Events

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?

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

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.

Join us for a live-streamed program of ceremony, song, and speakers from the three Salmon Seas, at a gathering dedicated to building Indigenous-led conservation alliances to restore the salmon at risk of extinction, and the world of relations they bring to life.