ANTH 3420 Urban Archaeology OER

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Week 6: Guest Lecturer Jaskiran Dhillon, The New School

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  • #79193

    For this week’s reading response, please write a response to the lecture given by Jaskrian Dhillon on 10/3 and discuss one point she brings up in lecture that might directly relate to some of the themes we have/or will be discussing this semester. Responses are due Friday 10/4 by midnight.

     

    #79469
    Jaeden Granger
    Participant

    Jaskrian Dhillon’s lecture on indigenous politics and environmental justice brought up the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Dakota Access Pipeline is a 1,772-mile-long pipeline that would transfer crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois. The controversy surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline is that the pipeline would negatively impact the environment, as well as the pipeline being built on top of Native American burial ground of numerous tribes. Some sacred ground was bulldozed in order for the pipeline to be built. The pipeline has led to protests at the pipeline site in order to stop development of the pipeline. The protests led to the creation of #NODAPL on social media.

    The discourteous act is similar to the events that occurred in Fulton Mall, Brooklyn during the late 2000s. Allison Lirish Dean and Kelly Anderson’s documentary My Brooklyn follows the displacement of small business owners in the district. Many of the hundreds of the small businesses were being replaced with high luxury housing. Many of those being displaced were mainly African-American and Caribbean residents and shop owners. This is just one example of wealthy corporates, politicians and private-owners building commodities that would benefit them without the acknowledgment or cross-examining with the established residents who may not wish for the gentrification of their home area. Those involved with the creation of the Dakota Access Pipeline did not cross-examine with the natives about locations of burial grounds, and ignorantly and unsympathetically continued with it being built despite the public outcry against it.

    #79471
    Matthew Wojcik
    Participant

    One point brought up in the lecture was the topic of displacement. The act of forcibly removing one group from a particular territory goes way back in history, into prehistory even. There is archeological evidence for such violent acts. In my other anthropology classes, I recall the Nataruk Massacre being mentioned. A  large group of people were brutally killed thousands of years ago in what is now known as Kenya. These people has some resource or territory another group desired, and the trauma found on the bones of the victims suggest a very grizzly end to the dispute. The fact that this violent behavior is documented in our other primate cousins suggests that we genetically ingrained to desire what is best in our environment. In my primates class, we went over how chimpanzees, our closest living relative, go on patrols around the borders of their domains. If they find a stranger, they kill the individual. They have also been known to expand their territories, much like we humans do. And by doing so, they displace other chimps.

    What was mentioned previously ties in to our class nicely because urban society was built by us, Homo sapiens, a member of the order of Primates. Even though technology changes over the years, we aren’t different from the people who lived thousands of years into the past. Our instinctual behaviors remain the same, the only really change occurring in our ideals, which are themselves influence by other people in society. The lecture mentioned terra nullis, as did our readings. This is an example of one of these ideals. And urban society is built on such theories, whether they are right or wrong. What is right and what is wrong is also something we humans tend to disagree on.

    To understand society, we have to understand ourselves. Our ancestors laid down the bedrock for our way of life. We are capable of altruistic acts, but too often we resort to ones based in hate. This had environmental repercussions as well, since our greed for resources has led to excessive strain on ecosystems worldwide.

    #79486
    Andrew Poccia
    Participant

    Thursday’s lecture given by Jaskiran Dhillon coincided well with one main theme that we have been discussing as a class over the past few weeks that being, displacement. Dhillon shared some of the work she had done as well as her experience involving the protests at the Standing Rock Reservation. After talking about her interactions and time spent with the indigenous people of that land we learned how deep of a connection the people have with the land and how incredibly important it is to their families and culture as whole. One aspect specifically was the importance of water and how this is deeply rooted in the culture and has been passed down through generations. Unfortunately, the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline would directly intervene with part of Lake Oahe on the reservation and has done so since its completion.

    Learning about this protest immediately brought to mind the destruction of the Fulton Mall and surrounding areas in Downtown Brooklyn which we saw in the My Brooklyn film. Despite protests and petitions an integral part of the culture of millions of Brooklyn natives was destroyed and taken away as a result of government action. More often than not we see situations like these where without the input or feelings of those native to the area being considered, wealthier and more powerful people simply do what benefits them. The morality of these situations is at question and I agree that something should be done to accommodate those who call these places home.

    #79489
    Blessing Tate
    Participant

    On October 3, 2019, I had the pleasure and great opportunity to listen to a lecture by Scholar and Political Organizer Jaskaran Dhillon. To note her position, Ms. Dhillon’s area of research, scholarship, and teachings include, indigenous studies, youth studies, anthropology, colonial violence, and political ecology. Her current work includes developing an Anti-Colonial critique of environmental justice. Dhillon mentioned that, although she is a native of Cree Territory, Canada, she is not indigenous however, she is a person of color. She examines colonialism, indigenous resurgence and the politics of climate justice.

    During the lecture, Dhillon passionately warns of the interconnectedness between colonialism, capitalism, violence, and environmental racism. Her ethnographic research included state violence against Canadian indigenous youth of the Sioux Nation. It was concluded that the link between colonialism and capitalism is evident in the ways in which the state continues to enact colonial violence against them and their community in a strategic effort to secure property rights enroute to “capitalistic and racial domination.” Dhillon asserts, that in order to extract natural resources from lands that are occupied by indigenous people there to protect it, you first need to do something to the people who are trying to protect that land. To achieve the goal of an “extractive projects”, subsequently acts of violence and criminalization are committed against the future landowners, aka “indigenous youth”, to avoid future resistance. We can witness first-hand the act of “colonial dispossession” at the front lines of resistance in 2016 at Standing Rock. It is here that the Sioux Nation peacefully protested the Dakota Access Pipeline project which was due to be erected through Sioux territory.

