites relative to other birds and animals (Bishop and Fladd 2018; Plog et al., this volume). This recent spate of complementary research provided the impetus for an Amerind Foundation seminar on macaws and other parrots in April 2019, which in turn has led to the collection of studies presented in the following chapters.

In the archaeological record of the greater Southwest/Noroeste (SW/NW), the presence of macaws and other parrots dates back to at least 600 CE, in the Hohokam area, and to the Ancestral Pueblos in the Mimbres and Chaco regions at least by the tenth century CE (Gilman et al. 2014; Szuter, this volume; Vokes and Gregory 2007:328– 334; Watson et al. 2015). For the protohistoric Pueblos, macaw images are common on kiva murals in the Hopi and Rio Grande regions and on Sikyatki Polychrome by the fourteenth century (Crown 2016; Schaafsma, this volume). Pre- Columbian, historical, and present uses of macaw feathers in Pueblo ritual are profuse (Ladd 1963; Parsons 1939; Tyler 1991). At Hopi, for example, “there is archaeological evidence that parrots were sometimes kept alive by the Hopi for ceremonial purposes. . . . Parrot- bones have also been found in ruined villages of the Hopi not far from their present pueblos. . . . Parrot- feathers are highly prized by the Hopi for the ornamentation of their masks, and in former times were brought from the [O’odham and/or Maricopa] settlements on the Rio Gila and from the northern states of Mexico, where they were obtained by barter” (Fewkes 1900:691– 692, emphasis added). In this connection, sometimes the Hopi Parrot/Macaw Katsina (Kyarkatsina) performs as a huuyan, “bartering,” Katsina (Stephen 1936:282), seemingly encoding the earlier material practice.

The behavioral and genetic characteristics of parrots, including macaws, offer hints as to why human cultures have been so interested in them: “Like humans, parrots as a group have large brains relative to body size, a high density of neurons in the forebrain, advanced cognitive abilities including object permanence and tool use, complex social organization, vocalizations learned through cultural transmission using specialized brain circuits, cooperative problem solving, extended developmental and rearing periods, and exceptional longevity” (Wirthlin et al. 2018:4001). Add the beauty and polychromaticism of their feathers, susceptibility to domestication, and capacity to mimic human speech, and it is no wonder that macaws and parrots— throughout Europe, the Middle East, South and East Asia, and the Americas— have served as symbols, partners, and metonyms of their human “masters” globally: “The Maharajah of Nawanagar had a parrot, one hundred and fifteen years old, which traveled in a Rolls Royce and possessed an international passport; George V’s parrot, Charlotte, used to peruse state and confidential documents over his master’s shoulder. . . . As early as Ctesias, the parrot was praised for its bright plumage and its ability to speak. . . . A fine- looking parrot, wearing a collar and evidently a household pet, still remains on the walls of Pompeii” (Rowland 1978:120–121).

Preparing Native Graduate Students for Success: An Excerpt from American Indian Studies

Posted on March 18, 2022March 18, 2022 by Savannah Hicks

March 18, 2022

In American Indian Studies, Native graduates of the University of Arizona’s American Indian studies (AIS) doctoral program, the first of its kind, share their personal stories about their educational experiences and how doctoral education has shaped their identities, lives, relationships, and careers. Essayists share the benefits of having an AIS program at a mainstream academic institution—not just for the students enrolled, but also for their communities. American Indian Studies also offers Native students aspiring to a PhD a realistic picture of what it takes. While each student has their own path to walk, these stories provide the gift of encouragement and serve to empower Native students to reach their educational goals, whether it be in an AIS program or other fields of study. Read the excerpt below for a glimpse into the experiences of the essayists.

The editors asked Native UArizona AIS PhD graduates to write about their educational experiences earning their doctorates using storytelling, a traditional means of passing knowledge and information for Native Peoples. In the resulting chapters, nine Native graduates who hold the highest scholarly degree in the academy from the first AIS program highlight their personal voices and stories, sharing their messages, lessons, and advice as gifts to future American Indian graduate students.

Personal stories of mentorship, networking, relationships, reciprocity, sacrifices, commitment, challenges, and triumphs shape this book. These stories are unique to the individuals, their families, and their communities. Their narratives provide insight into the journeys of American Indian graduate students pursuing advanced degrees and their experiences after earning the degree. We (co-editors) hope that giving voice to the AIS Native doctoral graduates in these stories will inspire future generations of American Indian students to follow in their footsteps—stories that are realistic so Native students are better prepared to succeed.

The personal narratives of struggle and success shared throughout this book help to reduce the invisibility of Native doctoral students and graduates in the larger mainstream dialogue that result from such statistics (Blair 2015; Brayboy et al. 2012; Shotton et al. 2013). While each student has their own path to walk, these stories can also serve to empower others to reach their own educational goals, whether it be in an AIS program or other field of study.

American Indian Studies: Native PhD Graduates Gift Their Stories is a collection of personal narratives from nine Native graduates of the UArizona AIS doctoral program. Here, these alumni tell their own stories of endurance and resiliency, hardship and struggles, and accomplishment and success in their own words. Not only do their perspectives provide insight into the diverse and dynamic experiences of Native doctoral students but they also serve as role models of encouragement for those following in their footsteps. In all ways, they illustrate the extensive benefits of having an AIS program at a mainstream academic institution, not just for the students enrolled but for Native communities as well.

The University of Arizona Press