The REDress Project by Jaime Black

AN AESTHETIC RESPONSE TO THE MORE THAN 1000 MISSING AND MURDERED ABORIGINAL WOMEN IN CANADA.

The REDress Project focuses around the issue of missing or murdered Aboriginal women across Canada. It is an installation art project based on an aesthetic response to this critical national issue. The project has been installed in public spaces throughout Canada and the United States as a visual reminder of the staggering number of women who are no longer with us. Through the installation I hope to draw attention to the gendered and racialized nature of violent crimes against Aboriginal women and to evoke a presence through the marking of absence.

Learn/engage more:

https://www.jaimeblackartist.com/exhibitions/

a conversation with my six-year-old about revolution by Cynthia Dewi Oka

when 3 feet of sunshine missing two front teeth

asked me why do we need revolution

all i had was grenade in my mouth.

i held him for a while and watched him draw

clouds and trees and ladybugs and a house

filled with everybody he loves

when was the last time we put to image

what we thought the world should be

when did it become enough to know

how to promptly explode

i said to him he was much better equipped

to figure out the revolution than his mama

that if i don’t he’s got to disarm this bomb

and throw it out the window

cause the revolution is not about self-defense

it’s about self-creation, it’s about seeing father than the walls directly in front of us

and my six-year-old has got a head start.

Revolutionary Mothering : Love on the Front Lines, edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, et al., PM Press, 2016.

Testimony from the Rafah massacre 27.5.2004

I left my children playing in the tent.

I hugged them as it felt like the last

hug. I left to cook them something to eat.

I came back panicking as I heard the airstrikes. I found my SIX children

that couldn’t fit in the tent. They burnt and became ash. I carried the

six in my arm as if it were a handful of sand. I continued hugging and kissing them.

My SIX children, world, they became the size of a HANDFUL OF SAND.

Letters of Hope

Solidarity letters with the People’s Circle for Palestine

A collective of social activated voices using popular education to elevate our higher consciousness.

Letter 1: We are not scared.

Letter 2: Your voices are being heard.

Letter 3: They still maintain hope.

Letter 4: We have a Sacred Fire.

Letter 5: Students are powerful.

Letter 6: Please hold onto hope.

Letter 7: We will continue to show up.

Letter 8: All I have is a voice.

Letter 9: Let it be the catalyst.

Letter 10: Stay fearless, empathetic and courageous

Letter 11: We will see a Palestine in our lifetime.

Letter 12: I see you and I am proud of you.

Letter 13: FREE Palestine FREE Congo Free Turtle Island.

https://x.com/ELDV4Palestine/status/1794462807968346234

Before I was subjected to institutional learning, my introduction to this world was to observe land formations, animal habitats, seeing the colors of the sky, reading the stars, listening to bugs and the seasonal songs of birds, knowing when the wind changed direction, when hunting was good. I would watch the cycle of plants, gaze at the moon, lay on the grass, climb trees and feel various weather patterns…

I could read water before I could speak, mirrored puddles, lazy waves, misty rainfall, crashing lakes, driving waterfalls, old muddy creeks. My dad loved to cast a reel, he would also spearfish so our family would always find and follow the waterways wherever we travelled. He taught me in every environment I enter, I should be keenly aware of all my senses, especially to believe in my intuitive self-awareness.

Finish reading it here —- > https://www.infoagepub.com/products/Who-Are-You-Without-Colonialism

Chrisjohn, Pamela Lynne. I Am Who I Am. In Who Are You Without Colonialism?: Pedagogies of Liberation edited by Clelia O. Rodriguez and Josephine Gabi, IAP, 2023.

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House by Audre Lorde

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for the Humanities conference a

year ago, with the understanding that I would be commenting upon papers dealing with

the role of difference within the lives of American women: difference of race, sexuality,

class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of

the personal and the political.

It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without

examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black

and Third World women, and lesbians. And yet, I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist,

having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input

of Black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this

conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable.

To read this program is to assume that lesbian and Black women have nothing to say

about existentialism, the erotic, women's culture and silence, developing feminist theory,

or heterosexuality and power. And what does it mean in personal and political terms

when even the two Black women who did present here were literally found at the last

hour? What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the

fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change

are possible and allowable.

Finish reading this text https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Lorde_The_Masters_Tools.pdfHERE

On the occasion of International Children's Day on June 1, the names of Gazan children killed in Israeli attacks were read out in the German capital Berlin.

As part of the event organized by 3 Berlin women in front of the Neue Wache, the city's central monument building, hundreds of pairs of children's shoes were placed on the sidewalk of Unter den Linden Street to draw attention to the mass murder in Gaza.

