THE FUNAMBULIST

Politics of Space and Bodies

N°40
February — March 2022

THE LAND… … FROM SETTLER COLONIAL

PROPERTY TO LANDBACK
THE FUNAMBULIST BEHIND
THE SCENES
Dear subscribers, dear occasional readers,

Ireland is on my mind while writing these words as

today we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the
colonial massacre of Bloody Sunday in Derry by the
British army. Four days ago, it was a more joyous
anniversary we were celebrating: the 50th anniver-
sary of the creation of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy
on the Australian parliament lawn, as described in
my introduction to this issue.

I’d like to welcome you to the new format of

The Funambulist, which was prepared with love by
Walid Bouchouchi (Akakir Studio). Those of you who
have been reading the magazine for a long time—
thank you so much!—must have the same odd feeling
that we are having at the moment. A chapter just
ended, but a new one begins, and we intend for it to
be at least as long as the first one, if not longer!
This issue was not an easy one to put together.
The global pandemic, general exhaustion, and per-
sonal matters have hindered no less than five of our
committed contributors from sending us their text
in the final few weeks of the editorial process. This
THE ISSUE’S
COVER EXPLAINED
For this new format and layout, we are very happy
to have commissioned an artwork by Amazigh artist
Lynda Handala. Her abundant drawings can be
looked at for long moments, appreciating the plen-
tiful, lively, and colorful details of each area of the
paper. We are lucky and grateful to have our very
own here to describe the many layers through which
the question of land can be approached. The piece is
entitled Akal (ⴰⴽⴰⵍ), which means soil in Amazigh.
Lynda Handala was born and raised in Algeria. She

N°40 created a quite complicated framework to rebuild a

large part of the issue at the last minute. I am, in this
regard, extremely grateful to the contributors that
I contacted at the 25th hour, and who graciously ac-
cepted to work with an exceptionally tight deadline.
is now living and working in France as a virolo-
gist. She is a self taught artist, trying through her
creations to perpetuate her Amazigh inheritage and
to celebrate women. She is currently working on a
project mixing art and virology.

In contrast to these difficulties, our last issue,

The Ocean… From the Black Atlantic to the Sea
Y
RT

of Islands was a resounding success! So much so

that we have actually ordered a small reprint (300
PE

copies) for the first time since the beginning of the

O
PR

magazine. The beautiful epistolary exchange be-

tween Christina Sharpe and Alexis Pauline Gumbs,
CK IAL

the amazing interview of Quito Swan on Black

BA N

internationalism in Oceania, the story of Zanzibar

ND LO

poem-maps by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor accom-

LA CO

panied by Shiraz Bayjoo’s artwork, as well as the

TO LER

several other contributions to this issue, have clearly

touched your soul the way they have touched ours!
TT

As usual, I am so grateful for this show of support

SE

that always allows us to continue doing what we do.

M
O

But back to this present issue, I hope that you enjoy and
FR

find as much interest in it as we did while preparing it!

…

Léopold Lambert
Paris, on December 30, 2022

THE LAND…
COVER 44.
AKAL (ⴰⴽⴰⵍ) RESPIRO HACIA ADENTRO
Lynda Handala OLVIDANDO LAS COSTILLAS
Daniela Catrileo
6.
FRAGMENTED FUTURES IN SUDAN 46.
Ola Hossanain LANDBACK IN SOUTH AFRICA:
WHEN, HOW, AND FOR WHOM?
10. Tshepo Madlingozi
SUSPENDED LIVES: .34
RESISTING THE DISAPPEARANCE 54.
OF BALOCH BODIES IN PAKISTAN CH’IXI FUTURITY
Fatima Anwar Ana María León
.54
14. 58.
THE VOID: SEARCHING FOR “THE PUEBLO REVOLT NEVER ENDED”:
FEMINIST YIDDISH PERIODICALS NOTES ON THE CONFLUENCE OF
Maya Ober LAND AND WATER 74.
Alyosha Goldstein and Julia Bernal .58
20.
THE LAND… FROM SETTLER 64. 34.
COLONIAL PROPERTY TO LANDBACK: RACIALIZATION AND RESISTANCE .72
INTRODUCTION IN THE ICE GEOGRAPHIES OF THE 20.
Léopold Lambert ARCTIC AND COLONIZED ALASKA
Jen Rose Smith .26
24.
A LETTER TO THE BARBED WIRE 72.
Moen Bseiso translated by Jehan Bseiso STONE MOTHER - LADY .64
OF THE BUFFALO 14.
26. Poem by Tanaya Winder - Artwork by Aly McKnight COVER.
COLONIAL LIVES OF PROPERTY
IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA, BRITISH 74.
COLUMBIA, AND PALESTINE LETTER TO OUR DAUGHTER
Brenna Bhandar EMA YUIZARIX
Wai Architecture Think Tank
24.
34.
DEPRECIATION
Cameron Rowland 6.
36. 36.
COLONIAL AFTERLIVES:
LAND AND THE EMOTIONAL HISTORY
OF THE MAU MAU WAR .26 .10
46.
Rose Miyonga
.26

4 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40

NEWS FROM Nº40
People celebrate the first anniversary of the revolution
by the Constitutional Court and inside Liberty Square
in Khartoum on December 19, 2019.
Photo by Wirestock Creators.

THE FRONTS

6 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 7

 FRAGMENTED FUTURES IN SUDAN
OLA HASSANAIN
It is difficult to write the present as if it was history. Ola Hassanain
nonetheless attempts to provide us with an account of the
unfolding situation in Sudan, where protesters against the
October 25, 2021 military coup risk their lives in the streets.
She reflects on the quasi-continuous military regime and what
civilian lives (and deaths) mean in this political context.
I write this text as the sounds of yet another round
of gunshots echoes into the skies of Khartoum.
Another procession and its chants continue to ring
in the air: “The people are stronger and there is no
turning back!” Upon hearing the shots I turn to my
mother and we exchange looks as if to ask: why
do they insist on shooting at people? What is it that
makes the State respond that way when they hear
our calls for freedom? My mother tells me about
her experience of the 1971 coup when she laid on
the ground of her dormitory at the University of
Khartoum while bullets flew through the windows
of their rooms for what felt like hours. Since then,
there have been a recorded eight coups in Sudan.
My mother gets up to look through the window and
I sit back in the armchair, the silence in the room
giving way to my mother guessing what kind of
weaponry might be at use here. My mind starts
wandering. Where did the shots come from? Was
it from the eastern part of our neighborhood, in
Aldiem? Or was it north? I start to picture the sites
where these bullets landed. Did they kill anyone?
What territory does the state
aggression draw out in the city?
How is space informing people on
how to navigate state terror as they
gather in the streets?
One question emerges from reflections on the
State’s response to these precessions made up of
neighborhood committees, resistance committees,
and other civilian organizations: what is this con-
dition of continuous catastrophe illustrated by the
obliteration of civilians when they revolt and de-
mand that political power be shared so that people
can have agency over their lives? With a climbing
death toll in the continuing anti-coup protests, it is
clear that the military has overestimated its capa-
8 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40
bility of governing through violence. The Sudanese
public is manifesting political imaginaries and there
is simply no return to the old ways of politics. They
are imagining a future where the State does not
have such a vexed relationship with the civilians’
social worlds, but rather make space to engage with
the local arguments about what works for them or
not. They are imagining a much needed epistemo-
logical shift in political discourse that does not en-
tail military assaults as a response to the most basic
political demands.
But Black people’s death is part and parcel of the
continuation of the nation-state project, and any
notion of civil society as we know it requires this
category of non-person to exist in order to ensure
its longevity: if you are a non-person (i.e. a civilian),
you cannot conjure agentic power. This was consol-
idated by the signing of the 14-point political agree-
ment of November 21, 2021 by the head of Sudan’s
Sovereignty Council Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan (leader
of the coup and self-inaugurated head of state) with
Abdallah Hamdok (the now-resigned prime min-
ister), which had an eerily similar desire of “stop-
ping the killing.” Although the document itself was
presented as a main means of ending violence, the
“stopping of killing” was presented as a solution to
the crisis created by the military’s coup itself in the
previous month. However, under the guise of “stop-
ping the killing,” the political agreement clearly and
deliberately ousted the civilian part of the civil-
ian-military transitional government; al-Burhan has
since handpicked civilians loyal only to his Islamist
ideology.
What does the recurring removal of civilians from
spaces of bureaucracy or from physical space (via
deadly assault) mean? This, for me, is what Frank
B. Wilderson describes as “being buried beneath the
world.”
When military rule dominates the
political landscape, controlling all
of the regional governorships and
holding a two-thirds majority of the
National Assembly in Sudan, this
signals that during its rule, an entire
world is being created without the
people.
The 14-point agreement plan signed on November
21, 2021 reinstated Hamdok as prime minister and
gave the military total control during the transi-
tional period until a handover to an elected civilian
government.
The Sudanese public has read the political agree-
ment as yet another rabbit hole of negotiations by
Burhan. It constitutes an open-ended reign for the
military, especially since the civilian component is
officially removed from the agreement, and that
there will be no guarantees that military rules do not
last indefinitely. Popular protests previously oppos-
ing the coup transformed into protests against the
political agreement and the very legitimacy of the
government. At this point, I firmly believe people
cannot be convinced that the current political forma-
tion comprised of the military and the same constit-
uencies from the previous regime will ever deliver
transitional justice, eliminate corruption, or be held
accountable for rampant human right abuses. This is
NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
especially true as the Islamist government has been
the political incubator for the military for the past
three decades and is largely seen as complicit.
The military remains a state apparatus that fore-
closes the democratic civilian power that ought
to flow through political institutions. The various
political parties in Sudan have historically seized
power of the State by way of deadly violence just as
their political projects begin to fail, and the coups
riddling the country’s history since “independence”
are a testament to how these parties have bled their
ideologies into the military formations and mobi-
lized them through coups as needed. Fifty-two out
of the 65 years of Sudan’ independence have been
under military rule. And although al-Burhan’s coup
in October 2021 is always spoken of as an individual
act, he is the product of the State’s nurturing of a
militarized consciousness whereby domestic politics
is akin to a state of war.
Within this political state, these cycles of military
rule are sustained by and rest upon what Alessan-
dra Raengo calls the “plasticity of Blackness”: the
repetitive and durative temporalities of Black life
that foreclose the possibility of futures. Imagine the
cartography of world-making processes within this
vision, what our urbanscapes look like and how ab-
stract and impossible the futures seem. We are per-
ceived as simply taking up space in and forestalling
the full expression of the State’s imaginary. When
people are deeply constrained in their life choices,
place-making becomes difficult. It is thus promising
to see the emergence of local resistance committees
as one of the forces against the removal of civilians
from the political processes that impact them.
Fig.1
9
If we consider the temporality of Black life, one
wonders how the ruling political parties in Sudan
never prioritized the creation of infrastructure.
Instead, everything was designed for their own
preservation: new construction has always seemed
to be a business venture for the political parties to
make governance serve their personal agendas.
An example would be when the National Congress
Party took power in 1989 led by Al Bashir (also
through a military coup), the party gradually
started to deploy political empowerment strategies
known as Tamkin. This essentially consisted in
decentralization policies that granted the private
sector government functions, thus dismantling civil
institutions and chipping away all the civic infra-
structure of Sudan. Every new project that could
have improved upon past infrastructure ended up
being outsourced to private companies which were
usually owned by members of the same political
party. Construction has been a means of hemor-
rhaging public money and funneling it into the
pockets of the ruling political parties and their
international partners; namely China, Qatar, and
the UAE amongst others. China remains one of
Sudan’s main trading partners and invests across
multiple sectors, including in mining. The process
of constructing the nation-state from the perspective
of the NCP consisted in perpetual negotiations to
broker deals for national projects. This was used as
a means of holding onto power, to level the playing
field against stronger opponents, to corrupt and
co-opt countering organizations and civil mobilisa-
tions, to assert that it is the principal partner for
any and all deals in Sudan—thus legitimizing itself
and extending its time in power. Their need to rely
on negotiations made it possible to enforce their will
enough to hold onto political and economic power.
This placed the Sudanese civil society in a position
where we are only allowed to be as long as we are
inscribed into capital through exploited labor. We
become the capital and we are then used as leverage.
What does this tell us about the vagueness (imposed
or otherwise) attached to the civilian in a world-
ing process? The state of affairs in Sudan seems to
affirm that we as African people, are not viewed as
valuable other than as a leverage for their political
agendas. The State gets to administer life and we
must perform their demands; otherwise, it adminis-
ters death. But people resist and continuously carve
out spaces to live the lives they want. Many people
are not particularly interested in mobilizing towards
modes of legible organizing that are deemed “eligi-
ble” to engage in the political dialogue as unstably
structured by partisan politics.
10
Rather, our organizing is constructed
around the spaces of our lives—in
our tea drinking, our gatherings
by the river, in our backyards and
homes, and the yet to be designated
houses and their emplacement in this
landscape.
The neighborhood committees are made up of most-
ly youths of the community, both male and female,
engaging in action-based approaches incorporating
readings of landscape and the spaces they inhabit.
“This requires recognizing that native
voices do not sing in unison or with
singular clarity, but just as importantly,
it also requires acknowledging that our
interlocutors are never merely describing
their world—they are perpetually analyzing
their world and making arguments about it.
The challenge then is not simply to
incorporate native voices, but to engage
seriously with native arguments.
Whose voice can be deployed as evidence of
culture? Whose as political ideology? Fig.2
And whose as theory?”
(Yarimar Bonilla, Non-Sovereign Futures, of nonviolent action can be turned into long-term
French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of sustainable political change. Resistance formations
Disenchantment, 2015). like the neighborhood committees thus need to be
understood as both a positive project and a negative
…Who is eligible to live life? placeholder. However, I would like to suggest that its
unfinished characteristics allow for transformations
Why should we, as a Black geography, focus on and changes to be imminent, and fully informed by
these spaces specifically? Because we should be real emergencies of a particular territory, not by
rallying around a multiplicity of living, not towards preconceptions shaped by postcolonial nationalist
the singularity imagined by the civic society com- ideas of what freedom, peace, and justice could be.
posed of the “citizen” and the “civilian” that makes Just like the NCP held its place in power through
it so easy to scrap us off of documents. The local continuous negotiation, resistance committees can
arguments demonstrated by neighborhood commit- hold time through steady transformations. ■
tees and resistance committees operate as forms of
unfinished critique: they are durational attempts Ola Hassanain trained her focus on subtle politics of space—
to escape from the epistemic constraints of politi- namely, how the built environment reacts to and reinforces
cal modernity while still considering its normative violence from the State and regulates the lives of those who
categories. Political projects in Sudan never last inhabit it. Her development of critical spatial practice is partly
long enough before military intervention interrupt informed by her post-academic training which includes an
them. The military recognize the potential of the ongoing Rijksakademie Residency, BAK fellowship 2017-2018,
“unfinished,” and use these interruptions in order and teaching at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, and Sand- Fig.1 A banner reads “No Partnership, No negotiation, No legitimacy” during the
to integrate themselves within state structures. This berg Institute amongst others. Sudanese protests against the military coup. / Merowe Resistance Committee
(December 2021).
is a major obstacle that prevents entities like the Fig.2 Two Sudanese martyrs killed during the protests on a banner. It reads “If you
resistance committees, policymakers, and intellec- don’t fight for what you wish for, you will fight twice as much to come to terms with a
tuals from envisioning how the short-term success situation you don’t want.” / Red Wadmadani (January 2022).
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 11
 SUSPENDED LIVES:
RESISTING THE DISAPPEARANCE
OF BALOCH BODIES IN PAKISTAN
FATIMA ANWAR
In this poignant text, Fatima Anwar describes the Pakistani
system that consists of disappearing people of Balochistan
every year. Starting from a 2015 censored event on the topic at
Lahore University of Management Sciences, she recounts the
struggle of Baloch people, in particular women and children, to
recover their loved ones.
In memory of Sabeen Mahmud
On April 8, 2015, two men from Pakistan’s Inter-Ser-
vices Intelligence agency (ISI), marched onto the
LUMS university campus in Lahore and forcibly
cancelled an academic talk to be held in auditorium
B-3 the next day. I had helped organize the talk,
titled “Unsilencing Balochistan,” in coordination with
fellow students and professors as a part of a series of
human rights roundtables. On the event poster was
a portrait of a Baloch boy, possibly 10-12 years old,
tightly clutching onto a photo of his missing father.
For families in Balochistan, this is not an uncom-
mon image. Mothers hold the portraits of missing
sons, wives of missing husbands, sisters of missing
brothers, and children of missing fathers. The boy
in this particular image was Ali Haider Baloch.
Four years later, in 2019, the young boy in the pic-
ture, now a teenager, himself would go “missing.”
It is almost impossible to speak of missing persons
in Pakistan without the spectre of Balochistan
haunting the conversation. A practice expanded
and perfected during Pakistan’s cooperation with
the United States’ “war on terror,” the escalation of
enforced disappearances in the country is attributed
to military dictator Pervaiz Musharraf. Musharraf,
who, significantly enough, came into power in 2001.
This marked the beginning of a period in which
Pakistani citizens were extrajudicially disappeared
and handed over to American authorities to do
with as they pleased. In the era of Bagram and Abu
Ghraib, as people disappeared into blacksites on
a semantic turn, the Pakistani military found for
themselves the convenient framework of a state of
exception for “terrorists.”
12
In Balochistan, however, people have been going
“missing” for much longer. The history of state vio-
lence there is as old as Pakistan itself. In the scram-
ble to divide states during the great British escape
from the subcontinent, regional governments were
asked to choose between India, Pakistan, or auton-
omy. On August 12, 1947, the Khan of Kalat an-
nounced a short-lived independence for the people
of Balochistan. On March 27, 1948, facing one of
the first military excursions of the infant Pakistani
military, the Khan was forced to accede to Pakistan,
marking the beginning of decades of brutalization.
A mineral rich province that hosts the largest nat-
ural gas field in Pakistan, Balochistan has suffered
from a criminal lack of investment from the center
in everything from basic infrastructure, water and
electricity, to schools and hospitals.
Fig.1
In the face of extractive exploitation
and political marginalization, the Baloch, who protested for the release of her father, activism. They were booked, charged, and jailed.
only for her brother to go missing in retaliation. Nevermind that she was murdered on her way
Baloch have struggled for their right Like that of Lateef Johar, on hunger strike for 46 home from successfully hosting a conversation on
days, as journalists and politicians alike averted enforced disappearances in Pakistan’s largest urban
to self-determination ever since. their gaze from his slowly emaciating body. center. Nevermind that the Pakistani military has a
long history of utilizing its militant “assets’’ to carry
I met Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur after we snuck “They are like vegetables when/if they are returned out its more unseemly tasks.
him onto campus for a strange one-man version of to us.” This is what Talpur sab tells me.
our cancelled talk, hushly organized and advertised
in a vague but thinly veiled fashion. An elder in the After the talk was cancelled, activists from across This is how you disappear human
Baloch community, lovingly referred to as “ustad” Pakistan attempted to host the same panel at differ- beings. First, you disappear their
and “baba,” he is an encyclopedia of the missing: ent venues in solidarity. Unprecedented defiance in
“So and so was picked up with so and so, in front the face of Pakistan’s seemingly all powerful military bodies. Then, you disappear their
of x person, in y place, for this many years. Then and feared intelligence agencies. One of these sister
he was released after n years and picked up again, talks was hosted by activist and organizer Sabeen
names. From every paper, from every
released and picked up again. “Released” a final Mahmud at a community space she founded called evening news report, from every
time when we found his mutilated body on the side The 2nd Floor (T2F) in Karachi. On the night of the
of this road near such and such village.” T2F talk, the Facebook group set up by students academic talk, from even the mouths
“When a family member goes missing, one doesn’t
began blowing up with notifications. Half asleep, I
couldn’t comprehend what I was reading: “Pakistani
of their family members.
know what to do,” he tells me. The families don’t activist Sabeen Mahmud shot dead in Karachi.”
know whether to keep quiet and hope their silence Mohammed Hanif, an acclaimed Pakistani novelist
will buy their loved one’s life or to risk going public Months later, the investigation would attribute her and journalist, is one of the few that has made an
in the hopes that media attention will bring them assasination to two young religiously motivated mil- effort to document the stories of the disappeared.
back. He tells me stories: like that of Mahrang itants frustrated with Sabeen’s “secular” views and In The Baloch Who is Not Missing and Others Who
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 13
Are (2013), he writes of a practice among Baloch
prisoners in blacksites of taking turns to give the
adhaan (call to prayer) and ending it with their
names. So that if another prisoner is released, he
carries with him a recitation of the names of the
still living. In another story, he writes of a brother
who sends his sister the buttons off his shirt with a
returned missing person, so that she may know he
is alive.
The stories in his pamphlet follow the same painful
cycle; a family member is picked up and the rest then
consign themselves to endless rounds of the Missing
Person Protest Checklist: file an FIR, get a lawyer,
submit a habeas writ, write letters to the govern-
ment, to media, to human rights workers, and wait.
What emerges is a bizarre labyrinth of paperwork
and police stations, courtrooms, and government
offices, protest camps and human rights NGOs.
The governor says: “I can’t do anything, it’s the mil-
itary who has your son.” The Military Intelligence
says: “We’re being forced to clean up ISI’s mess,
you should keep quiet, it’s what’s best for you.” One
year they say: “We have your son, he is safe, he is
alive, he is only being questioned.” The next year
they say: “We never had him.” And the next year
still, they say: “He died five years ago.” That your
eyes lied to you if you saw him alive, that your ears
betrayed you if he heard him over the phone. “He is
dead, we never had him.”
The families of missing persons live suspended lives.
March, camp, protest, hunger strike. Go to the thaa-
na. Go to the court. Speak to this journalist, speak to
that lawyer. Rinse and repeat.
Suspended childhoods, suspended schooling, sus-
pended jobs.
Suspended marriages, suspended motherhoods.
And perhaps most painfully of all, suspended grief.
Because mourning cannot happen until there is con-
firmation of a death. This is the ultimate cruelty of
enforced disappearances. At the end, the plea of so
many Baloch families becomes a plea for a body and
a prayer. For that last shred of dignity of being al-
lowed the certainty of death and the release of grief.
“All I want from you is that you take me to his
grave. I’ll dig it up. I’ll identify him. I’ll offer my
prayers and then never bother you guys again.”
The Pakistani state answers this plea in the form of
bodies mutilated beyond recognition, dumped uncer-
emoniously on far-flung roadsides.
14
In 2013, one of the speakers of our cancelled talk,
72 year old Mama Qadeer, set out with an odd
assortment of some 20 Baloch men, women, and
children to walk over 2,000 kilometers from Quetta,
in Balochistan, to Karachi to Islamabad. With them
walked 8 year old Beauragh Baloch, whose father
had been missing from 2009 to 2011. Beauragh was
4 years old when his grandfather Mama Qadeer
took him to see his father’s scarred and mutilated
body. Together, grandfather and grandson broke
Gandhi’s salt march record as the oldest and young-
est person to complete such an arduous trek of
protest on foot.
Of the women who marched, one was Farzana Ma-
jeed, another would-be speaker on the panel of our
silenced talk. The sister who received her missing
brother’s buttons, student forced to abandon her
Master’s in biochemistry, and general secretary
of the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP),
Farzana has now spent over a decade agitating for
the return of her brother. In the face of unimagi-
nable grief, Baloch women have stepped up to lead
the charge for the dignity and rights of the Baloch
people.
The first woman to chair the Baloch Students
Organization, Karima Baloch, was an inspiration to
scores of Baloch students, convincing girls to study
and join Baloch politics. In defiance of a highly
insulated conservative society, she led the charge
not just for Baloch rights but women’s rights within
Baloch society. In December 2020, Karima Baloch
was found dead in a lake in Canada, where she had
been living in asylum. A few months prior, Baloch
journalist Sajid Hussain’s dead body wound up in
a river in Sweden. Both Canadian and Swedish
authorities ruled out foul play despite evidence of
threats provided by their families.
“Karima was like a daughter to
me,” Talpur sab tells me, “There is a
searing pain in my heart every time
I see her picture, but it would be
betraying her sacrifices for me to lose
hope, to give up.”
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40
It is painful enough to have to make a spectacle of
one’s pain, to turn one’s body into a site of protest,
and to create a public display of one’s innermost
grief. Worse still, to do so in front of unseeing eyes
and unfeeling hearts. The Baloch have been de-
monized as de facto traitors. It is not that Pakistanis
have trouble believing what they have suffered, it
is that they believe it to be justified. That is the ugly
face of unrepentant nationalism and allegiance to
the State that the Baloch are contending with.
Writing this piece itself has been a painful and
disconcerting process. It is hard to hope in the
face of this history and it is hard to imagine one’s
pitiful contributions adequate. It is harder, still, to
confront the way I and other Pakistanis have failed
our Baloch brothers and sisters. That being said,
the memory of fear is difficult to shake from one’s
bones. And one thinks and rethinks the truths they
are allowed to say.
Some years after the events of “Unsilencing Ba-
lochistan,” I visited Sabeen’s community space T2F
in Karachi. Among all the art, pictures of Pakistani
icons, and messages of love scribbled in colourful
markers, there is a wall that carries her legacy:
“Fear is just a line in your head, you can choose
what side of that line you want to be on.” ■
Fatima Anwar is a Lahore based researcher, scriptwriter, and
lawyer. She has conducted extensive research on blasphemy,
hate speech, and extrajudicial violence in Pakistan. She has
worked on two Pakistani animated shorts that contend with Fig.2
the intersection of religious fascism and tech. She was the
founding Editor in Chief of Hashiya, a Pakistani critical histories
channel with a focus on colonialism, violent histories, and
intergenerational trauma. She is currently the 2021-22 Human
Rights Fellow at Columbia Law.
Fig.1 Left. Ali Haider’s portrait as a young boy holding a picture of his missing father
on the Unsilencing Balochistan poster. Right. Ali Haider, years later, as a teenager, still
protesting with his father’s photo in hand.
Fig.2 Artwork created by Pakistani artist Isma Gul Hasan for the 2021 Women’s
Freedom March. The women on the poster are adorned in distinctly traditional
Baloch patterns, paying homage to the resistance of Baloch women in the face of
state repression. / Courtesy of Isma Gul Hasan.
NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 15
 THE VOID: SEARCHING FOR
FEMINIST YIDDISH PERIODICALS
MAYA OBER
This text was produced as part of the L.i.P. workshop, and
has previously been published in a slightly amended version
in the Feminist Findings zine and on Futuress. In it, Maya Ober
recounts her quest in Polish archives to find feminist Yiddish
publications. As usual when searching the archives, absence
is as informative as presence.
Searching for past feminist Yiddish periodicals fills
me with a void. This void has been with me for a
long time; it accompanied me while growing up in
a family of Eastern European Holocaust survivors.
I missed the world of the large Ashkenazi diaspo-
ra, which was exterminated by the Nazis and their
collaborators against the backdrop of silent indiffer-
ence, decades before I was even born. I missed its
culture. Its languages. Its writings. And its press.
Growing up in Poland, I would browse through the
glossy issues of Midrasz, a monthly cultural journal
that was published between 1997–2019;
or the socialist leaning Das Yiddishe Wort
‫דאָס ייִדישע וואָרט‬Słowo Żydowskie (The Jewish
Word), to which my mom subscribed. Słowo
Żydowskie has been published since 1946 by the
Social and Cultural Society of Jews, and it is still the
longest existing Jewish periodical in Poland. Neither
of these publications was even remotely feminist.
Prewar Poland had a vibrant Jewish
press scene comprising 130 daily
newspapers and magazines in
Yiddish, 28 in Polish, and around 20
Hebrew periodicals; these made up
almost 7% of the titles and periodicals
in the country.
The online archive of the Jewish Historical Insti-
tute in Warsaw captures this diversity: it includes
daily newspapers from a wide political spectrum,
magazines on theater and literature, children and
youth periodicals, pedagogical journals, as well as
publications focused on culture, politics, art, and
16
even astrology. Through their online archive, one
can browse through socialist, communist, zionist,
and liberal periodicals; but there is not a single
feminist publication. But what does this absence
reveal? That there were no feminist periodicals,
or that they were simply not archived?
“The doors of the Jewish press are still strongly
shut for us women!” complained Pua Rakovski,
Rokhl Shteyn, and Lea Proshanski in the first issue
of Froyen Shtim ‫פרויען שטים‬ (Women’s Voice),
a black and white weekly newspaper that started
circulating in May 1925 in Warsaw. According to
Yiddish scholar Joanna Lisek, the objectives of the
periodical were clear: it demanded equal rights for
Jewish women, postulating that “the woman has to
play the same role and make the same contribution
as the man.” Also absent from the Jewish Historical
Institute’s website was Froyen Shtim, which
stopped being published abruptly in the same year.
Froyen Shtim adhered to feminist rhetoric from
the first wave of feminism, and was steeped in na-
tionalist, colonial, and Zionist rhetoric. Its cofound-
er, Puah Rakovsky, was an especially controversial
figure. She was a Jewish women’s rights activist
and educator on the one hand, and an adherent
supporter of the Zionist colonial-settler movement
in Palestine on the other. Without a doubt, her
work promoting literacy and formal secular edu-
cation among mostly working class Jewish girls
and women in Poland was important. However, her
involvement in the World Organization of Zionist
Women (WIZO) and other nationalist efforts that
led to the dispossession of Palestinian people in-
cluding many women, begs the question: can Rak-
ovsky even be considered a feminist? Even though
she self-identified as a Zionist feminist, Palestinian
activists and scholars urge us to see Feminism as
a movement striving towards equality and Zionism
as a colonialist and racist ideology, which make
both politically incompatible.
Khana Blankshteyn, Yiddish writer from Vilnius
and the editor of Di Froy 1925-1933 ‫די פרוי‬
(“The
Woman”), represents a different political stance.
She was affiliated with the Jewish People’s Party Fig.1
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 NEWS FROM THE FRONTS 17
 ‫ייִדישע פֿאָלקספּאַרטַײ‬, which demanded cultural and
political autonomy in the Jewish diaspora, instead
of being under the rule of Palestine. On the pages of
Di Froy, a weekly paper distributed across Vilnius,
Warsaw, Lodz, and Krakow during the 1920s,
there is a concern voiced about the preservation of
Jewish cultural and religious identity. The author
recognized the triple struggle of Jewish women:
their struggles due to gender; due to being members
of an oppressed ethnic group as well as a personal,
internal one; and due to Jewish women’s wish to
preserve a traditional Jewish household filled with
love and care, while also being attracted to the
modern model of equal rights.
I haven’t yet found digital scans or physical copies
of either Froyen Shtim or Di Froy. I have only ex-
tracted information about them from scarce schol-
arship on feminist discourse in women’s Yiddish
press. One article’s footnote mentioned Ewa, the
Jewish Feminist Weekly published in Polish from
1925–1933 and edited by Pola Appenszlak and Iza
Wagner, which led me to the digital archive of the
Polish National Library and an almost complete
collection of scans.
Ewa was bold. “Captivity of the Motherhood!”
screams the headline of the October issue in 1931.
Fig.2 Fig.3
18
Vocal about reproductive rights,
the paper continuously raised the
issues of birth control and women’s
freedom of choice, demanding legal,
safe, and free abortion as well as
comprehensive sexual education.
It’s a battle that Polish feminists are still fighting
for today, 90 years later. Appenszlak strongly
motivated her readers (other Jewish women) to
exercise their right to vote. As a vocal pro-abortion
activist, she also encouraged sexual education and
planned parenthood. Like many of her Jewish con-
temporaries in Poland, Appenszlak failed to see the
Jewish feminist cause beyond ethnic lines, and was
also an adherent Zionist, succumbing to its coloni-
al-nationalist discourse.
On the Polona digital repository of the National
Library of Poland, I found scans of almost all
issues of Ewa. Some show scares of time, but most
are well preserved. The website prides itself in
sharing “the most valuable treasures of the Polish
culture and history.” Ewa was published in Polish,
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40
feminist periodicals written in Yiddish apperently
are not precious enough. There might be many
potential reasons for this situation, however, I can’t
stop thinking about the triple oppression Khana
Blankshteyn mentioned on the pages of Di Froy
‫די פרוי‬. Pre-war Poland—even though multi-ethnic,
was still based on a single-nation ideology. The
Polish language was at the core of re-establishing
the young state and its identity. Speaking Polish
at home and abandoning any ‘visible’ signs of the
Jewish culture, was the unwritten demand by the
Polish mainstream to be considered part of the
ethno-nationalist society. Therefore, Jewish women
who decided to preserve their cultural, religious,
and ethnic autonomy and to fight the patriarchy
both within their communities and outside of
them, were marginalized and rendered invisible.
Consequently, their legacy remained missing from
the virtual space of the National Library.
The situation is not any better at the Jewish Histor-
ical Institute in Warsaw: “We only have one issue
of an American magazine called Bridges, from
2009,” replied an archivist from the Jewish Histor-
ical Institute in Warsaw, in response to my inquiry
about feminist or womxn’s periodicals. Bridges:
A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends
was a bi-annual publication produced from 1990
until 2011 by a U.S.- and Canada-based editorial
group. It supported a multiethnic feminist move-
ment, integrating analyses of racism and classism
into Jewish-feminist thought, as well as connecting
readers across generations and languages. Bridg-
es published archival writings, also of Yiddish
feminist press.
Politically, it was rooted in Radical
Diasporism, seeing “Jewish home”
wherever Jews reside, instead of
striving toward a nation-state.
It was also a periodical engaged in fostering
Jewish values of social justice and Tikkun Olam
(in Hebrew “repair of the world”), Bridges created
a unique space connecting divergent voices of the
Jewish community and activism, a home for ally-
ships across the difference.
Today, this call for transnational feminist soli-
darity is pressing. As we witnessed the inspiring
achievements of Latin-American pro-abortion
activists, leading to historic approval of the right
to free, safe, and legal abortion in Uruguay in 2012
NEWS FROM THE FRONTS
and Argentina in 2020. Simultaneously, we have
witnessed a continuous regression of rights and
access to abortion in Poland. In October 2020, the
Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw ruled on an al-
most total abortion ban, even when the fetus has a
lasting congenital disability. The decision sparked
a new wave of protest across the country under the
umbrella of the All-Poland Women’s Strike, a fem-
inist decentralized social movement fighting since
2016 to legalize abortion in the country.
The “Captivity of Motherhood!” that appeared on
the cover of Ewa magazine 90 years ago, seems to
be continually relevant for Polish women. On Jan-
uary 25, 2022, a team of doctors in a Polish hospi-
tal denied medical care to 37-year-old Agnieszka
T., which caused her death. She was hospitalized
due to complications in the first trimester of her
twin pregnancy. The heartbeat of one of the fe-
tuses stopped, but the doctors denied removing it,
which led to her death of sepsis. Agnieszka is not
the first victim of the new draconian law, which
led to the intensified campaign #anijednejwiecej
(Polish translation of #niunamenos meaning, not
one (woman) less). However, her story exemplifies
the fight Polish Jewish and Christian women have
been engaged in for already a century: the strug-
gle against patriarchal ideology underpinning the
Polish state. This endeavor could benefit from the
idea of radical diasporism. In the Polish context,
embracing this notion by the feminist movement
could open up possibilities of radical reconfigura-
tion of the Polish society and bring an end to the
ethno-nationalist spirit Poland has embraced since
its independence in 1918. ■
Maya Ober is an activist, researcher, educator, and designer,
based between Buenos Aires and Basel. She is a Ph.D.
candidate at the Institute of Social Anthropology, the
University of Bern. Her research focuses on the feminist
practices of design education emerging at the seam
of activism and the institutional. In 2017 she founded
depatriarchise design, a non-profit design research platform
she currently co-runs with Nina Paim, with whom she also
co-directs Futuress, a feminist learning community and a
publishing platform.
Fig.1 EWA, issue 1 from February 19, 1928, the headline on the left translates to:
“The question of the unification of Jewish women;” the one on the right to: “From the
minority standpoint.”
Fig.2 Di Froy (“The Woman”), issue from April 8, 1925, with the headline “Our task.”
Fig.3 Froyen Shtim (“Women’s Voice”), Issue 1, May 1925.
19
 THE FUNAMBULIST
LYNDA HANDALA, LÉOPOLD LAMBERT, MOEN BSEISO, JEHAN BSEISO,
BRENNA BHANDAR, CAMERON ROWLAND, ROSE MIYWWONGA, MAX PINCKERS,
DANIELA CATRILEO, TSHEPO MADLINGOZI, ANA MARÍA LEÓN, ALYOSHA GOLDSTEIN,
JULIA BERNAL, JEN ROSE SMITH, ALY MCKNIGHT, TANAYA WINDER,
WAI ARCHITECTURE THINK TANK.
FROM SETTLER COLONIAL PROPERTY TO LANDBACK

