Demarcating Territory
Session Objective: to address the connections between colonisation, redlining, borders, and control over environmental spaces
This week in Climates of Resistance, we finish Unit 2 and transition to Unit 3 by focusing on how demarcating territory (setting specific but artificial boundaries) serves to reinforce and maintain colonialism, racism, and environmental injustice. This happens on the macro level – e.g., through strict migration controls over international borders – and at more micro scales – e.g., through urban zoning laws.
Marginalised communities around the world regularly experience the violence of territorial lines. This includes the risks faced by migrants crossing borders, as we saw with our Hamilton exegesis; unequal health outcomes for those encountering inequitable infrastructure; and the forced relocation of Indigenous Nations to reservations that have been intentionally shrunk over the years. Review today’s asynchronous materials to critique how colonial thinking guides the prison-industrial complex, immigration policies, and spatial politics.
Understand: the relationship between imperialism, colonial practices, and environmental control through this “Theory at a Glance” overview and by watching Becca’s mini-lectures below.
At a Glance_ Imperialism and Colonialism.pdfColonisation Mini-Lecture by Becca.mp4Spatial Politics part 1 (click to read transcript)
Unit 2 has focused on Disparate Distribution, exploring unequal access to environmental risks and resources. Today, we are considering how spatial politics - historical and contemporary control over land - is at the root of many of these inequalities.
The most dramatic and devastating form of spatial politics shaping our world today is colonialism. We often think of colonisation as something that happened in the past, but its impacts - and the mentality of borders and resource control - are still very much ongoing today.
Colonisation is an imperial practice through which one country or group of people claims the rights to other people, territory, and their resources.
In recent centuries, most of Africa experienced exploitation colonialism: European powers made use of local populations for cheap and slave labour, and forcibly extracted minerals, agricultural products, and more from African nations. For most African territories, the goal of Europe was not to make a new home for Europeans, but to bring the riches of Africa back to European countries. Great portions of Asia also experienced this form of colonisation.
The Americas and Australia experienced settler colonialism. This was a land grab in addition to stealing resources and forcing labour. Through settler colonialism, Europeans moved to new places with the explicit intention of taking over the space. This kind of colonialism is very different than individual immigration - the goal is not to assimilate into the new culture and join the local people’s systems, but rather enforce your own kind of government. In settler colonialism, the existing communities are forced to assimilate to the settlers’ society. And they are frequently subjected to genocide and/or involuntary relocation in order to ‘make space’ for the settlers.
Most exploitation colonialism formally ended in the 1900s, as many countries gained independence. But many territories still experience external and disputed control: Guam, the Falkland Islands, Bermuda, Western Sahara, and more. And many places that experienced settler colonialism (the vast majority of the Americas and much of the Pacific) are now fully governed by the settlers, with Indigenous Nations vastly marginalised. Colonialism is not a thing of the past - both in these direct forms of colonisation, and in the way that borders and spatial control continue to inform policy.
Demarcating Territory Mini-Lecture by Becca.mp4Spatial Politics part 2 (click to read transcript)
The idea of claiming and owning land is central to colonial thinking. And these ideas of demarcating territory have played out again and again, at different scales.
Part of the American settler colonial project was forced relocation for Indigenous populations, setting aside certain pieces of land as “reservations” - expecting Native peoples to stay in these spaces and granting limited rights within and outside them.
Through redlining, banks drew borders around Black and minority populations in urban spaces - influencing property rights and development in these places.
Through gerrymandering, politicians draw borders around the demographics that will help keep them in power.
Through international borders - which were drawn by colonial practices, and are just as arbitrary as gerrymandered lines - settler governments now control who can access the territory and resources they forcibly claimed.
All this control over land is paralleled by control over bodies.
Slavery is often involved in both exploitation and settler colonialism. Local populations are used for cheap and slave labour, and people are traded as slaves across territories. Most of us know a bit about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, when more than 12 million African slaves were brutally shipped to the Americas. But the slave trade took place in many other colonised spaces: African slaves were taken by European powers to Asia to work plantations, and many people from India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia were forcibly sent to South Africa to work there.
In contemporary practice, slavery is abolished in America - except not really. Involuntary servitude is constitutionally allowed as punishment for crime.
And we police the border, historically redlined zones, and predominantly minority areas very differently than we do predominantly white and economically well-off spaces. The result is that Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and immigrant communities are horrifically overrepresented in our prison system - and that the use of their forced labour is completely legal. And it all fundamentally comes back to spatial politics and colonial claims to land.
So today, we’re going to unpack a little about these connections. We’ll take a look at some of the environmental impacts of these various forms of control, and then start to think about different ways to value, understand, and acknowledge Land.
