Field Lab #3

Petroglyph National Monument / Petroglyphs

Geometric symbols

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>geometric symbols<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<living artifacts>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>sacred/accessable<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<donottouch>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

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Los Volcanes / The Volcanoes / Three Sisters / Tres Sisters

FIELD LAB #2

Do bridges divide us in the process of connection?

By what means does modernity and capitalism survive?

Big- I / I-25 / Pan American Freeway
Las Cruses, NM – Buffalo, Wyoming

All freeways are highways, but not every highway is a freeway.

Pan-Americanism- 1888 movement toward commercial, social, economic, military, and political cooperation among the nations of North, Central, and South America.

1923
The concept of building a highway emerged at the 5th International Conference of the American States or Pan-American Conference.

> James Blaine, Secretary of State: proposed close ties between US + Latin America and would open markets to US trade.

> Western Hemisphere- create Union of the Americas where the US “would hold the upper hand and would be able to guide the agenda,” and carry heavyweight in major decision-making.

> Another reason for the union was so that the US could financially benefit from other countries.

theory > political theory > laws > power

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"No collectivity of people in US American society is a enigmatic or misunderstood as Indigeous peoples."

“From the very first encounters with them five centuries ago. Europeans were confounded by these peoples who looked so different and lived lives that seemed not just diametrically opposed to theirs but even blasphemous. Europeans brought with them their fears and prejudices accompanied by a sense of entitlement to the land that had been home to the Indigenous peoples for untold thousands of years. They were occasionally respected by the newcomers, some of whom voluntarily left their own communities in the early days of settlement to live among the Indians. They learned to speak the Natives’ languages, intermarried, and had children with them, sometimes for love or companionship, sometimes just to build alliances and gain access to Native territories and to convert them to Christianity. But by and large the history of relations between Indigenous and settler is fraught with conflict, defined by a struggle for land, which is inevitably a struggle for power and control. Five hundred years later, Native peoples are still fighting to protect their lands and their rights to exist as distinct political communities and individuals.

Most US citizens’ knowledge about Indians is inaccurate, distorted, or limited to elementary-school textbooks, cheesy old spaghetti westerns, or more contemporary films like Dances with Wolves or The Last of the Mohicans. Few can name more than a handful of Native nations out of the over five hundred that still exist or can tell you who Leonard Peltier is. Mention Indian gaming and they will have strong opinions about it one way or another. Some might even have an Indian casino in their community, but they will probably be curiously incurious if you ask them how Indian gaming came to be or about the history of the nation that owns the casino. In many parts of the country it’s not uncommon for non-Native people to have ever met a Native person or to assume that there are no Indians who live among them. On the other hand, in places where there is a concentration of Natives, like in reservation border towns, what non-Native people think they know about Indians is typically limited to racist tropes about drunk or lazy Indians. They are seen as people who are maladjusted to the modern world and cannot free themselves from their tragic past.

On a whole, it can be said that the average US citizen’s knowledge about American Indians is confined to a collection of well-worn myths and half-truths that have Native people either not existing at all or existing in a way that fails to live up to their expectations about who “real” Indians are. If Indians do exist, they are seen as mere shadows of their former selves, making counterfeit identity claims or performing fraudulent acts of Indianness that are no longer authentic or even relevant. Non-Natives thus position themselves, either wittingly or unwittingly, as being the true experts about Indians and their histories- and it happens at all levels of society, from the uneducated all the way up to those with advanced college degrees, and even in the halls of Congress. The result is the perpetual erasure of Indians from the US political and cultural landscape. In short, for five centuries Indians have been disappearing in the collective imagination. They are disappearing in plain sight.“

All the Real Indians Died Off,
By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker

11.6.20 // Alameda Open Space + Los Poblanos Open Space

I am so exhausted. I’m finding it impossible to ignore all that is happening right now, to think deeply about my work, what I’m doing here out by the river, and in general. I’ve spent time reading through writing from the past few months—I am interested in this:

10.14.20
Where is our oppositional energy most needed now?
Where / when is it ok to surrender, disperse, and fade into the edges for rest?
Can there be too much rest?

I’ve found it very challenging to hide the reality of all that is right now. I can’t pretend or fool myself into productivity. So for now, I am chasing texture—viscerally absorbing anything that doesn’t resemble the contours of my couch or computer screen. Waiting prone in the leaves, ribs and heart to the ground, there is time to witness the subtle vibrations of the river and distant indiscernible movements.

I walked about 5 miles through the arroyo and felt relieved to experience the texture and resistance of the sand against the soles of my boots.

