The College Hill Independent Vol. 33 Issue 3

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY SEPT 30 2016

33

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THE

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 33 / NUMBER 03 SEPT 30 2016

INDY COVER

Untitled Amy Chen

NEWS 02

Week in Review Jack Brook, Kelton Ellis, and Andrew Deck

09

Pipe-Lineage Camila Ruiz Segovia FROM THE EDITORS

METRO 03

Ask a Punk Will Weatherly

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Highway Robbery Jane Argodale

ARTS 07

11 FEATURES

Between Words Saanya Jain

A day has so much potential for movement. A day giveth and a day taketh away. On September 30, this last day of the harvest month, the day taketh James Dean as it giveth T-Pain; it giveth Ezra Miller as it taketh Robert Kardashian. Henry IV was crowned King of England on this day in 1399, bringing with him a whole new dynasty! Make your own tiny waves.

Do something spontaneous and radical, like registering to vote, or getting your flu shots, or just reading our li’l ol’ weekly.

Welcome back. We love you so much.

Heard Of Tatiana Dubin

13

Moomin' On Up Georgia Wright

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Joan-y Mitchell Raphaela Posner

— KE

OCCULT 06

SCIENCE 16

MANAGING EDITORS

God Made Me Here Athena Washburn and Eli Neuman-Hammond

Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs NEWS

Scenes from the Anthropocene Fatima Husain

Camila Ruiz Segovia Shane Potts Liz Cory METRO

LITERARY 17

Sweet Milk and Cinnamon Micaela Burgess

EPHEMERA 13

Ask a Hunk ;) Gino Tavlino

X 18

Jane Argodale Will Weatherly Marianna McMurdock ARTS

Will Tavlin Ryan Rosenberg Kelton Ellis FEATURES

Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick Dolma Ombadykow

X

DESIGN & LAYOUT

Liby Hays Nicole Cochary

Celeste Matsui Meryl Charleston Andrew Linder

Stefania Gomez EPHEMERA

LIST

Malcolm Drenttel Alec Mapes-Frances

WEB MANAGER

COVER

BUSINESS MANAGER

Amy Chen

Dolma Ombadykow

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

SENIOR EDITOR

Gabriel Matesanz

Alec Mapes-Frances

STAFF WRITERS

The College Hill Independent — P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912

Jonah Max

Hannah Maier-Katkin Corey Hébert Kim Meilun Jack Brook Eve Zelickson Saanya Jain Anna Hundert Andrew Deck Signe Swanson Josh Kurtz Raina Wellman

OCCULT

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS

METABOLICS

Hot Glasses Anna Bonesteel

Patrick McMenamin Mark Benz

Yuko Okabe Ivan Rios-Fetchko Maria Cano-Flavia Daniel Chimes My Tran Bryn Brunnstrom

LITERARY

Sam Samore Isabelle Doyle SCIENCE

Fatima Husain TECH

Sophia Washburn

Frans van Hoek Teri Minogue

Charlie Windolf

Letters to the editor are welcome. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

WEEK IN ANIMAL CONTROL

BY Jack

Brook, Kelton Ellis, and Andrew Deck Mileaf-Patel

ILLUSTRATION BY Pia

POLYESTER FUNK

FELINE FREE WILL The residents of Kenai, Alaska, have made the irreparable mistake of confusing cats with dogs. Let us reflect on this for a moment.

A dog is stupid. A dog slobbers. A dog has the attention span of a three-year-old. It will chase a ball that is thrown or, more embarrassingly, its own tail.

Worse, it may even hump your leg.

A cat is smart. A cat does not slobber, it purrs.

A cat is always immaculate, meticulous, poised. If a cat were a person, it would be invited to exclusive cocktail parties and salons.

And yet, it is the latter, not the former, that the city of Kenai may require to wear leashes. A radical new ordinance currently being debated by the Kenai City Council would force all members of the feline species to undergo some method of “restraint” at all times, chiefly in the form of a leash.

In an exclusive interview, Kenai Mayor Pat Porter told the College Hill Independent that the motivation for the ordinance comes from an influx of complaints, specifically from a certain neighborhood where upwards of 20 cats have been reported by residents. (Perhaps the residents should have appreciated that so many whiskered individuals deemed the neighborhood worthy enough to grace with their presence).

When pressed about whether she has ever actually owned a cat herself, the mayor allowed that she once had.

“His name was Cinder, because he was black,” she said. “He was never allowed outside, and as a responsible pet owner I don’t think they should be; it’s like with horses and dogs, if you do take them out, you need to have a restraint.”

She added, in a sweet grandmotherly voice that betrayed no signs of sadistic tendencies, that she had had Cinder declawed.

In an opinion piece published in the Kenai Peninsula Clarion, a so-called veterinary expert noted that “allowing cats to roam outside can be ‘inherently dangerous’.”

He continued: “For those who want to enrich their cats’ lives with the outdoors…cats can be taught to accept a harness and leash for a supervised walk, just like dogs… On the first few walks it is common for a cat to just want to lie in the grass or sniff the breeze, but as the cat gets more used to the idea it will gradually begin to explore and ‘true’ walks can begin. On the first walks, keep things brief, positive, and try to end the experience on a good note.”

While it is not traditionally the role of the news to bring in the opinions of the reporter, under certain extraordinary cases, such as the one set before us, objectivity must yield to...dogma. Thus, some would argue that this proposed ordinance violates the entire essence of felinity, a grotesque cat-stration of the species in its purest sense. One doesn’t have to be a libertarian to believe, to a certain degree, in the right of free will and a command of one’s own autonomy, and what creature on this planet exudes more claim to acting on its own free will than the cat? To roam the streets of suburbia like wild bison once roamed the Great Plains, to defecate wherever one pleases and to gaze down patronizingly on passerby from whatever vantage point so suits them: these are but of a few of the dignities that constitute the expressions of feline free will. Putting it in terms that may cut through to even those with the dimmest of wits, to make a cat wear a leash is akin to forcing Coltrane to perform on the kazoo or lobotomizing Einstein; it is, quite simply, applying a limit to greatness, an impediment to perfection.

Yet, regrettably, there are those selfish enough to want to infringe upon the expressions of these feline liberties, simply out of spite.

“Twice I have accidentally stuck my fingers in cat poop while trying to weed my flower garden, and I had to start trapping them after that,” wrote one misguided councilwoman, a leash advocate, who has, it would seem, never experienced the visceral joy of watching a kitten video in her life.

Nevertheless, the ACL-Mew seems unconcerned with the possibility of a restrictive ordinance and a potentially devastating repeal of a civil liberty that cats of all creeds have enjoyed for near millennia. When asked to provide a comment on the proposed ordinance, an ACL-Mew spokes-cat merely twitched its tail, murmured a dismissive “meow” and licked its private parts.

-JB

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The storied halls of Harvard University were filled with Nobel laureates last Thursday evening. They came from across the globe to present the Ig Nobel Awards, an annual celebration of scientific absurdity and the unofficial epicenter of scientific nerd-dom. The Annals of Improbable Research hosted the event, which featured the tagline “Achievements that make you LAUGH, then THINK” (emphasis not my own).

Past winners include a man who built prosthetic legs and attachable horns to live among a herd of goats (yes, he did eat grass). A team of linguists who proved the expression “huh?” exists in every known language. And a physicist who put to rest the question of why pregnant women don’t tip over. This year’s winner: a rat wearing polyester pants.

Well, kind of. The recipient of the 2016 Ig Nobel Biology Award was the late Ahmed Shafik, an Egyptian urologist and sexologist who researched the effect of different pants materials on the sex lives of rats. Polyester, cotton, and wool were in the mix.

In the Cairo University study, over a year-long period, 75 rats were outfitted with their respective trouser textile. Unfortunately, images of the rat pants are not included in the paper’s figures. However, there is, in fact, a tail hole.

Shafik then measured the rats’ rate of intromission to mounting. We’ll leave the specifics of that unit of measurement ambiguous, but let’s just say the rats that wore polyester pants had less sex and rats wearing other materials had an insignificant sexual response. Shafik conducted similar research on dog pants and human pants, with the bulk of his research completed in the early 1990s.

The reason Ig Nobel chose 2016 as the year to honor the late, great Shafik was because his work began a discussion about the harmful electrostatic field created around genitals by polyester material, which many argue lowers sperm counts. While the field is still contested, in an era where casual radiation is on the rise (think cellphones in pockets and laptops on laps), every sperm counts.

-AD

DOGGED LOVE Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

11-year old Apollo, of Jacksonville, Florida, would beg to differ. And also probably for a treat, after more than six weeks without his beloved peanut butter Buddy Biscuits®.

Apollo escaped his enclosure by mysterious means on August 11. The ruffled Great Pyrenees pup was being true to his lofty origins when he left his backyard in the low-lying wetlands of Florida and bounded up through Georgia for the Appalachian Mountains. When asked why he did it, he merely gazed at the interviewer before going back

into his dog-bed for a nap. But this writer thinks Apollo was merely fulfilling his obligations to his pedigree’s instincts before it’s too late. A Great Pyrenees’ typical lifespan is 10 or 11 years, and dogs have bucket lists, too. Besides, a little vacay to run up the eastern seaboard is a swell way to get some respite from Jacksonville’s swampy heat, for which painting is hardly any remedy.

Owner Cynthia Abercrombie got a call on September 8 about her missing companion, who she’d kept since he was a wee six months old. As she thought she’d never see him again, she was happy to hear that her dear Apollo had been found by a woman named Lisa White.

Until she realized Lisa White was an animal control officer in Swansea, Massachusetts. Abercrombie then felt like she’d gotten a second confirmation that she’d never see Apollo again.

But White, a dedicated animal controller, coordinated a two-dozen-driver rescue relay with the help of East Coast Paws, a volunteer animal transport service, to get Apollo and his paws back down the east coast. He got home late at night on September 23, wearied from two weeks of car rides and several nights in strangers’ homes. Abercrombie was at a loss for how Apollo made it all the way to New England, speculating that someone must have stolen the dog. However, I really have to wonder why anyone would steal a breed with such a poor temperament (my best friend in high school got his hand chomped by a Great Pyrenees!) and one that’s 11 years old, at that. Abercrombie is happy to have her best friend back. For his part, Apollo seems content to join thousands of other seniors who have retired to sunny Florida. When the Independent asked for comment on his thousand-mile romp, he had only to say, “Rough, rough.”