Watch: these videos highlighting the histories and contemporary realities of redlining, gerrymandering, and immigrant detention centres in the United States.
Myles Bess is a multi-media professional who graduated with a BA in Broadcast and Electronic Communication Art from San Francisco State University. Before joining KQED, Bess was a “Rise Up: Be Heard” Journalism Fellow with the Fusion Media Group and interned for Alameda Social Services.
He hosts KQED’s Above the Noise, which explores an array of issues through the lens of racial justice. Big topics are unpacked with the help of data, expert interviews, and the voices of high school students and youth journalists.
Gene Demby is the co-host and correspondent for NPR’s Code Switch team. Before coming to NPR, Gene served as the managing editor for Huffington Post’s BlackVoices following its launch, later covering politics. While working at The New York Times, Demby started a blog about race, culture, politics and media called PostBourgie, which won the 2009 Black Weblog Award for Best News/Politics Site.
Demby is an avid runner...mainly because he wants to stay alive long enough to finally see the Sixers and Eagles win championships in their respective sports. (Gene grew up in South Philadelphia.) You can follow him on Twitter at @GeeDee215.
Connect: these processes to colonisation and (the abuse of) Indigenous peoples’ rights by reading these articles.
PS: Remember that the United States isn’t the only place this happens - this article from 2018 discusses parallels in the colonial logic of American and Australian immigration policies.
Dr Rai Reece is a professor in the Community Justice Services program in the School of Social and Community Services at Humber College, Ryerson University. An interdisciplinary scholar-activist, Dr Reece’s work examines how carceral processes in Canada are organised and maintained by historical and contemporary narratives and practices of white settler colonial violence specific to anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism.
A central feature of her work explores how community-based ethnographic pedagogy can be a tool for social activism and the limitations to that praxis. In 2018, Dr Reece received the Research Excellence Award for her work on “One Seed at a Time”: Evaluating the Impact of the Horticulture Technician Pre-Apprenticeship Program on the Lives of Incarcerated Women.
Graham Lee Brewer is a journalist for KOSU public radio in Oklahoma. The Cherokee Nation citizen is also an associate editor for Indigenous Affairs at High Country News and a regular contributor to NPR and The New York Times. As a board member of the Native American Journalists Association, Brewer has trained large news organisations on how to ethically tell Indigenous stories.
His story about Navajo voters in San Juan County received critical acclaim and won several Native American Journalist Association Awards. He also recently teamed up with Simon Romero from The New York Times to report a story about Governor Kevin Stitt’s falling out with the Tribes over the state’s gaming compacts. The story shined a light on the unique situation Tribes in the state find themselves in as generators of revenue for the state as well as their citizens.
Dr Anne Helen Petersen is an American writer and journalist based in Missoula, Montana, who worked as a Senior Culture Writer for Buzzfeed until 2020, when she went full-time with her subscription newsletter Substack. Peterson holds an MA in English from the University of Oregon and a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Texas.
During her time at Buzzfeed, Peterson reported on the pandemic, student loans, Native American politics, expanding Medicaid, refugee resettlement, #MeToo, and more. In 2020, she published Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.
Harsha Walia is an activist, journalist, and writer based in Vancouver, Canada. Walia is active in migrant justice, Indigenous solidarity, abolitionist, feminist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist movements, and is particularly well-known for her organising work with No One Is Illegal and publishing reports like “Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside” with First Nations collaborators.
Walia is the award-winning author of Undoing Border Imperialism and, most recently, Border and Rule. Trained in law, she currently serves as Executive Director for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. A Sikh of South Asian heritage, her Twitter bio includes the phrase “Inquilab”, an Urdu phrase meaning “revolution”.
Learn: about how spatial politics impact contemporary lives through this write-up by a high school student examining the East Palo Alto-Palo Alto divide.
The Oracle is a newspaper publication produced by and for the students of Henry M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto: a school that has contributed to gentrification, as families scramble to purchase houses within its boundary so their kids can attend.
Since joining The Oracle in January 2020, Julianna Chang has served as a Copy Editor and reporter.
Watch: this piece motivated by the Keystone XL Pipeline that highlights a few of the similarities between the US’ reservation system and racist zoning practices like those that made East Palo Alto.
