City Koh

http://nativeappropriations.com/2018/02/an-apology.html

https://longviewoneducation.org/you-cant-teach-indigenous-history-without-confronting-settler-colonialism/

Community

https://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/designing-recess-in-difficult-times/

Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair by Joseph M. Pierce (2025)

Indigenous relations are often described in anthropological terms, or as expressions of timeless, unchanging kinship ties. In Speculative Relations, Joseph M. Pierce challenges this view, considering the potential of these relations as a means of repairing the damages of history. Pierce approaches Indigenous art and culture not as objects of study, but through relations committed to reciprocity and care for human and more-than-human beings. Drawing on Cherokee thinking, Indigenous queer theory, literary and cultural studies, and art criticism, he illuminates pathways for understanding and resisting the ongoing damages of colonialism while pointing to future worlds and imaginaries that breathe life into Indigenous thought and practice. Analyzing a range of materials—from photography, literature, and sculpture to film and ethnography—Pierce reveals how speculation, as a form of situated knowledge production, can repair and reimagine the worlds that colonialism sought to destroy. In doing so, Pierce highlights how gestures, poetics, and embodiment can uphold tradition and harness the imaginative power of speculation to create pathways for living in good relations.

Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2025)

“To Perpetuate a False Image of History”

Perspectives on Confederate Commemoration from the Black Press

Writing 70 years after the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, the fall of the Confederate capital of Richmond, and the capture of fleeing Confederate president Jefferson Davis, Du Bois nonetheless declared the resolution of the Civil War, in essence, a Confederate victory. The Confederacy, Du Bois argued, had successfully rebuilt its white supremacist power structure and forced Black people back into the status of a violently oppressed underclass. This was achieved through decades of white racial terror, legislative disfranchisement of Black citizens, massacres, and theft. The process of reasserting white supremacy in the South included the recreation of the South’s public built environment. Although Lee himself had repudiated public glorification of the Confederacy as serving only to “keep open the sores of war” (though he endorsed the maintenance of the graves of Confederate soldiers), the generation of white Southerners after him had an insatiable thirst for Confederate monuments, festivals, and flags.

#BinYourButts from artist Natalie Leung Shing

Image of On the Shore, a collaboration between Ackroyd & Harvey and poet Ben Okri, floating on the Thames River. The text “CAN’T YOU HEAR THE FUTURE WEEPING? OUR LOVE MUST SAVE THE WORLD" was made by masking the letters and preventing the grass from making chlorophyll.

Visual artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey have been working on Beuys’ Acorns, an open-ended research project which is a direct continuation of Joseph Beuys’ groundbreaking artwork 7000 Oaks – City Forestation Instead of City Administration (1982, image below shows Beuys with a shovel).

Trailer for 2024 documentary Ackroyd & Harvey: The Art of Activism

Award-winning documentary filmmaker Fiona Cunningham-Reid presents an intimate portrait of internationally acclaimed artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, who work at the intersection of art, activism, biology and ecology. Uncompromisingly preoccupied with the climate and ecological crisis, Ackroyd & Harvey’s work has become a rallying cry for the environmental movement, winning them international acclaim and a global following. With some of their pieces standing in prestigious galleries and others embedded in nature, their work not only references the natural world, but also regularly employs it. The film offers singular access into the lives, work and partnership of the artists, and their quest to shake humanity into action on climate catastrophe – whatever the personal cost – including their collaboration with Extinction Rebellion, and co-founding the movement Culture Declares Emergency.

Ben Okri's poetry as written by living grass (source).

Kampung Boy by Lat

Garden of the World Asian Immigrants and the Making of Agriculture in California's Santa Clara Valley by Cecilia M. Tsu (2013)

In Garden of the World, Cecilia Tsu tells the overlooked, intertwined histories of the Santa Clara Valley's agricultural past and the Asian immigrants who cultivated the land during the region's peak decades of horticultural production. Weaving together the story of three overlapping waves of Asian migration from China, Japan, and the Philippines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Tsu offers a comparative history that sheds light on the ways in which Asian farmers and laborers fundamentally altered the agricultural economy and landscape of the Santa Clara Valley, as well as white residents' ideas about race, gender, and what it meant to be an American family farmer. At the heart of American racial and national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the family farm ideal: the celebration of white European-American families operating independent, self-sufficient farms that would contribute to the stability of the nation. In California by the 1880s, boosters promoted orchard fruit growing as one of the most idyllic incarnations of the family farm ideal and the lush Santa Clara Valley the finest location to live out this agrarian dream. But in practice, many white growers relied extensively on hired help, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was largely Asian. Detailing how white farmers made racial and gendered claims to defend their dependence on nonwhite labor, how those claims shifted with the settlement of each Asian immigrant group, and how Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos sought to create their own version of the American dream in farming, Tsu excavates the social and economic history of agriculture in this famed rural community to reveal the intricate nature of race relations there.

