72 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. African countries have become reliant on a few food items.

      for - stats - Africa - food insecurity - adjancency - food colonialism - food insecurity - food dependency

      stats - food insecurity - 20 plant species make up 90% of food consumed in Africa - 3 crops introduced by the Green Revolution make up 60% of all calories consumed - wheat - maize - rice

      • African countries have become reliant on a few food items.

      • Just 20 plant species now provide 90% of our food, with three

        • wheat,
        • maize and
        • rice

      accounting for 60% of all calories consumed on the continent and globally.

      • This deprives the continent of diverse food sources,

      at the very time when research has found

      massive food and nutrition insecurity in Africa.

      • By 2020, about 20% of the continent’s population (281.6 million) faced hunger.
      • This figure is likely to have increased,
        • given the impacts of successive droughts, floods and COVID-19.

      Yet historically, Africa had

      - 30,000 edible plant species, and 
      - 7,000 were traditionally cultivated or foraged for food.
      

      The continent is a treasure trove of agrobiodiversity (a diversity of types of crops and animals) and

      • its countries could easily feed themselves.
  2. Dec 2023
    1. how do you reframe your idea of Hope to communities that this specific 01:19:33 conception that you've explained might not apply to as is specifically bipod communities and and just a side question if you have time how do you engage with degrowth theories 01:19:45 of capitalism in your work
      • for: question - colonialism and degrowth

      • question: how are colonialism and degrowth situated in his work?

      • for: carbon emissions - colonialism correction

      • title: Revealed: How colonial rule radically shifts historical responsibility for climate change

      • date: Nov. 26, 2023
      • author:
        • Simon Evans,
        • Verner Viisainen
      • publication: Carbon Brief

      • SUMMARY

        • first-of-its-kind climate justice analysis that measures the contribution of colonial contributions of carbon emissions
        • total emissions to date since 1850: 2,558bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2).
        • planetary global warming since 1850: 1.15C above pre-industrial temperatures.
        • 1850 was chosen as start year for humanity's measurable carbon budget due to available records and most emissions happening after this point"
        • carbon budget used from 1850 to 2023:92%
        • remaining carbon budget: 8%
        • chances of staying under 1.5 Deg C if we do not exceed our budget: 50/50
        • burn rate of remaining 8%: 1% / month
        • time remaining to stay within budget: 8.4 years:
        • emissions corrected by colonial emissions accounting"
          • Portugal emissions: > 3x more
          • Netherlands emissions: 3x more
          • UK emissions: 2x more
            • UK ranks 4th when colonial emissions are counted
          • France emissions: 1.5x more
          • EU+UK emissions:19% more
            • As a group, EU+UK ranks only 2nd behind US
          • India emissions: 15% less
          • Indonesia: 34% less
          • Africa: 24% less
          • On a per capita basis, China, Africa and India are far behind developed nations' emissions contributions.
          • Many former colonial powers are now net CO2 importers. This raises their emissions contributions even further if accounted for
  3. Nov 2023
    1. And while European powers and settlers in their colonies did not set out to exterminate the peoples they conquered, they killed any who resisted, claiming that their hands were forced.
      • for: colonialism - justifying death
    2. The Spanish thought they had been mandated by God to spread the faith and were thus justified in annexing all territories not populated by Christians in order to convert the heathens.
      • for: colonialism - role of religion

      • comment

        • Using religion as justification of violence committed against the other is liberally found throughout history
    1. Locke even grants absolute power to the master over them

      slaves seen as a necessary and embedded part of European life

    2. He argued against hereditary servitude, but the laws governing slavery in the New World allowed for it.
    3. t mentions that Locke strongly opposes slavery, he was involved in forming a colony where owning slaves was allowed.

      hypocritical, and contradiction

    4. This portrayal made them enemies of mankind and justified wars against them.
    5. He argued that colonization of America provided a solution to this problem, as it was seen as "free" land available for European settlers.

      idea that this is free to use as not being used for the proper purpose?

