(De)Colonising Land

So far in Unit 2, Climates of Resistance has considered the Disparate Distribution of environmental risks and benefits, and the need for evidence-based information about racialised trends in resource access and allocation.

“(De)Colonising Land” takes a closer look at the root causes of these divisions, critically examining imperial histories of colonialism. This week’s materials explore how the inequalities created by settler and exploitation colonisation have been maintained through practices of Indigenous reservations, redlining, gerrymandering, and border control.

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.

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.

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”.

Brita Maret “Sofia” Jannok is a Swedish Sámi artist, singer, songwriter and radio host who has been nominated twice for a Grammy Award. Her music is shaped by a diversity of musical influences including folk, pop, jazz and yoik (a traditional form of song in Sámi music). Born and raised in Sápmi, Sofia is an activist for Indigenous rights. She regularly speaks out against mining on land used by Sámi reindeer herders and uses her music to advocate for her people. “For the unbreakable sinews of kin, I continue to sing. For my future sisters, I raise my voice to the misters. Kings and queens. Cities and trees. Mountains and seas. All that is in between. This is my land. ORDA [tree line].”

Born in Los Angeles, Janel Pineda is a Salvadoran poet and educator. A first-generation college graduate, she earned a BA in English from Dickinson College, where she was a Posse Scholar. She is a part of the editorial team that founded La Piscucha Magazine, a multilingual arts, literature, and culture magazine created by Salvadoran writers, and a member of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). As a Marshall Scholar, Janel holds an MA in Creative Writing and Education from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her debut poetry chapbook, Lineage of Rain, was published from Haymarket Books in February 2021. (Photograph by Luz María Castillo.)

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.