Shannon Francis (Hopi/Dineh)
Executive Director
Spirit of the Sun, Inc.

Lucy Molina
Environmental Justice Activist
Commerce City, CO

Ana Miller
Advocate/Organizer
Housekeys Action Network Denver (H.A.N.D) 

The Colorado Geographies event will feature a panel of community leaders, elders, and activists living, working, who express the everyday ways of enacting life affirming geographies in the here and now. Indigenous community leader, Shannon Francis brings a wealth of wisdom on the everyday care taking of elders, Native ecologies, and models for enacting youth education. Latine environmental justice leader, Lucy Molina brings decades of knowledge on enacting community environmental monitoring and organizing for ecological and racial justice. Ana Miller is an organizer with Housekeys Action Network, a collective of advocates for the unsheltered community. Ana brings a decade of experience in advocating for the needs and desires of the unsheltered community. The culmination of these speakers expresses the multiple ways Colorado communities are already enacting life affirming geographies.

Panelist Bios:

Shannon Francis

Shannon Francis, is Hopi and Dineh from the Southwest homelands of Arizona and New Mexico. She is from the Towering House clan born for Red Running into the Water clan. Her Hopi clans are Massau', Bear, Sand, and Snake Clan. Shannon comes from twelve generations of farmers, ethnobotanists, and seed keepers. As a certified Permaculture Designer and Instructor, Shannon weaves TEK Traditional Ecological Knowledge with innovative science. She loves to educate on caretaking of land, water, and soil resources; preserving Native heirloom GMO-free seeds, zero-waste philosophy, and how to live more harmoniously with nature. Shannon is the Executive Director for Spirit of the Sun, Inc. in Denver. Shannon served on the Four Winds council as Board Chair and continues to serve on the Leadership council for American Indian Movement of Colorado (AIM). Shannon is currently a 2023 Livingston Fellow through Bonfils Stanton Foundation. Spirit of the Sun received the 2020 Human Rights Award from Youth Celebrate Diversity. Shannon received the Justin B. Willie humanitarian award (2014) on the Navajo Nation as well as the Cesar E. Chavez female leadership award (2015) for her work with Indigenous, food justice, and community building projects. Shannon has six wonderful children and four amazing grandchildren that are her inspiration to make this a better world for all future generations to come.

Lucy Molina

Lucy Molina is a dedicated environmental justice activist from Commerce City, CO, renowned for her tireless efforts in advocating for cleaner air and healthier living conditions in her community. As a prominent figure in the fight against environmental racism, Lucy has been a pivotal voice in highlighting the disproportionate impact of industrial pollution on marginalized communities. Her activism gained widespread recognition with her compelling appearance in the film A Good Neighbor, where she passionately shared the stories and struggles of her community.

In addition to her role in the documentary, Lucy has been featured on PBS and various local and international news outlets, amplifying her message and reaching a broader audience. Her work has earned her significant accolades, including recognition from environmental organizations and community awards for her unwavering commitment to justice and equity.

Lucy's passion for her community is evident in every endeavor she undertakes. She has organized numerous rallies, community meetings, and educational campaigns to raise awareness and drive change. Her relentless advocacy has not only brought attention to the environmental challenges faced by Commerce City but has also inspired many to join the fight for a cleaner, healthier future.

Ana Miller

Ana-Lilith Miller (she/her šŸ³ļøā€āš§ļø). Ana is a 43 year old trans woman with 12 years experience living on the streets. She is an advocate/organizer with Housekeys Action Network Denver (H.A.N.D.) coming up on 3 years with them. We are a houseless rights group that advocates with the houseless community to give them a voice in their treatment. She believes that "Housing Is a Human Right For All", and that the best way to achieve systemic change is by uplifting the voices of the houseless themselves. 

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Cindi Katz
Professor of Geography, Womenā€™s and Gender Studies, and American Studies
Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Abstract:

Practicing hope keeps the possibility of change aliveā€”a methodology against fear in dismal times. And while the dismal touches all too many places in multiple registers these days, countertopography is a way of marking the common effects of, and responses to, large-scale processes in disparate locations. Drawing out the common grounds and entanglements of such shifts as global economic restructuring, deskilling, state violence, or dispossession as they play out in distinct and dissimilar places offers a new geographical imagination for political organizing and action. Its ā€˜contour linesā€™ intended to incite new political imaginaries and spur alternative geographies of action and activism, potential spaces of hope in an expanded field. In this talk I will look at some of the experiences, practices, and challenges of grassroots organizations negotiating complicated place-based struggles while simultaneously engaging their translocal aspirations as critical to understand in building social movements at once global and intimate, sustainable and targeted, grounded and boundary crossing. Their actions create contour lines for practice and trace topographies of hope at different times and places making the imagined possible despite the dangers and displacements associated with the mobilities of capital accumulation, racialized state violence, and neoliberal land grabs.

