Events

This panel brings together community leaders and activists from key sites of contemporary environmental struggle across the country, who argue not for bigger and better fences between their homelands and extractive infrastructure, but for the end of extraction itself.

A poetry reading by Mark K. Tilsen from his book, “It Ain’t Over Until We’re Smoking Cigars on the Drill Pad: Poems from Standing Rock and the Frontlines.”

How are Indigenous culture bearers, archaeologists, and conservationists exposing the failures of current state and federal protocols for wildlife conservation, taking on the institutions and agencies tasked with preserving natural and cultural heritage, and pointing the way toward a more just and sustainable future for all?

This short film illuminates some of the deeper tensions at play in struggles to protect sacred places: a clash of irreconcilable ways of understanding and relating to the land, and what happens when the State’s perspective has been codified into federal law and the input of Tribal Nations as sovereigns is disregarded.

What if we understood fortress conservation not as the invention of patriotic nationalists in the American west, but as the renovation of a centuries-long process of primitive accumulation, where capitalist relations to land were violently imposed upon the world we share in common?