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Oaxxanda: The Origin Story

In January 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, eight Black and Brown East Oakland community members gathered on Zoom after months of discussions and talk to form a collective. The group formed to solve a problem its members otherwise must face individually: how to stay rooted in Oakland, California, as artists and culture makers—as rising rents and gentrification threaten their ability to stay. All of these folks were either born and raised in Oakland or have lived there most of their lives.

Tired of ongoing black disenfranchisement and gentrification, this community group came together in the spirit of Black and Brown power. They were made up of members from groups that were already trying to make an impact in Deep East Oakland—Repaired Nations, Black Cultural Zone, The Deep Grocery Coop, Feed the Village, Sustainable Economies Law Center—as well as unaffiliated community members who were artists, healers, organizers, activists, and entrepreneurs. At the tail end of a second Black out-migration from the Bay, the group felt the name of their collective needed to send a clear message to their families, neighbors, and future collective members: Oaxxanda.

Pronounced Oh-Kanda, Oaxxanda takes inspiration from Wakanda, a fictional country on the African continent that is the most technologically advanced society in the Marvel universe. Wakanda represents the possibility of Black sovereignty—an Afro-utopian vision for the African diaspora. Oaxxanda members fused this afro-futuristic vision onto their deep East Oakland neighborhood.

Oaxxanda co-founders Anita “Needa Bee” de asis Miralle and Tut Kingdom X shared their vision of Oaxxanda over a Zoom call this summer. Needa B says their vision of Oaxxanda is centered on “self-determination, ownership, control of one’s environment, control of one’s future …That’s what Oaxxanda is.”

Deep East Oakland has a history of neglect. Collective members say there is an abundance of talent and willingness to change conditions; however, many folks in the area haven’t had access to opportunities and investment to apply their ideas. Oaxxanda is an expansion of imagination that people from the neighborhood can create a flourishing community by investing in themselves. “They were trying to move us. We were still getting pushed out of Oakland. No, we need a safe haven! Oaxxanda! This is it!” says Tut.

Black Oakland Shrinks

The vision of Oaxxanda is grand. But within the context of what Black Oaklanders and Oaklanders of color face today, it’s a necessary dream and beacon of hope for a community being forced from their homes. Oaklandside reports that between 2010 and 2020, Oakland saw its Black population fall 14 percent.

In late 2019 through early 2020, a group of unhoused Black mothers known as Moms4Housing took over a vacant home in Oakland that fueled a new wave of housing activism in the Bay Area. The group increased awareness of the many vacant homes owned by corporations, inspiring a wave of state legislation to create more affordable housing opportunities. These women were able to leverage their message into political action.

The Moms4Housing struggle made clear that ownership is a powerful way to stay rooted. Needa B says within this current housing crisis, exacerbated by the pandemic and an end to eviction moratoriums, Oaxxanda strives to claim what they consider theirs. “With Oaxxanda, we’re reclaiming a culture that has been blocked from us, stripped from us. It’s a mindful process. We’re shifting a paradigm … [away] from being an individual and being capitalistic.”

At the heart of Oaxxanda is the desire to decommodify land, practice collective stewardship, as their ancestors had before them, and continuation of the legacy of communal care by which they already live. “I’m a product of the 90s. Crack was there, but it hadn’t deteriorated the family structure all the way complete. We still had a strong family,” shares Tut. “You know, the collective babysitting. The three families in one house. We all stayed in an apartment complex where one person cooks for the whole family. I grew up with a family that collectively took care of the youth and each other. We understood that’s what we needed to do to get by. Doing it in business is a no brainer.”

Oaxxanda members consider themselves culture bearers and artists. Needa B says, “We’re also trying to preserve the culture that we’ve been able to maintain that comes out in creative forms. As an organizer and activist, more of our work is in reaction to. Reaction to the oppression. So very few times do we get to actually build and dream what we want. This birthing is both of those things. We’re reacting to gentrification and displacement, but we’re also creating something else.”

The Struggle to be an Art Collective in Oakland

If an artist collective in Oakland gains traction and builds community, there almost always comes a point when it will face the threat of displacement. Rock Paper Scissors, a well-known arts and community hub formed in 2004, maintained a strong presence in downtown Oakland for 12 years. They helped found Oakland Art Murmur, which helped launch a cultural renaissance that ushered in mass gentrification and displacement that ultimately forced the collective to move out. In 2016, the group was displaced from its building due to continually increasing rent in what had become a bustling arts district.

Betti Ono gallery is a community art space founded by Oakland native Anyka Barber. In its 11 years, it has become a community anchor and space for Black artists to showcase culture and build Black cultural power. After eight years of uncertain tenancy, the gallery secured a long-term lease. The new lease is for five years with the option for a two-year extension. The city of Oakland is its landlord. But having the city as landlord requires patience with bureaucracy and shifting political alliances.

The Ghost Ship was an artist live/work space that had affordable rents while also maintaining space for the community to make art, perform, and host events. Just a few years before Oaxxanda was formed, the Ghost Ship went up in flames during an evening concert, killing 36 people. The tragedy made clear the compromises artists often must make to live in Oakland—living in dilapidated buildings not zoned for residential use and poorly maintained by unethical, absentee landlords.

Oaxxanda collective members have studied this history. That’s why they are starting with ownership first.

Who is Oaxxanda?

Tut was born and raised in Oakland. He’s the last of eight kids. He was emancipated at 14 because he didn’t feel safe at home. He has been an organizer for over 10 years, working with Walmart and fast-food workers across the country to organize for better wages and working conditions. He resonates with the situation of unhoused folks and wants to help create a feeling of safety.

“I feel on the forefront of bringing safety back to our community, to the workplace, to the environment. It’s hard to find ownership of anything in the ghetto. We’re bringing Sankofa. We are bringing the principles of cooperation, collaboration, collective ownership, patronage. I’ve seen the dangers of not working collectively.” All eight members of the collective abide by these principles.

Along with the work he’s been doing to develop Oaxxanda, Tut works with Repaired Nations, an Oakland-based organization focusing on building wealth in Black communities through cooperative development training. “Coming now with this collective organization Oaxxanda, we’re working to develop a cooperative hub that has cooperative infrastructure that people can come touch, feel, support,” Tut explains. Tut’s personal business venture, Good JuJu Good Vibes, focuses on providing wellness practices, classes, and consultations.

Needa B has lived in the Bay Area since she was 19 years old. She’s a modern-day renaissance woman, pursuing art, education, activism, and a Filipino food business. “I wear many hats. One of them is with The Village in Oakland, which is a grassroots organization led by unhoused folks. I’m currently unhoused myself. Housing insecure.”

When the pandemic hit, Needa B found herself working as an educator to serve the needs of her community’s children whose education was being affected by school closures. “Education is the work that gives me life.” Having a community hub like Oaxxanda provides a stable, safe space where Needa B can live, teach, and make art.

Oaxxanda is Control of One’s Future

Oaxxanda members say that when their friends and neighbors hear about the project, they support the idea right away. But it has been a challenge to get people involved in the day-to-day management of the collective. The nation’s political and economic system, Needa B notes, elevates the individual and discourages people coming together.

Overcoming this is not easy. “It’s a vulnerability of trusting people with what you have and letting go of ego…so there can be a collective truth. It is by design that we don’t know how to get down in our Indigenous ways. All the more reason why this work is so important,” shares Needa B. Oaxxanda members believe that community governance of the future Oaxxanda live/work space goes hand in hand with collective ownership.

Oaxxanda members are currently looking at three potential properties to situate their artist live/work space. One is on Fairfax Avenue in East Oakland. Another is on Aileen Street in North Oakland. The third property is on South 23rd street in Richmond, about 10 miles north of the city.

The collective has community support but is seeking financial support to purchase a building. Needa B shares its vision of who might support the venture: “We need investors with different levels of membership. If people feel like they’re not part of our demographic—colonial subjects of the empire—they should consider reparations.… We redistribute the wealth they obtained. That could look like land, money, resources.”

Oaxxanda collective was granted $300,000 from the Kataly Foundation to put towards its property purchase. Members project that the property’s cost will likely be between $850,000 and $1.8 million, considering space and zoning needs it has identified and the high real estate costs that are endemic to the entire San Francisco Bay Area.

To close the gap, it hopes to tap additional foundation support, loans, community investment, and individual donations. Needa B believes people of privilege and means should “invest with no strings attached. That’s what equity in action looks like. When we redistribute wealth, that impacts every issue that we face in this country.”