in Brasília as part of the Acampamento Terra Livre movement,

Indigenous activists in front of the Brazilian Ministry of Health

on April 26, 2019. / Photo by Mídia Ninja.

Nº40 THE LAND…
20 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 21
 THE LAND… FROM SETTLER
COLONIAL PROPERTY TO
LANDBACK: INTRODUCTION
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT
A grey car passes by a “Welcome to Okern, Oklahoma”
sign at the border between Kensas and Oklahoma.
On both sides of the sign, there is graffiti that reads
“Land Back” (with a “Fuckerzz” on the back).
— “What do you suppose that means?”
asks the male driver.
— “What, honey?” answers his wife.
— You see the graffiti on that sign back there?
— Oh, yeah, yeah.
I think it said “Land Back,” didn’t it?
— Well, what do you suppose it means?
— Well… I reckon the Indians did it.
— Well, sure they did. But I don’t understand.
— Hmm?
— They mean the whole damn thing?
They want the whole damn thing back?
— Well, I suppose so.
— That’s just not possible. I could see some of it back.
You reckon that’s what they mean?
Some of it back? Or all the damn thing?
— I mean, the whites did kill an awful lot of them,
and took the land. So, America ought to be
ashamed of itself.
— Well, they got the casinos. I hear they get paid a
thousand dollars a month just to be an Indian.
— Will you quit being a shit-ass?!
This simultaneously profound and hilarious dia-
logue reflects the tone of the amazing TV show
Reservation Dogs (2021) created by Seminole and
Māori filmmakers Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi.
The Whole Damn Thing may have been a great
alternative title for this issue dedicated to land.
At a moment of time when
“decolonizing” has been emptied
of its meaning by many as a handy
verb to signify anything that vaguely
questions the racist dimension of
22
objects as diverse as bandaids,
costumes, and dishes, we have at
the heart of this issue, an interest to
resituate land as the primary object of
the decolonizing struggle.
I’m writing these words on the day (January 26)
we commemorate 50 years of the Aboriginal Tent
Embassy’s existence on the lawn of the Australi-
an settler colony’s parliament, on Ngunnawal and
Ngambri land (Canberra). January 26 is also known
as Invasion Day or Survival Day. It is a day of
mourning, as it marks the beginning of colonization
on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands and
waters. As Gumbainggir activist and one of the em-
bassy’s initiators Gary Foley recounts, the six first
months of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy’s occupation
“changed the course of Australian history.” Con-
structed to demand Aboriginal land rights, but also
operating in the spirit of global Black liberation, it
resisted several police invasions through time, and
has succeeded in maintaining its existence, by re-
claiming land at the core of the settler colony.
Fig.1
But what exactly are we talking about when we
talk about land? Certainly not the flat and plain One does not steal land the way one steals a car. In finds an alternative or a complement in the forma-
surface of colonial maps! Land comprises various order for settler colonialism to enforce itself dura- tion of an almost equally elemental architectural
atmospheric, biological, cultural, and geological bly, there needs to be a legal system of property object: the wall.
layers. This includes its subterranean condition, ownership, as we discuss with Brenna Bhandar,
which is often the object of colonial extractivism. It but also a materialization of this system, through Walls are almost always built in such a way so that
is also the water that permeates the earth, whether the formation of a built environment. In his book the bodies they organize in space are not able to
in liquid form as discussed in Alyosha Goldstein and Barbed Wire (2002), Olivier Razac shows how such significantly affect them with sheer strength. In
Julia Bernal’s piece, or in the form of ice as we talk a simple architectural technology has been in- simpler words, walls are made sufficiently solid so
about with Jen Rose Smith. However, the spatial strumental in the colonization of Indigenous lands that people have to comply with them. Walls howev-
complexity that the depths of land and its striations on Turtle Island. When thinking further about it, er require a controllable degree of permeability: this
embody can also be used for stealth-resistive modes barbed wire is indeed the most elemental mate- is how doors (rotating/sliding walls) were invent-
of existence to colonial survey and surveillance. rialization of the lines traced on maps and plans ed, along with a lock-key apparatus that grants a
The various maquis, tunnels, jungles, and glaciers to represent and enforce the settler colonial legal degree of permeability to some, while refusing it to
are here to prove it in their role within the past and system. Its particularity simply consists in regularly others. The most extreme political and violent use of
present of anti-colonial resistance. featuring a hazardous knot, thus weaponizing the such a discretionary modulation of the walls’ effect
abstract line of the map. This simple technology can be found in carceral settings, where people are
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 23
 kept captive by a spatial formation, where its key is
kept by others. In the case of settler colonial proper-
ty, walls are meant to consolidate the stronghold on
stolen land. As such, in the transformation of coloni-
al architecture from military invasion forts to settler
civilian inhabitat, a degree of the original genocidal
violence remain within the walls and with it, the
materialization of the settlers’ continuous fear that
the Natives will come back to take, deep down, what
they know they have stolen.

