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Sinixt dispossession and a "caribou rainforest" (part 1 of 4): Extinction of mountain caribou in the contiguous US, timeline recap from 2018-2020

Newsletter

Sinixt dispossession and a "caribou rainforest" (part 1 of 4): Extinction of mountain caribou in the contiguous US, timeline recap from 2018-2020

Originally posted elsewhere 30 January 2019: A relict species of megafauna has barely held on to existence in the inland temperate rainforest region within borders of Washington, Idaho, and Montana. The “mountain caribou” or “southern mountain caribou” was the last native "reindeer” to live in the Lower 48 of

By iliana
A"grasshopper army," relief for the "(un)deserving poor," nationalist marketeering, and disaster in the Plains: implications of the Rocky Mountain locust swarm of 1874

Newsletter

A"grasshopper army," relief for the "(un)deserving poor," nationalist marketeering, and disaster in the Plains: implications of the Rocky Mountain locust swarm of 1874

(Public domain image of an illustration from 1875 by cartoonist Henry Worrall, provided by the Kansas Historical Society to Wikimedia Commons.) Just wanted to summarize takeaways from Alexandra Wagner’s work on implications of class; changing paradigms of poverty/disaster relief; nationalism in the marketing of frontier settlement; the curious

By iliana

Newsletter

Unruly shoreline ecologies, racialized imaginaries of "pestilent" swamps, and the (un)making of imperial borders in Bengal, Aotearoa, and Brazil

In December 1928, Benito Mussolini broke ground—quite literally—on a massive development project targeting the “death inducing swamps” of the Pontine Marshes, the substantial wetland region on Rome’s southern edges, which were to be remade into “New Town” settlements whose residents would model ideal standards of productivity. Having

By iliana

Newsletter

"Insuppressible alliances" (Part 3 of 3 - and a personal aside from me): Hostile architecture, haunting histories, and the utopian impulse amidst the abandonment (and care-taking) of the poor

I’m thinking about the things that you might encounter when taking a walk through a nondescript, “typical” urban environment—an Anywhere, USA-type small city. There’s a portion of paved bike-trail that runs parallel to a now defunct railway, portions of sidewalk running along defunct mid-century

By iliana