Category Archives: nayra

Freshkills

The landfill opened in 1948 as a temporary landfill, but by 1955 it had become the largest landfill in the world, and it remained so until its closure in 2001.

…

It consists of four mounds which range in height from 90 to about 225 feet (30 to about 70 m) and hold about 150 million tons of solid waste. The archaeologist Martin Jones characterizes it as “among the largest man-made structures in the history of the world.”

…

By the 1970s, city developers were referring to the landfill as ‘landscape sculpture’. Today, the 150 million-ton pile of industrial waste is twice the height of the Statue of Liberty.

…

“It had a certain nightmare quality. … I can still recall looking down on the operation from a control tower and thinking that Fresh Kills, like Jamaica Bay, had for thousands of years been a magnificent, teeming, literally life-enhancing tidal marsh. And in just twenty-five years, it was gone, buried under millions of tons of New York City’s refuse.”

…

Feral dog packs roamed the dump and were a hazard to employees. Rats also posed a problem.

…

From 1987 through 1988, in an environmental disaster known as the syringe tide, significant amounts of medical waste from the Fresh Kills landfill, including hypodermic syringes and raw garbage, washed up onto beaches on the Jersey Shore, in New York City, and on Long Island [during height of AIDS epidemic].

…

In 2001 it was estimated that, if kept open, the landfill would have eventually become the highest point on the East Coast. Under strong community pressure and with support of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the landfill site was closed on March 22, 2001, but it had to be reopened after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Virtually all the materials from the World Trade Center site were sent to the temporarily reopened landfill for examination.

Thousands of detectives and forensic evidence specialists worked for over 1.7 million hours at Fresh Kills Landfill to try to recover remnants of the people killed in the attacks. A final count of 4,257 human remains was retrieved, but only 300 people were identified from these remains. A memorial was built in 2011, which also honors those whose identities were not able to be determined from the debris. The remaining waste was buried in a 40-acre (160,000 m2) portion of the landfill; it is highly likely that this debris still contains fragmentary human remains.

…the City’s Chief Medical Examiner retains custody of all still-unidentified materials at a facility within the National 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan. The remaining materials at Fresh Kills were then buried in a 40-acre (160,000 m2) portion of the landfill that will be known as West Mound. Afterward, the landfill facility was closed permanently, in anticipation of the park on the site.

…

The garbage once destined for Fresh Kills was shipped to landfills in other states, primarily in Pennsylvania, but also in Virginia and Ohio.

…

The Fresh Kills site is to be transformed into reclaimed wetlands, recreational facilities and landscaped public parkland, the most significant expansion of the New York City parks since the development of the chain of parks in the Bronx during the 1890s. The new park will be designed by James Corner Field Operations, the landscape architecture firm also responsible for the design of the High Line in Manhattan.

…

To use Fresh Kills as a medium is complicated, but to regard it as a ‘site’ is impossible. You can’t see it, you can’t enter it, you can’t even, really, get close to it. The best you can do is stand on top of the layers of soil that conceal it and count the methane pipes popping out of the ground between flurries of wildlife. Friedman-Pappas reflects on these visits with a tinge of irony: “Gassing masses is not what they’re advertising. The staff at Fresh Kills runs a strategic campaign to highlight the repopulation of animals in the park, and to downplay the presence of waste. My site visits would consist of Freshkills Alliance employees pointing out and exclaiming, ‘An Osprey! A Red Fox!’”

…

“The transformation of what was once the world’s largest landfill into a sustainable park makes the project a symbol of renewal and an expression of how we can re-imagine reclaimed landscapes,” the FKA’s website reads. “As more sections of the park open, the unusual combination of natural and engineered beauty—including creeks, wetlands, expansive meadows and spectacular vistas of the New York City region—will be accessible.”

…

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!”

Buying Time

With the money they made by stealing our land
They have bought themselves some time—
Air time
Water time
War time
And underground time.
By that they believe that they have bought history.

But when I look back, past the hundred of years
Of history they claim to own,
Through our own thousands of years,

And when I think of the million of red flowers
That opened each Spring of those thousands of years
No matter how white the winters,

I see hours like stars in the eyes of our children.