However, LANDBACK does not match the vision

settlers have of it. In this vision, settlers remain
the protagonists of a vengeful narrative mirrored
in their own original genocidal rage. LANDBACK,
rather, is a vision in which settlers are fundamen-
tally absent, whether because a part of them fled
the unstoppable return of the stewards of the land
or because their settler condition ceases at the same
time as their domination on the land and its people.
What we mean by stewards of the land vary de-
pending on the context, as we discuss with Tshepo
Madlingozi, who departs from a strict nativism
in the specific situation of South Africa to favor
instead a pan-African perspective. Tshepo also
invites us to avoid an individualized and exclusive
understanding of the notion of ownership when
it comes to land. Further north on the east coast
of the African continent, in Kenya, Rose Miyonga
tells us how this ownership in the context of land
redistribution was denied anyway to former Mau
Mau fighters, who are nonetheless the forces to
thank for the liberation of their land from British
colonialism. Whether through state redistribution of
land like in Evo Morales’s Bolivia, or via means of
Pay the Rent campaign in Australia, where settlers
voluntarily compensate the original owners of the
land as a mechanism of restitution, these forms of
LANDBACK are as various as incomplete. As Cruz
Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski (Wai Architec-
ture Think Tank) narrates through a letter to their
newborn child at the end of this issue, Indigenous
futurisms are surely what can provide a horizon for
LANDBACK, towards which we can walk. With that
said, I wish you an excellent read. ■

Léopold Lambert is the editor-in-chief of The Funambulist.

Trained as an architect, he is the author of four books including
Weaponized Architecture (2012), Politics of Bulldozer (2016) and
States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial
Continuum (2021).

Fig.1 Stills from Season 1, Episode 3, “Uncle Brownie,” Reservation Dogs by Sterlin
Harjo and Taika Waititi (2021).
Fig.2 Fig.2 Barbed wire fence in Utah. / Photo by R. Nial Bradshaw (2017).

24 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 25

 ‫الشائكة‬ ‫األسالك‬ ‫إىل‬ ‫قصيدة‬ ‫الأصفاد‬ ‫جبل‬ ‫كلماتي‬
‫ترسو‬ ‫أن‬ ‫قدّر‬ ‫لو‬
A LETTER TO BARBED WIRE ‫ضفاف‬ ‫فوق‬
MOEN BSEISO / TRANSLATED BY : JEHAN  BSEISO ‫كالمجداف‬ ‫كفّك‬
‫بسيسو‬ ‫معني‬ ‫الهاربة‬ ‫كاللؤلؤة‬
.. ‫الأصداف‬ ‫تطاردها‬

That these walls would finally collapse into a sad pile of snakes and fingernails

 ‫يلدغ‬ ّ ‫ألا‬ ‫قدّر‬ ‫لو‬ ‫تنهار‬ ‫أن‬ ‫قدّر‬ ‫لو‬

 ‫ثعبان‬ ‫كلماتي‬ ‫أفاع‬ ‫كجدار‬
, ‫أظفار‬ ‫من‬ ‫وكأعمدة‬
That my words would be spared the serpent’s tongue .. ‫الأسوار‬ ‫تلك‬

 ‫تتفجّ ر‬ ّ ‫ألا‬ ‫قدّر‬ ‫لو‬ That I would see you again, for the first time, homeland,

 ‫رماد‬ ‫ينبوع‬ ‫أوراقي‬
Born in an earthquake’s kiss

  That I would see you again, for the first time, homeland
That my papers would not smolder into ashes and dust a sail lost at sea, found by the storm
That I would see you again, for the first time, homeland
Let the sword kiss my heart open, to see
‫تتسل ّق‬ ‫أن‬ ‫قدّر‬ ‫لو‬
   ‫وطني‬ ‫يا‬ ‫قدّر‬ ‫لو‬
That my poems could climb this tower of handcuffs, to rest on your shores  ‫ألقاك‬ ‫أن‬
 ‫المولودة‬ ‫البكر‬ ‫كالأرض‬
like a runaway pearl, chased by clams

Moen Bseiso (1926-1984) was born in the city of Gaza and
is considered one of the most influential intellectuals and
renowned poets of Palestine. In 1952, he published his first
work titled Al-Ma’raka (The Battle). He published several other
volumes of poetry: Palestine in the Heart, (1964), Trees Die
Standing (1966). Bseiso was awarded the Afro-Asian Lotus
Prize for Literature in 1980.
 ‫زلزال‬ ‫قبلة‬ ‫من‬
 ‫تاه‬ ‫قد‬ ‫كشراع‬
Jehan Bseiso is a Palestinian poet, researcher and aid worker.  ‫الإعصار‬ ‫به‬ ‫وعاد‬
 ‫سيفك‬ ‫على‬ ‫لسقطت‬
Her poetry has been published in several online and offline
platforms. Her co-authored book I Remember My Name is the
 ‫قلبي‬ ‫يتمز ّق‬
Palestine Book Awards winner in the creative category (2016).
She is the co-editor of Making Mirrors: Writing.Righting By and
For Refugees (2019). Jehan has been working with Médecins
sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) since 2008.
‫وأراك‬ , ‫سيفك‬ ‫قبلة‬ ‫من‬

26 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 27

 COLONIAL LIVES OF PROPERTY And so, the economy of the reserve, at least in the
Canadian context, and as it’s defined in early leg-

IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA, BRITISH

islation, from the mid to late 19th century onwards,
becomes a space that is kind of the antithesis of
the economy of private property relations. Land

COLUMBIA, AND PALESTINE
A CONVERSATION WITH BRENNA BHANDAR
The idea of this conversation with Brenna Bhandar was at the
base of the editorial process for this issue. Her book, Colonial
Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership
(2018) is indeed instrumental in thinking of the laws that enable
settler colonialism to be implemented durably, in particular
through the conceptualization of private property. As we
discuss, the commonalities created by colonialism between
distant geographies also allows us to think of new forms of
internationalist solidarities between them.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: Your book examines how “property
laws and racial subjectivity have developed in relation to one
another.” Could you please define in a few words your concept
of “racial regimes of ownership” in the context of settler
colonialism?
BRENNA BHANDAR: Thanks, Léopold, for inviting me
to speak with you, particularly for this issue of The
Funambulist. The concept of racial regimes of own-
ership draws on the concept of the racial regime as
elaborated by Cedric Robinson in his work. I trans-
pose that concept into the realm of property to ex-
amine the ways in which modern laws of property,
concepts of race, and processes of racialization are
articulated in and through one another. So the con-
cept of racial regimes of ownership is really about
finding a way to explain and to illuminate the ways
in which in settler colonies and in other colonial
contexts as well, modern laws of property emerge
in conjunction with concepts of racial difference
and racial hierarchies. So for example, in the book,
I examine how a commodity logic of abstraction,
which is the fundamental basis for modern concep-
tions of land within capitalist political economies,
is formed in and through particular racial abstrac-
tions. So that’s an example of looking at how a
commodity logic of abstraction operates, both in the
realm of property relations and ownership, but also
as a means of forming racial hierarchy.
If I give a more concrete example, we can think
about how the idea of terra nullius, which is used in
the Australian context quite explicitly, is based both
on the idea that land is a commodity, it is an abstract
form juridically speaking, in which any prior rela-
tions of use that don’t conform to the capitalist imag-
inary—we can talk about things like cultivation later
on—are really not recognized or not legible within a
system of modern property law. And when we think
about terra nullius, as a doctrine, which means unin-
habited land, it’s operating both in conjunction with
that commodified notion of land, but also in conjunc-
tion with a racial abstraction of Indigenous peoples
infamously, as the colonial legal authorities described
them as being, you know, too low on the scale of civi-
lization to constitute rightful owners of their land. So
there are different kinds of abstraction operating in
conjunction with one another. And that’s a concrete
example of how the racial regime of ownership is
working across both concepts of property ownership
and concepts of racial difference.
LL: When we talk of “stolen land” in the context of settler
colonies, we may not go far enough in describing the economies
of land, the way you do. There is, of course, the economy of
private settler property (or state settler property for that matter),
but there is also its opposite: the economy of reservation land
for the Indigenous peoples who survived the original genocide
and/or forced displacement. Would you say that these two
economies of land cannot go without one another?
BB: Yes, I think this is a really excellent question,
because the concept of the reserve, which is absolutely
key to how settlers appropriate Indigenous land, re-
ally needs to be understood alongside the economy
of private property ownership that emerges in the
settler colonial context.
These two economies of land are
again really linked to the particular
processes of racialization of
Indigenous peoples and First Nations
as being conceived of by the colonial
State as not rightful or legitimate
owners.
on the reserve is not held in individual fee simple.
In fact, early on, reserve land is held in trust by
the State for First Nations. Land cannot be used to
produce in the same way that land has been culti-
vated by individual proprietors and farmers on the
land that’s being stolen or appropriated outside of
the reserve. And, of course, the reserve is linked
to much more than just how the land is being used
and the economy of the reserve, it’s linked to cul-
tural practices that can or cannot be practiced, it
becomes a space of real control. I mean, that’s the
purpose of it. So of course, what actually happens
on First Nations reserves is another matter, but the
animus, the intent of the colonial State is to create
a very bounded space for Indigenous peoples and
First Nations peoples to inhabit. The purpose is to
create small bounded spaces in which Indigenous
people can be controlled by the colonial State in
terms of language, cultural practice, economy, etc.
We could think of the reserve as a space that is
part of the carceral logic of the settler colony. And
it’s something of course, that is used widely across
settler colonial spaces: in Canada, the U.S., South
Africa, etc..
LL: Your book describes more particularly the settler colonial
property laws in South Australia, British Columbia, and
Palestine (as well as South Africa in your conclusion). There
are, of course, countless specificities to each of these three
geographies and you’re very mindful to respect them, but could
you tell us what are the common points you have exhumed?
BB: I think when I was working on the book, I be-
came very interested in these points of commonality.
How did the British use different legal techniques to
appropriate the land of other peoples in very differ-
ent places? The commonalities in terms of the legal
techniques that were used, the kind of thinking that
was employed, and the philosophical justifications
for land dispossession, the way that they are em-
ployed across incredibly different places, became
very interesting to me. In terms of the specificities,
what I try and do in the book, is to really look at the
property logics that are employed in these differ-
ent places, and how even where the preexisting
life worlds of Indigenous populations—in the case
of Palestine, the history of that region is so very
different from these other settler colonial places like
British Columbia, or South Australia—how even in
spite of those massive differences, you still see these
same juridical techniques being deployed in order
Fig.1
to take control of the land. So in the book, I look at
how title by registration, to take one example, is
used in all of these different settler colonial con-
texts as the preeminent form of conveyancing and
legal ownership. I looked at how it is used during
the British mandate in Palestine, for instance, how
it was first used in the colony of South Australia,
and then how shortly after that, it travels to Brit-
ish Columbia. These are techniques of ownership
that are, again, really rooted in a certain form of
common law, and that form of common law is based
on both the commodity logic of abstraction that I
spoke about earlier, but it’s also based of course, in
a notion of civilizational superiority. So, it is based
on the idea that the common law in this case, the
common law of property, is universalizable—this is
something that ought to be imposed in these differ-
ent contexts, because it is a superior way of relating
to land owning of organizing an economy, that this
form of the common law of property is what more
civilized advanced societies need to employ. And
therefore, this is part of a civilizing mentality and
really rooted in the notion that this form of com-
mon law is superior to other legal systems. And of
course, embedded within that kind of thinking is a
notion of racial superiority. So these are the kinds
of commonalities that we see across these very
different places, which I found really quite fascinat-
ing to try and draw the thread between these legal
techniques that are traveling through very different
places, and also being transformed by the local con-
text as well, in some ways.

28 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 29

 LL: If I may push you even a bit further on that and talking
about the methodology. I feel that within the academic world,
operating through comparisons is usually a bit frowned upon.
But I think it’s an incredibly useful methodology, as long as we
remain very cautious not to flatten all the specificities between
these different situations. Could you tell us about this method a
little bit and why it may be useful?
BB: I have to say, I feel like when I look at some of
the different parts of the book, I feel acutely what
they’re lacking, and the problem, as you just pointed
out, with doing this, with trying to draw threads
between such vastly different contexts, where, of
course, scholars spend their entire lives embedded
in one small aspect or part of a place and a histo-
ry that you’re trying to understand for a specific
reasons, or that you approach with very specific,
bounded questions. And so I think one has to be
acutely aware of the limits of one’s engagement
with a particular place. I felt that most keenly in
terms of the work on Israel/Palestine, because the
limits of language for me were very evident. Need-
ing help with translation of Israeli high court judg-
ments, and then needing assistance with any kind
of interviews I did, at times needing someone else
to be present to translate from Arabic, these were
part of the process. And so these limits, I think, are
really important to acknowledge and to understand,
to see how they are impacting the framework one
is developing. I’m trying to be as responsible and as
conscious as one can be.
Fig.2
30
On the other hand, the importance and significance
of trying to do this kind of work, and trying to draw
the commonalities, the common threads of colonial
law, that appear in these contexts is vitally impor-
tant for thinking about coalitional possibilities for
solidarity.
Because, despite their differences,
there are profound commonalities
in how colonial powers dispossess
people, appropriate land, and impose
a certain economic and racial regime
of ownership.
So I think it’s very important to say “Hey, what hap-
pened over there happened here!” And then what
does that mean for our present moment, in terms of
trying to decolonize, in terms of trying to imagine
and push for a different political, economic order?
I think these kinds of analyses are also really impor-
tant. They’re politically and intellectually vital, I
would say. And I think it’s also driven by a frustra-
tion that I often have, maybe having grown up on
the west coast of Canada, and then having lived
in Europe for a couple of decades. Initially when I
moved, I always found it very dismaying that peo-
ple clearly had no idea of the violence of colonial
settlement in Canada. I mean, it was either treated
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40
as something that had happened in the past and
now was done, or Canada was seen as this kind of
paragon of liberal multiculturalism. Through these
sorts of mythologies about different states, different
places can be undone precisely by pointing out the
common histories of colonial subjugation. Racism,
tracing commonalities and systems of indentured
labor or enslavement, this kind of work, I think, is
really important for understanding how modern
colonialism produced a globalized order.
LL: Yes and when we do this, we do it less for white Europeans
to realize this commonality, and more for other people. For
instance, I remember being in Palestine with Lakota historian
and activist Nick Estes and hearing Palestinians telling him
their surprise that Indigenous people were still fighting in North
America. And of course this commonality is often created by
European colonialism first, but it also often gets transcended
by forms of solidarity, as you said.
BB: Yes! . And that’s also something that I find quite
problematic when we witness a lack of understand-
ing about what has happened in different places, at
this point in time. I think that politically, it’s interest-
ing to reflect on what happened after a period of in-
tense internationalism and internationalist struggle.
Glen Coulthard has been doing really interesting
work on this recently, exploring how the Red Power
movement here, for instance, in Canada, in British
Columbia, were very much tied into anti-colonial
movements happening in other parts of the world.
THE LAND…
I think now is a moment (if there
ever were one) when we need to
reinvigorate and strengthen this
kind of internationalism and these
forms of transnational solidarity and
political work.
LL: You’ve been describing Cheryl Harris’s text “Whiteness as
Property” (1993) as instrumental to the way you approached
property. Land and personhood are indeed intertwined
throughout the book. When talking about property and race,
many thinkers would refer to chattel slavery’s legal framing for
some individuals to be owned by white settlers. You also point
out how landowners, on the contrary, are referred to as “self-
possessed.” Can you tell us more about this question of status
when it comes to settler colonial property?
BB: One of the arguments I make in the book, is
really based on the question of status as it relates
to Indigenous women in Canada and the Indian
Act. But in terms of the larger question of status,
there is a significant shift between older notions of
status and how status is used in ancient empires,
such as the Roman Empire, and how that changes
when it comes to modern forms of colonialism. So
in the book, what I show is how, within Roman law,
concepts of status were very mutable; one’s juridical
status could change over time depending on many
Fig.3
31
 different factors. What happens in the modern
era is that status becomes conceptualized through
racial and gendered notions of difference. So status
becomes rather immutable and something that is
sort of affixed to one’s body in a different way. And
status becomes something that is used to control
access to land, to control mobility, to control one’s
entitlements,vis-a-vis the State one’s rights, etc. And
it also becomes something that is then passed along
to the next generation, according to a completely
artificial construct of racial and gender difference
that is legislated by the State.
LL: Property is undeniably mobilizing a detailed and careful
analysis of the law. I was wondering however, whether this
focus on how the law is built for settler colonialism to hoard
the land could not be complemented with the way such a law
is enforced and materialized on the land itself. And of course,
in this perspective, the built environment (barbed wires, walls,
door-lock-key apparatus, and other spatial forms of body
control) is also central. Would you agree with this?
BB: As you know, there’s a huge body of work
emerging from geographers, from legal scholars,
from planners, at that intersection of space, law,
and planning. I think that the kind of intersec-
tion or this sort of matrix that you’re pointing to
is indispensable for thinking about land dispos-
session. I’ve been thinking over the last couple of
Fig.4
32
years, more about housing in urban contexts. And
so, when I think about the built environment, I
think very much about the material architecture of
different kinds of residential housing. This is also a
way of entering the domain of financialization and
contemporary forms of capitalist accumulation.
Thinking about the relationship between the built
environment and law, and land and dispossession,
is a portal through which we can start to under-
stand not only laws as they pertain to ownership
and planning, but also to the financialization of
residential real estate for instance. Thinking not
simply, land as property or land as a commodity,
but thinking very specifically about residential real
estate, and how that is a site where urban planning
laws, the politics of ownership, financialization,
and investment, social reproduction, all merge not
only the physical built structures, but in cities of
different sizes and scale. We can also think about
all of the other technological infrastructure of the
built environment, and whether that be it in terms
of financialisation of investment, or the whole
world of real estate tech. Thinking about land and
ownership etc, within the specific context of the
built environment, can yield infinite trajectories of
inquiry that are multi-layered and intersecting and
help us understand the way in which law, political
economy, architecture, planning, all of these things
are connected to one another.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40
LL: In the book’s conclusion, you advocate for a “radically
different political imaginary of property,” which also involves
another relationship to land itself. This is what we try to address
in the LANDBACK part of the issue and I’d love to hear you
more on this.
BB: I think there’s a lot of different facets to that
idea. One aspect of that, which I think Rafeef and
I try and explore in the Revolutionary Feminisms
(2020) book we edited together is the different
conception of the self and how we relate to one
another, which is part of the core of thinking about
a radically different political imaginary of proper-
ty, because private property is so deeply intercon-
nected with modern forms of subjectivity. That’s
one aspect of it, but there’s a multitude of different
historical examples we could look at all over the
world: how people have related to land in a non
commoditized way and cared for the land.
It’s not just about thinking how
land figures in our imagination as
something outside of urban contexts,
but how people live with one another,
in ways that are not bound by a
commodity logic of exchange.
This is also part of reimagining how to live dif-
ferently. So historically, there are a lot of different
examples we can look at.
In the current moment, things that come to mind
are as diverse as the Wet’suwet’en land defenders
in central and northern British Columbia, who are
trying to halt pipeline expansion and have been en-
gaged in a multi year blockade on their traditional
lands to stop this extractivist industry from further
polluting and ruining land and waters. Of course,
it is not just about the Wet’suwet’en, but it’s really
about all of our present lives and futures. We can
think about what one of my Indigenous colleagues,
Robert Clifford has written about how in the place
where I grew up as a child in Victoria, British
Columbia, how, the WSÁNEĆ have concepts of land
and water and an understanding of the topography
or the geography of their traditional lands that
are rooted in a completely different ontology and
a system of law that is in many ways the antithesis
of notions of private individual ownership. He’s one
scholar among many who are explaining to peo-
ple who are not Indigenous , what a different way
of relating to land looks like, and we can grapple
THE LAND…
with these alternatives. And then another very dif-
ferent example is what’s happened in Berlin, with
housing activists pushing forward a referendum
on the expropriation of residential housing held
by corporate landlords. We can look to housing
activists in Spain since the 2008 financial crisis,
who have been really trying to articulate a differ-
ent concept of use when it comes to property. They
argue that the social uses of property and some-
thing as fundamental as the right to housing need
to supersede the uses of residential property as an
asset for accumulation and profit.
Another example that comes to mind is the work of
Cameron Rowland and how his artwork is rooted in
a very profound engagement with how to disrupt
all of the fundamentals of private property owner-
ship to render land less fungible or non fungible;
his work explores how to render property, sort of
use-less or how you can deflate the power of the
legal techniques that buttress private individual
forms of ownership. So, you know, I think there’s
so many different things happening around us that
show us what different imaginaries of property
look like, that I think are really exciting. It’s really
about looking at how people, both historically and
present are resisting the effects of private owner-
ship and creating alternate forms, alternate ways
of living outside of a regime of individual private
property. ■
Brenna Bhandar is Associate Professor at Allard Law
Faculty, UBC. She is the author of Colonial Lives of Property:
Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (2018), and
co-editor with Rafeef Ziadah of Revolutionary Feminisms:
Collective Conversations on Collective action and Radical
Thought (2020).
Fig.1 Photo of Brenna Bhandar’s book Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and
Racial Regimes of Ownership at The Funambulist office (“From Turtle Island to
Palestine” artwork by Michael DeForge in the background). / Photo by Léopold
Lambert (2022).
Fig.2 Protesters block a freight and passenger rail line through Seattle as they
support the Wet’suwet’en First People in their protest of the Coastal GasLink natural
gas pipeline. / Photo by Joseph Gruber (February 2020).
Fig.3 Aboriginal activists protest the burying of nuclear waste on their land in South
Australia. Photo by Friends of the Earth International (May 2011).
Fig.4 Palestinian Bedouins protest the destruction of their village on Pope Mountain
by the Israeli government. / Photo by Avaaz (April 2017).
33
 CAMERON ROWLAND
DEPRECIATION, 2018
RESTRICTIVE COVENANT; 1 ACRE ON EDISTO ISLAND, SOUTH CAROLINA

