Thesis Chapters by amrah salomon
Dissertation Chapter. Submitted / In Review to a journal:
Indigenous communities occupied by mul... more Dissertation Chapter. Submitted / In Review to a journal:
Indigenous communities occupied by multiple European colonizers exist in transcolonial space (Taylor Garcia 2011) between the overlap of competing and mutually reinforcing colonialisms. Through oral history, archival research, and an Indigenous critical geography method I call eco-memory I examine the Yuma Crossing site, a strategic transportation point on the Colorado river that also marks the U.S.-Mexico border, as an example of how competing colonial regimes reinforce each other through extraction, representation, carcerality, and memory. I employ a pedagogical reading practice to illustrate how a nuanced understanding of the technologies of colonialism led to an Indigenous politics of abolitionist autonomy within Mexico theorized by anarchists during the 1910 revolution, and how this differs from a politics of Indigenous sovereignty that has developed in the U.S. and Canada. The incarceration in the Yuma prison of the Mexican anarchists the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) who theorized abolitionist autonomy as an anti-colonial strategy during the Mexican revolution is analyzed to understand the influence of the Mexican revolution on border Indigenous communities and consider the difference between liberal reformist and autonomous tendencies.
I conclude the paper by speculating on the futurity of Indigenous autonomy on the border through the 1930s Tohono O’odham “Stoah Bith” uprising that utilized Mexicanness, the border, and autonomy in rejection of the limitations on U.S. federally recognized sovereignty in order to expose the tension between these political frameworks. And I consider how O’odham anti-border resistance and engagement with Zapatismo continues to this day as a strategy for O’odham who are critical of the complicity with border militarization that has occurred since federal recognition.
Books by amrah salomon
Making Citizenship Work, Aug 4, 2022
Making Citizenship Work: Culture and Community, 2022
In Making Citizenship Work: Culture and Community. Edited by Rodolfo Rosales. Routledge. July 21,... more In Making Citizenship Work: Culture and Community. Edited by Rodolfo Rosales. Routledge. July 21, 2022.
https://www.routledge.com/Making-Citizenship-Work-Culture-and-Community/Rosales/p/book/9780367762391
Abstract:
This paper examines how government Indian policies, extraction, and genocide have put some tribal nations in the position of having to internalize colonial logics and practices to survive colonial occupation, which extends to how Indigenous peoples define and practice nationhood and tribal citizenship. Following the metaphor of a carbon copy, I ask how Indigenous nations risk becoming faded imprints of colonial states through the internalization of federal government definitions of nationhood, sovereignty, citizenship, and the settler colonial conflation between capitalism, extractive development, and nation-building. Central to this consideration is the metaphor and materiality of carbon, as an indicator of extraction, a fuel, a pigment used in writing and painting, and ancestral matter which many Indigenous epistemologies consider sacred. I work this analysis through the metaphor of the carbon copy, a technological process of reproduction using carbon paper and applied pressure to produce an under-copy, which is not an exact replica but rather is a near replica- a capturing of traces and imprints that documents the original and could be stored or circulated beyond the original recipient but whose quality of reproduction is determined by the pressure applied through the original. The term carbon copy is also a verb, written as “cc”, which is used now in electronic communications to represent to whom else we are circulating a message or the process of circulating a copy of a message or document.
I use the concept of the carbon copy and “cc” to detail a few key methods of pressure, transfer, and circulation of colonial concepts of nationhood and belonging in Indian country through media, legality, and archival surveillance, and what the tertiary effects of this reproduction and circulation can be for Indigenous determination and decolonization. I trace how Indigenous nations have been formed through capitalist extraction, particularly mining and land theft, and how tribal governments have often then responded negatively to traditionalist efforts to protect sacred lands and waters. I also explore the link between the issue of archival containment and the use of colonial documents historically produced through efforts to occupy and extract land and disinherit Afro-Indigenous and other mixed race kin as the burden of proof descendants must use to define their indigeneity and relationship to land and culture for tribal enrollment. I conclude with a consideration of the question, if tribal enrollment practices based on colonial archives are inherently anti-Black and linked to violence towards land, why do we continue to depend on them as authentic evidence of belonging and relationship to land? I explore other practices and poetics of relationality to consider then how we can connect with relatives (human and nonhuman) beyond the nation, colonialism, extraction, and genocide.