Black and Indigenous communities, she notes, “aren’t allowed to have vibrant economies. Until that piece is addressed through action and redistribution, then equity is just a word we’re throwing around.”

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

Indigenous communities, particularly those of the Arctic, not only are on the front lines of the climate crisis but also are the engineers and economists of sustainability, and offer spiritual teachings of gratitude and deep relationship. Generating collective health and well-being requires spiritually and materially reconnecting our severed relationships to the land and each other.

All three of us live in Alaska. We descend from both settler and Native communities. For all of us, Alaska Native frameworks of reciprocity and intentional interdependence inform how we answer pivotal questions of our time—one being, What do reparations to the land look like after destructive mining, leaching of toxic pollutants, and irresponsible oil extraction?

We seek healing for the land itself. To engage in true climate justice work, we must be brave enough to consider reconciliation with places that have been harmed. We must all take accountability and turn to Indigenous leadership to help us remember how to live in and practice economies of care and compassion.

How We Arrived Here

When we ask our Elders about the changes they have witnessed on our Arctic lands, they tell us stories of growing up in Alaska without cars, televisions, cell towers—and with no English. Instead, they had rivers filled with fish, tundra filled with caribou, families joining together to hunt across the ice or line the smokehouse with summer salmon. They recount histories of this place with anthropological detail and serene reverence. But soon, conversations turn to the days those riches began to be taken away through compulsory boarding schools and proselytizing churches. The way their languages curved on their tongues was slowly lost, and the graceful curves of familiar rivers were similarly interrupted—blocked by dams, poisoned by mines, and now heating to record temperatures, deadly to fish and other creatures.

Erasure of Indigenous connection to place was crucial for the colonial settlement of the lands that became America. Political leaders, the army, and the church worked hard to break this connection. When settlers arrived and colonization began, our economic systems were targeted for disruption and destruction: Indigenous nations were dissolved, removed, subjected to genocide, or assimilated across this continent to make way for private land ownership, profiteering from finite resource extraction, and imposing of Christian norms of patriarchy and cisnormativity.

As PennElys Droz of the NDN Collective explains, “Removing a peoples’ means of providing for themselves is a cunning way to suppress and control them.  A state of dependency was intentionally created, with the Nations having to look to their colonizers for survival assistance.”¹

This was the birth of our modern extractive economy, which sequesters wealth for the elite few (largely white, landholding, straight, cisgendered men). It was achieved by commodifying relationships through the transformation of land into money, and enslaving people into zero-cost labor.

When we converse with our Elders, the stories they tell are old ones—stories of bounty and abundance, balance and reciprocity.² The climate crisis is not only a product of greenhouse gas emissions (which impact the Arctic landscape at twice the rate as the rest of the globe),³ but also of an ideological shift that was imposed by colonization and capitalism to justify violation of sacred land-, water-, and airways—domination that taught Americans to speak of “resources” instead of “relatives.”

Just Transition in Alaska

This language shift is important to understand as we envision opportunities for growth and healing ahead of us. Today, the pain and trauma of separation from our Indigenous worldviews, evidenced by the imposed language, is being healed and integrated into our vision for the future. The Just Transition Framework⁴ only began gaining widespread distribution in Alaska, in 2018, through collaboration with climate and justice advocacy organizations across the state. This framework, with roots in the labor movement of the 1960s, articulates the necessary shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative one. It realigns the purpose of the economy with the healing powers of our Earth, through ecological restoration, community resilience, and social equity. To achieve this, resources must be acquired through regenerative practices, labor must be organized through voluntary cooperation and decolonial mindsets, culture must be based on caring and sacred relationships, and governance must reflect deep democracy and relocalization.

However, when this language first began circulating in Alaska, our communities realized that there were both familiar qualities and foreign terms preventing us from reaching deep resonance with the growing movement. We needed to see ourselves in the work. When we asked our elders how they would describe this new vision, they told us in the Behnti Kenaga language, “Kohtr’elneyh” (We remember forward).

This process soon led to the Kohtr’elneyh Just Transition Summit, where, in January 2020, over two hundred community members from all regions of Alaska and many different industry sectors and background gathered.⁵ For days, we heard from community leaders and movement artists about renewable energy projects, food sovereignty, and cold climate agriculture. This was the last time many of us gathered in person. As the COVID- 19 pandemic sweeps across the world, the Alaska Just Transition Collective has coalesced online to articulate what a transitional economy for Alaska must look like. Now, we are pushing state and national recovery conversations to incorporate Indigenous sovereignty and stories from the land.

Bringing Kohtr’elneyh into National Policy

These acts of translating and centering Indigenous ways of knowing have similarly guided the Just Transition Collective’s statewide work in support of the Green New Deal and the THRIVE Agenda,⁶ championed by over one hundred members of Congress. The THRIVE Agenda is considered the most ambitious and holistic investment structure yet proposed, ensuring that climate, jobs, and care (health and well-being), will be made at the scale, scope, and with the justice standards this time of transition demands. In partnership with communities across the state, we have published conversations and creative zines and toolkits,⁷ elevating what Indigenous regenerative economy and climate justice must look like for Alaska.

In Alaska, we are actively engaged in building the solidarity economy ecosystem that is required to finance a just transition beyond fossil fuels. We are meeting a need for Alaskan financial infrastructure that is by us and for us, is aligned with our values, and enables community stewardship of capital. We are cultivating grassroots processes to seed the regenerative financial infrastructure Alaskans need, so that funds are grown, invested, and distributed by and for our collective well-being.

As we shift to new paradigms of land, resource, and financial management, we must remember that this meaningful participation is an exercise of sovereign Native nations’ right to self-determination: Tł’eeyagga Huˉt’aan Kkaa Nin’ Dohoodeetunh (Native people hold the land with words; Koyukon translation by Eliza Jones). The goal must be to return to balance in all investments, industries, and sectors—infusing justice and restoration throughout a new economy.

Remembering Indigenous Economies of Care

Indigenous economic frameworks for augmenting and redistributing abundance are key to informing how to approach economic recovery, and are needed now more than ever. Indigenous economies can counteract greed, the costs of which are increasingly apparent. For example, an important rite of passage in many Indigenous communities is sharing one’s first catch and harvest with Elders. Hunters will give away the first of each animal they kill, weavers will give away the first baskets they make, harvesters will distribute the first berries picked—based on familial responsibility and obligations to grandparents, aunties, teachers, and so on. This exchange is an act of reciprocity.

Traditional Indigenous economic frameworks center around ensuring the health and well-being of a community. The role of traditional leaders is to oversee the foundational functions to meet the community’s base needs for water, food, shelter, warmth, safety, and medicine. An economy is the exchange of time, talent, and treasure, and its purpose is to create stability. People generally want the same things but need to have shared understandings and expectations to reduce conflict and meet each other’s expectations. The growth of an economy also relies on creating trade or economic partners. In an Indigenous framework, economic partners are not only humans but also are plants, animals, fish, and other species. They are referred to as relatives or nations. This framing elevates these groups to being equals in the systems of exchange, and requiring respect. A core tenet of Indigenous economic structures is to increase abundance for all economic partners.

Reciprocity is another core tenet of Indigenous economic structures. When something is taken, something must be given, and even this is backward. Traditionally, it is understood that you give first—of your time, efforts, skills, prayers, and abundance—without expectation of return but rather out of pure generosity, caring, and duty. The exchange is thoughtful and intentional, benefiting all economic partners. It is also understood that taking without reciprocity can and generally will lead to suffering. For instance, if all the fish are harvested and not any are left to spawn, then starvation will be the reciprocal experience.

The modern fossil fuel economy is based in extraction and pollution for maximum profit and individual gain from a finite resource in a closed system (Mother Earth’s biosphere). These activities have not had a balanced exchange of benefits with our natural economic partners, and have created what can be described as a debt to our relations and a grievous desecration against our Mother Earth. The fossil fuel economy has overextracted, and humans are in debt to our relations.