40 acres and a mule as reparations for slavery
originates in General William Tecumseh Sherman’s
Special Field Orders No. 15, issued on January 16,
1865. Sherman’s Field Order 15 was issued out of
concern for a potential uprising of the thousands of
ex-slaves who were following his army by the time
it arrived in Savannah.1
The field order stipulated that “The islands from
Charleston south, the abandoned rice fields along
the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and
the country bordering the Saint Johns River, Flor-
ida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement
of the negroes now made free by the acts of war
and the proclamation of the President of the United
States. Each family shall have a plot of not more
than forty acres of tillable ground.”2
This was followed by the formation of the Bureau
of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in
March 1865. In the months immediately following
the issue of the field orders, approximately 40,000
former slaves settled in the area designated by
Sherman on the basis of possessory title.3 10,000 of
these former slaves were settled on Edisto Island,
South Carolina.4
In 1866, following Lincoln’s assassination, President
Andrew Johnson effectively rescinded Field Order
15 by ordering these lands be returned to their pre-
vious Confederate owners.
Former slaves were given the option to work for
their former masters as sharecroppers or be evicted.
If evicted, former slaves could be arrested for home-
lessness under vagrancy clauses of the Black Codes.
Those who refused to leave and refused to sign
sharecrop contracts were threatened with arrest.
ownership had come to an abrupt end.”5 The Freed-
men’s Bureau agents became primary proponents
of labor contracts inducting former slaves into the
sharecropping system.6
Among the lands that were repossessed in 1866 by
former Confederate owners was the Maxcy Place
plantation. “A group of freed people were at Maxcy
Place in January 1866 …The people contracted to
work for the proprietor, but no contract or list of
names has been found.”7
The one-acre piece of land at 8060 Maxie Road,
Edisto Island, South Carolina, was part of the
Maxcy Place plantation. This land was purchased
at market value on August 6, 2018, by 8060 Maxie
Road, Inc., a nonprofit company formed for the sole
purpose of buying this land and recording a restric-
tive covenant on its use. This covenant has as its
explicit purpose the restriction of all development
and use of the property by the owner.
The property is now appraised at $0. By rendering
it legally unusable, this restrictive covenant elim-
inates the market value of the land. These restric-
tions run with the land, regardless of the owner.
As such, they will last indefinitely.
As reparation, this covenant asks how land might
exist outside of the legal-economic regime of prop-
erty that was instituted by slavery and colonization.
Rather than redistributing the property, the restric-
tion imposed on 8060 Maxie Road’s status as valua-
ble and transactable real estate asserts antagonism
to the regime of property as a means of reparation.
Courtesy of the artist and Maxwell Graham/Essex
Street, New York

Although restoration of the land to the previous

Confederate owners was slowed in some cases by
court challenges filed by ex-slaves, nearly all the
land settled was returned by the 1870s. As Eric
Foner writes, “Johnson had in effect abrogated the
Confiscation Act and unilaterally amended the law
creating the [Freedmen’s] Bureau. The idea of a
Freedmen’s Bureau actively promoting black land-
1. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s
Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877,
updated ed. (New York: Harper & Row,
1988; New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 71.
2. Headquarters Military Division of the
Mississippi, Special Field Orders No.
15 (1865).
3. Foner, Reconstruction, 71.
4. Charles Spencer, Edisto Island 1861
to 2006: Ruin, Recovery and Rebirth
(Charleston, SC: The History Press,
2008), 87.
5. Foner, Reconstruction, 161.
6. Foner, 161.
7. Spencer, 95.
Cameron Rowland’s work centers on the material operations
of racial capitalism that order everyday life. Rowland’s work
relies on a materialist approach to the conditions of production
that structure institutions of subjection as well as their refusal.
The work is grounded in a critique of property, and the capacity
for the status of art to function as a medium of this critique.
Rowland lives and works in New York.

34 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 35

 COLONIAL AFTERLIVES:
LAND AND THE EMOTIONAL
HISTORY OF THE MAU MAU WAR
ROSE MIYONGA ( PHOTOGRAPHS BY MAX PINKERS )
The Mau Mau uprising remains one of the key early liberation
movements against European colonialism on the African
continent. Yet, as Rose Miyonga describes in this text, the
liberated Kenyan land has never been redistributed equally and
today, it continues to bear the colonial scars and the violence
they still contain. Her text is accompanied with photographs by
Max Pinkers.
It is 1963, and Kenya has become an independent
nation after over half a century of British coloni-
al rule, and a brutal guerrilla war. As the British
flag is lowered and the flag of the nascent Kenyan
nation raised, cheers ring out across the land. The
celebrations last for weeks, a wave of hope and
euphoria, shared by elite dignitaries in the capital
city and rural peasants alike. “At last,” they sigh,
“We are finally free,” they cheer. “Uhuru! Uhuru!
Uhuru!” [“Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” in Swahi-
li]. This is the story we want to hear. The story of
justice and African sovereignty finally prevailing, of
land returning to its rightful owners and peace and
freedom being installed: the restoration of a utopian
pre-colonial past. It’s the story I wish I could tell,
and one that some historians have tried to tell, but
the truth is more complicated and harder to swal-
low. It is a history of hope and betrayal, restoration
and disillusionment. Like all histories of colonialism
and decolonization, the story of the Mau Mau war
and the brutal end of British imperial rule in Kenya
is a story of land. It is a story of displacement, of
loss, and, for some, of restoration. The journey from
settler colony to “land back” is neither simple nor
linear, and the afterlives of colonial violence contin-
ue to infuse the land with contested histories that
penetrate the most intimate aspects of daily life.
Different people will give you different dates for the
beginning of the Mau Mau war. Some will tell you
that it begins on October 20, 1952, when the British
Colonial Office declares a State of Emergency in
Kenya in response to the growing threat of the Mau
Mau movement, a guerrilla group that had installed
itself in the forests of the Kenyan highlands. Others
will tell you that it begins a decade earlier, in 1944,
36
when the Kenyan African Union (KAU) was founded
to launch a unified constitutional nationalist cam-
paign for African self-rule in Kenya. Some people
will tell you that the war begins when people begin
to organize clandestine meetings in homes and
fields in the 1930s across central Kenya to discuss
their grievances at the hands of white settlers. They
might begin with a story about the Kikuyu peasant
farmers in the “White Highlands” and the struggles
of these “squatters” to eke out a living on white set-
tler farms through active resistance that culminated
in a peasant uprising called Mau Mau.
These different narratives speak to
the diverse experiences of the end
of British imperial rule in Kenya, and
this plurality of experience is key to
the decolonization process as well.
However, the point of confluence for
all these narratives is land.
Everyone wanted it. Many wanted it back. Many
felt they had lost land that was rightfully theirs,
and with that loss of land came a whole host of
other losses: the loss of freedom, of tradition and
connection to the past, of an imagined future. The
interplay between the powerful connection to and
severing from the land would come to define the
politics of post-colonial Kenya.
Today, the Mau Mau war is most infamous for the
vicious counterinsurgency carried out by the British
government. Shocked by the organized and effective
strategies of the Mau Mau militia, the Colonial Office
launched an all-out war against the movement in
everything but name, maintaining all the while that
it was a State of Emergency masterminded by a few
bad seeds and not a legitimate campaign for soil sov-
ereignty. One of the colonial government’s most dev-
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40
astating and effective strategies involved enlisting
Africans, often from the same communities as Mau
Mau members, to join the “loyalist” cause as “Home
Guards,” and defend the colonial state. At even the
most conservative estimates, tens of thousands of
people (combatants and civilians) were killed, main-
ly members of the Kikuyu ethnic group from cen-
tral Kenya who made up the majority of Mau Mau
members, but also Meru, Embu, Luo, Maasai, and
Kenyan Indians from across the country. Hundreds
of thousands were violently tortured and corralled
into concentration camps and fortified villages, as
people were put through a system of “rehabilitation”
known as “the Pipeline,” ostensibly designed to erase
Mau Mau from the hearts and minds of Kikuyu
people and convert them into co-operative colonial
subjects. Those who were believed to be Mau Mau
members had their land seized, and this land some-
times awarded to Africans seen as loyal to the British
cause. Thus, in keeping with the wider history of co-
lonialism in Kenya, the story of the Mau Mau War is
a story of displacement, of family separation, and of
separation from a sense of homeland. By 1957, after
the capture and execution of Mau Mau leader Dedan
Kimathi, the war was officially over: the British and
their allies had won the military battle. By 1959, after
the revelations about the horrors of the Hola Camp
THE LAND…
Fig.1
massacre—when 11 detainees were clubbed to death
by guards and scores were injured—shocked the
world, the writing was on the wall for the Pipeline
system, and for British rule in Kenya. Detention
camps were closed; independence was nigh.
This is where some people would end
the story. The colonial rulers were
vanquished, the fight for freedom had
prevailed. However, the end of the
war was in many ways the beginning
of the story.
Many prisoners returned to find the homes they
had left were no longer theirs—many did not return
at all. As a historian, my research looks at what
happened next, at the afterlives of the Mau Mau
war, and, in a sense, of the entire experience of
British colonialism in Kenya. I am interested in how
and where the histories and memories of the past
have permeated daily life since the end of imperial
rule. Where are the scars and how well have they
healed? Where are the bodies buried? In the context
37
Fig.2

38 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 39


Fig.3
of the Mau Mau war, this latter question is a literal
one. Many victims of mass violence were buried in
unmarked graves, their bodies never returned to
their families, or to their “own” land. On a political
level, the anticipated land redistribution policies
were never enacted.
The Mau Mau movement convened under the
slogan ithaka na wiathi, often translated literally
as “land and freedom” but perhaps, as historian
John Lonsdale notes, better understood as meaning
“self-mastery through land.” This was the move-
ment’s primary concern throughout the 1950s, and,
for many, there was a sense that independence
would spell the start of a new era of equitable land
rights under their definition of just distribution.
However, the incumbent president Jomo Kenyatta
rejected the proposal that land could be given freely
to Mau Mau veterans, or indeed any Kenyan citizen
as “utter chaos and total injustice.” Instead, land
was to be purchased from the government. Those
who had money could buy the land vacated by
white settlers who chose to leave Kenya. Some white
settlers chose to retain their land, and, to this day,
central Kenya is spotted with huge European-owned
farms and estates. This land policy, of course,
reinforced existing inequalities within the Kenyan
population, and tended to privilege families and
40
individuals who had allied themselves with the Brit-
ish during the Mau Mau War. Those who had been
imprisoned or fighting a guerrilla war in the forests
had not benefited from regular income, while some
of those who collaborated with British counterinsur-
gency efforts had been able to accumulate wealth
during that same period, leaving an obvious inequi-
ty around who was able to purchase land and enjoy
the freedom and self-mastery this would facilitate,
which fell along lines of Mau Mau war allegiances.
Furthermore, a mishandling of Mau Mau memories
in general saw the post-colonial government careful-
ly police and curate and public discussion of the war.
On their departure, the British carried
out ‘Operation Legacy’, which
destroyed the majority of archival
evidence pertaining to their conduct
during the Mau Mau war.
What fragments did remain were exported to a se-
cret Foreign Commonwealth Archive in the United
Kingdom, where they lay buried for decades, until
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40
Mau Mau veterans sued the British government
in 2011. At the same time, the Kenyan government
launched a selective amnesia campaign, encour-
aging Kenyans to “forgive and forget” everything
that happened in the past and focus on a nationalist
future fueled by industrial development. These joint
campaigns were effective and long-lasting. Growing
up in Kenya in the early 2000s, my parents would
still talk of the war in hushed tones, only ever hint-
ing at the terrors that my step-father’s family had
endured during their years in forced villages and
internment camps.
The combination of a disappointingly inequitable
redistribution of land after independence coupled
with a selective amnesia around public remember-
ing left many of the people who had taken up arms
under Mau Mau in a depressingly similar position
to the situation they had been in during the late
years of settler colonialism: living on small, pre-
carious scraps of land, and feeling disillusioned
and unheard by the political elite. In this context,
my research is interested in where land and mem-
ory meet. Memories of Mau Mau have lived in the
contours of the land, and land became a container
for the histories of the war that were marginalized
by public culture, and a center for their grievanc-
es. Last year, on a research trip in Nyeri, a region
THE LAND…
marked by particularly fierce insurgency and coun-
terinsurgency, one veteran led me to a field close
to her home, where a few children were kicking a
battered ball around. She told me that this had once
been a trench, which she and other women from
her village had been forced to dig. This digging, she
remembers, served two purposes. Firstly, it created
a physical barrier to sever the lines of communica-
tion between the women living in forced villages
and the men out hiding in the forest, who relied
on these women for food, supplies and intelligence.
Secondly, it was a form of back- and spirit-break-
ing labor, physically and emotionally exhausting,
and designed to be so in order to quash rebellious
aspirations. This trench, one research participant
told me, had been filled in by members of the local
community, and local children had adopted it into a
football field. To the unknowing eye, this is a small,
muddy patch of land with sticks and marking goal-
posts. Perhaps there is a little less grass and under-
growth than the surrounding areas. Perhaps the
ground slopes a little to the left from where we are
standing. “I used to look at the trench and remem-
ber how we suffered,” she told me. “Now, I see our
grandchildren playing here and I feel happy.” Thus,
the land has become not only a space for remember-
ing the pain and betrayals of the past, but also for
cultivating a communal, intergenerational sense of
hope and renewal. It is the quotidian nature of such
sites that makes them so powerful.
Just as the Mau Mau war and the system of British
colonialism penetrated the most intimate aspects of
daily life, it is in the sites of daily life that they are
remembered. Far from the political centers, commu-
nities created their own memorial sites, turning the
scars of colonial violence into spaces of reflection
and regeneration. This is particularly potent since
so many of those who died in the war were buried
in unmarked mass graves, and their surviving rel-
atives were therefore not able to seek healing and
renewal at their gravesites.
Land restitution may not have
happened on a national level, but on a
communal level, survivors found ways
to seek a sense of justice and healing
through the land.
This phenomenon is at the forefront of the Unhis-
tories photography project, which looks to redress
the imbalances of what remains of the decimated
41
colonial archive by producing photographs in col-
laboration with Mau Mau veterans. One powerful
series presents an image of a lush meadow. Only
the caption betrays the fact that this fertile land
is a mass grave site. It was produced by Geoffrey
Nderitu, who inherited this land from his father,
in collaboration with Belgian photographer Max
Pinkers. There are three other photographs in the
series, all of which depict Nderitu on the site of the
mass grave. In one image, Nderitu sits directly on
the red soil, with a human jaw in his hand, and the
mud-caked remains of a radius bone laid across his
own bare forearm, holding a watch tenderly over
the two wrists: his own, and that of the skeleton.
Nderitu is the guardian of this land, and with that
comes a responsibility to the bodies buried beneath
it. The mass grave is not abandoned, but enlivened
by the custodianship of new generations, engaged
in continuous dialogue with the past. In my own
interviews with survivors of the Mau Mau war,
these unburied bodies come up as well. Sometimes,
perhaps putting too much faith in the power of the
historian, interview participants ask me to help
them find the bodies of their dead, or to support
them in making land claims to the government.
After the end of the war, sons did not come home,
land was not returned, the bodies that lay in un-
marked graves were never identified and returned.
The glorious homecoming that was imagined has
yet to come. And some people are still waiting for it,
dreaming of it, imagining it into the future. These
land claims and grievances become a way for them,
and for us all, to think about the complex legacies of
colonialism, and the failure of the post-colonial state
to address them.
The question of what to do with the ruins that
empire leaves behind is also a key dimension to this
story. After the concentration camps were closed
and the majority of white settlers vacated the farms
in the central highlands, the land became a contain-
er for the physical structures of the colonial past.
Sometimes the physical structures left behind were
repurposed, as homes, as schools or even as prisons.
And sometimes they were left to ruin, returned to
the land. In both cases, there was an afterlife to the
experience of Mau Mau and of colonialism more
generally that was tangled up in the land. I visited
one man, a retired Kikuyu school teacher, who had
bought a white settler’s house after independence,
and now lives there with his wife. Several of his
children and grandchildren live on the same com-
pound, and they have a small farm. “We call it the
White Highlands because that is what they called
it in the times of Mau Mau,” my host tells me. “But
we have reclaimed it now, the house and the land.”
42
This speaks to the ways that, where people were
able to afford to buy land after independence, this
could be part of a reclamation, a repurposing of the
ruins of empire, into a new, optimistic future. For
the winners of Kenyatta’s land policy, therefore, the
land they bought, and the buildings they held could
be part of a transformative healing process. On the
other side of the spectrum, lie the buildings left to
ruin. The decades since these buildings were used
as torture chambers, the land has begun to swallow
them up. Walls crumble, covered in lichen. Grass
pokes out of cracked window panes. Doors which
were once locked shut to conceal the worst acts of
violence turn to rot and hang open. Without need
for any human intervention, the land is in its own
process of regeneration, and of expelling the ghosts
of Kenya’s colonial past. Thus, whether by inten-
tional human design or simple ecological reality, the
land that was and continues to be the site of conflict
is also the site of reclamation and regeneration.
The Mau Mau movement was always about land.
One woman I spoke to, who was a member of Mau
Mau’s civil wing in Nairobi, says that she saw her-
self as part of the mission to “recover the soil.”
At a time, she tells me, she and her
sisters would take handfuls of the soil
back to the city with them after they
visited Murang’a, the area of rural Kenya
where they had been born to remind
them what they were working for.
For them, land was not just an economic resource
to be possessed, but as a communal repository for
tradition, and the fertile soil for an imagined future.
Fig.4
It held, and continues to hold, an emotional pull.
It represents the feelings of loss, pain and discon-
nection experienced by many through colonial
oppression, the violence of war and the betrayals
of Kenya’s post-independence governments. And
it simultaneously connects us to feelings of hope,
justice, and renewal. It is a site of negotiation, a con-
tainer for memory and a conveyor of history, should Fig.1 Mass grave, Githambo, Murang’a County, 2015. / Photo from the series
Unhistories. Copyright Max Pinckers/Michiel Burger
we choose to listen to the stories held within the
Fig.2 The spot where Dedan Kimathi was shot in the leg and arrested. It is believed
landscape. ■ that the blood that soaked into the soil created an infertile patch of land where no
tea has grown since. Kahigaini, Tetu, Nyeri County, 2015. / Photo from the series
Rose Miyonga is a Kenyan-British writer and historian. She Unhistories. Copyright Max Pinckers/Michiel Burger
is a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick, where her Fig.3 Geoffrey Nderitu displays the bones buried in his land, Tetu, Gititu, Nyeri County,
2019. / Photo from the series Unhistories. Copyright Max Pinckers/Geoffrey Nderitu.
research focuses on the dynamics of memories of the Mau Fig.4 The Colonial executioner’s residence at former Mweru Works Camp, now
Mau War in post-independence Kenya. Mweru High School, Mukurwe-ini, Nyeri County, 2015. / Photo from the series
Unhistories. Copyright Max Pinckers/Michiel Burger
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 43
 RESPIRO HACIA ADENTRO
OLVIDANDO LAS COSTILLAS
DANIELA CATRILEO

Dos veces ha esparcido la hierba

y los huérfanos.

Nueva Imperial y el interior:

con boca de animal

se figuran relieves en el aire.

Nacimos con el río herido

nuestra mancha en el costado.
Un corazón que de pena se fragua
entre las costillas
y los metales son un líquido espeso
en el contorno de la pubertad.

-Arden y arden los puentes

y los perros del territorio-

Tengo colgando mi periferia

como fragmento de toda historia.
Herido tengo el fósil y mi llaga
es un horizonte en su discurso.

Tengo un río herido

en forma de zanjón
que grita india y me tira a la calle
desprendiendo hijos
en cada vena de su navío.

Un cordón umbilical extendido

atravesando montañas
en busca de su caudal.

Desde las esquinas de un país

cruzado en rieles Daniela Catrileo (Wallmapu, 1987) is a writer and professor of
construí una pequeña caja philosophy. She is a member of the Mapuche Rangiñtulewfü
con imágenes de un sol Collective and the editorial team of Yene Revista. She is the
author of the books Río herido (2016), Guerra florida (2018),
hacia el ombligo.
Piñen (2019), Las aguas dejaron de unirse a otras aguas (2020),
and El territorio del viaje (2021). Her other projects explore
El ombligo como punto medio artistic formats such as performance, video art, and sound-
del reencuentro. visual poetry. Among them, Maripura warangka küla pataka
mari meli:18.314 (2018), Llekümün (2020) and La escritura del Stills from the film Llekümün (2020)
río (2021). by Daniela Catrileo.