-KE

NEWS

02

PIT FIGHT Making safer spaces in Providence punk and hardcore Will Weatherly ILLUSTRATION BY Angela Hsieh BY

The first Providence punk show I ever attended was a concert at AS220 last fall featuring Downtown Boys—a punk band whose music often promotes radical politics and centers its members’ identities as people of color. About halfway through the show, frontwoman Victoria Ruiz offered an invitation: women who wanted to be up front, without being pushed around, were welcome to join the band onstage. I looked up over the burly arms of many large, sweat-drenched male moshers and saw Ruiz pull the women up by the arms, stationing them right next to her as she screamed out her next furious lines. Ruiz was making a statement in line with the band’s anti-misogynist politics: the women the band valorizes in its music were now a part of the band’s stage presence.

I’ve attended more punk shows in Providence since then, but none have so actively aligned a radical, often political spirit of Downtown Boys’ brand of punk with the structure of the show space itself. Punk music is difficult to categorize, but as a broad genre, the movement finds definition in its rejection of musical norms and its oppositional political practices. While American interventionism and expanding police influence in the 70s and 80s highlighted US state power, punks during that time wanted their music to be uncontrollable; riot grrrl sought, in the 90s, to offer assertive representation to women of varying identities in its incorporation of third-wave feminism.

Many of the markers of these earlier versions of punk are still visible in Providence. Moshing, which originated in Orange County in the early 80s, often dominates the dancing at shows. Providence’s many DIY spaces carry a flame from the city’s grassroots rock heyday in the mid-90s, when warehouses like Olneyville’s Fort Thunder served as a petri dish for the city’s brand of punk.

While some of the elements of the Providence punk scene were once seen as progressive, they’re regular occurrences at some venues now. Moshing, once seen as a restructuring of the dancefloor as a combined outlet of aggression and intimacy, can be a weekly activity for the (often able-bodied, white, and male) inclined. The aggression involved also points to a kind of homogeneity: a population whose experiences of physical violence can be enjoyable, or at least limited to the dance floor.

Spark City, a DIY venue founded and operated

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by some of the members of Downtown Boys, was a leader in promoting a diverse lineup, and repeatedly hosted nights centered around queer artists and fans; they were evicted in February of this year, marking the loss of one of Providence’s most progressively-minded music spaces. Its absence marks an opportunity for other venues to invite the diverse audience Spark City once served.

Ruiz’s privileging of female show-goers presented a strong example of how venue space can be structured progressively and inclusively. By reinforcing the band’s politics, she was also offering a response to one of the scene’s most pressing concerns: how does Providence punk create safer spaces in a genre and experience defined by aggression itself?

with the people who are playing the music, and you monitor who is coming through the door, and their attitude.” Machines with Magnets does this by using the venue’s obscurity to its advantage: they avoid booking acts that are so large that the people gathering to enjoy the music don’t know each other, and Machines has yet to utilize its building’s front entrance, instead forcing fans to discover the space through the back door. “I will say that we’re looking to use the front entrance again in the next year,” McVay says, “and [questions of safety] are important considerations when that happens. There’s the possibility that [Machines'] bubble could be burst.”

+++

The problem often prompts differing approaches—not least because the term “safe space” itself warrants different definitions for different parties. A safe space can aim for a broad range of goals, from the most basic precautions against assault to more nuanced protections of individual expression.

For AS220 Live Arts Director Jacob Nathan, AS220’s role in creating a safe space at its shows lies somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. The organization’s approach seems largely based on an organically developing relationship between audience, artist, and institution. Unlike other venues, they have no security team, relying instead on an implicit reciprocity between the space’s disparate parties. “We have developed a culture where we respect our audience and performers,” Nathan says, “and in turn they respect our spaces and organization.” This means that the cultural expectations against harassment are abided by through a self-regulating community. The freedom of the space is one of AS220’s draws for more aggressive acts—its booking is unjuried and uncensored—but Nathan sees this freedom as inspiring its own community regulation, rather than enabling harassment to occur unchecked.

Machines with Magnets, a Pawtucket-area venue, operates upon a similar principle, but with an even more intimate scope. “The general attitude of the staff is going to create a space—whatever that space is going to be,” the venue’s creative director, Michael McVay, told me. “You create a relationship

Joey DeFrancesco, Downtown Boys’ lead guitarist and co-founder of Spark City, told me that a music scene’s bubbles, like the one at Machines, might actually limit a space’s claim to safety by limiting who can feel included in its insularity. “I think within the punk world especially, the emphasis on secrecy and keeping it tiny and exclusive definitely gets to be detrimental to the art form, and detrimental to the form as a means of social change,” he told me in a phone interview. “How are [people who are traditionally excluded] going to feel safe about entering [spaces] and joining this community?”

In his work with Downtown Boys and Spark City, DeFrancesco has developed a philosophy of foregrounding traditionally marginalized identities.

In this, he diverges from the idea that punk communities could supersede barriers of race, class, and gender identity purely through being close-knit. “I think that show spaces, as much as we tend to focus on them, are going to be a reflection of the broader world,” he says. But like McVay and Nathan, he does see punk shows as an opportunity to take intentional safety measures. With a smaller space comes more opportunities for direct intervention, and more close-up oversight of how a show is going throughout a night. Downtown Boys’ frontwoman Ruiz, in addition to lifting women on stage, will designate spaces on the dance floor for opting in or out of moshing. “Even before and after the performance,” he says, “talking to people foreign to Providence… and giving them some point of contact in that space is a hugely important thing.”

Part of the work, he stresses, is making sure

+++

SEPTEMBER 30, 2016

that a diverse group of people is present in the space to begin with. The onus can be equally on the bookers and the artists, and diverse booking was central to the existence of Spark City; now that the venue is gone, it’s up to extant venues to promote diversity within the music scene they represent. “I feel like the music in the city has moved in a good direction,” DeFrancesco said. “Of course, there’s that heyday that people like to think about in Providence, when there were all those mill spaces and Fort Thunder, and you look at that and you’re like, ‘they’re cool and I like so many of those bands, but then you know, this really is heavily dominated (at least with what gets memorialized) with straight white guys…. I feel like there’s an opening and bands coming up now that have people in them that weren’t being represented in that old music scene; there’s so many more acts that represent what the city actually looks like.”

One such up-and-coming act is Lovesick, a punk band consisting entirely of men of color. In an email, bassist and guitarist Nathan Phrathep told me he was thankful that he sees people of color attending Lovesick’s shows in what is otherwise often a whitewashed scene.“There have been times where we’ve gotten weird looks and people not believing we’re Lovesick,” he said, “and we believe that had to do with the fact we look different than the typical rock band.” He wanted to stress, however, that not all spaces he plays in have been homogeneous, and that Providence has treated Lovesick well. “We wouldn't have had as much traction as we do it if wasn’t for Providence.”

Shannon Le Corre, a local guitarist and singer in the folk-doom band Bloodpheasant and the all-female grunge band Gertrude Atherton, says that hardcore spaces can often push female artists and fans to the margins. “At some point, I realized that in the music business, guys take up a lot of space,” she told me.

She has fought hard for respect—harder, she says, than many men in the same field—and has become a better guitarist for it. She resents the fact that, in the “pissing contest” of hardcore music, her acceptance is dependent on being able to play better than many of her male peers. “There’s not a lot of people going into music with the view that we still experience the power dynamics of the outside world, even though we’re

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

playing punk music. In some ways those dynamics are there, and they become subtler.”

Part of the solution, she says, is combining the intimacy of DIY spaces with non-male and minority visibility. Even when all-male bands represent seemingly progressive attitudes, the homogeneity of representation can often stall efforts for more inclusion and safety based around non-white-male experiences. “They see themselves represented, so why would they care?” Le Corre sighs. “[The impetus for change] gets put on minorities of all sorts, which is frustrating, but how are we going to get a bunch of white guys to create safer spaces without actually taking up those spaces themselves?” +++ A few weeks after my first Downtown Boys show, I attended the Ladies Rock Camp showcase at Aurora, which provided an unexpected, yet powerful response to that question. The showcase was organized by Girls Rock! Rhode Island, an institution that provides camp programming for female-identifying adolescents and adults, with the aim to use “music creation and critical

thinking to foster empowerment, collaborative relationships, and the development of healthy identities in girls and women.”

The showcase was the culmination of a three-daylong music and mentoring program, in which adult women with little-to-no musical experience formed bands, learned instruments, wrote and performed songs over the course of a weekend. People of all ages, many of them older women, milled about without the relative unease that comes from the culture of moshing. Nowhere was there a burly man looking to crush me with his midsection.

When I ask Hilary Jones, executive director of Girls Rock! Rhode Island, what the program can offer to the much less tame world of Providence punk, she tells me that the women in the program are “learn[ing] to take up space in a way where they might otherwise be uncomfortable doing so.” She hopes that the campers would bring the spirit of the program to other music communities throughout their lives. “This is a space that can be normal,” she stresses, optimistic about the possibilities of inclusion and expression of otherwise marginalized voices in spaces beyond the Girls Rock! program.

Through both the creation of tight-knit communities and the shaping of those communities through the inclusion of marginalized voices, many punk spaces could come to resemble the sense of a secure community of Ladies Rock. Even with the possibility of other spaces emulating it, the inviting warmth and creative spirit of that night still stay in my mind as extraordinary. Four bands, two of which featured women of color, took the stage and jammed out songs that would do the 90s feminist punk movement proud. “They/ them, he/she, don’t identify me!” the Sisters Against Social Stereotypes (SASS) sang out. As another singer, a young Latina mother named Natalia Garcia, left the stage, and reflected on her inspiration. “I’m in shock. It’s unbelievable,” she said to me. “It’s so scary, it’s like, why not? It’s like the world is asking me, so what are you going to do now?”

