Events

Thousands of mountains, valleys and rivers located on public lands have names that are derogatory, misogynistic, racist or just plain offensive. Join us for a conversation with grassroots advocates working to change offensive places nearest them, and learn about what you can do to help.

Place-names encode a way of seeing, understanding, and relating to the land. They inscribe our social values on official maps for the future generations. Like the movement to topple Confederate and colonial statues, renaming campaigns demonstrate how oppressive word-monuments–as symbols of extraction, erasure, and enclosure–can be replaced and reclaimed as life-affirming sites for cultural resurgence and #landback.

The broader community has a lot to learn from the Coast Salish peoples, and a lot to gain by collaborating with them in efforts to protect and restore the Salish Sea. This panel convenes people who have undertaken cross-cultural collaborations in tribal government, environmental design, activism & cultural interpretation to ask how can we build the capacity for difficult conversations, healing and reciprocity, and collaborative processes. 

The “language in common” can be understood as a call for the left to create signs, symbols, and traditions that can both unify the movement and withstand attempts at co-option by the state and capital. The precedent for such an undertaking can be found in Indigenous cultures of protest and resilience, which have served to unite a movement without essentializing its participants.