Chapter 15: Offering our stories: resistance narratives and the marketing of justice
This chap... more Chapter 15: Offering our stories: resistance narratives and the marketing of justice
This chapter works from the vantage points of Indigenous and traditional storytelling to critique the common story-based practices used by social justice activists to develop campaigns, record and remember social movement history, and narrate their struggles. The chapter uses examples from the Zapatistas, the movement by families of the disappeared in Latin America, and Indigenous story-telling and research justice methods to provide a nuanced analysis of story-based and narrative strategies as well as providing suggestions on how to use stories in ways that build dignity and power instead of cheapening or silencing experiences or maintaining unjust power relations between victims of injustice and oppressors who hold state or social power. The article examines in depth the cinematic impacts of and tensions between Latin American Third Cinema's neorealist journalistic approaches and new consumer market driven campaign advertising used by activists through a critique of the film No about the Chilean plebiscite to end the Pinochet dictatorship. Key terms discussed in this chapter include piegogia, an alternative epistemological approach and critique of western concepts of pedagogy that are rooted in Gramscian or leftist theory, as well as expansion on the term research justice, the focus of this collection, and it's application to the fields and practices of history, literature, activist organizing, and story-telling perspective.
Papers by amrah salomon
American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 2024
This article examines Bad Indians: A tribal memoir by Deborah A. Miranda in relation to the settl... more This article examines Bad Indians: A tribal memoir by Deborah A. Miranda in relation to the settler origin myths of California and the ways Central Coast Indigenous communities have been represented in film and literature. Against the genocidal tropes of disappearance or inevitable victimhood, Miranda’s mosaic tracing of the figure of the Bad Indian as resistance and resilience poetic shaping nonlinear genealogies and as a mode of queering kinship against intergenerational historical trauma unsettles the imagined permanence of California to regenerate a pluriverse of Indigenous land-temporalities before and after the settler narrative might end.
Bristol University Press eBooks, Aug 14, 2017
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Feb 1, 2023
Drawing on the Difuentes It's 1 a.m. My homegirl and I are working on tribal research after our k... more Drawing on the Difuentes It's 1 a.m. My homegirl and I are working on tribal research after our kids are asleep. We are exhausted but driven by curiosity knitted from our connection to the confluence of two great rivers via our O'odham and Yo'emem ancestors. She's found another elder and is thinking through questions for an oral history interview. The next night, we stay up again. The elder's interview released a flood of tears and triggers-the bitter taste after the contamination of sacred rivers, words he remembers in native language despite being beaten in school for speaking it, and how my great-great aunt Carolina was the traditional midwife who pulled him into this world. That shocks me, but the deeper we get into this work, the tighter the weave revealed on our ancestral basket of relations. We push beyond objectivity toward understanding our people and felt experiences. Our families read and critique our work, assessing whether we are dutiful daughters. We text spiritual strategies for carrying these stories another lifetime forward: plant medicines, ceremonies. I tell her about a research roadblock, and she councils, "Wear turquoise and ask ancestors to help." Descendants are troublemakers. Once I presented a paper on the Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón at a historical conference. I was analyzing multiple revisions of one Magón short story about the work of organizers in peasant and slave revolts, which-I argued-revealed what he learned from building relationships with campesinos and tribal nations beyond his circle of educated urban activists, and I speculated, from his own mixed-race Zapotec heritage. But the historians pushed back. One refused to imagine that a mestizo like Magón could identify with a specific tribe and was corrected by Magón's
Policy Press eBooks, Jul 22, 2015
Routledge eBooks, Aug 4, 2022
v EPIGRAPH vamos hacia la vida. Ayer fue el cielo el objetivo de los pueblos: ahora es la tierra.... more v EPIGRAPH vamos hacia la vida. Ayer fue el cielo el objetivo de los pueblos: ahora es la tierra... los revolucionarios vamos adelante. El abismo no nos detiene: el agua es más bella despeñándose. Si morimos, moriremos como soles: despidiendo luz.
Water Justice and Technology: The COVID-19 Crisis, Computational Resource Control, and Water Relief Policy, 2022
We Need to Reject "Sustainable" Technologies
That Reproduce Colonial Gold Rush Devastation
on Ind... more We Need to Reject "Sustainable" Technologies
That Reproduce Colonial Gold Rush Devastation
on Indigenous Peoples.
Water Justice and Technology: The COVID-19 Crisis, Computational Resource Control, and Water Relief Policy, 2022
Mining and Draining the Southwest is destroying Indigenous Communities in the name of Sustainable... more Mining and Draining the Southwest is destroying Indigenous Communities in the name of Sustainable Development.
Political Theology Network Symposia, 2020
https://politicaltheology.com/decolonizing-the-disaster-defending-land-life-during-covid-19/
The... more https://politicaltheology.com/decolonizing-the-disaster-defending-land-life-during-covid-19/
The current conjuncture of crises – climate change, pandemics, the rise of fascism and state violence, the backlash of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy against anti-racism, feminism, and queer/trans liberation, the deepening extractivism of capitalism, the further dispossession and disposability of mass incarceration and deportation, etc. – can be dismantled, swiftly, like a flood, a hurricane, a wildfire – if we can organize ourselves. This article introduces the term disaster decolonization and reflects on anti-border and sacred site activism during Covid19 and the relationships between border violence, disaster colonialism, and syndemics- pandemics that deepen lines of systemic inequity.