Speaker Bio:

Cindi Katz is Professor of Geography, Womenā€™s and Gender Studies, and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research concerns social reproduction, the production of nature, the workings of the security state in everyday environments, the privatization of the public environment, the cultural politics of childhood, and the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination. She has published widely on these themes as well as on social theory and the politics of knowledge. She is the author of Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Childrenā€™s Everyday Lives (2004) which won the American Association of Geographers Meridian Book Award for the Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography. She is the editor (with Janice Monk) of Full Circles: Geographies of Gender over the Life Course (1993), Lifeā€™s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction (with Sallie Marston and Katharyne Mitchell) (2004), and The People, Place, and Space Reader (with Jen Jack Gieseking, William Mangold, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert) (2014). The 2024 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Honor and the 2021 recipient of Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the AAG, Katz held a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2003-4), and the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professorship in Gender Studies at Cambridge University (2011-12). She is working on two book projects: Childhood as Spectacle and a collection of her writings on social reproduction tentatively titled Vagabond Capitalism: Social Reproduction in Crisis.

Want to know more about the bond between people and place?

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Aaron Strain 
Professor and Baker Ferguson Chair of Politics 
Whitman College 

Abstract: 

Dreams of "unf**king the planet" and "saving the world" with massive seaweed-based carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects exploded into prominence during the past seven years. The "Seaweed Revolution" quickly became a darling of the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, liberal media outlets, and a wide array of geoengineering, marine permaculture, and green start-up gurus. The movement capitalized on seaweed's charisma and a really good story: Seaweeds, the narrative ran, are the "rainforest of the ocean," "carbon-sucking sea trees." Even as start-ups and investors rushed forward with multi-million-dollar projects backed by this brilliant story, there was a sense that the science didn't add up and the analogy didn't work. Only a few years after the boom began, seaweed CDR now faces significant scientific challenges--and deep investor skepticism (particularly after the dramatic failure of the industry's most prominent start-up). Examining the wild ride of seaweed CDR, this talk goes beyond technical debates about the effectiveness of seaweed carbon projects to show how the cultural practices of "start-up culture" scupper real climate solutions. It ends by looking at two seaweed CDR start-ups that are trying to do things differently and suggests that "doing fine" might be better than "saving the world." 

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Dr. Robin Roth 
Professor of Geography 
University of Guelph 

Abstract: 

The Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership is a Canada-wide network of Indigenous thought leaders, scholars, conservation organizations, Indigenous governments, and conservation practitioners united in their commitment to supporting the establishment of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas and the transformation of existing protected areas. This presentation will discuss the work of the partnership as applied political ecology. I will discuss how key tenants of political ecology - 1) power is relational and multi-scalar, 2) the social and natural are co-constituted, 3) accepted categories of modernity need to be destabilized, and 4) transformational change is needed- are activated in the work of the partnership and, by extension, the work of decolonizing conservation. 

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Dr. AĆ­da Guhlincozzi 
Assistant Professor of Geography 
University of Missouri 

Abstract: 

This presentation covers the recent work in health geography focused on vulnerable populations by Dr. AĆ­da Guhlincozzi and colleagues. Specifically, this will cover the ongoing movement of the field in a direction of better encapsulating the needs of communities and populations previously overlooked and underserved by U.S. healthcare systems. This talk includes recently published results on Latina womenā€™s healthcare access, discussions of race and ethnicity in the Latine community, and critical disability geography work regarding Autism and healthcare access. A key intervention recommended includes a brief discussion of the value of community geographic theoretical frameworks and methods.

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Dr. Clancy Wilcott 
Assistant Professor 
University of California, Berkeley 

Abstract: 

This talk discusses a series of critical cartographic interventions undertaken in collaboration between local Indigenous, activist and community groups, and studio.geo?, a cartographic research and teaching studio based at UC Berkeley. It centers on Before You Are Here, one of a series of ongoing collaborative research projects making maps with the Sogorea Teā€™ Land Trust (STLT) an Indigenous, Urban, Women-Led organization seeking to rematriate the land in East Bay, California. This series of works reimagines cartography, a historically colonial tool of territorialization, for telling stories of Indigeneity, sovereignty and multiplicity in Sogorea Teā€™s view of the Ohlone Bay Area. Together, we asked: what would it mean to decolonise at the level of the fundamentals of cartography itself and produce a map that depicts a cosmography, rather than a cartography, a living world rather than abstracted data, a map that wrenches open notions of universality and standardization to represent the landscape of the Bay as a series of seasonal space-times through which communities of people live and move, a space uncomputable rather than a fixed fact: an ā€œIndigenous depth of placeā€ (Pierce and Louis, 2007)?

Speaker Bio:

Clancy Wilmott (PhD) is Assistant Professor of Critical Cartography, Geovisualization and Design in the Department of Geography and the Berkeley Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on intricacies of power inherent in spatial representations, including mapping, cartography and GIS from an anti-colonial perspective.

