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Asilo (Asylum). Lithograph tarp by J. Leigh Garcia, 2016  Moderator’s note:  Andrea Verschuyl (American Indian Studies, UW) presents two stories about how “indigenous peoples have long struggled against narratives that historicize them, marooning them in a distant past” and how one of the “great claim[s] of these discourses is that all Native peoples are dead.” Verschuyl continues: “In death, they are largely conceived of as a noble people whose erasure from the Earth was unfortunate … ” But we are still here; we endure; we are not ghosts of settler colonial and capitalist violence. Verschuyl’s essay goes beyond a mere critique of food “as a medium of insidious and destructive symbolic exchange … used by the state … to demand the deaths of Indigenous peoples asking for a better life. ”   She connects the experiences of indigenous transborder travelers avoiding death in the “weaponized landscape” of the Sonoran Desert and the hunger strike initiated in December, 2012 by At...

Moderator’s Note: Today’s blog post is adapted from a research paper prepared by Rocio Evelin Carranza Jacinto, a pre-med student that participated in the Second Annual Acequia Agroecology and Permaculture Institute, which just completed a month-long field school hosted by The Acequia Institute in Colorado and offered through the University of Washington for Natural World (NW) and I&S (Ideas and Society) credit. Rocio’s carefully documented research paper is based on original interviews with two women active in the struggles for land, water, and indigenous culture. While Rocio does not explicitly present this as a critical eco-feminist interpretation of women and property rights, the paper nonetheless links ecological concerns and gender dynamics in in the context of the acequia land grant communities of south central Colorado’s San Luis Valley. One fascinating aspect of Rocio’s argument is that assimilation actually represents a transition from machismo as a set of gender role ex...