Science for the People, 2019
This ground-breaking new article, "No Comemos Baterías: Solidarity Science Against False Climate ... more This ground-breaking new article, "No Comemos Baterías: Solidarity Science Against False Climate Change Solutions", by the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice (CIEJ) explains why lithium batteries and electric cars exploit Indigenous peoples and threaten sacred waters in South America, how they actually create more carbon emissions that gas vehicles, and why they are not justice-centered solutions for climate change. We also define a decolonial feminist science practice and present a call to action for scientists and researchers who want to challenge capitalism and support repatriating land and life to Indigenous peoples.
Science for the People Magazine, 2019
https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol22-1/agua-es-vida-solidarity-science-against-false-cl... more https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol22-1/agua-es-vida-solidarity-science-against-false-climate-change-solutions/
This ground-breaking new article, "No Comemos Baterías: Solidarity Science Against False Climate Change Solutions", by the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice (CIEJ) explains why lithium batteries and electric cars exploit Indigenous peoples and threaten sacred waters in South America, how they actually create more carbon emissions that gas vehicles, and why they are not justice-centered solutions for climate change. We also define a decolonial feminist science practice and present a call to action for scientists and researchers who want to challenge capitalism and support repatriating land and life to Indigenous peoples.
Dissertation, 2019
This dissertation positions together cartographies of containment such as the archive, the border... more This dissertation positions together cartographies of containment such as the archive, the border, transcolonial zones, and transfigured colonial carceral institutions alongside geographies of excessive fluidity such as the cuerpo-agua, difuentes, descendant spatial excess, and abolitionist autonomies to illustrate different practices of mapping relations through violence and through felt narratives of survivance and resistance. The project models a felt methodology that fleshes the archive through theoretical memoir, critical native and women of color feminist geography, and multi-directional eco-memory to theorize descendant spatial excess to the colonial archive. In doing so the project examines the colonial carcerality of the U.S.-Mexico border and theorizes anti-colonial abolitionist autonomy. Colonial carcerality is defined as the way that colonialism accompanies the development of the carceral state through the process of making space bounded, extractable, accumulatable alongside marking bodies for death, dispossession, and disappearance through the nexus of extraction, genocide, slavery, war, racialization, partition, and gendering regimes of domination. Colonial carceral geographies are most evident in transcolonial zones such as the Yuma Crossing, a point on the lower Colorado River in Yuma, Arizona, that are occupied by both Spanish and U.S. colonialisms that transfigure each other’s institutions and practices of extraction, representation, carcerality, and memory in ways that reinforce both colonial projects. The mutual transfigurations of Spanish and Anglo colonialisms limit and erase indigeneity and reproduce anti-blackness, as is illustrated through the dispossession and detribalization of O’odham and Yaqui laborers in Yuma in the early 1900s. Radical Mexican accompliceship is examined through analyzing how the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), whose leadership was once incarcerated in the Yuma Territorial Prison, developed a nuanced critique of colonialism and carceral statecraft that led to a politic of regeneración, anti-colonial abolitionist autonomy, during the 1910 Mexican revolution. Indigenous regeneration theorized in English is put into conversation with Mexican anarchist regeneración to imagine a cartographic unbounding of colonial carceral geographies through acts of abolition (burning the mission) and regeneration (re-storying and restoring relationships between native women’s and women of colors’ bodies and liberated geographies). Cuerpo-agua geographies and epistemologies are centered in this process.
I am interviewed for this article / zine by Indigenous Action Media Collective and Friends. I am ... more I am interviewed for this article / zine by Indigenous Action Media Collective and Friends. I am not an author of this piece.
This article explores the connections and lessons learned in confronting heteropatriarchal violen... more This article explores the connections and lessons learned in confronting heteropatriarchal violence across the various locations of Chicano Studies inside and outside the academy, specifically focusing on lessons that emerge from online zines,
social media, and the public denouncement of abusers by two women of color and queer activist zines, QUARREL and MalintZINE. Community accountability practices such as denuncia, harm reduction, and the reclaiming / flipping back of feminine and queer monstrosity are detailed as examples of how the zines document dignity centered community building as an alternative to violence. Bridging the community / academic
divide allows us to consider the diverse forms of institutionalization that maintain heteropatriarchy and locate ways to engage various institutional limits that reproduce violence. By analyzing the creative alternatives of community-based accountability processes, this article presents examples of how community activism can support creating greater gender justice within Chicano Studies programs.