To re-form Indigenous economies and economies of care does not mean creating anew. Traditional ecological knowledge, collective experiences, genetic memory, and oral histories can guide action. What is required is an understanding on a global level of the urgency to bring forward from the past and into the future—as at other times of great transformation, the teachings of which cycle back to today. Taking these lessons and applying them to inform climate action, addressing the past harms of colonization, paying due reparations, and ceding land back integrate just land-management practices and infuse healthy human and more-than-human relationships, while continuing Indigenous ways of knowing and traditional practices. Traditional Indigenous economies will guide this time of global transformation, rooted in generational knowledge from living in eco- regions that require continual innovation and extreme resilience. As Elder Wilson Justin (Althsetnay, of the Headwaters People) shared with us regarding well-being:

Well-being is vital to good decision making present past and future…… Economy [in the Western extractive context] didn’t exist in the world I came out of. When I grew up that term had no meaning or sense. The economy in [an] Indigenous worldview is health and well-being…… In its most basic component [well-being] is the ability to survive unexpected trauma, warfare, all kinds of things. In a future sense be ready at all times for the unexpected. Well-being means well protected.⁸

Indigenous economies are often described as gift economies, where resources and belongings—that is, wealth—are shared and given and received in return. The entire economic system is oriented to promote the interests of the community, not individual accumulation.

For example, potlatch ceremonies are held across Alaska to mark births, marriages, deaths, and important rites of passage. They are called ku.éex’ in Lingít, and have very specific protocols for economic redistribution.⁹ Potlatches formalize allegiances and loyalty through reciprocity. Those who have access to great abundance are expected to share; and if they encounter hard times, sharing is extended back to them. Sharing and redistributions help smooth out the ebb and flow of resource abundance and stave against not having enough, including starvation. Families save up for a very long time in preparation to host potlatches to this day. In the past, when chiefs would host a potlatch, they would give away everything they owned that they were able to give away. Generosity and responsibility are highly respected, and the most generous and thoughtful leaders were the most respected, creating extensive allyship among the community and across neighboring territories.

Lingít frameworks identify economic partners as other nations, which in the Lingít framework are the Plant Nation, the Animal Nation, the Fish Nation, and the Insect Nation. Lingít responsibilities and social expectations of behavior and roles are circular, overlapping, and follow specific protocols for caring for the community. Additionally, the Lingít headman, or Káa Tlein, is responsible for the health and well-being of everyone in the community, ensuring access to food, water, medicine, clothing, safety, spiritual health, and wellness. The headwoman, or Naa Tláa, is responsible for the organization, care, and understanding of the needs of the house group, family group, clan group, and extended community. These are just a small glimpse of traditional economic and social roles.

Lingít clans care for and augment production within the territories for which they are responsible. They increase food abundance in specific land- and waterways, through very meaningful practices—in addition to layered protocols for harvesting plants, animals, and fish. Not taking the largest animals and fish is an example of how people care for the stability and ultimate survival of the population; tending wild roots and berry patches is an example of how people assist wild plants to flourish.

These expectations of care are also built into treaties or agreements between neighboring Indigenous groups. Invested energy and efforts put forth by the Lingít people into the environment increase production and achieve reciprocal benefit for the community and all economic partners.

These concepts include the exchange of spiritual energy, as well. Energetic expansion is achieved by purposefully giving to someone else. These living economies ensure that people can do well, support the community and the environment, and have a sense of purpose—and they ensure well-being in perpetuity. These practices of stewardship are an economic exchange that reinvests in the land by giving back to it, and are symbiotically beneficial.

Our Values Must Guide Ambitious Solutions

To achieve effective climate solutions, restoration of balance and deep justice must flow through all policy and transformation. Policy must remember forward and be ambitious in its mission to restore ecosystems, food systems, and practices of reciprocity. Toward this goal, the Alaska Climate Alliance, a statewide network of climate advocates and conservation organizations, has gathered throughout the past year to align across the broad spectrum of environmental advocacy, encouraging historically white-led and well-resourced organizations to implement decolonization processes and operate in accordance with just transition principles.¹⁰ In this model, conservation organizations are given opportunities to learn from and grow with Tribal governments and Indigenous-led organizations, as well as learn from other non-Native groups who are following Indigenous stewardship principles and adopting actively antiracist policies into their work. Collectively, this leads to better coordination, healthier communication, and more unified communities.

Similarly, through Native Movement’s Untangling Colonialism, Decolonizing Advocacy training, the organization provides an interactive audience with the opportunity to question the mores of traditional conservation and uncover the white supremacist roots of the conservation movement: the three Ws—white, Western, wilderness. The modern environmental movement placed great emphasis on their idea of the preservation of nature, of keeping an untouched wilderness safe from the destructive tendencies of humans, and of venerating certain places as examples of the sublime, where one could “glimpse the face of God.”¹¹ As A-dae Romero-Briones notes, “These coveted lands only became ‘available’ when they were no longer occupied by the Indigenous people,” who were brutally eradicated from their homelands. “Many of the Indigenous stewardship practices have weakened because of inaccessible landscapes that have been ‘preserved’ for future generations,” writes Romero-Briones. “Given this country’s historical and current policies and practices, one has to question whether Indigenous people are included in this idea of future generations.”¹²

Many champions of wilderness conservation espoused racist thought and promoted eugenics as a necessary policy to accompany expanding land seizures, including John Muir,¹³ Gifford Pinchot,¹⁴ and Theodore Roosevelt.¹⁵ Modern land policy was developed through this settler colonizer framework—meaning, in conservation terms, a disruption of relationship among beings. These policies transition the land, rich with dynamic and interlocking relationships, into habitat—removing human relationship and denigrating Indigenous peoples as an unfortunate obstacle for nature conservation to overcome.

By acknowledging the ways in which colonialism and extractive capitalism have incurred climate chaos and deep social inequality, it becomes possible to enact real solutions that question these systems and break from them. False solutions maintain the status quo and will heal neither society nor the environment. Many net-zero carbon emission schemes do not lead to quantifiable emission reduction,¹⁶ and often reinscribe social inequalities, banking on the last reserves of Indigenous territory and natural spaces to pay for continuing industry emissions.¹⁷ Many of these proposed false solutions ask for collaboration with the perpetrators of harm. As Chris Peters (Pohlik-lah and Karuk), president of the Seventh Generation Fund, observes: “It is a breach of the ethical foundation of Earth-based spiritual understanding to sell the air and to continue unabatedly polluting for personal and corporate profit.”¹⁸ Only a values-based framework that changes behavior will lead to system change.

Youth Are Leading Us Forward

Indigenous cultures know that future prosperity requires investing in youth leadership. Native youth are not just the voices of the future—they must be the leaders of today. Key to this is infusing traditional ecological knowledge, technologies, and lifeways with modern calls to action. Today, “culture camps,” annual events held by local communities and Tribes, are immersive experiences to teach and pass on traditional knowledge and subsistence practices (qaqamiigux). As Unangaan artist and youth leader Dustin Newman shared,

When it comes time for culture camps, we often forget how our traditions and culture are tied into the climate crisis. Our camps tend to focus on the importance of our qaqamiigux. We teach our youth how to pull the seine net or how to butcher the seal, but we don’t tell them the reasons behind a low salmon return or why the seals are skinnier this year.¹⁹

The climate crisis is additionally a catalyzing opportunity to bring the voices of Indigenous youth from the lands into all levels of decision making.

In Alaska, on the front lines of the climate crisis, the environmental community is beginning to unpack its colonial roots and defer to Indigenous stewardship. The next phase of climate justice advocacy in Alaska must continue to invest in youth leadership. In Wilson Justin’s words, we are “responsible for the next generation [and have a] sense of duty and responsibility to someone [we’ve] never met, and never seen, and never will.”²⁰ How we live today is guided by the needs of future generations. We pay back the lands and waters, not only in reparations for losses and damages but also in gratitude for the life that the lands have always gifted us.

In this time of great struggle, it often feels like we are lost at sea. Our canoes are strong but weathered, and we are struggling to paddle as one. Many of us are tired. The swells of waves are relentless and steadfast, and we can no longer see the horizon we move toward as we struggle to trace the path that has carried us here. This is when we remember our paddling songs, synchronize our strokes, and trust one another to carry us forward. When we cannot see the horizon, we are reminded to look to the stars. There in the sky, our ancestors navigate us home. We remember forward.

The authors acknowledge that we live and write from the unceded lands of the Indigenous peoples of Alaska. We further acknowledge that, in the spirit of adrienne maree brown, we come as people raised in, interacting with, and intentionally dismantling white supremacy. We strive to additionally acknowledge the thought genealogies, community participatory work, and elders’ guidance that contribute to this article and the work it represents. The coauthors are particularly grateful to our culture and language bearers, our Indigenous youth, and Elders, who continue to shine the light forward and remind us of our roots.

