#la paperson

[sharpened--edges]

While I was writing this to you, Janet Napolitano, the former U.S. secretary of Homeland Security, assumed her new post as the twentieth president of the University of California system, the first woman to occupy the office. The revolving door between institutions of policing, bordering, surveillance, incarceration, illegalization, militarization, and schooling is not new. Indeed, in San Diego, where I am based, Alan Bersin was superintendent of public schools from 1998 to 2005, after three years of running U.S.–Mexican border law enforcement for Attorney General Janet Reno under President Clinton. After his stint governing schools, Bersin governed the border (again) in 2009, this time for the Obama administration, working as ‘border czar’ under Janet Napolitano, then Homeland Security secretary, now UC president. However, it would be a misguided comparison to describe the bodies of faculty and students as analogous to the bodies of detainees and deportees and migrants and suspectees. It is not analogous power but technologies of power that recirculate in these imperial triangles, for example, debt financing, neoliberal market policies, information systems, managing noncitizen populations, land development. If we consider triangular connections between war abroad and refugee management within, antiblackness and the maintenance of black fungibility and accumulation, and militarization and Indigenous erasure throughout empire, then we can understand why the governors of war and the governors of schools can have similar résumés, without pretending that the governed suffer through identical conditions.

la paperson, A Third University Is Possible (Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 37–38.

[skeleton-monarch]

I don’t want to detract from the post I reblogged, but I do want to offer some resources on learning about urbanism from a native perspective:

Indian Cities: Histories Of Indigenous Urbanism (Includes links to more articles at the end)

Urban Native Project

NUIFC Resurgence Initiative (and the NUIFC in general)

Planning for Coexistance? Recognizing Indigenous rights through land-use planning in Canada and Australia by Libby Porter and Janice Barry (Book you need to pay for)

Urban planning graduate aims to use education to support Native nations (A Cherokee Graduate’s Q&A, which is a lot more personal but I think it’s important to personalize this issue)

Reclaiming Indigenous Planning Edited by Ryan Walker, Ted Jojola and David Natcher, Foreword by Aaron Aubin (Book you need to pay for, part of a larger series)

Urban design for Native residents on KBFT Radio and here’s a link to where you can listen to the archived segment

A ghetto land pedagogy: An antidote for settler environmentalism by La Paperson (You can request the article from the author, not sure of response time I accessed the paper through my college)

There’s so much more than this out there, but I figured this should be a good start!

If there are any Native urbanist blogs, podcasts, youtube channels, or anything else really, please feel free to reblog with where to find them! I’ll keep an updated list on the original post with each addition

[transmutationisms]

are there any books i can read to learn more about university abolition?

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, 2013) [link: open access pdf]

Dylan Rodriguez, “Racial/colonial Genocide and the Neoliberal Academy: In Excess of a Problematic.” American Quarterly 64.4 (2012)

la paperson, A Third University Is Possible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017)

The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Edited by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014

Review essay: "Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus." Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell. Feminist Studies 44 (2): 432-463 (2018)

Clyde W. Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928 Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1990

Eli Meyerhoff, Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

[chaotic-archaeologist]

If you'll permit me to toot my own horn, I'm very pleased with my notes for today's sociocultural theory class

la paperson. 2017. A Third University Is Possible. Forerunners: Ideas First 19. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452958460.

[dazzlegradual]