Key Words: heteropatriarchal violence, denuncia, community accountability, cultures of silence, mactivism
2015 Chicana/o In/Civilities: Contestación y Lucha Cornerstones of Chicana & Chicano Studies. Annual Conference Proceedings. National Association of Chicana & Chicano Studies. , 2015
Plenary talk given for the 2015 annual meeting of the National Association for Chicana and Chican... more Plenary talk given for the 2015 annual meeting of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) in San Francisco, CA on April 15-18. The theme of this year's meeting was "Chicana/o In/civilities, Contestation y Lucha, Cornerstones of Chicana and Chicano Studies".
The theme of the Chicana Plenary this year was "Fuerte Hermandad: The Call for Healing and Resistance in Chicana/o
Studies, our Institutions, and in our Communities". The plenary was moderated by the current Chicana Caucus chairs Samantha Rodriguez and Theresa Torres and the other two panelists were Maria Carolina Morales, (activist with Communities United Against Violence or CUAV) and Yvette Flores-Ortiz, University of California, Davis.
This theme was chosen to launch the new working group within NACCS, the Ad Hoc Committee on Heteropatriarchial
Institutional Violence, to address issues of gender, sexual, and sexuality based discrimination, harassment, and violence within the academy as well as within community and activist spaces. My paper which will be published soon in the official conference proceedings papers discussed the work of the AdHoc Committee, the need for transformative justice through the stories of victims of violence, a harsh critique of white supremacist carceral feminisms, and numerous examples, critical questions, and complex provocations for the field of Chicana/o Studies to consider in approaching this issue through a transformative justice framework emerging from queer women of color theory and activism.
Conference Presentations by amrah salomon
Indigenous Action Media Podcast, 2020
In this premiere broadcast we talk with some long-time Indigenous Action co-conspirators about th... more In this premiere broadcast we talk with some long-time Indigenous Action co-conspirators about their thoughts on “land acknowledgements.”
Guests: Amrah Salomón J, Alex Soto & Chizhi Jack
Hosts: Bonn, Anthony, Klee
About the podcast: Welcome to Indigenous Action where we dig deep into critical issues impacting our communities throughout Occupied America/Turtle Island. This is an autonomous anti-colonial broadcast with unapologetic and claws-out analysis towards total liberation. So take your seat by this fire and may the bridges we burn together, light our way.
Subscribe, like, share on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Play. Email us at [email protected].
Music: ¡Alas! “Safety’s Off” www.soundcloud.com/alasmusika/safetys-off
#landacknowledgements
www.indigenousaction.org/podcast
Uploads
Thesis Chapters by amrah salomon
Indigenous communities occupied by multiple European colonizers exist in transcolonial space (Taylor Garcia 2011) between the overlap of competing and mutually reinforcing colonialisms. Through oral history, archival research, and an Indigenous critical geography method I call eco-memory I examine the Yuma Crossing site, a strategic transportation point on the Colorado river that also marks the U.S.-Mexico border, as an example of how competing colonial regimes reinforce each other through extraction, representation, carcerality, and memory. I employ a pedagogical reading practice to illustrate how a nuanced understanding of the technologies of colonialism led to an Indigenous politics of abolitionist autonomy within Mexico theorized by anarchists during the 1910 revolution, and how this differs from a politics of Indigenous sovereignty that has developed in the U.S. and Canada. The incarceration in the Yuma prison of the Mexican anarchists the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) who theorized abolitionist autonomy as an anti-colonial strategy during the Mexican revolution is analyzed to understand the influence of the Mexican revolution on border Indigenous communities and consider the difference between liberal reformist and autonomous tendencies.
I conclude the paper by speculating on the futurity of Indigenous autonomy on the border through the 1930s Tohono O’odham “Stoah Bith” uprising that utilized Mexicanness, the border, and autonomy in rejection of the limitations on U.S. federally recognized sovereignty in order to expose the tension between these political frameworks. And I consider how O’odham anti-border resistance and engagement with Zapatismo continues to this day as a strategy for O’odham who are critical of the complicity with border militarization that has occurred since federal recognition.
Books by amrah salomon
https://www.routledge.com/Making-Citizenship-Work-Culture-and-Community/Rosales/p/book/9780367762391
Abstract:
This paper examines how government Indian policies, extraction, and genocide have put some tribal nations in the position of having to internalize colonial logics and practices to survive colonial occupation, which extends to how Indigenous peoples define and practice nationhood and tribal citizenship. Following the metaphor of a carbon copy, I ask how Indigenous nations risk becoming faded imprints of colonial states through the internalization of federal government definitions of nationhood, sovereignty, citizenship, and the settler colonial conflation between capitalism, extractive development, and nation-building. Central to this consideration is the metaphor and materiality of carbon, as an indicator of extraction, a fuel, a pigment used in writing and painting, and ancestral matter which many Indigenous epistemologies consider sacred. I work this analysis through the metaphor of the carbon copy, a technological process of reproduction using carbon paper and applied pressure to produce an under-copy, which is not an exact replica but rather is a near replica- a capturing of traces and imprints that documents the original and could be stored or circulated beyond the original recipient but whose quality of reproduction is determined by the pressure applied through the original. The term carbon copy is also a verb, written as “cc”, which is used now in electronic communications to represent to whom else we are circulating a message or the process of circulating a copy of a message or document.