—Jimmie Durham

Ecological resiliency is strongest in places that are the least disturbed and most biodiverse. Bears Ears is a resilient landscape. Navajo people have a term for such places of ecological rejuvenation: we call them Nahodishgish, or “places to be left alone.”

— Bears Ears: A Native Perspective, October 2015, p.13

https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/preserving-the-natural-sonic-environment-in-bears-ears?fbclid=IwAR2GG2zwkLPZP9XqD2cZXnbdPeufSB0euQ71XUSmu-kghWJvB0gruPs1d5Y

Click to access Chippewas_of_Nawash-Encountering_the_Other.pdf

– David McLaren (except where noted)

…

sacrifice, literally “the making sacred”

…

But it’s useful to think about the metaphor of the cave itself. To take part in reality as defined by the Sun—to be able to perceive Plato’s higher Forms—you have to leave Mother Earth. There is no discussion in Plato of what has to be given up to gain knowledge of his Forms. There is also no discussion about what might be learned if you were to go deeper into the cave, away from the shadows cast by the Sun. There is an assumption that one ought to leave the Earth behind and “progress” toward the sun.

…

Humans and animals each have at least two souls—one remains with the body
after death.

…

To you the Great Spirit has given the book, to us He has given the earth.

– Red Jacket, 1805

…

There was a time in Europe when the wolf was the second most populous animal, after man. During the fierce winter of 1439 the people of Paris were besieged by wolves. The alpha male they named Cut-tail. Finally, they lured the wolves into the city where archers cut them down.

Werewolves, in European folklore are men transformed or capable of changing into wolves. In the European mythos, the transformation of wolf to man is a metaphor for the submersion of the intellect into the natural—it is a de-evolution. The result is a release of rapacious emotions that overwhelm reason and action based on rational motives. In other words, it is not the proper state for a gentleman. The transformation from wolf back to man is a replay of the evolution of mankind and an assertion of reason over base animal instinct.

In the tales of the Brothers Grimm, wolves are greedy and rapacious. In the tale of Little Red Cap (aka Little Red Riding Hood), the wolf tricks a girl on her way into the woods to visit her grandmother into straying off the path. While Little Red is trying to find her way back to the path, the wolf enters her grandmother’s cottage and eats the old woman. When Red finds her way back to the cottage, the wolf eats her too. A huntsman happens along to apprehend the wolf. Little Red and her grandmother are cut out of the wolf’s stomach unharmed and are rescued.

As in most myth, everything is significant. The wolf has to trick his way into the cottage where the grandmother lives. She lives in the forest, not the town where Little Red lives because, being old, she is still part of the earthy dark force of nature that huntsmen, wood-cutters and towns are set in opposition to.

Huntsmen (never huntswomen) and woodcutters in the old tales are always poor, but heroic. The men who cut down the dark and dangerous forest for firewood, houses and furniture are, in European popular thought, culture-bearers. They are the heroic force of progress transforming wild nature into civilization and, in the process, rescuing the feminine from falling back into the chthonic.

…

As for wolves, even today, a ramble through an English Thesaurus will uncover mostly unhappy associations: poverty or famine (wolf at the door); deceit (cry wolf, a wolf in sheep’s clothing); loneliness (lone wolf—but also freedom); lechery (wolf whistle); gluttony (don’t wolf down your food); rapacious (wolfish); inequality (wolf and the lamb).

…

There is an equivalency between the land and mankind: “Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.”

…

Native language itself is shaped by the land. To make conversation, Native people ask of others, “Where are you from?”. In Anishinaabemowin, one says: “G’boonzehbah”, literally, “Where does your sound come from?”

…

To separate Aboriginal peoples from the land, whether by treaty or by “enfranchisement” is to empty the mind of the land—to create a terra nullius of the soul.

…

To an Euro Canadian, time is quantitative. But to the First Nation, it is qualitative, as evidenced by the older Aboriginal man, who was living on a reserve, when asked if he had been — if he had lived on the reserve all his life, he replied, no, not yet.

The white man has the clocks and the watches … but, our people have the time. A word to describe one of the major qualities of time among the First Nation circle, is appropriateness. An event begins when it is appropriate. Most aboriginal languages don’t even have the words to designate time. In western cultures, however time is regarded as a commodity. Canadians buy it, sell it, borrow it, waste it, kill it, make it up, take it and if they run afoul with the law, do it.