NOTES

1. Jade Begay, “An Indigenous Systems Approach to the Climate Crisis,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, June 10, 2021, ssir.org/articles/entry/an_indigenous_systems_approach_to_the_climate_crisis.
2. If this deep relationship of Indigenous stewardship is not known to our readers, now is the time to self- We direct you to Nonprofit Quarterly’s previously published article by our cherished partners at Native Peoples Action, “An Indigenous Vision for Our Collective Future: Becoming Earth’s Stewards Again,” Nonprofit Quarterly 27, no. 3 (Fall 2020): 38–48.
3. “Climate Change in the Arctic,” National Snow and Ice Data Center, last modified May 4, 2020, nsidc.org/cryosphere/arctic-meteorology/climate_change.html.

4. “Just Transition: A Framework for Change,” Climate Justice Alliance, accessed August 16, 2021, climatejusticealliance.org/just-transition/.
5. Robbi Mixon, “Transition Is Inevitable, Justice Is Not,” Cook Inletkeeper, January 23, 2020, inletkeeper.org/2020/01/23/transition-is-inevitable-justice-is-not/.

6. Learn more at “A bold plan for economic renewal,” Thrive, accessed August 6, 2021, thriveagenda.com/.
7. Find these and more resources at Alaska Just Transition Collective, Toolkit, accessed August 6, 2021, justtransitionak.org/toolkit/.
8. Elder Wilson Justin, interview by Meda DeWitt and Margi Dashevsky, April 29,
9. “Lingít” is the correct spelling of the traditional See Jennifer Pemberton, “It’s not a typo: Why we are using ‘Lingít’ instead of ‘Tlingit,’ KTOO, August 4, 2021, www.ktoo.org/2021/08/04/its-not-a-typo-.
10. For more on the Alaska Climate Alliance, see Abby Finis and Larry Kraft, “Anchorage Alaska: Rewriting the narrative,” City Climate Corner (podcast), March 16, 2021, cityclimatecorner.com/episodes/anchorage-alaska-creating-a-new-narrative/transcript.
11. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (January 1996): 7–28, academic.oup.com/envhis/article-abstract/1/1/7/525047.
12. A-dae Romero-Briones, “Regeneration—from the Beginning,” Nonprofit Quarterly 27, 3 (Fall 2020): 32–37. (Republished in this issue—see pp. 50–55.)
13. “. . . they seemed to have no right place in the landscape, and I was glad to see them fading out of sight down the pass,” John Muir, The Mountains of California (New York: The Century Co, 1894),
14. Charles Wohlforth, “Conservation and Eugenics,” Orion Magazine, June 24, 2010, orionmagazine.org/article/conservation-and-eugenics/.
15. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth,” Theodore Roosevelt, 1886 speech delivered in New York, New York, cited in Hermann Hagedorn, Roosevelt in the Badlands (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921).
16. Ben Elgin, “These Trees Are Not What They Seem,” Bloomberg Green, December 9, 2020, bloomberg.com/features/2020-nature-conservancy-carbon-offsets-trees/.
17. Learn more in Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, “The Climate Emergency & The Colonial Response,” Social Policy, Yellowhead Institute, July 2, 2021, yellowheadinstitute.org/2021/07/02/climate-emergency-colonial-response/.
18. John Ahni Schertow, “International Outcry Against California’s Forest Offset Scam,” Intercontinental Cry, May 8, 2013, intercontinentalcry.org/international-outcry-against-californias-forest-offset-scam-19438/.
19. Dustin Newman, interview by Ruth Miller, June 17, 2021.
20. Justin, interview.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

How does social change happen?

In the story of the blind men and the elephant, we learn that different people touching different parts of the elephant “see” different things. One touches a leg and surmises it must be a tree. Another touches the trunk and imagines that it must be a snake.  Of course, the elephant is a complex living creature.

Social change, likewise, looks different depending on your vantage point.  So, to explore economics system change from multiple vantage points, this webinar invited panelists who hail from community-based economic development, electoral organizing, and group facilitation to be in conversation with each other. The result is a fascinating discussion uncovering both unexpected intersections and areas of alignment.

Our panelists for this discussion were:

• Sendolo Diaminah, co-director of Carolina Federation, a statewide group that combines electoral work with base-building local grassroots community organizing. In 2020, the group organized its first campaigns in four North Carolina counties.
• Lela Klein, co-executive director of Co-op Dayton, a nonprofit incubator of cooperatives. Klein was part of a team that engaged in a 6-year-long co-op organizing campaign that culminated in May 2021 opening of Gem City Market, a food co-op in West Dayton, a primarily Black neighborhood.
• Tuesday Ryan-Hart, cofounder and system change strategist for The Outside, a social change consultancy that helps build infrastructure for equitable systems change and which works with a wide range of groups across the globe in areas such as employment policy, hunger alleviation, homelessness, and refugee assistance.

Among the questions discussed in this webinar were the following:

• What are leading barriers to changing economic systems, even at the local level? What are some effective techniques for overcoming those barriers?
• How does one go about organizing a facilitated process to engage in equitable systems change? What are some key questions to ask going in?
• What does base-building organizing involve in practice? How does it differ from traditional voter mobilization strategies?
• What are the elements that enable a community to sustain a community economic development campaign over multiple years?
• What are some examples where organizing has led to major economic changes? What are some of the factors that led to those successes?
• What steps can nonprofits and philanthropy take to support economic systems change work?

Resources

Carolina Federation, Carolina Federation DNA, April 2021.

Steve Dubb, “Carolina Rising: Base Building Lessons from North Carolina,” NPQ, December 8, 2020.

Steve Dubb, “In West Dayton, Ohio, a Food Co-op Heralds a “Black Renaissance,” NPQ, June 16, 2021.

Gem City Market, Annual Report 2019-2020. August 2020.

The Outside, The Big Bang of Equity and Systems Change, May 31, 2018.

Sponsored by:

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

This article references the book The Politics of Design

Danielle Coates-Connor: Hello, I’m Danielle Coates-Connor. I am the Chief Creative at Nonprofit Quarterly. I’m here with our Art Director, Devyn Taylor. Good morning, Devyn. How are you? Morning.

Devyn Taylor: Morning, I’m good.

Danielle Coates-Connor: Yeah. How’s the weather in Miami?

Devyn Taylor: It’s, well actually today, it’s rainy. It was beautiful all week, and then I had relatives come to visit, and then it rains. So, great.

Danielle Coates-Connor: Of course. Of course, right?

This is our reflective moment, Devyn. We are especially today talking about design and visionary imagery and what it is actually like when people authentically communicate. And where this is coming from is last week, right before our meeting actually, I really had to pull myself together to come to the meeting. I got a text from my friend Kendra Hicks’ campaign manager. Kendra Hicks is a brilliant visionary politician who’s running for her first City Council seat in Boston, District Six. And the reason I’m involved with this is not because I live there, but it’s because Kendra’s my friend. And I’m part of the care team where we’re really personally supporting Kendra as she goes through this grueling and rigorous process of running for office. And so I get this text from her campaign manager with a PDF that says, ‘this is the mailer that her opponent sent out that hit doorsteps today.

The campaign rebuked and said they had no ill intent with this design, that they’d simply dropped the photo down to black and white to show contrast between the candidates and that the point of the flyer is to contrast them.

I looked at this as a designer and laughed at that, right Devyn? It’s just ridiculous to say that they didn’t alter this image and darken it in any way. But let’s just quickly go through the technical part of that. Devyn, can you walk us through what it would take to create this image of Kendra Hicks as they did in this flyer?

Devyn Taylor: It’s clear that the image wasn’t just desaturated; there was an opacity layer of some sort that was put over in order to create the effect that we see in the flyer. So you know, what the intention was behind that, obviously, I couldn’t speak to, but it’s clear that there was not just a simple desaturation there. There was some extra steps taken to get to the point that we see on the flyer.

Danielle Coates-Connor: And, conscious or subconscious, as you’re pointing to, Devyn, regardless of how they made that decision, the reality is that when we look at the politics of design, that is communicating a lot . I pulled out this book, The Politics of Design this week, and it details the way in which global narratives around the color of people’s skin have long upheld the idea that lighter skin is more pure and darker skin is more evil. This is well documented, and even the history of people describing themselves as white goes back to the slave trade. And so the idea that changing someone’s skin tone in a design piece, especially for a political candidate, especially for a district that has never had a non-white person elected, is extremely significant whether the campaign wants to admit that or not.