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Abstract:

In this presentation, I analyze the Piikani Nationā€™s attempts to halt the construction of the Oldman River Dam, as this struggle highlights the challenges Indigenous communities can face in attempting to assert our own forms of jurisdiction within the confines of Canadian law. Completed in 1991, the Dam faced multiple forms of opposition by Piikani members, including lawsuits, interventions within the Federal Environmental Review Process, and an attempt by community activists to divert the river around an existing irrigation weir. For this presentation, I focus on the Piikani water rights case, wherein the Piikani Nation attempted to creatively draw from the US Winters Doctrine as a means to establish a legal claim to the Oldman River rooted in treaty rights.

This presentation draws from my current research on Piikani/Blackfoot water relationships, which seeks to answer: how are Indigenous forms of jurisdiction enacted within and beyond reserve boundaries? And how do they articulate with Canadian legal systems, such as the reserve and band council systems? To answer these questions, I draw from both critical political economy and Indigenous legal scholarship, as I argue that in struggles against the capitalist reterritorialization of Indigenous places, it is through the assertions of competing legal jurisdictions that these struggles tend to find their most profound expression. Here, I draw from, and extend, the Marxian concept of articulation, suggesting this concept might be a generative reframing ā€˜legal pluralismā€™ frameworks that are often used by scholars to examine how Indigenous legal orders interact with settler law.

Bio:

Michael Fabris (he/they) is a Blackfoot scholar and Assistant Professor in the UBC Department of Geography. His current research focuses on Piikani challenges to the construction of the Oldman River Dam, Piikani water rights, and articulations between Indigenous and settler forms of law.

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Huatsen Gyal
Assistant Professor
Anthropology Department
Rice University 

Abstract

Drawing on a group of Tibetan pastoralistsā€™ efforts to make environmental documentary films as a means of creating alternative narratives of their relationship to their ancestral land, this talk details how documentary films produced by Tibetan pastoralists subtly challenge the power/knowledge structures and discourses through which they have been framed and known. The aim of this talk is to present how documentary filmmaking can serve as sites of theoretical production, decolonizing learning, and as well as community restoration efforts by blurring the conventional boundaries between theory vs. practice, analysts vs. informants, text-based scholarship vs. multimodal forms of knowledge production. In doing so, the talk crafts a larger argument about how ethnographic attention to different modes of knowledge production may offer us opportunities to participate in a process of collaborative theorization, where our interlocutors are not just information providers, but also analytical agents, knowledge producers, or image-makers alongside us.

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Dr. Cypri Jehan Paju Dale
Research Fellow
University of Wisconsin Madison

Abstract

In Komodo National Park, the natural habitat of worldā€™s largest living lizard known as Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) and the indigenous people of Ata Modo, a zoning system has been instrumental in the process of commodification of the dragon and the transformation of its habitat into  an ecotourism frontier. This talk draws upon an ethnographic and historical analysis of the two large scale ecotourism projects administered by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Indonesian government  in the park in the last 30 years: first, to analyze the mobilization of a zoning system as a tool of control over the protected area and its inhabitants in order to ease the capitalist expansion to the indigenous and multispecies territory and second, to elucidate the articulation of Indigenous spatial politics that relies on the revitalization of multispecies kinship relationship with the Komodo dragons to contest the exclusionary nature of the new tourism industry. While the zoning systemā€”and indeed the whole logic of conservation and ecotourismā€” is based on the modernist separation and hierarchy between human and nature, indigenous spatial politics relies on the intimate relationship with the dragon, perceived in  the indigenous cosmology as twins of the human that were born from the same mother and share the same living space on the islands. The presentation wishes to contribute to the conversation on the political ecology of ecotourism by highlighting ecotourism both as a discourse and policy regime that merge conservation and economic development and its entanglement with spatial politics as a process of negotiating social and environmental relationships in the increasingly disruptive capitalist world.

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Isaac Rivera
Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Geography
ĆŪĢŅ“«Ć½ĘĘ½ā°ęĻĀŌŲ

Abstract

Insurgent cartographies are an expression of knowing the world from the standpoint of place. This talk delves into the concept of insurgency and its expressions as a modality of cartography and cultural memory, exploring the task for enacting anti-colonial pedagogies oriented towards liberatory geographies. This study begins through geo-historical analysis of the making and abolition of Columbus Day as a state holiday in its place of origin in Denver, Colorado, underscoring the coalitional capacities of Indigenous world-making practices that envisioned the undoing of the colonial celebration and its maintenance on geographical imaginaries. Using the (Re)Mapping Native Denver art exhibit as a case study in the making of Native counter-cartographies, a study on Native Denverā€™s ongoing efforts for institutional accountability, I show the radical possibilities of enacting insurgent cartographies from within the colonial University. I will conclude with a discussion on bridging the geo-humanities and geo-social sciences, acknowledging the necessity of both to realize liberatory futures. The insurgent cartographies enacted in the (Re)Mapping Native Denver art exhibit demonstrate the ongoing ways in which Indigenous movements choose to tell their stories of resistance and resurgence, reorienting geographical information systems (GIS) and the art of geography itself.

Bio

Dr. Rivera is a Chancellorā€™s Postdoctoral Fellow for Faculty Diversity with the CU Geography Department.

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