I use the concept of the carbon copy and “cc” to detail a few key methods of pressure, transfer, and circulation of colonial concepts of nationhood and belonging in Indian country through media, legality, and archival surveillance, and what the tertiary effects of this reproduction and circulation can be for Indigenous determination and decolonization. I trace how Indigenous nations have been formed through capitalist extraction, particularly mining and land theft, and how tribal governments have often then responded negatively to traditionalist efforts to protect sacred lands and waters. I also explore the link between the issue of archival containment and the use of colonial documents historically produced through efforts to occupy and extract land and disinherit Afro-Indigenous and other mixed race kin as the burden of proof descendants must use to define their indigeneity and relationship to land and culture for tribal enrollment. I conclude with a consideration of the question, if tribal enrollment practices based on colonial archives are inherently anti-Black and linked to violence towards land, why do we continue to depend on them as authentic evidence of belonging and relationship to land? I explore other practices and poetics of relationality to consider then how we can connect with relatives (human and nonhuman) beyond the nation, colonialism, extraction, and genocide.
This chapter works from the vantage points of Indigenous and traditional storytelling to critique the common story-based practices used by social justice activists to develop campaigns, record and remember social movement history, and narrate their struggles. The chapter uses examples from the Zapatistas, the movement by families of the disappeared in Latin America, and Indigenous story-telling and research justice methods to provide a nuanced analysis of story-based and narrative strategies as well as providing suggestions on how to use stories in ways that build dignity and power instead of cheapening or silencing experiences or maintaining unjust power relations between victims of injustice and oppressors who hold state or social power. The article examines in depth the cinematic impacts of and tensions between Latin American Third Cinema's neorealist journalistic approaches and new consumer market driven campaign advertising used by activists through a critique of the film No about the Chilean plebiscite to end the Pinochet dictatorship. Key terms discussed in this chapter include piegogia, an alternative epistemological approach and critique of western concepts of pedagogy that are rooted in Gramscian or leftist theory, as well as expansion on the term research justice, the focus of this collection, and it's application to the fields and practices of history, literature, activist organizing, and story-telling perspective.
Papers by amrah salomon
That Reproduce Colonial Gold Rush Devastation
on Indigenous Peoples.
The current conjuncture of crises – climate change, pandemics, the rise of fascism and state violence, the backlash of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy against anti-racism, feminism, and queer/trans liberation, the deepening extractivism of capitalism, the further dispossession and disposability of mass incarceration and deportation, etc. – can be dismantled, swiftly, like a flood, a hurricane, a wildfire – if we can organize ourselves. This article introduces the term disaster decolonization and reflects on anti-border and sacred site activism during Covid19 and the relationships between border violence, disaster colonialism, and syndemics- pandemics that deepen lines of systemic inequity.
This ground-breaking new article, "No Comemos Baterías: Solidarity Science Against False Climate Change Solutions", by the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice (CIEJ) explains why lithium batteries and electric cars exploit Indigenous peoples and threaten sacred waters in South America, how they actually create more carbon emissions that gas vehicles, and why they are not justice-centered solutions for climate change. We also define a decolonial feminist science practice and present a call to action for scientists and researchers who want to challenge capitalism and support repatriating land and life to Indigenous peoples.
social media, and the public denouncement of abusers by two women of color and queer activist zines, QUARREL and MalintZINE. Community accountability practices such as denuncia, harm reduction, and the reclaiming / flipping back of feminine and queer monstrosity are detailed as examples of how the zines document dignity centered community building as an alternative to violence. Bridging the community / academic
divide allows us to consider the diverse forms of institutionalization that maintain heteropatriarchy and locate ways to engage various institutional limits that reproduce violence. By analyzing the creative alternatives of community-based accountability processes, this article presents examples of how community activism can support creating greater gender justice within Chicano Studies programs.
Key Words: heteropatriarchal violence, denuncia, community accountability, cultures of silence, mactivism
The theme of the Chicana Plenary this year was "Fuerte Hermandad: The Call for Healing and Resistance in Chicana/o
Studies, our Institutions, and in our Communities". The plenary was moderated by the current Chicana Caucus chairs Samantha Rodriguez and Theresa Torres and the other two panelists were Maria Carolina Morales, (activist with Communities United Against Violence or CUAV) and Yvette Flores-Ortiz, University of California, Davis.