WILL WEATHERLY B’19 hasn’t moshed in months, mostly because he’s dainty.

METRO

04

DISJOINT DESTINATIONS The 6-10 Connector’s future

BY Jane

Argodale

ILLUSTRATION BY Dorothy

Windham

Scrapping earlier plans for a redesign, the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT) announced on September 7 that it would rebuild the Route 6 and 10 interchange on Providence’s West Side rather than pursuing a redesign of the connecter. To justify their decision, RIDOT cited a lack of funding, the need to keep up with a high volume of traffic, and an urgent need to rebuild the deteriorating highway. Proposed redesigns include a plan popular with local community organizations and businesses to replace overpasses with a surface boulevard that would eliminate physical divisions between nearby neighborhoods and allow for improved pedestrian, bicycle, and bus traffic.

In spite of this announcement, Mayor Jorge Elorza plans to continue holding public forums on the 6-10 Connector, making the future of the connector and the possibility of a redesign unclear.

Whether or not RIDOT will be swayed by the new designs Mayor Elorza plans to unveil is uncertain, but the opposition between the city and state governments underscores a disconnect between what local officials and citizens feel is best for their communities, and what the state government is willing to invest in. Since highways in the northeast typically last about 30 to 50 years before needing reconstruction, it could be decades before there is another chance to redesign the 6-10 Connector.

When she announced RIDOT’s reconstruction plans, Governor Gina Raimondo justified the decision with the seriousness of the Connector’s structural issues, stating, “I wish we had time and these bridges were in better shape. We don’t have the luxury of time.” Seven of the 6-10 Connector’s nine bridges have been rated structurally deficient

by RIDOT, with the Huntington Viaduct crossing Troy and Westminster Streets and the Amtrak rail lines having the highest priorities for reconstruction. However, possible measures such as placing weight restrictions that would eliminate trucks or other large vehicles from the bridges have not been taken to curb the worsening of structural deficiencies and prevent accidents. The lack of such measures casts into doubt both whether the bridges are currently incapable of handling the current traffic volume and, if they are, whether the state is taking proper precautions to keep drivers on the highway safe.

The highway’s current layout, a system of overpasses connecting Route 6 and Route 10, has been criticized by community leaders as a poor design that artificially separates neighborhoods on the West Side from one another and prevents pedestrian and bicycle access to these neighborhoods, contributing to their economic stagnation as well as discouraging more environmentally-friendly modes of transportation. Public support for the surface boulevard plan at an August 30 workshop (one of several held over the past few months) on potential redesigns was enthusiastic, but the potential cost of such a plan has not yet been determined. An earlier proposal estimated a $595 million budget would be necessary to cover the highway with an “earthen cap” and build streets and parks on top of it—similar to Boston’s Big Dig, which rerouted I-93 and covered its former footprint with the Rose Kennedy Greenway—became unfeasible when the state government learned in August that it would not be receiving a $175 million federal grant.

Though RIDOT has announced it will go through with a reconstruction without a redesign, costing $400 million, there are continuing efforts to make RIDOT reconsider its move. According to Mayor Jorge Elorza, city planners will reveal two new

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METRO

redesign plans, along with their estimated costs, at a public forum on Monday, October 3. Whether anything will come of Mayor Elorza’s efforts is unclear. +++ Though budget concerns were among the reasons that RIDOT scrapped a redesign, Fix the 6-10—a coalition of local organizations and businesses— claims that a surface boulevard redesign would cost less in both the short and long term: maintaining a highway imposes a heavy tax burden, while the redesign would generate property taxes from business owners and facilitate economic revitalization.

According to Fix the 6-10’s website, the coalition is pushing for “a replacement to the crumbling 6-10 Connector that is innovative and shows we’re ready for the 21st century.” The group argues that the construction of highways in cities is outdated, expensive, and bad for the environment. Fix the 6-10 points to successful moves to convert large highways into usable land, including Milwaukee, WI, where a freeway was replaced with a boulevard, leading to a massive increase in real estate investment; and Seoul, South Korea, where a freeway was replaced with a scenic park.

Speaking to the College Hill Independent, Seth Zeren, a spokesman for Fix the 6-10, characterized the highway’s design as a relic of 1960s urban planning, which frequently disregarded the harmful effects of infrastructure on surrounding neighborhoods. Olneyville in particular is severely isolated from the rest of the city by highways and overpasses which surround the neighborhood on three sides, making access on foot or bike between Olneyville and nearby neighborhoods like the West End unappealing and extremely difficult. “No one likes to live next to a highway—imagine if we tried to build a highway through the East Side,” Zeren says. “The West Side is poorer and browner, so we’re just cramming highways into poor neighborhoods again. It’s left Olneyville gutted, and much harder and less pleasant to get to.” Zeren also noted that the highways leave the neighborhood choked with traffic headed elsewhere that doesn’t support local businesses and leads to poor air quality.

“There’s actually a missing connection from 10 North to 6 West, meaning you must drive through Olneyville Square, and that means at times Olneyville Square is crushed with cars. And they’re all trying to get to Johnston, it’s not traffic that wants to go to Olneyville,” says Zeren.

Since this traffic from the highway includes cars along with diesel-burning trucks, the highway’s presence also contributes to public health issues for the area. Data published by the Rhode Island Department of Health in 2014 shows that cases of asthma among children are most concentrated on the West Side in neighborhoods close to the 6-10, including Olneyville, where 8–10% of children ages two to 17 have asthma. In northern Federal Hill, also near the highway, rates of asthma among children range as high as 10.4–15.4%. Rates in the majority of the East Side are 4.4% or less.

The rebuilding of the highway also contradicts the state’s own environmental goals. In 2014, the Resilient Rhode Island Act was passed, which set an ambitious goal of 85% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. The presence of a highway cutting through the West Side discourages pedestrian and bicycle traffic between neighborhoods, particularly in Olneyville. “If you live in Olneyville, you have to have a car to get to work,” Zeren told the Indy. If

the state hopes to reduce carbon emissions significantly, it will need to find ways to make use of other modes of transportation possible for residents, which the 6-10 Connector’s hulking overpasses actively discourage. +++ The 6-10 Connector was built at a time when Olneyville was already in economic decline. Once a major industrial hub of Providence, factories began to move away from Olneyville or shut down entirely after World War II, taking employment opportunities away from the neighborhood. Even the website of Providence’s city government points out how the construction of the 6-10 contributed to this decline, stating that the rapid flight of residents from Olneyville at the time “was exacerbated by the construction of the Route 6 connector in the early 1950s. Built to alleviate the traffic snarls in Olneyville Square, the Route 6 connector had the effect of destroying a great deal of affordable, working-class housing.”

As cities across the country move to replace highways with streets and greenspace, and encourage alternative modes of transportation, RIDOT’s decision to keep the 6-10 in its current form entrenches a style of urban planning that is becoming increasingly outdated, one that has both created and worsened poor economic situations in Providence’s neighborhoods. RIDOT’s defiance of the city government in choosing the highway’s location makes its decision all the more bizarre. That the bridges, even with their structural problems, continue to function smoothly at present without posted weight restrictions, suggests that it’s a reluctance to consider alternative ways of handling traffic in Providence, rather than the need for a quick solution, that is driving this decision. The 6-10 Connector’s redesign provides an opportunity to improve the lives of the West Side’s residents.

Mayor Elorza’s upcoming unveiling of new designs means RIDOT could still consider taking this opportunity.

JANE ARGODALE B’18 doesn’t even have a learner’s permit yet.

SEPTEMBER 30, 2016

BREATH(E)

A conversation with Ronald Lewis of the Low Mountaintop Collective BY

Athena Washburn and Eli Neuman-Hammond

Ronald Kevin Lewis is a theater artist, dancer, poetperformer, and child of god whose group, The Low Mountaintop Collective, performed their first immersive dance/theater/poetry piece this weekend in the Mixed Magic Theater in Pawtucket. Entitled Breath(e), the piece circles around questions of connectedness and cosmic wonder as the audience is led through an interactive labyrinth to a dance piece, which continues into a night of poetry. We spoke with Ronald in a red room of the co-operative we all call home.

heals his eyes again, touches his eyes again, and he just sees people, and Jesus says, “Tell no one what you have seen.”

“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” - Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

athena: it feels to me that because of that transmission and connectedness to our environment, and to ‘our’ land, and to this land, and to be in a land that’s built on so much violence—all the trees in this place are new. Eli and I were just talking about this. There aren’t that many old trees here because of the colonial violence on this land and continuation of that. So I think it’s a beautiful thing to point out the connection there—that, no, there is a connection here, these things matter, these trees matter, their deaths matter, they are a mirror.

ronald: To remember breath, and to remember what breath is, in a way. With a lot of what has been happening in the world, specifically with police brutality and Black Lives Matter and all of these things that are in conjunction with nation wide protests etc., I felt really heavy. For the past couple of months I felt the need to investigate my inner world in a deeper way. To really investigate what center is, and what anchor is.

The work of Breath(e) is grounded in all of those things—in this desire for wonder, and this desire to be filled again. eli: I’m curious about the labyrinth structure that frames Breath(e). I feel like when you go into a labyrinth you get lost, but you also find something, and those things go together. I’m wondering how that labyrinth space figures into the piece as a whole and why you chose the labyrinth as a frame for the individual experience and reflection that takes place there. ronald: The labyrinth is the beginning, and it’s based on the Tree of Life which is a symbol that’s been haunting me for a while. For a lot of esoteric weird reasons I guess. athena: Please, go crazy. ronald: Ok, so the Tree of Life’s symbolism is kind of insane. It relates to Jesus, it relates to Adam, it relates to us and it relates to God and what we imagine to be the image of God. That’s really intriguing to me because it also relates to chakras and to energy spaces. The reason we chose it was because we wanted to have just the labyrinth itself this past summer, but it didn’t happen because the shootings in Orlando happened so that became a big focus instead, but the original thought was to just focus on the first seven Sefirot, because we were seven weeks past Pentecost. So that was the idea behind it and that just stuck onto the project afterwards—the idea to just focus on the first seven Sefirot.