At the event, the names of over 15,000 children from Gaza who were killed in Israeli attacks were read out at 09.00 local time. The reading of children's names by different people will continue until midnight.

Video/transcript:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW55zbppXt8

Listen HEREList of Canada's missing and murdered women, from Maryanne Pearce's An Awkward Silence

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pvMIkZ2JmoXCUEnUWmYbcFWxfz5xcD7ljz_a8UIVOH0/edit#gid=0

Listen —-> HERE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTG73ww5o4A

A Letter to the Graduating 2024 Class by Clelia O. Rodríguez

Every day we open our eyes we have the gift of change. Changers rise to the rhythm of higher consciousness which is not the same as higher learning. Diplomas do not grant warrior status. These administrative papers are part of politicized and socialized educational campaigns that brings the temporary illusion of “success.” The money that covered the fees and tuition to achieve the goal of the consonants and vowels of B.A., MA, PhD, the land where the learning scenarios took place, and the denying of pluriversalities of Knowledge have one shared affinity: Violence.

For the past three years I have taken a lot of pride sitting at the stage of the Convocation listening to the names of graduating students in a feast of proud communities that witness the miracle of students “making it.” This year I didn't even get the email with the invitation to attend. Self-explanatory much. I was once also a student who crossed stages carrying on my back the responsibility that was bestowed upon me from a community that was supposed to be destroyed. I remain rooted in the solemn cry for Humanity knowing that this journey of struggle is echoed in each of the voices of students whose breath, and spiritual presence is now the why of our Being.

As part of the requirements to fulfill the completion of your degree, you were asked to read, write, reflect critically, and to engage in endless discussions. All the violence I speak about is also part of that paper. As the nerves, excitement and adrenaline subside, you’ll arrive to a moment of silence when you’ll have to come to terms with Truth: How critically oblivious are you or were you to the violence of silence? To join a program, you were probably asked to write a statement of interest, and a statement of diversity in some of the newer programs catching up with performative tactics and strategies of DEI, and today whatever you wrote worked because you were accepted, and you get to graduate. How were you able to maintain your professed values to Social Justice in the practice beyond just wanting to get the reading lists from the only Black, Indigenous and racialized scholar in your department? How did you confront the inequalities when you were in a room full of silence? What changed in your hearts? What and who was spiritually murdered in the name of professionalization as you reflect today? How many land acknowledgements did you read or were read to you in a room full of well-read colonialists who are well-versed in decolonizing ways, apparently? The "what now?" question is between you and the Creator now.

To the graduating political class of 2024: You are the reason why many of us go on our knees with ancestral gratitude when we wake up in the morning. Without your fervor of demanding Dignity and transformative ways of learning and teaching beyond the likes, we in the multidimensional responsibilities we embody as professors, Tías, political mothers, and Ancestors-in-the-making, our ceremonies wouldn’t hold the real threats to our right to Sovereignty Knowledge.

To the graduating political class of 2024: Your senses, thirst, hunger, and unapologetic demand for the creation of dreamt spaces of Liberation is already here. The Palestinian textile is woven to the sacred geometry of my braids. The memory of today is tomorrow’s fire for the ceremonies that heal the womb. We are co-existing in a world that feels many times as an episode of Black Mirror. The absence of moral leadership is out. We know it. We see it. We aren’t happy or staying silent about it. To speak of hope while a genocide is happening is THE Hope. Do not become used to the false claims of learning to “navigate the system." Next time someone says that tell them you are the water and can’t be drown. The next time someone attempts to shift your pain to numbness tell them you can’t burnt because you are fire. The next time you see a person taking up space with their whiteness, their patriarchal violence, their heteronormative ways of behaving and their minimalist colonialist discourse to write off from the historical record of their violence tell them it ends with you.

To the graduating political class of 2024: Every child matters. Remember to remember! You don’t get flowers, applauses, congratulatory banners, cheerful messages, or my changes of plans to make it to your graduation in person this year. You get spiritual seeds from my sacred maíz mother that have existed in the kitchens of the world made up from red clay. Your Fire has literally awakened the energy of many of our ancestors of Abya-Yala, Amaru Kancha, the Pachamama, Turtle Island or what is known as the Americas. The presence of our multi-dimensional, infinitely epistemological sources of knowledge and the love of our seeds is with you as you scream Free Palestine.

As an active member part of a faculty community at an institution that is referred to as my Alma mater, a Latin phrase that's been around for 956 years as per the Gregorian Calendar, what is nourishing, mothering, honoring, and lighting up my relation to knowledge is literally you, graduating student. June 6, 2024 Clelia O. Rodríguez