This theme was chosen to launch the new working group within NACCS, the Ad Hoc Committee on Heteropatriarchial
Institutional Violence, to address issues of gender, sexual, and sexuality based discrimination, harassment, and violence within the academy as well as within community and activist spaces. My paper which will be published soon in the official conference proceedings papers discussed the work of the AdHoc Committee, the need for transformative justice through the stories of victims of violence, a harsh critique of white supremacist carceral feminisms, and numerous examples, critical questions, and complex provocations for the field of Chicana/o Studies to consider in approaching this issue through a transformative justice framework emerging from queer women of color theory and activism.
Conference Presentations by amrah salomon
Guests: Amrah Salomón J, Alex Soto & Chizhi Jack
Hosts: Bonn, Anthony, Klee
About the podcast: Welcome to Indigenous Action where we dig deep into critical issues impacting our communities throughout Occupied America/Turtle Island. This is an autonomous anti-colonial broadcast with unapologetic and claws-out analysis towards total liberation. So take your seat by this fire and may the bridges we burn together, light our way.
Subscribe, like, share on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Play. Email us at [email protected].
Music: ¡Alas! “Safety’s Off” www.soundcloud.com/alasmusika/safetys-off
#landacknowledgements
www.indigenousaction.org/podcast
Indigenous communities occupied by multiple European colonizers exist in transcolonial space (Taylor Garcia 2011) between the overlap of competing and mutually reinforcing colonialisms. Through oral history, archival research, and an Indigenous critical geography method I call eco-memory I examine the Yuma Crossing site, a strategic transportation point on the Colorado river that also marks the U.S.-Mexico border, as an example of how competing colonial regimes reinforce each other through extraction, representation, carcerality, and memory. I employ a pedagogical reading practice to illustrate how a nuanced understanding of the technologies of colonialism led to an Indigenous politics of abolitionist autonomy within Mexico theorized by anarchists during the 1910 revolution, and how this differs from a politics of Indigenous sovereignty that has developed in the U.S. and Canada. The incarceration in the Yuma prison of the Mexican anarchists the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) who theorized abolitionist autonomy as an anti-colonial strategy during the Mexican revolution is analyzed to understand the influence of the Mexican revolution on border Indigenous communities and consider the difference between liberal reformist and autonomous tendencies.
I conclude the paper by speculating on the futurity of Indigenous autonomy on the border through the 1930s Tohono O’odham “Stoah Bith” uprising that utilized Mexicanness, the border, and autonomy in rejection of the limitations on U.S. federally recognized sovereignty in order to expose the tension between these political frameworks. And I consider how O’odham anti-border resistance and engagement with Zapatismo continues to this day as a strategy for O’odham who are critical of the complicity with border militarization that has occurred since federal recognition.
https://www.routledge.com/Making-Citizenship-Work-Culture-and-Community/Rosales/p/book/9780367762391
Abstract:
This paper examines how government Indian policies, extraction, and genocide have put some tribal nations in the position of having to internalize colonial logics and practices to survive colonial occupation, which extends to how Indigenous peoples define and practice nationhood and tribal citizenship. Following the metaphor of a carbon copy, I ask how Indigenous nations risk becoming faded imprints of colonial states through the internalization of federal government definitions of nationhood, sovereignty, citizenship, and the settler colonial conflation between capitalism, extractive development, and nation-building. Central to this consideration is the metaphor and materiality of carbon, as an indicator of extraction, a fuel, a pigment used in writing and painting, and ancestral matter which many Indigenous epistemologies consider sacred. I work this analysis through the metaphor of the carbon copy, a technological process of reproduction using carbon paper and applied pressure to produce an under-copy, which is not an exact replica but rather is a near replica- a capturing of traces and imprints that documents the original and could be stored or circulated beyond the original recipient but whose quality of reproduction is determined by the pressure applied through the original. The term carbon copy is also a verb, written as “cc”, which is used now in electronic communications to represent to whom else we are circulating a message or the process of circulating a copy of a message or document.
I use the concept of the carbon copy and “cc” to detail a few key methods of pressure, transfer, and circulation of colonial concepts of nationhood and belonging in Indian country through media, legality, and archival surveillance, and what the tertiary effects of this reproduction and circulation can be for Indigenous determination and decolonization. I trace how Indigenous nations have been formed through capitalist extraction, particularly mining and land theft, and how tribal governments have often then responded negatively to traditionalist efforts to protect sacred lands and waters. I also explore the link between the issue of archival containment and the use of colonial documents historically produced through efforts to occupy and extract land and disinherit Afro-Indigenous and other mixed race kin as the burden of proof descendants must use to define their indigeneity and relationship to land and culture for tribal enrollment. I conclude with a consideration of the question, if tribal enrollment practices based on colonial archives are inherently anti-Black and linked to violence towards land, why do we continue to depend on them as authentic evidence of belonging and relationship to land? I explore other practices and poetics of relationality to consider then how we can connect with relatives (human and nonhuman) beyond the nation, colonialism, extraction, and genocide.