The Sefirot are kind of like spheres of being, modalities of energy or temperance in a way. They are also all attributes of the divine. They start, and the labyrinth starts as well, with Malkuth, or earth, and that is kind of like the present moment, the space in which we are now, this [gestures to us talking together in this room] in a way. And then you travel up the tree to the different other spheres. After Malkuth is Transmission. After that I believe is Victory and then Splendor, and then Beauty. One cool thought about the tree of life is that in the beginning there is the Creator and the Creator is all of these different temperances, and it just creates a mirror image of itself that is the same thing. And then that thing becomes shattered into all of the fragments that we are in now in all of our existences.

There’s a fabulous scripture in the New Testament that talks about Jesus healing a blind man’s eyes. He heals his eyes the first time and he says, “What do you see?” And the man says, “I see people, but they look like trees walking.” And so Jesus

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eli: but then, it’s written, too. ronald: Right. I think there’s a lot of depth there. It’s too wonderful for me. But I think there is—going back to the idea of breath, right. Breath is this exchange we have with trees.

There is some kind of connection, you know.

ronald: A favorite author of mine wrote that in the ancient world, specifically in ancient Jewish thought, there is no word for spiritual life, because everything is innately spiritual.

Everything is connected, there is no separation between the spiritual and the natural, they are one. athena: I love that thinking in terms of your performance too.

That the audience is one with the performance. ronald: Yeah, the audience themselves do become performers in the space. athena: I was going to ask you earlier, but I think we may have just answered it—I was going to ask you, as someone with the most shining amount of faith I know, what it means to create pieces knowing that part of your audience is always God. But perhaps you just answered that, in that everything you do is already part of God. ronald: Yeah. I have to constantly have that conversation with myself. Remembering that what I am doing is holy in a way, and that these ideas are not my ideas, they are just something that falls upon me, or that I run into, or that are blessings.

And if I try to have a specific kind of ownership over them, it ruins the thing in itself. eli: I feel as though that ownership is why we need a word for spiritual today. When trees are treated as wood and resource and land as property—you need to say, oh no that’s not spiritual anymore. That’s not a spiritual way of being. ronald: Going back to the tree of life—the Etz Chaim. The Etz Chaim is a Tree of Life, and those who hold on to her are blessed. eli: That’s amazing because it just reminded me that in a lot of synagogues they had the Etz Chaim in the lobby before the holy space, and all the dead members of the communities are up there as leaves as part of the Tree of Life. There’s like this huge tree of names, it’s like exactly what you’re saying.

It’s one of the most beautiful parts I remember of my many dreaded days—like wow, one day I’m going to be on that tree. [laughter]

ronald: Art-making is definitely magic. But then intention, right? When you make something with intention, that’s giving life in a way. athena: I see it like we have this objectified world where we need the objectification to justify using ‘things’ for resources instead of honoring their life.

For me I feel that there is this shared life inside each thing we are taught to view as separate, and that through intention you can access anything through any thing—once you get to that life layer, the connections you can make with other living ‘things’ which are supposedly objects, to me that’s magic.

Because then things start to operate on a different logic. ronald: They do. athena: Because this place’s logic is…fucked up. ronald: It’s so fucked up! It’s so fucked up! And it only leads to death. athena: Yeah, that’s what it’s meant for. To kill our understanding of living things so we can take advantage of them. ronald: God. athena: jesus. ronald: I hope people leave with that feeling that everything is connected. So the breath work is very important. There is a person, Pol, who walks you through the breathing exercise, and then you walk through this labyrinth of seven spaces. And there are three questions positioned in specific places for people to answer. One is: where are you going and where are you coming from? Another is: describe a moment in which you realized how strong you were.

And another is: describe a moment in which you were forgiven or forgave someone. Spaces for people to leave behind information and to reflect in a way.

And some people have given some crazy answers, which is both cool to see and really frightening at the same time. And so the last thing in the labyrinth is a mirror. And there’s a star machine that is beaming into the mirror, and then they’re also given a star by an actor-dancer. eli: it reminds me of the river in the underworld, especially as Charon is guiding people in. And you pay, that coin exchange. Maybe a little bit of a stretch. And then those questions about forgiveness and stuff feel like questions to cross a certain threshold. ronald: That is my hope. That is my hope, that we can cross a certain threshold.

You can see “Breath(e)” at its closing weekend at Mixed Magic Theatre in Pawtucket, RI. Friday, September 30th and Saturday, October 1st at 7pm.

ronald: In that hymn, right, it ends Kadesh, Kadesh Yameinu Ke-Kedem, which I believe is translated, “Cause us to return as in days of old.” So I heard recently that people are hungry for an ancient wisdom relating to self, to community, and to earth. That’s also kind of what sparked all this work with The Low Mountaintop Collective, and Breath(e). The theater originated out of this spiritual space.

Whether it’s the Ancient Greeks or wherever else it was happening in the ancient world, it was first connected to religious practice.

So as a theater artist there’s this question: there’s a magic there, so how do we move away from this explicit, “Ok now we’re going to tell a narrative and story,” and into the question, “How do we invite people into an ancient wisdom and an ancient magic?” athena: so what does magic mean now, for you?

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FOUND IN TRANSLATION Jhumpa Lahiri in Italian Saanya Jain ILLUSTRATION BY Matthew Lancaster BY

Try reading without reading. The first thing your eyes encounter is the appearance of the words, the absurdity of the shapes, the combinations of letters.

They have the power to conjure entire words and beings but also trap them within their slants and curves.

My words create me but they also limit me. How can their wholeness tell you how fragmented I am?

How can their logic apply when there is no thus, then, of course in me? I am is an implicit I am not.

Saying I am is also not saying Je suis, estoy, sono. My language is one you don’t know. +++ Last February, Pulitzer-prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri published her fifth book, In Altre Parole (In Other Words). Lahiri is the daughter of Bengali immigrants and grew up in Rhode Island. Unlike her previous works—largely fiction—the book is a memoir, and instead of in English, her primary language, it is written in Italian and was published in the United States as a bilingual edition in Italian and English.

In Altre Parole is an account of her twenty-year long study of Italian, which she fell in love with during a college trip to Florence. She wrote it while in Rome, where she moved with her husband and two children in 2013. While there, she resolved to read and write only in Italian, effectively exiling herself from the language that had brought her so much success, including a National Humanities Medal awarded

by President Obama in 2014.

There is a long history of authors rejecting one language in favor of another. Some have sought to escape the shadow of their predecessors, such as Samuel Beckett from James Joyce’s. Authors of works of postcolonial literature have sometimes chosen a native language over a colonial one—itself a subjugating presence—such as Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who writes in Gikuyu rather than in English. In Lahiri’s case, she has said that it was a refuge from her own success in English. In addition, I believe that it is a powerful personal and political renunciation that calls attention to the consequence of language choice.

In In Altre Parole, Lahiri experiments with a new voice between languages, setting a new model for exploring fragmented identity. +++ Her parents are Indian. So are mine. She grew up in America. I grew up in an American school. She became obsessed with Italian. I fell in love with French.

Her physical appearance creates a wall between her and Italian. My accent communicates one thing, my appearance another, my language a third. Her mother

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tongue, Bengali, was foreign in America, so in some ways, she has always been in linguistic exile. I grew up in Tunisia, where my native tongue, Hindi, was foreign, and in ways foreign even to myself. The superficial similarities in our experiences expose a deeper truth: the act of learning, reading, and writing in another language is the contentious claiming of an identity.

Lahiri’s three languages—both hers and yet not hers—triangulate around Italy, a geographical center between India and America. For Lahiri, crossing the ocean was not merely an exercise in physical displacement. Writing in another language required the translation of her entire world, her entire life and her entire words. Her choice of Italian is thus a subversion of her binary in favor of a kind of trinary. Through In Altre Parole, she constructs a home for herself between languages. +++ The epigraph of In Altre Parole is a quote from Antoni Tabucch, an Italian writer who was deeply enamored with Portugal and the Portuguese language: “…I needed a different language: a language that was a place of affection and reflection.” Lahiri sets up the whole book as an analogy: just as we have complex relationships with different parts of identity, we have them with different languages. She self-diagnoses her fragmented perception of herself as linguistic in nature. “I’m a writer who doesn’t belong completely to any language.”

Other authors, especially from postcolonial contexts, have also played with the notion of language as representative of identity. Salman Rushdie, who writes in English, uses words in Hindi that cannot be translated or obscured by English, representing a truer version of one of the languages spoken in his native India. He and others have introduced other languages unapologetically into the colonial lexicon, which together make one that they can claim for themselves.

They have also subverted the colonizer’s tongue: fragmenting sentences, omitting conjunctions, introducing jarring syntactical structures, refusing linear narratives.

Arundhati Roy, Indian writer and winner of the Man Booker Prize for The God of Small Things, plays with language almost irreverently. She transcribes phrases such as the Latin “Locus standi” to “Locusts Stand I,” uses rogue capital letters (“Love. Madness.

Infinite Joy”), and creates neologisms like “steelshrill police whistle.” The epigraph of the novel is: “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.” Some stories cannot be told in only one language. For some, entirely new ones have to be

invented.

Nina Bouraoui, a renowned French-Algerian author, is known for the fragmentation of her sentences that represent the fragmentation of the French language and her French identity. In her memoir Garcon manqué (Tomboy), many sentences are broken in odd places, creating their own rhythm and their own syntax. For example, she writes, “These ghosts of the Résidence. They return through my mother’s body.

Through her chronic asthma. Through her loneliness. Through her fear.” Nina adopts different names throughout the memoir, including Brio, Ahmed, and Yasmina, all of which are different parts of her. Her alter ego, Amine, calls her Yesmina, stressing the y, the Arabic version of her name, while others call her Nina, a name “that could be Italian” and thus obscures her French-Algerian identity. She finds refuge in Italy, like Lahiri, where she is no longer French or Algerian: just herself. There, she is able to break the dichotomy of her existence, in a country which is also geographically between her two poles, France and Algeria.

In Lahiri’s past work, she has made frequent use of words in Hindi and Bengali: Pujo, Kabadi.