Summer Camp in the CA Narrative Imagination

Working in the summer camp industry, many of the spaces I work in are named either after Native American tribes who ‘previously’ inhabited the colonized land or the primary colonizers who laid claim to the land to the behest of the United States government. The summer camp I have spent many years working at, primarily in a leadership position and most recently as the Director, is called ‘Camp Menzies’. It is not a clever reference to a popular and cheeky nickname for menstruation — it’s in honor of Charles Menzies, a cattle rancher and businessman whose primary residence was in Stockton, CA. The campground itself is situated about 2 hours from Sacramento, CA, just outside the small city of Arnold. It’s 5500 feet in elevation, in the heart of the Sierra Nevadas, and the land is riddled with Ponderosa Pines and the biggest pinecones you’ve ever seen. It’s gorgeous, and it’s understandable why Charles Menzies might have originally wanted to purchase the land. This 150 acre lot land that is now my Girl Scout camp (and has been since 1946) was land that Menzies and his wife bought for camping, entertaining friends, and outdoor recreation. His cabin, however dilapidated and rat-ridden, is still situated on the property today. It’s surrounded by tons junk: metal bed frames, charbroiled pipes, and a truly inexplicable number of bathtubs. At Camp Menzies, there are also original Me-Wuk built shake cabins, and a particularly creepy creaky old ‘ice house’.

Charles Menzies bought the land from a Me-wuk tribe around 1903. I’ve seen the land deed that his lawyer wrote up — I and a fellow camp staff member came across it this summer while we were searching through old camp documents. We were grateful to learn some of the names of actual Me-Wuk tribe members who were a part of the sale, including Nettie Hunter who our camp’s canoe lake is named after. The deed does not, however, list for how much the land was negotiated for. I’ve been zeroing in on this missing detail for months: scurrying myself in a tailspin as I try to parse through fragile, old documents in local libraries for how much this land exactly sold for. I had to know, and I knew it had to be written down somewhere.

I didn’t talk about this obsession with a lot of people because I felt it would become a better story, more neatly wrapped up, when I could finally report all the facts. But few months ago, I was recounting this hyper-fixation to a friend, he paused me and asked, “why?”

Why, exactly, was I invested in learning the exact amount that this sale amounted for? What would that answer? I responded that I didn’t know. And I didn’t know. Perhaps I wanted to know that Charles Menzies was a fair buisnessman. Perhaps if the land was truly bought for an amount of money that seemed ‘fair’, then I could feel absolved of some of my guilt for operating a summer camp on land that doesn’t have a clean history. Perhaps I wanted to absolve any feelings I had for running a camp named in honor of a man I know very little about. Perhaps I just felt fixated on a piece of information that felt out of my grasp.

But is there a fair price that this land could have sold for? Can you put a price on land people have lived on for thousands of years? What would that price be? The truth is, regardless of price, the event of a sale illustrates the colonial state at work. The claiming of ownership over a parcel of land is a construct we, the settlers, introduced in California 150 years ago. As la paperson writes in A Third University is Possible, “Property law is a settler colonial technology. The weapons that enforce it, the knowledge institutions that legitimize it, the financial institutions that operationalize it, are also technologies. Like all technologies, they evolve and spread.” The price of the land doesn’t really matter — the sale taking place in the first place is what counts. And it doesn’t matter is the Me-Wuk tribe members like Nettie Hunter sold the land because they genuinely wanted to or because they felt they were driven to no other choice. They were still making a decision based on their rapidly changing world, a world that was changing because of settler arrival.I will admit that I desperately still want to know all the details of this sale from the Me-wuk tribe to Charles Menzies, including the price. But I would like to know not because there is an amount that would constitute fairness, but because I feel deeply connected to this small parcel of history, which is embedded in this land, and I want to dig my fingers deep into its Earth and hear all of the stories it might tell me.

There is other evidence on the Menzies property besides the buildings of this land’s past iterations. Despite the campgrounds having been an operational Girl Scout summer camp for over 75 years, campers find old (and new) evidence every summer: horseshoes, wrenches, cowbells, rusted metal contraptions/parts we can’t make sense of. Every time a camper proudly delivers a new finding into my posession, I silently confirm in my head that, yes, we do indeed require updated tetanus shots from campers. These artifacts, to me, appear as persistent reminders that while we busy ourselves constantly with the self delusion that the past is behind us, the artifice of time remains just that: contrived and meaningless. There are ghosts at this camp. They demand to be known. And of course the children find them before I do.