This chapter works from the vantage points of Indigenous and traditional storytelling to critique the common story-based practices used by social justice activists to develop campaigns, record and remember social movement history, and narrate their struggles. The chapter uses examples from the Zapatistas, the movement by families of the disappeared in Latin America, and Indigenous story-telling and research justice methods to provide a nuanced analysis of story-based and narrative strategies as well as providing suggestions on how to use stories in ways that build dignity and power instead of cheapening or silencing experiences or maintaining unjust power relations between victims of injustice and oppressors who hold state or social power. The article examines in depth the cinematic impacts of and tensions between Latin American Third Cinema's neorealist journalistic approaches and new consumer market driven campaign advertising used by activists through a critique of the film No about the Chilean plebiscite to end the Pinochet dictatorship. Key terms discussed in this chapter include piegogia, an alternative epistemological approach and critique of western concepts of pedagogy that are rooted in Gramscian or leftist theory, as well as expansion on the term research justice, the focus of this collection, and it's application to the fields and practices of history, literature, activist organizing, and story-telling perspective.
That Reproduce Colonial Gold Rush Devastation
on Indigenous Peoples.
The current conjuncture of crises – climate change, pandemics, the rise of fascism and state violence, the backlash of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy against anti-racism, feminism, and queer/trans liberation, the deepening extractivism of capitalism, the further dispossession and disposability of mass incarceration and deportation, etc. – can be dismantled, swiftly, like a flood, a hurricane, a wildfire – if we can organize ourselves. This article introduces the term disaster decolonization and reflects on anti-border and sacred site activism during Covid19 and the relationships between border violence, disaster colonialism, and syndemics- pandemics that deepen lines of systemic inequity.
This ground-breaking new article, "No Comemos Baterías: Solidarity Science Against False Climate Change Solutions", by the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice (CIEJ) explains why lithium batteries and electric cars exploit Indigenous peoples and threaten sacred waters in South America, how they actually create more carbon emissions that gas vehicles, and why they are not justice-centered solutions for climate change. We also define a decolonial feminist science practice and present a call to action for scientists and researchers who want to challenge capitalism and support repatriating land and life to Indigenous peoples.
social media, and the public denouncement of abusers by two women of color and queer activist zines, QUARREL and MalintZINE. Community accountability practices such as denuncia, harm reduction, and the reclaiming / flipping back of feminine and queer monstrosity are detailed as examples of how the zines document dignity centered community building as an alternative to violence. Bridging the community / academic
divide allows us to consider the diverse forms of institutionalization that maintain heteropatriarchy and locate ways to engage various institutional limits that reproduce violence. By analyzing the creative alternatives of community-based accountability processes, this article presents examples of how community activism can support creating greater gender justice within Chicano Studies programs.
Key Words: heteropatriarchal violence, denuncia, community accountability, cultures of silence, mactivism
The theme of the Chicana Plenary this year was "Fuerte Hermandad: The Call for Healing and Resistance in Chicana/o
Studies, our Institutions, and in our Communities". The plenary was moderated by the current Chicana Caucus chairs Samantha Rodriguez and Theresa Torres and the other two panelists were Maria Carolina Morales, (activist with Communities United Against Violence or CUAV) and Yvette Flores-Ortiz, University of California, Davis.
This theme was chosen to launch the new working group within NACCS, the Ad Hoc Committee on Heteropatriarchial
Institutional Violence, to address issues of gender, sexual, and sexuality based discrimination, harassment, and violence within the academy as well as within community and activist spaces. My paper which will be published soon in the official conference proceedings papers discussed the work of the AdHoc Committee, the need for transformative justice through the stories of victims of violence, a harsh critique of white supremacist carceral feminisms, and numerous examples, critical questions, and complex provocations for the field of Chicana/o Studies to consider in approaching this issue through a transformative justice framework emerging from queer women of color theory and activism.
Guests: Amrah Salomón J, Alex Soto & Chizhi Jack
Hosts: Bonn, Anthony, Klee
About the podcast: Welcome to Indigenous Action where we dig deep into critical issues impacting our communities throughout Occupied America/Turtle Island. This is an autonomous anti-colonial broadcast with unapologetic and claws-out analysis towards total liberation. So take your seat by this fire and may the bridges we burn together, light our way.
Subscribe, like, share on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Play. Email us at [email protected].
Music: ¡Alas! “Safety’s Off” www.soundcloud.com/alasmusika/safetys-off
#landacknowledgements
www.indigenousaction.org/podcast
Roundtable Discussion:
Title: Mixed Ancestry: The politics of relationships across difference in resistance to settler colonialism and anti-black racism
Abstract:
The key topic this roundtable proposes to engage is to “...examine genealogies of anti-black racism and colonial racial formations" from the positionality of mixed-ancestry situated within different geographies. Mixed-ancestry identities and subjectivities are shaped in a context of suspicion, a tendency towards dehistoricization, complex erasure, and coerced complicity, yet being mixed is a lived reality that must be contended with given the history of the casta system, hypodescent, migration and diaspora, recognized status, and blood quantum rules. These systems of regulating land and labor are specific to regions and thus signal the historic, spatial, and temporal dimensions of decolonization, in addition to providing insight to the limitations of belonging and/or constructing self-determined realities and identities.
