Check out Highlights from our Community Showcase and Virtual Gallery!

Demarcating Territory

Session Objective: to address the connections between colonisation, redlining, borders, and control over environmental spaces

Today in Climates of Resistance, we are 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.

Read: about our guest speaker, ‘poetician’ Antonio López.

Antonio López

Born and raised in East Palo Alto, California, Antonio López received his B.A. in Global Cultural Studies and African & African-American Studies from Duke University before earning a Masters in Fine Arts (poetry) at Rutgers-Newark. His debut collection, Gentefication, won the 2019 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry, and is set to be published later this year.

As a 2018 Marshall Scholar, Antonio completed a Masters in Philosophy in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, where he served as poetry editor for the Oxford Review of Books. He is now pursuing a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University while fighting gentrification in his hometown as the newest and youngest councilmember for the City of East Palo Alto.

Antonio López, East Palo Alto
(pronouns: he/him/his)

Consider: the combination of institutional discrimination and microaggressions Antonio describes in one of his poems. Pay special attention to the way various conceptions of ‘territory’ underly the issues he is writing about.

Grading Rubric

Trauma is weighted as follows:

Formal Essays (55-65%)

Write “Children of Immigrants” – 10% (doubled if undocumented)

Write “first generation” – 15%

Mention the color of the coyote’s van – 10%

Keep family in the past tense – 5%

Write birthplace next to its murder per capita rate – 20%

In-Class (35%)

Don’t correct them when they say your name wrong – 5%

Go by Tony starting sophomore year – 10%

Stay quiet when they make fun of Keisha – 5%

Believe Tim when he says, “You just got in because you’re” – 10%

When it’s your turn to read, pronounce it like they do, gwa-da-mala – 5%

Participation (10%)

Turn to the person next to you:

debate your belonging

Learn: about the history of Antonio’s hometown through this article written by a high school student from the neighbouring – and far more well-resourced – city.

A Tale of Two Cities: How racism in housing deeds, redlining and gentrification led to the stark divide between Palo Alto and East Palo Alto

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

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

Making you rich, you soil my love

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

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

Making you rich, you soil my love

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

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.

Think: about creating, crossing, and breaking borders as you examine Prince’s work below.

Sabiyha Prince's piece titled "Crossing Borders." The painting is both oil, ink, and watercolor on canvas. A thick black, blue, and purple line flies down the piece with similar stripes horizontally near the top and bottom of the canvas. Two more of these stripes emerge from the right side jutting and fading out toward the edge of the right side of the painting. On the left an orange horizontal stripe emerges. Different colored stripes including orange, yellow, pink, and red are riddled throughout the piece. Still there remains a large amount of white or "unclaimed" space.

Crossing Borders (Ink and Watercolor on Canvas, 2018)

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.

Prepare: several questions for Antonio in today’s Learning Log.

Google Sites

Report abuse