Now let’s look at the original photo which  I have seen before when our friends were on a text chain doing a fashion review on a text chain for how amazing Kendra looked on election day when she was out celebrating with communities since she was the person who topped the ticket in the district that day. You can see here, Kendra is in community, she is celebrating, and her face is not shadowed the way it is in this flyer.

Devyn Taylor: There’s so much schema that informs just the way people look at individuals with darker skin. And if you’re going to deliberately make changes to get to the point where the opponent’s skin is darker, then that’s coming from somewhere.

Danielle Coates-Connor: And you, Devyn, have been creating a visionary library of images with all of the branding work that you’ve done at Edge Leadership, with all of the illustration work that you’ve done for Nonprofit Quarterly and for The Voice Lab. And I wonder if you could share a little bit about how it’s been for you to be working with this imagery, this visual language that you’re creating?

Devyn Taylor: Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, it’s been super rewarding. There’s just so much richness in everything that comes out of the people at Nonprofit Quarterly. So it’s really nice to be able to create kind of like these backdrop images to enforce and hopefully enhance everything that people are talking about, everything that people are bringing to the forefront. So it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been a lot of fun.

Danielle Coates-Connor: And we have Amy Costello here, who is a producer. The two of you collaborated recently on a piece illustrating a poem by Dr. Dorceta Taylor, who’s one of the leading thinkers in the world on environmental justice. Amy, welcome.

Amy Costello: Thank you, Danielle. It’s good to be here.

Danielle Coates-Connor: This piece that you two collaborated on is stunning, I think. I wonder if you could bring us in to this project, explain what is the poem that you were working with and what you all made? Maybe we’ll start with you, Amy, bring your voice in.

Amy Costello: Thank you. Yeah, our colleague who is in charge of the magazine at NPQ had brought to us a poem that Dr. Dorceta Taylor at Yale University – one of the nation’s leading scholars on environmental justice – had written a few years ago in which she describes the irony of black people in this country being encouraged to kind of go out and enjoy nature. Yet, incredible risks and deadly consequences at times they face when they do go out and try to enjoy nature. This poem illustrates through three kind of case studies, what has happened to certain black men when they’ve gone out into nature.

And as soon as I started listening to it, it was so visual and so powerful that I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to try to illuminate her narrative with some ambient sound, as we call it. And so I’m kind of a radio producer and audio nerd, and I just thought it would be amazing to bring in sounds from the natural environment to accompany her words. And so, you know, that’s what I did. And I had two very specific ideas in mind when I was thinking about the soundtrack to accompany this poem. And the first one was that I wanted it to be really spare, and not to compete with Dr. Taylor’s powerful words. And so I never wanted to compete with her voice but rather just have this quiet undertone beneath her, to kind of convey a sense of space. It was important that any sound we added would add to the experience of the black people profiled in this poem and not the white people that they were interacting with – that this was definitely a poem about the experience of black people out in nature and the dangers they face. And so the sounds I chose—you can hear, for instance, a heartbeat or breathing—an d so what I was trying to do is to bring the viewer in to the perspective of the people being profiled. And I didn’t add sounds to the white people’s perspective, for the most part. It’s not their story. And so those were the two guiding principles I used when doing the soundtrack for this piece.

Danielle Coates-Connor: Powerful, Amy. Thank you. And simultaneously, Devyn, you were working your magic. You had a original recording, you had the what came out of the Yale studio, just the raw recording of Dr. Taylor. And tell us what you went through.

Devyn Taylor: Yeah, I think it’s interesting hearing Amy talk about it, because I think we had a lot of that same experience coming, and it sounds like we’re coming from a lot of the same spaces without even having had this conversation before, so I’m gonna echo some of the things she was saying about really keeping the soundscape quiet. That’s what I wanted to do with the visuals as well is keeping the visuals quiet in a way. So the method I used was line drawing, which is really a medium of drawing that I only recently got into, and I think it has its place, for sure. Line drawings are typically made with one continuous line, or two or three, however many. Very few. And I love them because it does create connection between all of the pieces and the image. They’re usually, it’s one line that’s continuing throughout the entire image, so you pick up the stylus very little. And again, it just kind of creates a spirit, if you will, of continuity throughout what you’re seeing on the screen. And they’re also very yeah, they’re pared down, and they’re not very dense images—you only see the one line, the outline of what’s happening. And so it does create kind of a quietness of visual language. You’re looking at something that is just barely there and there enough to get the point across but isn’t something that’s overpowering. And what I really wanted to make sure of is that the visuals weren’t overpowering everything that Dr. Taylor was saying, because that’s the point is hearing her voice, really feeling what it is she’s talking about, and really putting yourself in that moment. And the visuals are also hard to look at for some of this. There’s a lot of videos out there that exist of a lot of these encounters.

The George Floyd video’s out there, the Christian Cooper video is out there, Ahmaud Arbery’s video’s out there. And whether you’ve seen it or not – some people chose not to see it because they knew what was on those tapes and that it would be a very difficult experience to watch, so—it was about really trying to find the balance of paying homage and giving justice to these stories and bringing that imagery forward, but also not bringing so much through the hard parts of that. So anyone can watch this without feeling like you’re being assaulted with these very violent and brutal images. One thing I did make sure to do was bring the actual outlines and the actual images from these encounters to the forefront. So the image of George Floyd, for instance, is actually from police body cam footage. The image of Ahmaud Arbery, there’s kind of that truck with these three armed men kind of following him, and those three armed men are literally just outlines of some of the video footage from that encounter as well. The pictures of Amy Cooper are cell phone footage of Chris Cooper’s, where she’s calling the police and holding her dog. So they’re really the outlines of these things that really happened, because again, I wanted to serve justice to those moments without bringing in the brutality of the real images themselves.

Another thing I want to echo that Amy also touched on is really bringing in the experience of the people we’re talking about—the black people who are experiencing these moments of microaggressions, macroaggressions, violence, death. So, I wanted to make sure that the stories didn’t become about the aggressors, and I think that that comes through in some of the ways that I don’t draw the features on, for instance, Amy Cooper. We don’t see her face, and it’s not because of—we just don’t have to. It’s not about her. It’s about Chris, right? So I wanted to make sure that the focus stayed where it needed to. And so I can echo Amy in that, in saying that I made a conscious effort to try and keep the stories of the black people in the forefront.

Danielle Coates-Connor: Thank you, Devyn. Amy, you worked with tape from these events as well. What was the thinking that you put into that?

Amy Costello: Well, the one piece of kind of archival tape that we used is the encounter between Christian Cooper and Amy Cooper in Central Park—and for those who aren’t familiar with the story, there was an altercation between Chris Cooper who is a birdwatcher who was trying to watch birds in Central Park, who was then confronted by a white woman with her dog unleashed, which is against rules in Central Park. He asked her to put the dog on a leash, and she refuses and calls the police on him. And I thought it would – and again, this sensitive line that we’re looking at about whose story are we telling? What visuals are we bringing in? What audio are we bringing in to keep this from the perspective of the black people we’re profiling? And I made a decision to, in consultation with you guys as well, of course, to bring in this archival tape, because there  was archival tape of Amy Cooper’s phone call to the police. And I thought it was important to kind of lay bare the egregious behavior and language that she used against Chris Cooper. And so, in this instance, we do hear her, and then we hear a very reasonable Chris Cooper speaking back to her. So I thought it was powerful audio to use. And I think it’s nice to kind of bring in that archival audio.

And the one other thing I want to say—because we’re talking about ethical design, and ethical storytelling in a way—is that I think it is important to note that we were in touch with Dr. Taylor, the author of this poem, throughout our process. And I think that’s so important when you’re using other people’s work or elevating other people’s work as we were doing in this case. With such sensitive and highly personal material to Dr. Taylor, it was a highly personal poem, I thought it was really important that we have her as a partner in this. And so I shared with her before we even started what I was envisioning for this piece—to bring in some audio that would ultimately be an animation—and she was very supportive and really, I think, quite happy that we were doing this with her work. But I just think that’s important to say, that we were in consultation with her throughout the process.