Although, it can’t be all too surprising that the past beckons forth our attention when summer camp, as an institution, seems to uphold the past as a heralded beacon. To summer camp professionals, our pioneer-origins are accepted as an innate, powerful, and a nearly religious origin story. We relate deeply to the cowboys of America, the hikers of the Adirondacks, the brave and sure-footed Pioneers trekking across the plains. Summer camp professionals are often white people who embrace community and cooperative visions of the future, but cling needlessly to narratives of an idealized, non-existent past: one in which white ancestors, our forebears, lived ‘off the land’ in a way that was virtuous and noble. It allows us to see ourselves as perpetual underdogs, united by our altruistic and highly profitable love of the outdoors.

At Camp Menzies, we often play a game called ‘Gold Rush’ where we hide gold-spray painted rocks all over the camp property, and each camper’s goal is to retrieve as many gold pieces as they can and bring the rocks back to the bank (which is a cardboard box in the Dining Hall we have fitted with a Sharpie scrawling of the word “BANK!”). We assign older campers with the role of ‘robbers’ who job it is to steal gold from younger campers and re-hide them before campers can bring the rocks to the bank. After rules are described and teams are chosen, what ensues is delightful, wonderful chaos. Running is allowed, points are not kept, scores are meaningless, and the game concludes when the younger kids are tired of running and the older kids have run out of hiding places. I love Gold Rush. It exemplifies so much of what I love about summer camp. When we yell, “GO!” I watch dozens of kids squeal with delight and run with glee into the woods. I watch them take their friend’s hand and move freely, uninhibited, with a watchful adult trailing closely behind. There aren’t many times I witness young kids, girls especially, live with this complete lack of inhibition. The competitive air rushing through camp when we’re playing Gold Rush is something thick and alive. I watch teenagers, who are often otherwise constantly adjusting their hair and standing so self-assuredly in an “I’m way too old and cool to be here fashion” run full-speed at a tree stump because they caught a glint of something shiny. I’ll see a middle schooler plunge into the dirt towards a fern plant, chucking sticks and dirt at her friends, commanding that they “go on without her” because she’ll stay behind and obstruct the path of the robbers. I’ll see a younger gaggle of 10 year olds abandon the game to braid together wildflowers in the meadow, oblivious to the chaos around them. I love nothing more than watching this scene unfold before me as I stand and laugh until I can’t breathe. But I can’t shake the feeling whenever we play Gold Rush we’re playing into something weird, and complicated. I can’t help but think about that before the Gold Rush began in 1849, at least 20,000 Me-wuk people lived in the Sierra Nevadas, but by the 1910 census, only about 300 Me-wuk people (then called ‘digger Indians’) were recorded on the Tuolumne County census. The Gold Rush killed thousands of people, and here I am teaching kids it’s all in good fun.

Everyone who grows up in California is closely acquainted with the Gold Rush, and for those of us in close proximity to the Sierra Nevadas (such as myself), it’s legacy is inescapable. Practically every Main Street, town square, school is named after some aristocrat who got rich off the Gold Rush. While 4th graders in Southern California construct tiny dioramas of the Spanish missions, NorCal kids pull wagons and pan for gold in Coloma, where James Marshall discovered gold in 1848. I remember being taught that the Gold Rush was inseparable to the identity of Californians. It influenced our plucky, creative, and independent spirit. Californians, especially those in the Northern half of the state, are go-getters, problem solvers, the last true cowboys of the West. Out here, you could make something out of nothing. You could live surrounded by the most beautiful trees - Giant redwoods, palm trees, or majestic oaks. Any tree, whichever y your favorite, take your pick. You could live in the Golden State and become the truest, most shiny version of yourself. This legacy is especially enduring as any other pervasive colonial narrative, thanks to the outpouring of wine, film, music, and agriculture from the state. Everyone knows who we are, the Californians. When I traveled abroad to other countries, I learned that other U.S. Americans usually introduced themselves as just being from the States. If you’re from California, you can just say, “I’m from California” — and be certain they will know what you mean. But most of California’s modern recognition power doesn’t come from Northern California, even if that is where our golden legacy began. It comes from the Golden Gate Bridge, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Disneyland, and of course, our infamous sprawling, seaweed stinky beaches. This leaves Northern California and its many cities, strewn about the valleys and foothills and Sierra Nevada mountain range, condemned to the footnotes — despite their cities’ high populations, agricultural outputs, and literally housing the Capitol of the state. It isn’t cool to be from NorCal. It’s too hot, the valley is too flat, it’s on fire all the time, and it’s not L.A. or the Bay. The gold country remnant towns are sparsely populated and often tote tired, peeling building facades and deeply Republican vibes. Even still, this is where Camp Menzies is situated, I love it so dearly, and folks living here honestly have a point about hating the government and establishment Democrats (you and me both, buddy).