    6. It is important to note that Locke's theory only included certain individuals, propertied European men
    7. colonization in America was important for Locke's conceptualization of the state of nature and his defense of enclosure. Indigenous Americans were portrayed as hunter-gatherers, and only enclosed lands were seen as producing value.
  4. Oct 2023
    1. Ogilvie uncovers the story of Anna Thorpe Wetherill, an anti-slavery activist who hid escaped enslaved people in her house in Philadelphia. Mrs Thorpe focused her efforts in the slips she sent to Oxford on recording the language of slavery, submitting definitions for ‘abhorrent’, ‘abolition’, ‘accursed’ and ‘attack’. Like Margaret Murray’s, her work ensured that the language of colonisation appeared in the dictionary not just as the lingua franca of jingoistic imperialism but shaded with the stories and the voices of the colonised.
  5. Jul 2023
    1. we are left with questions of how to split the burden of collectively staying within the PBs. To know if e.g. a person or a company is absolute environmentally sustainable, we need to know that person’s or the company’s assigned SoSOS. How to determine a person’s or a company’s assigned SoSOS is not only normative, but essentially a question of distributive justice.
      • question
        • how to we split the burden of collectively staying within the PBs?
        • To know if e.g. a person or a company is absolute environmentally sustainable,
          • we need to know that person’s or the company’s assigned SoSOS.
        • How to determine a person’s or a company’s assigned SoSOS is not only normative,
          • but essentially a question of distributive justice.
  6. May 2023
  7. Apr 2023
    1. The specialist modelling groups (referred to as Integrated Assessment Modelling, or IAMs) have successfully crowded out competing voices, reducing the task of mitigation to price-induced shifts in technology – some of the most important of which, like so-called “negative emissions technologies”, are barely out of the laboratory.

      Question - Who is controlling and advocating - the dominant techno-based NET narrative? - This narrative creates many scenarios that carry strong colonialist assumptions that perserve existing inequalities - Whilst IAM scientists strive to work with integrity, the fundamental framing narrative constrains their work to support ethically questionable recommendations - reference the work of Kanitkar et al.https://theprint.in/environment/why-indian-scientists-are-critiquing-ipcc-report-unfair-burden-on-developing-countries/1298871/

  8. Mar 2023
    1. Europe invented the practice of turning words around on themselves. You need only look to the treaties between American Indian peoples and various European governments to know that this is true. Draw your strength from who you are.
      • Critique
      • I doubt that European culture invented institutional deception but through colonialism, they were certainly leading practitioners of it
  9. Oct 2022
    1. The first is the continuing effort of the United States to educate all of its citizens,which means, of course, at a minimum, to make them allliterate.

      Depending on how it is done and the culture in which it is done, forcing literacy on a people, even when well-intentioned can be a devastating and colonialist act.

  10. Sep 2022
    1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/jeff-bezos-under-fire-after-tweet-about-queen-s-b2165039.html

      Jeff Bezos should know better than to punch down like this. Uju Anya got put in Twitter jail for not deleting her post which Twitter took down anyway.

      Twitter taking down Dr. Anya's post is disingenuous with respect to the tons of crap that they leave up... and much of that far worse than the content here.

      read on 2022-09-09 at 1:58 PM

  11. Aug 2022
    1. Margo Neale (featured at right) suggests that the Songlines project can be conceived as a Third Archive, a bridge between the First Archive of Indigenous knowledges, kept alive in the songlines that crisscross Australia, and the Second Archive, that of the Western Knowledge system, imported into Australia through colonisation and settlement and transmitted through our education systems and institutions of government, business and civil society.
  12. Jun 2022
    1. Between 1914 and 1980, inequalities in income and wealth decreasedmarkedly in the Western world as a whole (the United Kingdom,Germany, France, Sweden, and the United States), and in Japan,Russia, China, and India, although in different ways, which we willexplore in a later chapter. Here we will focus on the Western countriesand improve our understanding of how this “great redistribution”took place.

      Inequalities in income and wealth decreased markedly in the West from 1914 to 1980 due to a number of factors including:<br /> - Two World Wars and the Great Depression dramatically overturned the power relationships between labor and capital<br /> - A progressive tax on income and inheritance reduced the concentration of wealth and helped increase mobility<br /> - Liquidation of foreign and colonial assets as well as dissolution of public debt

    2. Had their colonies not allowed European countries totranscend their territorial limits, it would have been necessary to findthese sources of supply elsewhere.

      Colonial exploitation between 1500 and 1800 allowed European countries to dramatically expand beyond their own dwindling natural resources and territorial limits. Had they been trapped in a closed system, the world would have seen a very different arc of history.