Fútbol in the Park : Immigrants, Soccer, and the Creation of Social Ties by David Trouille (2021)

Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation along the Former Iron Curtain by Sonja K. Pieck (2023)

The first book-length scholarly treatment of Germany's largest conservation project, the Green Belt, Mnemonic Ecologies by Sonja Pieck presents a new interdisciplinary approach: that effective restoration and conservation of wounded land must merge ecology with memory. Since the Cold War's end in 1989, German conservationists have transformed the once-militarized border between East and West Germany into an extensive protected area. Yet as forests, meadows, and wetlands replace fences, minefields, and guard towers, ecological recovery must reckon with the pain of the borderlands' brutal past. The lessons gained by conservationists here, Pieck argues, have profound practical and ethical implications far beyond Germany. Can conservation help heal both ecological and societal wounds? How might conservation honor difficult socioecological pasts? Deeply researched and evocatively written, this beautiful, interdisciplinary investigation into the legacy of war and nature's resurgence blends environmental history, ethics, geography, and politics with ecology and memory studies. Amid our rampant biodiversity crisis, Mnemonic Ecologies shows why conservation must include humanized landscapes in its purview, thus helping to craft a new conservation ethos that is collaborative, empathetic, and more sensitive to the connections between humans and the places they inhabit

Building Ghosts: Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City by Molly Lester, photography by Michael Baxter (2024)

Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, And the Moral Panic Over the City

2006

Steve Macek

PLUS

Utah Sen. Mike Lee Says Selling Off Public Lands Will Solve the West’s Housing Crisis. Past Sales Show Otherwise. (Propublica, July 2025)

But this spring, Lee found support from unlikely places: the coastal elites he previously railed against seemed open to some of his ideas. The arguments in favor of privatization and development use a word of the season: abundance. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling book of the same name argues that burdensome regulatory processes have crushed the American housing market. While the authors focus on increasing supply in urban areas, in April, The New York Times ran an op-ed calling for building housing on public lands. That same week, the Times Magazine, in a piece titled “Why America Should Sprawl,” framed outward growth, including through the sale of public lands, as all but inevitable. The American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank, has estimated that the nation could build 3 million homes by opening federal land. In December, AEI leaders advocated for federal land sales in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, promising that disposal could “usher in housing abundance and prosperity.”

In Palestine in the ’30s, as in colonies everywhere, the settler regime relied on coercive force to keep the Indigenous population in line. In the Mandatory period, the Jewish settlers in Palestine were integrated into the coercive systems of rule deployed by the British: The Yishuv members of the British Palestine Police received training amid the British subjugation of the ’30s revolt, and many future officers of the Israeli military, some of whom went on to become prime ministers of Israel, served in the British army during World War II. To this day, some of Israel’s most repressive counterinsurgency practices—the use of separation walls, human shields, torture in interrogation, punitive displacement and expulsions, racialized pass systems, home demolitions, collective punishment, and administrative detention, among others—are a direct inheritance from the British, who had perfected these methods in other colonial settings.

...

A system of labor apartheid that saw Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza working low-wage jobs inside Israel has been hobbled as a result of checkpoint closures, and Israeli policymakers are frantically scrambling to replace these workers with migrants from India, who suffer under kafala-like systems of control. In the West Bank, settlements are expanding every day; the area inhabited by Palestinians is divided into a discontinuous, highly surveilled archipelago, riddled with apartheid roads and permanent and “flying” checkpoints. Jenin refugee camp, regularly subjected to batterings, now lies in ruins. The Golan Heights, once a supposed buffer zone between Israel and Syria, have been annexed to Israel. Israel’s virulent settlers, encouraged by their fascist leadership’s power in the government, are establishing “facts on the ground” on Syria’s Mount Hermon and in the rich river basins of the Yarmouk River and the occupied “buffer zones” of Lebanon.

...

Data collected by many researchers over decades has revealed that Interstate-80 is the single biggest barrier to big game animals in Wyoming — and perhaps the entire Northern Rockies.

Wyoming Game and Fish biologists recognized this barrier while I-80 was under construction more than fifty years ago. However, the full picture of how the interstate alters and obstructs wildlife movements has only emerged in recent years due to advances in GPS tracking collar technology.

Efforts to retrofit fences and underpasses for better wildlife connectivity are already being implemented across the state by WYDOT and Wyoming Game and Fish Department. Many of these projects focus on two-lane roads that have higher wildlife mortality and driver safety issues than I-80, yet no road severs more habitats than I-80.

Fixing the entirety of the I-80 wildlife problem would be more expensive and complex than smaller-scale local projects. Yet it is arguably one of the most significant large-landscape conservation opportunities in the American West.