I’ll try to digress. There’s very little I can say about my personal feelings on growing up near Sacramento that Greta Gerwig didn’t say in Lady Bird. But I’d like to make a case for where to go from here, and what to do at this point. I love summer camp. I worry about summer camp. I worry when we play Gold Rush at Camp Menzies, we play into the persistent myth taught in California public school classrooms that the 1849 Gold Rush was exciting, great fun. Part of me thinks our version of the game is so anachronistic and removed from context that we are perhaps absolved. But another part knows that while the Gold Rush represents the beginning of California’s human history for many people, for the Me-wuk, Patwin, Neislan and countless other peoples and tribes, it represents an end: the end of a way of life in communion with the Earth. Many white descendants living in Northern California believe that Native Americans in the area died because of exposure to diseases like smallpox that their immune systems weren’t used to. This did occur, but this narrative instils a certain passivity on the part of white settlers and negates their real, human agency and actions. There are many letters between settlers from this time period where gold panners describe intentionally sending someone infected with small-pox as the ‘go-between’ person to tribes, knowing that infection would likely spread. Many rivers in the Sierra Nevadas were plugged or rerouted during the Gold Rush, the reason being attributed to building necessary dams or panning for gold, but a great number of the rivers were directly in path of Me-wuk tribal homesteads, and white settlers also wrote in letters that removing water was a means of ‘dealing with the Indian problem’.

Never mind many of these rivers are still not ecologically restored to their pre-colonization splendor, such as the Little Mokelumne River that runs through the Camp Menzies property. There’s rock striations and tree evidence that this river used to be much bigger. Now, it rushes in quiet earnest with snow run-off in the early summer, usually drying up by late July. When a fire blazes through this area (which it will, at some point — this is California, after all), the Little Mokelumne River likely could have provided land protection pre-Industrialization. Now, though, the river will only be a small blip in the monstrous and unstoppable path of a wildfire. There’s no way that white settlers in 1849 rerouting rivers in Tuolumne County could have known they would one day bear some responsibility for the current state of wildfires in Northern California — they also must have known, on some level, that what they were doing would cause a disruption. But I suppose that was the object. Californians love to cause a disruption, be it artistic, economic, or political. That much was certain with the sudden arrival of hundreds of hopeful white settlers in the mid 1800’s to Northern California. It is in our nature to be hopeful — to know the slight odds, and preserve anyway. A bet on the hope that you could discover something new. It is always during Gold Rush that campers discover the horseshoes, the weird tools I can’t name, the cans rusted beyond recognition. The past’s legacy of this land doesn’t just linger in the back of my head while we play Gold Rush: this history is rooted here, in this land, and in children’s hands splayed before me.

[relaylibrary]

Relay Recommeds!

A Third University is Possible by la paperson (2017)

Click here to learn more! Amir Dif, Manager, Registrar Review: I read A Third University is Possible two weeks before the first university encampment at Columbia University began. The book offers, in my opinion, a helpful framework in which to consider this moment and indeed this movement. la paperson, AKA Wayne Dang, UC San Diego professor, discusses the long and often unsavory relationship between contemporary universities in the US and the violent settler colonization of North America. paperson posits that within each institution exist “scyborgs”, or humans who can act as decolonizing agents by co-opting the colonial tools of the university. paperson makes the effort to and challenges the reader to also push beyond critiquing colonial systems, and into the realm of active decolonization. paperson argues that the university is an assemblage of technologies and institutional governance structures that created and sustain their colonial legacies, and these same technologies and structures can be used for decolonial purposes, according to paperson.  Happy reading! 

