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https://nativeappropriations.com/2018/02/on-consenting-to-learn-in-public.html

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/

In almost every community, school means more than just curricular content and academic learning. Though academic/cognitive development plays an important role in school mission statements it is not secondary to emotional and social development – and knowing this, we must keep their relationship to one another at the forefront of educational design. For many of us and our students, joy seems like an elusive emotion. In our course, our ambition is to bring sparks of joy in a time that is so difficult. Throughout our week together, we hope to discuss this as well as engage in opportunities that bring joy to our (and your) learning communities.

Deborah Coen shows how historians miss a great deal when they rely on the quantitative tools of scientists.

Indigenous critics pointed out that the framework of collapse ignores the enduring and dynamic presence of their cultures despite dispossession and genocide. Heather Davis and Métis scholar Zoe Todd urged attention to “the renewal and resurgence of Indigenous communities in spite of world-ending violence.” Tahltan scholar Candis Callison explained that, for many Indigenous cultures, “stability” is not a given but rather an outcome of conscientious stewardship, “a result of being in good relations.” Other scholars asked whether collapse, typically defined as a relatively rapid decline of a “complex hierarchical society,” was necessarily to be feared. Why, some critics wondered, did historians of collapse always take the viewpoint of elites? Wasn’t it possible that much of the population had cheered their release from an oppressive hierarchy? A few archaeologists pointed to evidence that nonhierarchical social organization had been a viable alternative for cities in early human history. The anthropologist David Graeber even proposed that early humans in some cases had intentionally abandoned or dismantled “complex hierarchical” ways of life.

#degrowth

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)

For many years, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson took solace in skiing—in all kinds of weather, on all kinds of snow across all kinds of terrain, often following the trail beside a beloved creek near her home. Recently, as she skied on this path against the backdrop of uncertainty, environmental devastation, rising authoritarianism and ongoing social injustice, her mind turned to the water in the creek and an elemental question: What might it mean to truly listen to water? To know water? To exist with and alongside water? So began a quest to understand her people's historical, cultural, and ongoing interactions with water in all its forms (ice, snow, rain, perspiration, breath). Pulling together these threads, Leanne began to see how a "Theory of Water" might suggest a radical rethinking of relationships between beings and forces in the world today. In this inventive work, Simpson draws on Nishnaabeg origin stories while artfully weaving the work of influential writers and artists alongside her personal memories and experience—and in doing so, reimagines water as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world. Theory of Water is a resonant exploration of an intricate, multi-layered relationship with the most abundant element on our planet—one that, as Simpson eloquently shows, is shaping our present even as it demands a radical rethinking of how we might achieve a just future.

#indigenous #to read

“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.

Black journalists in the post-Reconstruction era unflinchingly documented the white supremacist violence, both physical and psychological, inflicted on Black people during this period. Wherever possible, we have used the language and descriptions presented in these materials to faithfully convey the pain and sense of urgency of their moment.

#american history

#BinYourButts from artist Natalie Leung Shing

Mauritius is known as a paradise island with soft sand beaches and warm turquoise oceans. Sadly, trash on the beaches is causing major threats to this idyllic image. It is now common to see empty cans of beer, plastic bottles and cigarette butts littered on the beach. As we say in Mauritian Creole "Amize et oublier ou bon manière lacaze", have fun and forget your good manners at home. This is not a story of sadness, however, but a story of hope. Through my art, I have created an object converting ugly and toxic discarded cigarette butts into a visually appealing container in order to convey an eco-conscious message about the importance of properly disposing of cigarette butts. This is a story in which one small action, tossing a used cigarette onto the beach, changes into a positive, hopeful movement, BIN YOUR BUTTS. THE TRIGGER While I have attended several beach cleanups in the past, a recent one was so shocking to me, that it became the inspiration for this new movement. In less than 2 hours, our small group collected an astronomical amount of cigarette butts just in the parking lot at Mont Choisy beach, an astounding 1,700! Filling a large rubbish bag, I took them home to contemplate how to create an art object that would challenge the disposable nature of human consumption.

#visual art #environmental justice #waste

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).

Ackroyd & Harvey have grown Ben Okri’s visionary poetry into living skins of seedling grass, in two large scale artworks. Displayed in a dried state, excerpts from the poem I Sing the Spirit Fantastic present the climate crisis as - in part - a crisis of the imagination. The poem speaks to the transformative power of nature; to the wind, the tides and the sun that could transform our energy systems as well as inspire new ways of living in relation to the natural world.

#climate change #visual art #Youtube

Kampung Boy by Lat

the world drawn by [Malaysian] cartoonist Datuk Mohammad Nor Mohammad Khalid or better known by his moniker 'Lat'. "Lat is short for the Malay word bulat meaning round or moon-shaped... the moon is bulat, the soccer ball too...and so is the globe... The family wouldn't call you Mohammed Nor Khalid when you're a stark-naked toddler running around the village house. The name Lat got stuck till school days, early adulthood and eventually up to the end," he explained tongue-in-cheek (source)

#malaysia #graphic novel #childhood

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)

You know the scene: amateur soccer players battling over the ball, spectators cheering from the sidelines, vendors selling their wares from carts. Over the past half century, immigration from Latin America has transformed the public landscape in the United States, and numerous communities are witnessing one of the hallmarks of this transformation: the emergence of park soccer. In Fútbol in the Park, David Trouille takes us into the world of Latino soccer players who regularly play in an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood where they are not always welcome. Together on the soccer field, sharing beers after the games, and occasionally exchanging taunts or blows, the men build relationships and a sense of who they are. Through these engrossing, revealing, and at times immortalizing activities, they forge new identities, friendships, and job opportunities, giving themselves a renewed sense of self-worth and community. As the United States becomes increasingly polarized over issues of immigration and culture, Fútbol in the Park offers a close look at the individual lives and experiences of migrants.