The name of the protagonist in The Namesake, her first novel, is the impetus for his struggles with his identity. His name is Gogol, a Russian name, creating much confusion for other characters but most of all himself. Gogol’s struggle is inspired by Lahiri herself.

Her name, Jhumpa, is in fact a nickname chosen for by her American kindergarten teacher, who found Nilanjana too difficult to pronounce. The literal changing of names in these cases represents a confusion of identities and languages. +++ So much of our identities are based on how others perceive us. Garcon manqué is a polyphony, constructed of many voices. Together they construct Nina through others’ eyes. “Are you Israeli? … I’ve seen hundreds like you… So you aren’t Arab?”

Languages are so steeped in certain identities that someone else’s claiming of them becomes a contentious act. Lahiri describes how she will never be fully accepted in Italy and never fully be able to learn the language because there is an impenetrable wall: her appearance. Her tone quivers with frustration as she describes the automatic acceptance of her husband in Italy, because of his white skin and his European name. In this way, his imperfect Italian is also considered flawless, even though he makes mistakes where she doesn’t, where she has devoted herself to reading the literature and learning the language while he speaks only because he has to.

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She also has to provide an explanation every time she speaks in Italian. She hears implicitly, every time, “Don’t touch our language. It doesn’t belong to you.”

She can’t just speak. Be. Belong. A similar wall exists in English. Even though she is an American author, so to speak, “No one anywhere assumes that I speak the languages that are a part of me.” Writing can break down that wall. “When I write, my appearance, my name, have nothing to do without it. I become my words and my words become me.” By writing in Italian, Lahiri rejects the mutual claiming between a physical identity and a language. She ends In Altre Parole with the hope that “a piece of me can remain in Italy… though I hope that every book in the world belongs to everyone, or to no one, nowhere.”

Thus, in the bilingual edition, across the pages, Lahiri translates herself from Italian into English. The presence of the Italian gives the English—across the schism of the spine—depth, and vice versa. One’s limitations and the other’s possibilities create a more coherent whole: not just book, but also person. It is not within one language, but in the spaces between that Lahiri expresses herself. Between the countries, the words and the white pages that separate them. She gives me hope that I can find my way too.

SAANYA JAIN B’19 wants to learn Italian.

+++ Lahiri’s rejuvenation by Italian comes through a rediscovery of the reason she reads and the reason she writes. Lahiri describes reading in Italian as becoming conscious of the act of reading itself. Reading the bilingual edition of her book is like that as well: becoming conscious of the act of reading through the juxtaposition of two languages.

A similar bareness is present in her writing, stripped of artifice, of crutches, and in her words, “without style.” It is composed of its bare constituent parts — subject, verb, object. It is like eating a dish without the flourishes, which allows the pure flavor and the love with which the dish was made to come through. She writes, “A second metaphor comes to mind…” Her writing draws attention to itself through its plainness and self-reflexivity, pointing to the most important choice of all, circling back to the literary and political implications of her decision to write in Italian. In the limits she finds limitlessness.

Writing creates her, and her life of many facets is like a word with infinite nuances. “I become my words and my words become me.” Through the mortification and the mistakes, a new voice emerges.

This self-imposed exile has changed Lahiri in English, the language which remains the base of the triangle that frames her self-portrait. At the same time, she questions the notion of the exile itself. “Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere…I am exiled even from the definition of exile.” +++ Lahiri’s decision to write in Italian examines a paradox: language creates her but boxes her in. She writes in In Altre Parole, “Ever since I was a child, I’ve belonged only to my words. I don’t have a country, a specific culture.

If I didn’t write, if I didn’t work with words, I wouldn’t feel that I’m present on earth.” At the same time, her previous works and words written in English can only reveal one aspect of her: the one connected to America and to English that obscures most everything else.

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AGAINST THE PIPELINE, THE An interview with

BY Camila ILLUSTRATION BY

The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) is a 1,100-mile pipeline under construction by Energy Transfer Partners, slated to carry a half million barrels of Bakken shale oil under the Missouri River just a half mile upstream from the border of the Standing Rock Reservation, and a few miles north of the drinking water intake for the majority of the reservation population. The pipeline is being built on the treaty territories for which the ancestors of the Standing Rock people negotiated in the Fort Laramie Treaties of 1851 and 1868.

Jennifer Weston was born and raised on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas, and spent several years working for her tribal government’s Environmental Protection Department and tribal chairman’s office, as well as writing for the Lakota Nation Journal. She grew up surrounded by her mother’s extended families from the Hunkpapa band of Lakota in the Running Antelope and Bear Solder Districts of Standing Rock—two of Standing Rock’s eight reservation districts. Weston attended Brown University in the mid-’90s and studied American Indian history, Ethnic Studies, and journalism. She now lives in southeastern Massachusetts, though she frequently travels home to visit her family on Standing Rock. Weston corresponded with the Independent via email this past week. +++ The College Hill Independent: How is the community of Standing Rock being affected and what is the potential environmental impact of the construction of the pipeline?

Jennifer Weston: Our drinking water and all water used for the region’s agriculture are at risk. The state of North Dakota has refused to responsibly regulate the oil industry in its hunger for tax revenues, and has allowed hundreds of spills of fracking liquids, lax disposal of radioactive fracking waste and equipment, and many other pipeline spills. Our people on Standing Rock are unwilling to bear any further consequences of this takeover by Big Oil. The Indy: Can you tell us a little bit about how the conflict begin?

JW: Dakota Access originally proposed building its pipeline just upstream of North Dakota’s capital city, and then came to Standing Rock in 2014 once its initial construction application was rejected by the Army Corps of Engineers due to its proximity to Bismarck’s drinking water and the number of sensitive wetlands crossings. For some reason the Army Corps has expressed little concern for Standing Rock’s public health concerns, perhaps due to our smaller population; however, we view their initial permitting of a river crossing just upstream from us as a classic case of environmental racism—one exacerbated by the fact that this same

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federal agency in the 1950s flooded 56,000 acres of our riverine ecosystem, best farmlands, gardens, medicine places, fruit trees and timberland. The Army Corps’ previous decimation of our homelands—and subsequent naming of the resulting reservoir in our own language, Lake Oahe (“Something to Stand On”)—has been the backdrop for generations of youth growing up on Standing Rock. We’re steeped in stories of this outrageous treaty violations, federal overreach, broken promises of free hydropower electricity for our communities, and the forced relocations of our grandparents and great grandparents from prime river bottom lands sheltered by massive cottonwoods to the harsh windswept upper prairies.

The Indy: We know that one of the main spaces of resistance within Standing Rock is the Sacred Stone Camp. Could you tell us a little bit about life in there?

How many people are living there? What does a typical day look like?

JW: Sacred Stone was founded in April on private land on Standing Rock, and overflow camps were established across the Cannonball River on federal lands adjacent to Standing Rock beginning in early August as more supporters arrived. A few hundred folks reside at Sacred Stone, and several thousand along the Cannonball in the Rosebud Camp, and across the river in the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires) and Red Warrior Camps. Many supporters also stay at our tribal casino, Prairwie Knights Casino and Lodge, about 15 miles south of the camps along ND Highway 1806. Life in the camps is getting more challenging as the weather changes to fall and the north winds arrive, but the atmosphere of unity and solidarity is beautiful. Hundreds of tribal delegations and folks from around the world have joined in the local actions as water protectors, and the sight of 300+ flags flying above camp is inspiring and moving to witness.

The Indy: So what has been the response of local authorities to the camp, the resistance efforts, and the pipeline project?

The Indy: There seems to be a discrepancy between the position of local authorities and the US President on this conflict. What’s your stance on President Obama’s order to stop the ND pipeline construction? Was this a victory?

JW: The Obama administration only ordered a temporary stoppage on the three miles of federal lands west of the Missouri, and 20 miles east of the river. Since 60% of the pipeline has already been built and active construction sites continue on private property easements up to the stoppage zone, we can hardly declare a victory. The federal appeals court ruling on September 16 extended the no-construction zone to 20 miles from the river in both directions, but construction zones are active everywhere else along the route.

The Indy: So do you think it makes sense to appeal to international bodies to permanently stop the construction of the project? How does the construction of the pipeline, for example, violate indigenous treaties and international law? What do you think of the UN’s response to the pipeline’s violation of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples?

JW: The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples delineates our rights to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent to resource extraction and other development projects that impact our peoples, and our ancestral treaties guarantee our undisturbed rights to our homelands. Our Tribe’s lawsuit against the Army Corps cites explicit violations of the Clean Water Act, Clean Rivers and Harbors Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. I’m hopeful that statements from the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, the UN Human Rights Council, and NGOs like Amnesty International and the International Indigenous Treaty Council will continue to amplify our local voices on an international stage as we seek justice and a revocation of the federal permits that are enabling this direct threat to our communities’ health and survival. +++

JW: Locally, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department (who polices the county directly adjacent to Sioux County, ND), has been functioning as a paid law enforcement agency serving Big Oil, alongside Energy Transfer Partners’ armed, private security contractors. Federally, the EPA, National Trust for Historic Preservation, and US Dept. of Interior have all weighed in to the Army Corps—the agency holding regulatory permitting authority for the river crossing—in favor of a comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement and shoddy cultural and historic properties review conducted by consultants paid by Energy Transfer Partners.

The Indy: Media coverage can certainly play an influential role in building the narrative around this conflict.

How has the media reported on the pipeline and the resistance against it? Are there important differences

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R Iv

STANDING ROCK STRUGGLE Jennifer Weston

Ruiz Segovia van Rios-Fetchko between local and national coverage?

JW: Media coverage has been fairly sparse, and local coverage is extremely biased in favor of the energy industry. Tribes are portrayed as lacking an understanding of technology, and even in national coverage, pipelines are constantly referenced as the ‘safest means’ to transport oil.

There is little evidence to support that, since the corrosive crude of the type from the Bakken shale oil region has only recently begun to be extracted in recent years.

The Indy: You said coverage is sparse, so what do you think the media has been missing about this story?