Recommended Audience: Those involved in teacher education, Everyone (whether or not they work in education)

[lordville]

Episode 8 discusses Lordville!

Saturday School Podcast (the project of film scholar Brian Hu and journalist Ada Tseng) just released Episode 8 devoted to LORDVILLE. Their conversation teases out some of the thornier  issues in the film related to land, land ownership, and whether Asian Americans benefit from settler colonialism.  Check it out here. Thanks to Brian and Ada for taking the time to walk through some of these more buried questions in piece. 

The process of making LORDVILLE came through the fact that my mother’s family could not own land when they arrived from Japan three generations ago. They were peasant class there and decided to immigrate to the US in a wave of migration during the post Meiji era. In Salinas and Mountain View California, they leased land to grow strawberries and then every three years after the soil was spent, they would move on. They continued this process up until the time they were placed in a U.S. Concentration Camp in Poston during WWWII. My paternal grandmother purchased a family house in San Diego under my father’s name, since she could not own property in her name as an immigrant from Japan in 1936. Prior to this, they had been kicked off of property they leased in Long Beach California when oil was discovered under their house. During World War II, the San Diego house was stolen while they were in camp. We’re not sure where it ended up. By the time I was able to purchase my house in Lordville for a reasonable price  -- I was uncomfortable knowing that I came from a legacy of property theft and reflected on the meaning of owning land when all land in the U.S. has Indigenous lineage. (By the way, in NYC I did not own property, I leased a rent stabilized apartment. Lordville was my first experience buying property). My first day home, I did a tour with the licensed surveyor’s map - to walk the perimeter of the property trying to understand the concept of ownership and land. I recalled when I first saw the house there- I always  knew/felt the indigenous presence and history was very visible. When I discovered my neighbors had little knowledge of the history of the area outside of the fact that they were descendants of the Lenape tribes-- I set out to research more of the history of land/land settlement/ and discovered some of the fragments included in the film. I  was also given the original handwritten deed that showed the  three previous owners prior to the couple I purchased the land from. Researching Lordville’s history, I stumbled on Sheila Spencer Stover - 5th Great Granddaughter of Betia Van Dunk - who married one of the original white settlers of Lordville, Deliverance Adams. For the filming I wanted to have the land ‘marked’ in time. I found out about the work of Environmental Scientist ( Tom Wessels) and invited him to ‘read’ the land in order to trace the time line of certain ‘events’ as marked on trees and rocks. 

 Saturday School also mentions this wonderful book “A Third University Is Possible” by la paperson. ‘Author la paperson, cracks open uncanny connections between Indian boarding schools, Black education, and missionary schools in Kenya; and between the Department of Homeland Security and the University of California…. “ they credit some of the ideas in their discussion of Lordville ot this book - I just purchased it and look forward to reading it. 

A few corrections mentioned in the podcast -- I purchased the house from a NYC couple on their way relocate in Mali. Lamira Smith, mentioned in the conversation, was one of the original owners (she bought the house from her father John Lord II) . Betia Van Dunk - was of the Minisink/Delaware/Lenape tribe, she married Deliverance Adams and Sheila Spencer Stover who appears in the film is her 5th generation Great Granddaughter. Sheila, does not live in Lordville. The descendants of Betia in subsequent generations had the initial “P” for Pon-ti-ton but this does not apply to the current inhabitants of Lordville. Its a bit complicated to explain. The recorded indigenous man you hear from time to time on the soundtrack giving translations of Delaware words -- is Fred Washington. He is a descendant of one of the strands of Delaware tribes - who may have lived in the area -- but is not directly known to be from Lordville. I found a recording of his voice in the American Philosophical Society Archive in Philadelphia. My original intent - was to work with recordings, energy, language, words of the Delaware, one of the tribes that passed through the area. 