#to read #immigrant

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)

“Building ghosts” are the idiosyncratic remnants or imprints of demolished buildings, left behind on the sides of neighboring structures. Mostly seen in older Northeastern cities with rowhomes or party-wall adjacencies, they can reveal remarkable things, such as an old staircase going up the side of a building or plaster traces left by a set of shelves in an attic gable. As history in our changing cities is erased and remade, these ghosts can be ephemeral or enduring. They can be quickly revealed and replaced in a neighborhood seeing rapid change or unveiled and never re-covered in a neighborhood that has not seen new construction in a long time. Building Ghosts features more than 100 striking contemporary color photographs and a deeply researched narrative about Philadelphia’s buildings, neighborhoods, and the ghosts that reveal new truths and provocations about the changing city. The text and images in this lavish volume illuminate these lost buildings and found ghosts. Building Ghosts is an invitation to see the city differently, with the past clinging visibly to the present.

#to read #history #ecology #architecture

kitwallace

Tensegrity

Tensegrity was a term coined by Buckminster Fuller for structures of independent members, typically solid bars, held in compression by a network of members in tension, typically cables. Apparently he picked up the idea from his student Howard Snelson who went on to use it in his large scale sculptures such as the Needle Tower. An even earlier explorer of this concept was the Russian constructivist Karlis Johansons.

I came across this rather simple example of tensegrity on YouTube and Charlie and I built our own version in hardwood.

Made out of hardwood beading- 22mm x 5mm

Improvements

make a 60 degree angle jig so that corners can be cut more precisely - a small mitre box.

make 60 degree angles to use to clamp after epoxy glueing - actually the hardboard triangle and acetate slide as base for clamping worked pretty well

despite our best trig calculations and measuring, the diagonal is a bit long, leading to the forward tilt.

make the ‘cables’ line less visible - monofilament or black thread - one reel of black ordered

Version two

Lacking suitable wood and with hardware stores deemed inessential, I turned to glass - not an obvious material but I had some 2mm sheet which is easy to work. Templates were designed in OpenSCAD and the cables tensioned through some small ferroles I had. Being lighter, it’s more springy and stable than the heavier wood version.

Refs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4D6BOSbVfI

https://hackaday.com/2019/11/29/building-your-own-tensegrity-structure/

anniekoh

I took a math art class through Portland Community College with mathematician-artist Mircea Draghicescu. Two of the projects involved tensegrity. Image source of the tetrahedron.

#polyhedron #math art #tensegrity

smylealong

More dragonflies and damselflies

Difference between dragonfly and damselfly

Although we often talk about dragonflies in general, the truth is that within this fascinating group that are the odonates there are two suborders: Anisoptera (dragonflies) and Zygoptera ( damselflies ). In addition to the fact that dragonflies tend to be larger, one of the most visible differences is found in the wings: in dragonflies the rear pair of wings is larger than the front pair, while in horsemen the two pairs of wings are of the same size. Furthermore, the latter fold their wings against the abdomen when perching, whereas dragonflies do not. On the other hand, dragonflies’ eyes are larger than damselflies and are closer together.

Roseate skimmer

Beautiful demoiselle

Flame skimmer

Golden-ringed dragonfly.

I don't know the species but I have seen this dragonfly. One of the prettiest things I have ever seen. If anyone can tell me the species, I'd be grateful. (Picture not taken by me).

Trithemis Aurora.

Lady Halloween - Celithemis eponina

Prince Baskettail

Checkered Setwing

Green darner.

Series: Dragonflies and Damselflies Part 2. Part 1 can be found here.

#dragonflies #insects

A new study finds that freshwater resources are rapidly disappearing, creating arid “mega” regions and causing sea levels to rise.

#climate change

#law #american history

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

2006

Steve Macek

PLUS

Fear City

reading

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.”

GOP Wrecking Ball Slams Through Medical System (American Prospect, July 2025)

#housing #health care #policies

On Adam Kirsch and settler colonialism

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.

...

And in Gaza, the settler colonial practice of expulsion has now culminated in extermination. Israel’s genocidal violence has transformed an area populated by some two million people—already living under conditions of extreme control and subjected to bouts of colossal violence—into a vast free-fire zone, covered in mass graves and 42 million tons of rubble that is itself a mass grave of another kind. Gaza is filled with more child amputees than have been seen in any other war and with people dying from starvation and disease, in numbers that surely exceed 150,000 souls. The life expectancy of Palestinians in Gaza is now 34.9 years, about half of what it was before Israel’s genocidal assault.

#palestine #gaza

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.

Wider public knowledge of Interstate 80 wildlife research will help make migration connectivity a part of all future I-80 infrastructure projects in Wyoming.

#ecology #migration

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