…

In the 19th century there were no wrist watches. White men carried pocket watches, some Plains Indians said white man carries his God in his pocket because he never did anything without consulting it.
(Wally McKay)

Click to access Lewis+-+Improvised+Music+after+1950-+Afrological+and+Eurological+Perspectives+.pdf

Click to access mills.nie-bridges-to-a-new-era-2020.pdf

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/05/return-the-national-parks-to-the-tribes/618395/?fbclid=IwAR2Hq5EI2P_qm9dr-ALUu2y9qNNRZ8BJzztIpgCl3gImmZb077n9_Xn55yQ

https://www.pressherald.com/2020/11/08/vegan-kitchen-americans-have-been-enjoying-nut-milk-and-nut-butter-for-at-least-4-centuries/

Gift

Daniel Everett, a linguist who studied the small Pirahã tribe of hunter-gatherers in Brazil, reported that, while they are aware of food preservation using drying, salting, and so forth, they reserve their use for items bartered outside the tribe. Within the group, when someone has a successful hunt they immediately share the abundance by inviting others to enjoy a feast. Asked about this practice, one hunter laughed and replied, “I store meat in the belly of my brother.”

…

Anthropologist David Graeber argued that the great world religious traditions of charity and gift giving emerged almost simultaneously during the “Axial age” (800 to 200 BCE), when coinage was invented and market economies were established on a continental basis. Graeber argues that these charity traditions emerged as a reaction against the nexus formed by coinage, slavery, military violence and the market (a “military-coinage” complex). The new world religions, including Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, and Islam all sought to preserve “human economies” where money served to cement social relationships rather than purchase things (including people).

…

In North America, it is illegal to sell organs, and citizens are enjoined to give the “gift of life” and donate their organs in an organ gift economy. However, this gift economy is a “medical realm rife with potent forms of mystified commodification”.

“Real Power is our relationship with the earth. We are the earth… [human.beings]…are just different shapes and forms of the life of the earth,…no more or less than the trees …[and]… stones…human physical, being spirit. Authority is not power. Authority is something man creates. All authority is usually based upon aggression or implied aggression. Whoever has the most money has the ability to [buy] authority, but that is not power. The industrial technological authoritarian political system that we live under, has developed a way to mine the human spirit just as it mines all natural resources. We are being mined in the same way that [oil] is mined, out of the earth. The pollution of the air, of the water, …of the environment …comes from this plundering and mining of the planet in an irresponsible manner. Every fear, every doubt, every insecurity, every way that we ever beat ourselves up inside of our own heads,—that is the pollution left over from the mining of our spirit …by the confusions that are in our minds. There is no existing cure to the problem, the disease, than the one we create by using our intelligence as intelligently and as clearly as we possibly can. Either we know or we don’t know. Our ancestors are our power connection to knowledge. Real Power is what we come from. It is part of the natural order of the universe. Real Power has no limitations. Real Power cannot be removed from us, it is a natural part of us. Any relationship we will ever have to Real Power is our relationship to the earth. [We must re-establish]…our connection to that basic reality, we must take care of the earth.”

(Excerpted from the spoken words of John Trudell at the memorial for Earth First activist Judi Bari, April 26, 1997.)

e. crampton

‘…heal the wounds that colonialism had inflicted on me my whole life — wounds I previously lacked the capacity to see.

…

A press release once defined her style as “an adoption of sonic dialects across the Americas [that] shape the way different communities hear not just sounds but frequencies.

…

As Nishnaabeg academic Leanne Betasamosake Simpson says in her book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2014), indigenous people don’t relate to the land by possession or control over it, but through connection; “a generative, affirmative, complex, overlapping, and nonlinear relationship” with the land (Simpson, 2019) is exactly what Crampton has been investigating in American Drift. As she remarked in an interview in 032c last year, “The notion of stone is something that is prevalent in our daily lives because of geography and praxis, becoming part of the languages we signal — chemical, tactile, textual, textilic, iconographic, oral, etc. That affiliation with stone, with all of its becoming, all of its generativity — all of these things come into play and that’s a long history that also created me. The stones are my family and my ancestors, a shared becoming, a shared story.”’