    3. Those who are born today are not individu-ally responsible for this burdensome heritage, but we are all respon-sible for the way in which we choose or fail to take it into account inanalyzing the world economic system, its injustices, and the needfor change.

      burdensome heritage [of slavery and colonialism]

    4. How did Europe and the United States attain such a dominant posi-tion on the global level, at least until recently? Although no single ex-planation exists, we shall see that slavery and colonialism played acentral role in the Western world’s acquisition of wealth.

      Slavery and colonialism likely played the most outsized roles in global positioning for the United States and Europe, but how might we also comparatively measure these effects separately and also include other broad effects like the industrial revolution?

  13. May 2022
    1. Ken Pomeranz’s study, published in 2000, on the “greatdivergence” between Europe and China in the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries,1 prob ably the most important and influential bookon the history of the world-economy (économie-monde) since the pub-lication of Fernand Braudel’s Civilisation matérielle, économie etcapitalisme in 1979 and the works of Immanuel Wallerstein on “world-systems analysis.”2 For Pomeranz, the development of Western in-dustrial capitalism is closely linked to systems of the internationaldivision of labor, the frenetic exploitation of natural resources, andthe European powers’ military and colonial domination over the restof the planet. Subsequent studies have largely confirmed that conclu-sion, whether through the research of Prasannan Parthasarathi orthat of Sven Beckert and the recent movement around the “new his-tory of capitalism.”3
  14. Apr 2022
    1. Biometrics play an important role in colonial history: British administrators began experimenting with them in the 1850s as a way to control and intimidate their subjects in colonial India. Worldcoin’s activities in India, as well as other former British colonies such as Zimbabwe, where banks are banned from processing crypto transactions, and Kenya, where a new law forbids the transfer of biometrics data beyond the country’s borders, evoke Silicon Valley’s history of ignoring sensitive cultural issues and skirting regulations.

      Colonial history of biometrics

      Article text links to The Origin of Finger-Printing . Nature 98, 268 (1916). https://doi.org/10.1038/098268a0.

  15. Mar 2022
    1. Mostof the knowledge shared in this book is what might be consideredthe ‘lower levels’, meaning it is equivalent to primary school intraditional cultures. Star knowledge is far more complex and in-depththan we discuss in this book, but even this is a lot to absorb.

      This is a strong example of the sort of erasure that happens with colonial cultures invading indigenous spaces. The invading colonizers don't realize how in-depth the indigenous knowledge is, how it's structured, or how to earn it through initiation processes, so they discard it and dismiss it.

    1. What could account for such views? - Desire for power in a globaliziing conext? - Nostalgia? - Ignorance of what "empire" meant for the experience of those subject to it and the continuing legacy? Would they express the same views if they really knew what it meant? - Others?

  16. Jan 2022
    1. Councillors accused Westminster of treating Welsh people as children, or as the empire’s last colony, and said they were fed up with going “like Oliver Twist” to London to ask for concessions. They complained it was not fair that an extra bank holiday had been granted to mark the Queen’s platinum jubilee but Wales was not allowed to celebrate its patron saint.
    1. Chinua Achebe explained that Nigeria, “had some of the very best secondary schools in the British Empire. As a group, these schools were better endowed financially, had excellent amenities, and were staffed with first-rate teachers, custodians, instructors… and librarians. Of course today, [writing in 2012] under Nigerian control, these schools have fallen into disrepair, and are nothing like they were in their heyday.” (See, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, p 20). 

      The case for

  17. Dec 2021
    1. people end up being told their needs are not important, and theirlives have no intrinsic worth. The last, we are supposed to believe, isjust the inevitable effect of inequality; and inequality, the inevitableresult of living in any large, complex, urban, technologicallysophisticated society. Presumably it will always be with us. It’s just amatter of degree.

      People being told they don't matter and don't have intrinsic worth is a hallmark of colonialism. It's also been an ethical issue in the study of anthropology for the past 150 years.

      Anthropologist Tim Ingold in Anthropology: Why It Matters touches on some of this issue of comparing one group of people with another rather than looking at and appreciating the value of each separately.

