“GENOCIDIO INDIGENA” by Mariza Bafile
“La vida de los indígenas en Brasil está en riesgo. Hoy más que nunca.”
In the July 6, 2020 issue of ViceVersa Magazine
Monthly Archives: November 2020
Read, Listen, and Watch – November 2020
INDIGENOUS ACTION: An Autonomous Podcast
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. Available on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Play.
In this premiere broadcast some long-time Indigenous Action co-conspirators talk about their thoughts on “land acknowledgements.”
Read, Listen, and Watch – November 2020
“WE SHALL REMAIN: America Through Native Eyes”
PBS documentary series, shown at ALANA Center’s Anti-thanksgiving events, and originally aired on PBS in 2009. “These five documentaries spanning almost four hundred years tell the story of pivotal moments in U.S. history from the Native American perspective, upending two-dimensional stereotypes of American Indians as simply ferocious warriors or peaceable lovers of the land”
Available through the Vassar College Libraries – DVD 5388
The first episode of the PBS series was directed by Chris Eyre (Smoke Signals,1998), which was written, directed, and acted by Native people and reenacts and historicizes the first thanksgiving.
Available through the Vassar College Libraries – DVD 8779
Literacy Moment – November 2020
BIPOC = Black, Indigenous, People of Color
A BIPOC lens puts Black abolition and Native Justice in conversation and coalition with one another. It highlights their historical intersections and differences and “the common ground of Afro-descendant and Indigenous experience, such as land dispossession, political marginalization, and a shared desire for sovereignty and self-determination.”
Taken from the Introduction to the special issue on “Rethinking Blackness and Indigeneity in the Light of Settler Colonial Theory” in American Indian Culture and Research Journal: Vol. 43, No. 2 (2019) http://www.books.aisc.ucla.edu/books
In particular see, “Settler/Colonial Violences: Black and Indigenous Coalition Possibilities through Intergroup Dialogue Methodology” with Vassar’s Professor Kimberly Williams Brown!
Also available through the Vassar College Libraries – E75 .A5124
Other Resources:
Yellow Head Institute – An Indigenous Abolitionist Study Guide
The BIPOC Project – A Black, Indigenous, & People of Color Movement
Vassar College Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that Vassar stands upon the homelands of the Munsee Lenape, Indigenous peoples who have an enduring connection to this place despite being forcibly displaced by European colonization.
Munsee Lenape peoples continue today as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community in Wisconsin, the Delaware Tribe and the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma, and the Munsee Delaware Nation in Ontario. This acknowledgment, however, is insufficient without our reckoning with the reality that every member of the Vassar community since 1861 has benefited from these Native peoples’ displacement, and it is hollow without our efforts to counter the effects of structures that have long enabled—and that still perpetuate—injustice against Indigenous Americans. To that end, we commit to build and sustain relationships with Native communities; to expand opportunities at Vassar for Native students, as well as Native faculty and other employees; and to collaborate with Native nations to know better the Indigenous peoples, past and present, who care for this land.
Flashback
Molly McGlennen wrote and recited the poem, “Vigilance,” in the fall of 2016 in support of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests (hashtag #NoDAPL) and against the Trump election. The poem was featured in the exhibition entitled “The World After January 20th, 2017,” curated by Judy Nichols and Monica Church, in the wake of Trump’s inauguration, which brought together the work of community artists, poets and activists through an exhibit and protest that circled Main building at Vassar. “Each morning we wake up to a new order: bans, firings, and threats to liberty, humanity and the Earth.” The work continues.
VIGILANCE
This winter you will need insulated boots
and gloves; propane and wood, though
wind generators are ideal.
You never knew camp etiquette
would read like a manifesto.
A thin shadow cast by shortening
days. Solstice approaches
then falls away. Everywhere, it falls
away. Sub-zero hands direct
kinship, traffic, a camera’s shutter.
What more can greed take, when protracted
songs pitch shelter against
sets of men’s pockets,
whether thieves, plutocrats,
churchgoers. Everything, you say.
You erect tents and websites, assemble
pittance before long histories of amassment.
Free land, free labor, makes the rapacious few.
Come spring, you will notice
new needs. A windbreaker, you hope. For now
those stars set deep in what seems
a blacker sky.
You pluck one, you think,
and place it in your gloved palm, almost
your heart. Almost your life.
From Our Bearings, by Molly McGlennen. © 2020 by Molly McGlennen. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press and the Author.