JW: The media is underreporting on so many elements of this story: 1) The original siting of the pipeline north of Bismarck, ND, for example. If the pipeline isn’t safe enough to be built north of Bismarck, then it’s not safe enough to be built north of Standing Rock. 2) The extreme nature of the energy production in the Bakken region that’s already destroying hundreds of millions of gallons of freshwater by converting it to radioactive and saline fracking wastewater in an already arid region, while simultaneously generating huge volumes of methane and ethane emissions in this era of demonstrable global warming impacts. 3) The Army Corps’ already intolerable assaults on the tribes of the northern plains through their construction of Missouri River mainstream dams in the latter half of the 20th century, and their brazenness in returning again to destroy our water supply and means of survival. We are not America’s sacrifice zone for energy security. Millions of Americans rely on the Missouri River watershed for drinking water. 4) Our commitment to peaceful and prayerful resistance, our ancient ties to our remaining homelands, and our resolve in standing as protectors of our water—not as protestors. 5) The intensely militarized, morally bankrupt and unconstitutional response by the state of North Dakota in service to the energy industry. When the governor can senselessly declare a state of emergency, call out the National Guard to intimidate travelers on a state highway leading to our

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reservation, foment felony reckless endangerment charges against unarmed water protectors, and stand for arresting members of the independent media—Democracy Now! and Unicorn Riot—just for doing their job, all vestiges of democratic pretense are gone. Even after deliberate destruction of our ancestral sacred sites and burial sites were documented with the federal courts, and energy security teams unleashed dogs and mace on our people and our allies, the state and county law enforcement have continued to publicly promote the so-called abuses of energy company hired mercenaries by unarmed water protectors—folks carrying wonly tribal flags, prayers, and signs calling for justice. My relatives are under constant state and federal surveillance, aerial and ground-based. North Dakota is in the wrong, the world is watching, and we can all see how upside down democratic principles have turned when time-honored practices of civil disobedience are essentially characterized as terrorist activity by an elected official who serves as a member of the state industrial commission (which approves all energy industry proposals) and receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions and investment income. +++ The Indy: The Standing Rock struggle has inspired thousands of people across the US. What has solidarity looked like on the ground? Have many people and organizations visited the camp?

JW: At this point perhaps 10 to 12,000 folks have passed through the camps, with only around 70 arrests occurring—all for nonviolent and petty charges. Recently Morton County has escalated charges from misdemeanors to felonies (for the same actions like locking down to bulldozers), but the water protectors’ commitment to nonviolent direct action is unshakeable.

The Indy: Can you tell us a little bit about the international solidarity with Standing Rock—especially from other indigenous communities around the world?

JW: Delegations have come to bring their flags and testimonies from New Zealand, Ecuador, Mauna Kea in Hawaii and beyond. We all face threats to our lands and waters from extractive industries and other exploitive practices, and our youth on Standing Rock have galvanized an international movement to stem the tide of climate change and reverse the longstanding pattern of unjust abuses against Indigenous Peoples through their peaceful and prayerful leadership. I’m so proud of our young people, and inspired by their ability to continue to persevere on a national and international stage. They’re a powerful force, and I’m grateful for their leadership in calling for a shift from fossil fuel reliance to renewable energy for the survival of future generations.

The Indy: How can people in Providence and elsewhere support this struggle?

JW: Folks should consider donating generously at standingrock.org and sacredstonecamp.org, and coming to witness and support the movement in person through volunteer efforts on the ground. I also urge your readers to visit the ACLU of North Dakota online to read about their leadership in speaking out against the unconstitutional behavior by North Dakota's elected officials, and their work to defend my brother for exercising his constitutionally protected rights. While he was never arrested, he is still being sued by Energy Transfer Partners in a blatant attempt to bully and silence pipeline opponents. Our family is very grateful for the ACLU's efforts and pro bono representation. Our lawsuit against the Corps has yet to begin, and folks at the camps are going to winterize and move onto reservation land overlooking the river and the construction zone at the proposed river crossing. Our relatives are determined to prevail, and I believe in our people power and our prayers.

The Indy: Is there anything in particular you’d like us to add to this interview that we have not yet covered?

JW: We can all support this movement to protect clean water as a human right, and to grapple with the necessary transition from the fossil fuel industry, through reaching out to our Congressional delegations, the White House, and by recognizing and calling for treaties to be honored for all tribes. We all benefit from recognizing the real impacts of climate change, and the imperative to turn the tide and implement a societal shift to renewable energy sources. Tribes have stewarded the water and natural resources of the Americas for tens of thousands of years, and we can provide leadership for today and the future, but we need and welcome allies in order to make this critical 21st century transition a reality.

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RECLAIMING ENDANGERED LANGUAGES When language death means culture death Tatiana Dubin ILLUSTRATION BY Nana Qi BY

Spanish missionaries were the first Westerners to begin documenting the indigenous languages of the ‘Viceroyalty of New Spain.’ Travelling to newly conquered lands, missionaries realized that translating the Bible into the languages of target communities was an effective way to spread Christianity. These missionaries eventually Christianized large swaths of South America as they wrote some of the first modern books describing the syntax of the languages they encountered. By the 18th century, the better the linguist, the better the missionary. But these missionaries were by no means proponents of indigenous language preservation—native children were forcefully sent to mission boarding schools, forbidden from speaking their language.

Today, the most powerful player in language documentation is an US-based evangelical organization, SIL International (originally known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Inc.), which boasts of having translated the Bible into over 700 languages.

While making strides in language documentation, SIL has been accused of colluding with both US oil companies and the CIA. In 1986, the Mexican government cancelled its relationship with SIL amid concerns that the linguist-missionaries were exacerbating the problem of cultural extinction, especially via their practice of relocating communities to ‘mission’ towns and discouraging indigenous language use.

A stigma continues to surround indigenous language use, and calls by foreign academics to save these languages from extinction rings suspicious to some native ears. In her article, “Language Endangerment in Amazonia: the role of missionaries,” linguist Patience L. Epps quotes a Tukano man, from the northwestern Amazon: “First the Whites come and tell us we must give it all up; then they come and reproach us for having let it go!” +++ According to UNESCO, half of the world’s languages will disappear by the end of the century. Over 6,000 languages are currently in use, but the vast majority of these languages are spoken by just 4% of the global population. The world’s linguistic diversity lies in very small, indigenous communities, whose native languages are frequently seen by governmental forces as barriers to integration. For example, in Turkey, it is illegal for Kurds to teach their native language to the next generation. Up until the Native American Languages Act in 1990, similar policies were enacted across the United States. For close to a century, native children were barred from speaking their languages by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

With pressure from advocacy groups like UNESCO’s Endangered Language Program, legally sanctioned language discrimination is on the decline worldwide—but the effects of these policies are long lasting. In a 2015 interview on Public Radio International, Peruvian teenager Renata Flores addressed Quechua, an indigenous language family spoken throughout the Andes region. “Quechua equals poverty,” she said. In 2015, Flores—who is credited with partly reducing the stigma associated with indigenous language use— founded a campaign called “Young people speak Quechua too,” in which Flores performs contemporary pop songs in Quechua. In her most popular video, Flores sings Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel” against a backdrop of Incan ruins.

Language death is nothing new—one oft-cited historical example is Etruscan, which was superseded

by Latin in the 1st century CE. Due to increased rates of migration and urbanization, the rate of language extinction has never been higher than it is now.

Yet efforts to document endangered languages have

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inspired criticism in recent years, such as by Robert Moore in his 2006 essay “Disappearing, Inc.: Glimpsing the sublime in the politics of access to endangered languages.” In this essay, Moore likens linguists working with endangered languages to “tourists of the mind” and claims that the process of language documentation usually disregards the wishes and goals of the language speakers themselves.

In the past decade, the field of language documentation has responded to this criticism, and contemporary linguists emphasize the need for long-term partnerships with communities in which speakers of endangered languages decide how and to what extent they want to preserve their language. Meanwhile, many speakers have chosen to prioritize their oral cultures, including poetry, music, and historical narratives. A small but growing movement to preserve art forms expressed in endangered languages is widening the appeal of endangered language preservation. +++ An estimated 800 different languages are spoken in New York City, the most linguistically diverse city in the world. Daniel Kaufman, an associate professor of linguistics at Queens College, identified a strange disconnect amid this linguistic richness—why weren’t endangered language activists reaching out to these speakers? While linguists often rely on expensive grants funding travel and accommodations to hardto-reach areas, NYC contains a trove of accessible endangered language data. According to Kaufman’s website, he founded the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) in 2014 “with the purpose of initiating long-term language projects in cooperation with immigrant communities in NYC and local linguistics students.” But his organization goes beyond documentation. ELA also uses art and culture to encourage endangered language awareness and preservation through its ongoing performance series Unheard Of!.

Hosted in the East Village’s Bowery Poetry venue, Unheard Of! features individual artists working in their native, endangered tongues, as well as groups performing traditional dance and song. Each event begins by giving the social and linguistic context necessary to understanding the upcoming performance and is centered around a particular geographic location—most recently Mexico. In addition to interviews, lectures, readings, and jokes, the Mexico event featured poetry in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. During the event, Nahuatl teacher and activist Irwin Sanchez read two poems in Nahuatl.

According to 19th-century anthropologist Daniel Garrison Brinton, the Nahua made no distinction between poetry and song (both are named cuicatl).

Nahua culture is also known for its extended list of cuicatl genres, for example: xochicuicatl (literally: flower-song, used only to praise flowers), and xopancuicatl (literally: song-of-the-spring, used in reference to the beginning of events). “Nahuatl is a metaphorical language,” explained Sanchez in a 2012 article on Voices of NY. For an endangered language, Nahuatl has an unusually high number of speakers, estimated around 1.5 million, but it is considered ‘endangered’ because it will likely fall out of use in coming generations. +++ Reading through statistics about language extinction, one might feel an urgent impulse to archive as much as possible. This archival impulse motivates many western attempts to fossilize indigenous cultures. A grim binary is underway: archive or extinction. But City Lore, another NYC-based organization, has a more nuanced alternative.