  18. Nov 2021
    1. i 00:35:57 think that's really important but i want to come back to a bigger issue which is the lack of the hundred billion dollars and also loss and damage and i think that actually goes back to a lack 00:36:09 of knowledge and education in the developed world about our history and i think this is incredibly important that we need to think not just about the science but actually educating people 00:36:20 about colonization about how much we've actually admitted i think that if we can get the developed world to actually understand uh the crimes of our past to 00:36:32 be able to understand why there is this trust issue i think that's actually critical and it sounds really strange to deal with history to actually save the planet to deal with climate change but 00:36:44 i've become more convinced having heard politicians who supposedly studied history and politics at university must admit it was a very strange small oxford university you know they're not very 00:36:56 good but again i think we really have that whole education piece to do before we can acknowledge those crimes and move forward

      Education about the history of colonization is critical to helping developed country leaders understand and prioritize the transfer of funds.

  19. Oct 2021
    1. And at the end of the day, Gates is not accountable to governments or to communities. He was not elected, and there is no mechanism for him to be recalled, challenged, or held responsible for faulty policies. He could suddenly decide that he was no longer interested in supporting agriculture in Africa. In that case, the new food system Gates is importing to the African continent would collapse. Political and economic systems are being drastically altered, all at the whim of one person, one foundation.In fact, the differences between this situation — powerful individuals and institutions deciding to mess with the social, political, and economic realities of countries — and the earlier form of colonialism are thin. It’s still advertised as “good intent” and the desire to “civilize” an “uncivilized” people. The only difference is that neocolonialism is quieter and more covert. By design, it provokes less outrage. But the essential power structures remain the same.

      Concentrating power to one individual is dangerous. Large portions of the food security of African nations should not be so vulnerable to corporatism.

    2. espite the foundation’s claims to be investing “within” Africa, The Nation “examined 30,000 charitable grants the foundation has awarded over the past two decades and found that more than 88 percent of the donations — $63 billion — have gone to recipients in the wealthiest, whitest nations, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and European countries.”African groups received only 5 percent of their total funding for NGOs.By withholding critical funding from African institutions, Gates ensures that any technologies developed are owned externally to the continent, keeping power consolidated in Global North institutions.

      The money trail speaks for itself.

    3. Powerful Global North governments, corporations, and individuals today don’t need to resort to explicit violence — invasion, seizure, genocide, and enslavement — in order to control other countries. Instead, they can use structural violence — leveraging aid, market access, and philanthropic interventions in order to force lower-income countries to do what they want.

      Economic dependency of the Global South on the Global North is exactly what happens when exploitation of the wolf is disguised under the sheep’s clothing. A case in point is Unilever, the multinational food conglomerate based in the global north. Unilever is spending a significant amount of capital to circularize their entire supply chain. That is laudable. Yet, at the same time, they see Africa is their future growth market. Who benefits from that economic growth? ,,,, a small group of wealthy shareholders in the Global North or Global South. It is important to realize that capitalism has levelled the playing field. Economic exploitation, wealth concentration and extractionism is now democratically open to all!

    4. Typically, what they want is more control over markets. The initial interventions end up creating debt for lower-income countries (because they give more power to Global North corporations). That debt ultimately becomes the most deadly form of leverage, giving Global North governments the justification for more interventions and allowing them to shape economic and trade policy in the way they see fit.In short, colonialism never ended. It just changed form.

      The weaponization of economic leverage points means control can be gotten without spilling blood. Why is Africa perpetually poor in spite of its enormous wealth? Look no further than the wealth of management tier individuals of the Global North mining resource companies.

    1. To date, there is no single accounting of how much money flowed from the slave economy into coffers of American higher education. But Wilder says most American colleges founded before the Civil War relied on money derived from slavery. He suspects that many institutions are reluctant to examine this past. "There's not a lot of upside for them. You know these aren't great fundraising stories," Wilder says. Some people say that institutions must do more than make apologies and rename buildings. They insist that scholarships and other forms of monetary reparations are due. And others argue that whatever colleges and universities are doing to acknowledge their slave-holding past — a campus memorial to slaves, for example — is motivated by public relations and does nothing to ameliorate the legacy of slavery and systemic inequality. Brown University was the first to confront its ties to slavery in a major way. In 2003, Brown president Ruth Simmons appointed a commission to investigate. "What better way to teach our students about ethical conduct than to show ourselves to be open to the truth, and to tell the full story?" she says.