44 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 45

 LANDBACK IN SOUTH AFRICA:
WHEN, HOW, AND FOR WHOM?
A CONVERSATION WITH TSHEPO MADLINGOZI
In a previous conversation (cf. The Funambulist podcast
and The Funambulist 30 Reparations), Tshepo Madlingozi
had told us the Truth and Reconciliation process initiated in
1996 consists essentially in recalibrating the settler colonial
conditions of South Africa. This second conversation allows
us to go further in this claim and discuss the issues related
specifically to land (dispossession, restitution, redistribution),
as well as the complex uses and misuses of concepts such as
Ubuntu and indigeneity in “the country with no name.”
LEOPOLD LAMBERT: Could you please explain to us what
kind of land restitution is integrated in the South African
constitution? And later on, could you speak about the
proposed constitutional reform that would allow for land
expropriation without compensation, which has made
Afrikaner “landowners” outraged and led to them being given
“humanitarian” visas by the cousin settler colony of Australia?
TSHEPO MADLINGOZI: We are talking about the con-
stitution of 1996. As you know, South Africa became
a liberal democracy in 1994, with an interim con-
stitution and, in 1996, a final constitution. Now, of
course, South Africa is a historically settler colony,
and the issue of land in any settler colonies is the
main issue, the main point of struggle. In the 1800s,
when settler conquerors waged dispossession wars
against Indigenous peoples, politically subjugated
them and displaced them from their land, Indig-
enous people often lamented: “Ilizwe lifile” (“the
nation/world is dead”). By this, they meant that
settler conquest and especially land dispossession
and dislocation had destroyed their metaphysical,
spiritual, social, and material worlds. This is the
fullest import of the proposition that land disposses-
sion is the original sin in this place/camp without a
name (so-called “South Africa”). This lament led to
the rallying cry of both anti-colonial struggle and
the unending struggle to dissolve South Africa, the
settler-constituted polity: “Mayibuye iAfrika” (“Re-
turn Africa/Resurrect Africa/Re-member Africa”).
So, of course, the constitution of the “new South Af-
rica” had to take into account the issue of land. Now,
there were three problems.
46
The first one is that the African
National Congress (ANC), which is
in power in South Africa, did not win
the liberation struggle. In fact, if we
are honest, they did not even wage
a liberation struggle: they pursued a
democratization agenda.
And therefore, the constitution had to be a compro-
mise. It was not like the ANC won, and therefore
they could come up with their own revolutionary
constitution. Rather, the constitution is a product of
compromise between the ANC and the colonial set-
tler minority party, the National Party. Being a prod-
uct of compromise, it meant that the land restitution
program articulated in the constitution was going to
be very mild, very watered down. The second prob-
lem, and perhaps most importantly, the ANC, since
it was formed in 1912, never fought for LANDBACK/
Mayibuye iAfrika. Instead, the ANC pursued democ-
ratization and integration into the settler-constituted
State. So of course, when they took over power, they
were not interested in a fundamental and radical
program of land return, and therefore the constitu-
tion, apart from being a part of compromise, reflects
what the ANC is about: no land return, but land
must be shared, and Black people must be able to
buy land if they can afford to buy land.
The third problem is that the constitution is ulti-
mately a (new) South African constitution. It is not
an African or Azanian constitution. The constitu-
tion is based on the best traditions of Euro-Ameri-
can constitutions. So its framing in its epistemology
and its ideology is eurocentric and liberal. Now, as
you know, one of the key aspects of Euro-American
liberal constitutions is the protection of property
rights, as part of civic rights. The longest clause in
the South African constitution is the one on proper-
ty: not on dignity, not on education, not on life, not
on equality. What this means is that the property
that was stolen during colonialism is protected by
the constitution. In practice, this has meant that
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40
the State cannot deprive conquerors of land, unless
it pays compensation. There are basically three
schemes: land restitution for people whose land was
taken away because of racist policies; then there is
land reform, which seeks to distribute available land
to historically marginalized people; and then lastly,
there is a program of land tenure, meaning people
who work in the farms or small holdings must have
a secure tenure on those properties. Now because of
the three problems I have articulated above and the
befuddled way the property clause is articulated in
the constitution the State has only distributed about
5% to 8% of the land since 1996. Studies show that
white people, who comprise somewhere between
8% and 9% of the population, own about 77% of the
land. The settler(dispossessor)-native(dispossessed)
relation subsits.
People mischaracterize the ANC by claiming it
was formed because of land dispossession. No, the
ANC was formed, because the Black petty bour-
geois, intellectuals and elites of that time, wanted
to also buy land. They didn’t fight for the return of
the land, they wanted to end discrimination on the
THE LAND…
Fig.1
basis of race to buy land. As you know, the Freedom
Charter is one of the ANC key documents, adopted
together with their partners in 1955. This document
infamously declares that South Africa belongs to
all who live in it, Black and white. That declaration
is a clear concession that settler invaders also own
the land. The Freedom Charter makes it very clear
that the ANC is not interested in land return. We’re
not here talking about the Mau-Mau struggle, which
was a struggle for land and self determination.
We’re not talking about Algeria. We’re not talking
about Palestine. All those struggles are anti-coloni-
al struggles. In the case of the ANC, we are really
talking about a civil rights movement that is fight-
ing for recognition by settlers, integration into their
civil society, rights protection, and distribution of
certain social goods to “previously” marginalized
groups. So the ANC was never interested in land
return. This is to say that it is a mistake to accuse
the ANC of ‘selling out”.
Similarly, as I said, the constitution is the result of
a compromise. It’s not the Bolivian or Ecuadorian
constitution.
47
It is a constitution and an approach
based on democratization, not
decolonization. Consequently, it
protects property rights in a very
European sense.
In African cosmology, you cannot own land. It’s
such a silly notion: how do you own a piece of
Mother Earth? It doesn’t make sense! In European
legal epistemology, one can have property owner-
ship over land. In our cosmology, you can’t: the land
is owned by the community and the community
gives it to people, because they’re getting married,
because they need land to farm, etc. but no one ever
owns land, not even a chief or a king!
The failure or rather the displacement and rejection
of the Mayibuye iAfrika agenda and consequent
land hunger and homelessness have led to the emer-
gence of parties and movements, demanding land
return and agrarian reform. You’ve been in South
Africa, you have seen a lot of shack settlements, peo-
ple living on top of each other... And then you’ve seen
places where there are vast pieces of land owned
by one person or one family trust, some of them
converted into game farms, etc. Some of them are
reserved for conservation, and we know conserva-
tion has colonial roots in Africa anyway: people are
displaced, and then you enclose the land for con-
servation…. So that’s the situation in South Africa.
There’s a shortage of housing, there is hunger for
land, and therefore, there is a mushrooming of shack
settlements, of slums in urban zones. Therefore, par-
ties such as the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF),
have emerged to take up this struggle for land. And
because of the EFF, from 2018, as you said, there’s
been discussion about amending the property clause
of the constitution, to make it clear that the State can
expropriate land without paying any compensation.
So from 2018, that has been the struggle to amend
this constitution, and ultimately because the ANC
was losing votes, it agreed that the constitution could
be amended. But we know they don’t mean it. Since
2018, they have been playing for time.
It is very clear that land return is an unfinished busi-
ness of decolonization. We can’t talk about “post-apart-
heid,” let alone decolonization in the absence of land
return. And we can’t talk about the end of a settler-na-
tive relationship until the land has been returned
and conditions that led to ilizwe lifile (the ongoing
situation of worldlessness, rootlessness, homeless-
ness and unhomeliness) have been terminated.
48
The final thing I want to say is that, as you know,
land for us is not just property, it’s not just this piece
of thing. Land is identity. Without land, you can’t
say, “This is who I am; this is where I come from.”
Without land, you can’t do and perform certain
rituals that you need space for. Now, people who
live on top of each other can’t even slaughter cows,
there’s no space to do those rituals. And if you are
not able to undertake those rituals, you are not able
to connect with your gods and your Living-Dead. So
without land, as African people, we are not people.
We are basically cosmic hobos; pariahs on this land.
We are not in this world, we feel worthless, we feel
rootless, we feel homeless.
So the issue of land for us is not
LANDBACK so that one can have
a place to have property, it is
LANDBACK so one can be whole
again; one can be re-membered; one
can re-world themselves.
LANDBACK is a return not just to the source, but to
humanity, to the world. It is as serious as that. The
ANC government has not taken this issue seriously.
I’m afraid that is going to be the subject of the next
war in South Africa.
LL: You place the concept of Ubuntu at the center of a true
decolonizing effort. Outside of the Continent, we often hear
this concept in a rather abstract way. Can you define it, and
tell us what a decolonizing land reform in “the country with no
name,” could look like following its precepts?
TM: Ubuntu has been translated into English to mean
humanness, togetherness, interdependence, hospi-
tality, etc.. All of those are fine. However, we need to
appreciate that Ubuntu is an ethical epistemological
prescription. It is a demand that as an individual,
in your everyday interaction, you do humane acts
for other people—not just for human beings, but
also for all other sentient beings. You must interact
with them in the spirit of interdependence. So the
starting point is that in African epistemology and
cosmology, you’re not just a person, you are always
becoming a person. As one philosopher put it: “I am,
because you are, and since you are therefore I am.”
You lose your personhood if you behave in a selfish,
self-aggrandizing manner. Hence in my language,
we sometimes say: “ha se motho, ke selo” (s/he is
not a person, s/he has become a thing).
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40
The second thing I can say is that in the context of
South Africa, Ubuntu is one of the reasons we were
colonized. When settlers came with the ships, we
welcomed them with open arms, right? My students
always assume that settler-invaders came from the
ocean firing guns, like they do in the movies. Not
here! They came nicely, disembarked from their
ships, and said: “We are these people, and we want
to know more about you guys. And we also need
a piece of land...” and they were welcome because
that’s what Ubuntu demands—there is no stranger,
everybody’s your brother and your sister. Shaka
Zulu, famously instructed his soldiers to assist
shipwrecked Europeans and bring them to shore,
proclaiming: “They are also human, please welcome
them.” And of course, they took advantage of that.—
the notion of open borders, the notion of hospitali-
ty… Ubuntu was abused by settler colonizers.
The third thing to say is that in 1994, there was
liberal democratization and then in 1996 a ‘final’
constitution was adopted. But something else hap-
pened in 1996. As you know, South Africa’s transi-
tional justice process began in 1996 in the form of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And as
Black people we are told by the late Desmond Tutu:
“You are the people of Ubuntu, therefore, you must
forgive,”—forgiveness from Black people by black-
mail. So, Ubuntu was appropriated in 1996 to facili-
tate elite reconciliation, integration and settlement,
as well as taming revolutionary impulses. Ubuntu
became a tool of epistemic and political violence.
This is to say that Ubuntu was (mis)appropriated
to displace the Mayibuye iAfrica agenda and thus
to consolidate “South Africa.” “Do not ask for land
back; do not demand the radical redistribution of
political, economic, epistemic, cultural power; do
not ask for the destruction of South Africa and the
building of Azania...”
Starting 1996, you see a flourishing of
Ubuntu discourse: people are setting
up Ubuntu security companies,
Ubuntu loan companies,Ubuntu
named buildings, which are owned by
white people, and so on...
Ubuntu is turned into a gimmick. It’s the most
painful thing, it’s a slap in the face that the core of
our being, our ideology, our epistemology, Ubuntu,
is used against us to consolidate white hegemony
in education, in the economy, in the cultural life in
THE LAND…
everything... And to top it all: Ubuntu is then appro-
priated by white people to claim their Africanness
without subjecting themselves to Ubuntu demands:
truth, justice, and harmonization through righting
historical wrongs, and liquidating whiteness and all
the historical and contemporary privileges white-
ness and settlerization bestow. What I am saying is
that Mr Tutu and Mr Mandela’s “Ubuntu” ultimately
functioned to consolidate the anti-decolonization
agenda.
Ubuntu actually at its core demands two things:
truth and justice. The truth about what happened
on this land, the truth about “South Africa” and
all it represents and masks. The truth and honest
conversations about land dispossession, political
conquest, as well as economic, epistemological,
religious, and cultural subjugation. The truth is that
there is no South Africa without the subjugation
of African kingdoms, in particular the destruction
of the Zulu kingdom. Black people in the majority
don’t have meaningful democracy. They don’t have
a meaningful say in decision making. I do have
decision making possibilities and space because as
a middle-class professional I can make my voice
heard and I can go to court if my rights are not
respected. That’s not the case for many people, who
are regularly shot at, arrested, and dismissed for
claiming basic rights, as we’ve seen in Marikana in
2012 when people were killed for demanding fair
compensation in the mining sector. So, remnants of
political conquest can be seen in life experiences of
the impoverished and invisibilized majority. Eco-
nomic subjugation is very obvious when one sees
the level of racial disparity in income and in wealth:
white people still own the economy in South Africa.
In fact, white people are becoming richer. As for
epistemological and cultural subjugation, you see it
everywhere: in the university, in the architecture, in
our books, in our standards of beauty… manifesta-
tions of neo-apartheid are everywhere.
But Ubuntu can also be revolutionary. People who
decide to occupy the land say: “We occupy the land,
because Ubuntu demands that we share, therefore,
I’m going to take this land that you are not using,
and I’m going to occupy it.” In the same spirit, Ubun-
tu allows us to say that education is not a privilege,
education is a right, and therefore, we will demand
free education, as we have seen with Fees Must Fall
in 2015. You also see this revolutionary understand-
ing of Ubuntu in gay and lesbian struggles, where
LGBTQIA+ folk push back by showing that Ubuntu
clearly proscribes homophobia, transphobia, etc. on
the basis that this ongoing colonization of sexual
minorities is anti-African.
49

Fig.2
Lastly, Ubuntu is sometimes also abused by patri-
archs who misappropriate Ubuntu and lie and claim
that Ubuntu demands the obedience and subjuga-
tion of women and non-binary people. So we’ve got
various controversies about Ubuntu, but the one that
dominates is the one that is aligned to the anti-de-
colonization agenda.
LL: Do you think that pan-Africanism can render more complex
(in an interesting and productive way) the notion of Indigeneity
when it comes to LANDBACK? I’m asking this because many
people who live in South Africa come from everywhere on the
Continent, especially since the mid-1990s.
TM: Yes, that’s a very fundamental question, and
this allows us to talk about a number of things.
The first thing we can say is that Ubuntu is not
based on nativism or autochthonism. That’s why in
pre-colonial Africa, people could move around, and
people could settle anywhere. And people could be
integrated into different spaces. The notion of strict
borders, even within so-called South Africa, was not
there: borders were very malleable. Same thing for
ethnicities. Ethnicities and cultural identity were
50
very fluid. The notions that “I’m a Zulu,” “I’m a So-
tho,” etc. we know that they came with colonialism.
Before that, ethnicities were much more mestizo or
creole kind of identities...
So it goes back to the question of LANDBACK: land
back to whom? My mother died while still in the
process of claiming back our land from where we
were displaced, even before I was born. But she
died before she could complete that process, and
she told me to leave it alone, because it involved
too much corruption, carelessness, and inefficient
bureaucracy. But the land from where we were dis-
placed by white people, if you go back in time, we’d
see that we are from elsewhere. All of us have been
moving all the time. So if you just say “LANDBACK”
to people who were displaced by white people, there
might be a counterclaim by people who were there
4,000 years ago. So I don’t believe in land restitu-
tion at all! In the context where there were no solid
borders, in the context where identity and belong-
ing were so fluid, whose land is it anyway? This is
not to say what settlers like to say that “all of us are
settlers.” White people say “We come from Europe,
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40
you guys come from Kenya, from Congo, etc.” That’s
not what I mean of course. What I mean is an inter-
nal discourse within so called African people, which
says that no one owns land. That’s why I don’t be-
lieve in land restitution.
Colonization was very transformative of so-called
South Africa, and many people were displaced
because of it. However, there was another transform-
ative event or series of events that took place here
which was Difaqane. This is when the Zulu Nation
was expanding and becoming a nation under Shaka
Zulu and displacing everyone from here all the way
to present Zambia. Communities were moved, people
were running away, everything was transformed. So,
in that context, whose land is it anyway?
The third reason why I don’t believe in land resti-
tution is that if we say if the Zulu nation can prove
that this was their land, if the Sotho people can
prove that this was their land, if the Pedi people...,
and all the other so-called Ethnic groups can prove
that this was their land and the land is given back
to them, what you then is the balkanization of this
territory, with very firm boundaries, because people
are thinking in a European way. Balkanization
would be the triumph of colonization and coloniality.
What happens to white people in that context and
where do they live if land is reclaimed by different
kingdoms? What happens to people like myself,
who belong to two or three different ethnic groups?
I don’t claim one ethnic group: my mother is one
thing, my father is one thing, my grandfather is one
thing... which is really the same for a lot of Black
people, if they’re honest, if they don’t just claim fa-
ther identity. That’s why the title of my PhD disser-
tation was Mayibuye iAfrika?. A question mark…
In your question, you have added another compo-
nent: people coming from other countries. After
1994, we saw an influx of people from other parts of
Africa because of war, or because of economic migra-
tion, or because they wanted to settle here in South
Africa. What would happen to them in the context of
LANDBACK is going to be a big problem. We know
that the most revolutionary conception of our eman-
cipation doesn’t believe in a notion of nation state.
It believes in one Africa, one continent,
no borders, especially those that were
created by the white man. So Africans
from other parts of Africa have as much
a right to be on this land, as I have.
THE LAND…
Land restitution is based on the notion of autochtho-
ny, of being a “son of the soil” and that I can claim
belongingness and certain privileges. That notion
is anti-Ubuntu, anti African, and is contrary to our
deepest aspiration, which is that there must not be
borders. You have seen that people who are xeno-
phobic in South Africa, who don’t want foreigners,
they start with that. Then they go to the next part
and say, “We don’t want the Zulus in this town: Zulus
must go down to Zululand…” This thing never ends:
from racism, to xenophobia, to tribalism, to full
blown neo-colonialism. So I am very suspicious and
very cautious about LANDBACK from that perspective.
What I believe in is land redistribution. Land redis-
tribution doesn’t say, “I deserve land, because my
parents were here 20 years ago, or 40 years ago.”
It says, “I deserve land because I don’t have land,
and there is available land. And I’m going to use
this land.” So land redistribution is about equitable
redistribution of land, to those who want the land,
and who can use the land. Land must be given as
a form of reparations. Equitable redistribution:
that’s a form of land reform that I’m interested in.
I’m not interested in land reform that is based on
indigeneity or nativism, or being the son of the soil.
I believe in LANDBACK as a way of reversing the
unequal ownership of land by white people who
got it through colonialism. There must be justice
for that: land must be taken and redistributed fairly
without compensation to those who are deserving
and those who want land. Only then can Africa be
re-membered. ■
Tshepo Madlingozi is Associate Professor and the Director of
the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at WITS University. He is
a Research Associate at the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher
Education at Nelson Mandela University. He is the co-editor
of South African Journal on Human Rights. He is co-editor of
Symbol or Substance: Socio-economic Rights in South Africa
(2015) and co-editor of Introduction to Law and Legal Skills in
South Africa (2021). He sits on the boards of various NGOs and
social movements.
Fig.1 Settler property gate in South Africa. / Photo by Geoff Sperring (2018).
Fig.2 A group of Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) marches down Vermeulen Street
in Pretoria on March 4, 2021. / Photo by Wirestock Creators.
51
 CH’IXI FUTURITY
ANA MARÍA LEÓN
The Settler Colonial City Project founded by Ana María León
and Andrew Herscher has been instrumental in confronting
the architecture discipline with its role in the consolidation
of settler colonialism in Turtle Island. For this issue however,
we asked Ana María if she could write a text about her
home country, Ecuador. In this short text, she describes the
contradiction between the Indigenous ontology claimed by
the State in recent years and the invasive and destructive oil
extractivism on Indigenous lands.
Ecuador is a small country with a big heartbreak.
For such a country that has depended on the reve-
nues of oil for decades, a future without oil seems
impossible. And yet, as I sit here writing from Ec-
uador and thinking of Ecuador, I understand that a
future free from oil is the only future we can aspire
to and the only future we can work towards.
It is a common misconception to envision South
American populations as homogenous, ignoring the
erasures and violence enacted by mestizo groups
over Indigenous and Black populations. I under-
stand this as an Ecuadorian mestizo of Chinese,
Spanish, and unknown ancestry. I am the product
of transnational migrations and also now a migrant
myself, an academic that teaches in the United
States and is currently in Ecuador because of the
uncertainties of this pandemic. I am part of so many
populations and yet I’m not sure I belong anywhere,
and perhaps because of this transient status it has
been difficult for me to fathom Indigenous claims
and rights. I am still learning.
The Amazon jungle is one of a set of regions in
South America whose location, far from ports and
urban centers, difficult geography, and lack of de-
sired colonial resources, made them less attractive
to colonization. These areas became a refuge for
Indigenous groups fleeing colonial violence, adding
to already existing populations. In the Andes, inde-
pendence processes were led by criollos—Spanish
descendants born in the Americas—with Indigenous
populations often caught in the battles between
these groups, their mestizo allies, and those still
loyal to the Spanish crown. The legacies of these
conflicts have prompted greater concentration of
Indigenous populations in formerly remote and for-
merly unprofitable areas. Here, while their lives are
inevitably enmeshed within contemporary processes,
52
Indigenous groups have retained some capacity
to maintain relations with human and non-human
lifeways. In and around urban centers, Indigenous
groups have a strong presence in political rep-
resentation and governance. They are also inter-
connected with the mestizo majority, made up of
multiple groups including many who are ethnically
close to Indigenous ancestry, but whose traditions
and memories have been erased by the ongoing
cultural dominance of economic empires.
In 1967, vast oil reserves were discovered in the Ec-
uadorian Amazon, jumpstarting the transformation
of the country into an oil economy. Oil was not new
to Ecuador: reserves had been extracted from the
coast in the early 20th century. However, the demand
for oil that resulted from the postwar suburbaniza-
tion of the United States completely transformed the
economies of oil-rich countries worldwide.
The intrusion of oil extraction was
particularly disruptive and violent
in the Amazon, where lands are
still populated by the Huaorani, the
Kichwa, the Shuar, the Achuar, and
the Taromenane.
In 1993, responding to the heavy contamination in-
flicted by oil extraction in the region of Lago Agrio,
many of these groups sued Texaco (now Chevron),
demanding the company to clean up the area and
provide care for residents afflicted by multiple health
issues, the result of years of living in contaminated
land. This high-profile case is only one of innumer-
able struggles in which oil extraction has led to the
destruction of Indigenous landscapes and lives.
When I started my doctoral studies in the United
States, I met my friend Yavuz Sezer, a quiet and
studious colleague from Turkey, who has left us
too soon, too young. “Turkey is so similar to Lat-
in America,” he said. “Do you have oil?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered. And he replied: “I’m so sorry.”
That was when I understood that oil countries share
oil heartbreak.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40
At the same time, oil has provided the capital for
developmentalist models that have allowed gov-
ernments on both the right and the left to do large
infrastructural works as they attempt to main-
tain political stability and popular support. In Red
Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political
Thought (2004), Quechua scholar Sandy Grande ex-
plains how “both Marxists and capitalists view land
and natural resources as commodities to be exploit-
ed, in the first instance, by capitalists for personal
gain, and in the second by Marxists for the good
of all.” This has been the case in Ecuador, where
attempts have been made to incorporate Indigenous
ontologies and populations into the frameworks of
a developmentalist state, particularly through the
concept of Sumak kawsay.
Sumak kawsay is a Quechua word that brings to-
gether Andean Indigenous thought with the 1990s
socialist tide. It seeks to mobilize Quechua ontology
as part of a model for state and social organization.
The term, which in Quechua means something akin
to “life in plenitude” but is usually translated as
“good living,” is meant to oppose the developmen-
talist model that guided neoliberal policies in South
America through most of the late 20th century. In
2008, a new Ecuadorian constitution put Sumak ka-
wsay into action by recognizing the rights of nature.
Article 71 of the constitution states
that “Nature or Pacha Mama, where
life is reproduced and realized, has
the right to the integral respect of
its existence and the maintenance
and regeneration of its vital cycles,
structure, functions, and evolutive
processes.”
In support of these actions, then-president Rafael
Correa mobilized an ambitious project that invited
international funding to allow the country to keep
the oil in the ground. I remember my enthusiasm
for this ambitious and courageous proposal. The
project was unable to gather funding, leading Cor-
rea to a embark on a program of oil extraction that
would fund his ambitious infrastructure program.
Thea Riofrancos’s work in Resource Radicals: From
Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecua-
dor (2020) traces some of this story and its conse-
quences.
THE LAND…
I spent the first season of the pandemic in Ecuador,
taking advantage of remote connections to be able
to care for my father. While I was here, I voted in
two election rounds, as the country tried to figure
out the choice between several candidates on the
left and one conservative moderate, right-leaning
bank owner Guillermo Lasso. Voting in Ecuador is
mandatory, but the country has no reliable postal
system and elections by mail would be impossible.
By the second round of elections, the pandemic
was rising, but I went to vote nonetheless. I had to
choose between two extractivist options: Correa’s
successor on the left and Lasso on the right. The
third choice, left out of the second round by the
smallest of margins, had been an Indigenous can-
didate, Yaku Pérez—the only who ran on a non-ex-
tractivist platform. I went to vote in the middle of
the pandemic and wrote the word “NULO” (null) in
capital letters over my ballot. Ultimately, Lasso prof-
ited from the fragmentation of the left and gained
the presidency.
The Indigenous candidate that made it to the third
place in the electoral race had been in confrontation
with Indigenous groups who supported Correa’s
elected successor. These confrontations between
Indigenous groups point to the challenges of absorb-
ing Indigenous governance and self-determination
into the machinery of the state. Such challenges
are highlighted by the contrast between Pachakutik
Movimiento de Unidad Plurinacional (Pachaku-
tik Plurinational Unity Movement), the left wing
Indigenous party, and the Confederación de Nacion-
alidades Indígenas de Ecuador (Confederation of
Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, better known
for its acronym, CONAIE), Ecuador’s largest Indige-
nous organization. In order to operate within Ecua-
dorian politics, Packakutik has become enmeshed
in complicated networks and alliances. In contrast,
CONAIE retains the independence to push for Indig-
enous rights outside the frameworks of the state.
In order to secure his rule, Lasso allied himself with
the Indigenous political party Pachakutik for the
control of the National Assembly. On January 19,
2022, Lasso announced that a new oil reserve had
been discovered in the Ecuadorian Amazon, as well
as his intention of duplicating oil extraction to one
million barrels a day in the next seven years. While
Lasso is happy to extoll the advantages of privat-
ization, he is eager to reserve oil profits for the
Ecuadorian State, which legally owns and admin-
isters oil reserves. However, the nationalization of
oil entails the extraction of oil-rich territories from
its Indigenous inhabitants. Lasso’s announcement
was followed by silence from the president of the
Fig.1
53
Indigenous activists protesting oil and mineral extraction concessions in front of the
Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador in Quito.
Photo by Diego Sugoniaev (January 2015).