Danielle Coates-Connor: And when we think about capturing and expressing truly authentic voices, it is about that consultation, of saying, we’ve added a layer of meaning to this, did we get it right? And I think what I’ve been noticing at NPQ is that the more space that is created for authentic voices, the more interesting our content becomes. And it’s the same thing I see in Kendra’s campaign—when her opponent is going after her authentic points of view, Kendra is doubling down  with the truth of her lived experience. She’s saying, my policy platform derives from my lived experience in this city, and there are tens of thousands of other people like me. And I think that this kind of storytelling, these kind of ethics that we’re discussing here where we think about all of the different components of a story—from the tone of the visuals to the tone of the sound to whose perspective is truly highlighted, and “is this as authentic as it can possibly be?”—is, I think, a new strategy in storytelling that I’m mostly seeing led by women of color who are speaking truth, and it’s amazing to watch it resonate.

So, with that, these are the deep thoughts from the Creative Department at Nonprofit Quarterly, coming at you live—or not live, as it may be. Thank you, Devyn and Amy, thank you both for the work you’ve been doing, and thank you for sharing your thoughts today. And we want to know from everybody out there, what are you guys talking about? What do you want to hear about from us? What are you thinking about in all of these different layers of how our stories are designed? And what are the stories that we need to shift consciousness in the society and bring about the world that we are all dreaming of? That’s why we’re here. You get a hold of us if you want to talk more. Take care. Bye bye.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

Amy Costello: Welcome to Tiny Spark, a podcast of the Nonprofit Quarterly. We focus on what is required to build a more just society—in matters of race, health, the environment, and the economy. I’m Amy Costello. And today, we are going to broadly explore the topic of justice, and we’ll do that by looking closely at the female form.

Macushla Robinson: There have been so many important critiques of the nude in art history.

Costello: That’s Macushla Robinson. She’s a writer, curator, PhD candidate at the New School in New York, and she’s the founder of Interstitial Press. Macushla has spent much of her career as a curator at museums and art collections in the U.S. and in her home country, Australia. Lately, she’s been intrigued—and frankly, disturbed—by something. Namely, the way women’s bodies and experiences have been portrayed and described in arts institutions the world over.

Macushla was inspired to delve into this topic by a group of feminist artists called the Guerilla Girls. They formed back in 1985 and created a poster campaign that targeted the art world. It was a year after the Museum of Modern Art in New York held its International Survey of Painting and Sculpture. The exhibition included the work of 169 artists. Less than ten percent of them were women. Macushla was especially inspired by The Guerilla Girls campaign against the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City—or ‘the Met’ as it’s known—for excluding women and non-white artists from exhibitions and publications.

Robinson: The Guerrilla Girls’ iconic poster, which is currently on display in the Met Museum, is titled, Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into The Met Museum? And then it cites the statistics of how many women artists are collected by the museum in comparison to how many paintings of nude females there are in the museum. And that work, which has been around for decades, and which is just, you know, a really important and provocative question, I think has lived in the back of my head for a long time.

Costello: And so, have some other questions, which we are going to explore in today’s conversation with Macushla. And just a heads-up, some of that will include discussions about sexual violence in particular. Macushla decided to look at the way sexual violence has been publicly displayed and artistically praised even, and also how its depiction is described in museum catalogues. Macushla has aimed her focus on the Met, and her forthcoming book is called, Every Rape at the Met Museum.

Robinson: If you type the word rape into the Met Museum’s collection database, it returns some 181 results. The works range from large paintings and sculptures to print folios, ceramic plates, pocket watches, vases, snuff boxes and other decorative homewares. Only six of the total 181 pieces are made by women artists.

Costello: Macushla is reading a paragraph from the Kickstarter campaign she launched to raise money for her book. She plans to make 181 copies, one for each of the artworks she investigated. This winter, she hopes to stand outside the Met and distribute one of each to visitors who are walking into the Met—an alternative guide, as it were.

Robinson: Art history has traded on stories of rape to create drama, to set up opportunities to paint nude women, and to display the mastery of the artist over his subject. But these images, and the way that we describe them, shape how we think about women’s bodies and what can be done to them. Millions of people visit the Met Museum every year, the way that these images get displayed and talked about matters.

Costello: And while the Guerilla Girls’ campaign launched some 36 years ago, sexism persists in the art world to this day, of course. And that reality caused Macushla to reflect on a related set of questions.

Robinson: I also, I suppose, wanted to think about, perhaps why the art world has not responded, I think, as fast or deeply as it needs to, to the discussions around MeToo. And I think that, at some level, I do want to complicate this question of how women are depicted in these scenes of rape. It started really with noticing the way that a particular extended label, which is the small piece of text that sits beside the artwork in the museum, how that particular label spoke about and lent emphasis to the significance of a painting by Poussin of The Rape of the Sabine Women. It’s a very iconic piece. It illustrates the classical story of the Roman mythological story of the Sabine women being abducted.

Costello: And the first sentence of the label that accompanies this piece of art describes what’s going on. Could you read that first sentence on the label itself?

Robinson: According to Roman mythology, the neighboring Sabines were invited to a festival with the intention of forcibly retaining their young women as wives.

Costello: I mean, it’s incredible to me, this is called a festival when we’re seeing clearly a pretty disturbing image. How would you describe what’s going on? What are we seeing here?

Robinson: What you’re seeing here is an array of men and women in a state of conflict. You see particular women in the foreground who are lifted up by men. They’re very sort of strikingly posed with their arms flailing in the air and their feet off the ground. There is another woman over to the right of the composition who is laying on the ground and being kind of pushed over by a male figure who is holding aloft a knife. There are two babies laying strewn on the ground and an old woman with her hand to her head, who is kind of lamenting and looking on in horror. In the background, there are a lot of men with swords fighting. There’s a man on a horse, and sort of presiding over all of it is this figure of Romulus who has effectively staged this event. He’s, in the story, in the mythology, he has created this festival invitation, this ruse of bringing all these people from the neighboring town over to their space and then abducting the women and taking the women as wives. And it’s really a very orchestrated and political decision. He feels that there are not enough women in his jurisdiction to provide wives to his men. And it’s a kind of planned mass abduction, which is often described in titles as rape, and it’s a scene of incredible violence. When it was taught to me in art history, in several different courses over the years, because it is really an iconic piece, most of what we addressed, most of what was talked about, was the kind of question of what’s often called the Serpentine line. This very, very dynamic quality of the image, the way that the women create these almost S-shapes and the treatment…

Costello: …with their arms, with their bodies…

Robinson: Yeah, you can see the way…

Costello: Yeah, the bodies kind of, please, go on.

Robinson: So, the dynamism of the scene has made this an incredibly beguiling and oft repeated image throughout art history. And the way that the label talks about it, I was particularly struck by this line: This dramatic story gave Poussin the opportunity to display his command of gesture and pose and his knowledge of ancient sculpture and architecture. And you can see in the background to the right there is this very classical, very still building. It lends a kind of structure that foregrounds the kind of violence and motion and movement of the scene that’s going on in the foreground.

Costello: And you point out in your book that this line, the one that speaks directly to the work itself and the artistry of it, does not in any way talk about the violence against the women that’s going on here, but rather talks about his command of gesture and pose and his knowledge of ancient sculpture and architecture. Talk to me about this omission that you saw as you went through these 181 works at the Met. What is not said here, like when we look at this painting, when we read the five-sentence label that accompanies it…

Robinson: Yeah.

Costello: What’s missing here to you?

Robinson: Well, I think what’s missing is the gravity of the scene and the story. It’s really striking to me the ways in which rape is simply taken for granted. And a lot of the labels and the collection database material that I draw on, because this book, apart from my introduction, comprises entirely text from the museum that is searchable on the website. A lot of that material either completely sidelines the gravity of the title and of the scene, or it sort of speaks about this compelling display of mastery of the female body and how these women, they really become sort of ciphers for this idea of pity. And they become tools, not only for the artist to display mastery, but also for, kind of art history and classicism to talk about the ways in which women’s vulnerability of this particular kind has been a political tool. And that, to me, speaks to the ways in which violence against women has a strong political cadence in the way that we tell stories about it. And this isn’t simple, like this is very, very complex, particularly, I think, along racial lines. And perhaps we can get to this in more detail later. It’s not something that I particularly analyze.

Costello: Well talk to me, but I’m interested in that. Talk to me about the racial lines. What are you talking about?