      This is important research to do so as not to conveniently forget the past. If all were equal today, that would have happened as the proper outcome of proactive, widespread and impactful recognition of the injustice of the past. Inequality has persisted, transmuted into structural inequality, especially manifesting in economic legacy of inherited wealth. It could be interpreted as unconducive for fundraising, but so can opaqueness of a proactive strategy.

    2. "The story of the American college is largely the story of the rise of the slave economy in the Atlantic world," says Craig Steven Wilder, a historian at MIT and author of "Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities."

      In this way, the past seeps into the present. This is a literal example of the legacy of structural inequality.

  20. May 2021
    1. But, and this is a big but, replacing Welsh place names with English ones, just because some people can't pronounce them or they just don't like the sound of them, is not ok.It's deleting your cultural distinctiveness. Your heritage and the uniqueness of these British islands. It's getting rid of one of the oldest languages in Europe, one place name at a time.
    1. Article about the renaming of Welsh place names into English which erases culture and history.

    2. Australia's giant monolith Ayers Rock was renamed Uluru in 1993, switching from its colonial namesake, former South Australian Premier Sir Henry Ayers, to the language of its traditional owners, the Anangu people.In 2002, that dual name was officially reversed, making it Uluru/Ayers Rock. Almost all Australians now refer to it as Uluru.
    3. The highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest, is not commonly known by its Tibetan name Chomolungma, meaning goddess mother of the world.Many Sherpas, a community indigenous to the Himalayan region, believe that the summit of Chomolungma is home to the Buddhist goddess Miyolangsangma.Its English name comes from Colonel Sir George Everest, who was born in Crickhowell, Powys, in 1790, who was a Surveyor General of India.
    1. I know tech policy pretty well, and this absolute dumpster fire of a policy area isn’t just a cool new place to build a blockchain-based commons, but a hard-right haven of male libertarians asset-stripping the social democratic state to build global monopolies that re-run nineteenth century colonialism, but bigger.

      A well stated version of our current problem.

  21. Apr 2021
    1. “We understand that under colonialism African and Indigenous people had very different experiences,” Dr. Nelson said. “To conflate everything in one is to erase, which is the very nature of genocidal practice.”
  22. Mar 2021
    1. The scholars Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias have called it “data colonialism,” a term that reflects our inability to stop our data from being unwittingly extracted.

      I've not run across data colonialism before.

  23. Nov 2020
    1. A similar superstition was once prevalent, as I have heard, in ancient Greece and Rome; not applying, however (as in India), to a diamond devoted to the service of a god, but to a semi-transparent stone of the inferior order of gems, supposed to be affected by the lunar influences

      The backdrop of the narrator's story is westward expansion, and this is important to keep in mind because it can correlate to lines like this. Here, the narrator demystifies the moonstone of its superstition by fitting it into a western geologic history. Notice that he does not totally demystify it. Our narrator may not be superstitious, but he is a little stitious.

  24. Sep 2020
    1. mahogany-coloured

      While this was not a super unusual color metaphor, this is an interesting descriptor, since mahogany is a colonial hardwood, native to the Americas.

  25. Feb 2019
    1. Escobar casts wide the net of his critique, his objective is not merely to tackle neoliberal capitalism, rampant individualism, patriarchy or colonialism — although each of those topics are explored in detail. He is writing against nothing less than all of modernity, a “particular modelo civilizatorio, or civilizational model… an entire way of life and a whole style of world making.” Our toxic, modern lifestyle in the Global North and the way it understands (or fails to understand) the relationality between humanity and other forms of life plays the dominant role in creating the contemporary crises. To preserve the future we need a different way of life and way to relate to all of life, “no less than a new notion of the human.” The crises are inseparable from our social lives. We need to step outside of our established worldviews to bring about significant transformations. Is this possible? How can we achieve such a transition?

      Designs for the Pluriverse book review

  26. Dec 2018
    1. Today, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at the Comparative and International Education Society’s Annual Conference with representatives of two open education projects that depend on Creative Commons licenses to do their work. One is the OER publisher Siyavula, based in Cape Town, South Africa. Among other things, they publish textbooks for use in primary and secondary school in math and science. After high school students in the country protested about the conditions of their education – singling out textbook prices as a barrier to their learning – the South African government relied on the Creative Commons license used by Siyavula to print and distribute 10 million Siyavula textbooks to school children, some of whom had never had their own textbook before. The other are the related teacher education projects, TESSA, and TESS-India, which use the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license on teacher training materials. Created first in English, the projects and their teachers rely on the reuse rights granted by the Creative Commons license to translate and localize these training materials to make them authentic for teachers in the linguistically and culturally diverse settings of sub-Saharan Africa and India. (Both projects are linked to and supported by the Open University in the UK, http://www.open.ac.uk/, which uses Creative Commons-licensed materials as well.) If one wakes up hoping to feel that one’s work in the world is useful, then an experience like this makes it a good day.