54 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 55

National Assembly, Guadalupe Llori, a member of
Pachakutik who rose to fame for her role in protests
against Correa’s oil policies.
These contradictory alliances highlight how in
Ecuador, the recruitment of Indigenous concepts
It combines the Indigenous world and its opposite
without mixing them. In opposition to Nestor García
Canclini’s notion of hybridity, which to Rivera ulti-
“Nature or Pacha Mama,
where life is reproduced
mately connotes infertility, ch’ixi expresses “the par-
allel coexistence of multiple differences that do not
extinguish but instead antagonize and complement

and realized, has the right

like Sumak kawsay and Indigenous groups into each other.” Rivera’s description of ch’ixi suggests
the administration of the State has often mobilized that the possibility of governance for our societies
and betrayed communities, positioning Indigenous should not be based in forcing Indigenous thought

to the integral respect

leaders against the very principles they stand for.
Moreover, while the Ecuadorian constitution recog-
nizes the “pluri-nationality” of peoples who choose
to claim their affiliation with Indigenous groups,
when they operate within the State they are incor-
porated into an extractive model—one that contin-
ues colonial frameworks that understand the land,
the air, and the water as resources to be profited
from. Between Sumak kawsay and the recognition
of pluri-nationality, the constitution provides a legal
framework for communities to claim their rights,
but the actions of the State undermine the authority
and validity of their claims. Ultimately, the Ecuado-
rian State has been unable to reconcile its extractive
model with Sumak kawsay frameworks. In other
words, it operates against its own constitution.
into settler or mestizo notions of a developmentalist
state, but rather reformulating and transforming
local networks to understand the ch’ixi reality in
which we live, and providing the extra-state formu-
lations to support a ch’ixi futurity in we can think
of, formulate, and work towards renewed relations
with the land. ■
of its existence and
Ana María León is an architect and as a historian, her work
examines how architectures of struggle have shaped the
the maintenance and
modernity and coloniality of the Americas. She is co-founder
of several research and practice collectives including Nuestro
Norte es el Sur and the Settler Colonial City Project. She
regeneration of its vital
cycles, structure, functions,
teaches at the University of Michigan and sometimes manages
to spend time in Ecuador, which is still home.

On the afternoon of January 28, 2022, just as I was

presenting some of these thoughts to an academic
discussion on Indigenous futurity, a new fracture in
and evolutive processes.”
the Ecuadorian oil pipeline caused an oil spill which
has again created havoc in the Amazon, specially Article 71
affecting Kichwa communities. It is easy to feel
discouraged in the face of what appears as insur-
mountable obstacles.

What is to be done?

Aymara and Bolivian scholar Silvia

Rivera Cusicanqui points to some
possible directions through her
explanation of the notion of ch’ixi,
which she proposes as an alternative,
in the Andean region, to the erasures
prompted by mestizaje.
Rivera Cusicanqui explains that ch’ixi is a color
that is the juxtaposition, in small points or spots, of
opposed or contrasting colors: black and white, red
and green, and so on. Ch’ixi, she explains, reflects
the Aymara idea of something that is and is not at
the same time: it is the logic of the included third.

56 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 57

 “THE PUEBLO REVOLT NEVER ENDED”:
NOTES ON THE CONFLUENCE
OF LAND AND WATER
ALYOSHA GOLDSTEIN AND JULIA BERNAL
In this text written together, Alyosha Goldstein and Julia Bernal
make sure that the stewardship of water, as well as its access,
incarnate a full dimension of the LANDBACK movement.
Using the example of the Pueblo Action Alliance directed
by Julia, they demonstrate how the fight for WATERBACK
is fundamental to both Indigenous sovereignty and to a
decolonial ecology.
In early October 2021, Pueblo Action Alliance (PAA)
traveled to Washington, DC as an Indigenous con-
tingent of mainly femmes, matriarchs, and 2spirit
youth to represent their nations in the fight against
extractive colonialism as part of the “People vs.
Fossil Fuels” action. The week-long event gathered
Indigenous and environmental organizations from
across the so-called United States and throughout
the world to directly confront the Biden administra-
tion with demands for policies to “Build Back Fossil
Free.” Thousands of people involved in collectively
opposing oil and gas pipelines, fracking, offshore
drilling, militarism, plastic production, and the
carbon economy came together for this DC action.
More than 530 activists were arrested by the police.
Indigenous peoples led the occupation of the Bureau
of Indian Affairs with a list of demands that includ-
ed LANDBACK, WATERBACK, as well as the aboli-
tion of the bureau itself. Under conditions of acceler-
ating climate catastrophe and insatiable economies
of dispossession, foregrounding the interrelation of
land, water, air, and Indigenous self-determination
is crucial for the fight against the lethal conse-
quences of colonial-capitalist extractivism.
Along with its other environmental and commu-
nity defense work, youth programs, ceremonial
action, and solidarity initiatives, the Pueblo Action
Alliance’s “WATERBACK” campaign is an indispen-
sable counterpart to the now prominent Indigenous
demand for LANDBACK. Both the campaign, which
was launched in November 2020, and PAA’s “WA-
TERBACK Manifesto” call for the rematriation of
all water resources stolen under colonial-capitalist
regimes and the resurgence of Indigenous self-de-
termination, identity, and worldviews. From a Pueblo
58
perspective, rematriation is reasserting balance
with the natural world and centering the maternal
relations of water, Indigenous matrilineal systems,
and community defense.
WATERBACK in practice is not
limited to the legal arena of rights
or the resolution of water litigation
and adjudication, but has to do with
the capacity to protect and practice Fig.1
Indigenous political, cultural, and
spiritual reciprocity with water, land,
and place.
The manifesto also refuses the colonial ascription of
a monolithic Indigeneity, instead highlighting how
Indigenous peoples experience and respond to dis-
possession specific to their territories. Although at
times overlooked and underestimated as a counter-
force to imperial dominion, the Indigenous peoples
of the 20 current Pueblos in the arid lands of what water within a market system that privileges use for with all elements of land and life. In a 2012 essay,
are presently the states of New Mexico and Texas “economic development” and large-scale agribusi- she observes that “water brings with it the soil, the
precede by thousands of years the succession of co- ness while ignoring other collective relations with ground that it moves through, making the quality of
lonial occupations by Spain, Mexico, and the United and responsibilities to the more-than-human world. water in any watershed unique. Then, as we drink
States. Centering Pueblo youth and femmes to envi- Just as the Public Land Survey System established that water, our lifeblood, we are again and always
sion and enact a living Pueblo futurism, the Pueblo by the 1785 Land Ordinance systematically imposed one with and part of that place, part of that water-
Action Alliance asserts the interdependence of land, a grid of property division amenable to settler real shed, part of that unique community.” This cycle
water, and Indigenous ways of being in the world to estate transactions, the quantification of water pri- of water and life moves from underground, to the
reject the prevailing imperatives for property, mar- oritizes capitalist social relations over and against earth’s surface, rising to become clouds in the sky,
ket value, and so-called economic growth. other forms of collective life. This institutionalized and then returning to the soil to begin again, all
and instrumentalized system of water delivery and the while nourishing and connecting land, air, and
Before colonial water governance, Indigenous storage is unsustainable for life on and of the earth. living beings.
peoples of their respective territories developed and
implemented water management strategies based New possibilities emerge instead from learning The Pueblo Action Alliance was first created in re-
in reciprocity and stewardship. These strategies from and living with how “water is transformative,” sponse to the Standing Rock movement in 2016. PAA
continue to be a vital part of Pueblo political life. as the WATERBACK Manifesto asserts. The Santa remains aligned with the movement’s insistence
By contrast, the dominant colonial-capitalist wa- Clara Pueblo architectural historian and artist Rina that “Water Is Life,” as well as the militant fight for
ter paradigm quantifies and administers access to Swentzell writes vividly of the interrelation of water inherent Indigenous sovereignty, treaty rights, and
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 59