Founded in 1986, City Lore believes in the prin-

ciple of cultural democracy, defined on their website as: “a society which allows many cultural traditions to coexist on an equal footing.” Like the ELA, City Lore focuses on minority cultures within New York City. But rather than centering its mission around endangered language preservation, the organization focuses on the proliferation and expansion of New York’s endangered language culture. City Lore’s perspective is notably more romantic than that of ELA as their cultural goals allow for a level of artistic depth rarely seen in linguistics-oriented organizations.

City Lore was inspired to start its Endangered Poetry Initiative after its seven-year involvement with the People’s Poetry Gathering, a biennial festival aiming to push the traditional boundaries of poetry.

In 2006, the People’s Poetry Gathering centered its festival on endangered language poetry, featuring the Alaskan Tlingit poet Nora Marks Dauenhauer who also transcribes and translates Tlingit oral literature.

In a poem titled “Listening for Native Voices,” written in 1984, Dauenhauer makes a case for listening to native writers: Trapped voices, frozen under sea ice of English, buckle, surging to be heard.

We say ‘Listen for sounds.

They are as important as voices.’

Listen.

Listen.

Listen.

Listen.

Soon after the 2006 festival, City Lore decided that endangered language poetry needed to be showcased and celebrated more than every two years.

City Lore’s Endangered Poetry Initiative is born of festival ashes, self-described as: “a long term project to feature, disseminate, and document poetry in endangered languages to help assure these distinct visions will not be lost upon the world.”

Like ELA, The Endangered Poetry Initiative hosts events at the Bowery Poetry venue. In addition, the Endangered Poetry Initiative sponsors the translation of Somali and Georgian poetry, and helped fund fieldwork on a Kuranko-language epic from Sierra Leone called Finah Misa Kule. And, as a testament to their commitment, the Endangered Poetry Initiative published a ‘Declaration of Poetic Rights and Values,’ whose first two lines serve as tribute to an ever-important, yet ever-forgotten, cause: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all languages are created equal, endowed by their creators with certain inalienable meanings. These meanings are embedded in sounds and texts; in words, imagination, and the poems that bind them.”

TATIANA DUBIN B’18.5 thinks we should listen closer.

SEPTEMBER 30, 2016

DEAR INDY...

BY Gino Tavlino ILLUSTRATION BY

Gabriel Matesanz

I want a baby. Should I get a dog?

I don’t enjoy the company of children, and they don’t enjoy my company either. I make incorrect faces, say the wrong thing at the wrong time, change the wrong diaper. The stakes are high with children—babies specifically, since you asked.

I do, however, have an instinctual prowess with dogs. I sometimes see dogs in parks from a distance, and as if my sheer will commanded it, they come running to me and inhale the meaty dog treats spilling out of my pockets.

Your question assumes that owning a dog can a substitutive replacement for parenting a child. To me this seems like a dangerous supposition—not because humans and dogs require radically different approaches to things like health and prenatal care, but rather it assumes that the value of parenting is derived solely from the act itself.

I’m not a parent, and I don’t plan on being one anytime soon. But I do exercise regularly and lately I’ve found that a healthy lifestyle isn’t cultured from a single act of exercise. I used to think this, then I ran my ankles into bilateral achilles tendonitis. These days I conceptualize my health as something like a pie chart: 10% is dedicated to deep tissue massage, 20% to biking (no handlebars!), 30% to breathing deeply and stretching, and the remaining 40% to oatmeal with peanut butter.

My feeling-based opinion tells me that having a baby and having a dog are two slices of the same pie chart which specifically concerns caring for living creatures. What species those creatures happen to be is ultimately decided by a set of frequently changing factors out of our control (time, your parents, where you’re born). Some people get dogs before babies, and other people get babies before dogs. I had a hamster once and it died pretty quickly.

For now, get a house plant. +++ Lately, all I’ve been wanting to do is make my house look really nice: bake bread, build tiny shelves, rearrange the living room again and again.

This seems to be true of many of my friends who are in the midst of rigorous academic experiences.

What is happening? Does my quarter-life turn toward domesticity run counter to my desire to live a radical queer lifestyle? Should I put down my drill and pick up a book?

In his essay “Late Victorians,” Richard Rodriguez talks at us about architecture and how gay men in San Francisco in the 1980s were moving within it. Queer men, according to Rodriguez, moved into the Victorian-style neighborhoods of San Francisco because they were the cheapest. “That gay men found themselves living within the architectural metaphor for family,” says Rodriguez, was merely a “coincidence.” The crux of Rodriguez’s essay, for the sake of your question, is how he describes the historical understanding of homosexuality: since homosexuality found definition as an identity category in the Victorian era, the gay man was defined as “sinful” because “he had no kosher place to stick it.” Decoration and refabrication, what Rodriguez calls “artifice,” is used by gay men (notably, Rodriguez excludes all other queer identities) in Victorian homes in San Francisco to both undo and renovate heteronormative history and home. Rodriguez’s Victorian home, once built with the confidence to house a multi-generational family, has now been converted into four single occupancy rooms—each housing a single queer man.

Your duteous advice columnist does not live a radical queer life. He doesn’t live in a Victorian home

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and he hasn’t seen San Francisco (he’s been huddled over his Remington typewriter for weeks trying unjam the letters “C,” “R,” and “Y”). But he does know that space can be made even in rooms which appear to have none. Living rooms especially. It’s not about, as you say, setting down the drill and picking up a book.

It’s about using the drill to build a bookshelf. Maybe to hold your collection of radical queer literature.

Maybe Richard Rodriguez’s Days Of Obligation in which “Late Victorians” can be found. Maybe neither of these things, and instead buy a power sander to redo your floors. Your advice columnist thinks either is a good idea, and he’ll have a housewarming gift at your doorstep regardless. +++ I’ve been missing some vague, undefinable sense of intimacy in my relationships, and I just met somebody I want to see if I can build that rapport with. Being sort of a conciliatory person, I tend to couch the kind of interaction that intimacy would need behind a veneer of casual good humor and self-effacement. Should I try for what I feel to be more genuine start to a relationship, with the understanding that they might get spooked? Or is my impatience unfair to them and the possibilities of our relationship?

Consider for a moment the following: Both Trump and Clinton supporters live in the realm of fantasy.

This is not because either political camps have unrealistic or amoral political agendas (they do, each in their own right, but that’s not the point here). The entire election cycle is in fact an amusement park of fantasies with mascots (the candidates), visitors (voters), and sad teenage ride operators (millennials, or elderly volunteers at the polls), each constructing their own mini-fantasies in order to sustain them for the duration of this vomit-inducing hell-pit until the park closes— or, the election ends.

It is a fantasy when Trump promises to build a #bragadocious wall across the American-Mexican border as it is when Hillary makes a promise “make debt-free college available to everyone.” Neither candidate is president and neither scenario is actually reality. Trump’s xenophobic racism and Clinton’s promises hedged from Bernie Sanders are there to produce in you, the voter, a type of yearning. Not for this

reality—the current one in which your sullen, tired, and politically disappointed advice columnist is writing—but that not-so-far-off one you’ll be voting for in November, wherein Trump can rap his tiny knuckles on the Roosevelt desk and Clinton can “squeeze ISIS” like a squeegee.

My point here has relevance. The fabric of our dating world is unfortunately composed of dark matter (stay with me): look for a person’s romantic intentions and you’ll face a gaping void of non-information you’ll never know and it’s probably not worth guessing. Logistical politics play a role in your dating life whether you like it or not; being upfront about your serious romantic desires, as you intimated in your question, will result in almost certain disaster. But it’s not because they’ll get “spooked” at your intentions, but rather that your intentions are focused more on the idea of a relationship, in its fantastical abstract, than they are on a relationship with the particular person you have in mind.

We all yearn for the idea of a relationship at some point—when we’re lonely like the Miss Lonelyheart writing to you presently—but actualizing relationships requires us to remove ourselves from the fantasy and, as we will do in November, step into reality. In other words, your impatience is only unfair to your love interest in that your end goal is the idea of a relationship more than it is a relationship with your specific love interest. This position is doomed. It renders your love interest as merely incidental.

You’ll be unsurprised to find that the individual who makes promises as Clinton does, who lives permanently in the world of the election cycle, who seeks not the practical connection to another person’s well-being, but the pleasure that’s produced by yearning for that connection, makes for an undesirable potential romance. Acting as president is not the same as being president. Wanting a relationship in the abstract is not the same as wanting a relationship with a particular person. No one likes election cycle politicians, and certainly no one likes an election cycle relationship candidate, making empty promises to anybody, acting the part without doing the job.

You need to drop your “veneer of casual good humor and self-effacement.” These are defense mechanisms that run totally counter to the vulnerability and open lines of communication required in the “undefinable sense of intimacy” you mentioned. Cynicism cuts like a dull blade. It bruises more than it makes bleed.

Acting the part takes vigilance. It’s easy to fall back into the realm of fantasy—and don’t feel bad if you do.

The most powerful media machines in the world already have. Just try not to hang out there for too long.

EPHEMERA

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“’I’ve had enough of your dark nights,” yelled Moomintroll.

“I’m cold, I’m all alone and I want the sun to come back.”

-Tove Jansson If I’d had a substantial reason to claim Scandinavia as my temporary home, perhaps I would have felt less small in the breaking of each new morning.

However, I was pulled to the north by a strong nostalgia, nostalgia in the form of a set of children’s books dating from around 1945. (There have been more tenuous ways to determine a place to live, but not by much.) The author, a gentle Swedish-speaking Finn named Tove Jansson, wrote long into her old age on a knobbly Finnish island.

In the series, small creatures called Moomintrolls live in a sleepy valley somewhere in the very north of Europe. They are sweet white dumpling-shaped things, with big sheepish eyes and round snouts that render them not unlike tiny hippopotamuses. The Moomins play the harmonica, ride clouds, and throw festivals. They are as prone to the changing of the northern seasons as they are to the magic of a sorcerer, or visitors from faraway lands. I have loved them since I was very small. I have always been prone to letting fits of sentiment determine my choices. Allowing trolls to dictate my temporary home was perhaps the most dubious choice of all.