read full lyrics
Everything’s Red (All Red Everything)
Everything’s Red (All Red Everything)
Everything’s Red
Everything’s Red
Red
Red
Dead
Red
Dead
Red
First off, I send love to Lupe
For giving us hope in this Lakota Sioux way
All Red Everything; Red Nation Rising
Revising our story they’re televising
Child of the Plains, I see 20/20
Poverty porn TV pimp us for money
Tell Diane Sawyer I am a warrior
Give me your camera, send Peltier your lawyer
Free all my people; get them out of prison
Take them to Sundance; show them how we’re livin’
Give youth an outlet, disadvantaged prodigies
Feed these Republicans all our commodities
Put them on the rez from the day they’re born
They won’t survive, cuz their cancer is airborne
Put them in our schools, put them in our shoes
Take away their money and give them our blues
Red
Make everything Red
Words of my ancestors up in my head
Food for thought, our kids underfed
Your oil is mud, they want the Earth dead
Oil 4 Blood
Oil 4 Blood
Making you rich, you soil my love
Oil 4 Blood
Oil 4 Blood
My Mother is clean, that oil is mud
(Keystone) Everything’s Red
(Pipeline) Now everything’s dead
(Keystone) Everything’s Red
(Pipeline) Now everything’s dead
Everything’s Red
Everything’s Red
Red
Red
Dead
Red
Dead
Red
I can’t afford to leave the rez
Government has got me trapped
Our leadership need a tip and most my tribal leaders wack
But they don’t wanna hear that; they just wanna chill
I’m sick, I’ll go to IHS and get a pill (For real?)
Like a song without a title
Feel forgotten like slaves picking the cotton
Forever tribal with no connection to the bible
Plottin’, people rotten, sometimes I’m suicidal
Feeling like No Exit, Generation X shit
Text messages and sex, what I connect with
Technology, get this world to acknowledge me
My ancestors studied numbers and astrology
Lakota philosophy; keep them haters off of me
Keystone XL, you smell like an atrocity
To my home and my ancestors I am loyal
Build that pipeline and I’m burning down your oil
Oil 4 Blood
Oil 4 Blood
Making you rich, you soil my love
Oil 4 Blood
Oil 4 Blood
My Mother is clean, that oil is mud
(Keystone) Everything’s Red
(Pipeline) Now everything’s dead
(Keystone) Everything’s Red
(Pipeline) Now everything’s dead
Everything’s Red
Everything’s Red
Red
Red
Dead
Red
Dead
Red
Frank Waln is an award winning Sicangu Lakota Hip Hop artist and music producer from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. A Millennium Scholar, Waln attended Columbia College Chicago where he received a BA in Audio Arts and Acoustics. While in Chicago, Frank became more aware of the connections between Native American youth on reservations and Black youth in urban spaces: “we are both being oppressed by this system that was imposed on us”.
In 2010, Waln became the youngest Native American Music Awards winner in history for producing “Scars and Bars” with his group Nake Nula Waun (I am always ready, at all times, for anything). Waln has written for various publications including Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society and The Guardian. Frank travels the world telling his story through performance and doing workshops focusing on self-empowerment and expression of truth.
Realise: that decolonisation is not a metaphor, but the active “repatriation of Indigenous land and life”. Decolonisation is not about the reconciliation of settler guilt. Nor is it focused on settler futures. It is unsettling, in its truest and fullest sense. Read more in this article by Tuck and Yang.
Note: This article is really good, and please do read it thoroughly - but it isn’t critical for your Learning Log, so you can take your time with it and work on it throughout the week.
tuck_and_yang_2012_decolonization_is_not_a_metaphor.pdf
Eve Tuck is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. Dr Tuck is Unangax̂ and is an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska. She earned a PhD in Urban Education from The Graduate Center, The City University of New York in 2008.
Tuck’s research focuses on how Indigenous social thought can be engaged to create more fair and just social policy, more meaningful social movements, and robust approaches to decolonisation. She makes a podcast with graduate students called The Henceforward on relationships between Indigenous and Black communities on Turtle Island.
Wayne Yang’s work transgresses the line between scholarship and community. Before his academic career, he was a public school teacher in Ohlone territory (now called Oakland, California), where he co-founded the Avenues Project, a youth development non-profit.
Dr Yang writes about decolonisation and everyday epic organising, particularly from underneath ghetto colonialism. He is interested in the complex role of cities in global affairs: cities as sites of settler colonialism, as stages for empire, as places of resettlement and gentrification, and as always-already on Indigenous lands.
Sometimes he writes as la paperson, an avatar that irregularly calls.
Think: about creating, crossing, and breaking borders as you examine Prince’s work below.
Artist and anthropologist Dr Sabiyha Prince is a native Washingtonian whose paintings explore memory, personal growth, identity, and African American experiences in the US. With a doctorate in cultural anthropology and an undergraduate degree in communications arts, Sabiyha relies on her background as a social observer and activist to inform her visually –delving into anti racism, environmental justice and other issues to inform her visual work.
A former faculty member in the department of anthropology at American University, Sabiyha has authored books and journal articles that explore the impacts of urban change and societal stratification on Black populations. She has also directed educational programming and political mobilisation campaigns for The Washington Office on Africa, Greenpeace, USA and Black Voices for Peace.
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