Events

NEPA, NHPA, and other federal policies were drawn up to protect sensitive ecosystems, sacred and historic places, and ancestral lands and waters against destructive industrial development, yet time and again they fail. This event explores current challenges as well as opportunities for communities, legal activists, conservationists and historic preservationists to creatively leverage the law, change it, or replace existing policies entirely with new protections that can better protect what is sacred for the generations to come.

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.”

Narrated by Freddie Lane (Lummi), this video introduces the ways of seeing, understanding, and relating to the land, water and air that guide the work of the House of Tears Carvers, a collective of carvers from the Lummi Nation.

A participatory exercise led by artist, performer, and climate justice activist Ruth Miller, inviting members of the audience to experience the world through the eyes of the salmon.

The second day of “Unfence the Future” opens with a poetry reading by Cheyenne and Hudulgee Muscogee poet and Native American rights advocate Suzan Shown Harjo.