Two key challenges that continue to surface in mixed-ancestry discourses is how to resist colonial structures of racial categorization while not perpetuating anti-black racism and settler colonialism and, how definitions of “being mixed” have been used to negate Indian sovereignty. This roundtable plans to identify a different vocabulary to discuss the mixed-ancestry experience in relation to Indian sovereignty, anti-black racism, settler colonialism, and decolonization so that a fuller conversation regarding race and political mobilization can be had. A key aspect of our discussion will be to situate our analysis in the contexts of Spanish colonialism, U.S. colonialism, French, and Canadian colonialisms and how they created very different realities, possibilities, and challenges for mixed-ancestry folks to work towards self-determination. Taking responsibility for the unique ways that survival was and is conditioned on complicity with the settler state and settler society is an important move towards decolonization, but one that is fraught with tensions. Critical discussions regarding mixed ancestry are often caught in stalemates that we seek to unsettle and shift toward the possibility of discussing mixed-ancestry subjectivities while not perpetuating problematic identity politics that fail to come to terms with the privileges and/or nuances of being visibly mixed, and/or an arrivant (as Jodi Byrd defines diasporic, migrant, refugee, and asylee peoples) in a context of the widespread negation of Indian sovereignty. Refusing lactification, as Fanon put it, is a critical move in prefiguring decolonization, but also accepting responsibility for the privileges granted “castas” and mixed-ancestry people - depending on how one appears to the colonized gaze - will be part of our discussion.
Key concepts we will explore are the politics of recognition, responsibility, reciprocity, and mutual aid in anti-colonial struggles. These concepts will require discussing trauma, healing, affect, ability, loss, belonging, and passing as we navigate anti-colonial struggles.
Co-presenters: Rachel Gorman, Daphne Taylor-Garcia, Yomaira Figueroa, Jennifer Adese.
Amrah Salomon J. Paper Abstract:
This lyrical paper weaves family stories and storytelling methods through a critique of the erasure of mixed ancestries in the conversation between Indigenous Studies and Black Studies on colonialism, settler colonialism, and anti-blackness. This paper argues for a rethinking of this discourse to address the complex transcolonial geographies of California, Arizona, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The paper analyzes the relationships between African, Indigenous, and Mestizo/a peoples in this region and the racial formations of overlapping colonial regimes. The family stories presented disrupt scholarly discourses that make easy distinctions between these communities and complicate the ways that academic framings of identity-based disciplines foreclose the possibility of wrestling with colonialism beyond binary identifications. The paper strongly critiques discourses of mestizaje and indigenismo in Chicana/o Studies that appropriate and romanticize Indigenous identity while also illuminating the structural processes that created a slippage between tribally based Indigenous peoples and Mexican American communities, (a slippage where it became possible for Native people to "pass" as Mexican in order to avoid boarding schools, indenture, and the limitations for survival posed by the reservation system). The paper also explores the connections between anti-black violence and the formation of Indianness, Brownness, and Blackness through colonial racial projects in the Southwest. This paper calls for new vocabularies and new conversations to happen across the three fields of Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, and Chicana/o Studies to re-examine the geographies of the West, Southwest, and Borderlands to consider what problems and limitations for collective liberation and decolonization have been created by the separation of indentity-based disciplines within Ethnic Studies. In addition, these stories call for a deeper wrestling with the dissonant ideas of what addressing colonialism means to different communities.
Students spent about two weeks in class time and online outside of class analyzing each others' papers, voting on texts, topics, and analytical insights, studying Buzzfeed publication standards, and then collectively revising the paper in google docs. I provided guidance, encouragement, conflict mediation, and coaching along the way. Students selected gifs to accompany each section to make the article dynamic for their target audience: young (teens to 30s) internet readers. When students were satisfied with the article and felt it was ready for publication I provided minimal grammatical editting and uploaded the article to the Buzzfeed Community publications interface.
Not all students participated in this project as it extended beyond final exams. The seminar course had about 13 student participants, about half of whom identifed as Native American. Most students were not Native Studies majors, but came from various fields of Humanities and Social Sciences. Out of the 13 students in the course, 10 chose to participate in the Buzzfeed project. The other three students expressed interest but had various personal challenges that limited their ability to participate outside of class meetings. They did however contribute to the project in class, but chose not to be identified in the publication due to their limited availability outside of class meetings. They did receive grade credit for the assignment though for their classroom participation.