Robinson: So, the first thing that I want to say here is that I’m really indebted to the poet Robin Coste Lewis’s poem and accompanying sort of imaginative essay The Voyage of the Sable Venus. And her poem catalogues, I think she looks at 115 different collecting institutions. So, it’s kind of a different project, and she pulls out all of these texts about the depiction of Black women, and what her poem fundamentally reveals is the ways in which Black women throughout this vast collection of art history have existed in the margins. They’re really, really sidelined. They become things like chair legs. They sit in the background of paintings of, sort of, seductive White women. They live on decorative arts objects. They are invisible-ized and yet present everywhere, and yet not centered, and whose suffering is taken for granted, but not in the heroic way. They are never, or very rarely, cast as the prime subjects. And so, in looking at the word rape, there’s a kind of having your cake and eating it too, with the invisibility in the way that we talk about this violence and what it really means and its gravity. And yet, at the same time, the kind of proclaiming of it in the titles and in the labels, the way that these women and their vulnerability to sexual violence is really centered is incredibly racialized. The vast majority of them are White women, especially in the near classical and classical depictions throughout the museum, and they’re cast as very sympathetic characters and characters for whom you ought to feel pity. And what I can’t help but keep thinking about is the complexity of, the way that imperiled White femininity has been used, especially in America, I think, especially in the context of, of race.

Costello: As visitors to the Met hold your book in their hands and walk through the famous halls there: what, what do you hope they’ll think about differently, what questions do you want to have going through their minds as they walk through the Met with your book in their hands?

Robinson: I think what I hope is that they’ll turn an eye to what has largely been taken for granted. I am not trying to say that we should take these works off display necessarily, in many ways, what I’m trying to say is we should add a lens to how we look at, think about, display, and valorize these works. I do think that museums have an opportunity right now to look at how we contextualize this work for the public—the public broadly conceived—and being of curatorial extraction, I suppose you would say, I’m also really interested in the spatial dynamic, in the way that the museum categorizes and displays things in space, the way that things tend to get grouped by historical period and to a certain extent, materiality. So, you enter the museum, there are American paintings, European paintings, and they tend to be grouped by kind of eras, by time frames. You know, what I’ve always found curating is that a lot of it is about how objects activate and speak to one another and what they draw out of one another. This sounds very esoteric, but I really feel that this is an enormous, unspoken part of curatorial work. When you put things alongside one another in museum spaces, they do draw out different meanings. They activate things in sometimes unexpected ways. And I think that a lot of this work in the museum could mean something very differently and could reflect on the history of how we’ve imagined sexual violence and the ways in which it has changed really productively. The other thing that I just, I think, and I hope, I guess, this is the primary sort of switch in perspective that I hope the book will trigger, which is just simply to say how enormous and ubiquitous this topic is, how it’s everywhere. And I mean this is where the conceit of the work gets tricky because I have titled it Every Rape in the Met Museum and I’ve stuck to that title, but really, all it is is every work that turns up in the search of the word rape, which is a really loaded and complex word. You know, when people have written about this project very kindly, Hyperallergic wrote about it, but it was interesting that they changed the titling subtly. And they talked about sexual assault, not rape. So, there’s also a question around the meaning of that word, how it’s been folded into mythologies and how it’s disappeared in plain sight, you know, these works are boldly claiming a lot of the time, they use the word rape. When in contemporary parlance and discussions of sexual violence happening now to real living people, we tend not to use that word. And that’s partly…

Costello: What does that, what does that tell you?

Robinson: I think that tells us, I’m not entirely sure. I don’t feel qualified as yet to draw a singular, firm conclusion. But I think that part of what it tells you is that we really have complicated productively, and I think powerfully, what the word rape means, and we sort of have these questions around sexual violence, degrees of violence, scales of violence and lines that are not crossed. So, I have to be very careful here, because I suppose if I can reflect on this from a really personal perspective for a moment. As a young woman in the art world and all women, I think to one degree or another, live their lives in acute if often unconscious, internalized awareness of particular kinds of violence. And as a young woman in the art world, it was just commonplace to be harassed and kind of victimized or turned into the butt of jokes. It is an incredibly misogynistic environment, historically. Even though women make up a statistically large portion of people who work in curatorial environments, there’s still this real legacy of a kind of boys’ club that really treats the female body and the young women that work in these environments as a resource of all kinds. I really want to long term complicate the idea of the muse. I’ve started talking about Muse work some years ago, because I think that there’s this complicated way in which, that old line of ‘you should be flattered,’ has been an incredibly pernicious tool in the art world where actually being the subject of leering sexual commentary and a sense of degradation and really constant threat.

Costello: Yeah, I mean, I saw that you wrote about your personal experience, you said, I think we have to complicate how we talk about sexual violence.

Robinson: Yes.

Costello: There is all this ambiguity. History has taught us, has taught me, from when I was a little girl that to be loved, looked like that.

Robinson: Yes. Yeah. And so, from when I was a little girl, it predates the art world, right? It’s everywhere. Like all women, I’ve had my share of detrimental encounters, but I think one thing that has been really striking. I had a particular experience as a teenager with a pretty, relatively famous artist. And then a decade later, in the museum where I was working, his art became the subject of a lot of focus in an exhibition, and it was everywhere. His images were in the, built into the email signatures that I sent every day, reproductions of his work were in bus shelters across from my apartment. And what I found myself struggling with was the contours of the encounter really came into focus in a way that I suppose I hadn’t processed in that time. Immediately when something happened in my own mind, but also in my social world, people just kind of went ‘Don’t talk about this because it will make you a troublemaker. It will affect your future.’ To be clear, I wasn’t sent there by the museum, but what was really striking to me also was the way that I found myself speaking about it in the museum context. I found myself really unable to maintain professionalism. To be honest, I’ve always been a little bit more heart on my sleeve than could be really called professional, but to put that aside for a moment like, to wrestle with that encounter in the professional space really brought out that ambiguity and that complexity because the first sentence that I would bring up, the first thing I would say to anyone, to my boss, to the curator who was working on the show was, ‘It wasn’t rape. Just let me be very clear. It wasn’t rape.’ It was frightening. It had all these consequences. It was orchestrated. There were other men involved who were sort of arranging and facilitating this, the way that is often the case with sort of more privileged men, and men who are considered talented in various ways. And that defensiveness, that kind of mitigating of the experience has really stuck with me. I find myself incredibly anxious talking about this now, incredibly anxious to qualify how I talk about the experience. And that’s partly because, especially in Australia, there’s an incredibly litigious culture around the MeToo movement, but it’s also just this sort of, this sense of self-doubt that comes with it. I don’t have a neat, tidy conclusion for you here. I just have this interest in the way that this language lives in classical art history and lives on the walls of museums. I’m still asking, what does that mean? How do we talk about this now? How do questions of consent function differently, especially since so many of these stories are looking at times when perhaps what was called a rape was also a woman marrying without her father’s permission or her family’s permission. You know, there’s just an enormous amount that we need to unpack. I don’t believe that unpacking is in any way a diminishment of the gravity of the experience. I think it’s a really necessary phase that we’ve reached in being very, very clear about the degrees and cadences of different kinds of coercion and violence and how much they live in everyday experiences. And I think also because, it’s very clear to me that in the art world at least, and I’m assuming in many other professions, but also in the home, which is really the site of statistically the most sexual violence, the complexity of love and the idea of love and the idea of the domestic, gets really tangled up with sexual violence in ways that make it really hard to contend with. It’s an intractable problem, in part because we are told this is a form of love. I mean, that’s what abuse is, right? It’s the complexity of how we imagine forms of coercion as coming from a place of love, and the complexity of human commitments and emotions. It’s really odd to talk about this coming out of like this critique of the museum and Classical Painting and Sculpture, it can seem like a bit…

Costello: Why is it odd?

Robinson: Well, I think it seems like a reach because we treat the museum space kind of like it’s a sequestered, exceptional zone. But I think…

Costello: And I think you’re trying to suggest that it is not.

Robinson: It is not. It is not because these stories are everywhere. These images are everywhere. The earliest, you know, my passion for art and art history is deep. I was really, really invested in art from the earliest age. I remember insisting on museum visits for my 10th birthday visiting Ophelia, the painting by John Everett Millais in the Tate in London. I was very obsessed with and committed to the woman who modeled in that painting. And it’s really extraordinary to me looking back on that, how much I aspired to be the subject in the painting. Now Elizabeth Siddall, who was the model for that painting, got very, very sick. I mean, the candles went out in the bathtub that she was floating in in the winter in England, and as she got really sick, she lay in the bath for 12 hours and she wound up dying. It’s actually kind of hard to tell from consumption or suicide. It’s all contested, but she’s just this, we aspire to be these women. Like, I was really like, ‘That’s, that’s the, that’s the goal, right?’ That’s what it means to be loved and to gain some kind of protection. And this is complicated by family history. It’s complicated by complex intergenerational relationships between women, mothers and daughters. It’s just so telling to me that that was my goal. That was my ambition. To be loved, to be loved, in a way that meant, lying in a bath for twelve hours, to be beautiful in suffering and in retreat. Yeah, sorry, I’m trailing off here, but…

Costello: No, that’s OK.