Fig.2
the protection of water and land from extractive
colonialism and capitalist depredation. What PAA
learned from their collective experience with their
northern relatives is that the same extraction was
happening on Pueblo sacred and culturally signif-
icant lands. In the wake of Standing Rock, PAA
organizers began a process of self-education about
Indigenous resistance movements on a global scale
as well as Pueblo Indigenous history, including the
Pueblo Revolt of 1680. The PAA studied community
and land defense by the Zapatistas in Chiapas and
the Purépecha Mountain Community in Michoacán.
Facilitated by the international political education
initiatives of the Landless Workers Movement/Movi-
mento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST),
PAA Community Programming Director Reyes De-
Vore spent time in conversation with Guarani-Kaio-
wá peoples in Brazil. PAA organizers likewise draw
inspiration from the Kanaka Maoli activist, educa-
tor, and author Haunani-Kay Trask’s remarks on
the importance of keeping the history of Indigenous
resistance alive and relevant.
60
Attuned to the entwined histories of Indigenous
dispossession and resurgence, Pueblo Action Alli-
ance prioritizes Pueblo-centric grassroots organiz-
ing in order to embody the revolutionary spirit of
the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. During the 17th century, in
response to increasing Spanish colonial violence,
terror, enslavement, and efforts to annihilate Pueblo
religious beliefs and practices, the leader Po’pay of
Ohkay Owingeh (San Juan Pueblo) was guided by a
spiritual calling to organize and unify the separate
Pueblo nations in the uprising against Spanish rule
and missionization. A decade dedicated to building
alliances across the Keres, A:shiwii, Tewa, Tiwa,
and Towa speaking Pueblo peoples preceded the
coordinated insurgency that drove out Spanish colo-
nizers and missionaries. This uprising was the first
successful anticolonial revolution of so-called North
America, but it remains largely erased in main-
stream histories.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40
The 1680 revolt protected and
made possible Pueblo futurity. The
strategies for aligning and building
the collective power of the Pueblos
in the years leading up to the revolt
remain relevant for organizing today.
Pueblo Action Alliance aspires to carry forward this
legacy of resistance against colonial dominion and
Euro-American patriarchal values. Climate justice is
at the center of this struggle today.
In dry regions of the world, such as the so-called
Middle East, Northern Africa and the Sahel, Austral-
ia, or substantial parts of the Western hemisphere,
the politics of water have long foreshadowed what
has increasingly become a global struggle against
interminable appropriation and devastation on
behalf of imperial-capitalist accumulation. Market
rationalities create and calculate discrete categories
of resources and raw materials subject to distinct
domains of speculation and administration. Carbon
credit trading and debt-for-climate swaps are ex-
amples of the absurdity of such partitioned abstrac-
tions masquerading as market-based “solutions.”
As the planetary climate catastrophe intensifies,
the artificial separation of land, water, air, and the
subterranean made under colonial racial capitalism
is increasingly untenable. For people living under
colonial occupation and imperial dominion, such
distinctions have been part and parcel of the experi-
ence of dispossession and displacement.
Water infrastructure and hydrologic engineering
have been instrumental for continental colonization
by the United States. During the mid-19th century
massive drainage projects transformed the wet-
lands of the upper Mississippi River watershed,
which includes the traditional homelands of the
Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac
and Fox, Meskwaki, Nemahahaki, and other Native
nations. Of the 68 million acres of wetland prairie,
sloughs, and marshes throughout the watershed
that predated settler invasion, 48 million acres
were drained under the aegis of the “swamp acts”
to make way for farmland. In Illinois, for instance,
90 percent of the original wetlands were drained.
Colossal mid-20th century dam projects such as
Dalles, Elwha River, and the Pick-Sloan Missouri
River Basin Program destroyed traditional fishing
sources and farmland and displaced Native peoples
including the Yakama, Warm Springs, Nez Percé
THE LAND…
(Nimiipuu), Umatilla, Klallam, Elwha, Oceti Sakow-
in, Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara nations. Coloni-
zation in the arid West entailed and still relies on
the development of a vast system of water diversion
and transfer. In the western U.S. today, the coloni-
al-capitalist demand for water continues to increase
exponentially with only limited acknowledgement
of the long-term and escalating conditions of
drought. Urban development, extractive industries,
the military, and agribusiness compete for already
over-appropriated and scarce water. Competition
across imposed geopolitical borders and settler-state
jurisdictions further compound this unsustainable
problem of over allocation.
It is thus necessary to refuse the
market-driven commodification,
quantification, and extraction of
“natural resources” that are the
basis of the intensifying climate
catastrophe.
This compartmentalized and monetized world is ul-
timately unsustainable in its starkly uneven spatial
mechanisms of segregation and geopolitical bound-
aries over and against people and ecosystems of
the more-than-human world. Initiatives by peoples
from the atoll island states in the Pacific and Indian
Oceans, including Kiribati, Maldives, the Marshall
Islands, and Tuvalu, have been at the forefront of
calling for action to address rising sea levels, storm
surges, coastal erosion, and ocean acidification
caused globally by the burning of fossil fuels. Such
conditions of climate crisis are not separate or caus-
ally distinct from the endemic water shortages and
accelerated desertification experienced elsewhere in
the world.
The legal basis of most Native water rights in the
United States is the 1908 Supreme Court decision in
Winters v. United States, which affirmed the Fort
Belknap Indian Reservation’s water rights over and
against non-Indigenous farmers in Montana who
were arguing that the land reserved for the tribe by
treaty in 1888 did not reserve or include water. The
ensuing reserved water rights doctrine, while de-
nying the artifice of a juridical partitioning of land
and water, conveyed rights “to an extent reasonably
necessary to irrigate [tribal] lands”—in other words,
with the ideologically narrowed priority of small-
scale commercial agriculture. Over the past century,
reserved water rights for tribes nevertheless have
61
been continually undermined by a combination
of the steadfast reluctance of the U.S. Congress to
appropriate the funding required to secure water
for tribes and endemic mismanagement by the U.S.
Department of the Interior. As such, in the further
abstraction of water from living social materialities,
the Winters doctrine has largely delivered what lit-
igators describe as “paper water” rather than what
they term “wet water.”
The historical context for the Pueblo nations in
what is presently called New Mexico has been
different from other Native American nations for a
number of reasons, not least of which was the 1876
U.S. Supreme Court decision that Pueblos were not
Indians according to the congressional definition
and were not therefore entitled to protection under
federal law. Here again, we see a form of compart-
mentalization operationalized in colonial-capital-
ist efforts to divide and conquer. Decisions of the
Supreme Court of the New Mexico Territory and the
U.S. Supreme Court held that the Nonintercourse
Act did not restrict the alienability of Pueblo lands.
In other words, unlike the treaties that govern most
Native relations with the U.S., Pueblo land grants
did not provide an equivalent protection of Pueblo
territorial sovereignty. When the Supreme Court
reversed its position in 1913, the land title to much of
the state was called into question. The Pueblo Lands
Act of 1924 intervened so that the Pueblos were to
receive compensation for damages resulting from
the United States’ negligence in protecting Pueblo
lands and water. The Senate and House reports de-
scribed the purpose of the act as “to provide for the
final adjudication and settlement of a very compli-
cated and difficult series of conflicting titles affect-
ing lands claimed by the Pueblo Indians of New
Mexico.” The act likewise mandated the purchase of
land and water rights to replace those which have
been lost due to federal negligence.
By the time of the 1938 Rio Grande Compact, howev-
er, the participating states of Colorado, New Mexico,
and Texas made little effort to account for or protect
Pueblo water rights. While stating that “nothing
in this Compact shall be construed as affecting the
obligations of the United States of America to Mex-
ico under existing treaties, or to the Indian Tribes,
or as impairing the rights of the Indian Tribes,” no
representatives of Native nations were included in
its deliberation or drafting. Over the past 50 years,
a series of lawsuits have sought to clarify or adju-
dicate unsettled “Indian water claims” but have not
resolved Pueblo water rights in populated areas
like the Middle Rio Grande perhaps out of fear that
Pueblo nations may claim more political power. Ne-
62
gotiated settlements rather than precedent setting
court rulings have been the principal outcome of
most of these long-term litigations. This has the ef-
fect, even when the terms of settlement are relative-
ly favorable for the Pueblos involved, of stabilizing
state and private development without addressing
the underlying issues of Pueblo sovereignty. Indeed,
as recently as 2016, a New Mexico district court
ruled that Spanish conquest extinguished the water
rights of the Pueblos of Santa Ana, Zia, and Jemez
in the Jemez River Basin. Although this ruling was
appealed and overturned in September 2020, the
state’s investment in claiming Spanish colonization
as historically definitive says a lot about current
water politics in New Mexico.
Still contending with the everyday
material, spiritual, and political
legacies of colonialism, Pueblo
nations are now also deeply impacted
by the dire circumstances of climate
catastrophe.
For the greater part of this century, the fossil fuel
Fig.3
industries have dominated current land management
strategies over and against sovereign Pueblo
nations and their communities. Ancestral Pueblo
territories such as the Greater Chaco region are sig-
nificant sites of struggle in which the Pueblo Action
Alliance works in coalition with other grassroots
Indigenous and environmental groups to protect
water, land, air, the people and inherent sovereignty
against global capitalism and such lethal effects of
the fossil fuel economy as greenhouse gas emis-
sions. U.S. Department of the Interior agencies like
the Bureau of Land Management have co-opted the
federal fossil fuel leasing program in the service of
an industry-friendly agenda. Even under the elected Alyosha Goldstein (he/him) is a professor of American
leadership of Pueblo kin, colonialism and its val- studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of
ues continue to influence the interpretation of U.S. Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during
policy and approaches to climate action. As a com- the American Century, editor of Formations of United States
munity-based youth and femme-led organization, Colonialism, and coeditor of For Antifascist Futures: Against
Pueblo Action Alliance works as a counterbalance the Violence of Imperial Crisis. He also currently serves as an
to the accommodationist pressures of the legislative elected board member of the SouthWest Organizing Project.
Fig.1 Julia Bernal, Alliance Director, speaking at the Red Road to DC totem pole
business as usual. Grounded in everyday organiz-
ceremony and delivery to the Department of the Interior, July 29, 2021. / Courtesy of
ing, ceremony, community defense, and solidarity, Julia Bernal (she/they) is from the Indigenous Nations of Pueblo Action Alliance.
the PAA enacts a revolutionary commitment to the Sandia Pueblo and Yuchi and is the Director of the Pueblo Fig.2 “Here in the Southwest, We can’t have #LANDBACK without #WATERBACK”
legacy of Po’pay and demonstrates that, as declared Action Alliance. She is pursuing dual masters degrees in Water campaign graphic that visualizes Pueblo Indigenous people’s relationship with water. /
on the alliance’s website, “the Pueblo Revolt never Resources and Community and Regional Planning. She serves Courtesy of Pueblo Action Alliance.
Fig.3 Pueblo Action Alliance Youth Organizers at their community event, “Pueblo
ended.” ■ on the Natural Resources Committee for the All Pueblo Council Youth Revolt,” to honor the 341st anniversary of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt and educate
of Governors and the New Mexico Climate Change Task Force the community on their campaign “Youth to the Front!,” August 10, 2021.” / Courtesy of
Technical Advisory Group.   Pueblo Action Alliance.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 63
 RACIALIZATION AND RESISTANCE
IN THE ICE GEOGRAPHIES OF THE
ARCTIC AND COLONIZED ALASKA
A CONVERSATION WITH JEN ROSE SMITH
Land is not always made of earth, as we discuss with Jen Rose
Smith. Her work on ice in the context of the Arctic Circle
in general, and Alaska in particular, shows how the very
materiality of land has deep repercussions in both the way
Indigenous people are racialized and the means through which
they can resist colonialism.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: You’re currently writing a book that will
be entitled Icy Matters: Race, Indigeneity, and Coloniality in Ice-
Geographies. I know that this is a work in progress so what you
can say about it is limited, but could you tell us a little bit about
ice in an issue dedicated to land? What does the temporality
and mutability of ice involve as a key component of one’s living
environment? Your short fiction, “Cryogenics,” around the
La’ Glacier in your homeland is something I have in mind while
asking the question.
JEN ROSE SMITH: Sure, I can talk a bit about it. Basi-
cally, I’m interested in ice in three ways, and I’m us-
ing this kind of three pronged approach to come at
my analyses. On a general scale, I’m thinking about
how ice has been wielded as a tool and a terrain for
furthering multiple forms of white supremacy. So
the first way that I’m interested in ice is thinking
about it as an imaginary. Arctic ice geographies—I
do a little bit of thinking in Antarctica, but mostly
on Arctic ice geography—this, major part of the
globe, has filled the West with fear and anxiety.
That ice geographies, through this particular colo-
nial lens, have been understood as barren, blank,
empty, without history, as ahistorical and without
sociality. That’s one of the ways that I’m think-
ing about ice and how it’s been sort of rendered
and mediated. And we can see this in some major
contemporary ways. In this moment, we are seeing
ice as it appears in a dominant cultural imaginary,
as it is narrated, and packaged out to multiple
viewing audiences as melting ice: calving glaciers,
fracturing ice sheets, etc., ice that the viewer can’t
necessarily pinpoint its location—it’s the ice melt
of everywhere.. These images fill our TV screens,
movies, computers, and the newspapers, and in that
way, ice is utilized and forced to represent a climate
64
apocalypse that is said will inevitably destroy the
planet, and will destroy the human species.
The second prong of this analysis is thinking about
ice as it’s been made malleable and culled into artic-
ulation through science, and this is mostly through
projects that cordon off ice. Through different kinds
of technologies, that work maps ice’s surface, its
volume, its composition, etc. And I’m thinking here
in particular in terms of the technologies of the
ice core, or drone images, or satellite images: all
of these new and constantly populating technolo-
gies are working to try and analyze, organize ice
as data. And so we have these polar ice caps that
are constantly being measured and surveilled and
tracked and poked and prodded to reveal informa-
tion about the planet, and oftentimes the health of
the planet. This always correlates back to the ques-
tion of human health.
And then the third and final interest of the sort of
organizing format of the book is thinking about ice
as a materiality, and also as an analytic. Obviously,
these three ways are not neatly contained analyses,
instead they overlap, and they inform one another. Fig.1
In this third one, I’m thinking about the material
constitution of ice as a substance.
And as a substance, ice has agency
and it is an entity that moves and
shapes and responds to the world.
We don’t just act upon ice, ice is also
making decisions of its own accord.
In that sense, I’m thinking about what ice does offer,
just by virtue of existing in all of its movements,
shapes, and conditions, to thinkers, intellectuals,
scholars, etc. for thinking about relations of pow-
er. I’m interested in critical analyses of race, and
indigeneity, thinking about these constant struggles
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 65
over territory and sovereignty, especially again,
as ice is changing shape and moving, particularly
in Arctic spaces. And thinking of that, in this final
prong, I’m interested in how ice then complicates
these questions of boundaries and borders. Ice is
pushing out these neat containers, of land, of ocean,
of the concept of roots and tides, as it moves and of-
fers these different ways of organizing the world. As
I said in the second category, there are some humans
that are working so hard to try and control ice and
understand ice and all of the possible dimensions
that they can, but the truth of the matter is that ice is
actually quite elusive. It eludes many of these sort of
dominant colonial formations of thought.
That’s the main idea of the third category: that, in
these unique specificities of ice, I think we need to
think about power relations with an additional set
of concepts and tools. And thinking about “Cryogen-
ics,” the fiction piece that you referenced, I think
that one way of getting at that is through poetics,
thinking about different ways that ice is mediated
through the human experience, particularly through
an Indigenous experience, that are not simply rele-
gated to this question of the quantitative. Poetics is a
really a rich place to do some of that thinking.
LL: Listening to you makes me ponder on how ice geographies
are typically difficult to map, and as we know, what is difficult to
map is difficult to colonize.
JRS: Yes, that’s a great point. And I think that it’s
part of this desire to populate new forms of tech-
nology that can map, that can measure, that can
surveil, to try and make sense of what ice does and
what ice is.
LL: In this work on ice, you articulate a concept of “temperate-
normativity” to describe the formation of European
racialization of Indigenous people in the Arctic, in particular
when it comes to environmental determinism. Could you
unpack it for us?
JRS: Sure, this concept comes up in the book and
also in an article I’ve published in Environment and
Planning D called “‘Exceeding Beringia’”—borrowed
from the title of Joan Naviyuk Kane’s poem, “Ex-
ceeding Beringia” (2016), which I use as a form of
evidence in that piece. The way that I’m thinking
through temperate normativity is thinking through
how Western civilization is grounded in this idea of
agriculture as a specific kind of cultivation, and this
sort of sedentary lifestyle that is meant to emerge
out of an agricultural way of being in the world, of
a kind of stasis in space. The idea is then that this
form of civilization is the “proper” form of civilization.
66
There’s this sort of undergirding idea that being an LL: Now talking about your homeland—which, at the scale To answer your question, one thing that you brought
agriculturalist is really the most proper way to live, of the Eyak nation, is situated on the Pacific Coast, not on up is this history of Jim Crow laws, which were the
because out of that sort of sedentarism, is the only the Arctic Ocean. When talking about Jim Crow Laws, we systematic, racist policies of segregation and that re-
way for a particular form of sociality to occur, for of course tend to turn towards the southern states of the ally is an undertold history of Alaska. I don’t identify
government and governance to occur, of all of these U.S. settler colony, thousands of kilometers away from the as an historian, and I’m not an expert of this time
sort of organized ways of politically being in the region designated by Russian and after 1867, U.S. colonists as period, but I can say a few words on this important
world, all stem from this particular form of cultiva- “Alaska.” Nonetheless, these racial segregation laws were also part of history. I would, however, refer to Alaska
tion. Each of those projects and instances necessi- active against the Indigenous people of the region. Could you Native historians that are experts of this time period
tate a particular kind of land where specific kinds describe the conditions of settler colonialism at that time? and these questions of segregation and racism:
of growth can occur: it all stems from a temperate Dr. Holly Guise and Dr. Caskey Russell. These two
locale, and that becomes the apex. In that rendering JRS: Sure, and perhaps starting with an aside about have a lot of really important things to say about that
of civilization, ice geographies become the antithesis the Pacific Coast. When I started thinking about era, and the World War II era, and particularly about
to that and, as such, the antithesis of civilization: the these questions, a lot of them were about Alaska Elizabeth Peratrovich, who was a Native activist in
possibility of legible government, of organized cul- and about the unique legal positions that Alaska the 1940s. She, among many other Native folks at the
ture is impossible, so the story goes. Wrapped up in Native folks are in, and how that came to be. And time, accomplished a lot of important lobbying for
that is the idea that the peoples then that live in ice, through reading archives and researching and the passing of the Anti-Discrimination Act in Alaska,
with ice, along ice, in ice geographies become ren- studying certain time periods of Alaska history and which was passed in 1945. And that was essentially
dered aberrant or exceptional, or outside of these Alaska Native history, the question of ice surfaced civil rights legislation that worked to end the segre-
major master narratives that are used to describe not only for northern parts of Alaska, but also gation of spaces years before similar legislation was
how people should be living and how people should around how imaginaries of Alaska and ice shaped passed on a federal level.
be interacting with one another. So in that historical the enactments of racialization, even for those who
idea of temperate normativity, it is a site of racial- are who have been called “sub-Arctic Indians.” So
ization. Because if you aren’t living and existing the manifestations of ice, even if not materially or
in temperate normative landscapes, then you are a explicitly present, are always part of the equation of
non-normative subject. race and power, it is still shaping politics, still shap-
ing questions of dispossession and racialization.
This continues to shape the present moment. And
it’s reiterated in these dominant narratives of
climate change, that don’t, for the most part, under-
stand and don’t see ice and ice geographies as the
center. Ice is always something that is far off. And
ice and ice geographies mostly only come to matter
in these dominant narratives largely through the
belief that ice melt is a danger.
Ice geographies come to matter as
they make precarious temperate
living and temperate landscapes and
temperate livelihoods.
So I think that this understanding of temperate
normativity is still present, we can still see it, we
can still name it and point to it. Most of the thinking
that gets done, and gets held up for attention is the
thinking that comes from settled urban hubs situ-
ated in typically temperate landscapes, and often
around universities. So, in that sense, the centering
of a kind of temperate normative planet is con-
tinuing this historical idea that a particular form
of civilization is the most “advanced” or the most
important. That’s how I’m thinking about temperate
normativity, as it is operating on multiple scales,
and in multiple temporal ways.
Fig.2
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 67
 I can also say in relation to Jim Crow laws as they
stand out as a concretized example of racism and
segregation in Alaska, that they correspond to one
moment of racialization of Alaska Native peoples
among many. Part of what I discuss in my book, are
the multiple ways that Alaska Native peoples were
racialized, which, in my estimation, can be and
should be analyzed through this question of ice.
The particular proximity to ice
geographies is a major point of the
ways that Alaska Native folks were
racialized, especially in early times.
In your second question, you brought up this term
of environmental determinism. That is certainly one
way that was enacted through the idea that your im-
mediate environment is shaping your capacities and
your capabilities as a human being. Early anthropol-
ogists and ethnographers saw the material of ice as
slowing intellectual capacities, for instance.
Another thing that I’m interested in is the ways that
Alaska Native peoples and polities were racialized
as of Asian descent. I talk about this in one of my
book’s chapters, but in this regard, I would like to
also cite Dr. Juliana Hu Pegues’s work and her book
Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and
Asian Entanglements (2021). In it, she demonstrates
the ways that Asian and Indigenous peoples in
Alaska were similarly and differently racialized by
colonial and Imperial regimes in Alaska during 1867
period and onward, through lenses of race, gender,
and labor. This is a crucial text for thinking long
form about the question of racialization in Alaska.
LL: In Alaska, the colonial stranglehold on the land is not merely
a surface one, but also one that touches the million-year-old
depths of the earth sedimented as oil. What does this particular
dimension of U.S. settler colonialism imply in terms both of life
conditions for Indigenous people and their resistance?
JRS: Infrastructures of extraction, in the state of
Alaska has most certainly become intrinsic to the
socialities that exist in Alaska in a range of dif-
ferent kinds of ways. One way I’ve thought about
this question about how oil shapes social-political
landscapes, particularly Alaska Native politics, is
through the context of the Alaska Native Claims
Settlement Act, or ANCSA, which was signed in
1971. Up until that point, in Alaska Native history,
Fig.3 there wasn’t a precedent legal framework through
which land claims were processed. There were a few
68 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND…
instances here and there in terms of certain tribal
polities receiving land or money. And there was
one case of a given reservation status—there is one
reservation in Alaska, Metlakatla—but as a whole,
Alaska Native polities have an entirely different
legal history when it comes to claims to land.
We, Alaska Native tribes and polities,
did not sign treaties with any version of
the United States federal government
or state governments.
And because of that fact our processes of land claims
look entirely different than the way they do in the
majority of the U.S., California notwithstanding.
And this all stems back to what you mentioned, in
terms of Alaska, being purchased by the U.S. from
Russia in 1867. In terms of thinking about the colo-
nial period in the U.S., 1867 is relatively late. At that
point, many treaties with Native nations had already
been signed. And the U.S. was understanding Alas-
ka as an imperial acquisition, so not necessarily
an extension of manifest destiny in the same kind
of format that it was violently being enacted in the
what we call “the lower 48,” but Alaska was seen as
the United States starting its journey as an Empire.
Thinking of it in that way, when the U.S. and Russia
were signing the Treaty of Cession, which is the
Purchase of Alaska, no Alaska Native nations were
being consulted nor were there forms of negotiation
with Alaska Native polities. So the land was acquired
wholesale, which is a pretty important point, because
now in Alaska, currently there are 229 federally
recognized tribes. That constitutes almost half of the
over 570 federally recognized tribes in the U.S. The
diversity of Alaska native tribes is huge: we have 20
distinct languages, Alaska is a huge landmass... And
because of that lack of negotiation with Alaska Na-
tive nations, lots of Native folks say that Alaska isn’t
actually U.S. land, because the land was never ceded.
The land was never transferred or purchased from
Alaska Native tribes themselves.
That specific history of the absence of treaties,
which means no treaty rights, and no negotiation
with specific distinct political entities of Alaska
Native peoples really goes on to shape Alaska Na-
tive politics throughout history, and definitely into
the contemporary moment. And going back to the
question of oil, the whole body of ANCSA, the way
that it took shape and pushed through as legisla-
tion quickly—it was settled under two years. There
was a sense of urgency given the discovery of oil
69
in Prudhoe Bay in 1968, in northern Alaska. This
discovery of oil was the backdrop in which ANCSA
was formulated, agreed upon, and quickly settled.
So I think that the presence of oil, in the obvious
ways that we think about oil development and its
relation to climate change, is certainly there. But
your homelands, and whatever you need for that
travel, access to your stories and your histories, to
your place names, to all of your fish and your ber-
LANDBACK is tied up
with having access to your
ries and your plants and all of that access without
oversight and without paperwork. So I think the
folks that are doing that kind of work, to me, means

language, cultural items,

there are all of these other sort of formative and what doing LANDBACK looks like. ■
influential ways that that oil has shaped Alaska
Native history and Alaska Native politics, historical- Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu [Eyak, Alaska Native]) is an

access to travel to your

ly, and in the form these politics take today. I think assistant professor in the Geography Department and
that specifically, in terms of the relationships to the American Indian Studies Program at the University of
industry, it is part of the fabric of life in Alaska, and Wisconsin-Madison. Her current book project Icy Matters:
it exists in a multiplicity of relationships, politically,

homelands, and whatever

Race, Indigeneity, and Coloniality in Ice-Geographies,
and in social relationships. And so I think it’s im- foregrounds an analysis of colonialism in relation to ice in
portant to stay attentive to how that works in a very Alaska and the Arctic. She serves on an all-Native women
fine grained way. advisory board for the Eyak Cultural Foundation, a non-profit

LL: What does LANDBACK look like in the context of Alaska

and neighboring Indigenous nations?
that organizes annual language and cultural revitalization
gatherings and directs a Cultural Mapping Project in their
homelands of Eyak, Alaska. She is also an editor at the journal
you need for that travel,
JRS: I think that my gut reaction to this question is
my feeling that there are many Alaska Native folks
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, and
was a University of California President’s Postdoc at UC Davis.
access to your stories and
your histories, to your place
back home who could probably and should proba-
bly answer it more easily and more appropriately
than I can or should as someone who doesn’t live in

names, to all of your fish

Alaska full year round. But of course, I think about
this question a lot. My political sensibilities have an
attachment, a responsibility, and an obligation to

and your berries and your

my homelands and my people. I talk to my brother
a lot about this question, because he is one of those
people who is working on the ground to think about
what LANDBACK and ocean looks like in practice.
My conversations with him informs my thoughts
and my answer to a large extent. plants and all of that access
I like to think about LANDBACK on
the scale of a day, or the scale of a
without oversight and
year, or the large scale of a lifetime,
and at the scale of a community.
without paperwork.
For me, LANDBACK looks like literal land back,
like in acres, for those of us who have been dis-
possessed, and continue to be dispossessed. But I
think it also means control and management over
industry, jobs, markets, housing, and resources, and
specifically an Indigenous management network of
those resources. So it’s about the literal land itself, Fig.1 La’ Glacier on Eyak land. / Photo by MNDA (2021).
but also a control over resources and the manage- Fig.2 Elizabeth Peratrovich Mural by Tlingit Athabascan artist Crystal Worl on the
ment of resources. In addition to that, it also looks walls of the Downtown Juneau Library Building in Alaska. / Photo by Shackpoet (2021).
Fig.3 Map of Alaskan languages by Léopold Lambert. All information comes from
like Native folks having complete and unfettered
the Alaska Native Languages Map by the Alaska Native Language Center, University
access to their homelands, to the management of of Alaska Fairbanks (2011). The interest of making a new map was to ensure that all
those lands. This is tied up with also having access information was legible in the magazine’s format, as well as to use a cartographic
to your language, cultural items, access to travel to projection centered on the North Pole, rather than the “usual” ones that tend to distort
Arctic territories.

70 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 71

 STONE MOTHER I.
I was born in the desert
learned to cherish water
TANAYA WINDER like it was created from tears.
I grew up hearing the legend, the lesson
of the Stone Mother who cried
enough cries to make an entire lake
from sadness. From her, we learned
what must be done and that the sacrifices
you make for your people are sacred.
We are all related
and sometimes it takes
a revolution to be awakened.
You see, the power of a single tear lies in the story.
It’s birthed from feeling and following
the pain as it echoes into the canyon of grieving.
It’s the path you stumble and walk
until you push and claw your way through to acceptance.
For us, stories have always been for lessons.
II.
I remember my grandmother was well versed in dirt,
the way the earth clung to her hands as if it were a
part of her.
We come from the earth. So she tended the seeds
as living beings, planted her garden full of foods
traditional to the land and handled them with care.
Every tree, plant, or rock has a spirit, she said “hear it.”
III.
I listen.
Our Mother Earth holds our histories in her dirt.
But today, she burns not in the traditional ways
once taught,
controlled and deliberate. Today she burns desperate,
for all to resist fossil fuels, the drilling, and the
black snake named
greed that swallows everything.
V.
When you lose something, you hope it will be found.
When something is stolen, you want it returned.
We’ve had our land stolen and we’re losing it again
unless we all take action for the climate to change.
VI.
Land back is a demand, a stand
against the Age of Exploration and Extraction,
a call for the Time of Reconciliation, the Now of Res-
toration
Land back is an understanding
that tomorrow isn’t promised, but today we can return
the power to the earth and her stewards.
And those who wish to stand with us
must take action beyond the performative
where Indigenous consulting isn’t just a costume of
free
and informed consent, where consulting with tribal
nations
isn’t just a box one checks without due diligence,
where co-management isn’t co-opted
just for the optics of equity, diversity, and justice.