[jre-intersectionality]

la paperson!

[freedomartspress]

civil war is not a metephor — wren cuidadx

civil war is not a metaphor

“When we write about decolonization, we are not offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym.”

-k.wayne / la paperson, Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, page 3

part one, for ysleta

Before there was a wall,

there was a house on a river

that never touched the same bank twice.

When the saints came marching in,

first they killed the daughter of the house,

& then they killed the house,

&  then they killed the river,

&  then the language the river babled in,

&  then there was us & these words:

muro murio matar.

The wall and these words rolling around our mouths

kill killed killing

& the wall & the shadow & the words

kill killed killing

& the bank & the burning

sunset & the lateness of the hour

& the lowness of the river &

the dam & the bank & the wall

& these words

kill killed killing

& the light, all white,

& the saints, all white, marching in plain view,

all white.

—

cuidade is a burning bird with a story to tell. find them on socials @CUIDADX

this is the first part of ‘civil war is not a metaphor,’ a series of poems and essays about violence, politics, and america (or, about american political violence, or the violence that is american politics, or the american violence that is politics, or, the violent politics that is america), after the essay Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.

[arcanemoody]

It’s 1:15pm.

I’m in Chicago.

I’m drinking cold brew with coconut milk (Rocket ordered starbucks because she is amazing).

Took melatonin before bed last night and managed to sleep the whole night in one spot. A win. Brushed my teeth, took my meds, put on a seamless compression sports bra, a maxi skirt and my new raglan “androgyne” t-shirt.

My final project is turned in, cover and all. I’m hoping the text is good enough to warrant an “A” and I’m going to be making some adjustments over the next few months anyway. Because, possible publishing is on the table. At the very least, I want to send it to la paperson to get their opinion. 

Mild fatigue (it’s late-pandemic, the fatigue’s not going away), moderate sound sensitivity, no itches or overheating or constriction. Body dysmorphia is more or less under control. No nail chewing – and the non-toxic water based nail polish comes off in sheets, so it’s locked me into a cycle of peeling and then repainting my nails. Which I can live with, personally. 

Things I feel positive about today: I made blueberry syrup during my lunch our and that’s currently cooling in our fridge. I went grocery shopping with Rocket yesterday and we got salsa verde (which I managed to eat responsibly with my lunch). Knitting, caffeine. It’s a buy nothing day (but I have some more hard red wheat berries in my shopping cart). 

[sharpened--edges]

Decolonization is, put bluntly, the rematriation of land, the regeneration of relations, and the forwarding of Indigenous and Black and queer futures—a process that requires countering what power seems to be up to. To take effective decolonizing action, we must then have a theory of action that accounts for the permeability of apparatuses of power and the fact that neocolonial systems inadvertently support decolonizing agendas. […] Colonial schools have a tradition of harboring spaces of anticolonial resistance. These contradictions are exquisitely written about by the eminent novelist, literary scholar, and postcolonial thinker Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. He describes how the machine of British colonial schooling in Kenya produced a Black governor of colonial Kenya and, paradoxically, also helped to produce Mau Mau revolutionaries. Fearful that schools sheltered the Mau Mau, who occupied the imaginations of Indigenous Kenyans and settlers alike as he quintessential Black, violent resistance movement, the colonial state banned many of its missionary-inspired schools in the 1952 declaration of a state of emergency. This ban included the Kenya Teachers College, whose campus was converted into ‘a prison camp where proponents of resistance to colonialism were hanged.’ During the Mau Mau Rebellion, [Ngũgĩ] attended Alliance High School, a segregated, elite missionary school for Black Africans in British Kenya. And prior to that, he attended Manguo elementary school, which was banned for a time by the colonial government. How can colonial schools become disloyal to colonialism? According to [Ngũgĩ], the decolonial is always already amid the colonial.

la paperson, A Third University Is Possible (Duke University Press, 2017), pp. xv–xvi, summarising Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir.