October: Green

Session 3: Land

We’ve broken this unit, Green, into two sections. The first section, “Land,” focuses on the ground beneath our feet. As you study the environmentalisms that sustain prisons and imagine an environmentalism without them, consider the physical space necessary for mass incarceration. On whose stolen land do America’s prisons and jails sit? What types of violence were necessary to establish and then to maintain a system of private property? What sorts of historic and current value extraction from the earth can you think of? Who decides whether to use land to build a prison or to grow food? How does the nation-state’s promise of exclusivity and security to property owners perpetuate militarism at home and abroad? Why must we be in solidarity with nonhuman relatives with whom we share the land? Have any movements provided blueprints for the present? How can we make sure we do not merely “green” the PIC? What better questions can we ask so as not to repeat past failures to organize?

Don’t forget to check out the facilitator guide!

Readings

Core Texts

Supplemental Texts

Discussion Questions

Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account (1542)

  • Why do you think Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote these two accounts? To whom do you think he wrote them?

  • How does the account from  Bartolomé de Las Casas change or further your understanding of the consequences of European contact on the native people of the Western Hemisphere?

  • De Las Casas wrote these accounts fifty and sixty years respectively after Columbus initially arrived in Hispanola. Do you think the intervening years may have influenced his perceptions? How and why? What happens when someone writes down an account after most of the consequences of an event are known?

Winona LaDuke, “Acceptance Speech for the Green Party’s Nomination for Vice President of the United States of America” (1996)

  • What is the “seventh generation” Winona LaDuke describes in reference to sustainability?

  • Do you think LaDuke is correct when she claims that “there is no real quality of life in America until there is quality of life in the poorest regions of this America”? Why, or why not? How do other voices in the book support her contention?

  • What does LaDuke mean when she says that American Indians are “the only humans in the Department of Interior treated as a natural resource”?

Dan Berger and Emily K. Hobson, Remaking Radicalism, “Utopias and Dystopias”

  • Berger and Hobson write that the Survival Gathering in South Dakota in 1980--dubbed the Cowboy-Indian Alliance for its broad-based coalition--recognized that “planetary survival itself was imperiled by the trifecta of environmental devastation, corporate greed, and US militarism.” What are some examples from other readings, across time, that come to mind using these three categories?

  • What are the limitations of both capitalism’s and communism’s belief in the nation-state as a form of political organization? How does the interconnection between earth, human, and non-human forms exceed and require such formulations?

Akinyele Umoja, “Why We Say ‘Free the Land’” (1984)

  • What is the meaning and significance of the call to “Free the Land”?

Winona LaDuke, “We Are Still Here: The Five Hundred Years Celebration” (1991)

  • What is the relationship between colonialism and ecological devastation?

  • According to LaDuke, how is the consumption and devastation of land tied to the consumption and genocide of people?

James Yaki Sayles, “War for the Cities” (1978)

  • What are the six points that Sayles makes about the connections between displacement of Afrikan people from cities and the growth of prisons?

  • What are similarities between the dislocation and relocation that Sayles describes and various forms of settler colonialism you’ve studied?

  • How does Sayles’ piece help us think about land in relation to various forms of exploitation and colonialism?

J.T. Roane, “Towards Usable Histories of the Black Commons”

  • How does the Black commons challenge previous uses of the land based on extraction?

  • Do you think Roane writes on merely surviving racial capitalism -or- “survival pending revolution,” in the formulation of the Black Panther Party? Why?

Dian Million, “We Are the Land, and the Land is Us”

  • What is the relationship between capitalism and settler colonialism?

  • Million addresses the state violence carried out by militarized police forces in the interest of “production, consumption, and distribution.” What are the examples Million names?

  • How does Million’s exploration of “place” unsettle the “antithetical split” between the “urban” and “rural” as geographical categories?

The Red Deal, Part I

  • Who is the Red Nation and what are their political principles?

  • What is the Red Deal? What is its relationship to the Green New Deal?

  • If you have the reading from Albert Woodfox’s Solitary for Session 6, you might compare and contrast the Black Panther Party’s 10-point program from that of the Red Nation. 

  • The Red Nation writes that they are “dedicated to the liberation of Native peoples from capitalism and colonialism.” What is the relationship between colonialism and capitalism? In what ways is the punishment system designed to uphold both? How does discipline relate to dispossession?

  • What are some examples of the destruction of nonhuman relatives the Red Nation describes? How are these intertwined with colonialism? 

  • What is the relationship between “Healing Our Bodies” and “Healing the Planet”? Why is “Ending the Occupation” necessary to both?

Bukka White, “Parchman Farm Blues” (1940)

  • To whom do you imagine the once-incarcerated bluesman Bukka White is singing?

  • What do you think his song says about incarceration as an answer to human conflict?