Robinson: There’s something of…Yeah, I have not yet unpacked it. I would like to emphasize that this book is kind of one phase or stage in a much larger project, long-term of thinking about uncomplicating this, and having a complex relationship to the idea of beauty and to the idea of love. You know, those women led terrible lives…

Costello: Which women?

Robinson: The women who, often the women who were the models for these paintings, but also the women who are the subject of these paintings, fictional, non-fictional, there’s some kind of romance, and they weren’t suffering for their own art, they were suffering for someone else’s.

Costello: In some of your other scholarly work, you have taken a broader view of women in the art world, and in an article you wrote in Runway Journal entitled Labors of Love: Women’s Labor as the Culture Sector’s Invisible Dark Matter, you describe the many ways that women are exploited in the art world, whether through their lack of representation as artists in galleries, whether through the well-documented pay gap that women experience in so many sectors of society, and you also talk about the more hidden ways, what you call the undocumented ways that women are exploited in the art world. You said: ‘It happens in the realm of interpersonal relationships, in the studio, the gallery, or late at night on a laptop in bed. In long unaccounted for hours and work brought home from the office on maternity leave.’ You go on to say: ‘It happens in conversations and meetings where women must appear subtly more humble, more efficient, more dedicated than any of their male counterparts. Such labor cannot be accounted for by statistics alone.’ That was quite a visual, visceral description of women’s work. And I’m wondering, what impact has this invisible labor by women had on the art world? And I’m also just kind of wondering where you think the art world would be without the uncompensated or under-compensated work of women?

Robinson: It would be nowhere. I mean, I hate to sound militant, but it really would be. I don’t know how the art world functions without that labor. And that’s why the title of that piece was taken from a line from a Hito Steyerl essay, The Invisible Dark Matter, that she talked about as women’s labor. It just really struck me when I read that essay, because I don’t know and I didn’t know then, how to measure the kind of work that I was doing, and the kind of work that I was doing was incredibly privileged in some ways. But because incredibly privileged, because there’s this also very complex history of the curatorial class as an upper-class pursuit, it tends to be very underpaid at a certain level, and that old idea of the glass ceiling, it remains in place. So, these really key decision makers, they’ve just not been women, and they make all kinds of decisions about what gets acquired and what gets displayed. And yet underneath them, there’s this enormous infrastructure of women who are really very often curatorial assistants and assistant curators. There were people in the museum where I worked, who were older women who had been assistant curators for decades, they’d never advanced in their careers. Now, I don’t want to make an example of any one person. There’s lots of reasons for that. But the truth of the matter is that we all just worked much longer hours and, wittingly or not, the men who were in power, some of whom I’m incredibly fond personally, had incredibly healthy boundaries with their work that relied entirely on the unhealthy boundaries of the women who worked for them and beneath them. You know, I have memories of waking up in the night, checking my email at 2:00 in the morning, having an email from an international lender, signaling a real crisis in a major exhibition, and just being up all night until it was considered an appropriate time for me to contact my boss. And at this point, I was an assistant curator and he’d been a senior curator, but like the head of a whole portion of the museum for a long, long time. And I simply internalized the idea that his time was valuable, but I had to prep to use his time the most effectively. Now it’s one example among many. The other part of that really is emotional labor, and this is just harder to quantify. How much you internalize things as your fault. How seriously you take certain issues and the interpersonal relationships part of it is complex as well because part of what I was trying to talk about in that essay was not just women who work within the institution in some kind of professional capacity, but also the wives and the long-term girlfriends and the partners of many artists. And we think of this as a very old-world thing, but I’m in my thirties. Many of my contemporary male artists have wives and girlfriends who run their studios, who really like physically make the work. I have physically made the work for men in my life who are seemingly perpetually in crisis. I have seen so many of the women that I love put so much energy into the output of partners. It just eats away at you, you know. It’s not like there’s a singular example, it’s cumulative to see these hidden women. It’s just the normal thing. A studio assistant will often be a woman, somebody who is deeply involved in the production of work, who’s deeply involved in discussion and conceptualization of the work will be a woman. Or somebody who, I suppose I would like to introduce a caveat here about gender rather than sex, and the gendering of particular roles. I mean, I wrote that essay, despite it sounding very, maybe polemical, and distanced, I’ve wrote it from an incredibly personal place at the end of a relationship, where I just felt like I had drained every resource I had and that it had really gone unseen. And I just know so many women whose work and whose practices are diminished in one way or another. And that’s really important. It’s not just important to foreground that experience, and to ask that that experience be changed, but it’s important because of the kinds of stories that are being told, and I suppose that’s how it links back to also the way in which these paintings are displayed, and this history is foregrounded in the museum. The stories that we’re familiar with and that we empathize with still continue to be the stories of men. Now that’s changed a lot in recent years, but the weight of history is enormous. And when you’re in museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that history is the vast majority of what you see. I think I do want to just take a minute to also say that there are women artists in the Met, and there are women artists who I’ve referenced, you know, a very small portion of them, but those women artists have also used the thematic of rape to complicate and speak back to this history, and they speak back to this history from within the museum. It’s just that it’s a really, really small amount of space.

Costello: I think you mentioned five women artists.

Robinson: Yes. Yeah.

Costello: Of the 181 that you critique.

Robinson: Yeah.

Costello: I’m wondering, has the Metropolitan Museum of Art responded to your critique?

Robinson: They did. I believe the journalist who wrote for Hyperallergic, reached out to them for comment, and there was a comment back that was generous in saying: That’s exactly why they’ve made all of this material available. And the Met is, I think, a leader in making this material available. A lot of the images that they have of their collection are available for any kind of use. They don’t use copyright as a way of compressing the kinds of conversations, and I believe the comment was something along the lines of that’s exactly why we’ve made this material available, and we invite this kind of critique. So, I think there is a lot that can happen in the museum space. I do see efforts within that, that are interesting. It remains to be seen how they respond to me showing up out the front with my alternative guide. There’s no simple answer to this. And I also want to just again, perhaps quote actually from the Robin Coste Lewis. This is actually the dedication at the front of my book, she writes, “Instead of the intellectual propaganda we call art history, the more honest, simple and accurate narrative of art, of perception, of projection, in short, the development of our visual subconscious, was hiding right there in plain view, not however, in the imagery, but simply in what the image is called within the signs, within the words.” That’s been taped up above my desk from when I began this project in March of this year. She’s a poet, she’s a wonderful poet and she’s not a museum professional, and I found in some ways it was that little gem of a quote, that little fissure that opened onto the museum space that allowed me also to dislocate from my own visual subconscious, I suppose, and my own museum training and art historical training and training as a really a woman to take certain things for granted and allow them to recede from a site, if that makes sense.

Costello: Macushla Robinson, writer, curator and Ph.D. candidate based at the New School in New York and author of the forthcoming book Every Rape at the Met Museum, I so appreciate our conversation today and your incredibly detailed attention to this very important topic. Thank you so much, and I and I want to thank you for sharing some deeply personal parts of yourself with me today, and for sharing what you did with me about the artist. That’s very painful territory and very highly personal territory, and I’m grateful that you were willing to talk to me a little bit about it today.

Robinson: No, I want to say my pleasure. It’s…pleasure is the wrong word. But I think that it is so ubiquitous and so common and so important to speak about these things. Really that’s the consequence of the idea of the personal being political. Yeah.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

Valentina Di Liscia, “What “All the Rapes in the Met Museum” Tell Us About Sexual Violence in Art History,” Hyperallergic, September 1, 2021.

Macushla Robinson, “Labours of Love: Women’s Labour as the Culture Sector’s Invisible Dark Matter,” Runway Journal, Issue 32.

Guerilla Girls, “Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum?,” The Met Collection.

Dan Chiasson, “Rebirth of Venus,” The New Yorker, October 12, 2015.

Katie White, “The Tragic ‘Ophelia’ Epitomized Pre-Raphaelite Beauty. Here Are 3 Facts You Might Not Know About the Mesmerizing Painting,” artnet, October 6, 2020.

Tiny Spark Podcast: “Museums Must Open Doors to Today’s Realities,” October 9, 2018.

On Instagram: macushla_r

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.