Embedded Files
Session Objective: to identify realities in the (mis)use and provision of food, water, energy, and other environmental resources
Last week in Unit 2, we identified various inequalities that exist in current environmental resource and risk divisions, finding new forms of segregation through environmental harms. This week, we’re taking a look at segregation created by unequal access to environmental benefits.
The goal of Climates of Resistance is to uncover the reality of structural injustice and racialised inequalities while valuing the agency of impacted communities – and the best way to do that is to learn directly from them! In addition to exploring academic articles, news stories, and art about these issues, the course connects with a number of community leaders working on the frontlines of environmental justice initiatives. Week 4 introduces the first of these: Emma Robbins with the Navajo Water Project.
Learn: about the environmental injustice faced by the Navajo Nation – and what Emma is doing to change it – through the videos below, including a COVID-19 project update and a conversation with Syracuse students. Then dig a little deeper (pun intended) on the project website and/or through your own research.
Though Emma isn’t able to join each of our Discussion Groups in live time, she is more than happy to answer questions or continue conversations via email! Email info@climatesofresistance.org and we’ll put you in touch.
Emma Robbins is a Diné artist, activist, and community organiser with a passion for empowering Indigenous women. As Director of the Navajo Water Project, Emma creates infrastructure bringing clean running water to the 1-in-3 Navajo families without it.
Founder of The Chapter House, a new Indigenous arts space, Emma completed her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied Modern Latin American Art History in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Through her artwork, Emma strives to raise awareness about the lack of clean water on Native Nations and educate viewers about issues such as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis; representations and misrepresentations of Native Peoples; and broken treaties.
Visualise: other environmental inequalities around the world through the Unequal Scenes project.
Choose: one of the Unequal Scenes locations that is compelling for you, and read more about it. Your Learning Log for this week asks you to compile some information about your chosen Scene to compare with others in your Discussion Group.
Dive: into your final piece of media for today by spending some time with the “Water Dancer” series. Calida Garcia Rawles’ work engages with water as something precious and relational, even as she recognises the violence done through uneven resource allocation, unfair environmental divisions, and inequitable community treatment.
Pillar (2018)
Merging sharp hyper-realism with poetic abstraction, Calida Garcia Rawles paints African-American women and men submerged in glistening water; bodies are swarmed by a flurry of bubbles, ripples, and refracted light. For Rawles, water is a spiritually healing element for all people – yet she recognises its historical connotations to racial exclusion and cultural fears. She uses the complicated duality of water as a platform to address identity politics while reimagining her subjects beyond cultural tropes. At times, her work alludes to current events, even making topographical maps of cities where acts of racially targeted violence have occurred. In other moments, her works are purely celebratory of the resilience, strength, and beauty of African American culture.
The “Water Dancer” series reflects Rawles’ triple consciousness as Black, woman, and American. Her work on these themes is also showcased in the cover art for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s debut novel, The Water Dancer.
(photograph by Glen Wilson)
Complete: your Learning Log for this session via the form below.
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