When my mother says words are seeds and to be
careful
of the words you say, I pray. For I know each seed
carries a story.
My mother taught me that water is the source
of all living things and to honor life like the circle
we sit in for ceremony. From the doorway in
to the doorway out, life is about all our relations.
Stand with us as accomplices.
Follow our lead for we have always been well
versed in survival.
We were shaped by fire, made from lightning and
dirt-covered hands that know when to ignite healing.
Now is the time. Let us not drown in Mother Earth’s
tears.
Mother Earth has a spirit and she’s asking us to listen.

IV. Tanaya Winder is an author, singer/songwriter, poet, and

Lady of the Buffalo. / Artwork by Aly McKnight (2020), 9x12”, watercolor on paper.
Aly McKnight is a Native American female artist, enrolled member of the Shoshone-
Bannock Tribe. She grew up in a small farming community in Northern Nevada. Her
work emphasizes the beauty of her people and the land, as it is her goal to create art
that reclaims her people’s stories and influences the decolonization of their minds on
what is considered beautiful and valued.
Before I was born, they tried to silence us,
pierced our tongues with needles then taught
our then-girl-grandmothers how to sew like machines.
You see, colonialism has always been
about them not seeing us as human but as object,
a thing. Conquest meant they saw our bodies as land,
full of resources waiting to be extracted and exploited.
Our land was stolen.
Our language. Our grandmothers, grandfathers,
fathers, sisters, mothers, brothers, daughters, sons,
children, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, and ancestors.
motivational speaker. She comes from an intertribal lineage
of Southern Ute, Pyramid Lake Paiute, and Duckwater
Shoshone Nations where she is an enrolled citizen. Tanaya’s
performances and talks emphasize “heartwork”—the life path
one is meant to follow by using their gifts and passions. She
blends storytelling, singing, and spoken word to teach about
different expressions of love. Her specialties include youth
empowerment and healing trauma through art.

72 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 73

 LETTER TO OUR DAUGHTER
EMA YUIZARIX
WAI ARCHITECTURE THINK TANK
In this letter to their newborn child, whose name was chosen
as a map of her ancestral paths, Cruz Garcia and Nathalie
Frankowski unpack the many layers of settler colonial
domination over the lands she is from. They single out the
university, the prison, and the museum as three spatial
institutions that continuously strengthen the stronghold on
stolen land.
Our dear daughter Ema Yuizarix,
Throughout history, maps have served as abstrac-
tions of power relations over the land. Some maps
satisfy the narratives of leading ideologies, while
others mark routes of escape or resistance. Mean-
while, names are like maps—some names are more
like maps than others. Names can lead back to ideo-
logical power exerted by the occupier as well as the
struggles of the occupied. Like maps, names trace
narratives that tie us to the land, ideal or material.
Sometimes our names disguise histories of kidnap-
ping, capture, and predation. They erase our strug-
gles, our right to opacity, and homogenize us under
the leading ideology of the time. In other instances,
names render imaginaries of resistance, of utopi-
an ideals, of nostalgic returns to ancestral lands.
A name could be a hegemonic map, or, instead of
aligning with ideological power, it could be a route
to subversion, a treasure map to liberation.
We write this letter to you as a small narrative
about your name, the footprint of its origins, and
how it ties up with ideas about the land.
Land is used here not as the
geological layering of soil that
composes the surface of the earth,
but as a broader concept that
engages with the geopolitical and
ecological footprint of material
culture in the form of built and
destroyed environments.
74
This idea about land takes into consideration forces
of extraction, preservation, speculation, transforma-
tion, occupation, segregation, fragmentation, ecolo-
gy, territory, identity, colonization, and emancipation. 
EMA
Your name is a combination of two narratives of
resistance. The first, Ema, is short for emancipa-
tion (émancipation in French, emancipación in
Spanish and it works in different languages where
your family is from), but could have been liberation,
or ultimately abolition. In that regard, your name
wishes to raise a consciousness about the struggles
that unite oppressed people around the world. It
summons centuries-long fights against how lands
have been occupied, colonized, militarized, frag-
mented, fissured, drilled, extracted, commodified,
fetishized, and turned into touristic post-cards. Ema
Fig.1
also recalls the struggles for emancipation that have
been at the center of many stories that run through
the land where your ancestors lived. Your name in- ca—sold into bondage, and forced into labor. Indigenous expropriation and Black exploitation—
vokes many events, from the Scottish role in British Boriken, the land where your father was born, is into the norm, forming the base of cities, towns,
anti-slavery movements, the Irish fighting against the world’s oldest colony. Occupied since 1493, Puer- urban police-states, and vigilante suburbia. Out
British control, your Polish great-grandfather to Rico was a brutal site of extraction and abuse ad- of the rotten roots of white supremacist planning
accepting his new life in Scotland, where he ended ministered by Spain for 400 years, and for over 120 grow institutions and disciplines that, however
up with the military as Nazis occupied Poland while years, it has been a military, pharmaco-toxicologi- benevolent they may appear, serve the values of the
murdering and separating his family, the French cal, financial laboratory run by the United States. settler-colonial state. As both of us are professors,
violently ending monarchic rule and witnessing Like Puerto Rico, many parts of the world are only we would like to explain to you how the university
Caribbean revolutionaries fighting their grip on post-colonial in theory, as plantation economies have (as it will play an important role in your life) is part
their former colonies, to what we will focus this let- now expanded globally despite the apparent remov- of a system that—together with the prison and the
ter on: anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist struggles al of colonial occupying powers.  In fact, your name museum—stand at odds with the concept of emanci-
in the Americas.  recalls emancipation, not decolonization, because pation of the land, the body, and of historical narra-
the latter has become misconstrued and turned into tives respectively.
Emancipation in the Americas is needed since Euro- a metaphor for what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang
pean settler-colonizers landed in Quisqueya (what is (quoting the work of Janet Mawhinney) call “settler We work for Land Grant Universities (including in
now known as the Dominican Republic) in 1492, and moves to innocence” (2012). This aims to reconcile the first state whose legislature officially accepted
occupied Boriken (Puerto Rico) a year later, because settler futurity with the unwillingness to return the provisions of the Morrill Act in 1862), which are
they understood the land as a means to extract re- power, resources, and wealth that they have been in principle, public institutions (with the heinous
sources and accumulate wealth. This is the land that violently stealing. Decolonization has never hap- exception of a few private ones) that are only made
your ancestors took care of and produced delicious pened. Thus, the drive for emancipation remains possible through the robbery of Indigenous lands.
foods, spices, and shiny minerals from, that colo- imperative. With their original focus on settler-capitalist forms
nizers thought were more valuable than Black and of agricultural technology, Land Grant Universities
Indigenous life. Through many generations, your
family fought for emancipation because they were
The lands of which your ancestors were custodians,
like many others around the planet, were occupied,
exist via forced removal and violent dispossession of
Indigenous nations, similar to what happened to the
stolen from their land, first from the archipelagos exploited, and kept under siege by the invention of Taino or Carib, and continues to happen to millions
in the Caribbean, then from the west coast of Afri- laws that turned the blueprint of the plantation—of in Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 75
Your parents chose to work in public over private
universities, because they have the (unaccomplished)
mission to provide education to people that inhabit
these lands. This dream of a model for free and
accessible public education begins one of the steps
towards emancipation, and reparations for all that
has been broken, stolen, and destroyed.
However, just because they are Land Grant Uni-
versities, does not mean that they are the only
education institutions built on violently stolen land.
There’s another group of older, private, wealthy,
and powerful universities. Built by enslaved people’s
labor, many times from the same plantations where
these forced laborers built them (whose names we
don’t even get to know), these Universities includ-
ing those grouped as “Ivy League” are institutions
that continue to extract from communities they are
supposed to serve—through tax laws, gentrifying
real estate development, as well as benefiting from
the global effects of empire. With ballooning endow-
ments (sometimes bigger than the GDP of entire
countries), these universities profit from shady
investments that have and continue to support re-
source extraction, military interventions, apartheid
regimes in South Africa and Palestine to name a
few, and ironically, even the destruction of public
education in places like Puerto Rico by means of
vulture funds and colonial infrastructures of preda-
tory fiscal control. Although ideologically operating
in the abstract domain of finance, neoliberalism is
a physical obstacle for emancipation as it scavenges
the land. It rewards powerful, real-estate develop-
ing, wealth-accumulating universities, and threatens
to destroy public education institutions that could
serve the people.
As we hope you’ll discover, this world is shaped
by artificially created and enforced value-systems.
Public, land grant, and private universities around
the world, but particularly in the Americas and
the United States, are entangled in the problematic
legacy of “modernity” with its promises of progress,
development, social mobility, and enlightenment.
The incessant calls to modernize also mask the
antithetical heritage of primitive accumulation by
means of the consolidation of white supremacy, elit-
ism, class struggle, and asymmetrical accumulation
of land, resources, and therefore, wealth.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney argue in The
Undercommons (2013) that the university produces
“incarceration as the product of its negligence,”
making the university and the prison two heads of
the same modernist monster. These questions about
the university and the prison encapsulate two very
76
important contemporary issues about emancipation.
If the university creates an extractive and problem-
atic relationship with the land, the prison can be
said to pose a set of equally troubling challenges
concerning the body. As land is turned into capital
in the university, it is the body that is commodified
in the economy that supports the prison-industrial
complex. Just as the construction of—what Achille
Mbembe calls the “vertiginous assembly”—Black-
ness and race can be traced back to the transat-
lantic slave trade that forcibly brought 12.8 million
kidnapped Africans to the Americas, the prison
can be seen as the contemporary software upgrade
not only of the biotechnology of race, but also of
gender—trans activists have been fundamental in
revealing this. With its blueprint in the plantation
where millions of those kidnapped Africans (includ-
ing some of your ancestors) were forced to work,
the prison remains one of the ultimate deserving
targets of worldwide movements for abolition.
While we write these words to you from the comfort
that is provided to us by working for a university,
today the prison embodies one of the biggest obsta-
cles for human emancipation.
As designers and teachers, we
think of these two institutions—the
university and the prison—as part
of the colonial footprint of cities and
suburbia that are material displays of
ideology and wealth accumulation via
land occupation.
Your name acknowledges the problematic nature of
the legacy of settler-colonialism and the institutions
it generates, as we continue to wonder: what could
be a more sensible and emancipatory relationship
with the land? After all, isn’t emancipation funda-
mentally against wealth accumulation? Is there such
a thing as wealth accumulation without institutions
and buildings that enforce it by means of the spolia-
tion of the land? Can we imagine a world beyond the
ideological constraints of ownership (of bodies, land,
buildings, and infrastructure)? Can emancipation be
possible without acknowledging that land steward-
ship and custodianship—something that your ances-
tors in the Americas shared—are more honest and
sensible relationships than land ownership, since
we could never own the planet—because it has been
here long before the oldest of us even existed, and
will continue to be here long after we are gone?
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40
YUIZARIX
Yuizarix, your second name, is an afrotainofuturist
connection to the archipelago of Boriken. Yuiza, an
Arawak voice, was pronounced by the Tainos in
Puerto Rico, whose family lived across Quisqueya,
Ayiti (Haiti), Jamaica, Cuba, Florida, the Bahamas,
and many other islands in the Caribbean.
Like many of the landscape paintings that formed
the propaganda of “Manifest Destiny,” genocidal
expeditions that rendered the officially-sanctioned
myth of the disappearing Indian in the United
States, or in the many depictions of Indigenous
erasure by colonial painters in the Caribbean and
the rest of the Americas, Spanish records claimed
Tainos disappeared in the 1500s. But in reality,
they are us. More precisely, Taino, Yoruba, Igbo
(amongst all the symbols and candles, and avatars
that you would have found on your great grand-
mother’s altar), and the many nameless peoples that
were captured and brought into the plantations in
the Caribbean, live within the futurism of Yuizarix.
We tried to pack as much history in your name so
that you won’t have to rely on the faux tradition of
the still-life painting that exoticized your nature into
bounties of colonial expeditions, and the imperial
narratives that have misconstrued our past through
the fragments of stolen artifacts and contraband
that fill permanent collections of museums around
the world. Like the university and the prison, the
museum is another one of these modern institutions
that continuously forges the narratives of collective
memory from a dominant position of power.
We hope that your name prepares you for when
you walk into a museum and see fetishized pictures
of your family, your childhood toys, the spiritual
artifacts that your great-great-grandparents used
to pray to, and even their kitchen utensils, hunting,
and construction tools. In these museums you may
also find large paintings of landscapes that, while
familiar to you, have removed any evidence of your
relatives that used to share these views, trees, and
rivers.
Aware of the tricks performed, you will notice
how under the violently bucolic landscapes, white
squares document all sorts of heroic information
about the “authors” of these seductively fictitious
images. The labels will describe in great detail the
life and achievements of the artists and how they
“discovered” the “untamed wilderness,” while very
little will be said about the erasure of your civiliza-
tion, presenting your culture as a distant memory
of a fading past. The deeper you venture into the
THE LAND…
world of so-called “high culture,” the more you will
be confronted with familiar objects that have been
decontextualized and turned into “artistic” fetishes.
Deep inside, you will know that many of the labor-
ers and craftspeople who assembled these artifacts
would have never thought of them as artworks, and
even less as contraband commodities.
Like ideological maps, some of these museums in-
accurately repartition and retell geopolitical stories
of global domination. “American” wings, adjacent to
European clusters display mainstream icons of relig-
iosity and works of settlers pompously presented in
brightly lit rooms, tall pedestals, and within golden
frames. As you walk through, you will see fragments
of buildings, temples, and drawings brutally decon-
textualized and iconoclastically displayed. On the
other side of these museums (always on the “other”
side), spiritual avatars, hunting instruments, and cer-
emonial devices of your planetary neighbors and rel-
atives have been gathered together. Unlike in any of
the “Western” halls, the items in these rooms are not
assembled collectively because of geographic proxim-
ity, but rather by their imaginary distance from the
“enlightened” works of European and white Ameri-
cans. Very much like the programs and curriculums
of university that focus on Eurocentric canons, you
will wonder as you venture in this room if you are
still in the museum, or if you have been summoned
to the “sunken place” Jordan Peele rendered in his
film Get Out. In the darkness of these galleries, you
learn that wooden effigies of Black bodies, masks
shaped with the gold of Abya Yala, and the very
familiar Zemí trigonoliths (that you will know from
history books and the images your parents showed
you), have been gifted by the Rockefellers, the Fords,
and many other philanthrocapitalists who not only
have no Arawak, Yoruba, or Mayan roots, but have
amassed their wealth directly out of the erasure, and
spoliation of their land; your land. 
In one of these museums, you may see J. M. W.
Turner’s painting Slavers throwing overboard the
dead and the dying—Typhoon coming. We hope
that in addition to being disgusted by the (histori-
cally accurate) rendition of slaveowners throwing
Black slaves into the ocean, in order to claim the
insurance attached to their bodies as private prop-
erty; you will remember that the transaction that
allowed the Sturgis Hooper Lothrop family to sell
this painting to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,
financed the purchase of a sugar mill and planta-
tion in Salinas called Central Aguirre where racial-
ized Puerto Ricans worked under the brutal regime
of the plantation economy.
77
 leader that is the reason behind the name of the mu-
nicipality of Loiza), but also to the potentialities of
working today with the legacy of the Spanish-lan-
guage equivalent of the name, that is shared by a
most iconic Puerto Rico early 20th century feminist,
anti-capitalist utopian, and anarcho-syndicalist.
As well as being afrotainofuturist, the Yuiza in Yuiz-
arix is also the Luisa of the Loudreaders. Arrested
several times for wearing pants in public because
of restrictions on women’s clothing, Luisa Capetillo
wrote essays about feminist emancipation and free
love, as well as fiction about worker’s’ emancipation.
In her anti-capitalist utopias, workers would rob (re-
claim back from) banks and live happily ever after
in the Puerto Rican countryside, eating delicious
and nutritious locally grown vegetarian meals, and
displaying solidarity with workers of the world.
full of critical memories and hopeful visions of the
future, we wish that the afrotainofuturist emancipa-
tion in your name guides you in your worldmaking
journey. ■
WAI Architecture Think Tank is a planetary studio practicing
by questioning the political, historical, and material legacy and
imperatives of architecture and urbanism. Founded in Brussels
during the financial crisis of 2008 by Puerto Rican architect,
artist, curator, educator, author and theorist Cruz Garcia and
French architect, artist, curator, educator, author and poet
Nathalie Frankowski, WAI is one of their several platforms
of public engagement that include Beijing-based anti-profit
art space Intelligentsia Gallery, and the free and alternative
education platform and trade-school Loudreaders.

Capetillo understood the relationship

Fig.2
The combination of emancipation
and afrotainofuturism in your name
may help you decipher that what
is problematic about the art and
architecture that you may encounter,
is not only their ideological content,
but the invisible economies that fuel
and fund them, as well as how they
are always related to relationships to
the land and the body.  tified indigenous subject” Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
How could an artwork painted in London and sold
in Boston fund biopolitical regimes in Puerto Rico?
How can the Rockefellers, and the Fords, and Car-
negies, and Mellons “own” your history and possess
fragments of your life? You may remember that
these same benefactors, in addition to being former
proprietors of the pictures you had previously seen,
also claimed ownership over the landscapes they
depict before they became postcards memorializing
troubling accounts of white-washed history. These
“collectors’’ of your history continue to own large
swaths of the Earth, not only through the land they
occupy with their museums, real estate, mining
companies, banks, university buildings, private
prisons, but also through your land, back in the
colonized islands. An imaginary afrotainofuturist
emancipation will make you aware that it is through
extracting from these landscapes that allow them
to fund and run their museums full of objects that
they have stolen from your people, and the univer-
sity buildings that they have endowed where your
history continues to be perpetually distorted.  and workers of the land that had been oppressed
Bolivian philosopher and self-proclaimed “uniden-
shares with many Indigenous thinkers like Nick
Estes and the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the belief that
history, rather than being a linear sequence of
events, is a spiral that binds past and present to the
future. Like Taino petroglyph spirals, your name
coils to a hopeful future in direct opposition to a co-
lonial footprint that expands ad infinitum, leaving a
trail of ecological disarray. In this way, Yuiza is not
only connected to the past history of extraction and
colonization of Puerto Rico, or to a Cacica (a Taino
between land, sovereignty, gender,
emancipation, education, love, and
freedom, as she, in her role as a
loudreader in the tobacco factories,
organized strikes with tens of
thousands of workers who were
denied any other means of formal
education.
As loudreaders shared radical literature aloud for
workers during the entire workday, Capetillo found
inspiration in the communist writings of Fredrich
Engels and Karl Marx, and in the anarchist texts
of Mikhail Bakunin and Piotr Kropotkin. The
anti-capitalist imaginaries of her oral narratives
helped outline routes of resistance for former slaves
because of their social class, their gender, and the
color of their skin.
We hope that these names you bear connect you,
against all modern institutional odds, to the spiral
temporality of a past that has been erased, painted
over, fetishized, and commodified, as well as a
future that allows you to be a part of a planetary
network of solidarity. We wish that your name
allows you to establish a connection with struggles
of emancipation that seek the liberation of the land,
and those who, although denied from access to it, Fig.1 / Fig.2 / Fig.3 It’s the sight of the future spiraling in post-colonial rooms:
are their custodians and relatives. Like in a room A Triptych for Ema Yuizarix. / WAI Architecture Think Tank (2022).

78 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 79

 Fig.3

Fig.3

80 THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40 THE LAND… 81

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 Workplace is a collaboration between e-flux
Architecture and the CCA within the context of the
year-long research project Catching Up With Life.
Over the past five hundred years, two hundred
years, one hundred years, thirty years, ten years,
year, labour has changed. The way we work—the
things we do, the ways and places we do them,
who and what we do them with—has transformed.
In parallel, so has our understanding of the world,
of the city, of architecture, perhaps of life.
Workplace
cca.qc.ca/workplace
84
Edited by Nick Axel, Albert Ferré, Nikolaus Hirsch, Megan Marin.
Featuring contributions by FICTILIS, Kim Gurney, Nahyun
Hwang and David Eugin Moon, Alberte Lauridsen and Marianna
Janowicz, Samiha Meem, Migrant’s Bureau, Kelly Pendergrast,
Andreas Petrossiants, Arvand Pourabbasi and Golnar Abbasi,
Nick Srnicek and Helen Hester, Denisse Vega de Santiago, and
Dank Lloyd Wright.
Image: Alice Proujansky, 24-hour Daycare, 2018. © Alice Proujansky.
Graphic design by Folder Studio.
THE FUNAMBULIST — N°40