      I think contextualizing Creative Commons material as a component in global justice and thinking of fair distribution of resources and knowledge as an antidote to imperialism is a provocative concept.This blog, infojusticeorg offers perspectives on social justice and Creative Commons by many authors.

  27. Oct 2018
    1. the prevalence of liberal multicultural discourses today effectively works to maintain settler colonialism because they make it easy to assume that all minorities and ethnic groups are different though working toward inclusion and equality, each in its own similar and parallel way. Justice is often put in terms that coincide with the expansion of the settler state

      Liberal multiculturalism promotes the idea that marginalized communities have to partake in settler colonialism in order to be liberated (whether they realize it or not). In reality, liberation lies outside of settler colonialism.

  28. Sep 2018
    1. The power of that scene in Black Panther lies in its critique of Western museums as symbols and products of colonialism and repositories of empire’s loot.

      Distinguish the institution's culpability in colonialism and cultural appropriation, versus the individual's desire to share ideas, knowledge, and history--including (assumed) the critique of colonializing practices of the institutions.

  29. Jul 2018
    1. (If the map were to be a valid academic resource, he adds, it would also need a time slider to specify different time periods, separate existing and historical nations, and highlight the movement of nations across time. That would be a huge logistical challenge, Temprano says, requiring time, sources, and resources not currently available to him.)

      sounds like a digital humanities project

  30. Mar 2018
    1. young activists can feed a constant conflict over racist Native-American sports mascots, even as actual Native Americans, when surveyed, consistently say that they do not care about the mascots, and instead are far more concerned about poverty, addiction, and violence in their communities.

      Accusations of "cultural appropriation" serving to distract from more difficult challenges.

  31. Feb 2018
    1. I am not concerned here to enter into debates about whether Joyce shoidd be considered a postcolonial writer nor whether Ireland can properly be located under the increasingly capacious umbrella of the postcolonial.4

      It's interesting to me that there is a gray area surrounding Joyce as a postcolonial writer, in comparison to more traditional postcolonial authors, like Salman Rushdie or post-colonial theorist, Frantz Fanon.

  32. Mar 2017
    1. At the back of the changing room, I open a door and suddenly find myself in a new country/[planet]/[town]/[village]/[landscape] (choose appropriate) and embark on a new adventure in which I will meet the inhabitants and learn to adapt myself to their/my/our? world.

      Colonial explorer. Possibility to Jump from Country to Country.

    1. This is what their claims are about, and this is why they say their claims must be settled before a pipeline is built.

      In this statement, Berger is expressing the perspective of the native culture that has not been treated as owners of their ancestral land. Even though land claims are rarely perfect, Berger argues their importance in improving social inequalities. As a whole, the native populations aren’t opposed to the creation of a pipeline, however they are demanding respect in these decisions that will vastly impact their land (132). Until this point the native populations have been viewed from a largely colonialist viewpoint. Starting in the mid 19th century with the Hudson’s Bay Company wanting to “tap the value of the arctic and drain it via the Mackenzie river” (18). After the fur traders, whaling boats harvested the abundance of the Mackenzie delta from the north (31). Continuing on, the imperial mindset brought forth Reindeer as a “solution” and apology to the native people (78). After this rich history of white subjugation, it is obvious why the paramount issue at the time of this document was not the creation of the oil pipeline, but instead government agreements to settle land claims and ownership. In stating “This is what their claims are about”, Berger is arguing for the crucial impact in continuing to develop these large projects on other people's land without their consent. Due to the extensive environmental considerations as well as the mass amount of infrastructure needed for this project, the Canadian government would be entering a new stage of colonialism if they were to follow through with this project without consultation of the local populations.