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11.8.20 // Volcanoes

Today I have been thinking about the practices that have kept me present with myself and my work throughout the past few years—hiking anytime and anywhere away from the city of Chicago was such an escape. I knew I could get up before dawn, drive somewhere and disappear for a few hours into a landscape that felt healing. Three days into our weekend now, I can finally think more clearly about what I am working on and why. The wind is intense, but somehow my mind is finally still—the first time in weeks that I have been able to focus enough to meditate calmly. The distance of the horizon here provides a counterpoint to my presence in my body—I am not there, but here. I am a guest in this sacred place, and I am grateful.

Our field study occurred on lands of the Pueblo people—the true stewards of this place. I was/am a guest.

I keep thinking about the drinking-water facility beside the Rio Grande,
“built to resemble a Spanish mission church to better blend in with its surroundings.” I stood beside it, hearing and feeling its industrial hum; it sounded like no church I’ve ever been to.

The past few months have been an awakening to the pipes and wires and tracks that uphold my life. I’ve been following lines and flows, realizing I walk by a natural gas pipe there, drive by a generating station here.

Why didn’t I see the infrastructure that supports me? Why is a pump station masked as a church? Are we ashamed of the cost of our living? What would it mean to create infrastructure meant to be seen? Something to be celebrated? Something not weighed down by costs we wish to forget?

Fences or distance, innocuous facade or duplicitous facade—all ways we keep infrastructure at bay. But it’s easy to witness effect.

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I’m interested in where control lapses—where humans are reminded other forces and life have a say.

It’s like trying to hold a feather still in the wind.

For now, I’m working on seeing what I’ve been blind to.

I keep returning to these displaced trees, now standing as transmission poles.

I keep thinking of the years they collected and hardened sunlight, inch by inch. A height aimed at reaching light above a canopy. That height now holds wires, carrying energy at the speed of light.

So I can scroll.

For a brief moment I wanted to playfully yet systematically create parameters for myself in the landscape. I constructed vestiges of my moving body using vinyl flagging tape to map the temporary artificial boundary I placed myself within. Curious of what the natural environment would look like as a briefly constructed form, I used the spaces between branches, trunks of trees, the bottom of the arroyo to it’s top and the stones buried in it’s basin. I wanted to, if only for a moment, demarcate my passage, revealing it through my mark making with the graphic vinyl tape. I then dismantled and left the space to document the seemingly absent and erased trace of my past self. I was curious as to what the visibility of subtle distance may have been between the growth of two trees , between a stone or to the top of an eroding arroyo, making apparent the scale of a natural space through feeble and inconsequential attempts of mapping my movement through the landscape. These constructions were like minimal drawing exercises to try and reveal unseen distances I climbed or walked within these moments of occupying a space.

My interest in using vinyl flagging tape comes from seeing it left about in the landscape. Used as trail markers, and by land surveyors to mark a point of measurement, as well as in other forms of demarcating boundary lines. These pieces of vinyl tape left by someone are often used to help guide another through a particular area, to assist in their orientation. They read to me like small messages, seemingly unimportant, but may hold some meaning to the unknown person’s profession, a small trace of conversation from one to another in the land. I find myself photographing them often when I am hiking, biking, etc.

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KOCHIA

PROCESSING INVASIVENESS:

Kochia– an aggressive colonizing, migrant species; “an undesirable weed”. Prodigious in its tumbleweed method of seed dispersal; indicator plant of poor soil conditions; drought tolerant; resistant to herbicides; “ornamental”- and brought into the US for this reason around 1900.

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….   “A colonial mode of relationship blocks consciousness.”    .…

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-Manu Karuka, (p. 25) in Empire’s Tracks

Invasiveness is deeply embedded into my experience of life as I am really just a visitor on the lands that I once believed I belonged to. I am realizing that I don’t feel like I belong to any place and long to know the physical earth that feels like I am of it. I’m paying attention to the ways that we invaders take root and displace thriving native communities, violently forcing intelligent systems out of balance. This imbalance ripples outwards.

 How to reconcile this?

I first took note of this plant in the Bosque near the Hispanic Cultural Center. It stood out to me because of its assertive pink color which I was told was in reaction to the recent frost. After that initial sighting and gathering, I continue to encounter it everywhere and in very large quantities.

I revisited Valle de Oro after discovering that kochia had essentially lined the entire path on our walk to the Rio Grande and had completely overtaken the fields. It appeared on the roadside on 2^nd Street in Mountain View, framing the AT&SF superfund site.