    To target resistance, awareness, remembrance, and recognition against those who experience environmental racism and the oppressed alike, the fossil fuel industry, state, and government agendas in both Canada and the US, have surmised a strategic approach of colonial violence and criminalization. The substrate for social movement usually predicts there is some form of ”justifiable injustice.” Similarly, this is how the Black Lives movement began.

    As a supporter of the resistance, Black Lives, a beacon of awareness concerning the multitude of issues faced by Blacks in America, shares a commonality regarding the hardships of colonialism and criminalization. One event we’ve discussed in our lesson, as expressed by Dhillon herself, was the events of Ferguson. As a recap, Michael Brown was gunned down by a policeman who suspected him of being involved in a robbery attempt. Some demonstrations led to the destruction of property, including one QuikTrip store in the area. Issues arose when the preservation of the burnt store as part of history that analyzes the racism culture was not agreed on by several parties. Some wanted it preserved, whereas others saw this as not warranting preservation (Allen). In this case, the question of preservation is minimal to the idea of the heinous act itself and in the words of Dhillon herself, if there are no communities left to fight for social injustice and displacement, then they are no longer able to campaign against it.

    #79490
    Kellen Gold
    Participant

    In Professor Jaskiran Dhillon’s lecture, “Indigenous Resistance, Planetary Dystopia, and the Politics of Environmental Justice,” she discussed the usage of indigenous knowledge by colonial governments as a way to mediate the effects of climate change. She was critical of this approach, as indigenous knowledge is not merely what an indigenous individual may know, but is an entire body of activities, emotions, spiritualities, oral histories, and connections with land that is shared amongst a group and passed down from elder generations to younger ones. For a colonial structure to attempt to employ facets of this knowledge as a way of managing the effects of their environmental destruction is to further the erasure of indigenous peoples. Using this knowledge outside of an indigenous context decontextualizes and distorts it, especially when the land under consideration is viewed by colonizers as a source of profit, instead of viewing it as kin, as indigenous peoples do. It is also extremely hypocritical and disrespectful for colonial structures to exploit this knowledge, when many of them have not acknowledged the ongoing genocide and marginalization of indigenous groups that these structures still employ.

    I related this point to our class discussion of Craig N. Cipolla’s article, “Native American Historical Archaeology and the Trope of Authenticity.” In the article, Cipolla discusses the Brothertown Indians, a group of Native people who mixed Christian beliefs with their indigenous ones. The group’s quest for federal tribal recognition was denied by the Office of Indian Affairs, as they believed there was insufficient archaeological evidence to prove that Brothertown Indians were an existing entity. This relates to Prof. Dhillon’s lecture in that it shows how colonial governments cannot accurately comprehend the lived experiences of indigenous peoples and only seeks to utilize them when it is financially or politically expedient. Just as the American government erroneously used Native archaeology to deny federal recognition, so too do they pick and choose which aspects of indigenous life to embrace to further capitalist and colonial goals.

     

    #79491
    Denille Samuel
    Participant

    Reading/ lecture response
    I was moved by the lecture given by Jaskrian Dhillon an associate professor of global studies and anthropology at The New School. The lecture was titled “Indigenous Resistance, Planetary Dystopia, and the Politics of Environmental Justice”. Dhillon brought up a few points that I believe definitely related to topics we have discussed in class. She spoke of the indigenous people of Standing Rock and their resistance signifying environmental justice. The land, to the people at Standing Rock is sacred and it has meaning, it is their home, the professor likened the land to a being or an actor in the lives of the indigenous people. It seems as though no thought is being given to the destruction that the pipeline can bring to the source of the indigenous people that live on the land water supply and it is all being done for the purpose of profit.
    Dhillon used a few terms one of them being “racial capitalism”, in relation to the people of Standing Rock it concerns the extraction of resources, sacred land and the exploitation of the indigenous people so that land can be taken and used, Dhillon stated “To extract resources from the land one has to do something to the people indigenous to the land”, “ this works through the axis of exploitation”. Hearing this made me think of colonialism on the continent of Africa, there is not much of a difference. Another term she used was “settler colonialism”, which is a type of colonialism where the settlers infringe upon a land displace the people indigenous to the land and impose their laws or rules upon the people of that land. My question is, can gentrification be likened to settler colonialism? The land that was occupied by a certain people is bought or what seems like confiscation, restructured and used by the dominant figures to capitalize, which displaces families, small businesses and communities.

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    #79493

    The indigenous rights lecture that I went to yesterday greatly reminds me of My Brooklyn, a documentary that we watched in class about the gentrification of the Brooklyn neighborhood near the Fulton Mall. Both the documentary and the lecture discussed the various resistance techniques against suppression/displacement of disenfranchised groups. The documentary dealt with Hispanic and African American groups in Brooklyn while the lecture was about American native peoples, including those of Canada and South America. Both the documentary and the lecture reviewed the various ways in which a group can be suppressed. The lecture and documentary are related in that they go over how destructive suppression can be for a group and the various ways said groups have fought against suppression as well as who benefits from it. Both agree that the primary beneficiaries are white people in general and, more specifically, rich people in particular. Dhillon mentioned specifically the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), the protests, and the massive government reaction to it.

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    #79503

    Really great response everyone. You tied the lecture to so many points we have discussed in class-from displacement and gentrification seen in readings and film and the aspect of preservation and BLM movement through the reading regarding preserving the Quik Trip of Ferguson. It seems you all enjoyed the lecture, as did I and look forward to discussing your thoughts on it more in class.

     

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