      Annotation drawn from Stuhl, Andrew. Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands. University of Chicago Press, 2016, 132

    2. seismic trail

      Industry blazed a trail, rather physically, across the North. Big oil companies came in, ran tests, drilled wherever they pleased, and left scars on the fragile landscape. Before they could drill though, they had to find out where the oil was and to do so, seismic crews would do a survey of the area using what is called the single line method. “This method required the use of several tracked vehicles in a caravan, setting off blasts and collecting the data from them, and gashing vast stretches of the Arctic landscape” (114). These trails are what Berger is referring to and they are very much still visible today, decades after being created. The seismic testing left an impact on the physical substrate and the vegetation growing on it. The trails “are physical legacies of the ways multinational oil companies, governmental policies, and geological science combined to enroll Arctic nature into global energy economies. To those who know their full history, though, they are also a reminder of how ecological disturbance became a focal point for scientific and Inuit activism in the 1960s and 1970s” (115). As Berger goes on to say, the land itself could be, and was, taken from the native people and they are reminded every day of that when they see these trails.

      Annotation drawn from Stuhl, Andrew. Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. For aerial images and more information on seismic trails visit: https://www.fws.gov/refuge/arctic/seismic.html

    3. The native economy refuses to die

      Way before white men ventured into the Arctic, the indigenous people had a perfectly functioning economy of their own. They did not need wages or paper money to do business. They relied on what the environment around them provided, working for food and trading furs. In the 1920s, when scientists and researchers began coming north it led to the introduction of reindeer husbandry as a way to feed the influx of people. This “did not work well with Inuit herders on the north slope, since their labors supported people who did far less work, but still paid through shares of meat and hides” (82). There was a divide between the reindeer community and the genuine Inuit which caused major strife in the economy. Many Inuit “pointed to fur trapping as offering more fulfillment and dignity [than herding reindeer], even though it required similar commitments of labor and time…The private fur trade thus remained an escape from state-sponsored colonialism” (82). However, despite their best efforts to stay true to their native economy, in the 1940s, “herding and harvesting reindeer appeared as more stable than animal life cycles and the global fur trade” (84). But this is not the farthest extent to which southerners took over the land and economy of the Arctic. “Even if Inuit did not imagine themselves within the world being created by southerners, they could hardly avoid participating in it. While the United States and Canada established an Arctic oil economy, the world Inuit had built deteriorated. In the 1950s, fur-bearing creatures became harder to find, markets for fur evaporated, and the Hudson’s Bay Company converted its Arctic fur posts from fur trade centers to retail outlets. For both outsiders and Inuit, the 1950s were a turning point, when the machines and methods of colonialism became the vehicles of cultural survival” (91). There was no longer a market that could support a lifestyle of only hunting and trapping. The indigenous people had to leave that way of life behind and take up wage jobs in the industrial system.

      Annotation drawn from Stuhl, Andrew. Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

  33. Nov 2016
    1. Consuming and propagating my culture and history as if it were an internet meme might seem revolutionary on the surface; but, in reality, it’s just another form of capitalist consumption and isn’t revolutionary, at all.

      Reminds me I really mean to read "The Rebel Sell".

  34. May 2016
    1. Engagement with decolonization and decolonial practices is central to the work of most cultural rhetorics scholars.

      Are there colonial methodologies? If so, how can we implement the methodological practices of a culture (i.e. Mormonism) and apply them to a cultural rhetorics study? Wouldn't that be furthering colonialism?

      Zooming further out: are there instances where one shouldn't adopt methodologies of a culture?

  35. Oct 2015
    1. The “patriotic” and supposed “Spanish Only” blanquit@s also can articulate English and Spanish very well while the poor and scrutinized in public schools learn only Spanish. Isn’t it easier and more fruitful to speak about race, language, diaspora openly instead of having a racist and irrational “todos somos iguales” discourse? I guess white supremacy and privilege are more important than caring for our own people. But yes, many white Puerto Ricans have done incredible work for Afro-Puerto Ricans, other black bodies and low-income Puerto Ricans of all hues but rest assured; they are the overwhelming minority.

      William Garcia explains his stance on the importance of acknowledging racism in Puerto Rico gives counter arguments to those who deny it's existence .

  36. Sep 2015
    1. "I would also say, and here I wish to be quite clear, as was St. John Paul II: I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offenses of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America," he said to applause from the crowd.

      Pope Francis, seen as "pope of the poor," visited Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay because they are thought of as the poorest countries in the region and are home to 40% of the world's Catholics