Events

In the name of conservation, natural landscapes the world over have been divided up, fenced off, and barricaded against the people and animals that call them home, fragmenting habitats and devastating lifeworlds. Join us for four days of events that expose this crisis of colonial conservation, and advance a more just conservation for our world in crisis.

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.

Unfence the Future opens with a blessing and song from Kwastlmut, Sadie Olsen (Lummi), a student and co-founder of Whiteswan Environmental.

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?

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?