Copenhagen, 1 The sun hangs low and strange in Denmark’s winter sky. There is no high noon in the north this time of year, only a long uncanny dawn that slides seamlessly into dusk. Beginning traces the sky immediately until end, a rising and sinking without prolonged suspension. All the day is change, gradient, dream state. And then—the stretch of night.

Denmark, the southernmost of the Nordic nations, is very flat. I live just outside the city in a suburb called Høje Taastrup, in the home of a couple named Ellen and Morten Grøndtved. They do not seem remotely bothered by the weather, perhaps understanding that compared to the Swedes or the Norwegians they don’t have it half bad. On the contrary, they say the summer has extended late this year. They eat almost exclusively red meat and periodically walk their cat on a leash. I do not know whether these are classic Danish traits or pure eccentricity.

One day in the first month, over tea, Ellen attempts to explain to me the meaning of the word hygge. It’s a noun, though it can be manipulated into the adjectival hyggeligt. Hygge, as Ellen describes it, is a remedy of sorts, a notion she loosely translates as

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coziness. Candles can be hygge. Spending time with friends can be hygge. A warm blanket can be hygge.

Moreover, though, hygge is a feeling: that of inner warmth, kindled differently depending on who you ask. As she speaks, I think perhaps I used to know hygge better as a child, though the word was then unfamiliar. Sun-warmed skin, days salted by the sea.

My room in the Grøndtved household is very small, with a slanted ceiling. When I wake at seven each morning it is dark. Gaining consciousness here feels to me like falling into a black hole.

Displaced inside this Nordic darkness, I ache for a light of my own. I am not so sure I can live without sun, if I might wilt, unable to photosynthesize. But a lack of sunlight does not preclude hygge.

If anything, it encourages it.

Bergen On a weeklong sojourn that concludes in Norway, fellow expatriate Louise and I climb through the slouching fog to scout for trolls. There are sculptures of them everywhere on Mount Floyen, scattered at random in the forest: hacked-wood carvings of creatures with scarred, bucktoothed faces and smeary grins. The Norwegians believe in them ruthlessly.

As we search, Louise and I patter words back and forth. We have mutually suspended the last ten or so years of our lives; we are back in the yonderland, a place in which I used to build fairy houses out of bark and stones.

We soon find ourselves in a part of the woods that feels unrulier. Moss grows thick on every surface. At one point, we stumble upon a fallen tree, one that has long since fused its trunk with the ground. A deep crevasse cuts underneath it, and I climb to the entrance, call a soft and sheepish hello into the blackness. Beyond the high-topped trees above us, dark clouds scud in search of a horizon to land upon, letting loose in the meantime a light rain trembling earthwards. I spot a whittled wooden sign, pinned on a birch tree, that reads OBS FARE FOR PULVERHEKSER: beware of witches. Beside it is the outline of a sorceress on her broom. I grin at Louise to mask a breath of fear on the back of my neck. Perhaps a witch is no cause for alarm. Perhaps she knows how to bottle potions: to banish loneliness, to instill a sense of safety, to replace the sun. A cauldron of rays. Brewing light must be a necessity when one lives alone in these northern woods.

We descend. Night drifts into misted predawn.

I wake to news that turns my stomach: gunfire in Paris, a city I slept in only nights before. Circumstance is wire-thin. So far trauma has hit only by proxy. Of late, though, I have felt it sideswipe my

L I G H T

own body, closer each time. I swaddle myself in layer after layer of sweaters, bulky and protective, before our walk to the train station.

After the darkened trek from our apartment, the station is violently bright. We board a railcar and it stutters and then starts. Painted Norwegian towns flicker by in the dim, scattered across the bases of great peaks. Across from me, Louise fights sleep, eyelids twitching. I resist too. Resist sleep, resist news of tragedy. The gush of words and grieving it has prompted, how one catastrophe seems to give way to all of them. The peaks slide by. Slumbering giants, sunk into the soil, capped with snow. With age, a dwindling number of places left untouched by fear. I used to be an optimist.

The clouds burst with sleet as we board the ferry, but I remain undaunted. Instead, a sort of hardness has sprung up in my stomach, and I walk to the bow. The fjord is black and glassy, and we glide along it, looking up from the base of gargantuan, overlapping slopes. A wooly fog gathers by each crag’s pinnacle. I feel a sort of relief in my own diminutive body, in our tiny little vessel. Borne on the melting of ancient ice, the streaming split of mountains. I am grateful to be a small thing. Grateful and afraid.

Copenhagen, 2 Days spin by, spokes whirring on a bicycle or many.

Traffic laws are obeyed here religiously. Even drunk youths in the wee hours of the morning patiently wait for the little walking man to flick from red to green before stumbling across the road. I have been counting on my body to begin, at some point, generating its own light. The fact that it hasn’t started this yet makes me anxious and sick.

At my desk each afternoon, I obsessively Google Høje Taastrup sunrise and sunset times. I can’t stop thinking about them. I draft a text, knowing it is perhaps inadvisable. Do you know, I write, that the sun is going to set at 4:13pm here next week?

It’s only October! The recipient is bored but patient. He has heard this before, though the specifics change each time. Send me some daylight, I write.

Send me some warmth.

When a letter arrives in Høje Taastrup, worn after crossing two continents and an ocean, I handle it gingerly. A mark of my generation, I suppose, that the electronic transmission of words across the world feels more probable than this successful arrival of snail mail in Denmark. I am tired of the light of screens. When I was young, everything was graspable, everyone I loved close. Now, I can only imagine. Bodies once close to or touching mine

SEPTEMBER 30, 2016

Georgia Wright ILLUSTRATION BY Heini Korhonen BY

breathe thousands of miles away.

Reykjavik One weekend after the weather grows wintry, I fly to Iceland, hop a bus across the country. At first I think the Icelandic light is weaker than Denmark’s, being farther north, but I am mistaken. It is wildly potent, filtering out in small hued strands from behind puffs of geyser steam. Through the scratched bus windows, it magnifies, warming my cheeks as I watch cosmic lava fields slide by. Though I am not yet ready to greet it, night falls. The bus shudders ever ahead.

There is a spark in the distance. One of the small shacks that peppers the twisty shadow landscape.

Inside, I imagine a fire crackling, belching flame as a man in a sheepskin nudges it with an iron prong.

Outside his cottage, the wind gallops in bitter eddies.

Something ripples distant in the night sky. Were the air not so bone-cold, the man might go outside to watch the aurora borealis and perhaps never return.

It’s happened before. The Huldefólk, those wily elves, are so lecherous and seductive that even the burliest man is vulnerable. Legend has it they lurk in the crevasses of the terrain, small unbreaths sucking in and out of the coldest shadows. They entice from the periphery mortals to step farther and farther away onto the lava fields until they find themselves stranded. There, the humans freeze into ungodly befuddled pillars, skin waxy, numbing slowly solid in the endless night.

Our leader is called Freya, and she moonlights, inexplicably, as a Dolly Parton impersonator. Freya has lived all her life in Reykjavik, weathered many of its dim winters. She stands at the front of the bus full of runny-nosed, stiff-limbed tourists, and with round eyes unspools tales of the northern lights. Periodically, she breaks into song—at one point a singlehanded duet, attempting when necessary a Kenny Rogers baritone.

Then she lets loose the legends.

“Some believe,” she says in an accented voice over the fuzzed hum of the loudspeaker, “if a man and a woman copulate beneath the northern lights, they will conceive a genius baby.” She laughs, raucously. “We have blankets in the back, should anyone want one!”

The bus sneezes and rumbles over a hill. On either side of us spread great ice sheets, lava fields capped with snow. But we are all preoccupied with the sky.

“Last night, we saw them dance for us—reds and blues and greens. The gods were with us.” Her tone is reverential. Freya’s tales range from traditional Icelandic myths to unfounded superstitions, such as the following: if you whistle in the presence of the northern lights, the lights themselves—spirits of the dead—will whisk you away. A forever-disappearance. I wonder

what might happen if one sings Dolly Parton to them.

The bus thrums quietly now, the initial excitement of its passengers subdued by impatience. Freya hums a lullaby. Her voice has a certain indisputable soothing quality to it, and I am lulled, heavy-lidded.

Abruptly, she stops. The bus shudders to a halt. “I see some activity!” she says, ecstatic. “Above the rock faces to the left—hurry, hurry!” She exits, docile as a fox. Jolted awake, we triple-wrap our scarves, rush out of the bus into what feels like a physical wall of cold and darkness. Then I see the exuberant silhouette of Freya, perched on the crest of a hill, silhouetted by shifting, luminous ribbons in the northern sky.

Their celestial glow is worlds away from the daylight I’ve pined for. Not a sun, or a weaker version thereof, but a new and odd radiance. For once, tiny under the swirling spirits of gods to which I have no claim, I do not resist the strangeness. Instead, I let myself feel strange, too.

Copenhagen, 3 Early one mid-December morning, Ellen and Morten drive me to the airport. Though the baggage check line is hours long, they refuse to leave my side until I process through.

As we wait side by side, I think of a couple weeks ago, when Ellen and I sat on the couch in their very small living room. It was nearing two in the morning, candles flickering. We’d all talked late, lazy and beatific, sated with food and drink. Following a silent moment, Ellen closed her eyes and told us about when she and Morten had applied to be foster parents. It didn’t work out. They have children, lovely and grown children. Yet they still longed for more. As a substitute for the foster kids, they had hosted more than eight students like me. Enough hygge present in their small and boxy home to welcome us restless souls. How wide and strong their filaments must be, to bridge so many partings.

In the weeks and months after I return to the states, I still won’t feel quite right. I will wonder if what I thought was a result of slanting and uneasy rays was in fact created by watching my childhood fade into movie stills or storybook fiction, the outlines of friends and family and loves nudging soft into memory-echoes. Once in a while, I’ll turn to lock eyes with a ghost.

When we reach the end of the line, I squeeze Ellen tight to me. I watch her and Morten grow small as I move forward, upward on the escalator. When I reach the top, I am for a moment frozen there, reluctant after all this time to take another step. But the strange and slanting sun is low in the sky, so I turn, and keep an uneasy move on.

GEORGIA WRIGHT B’17 is overthinking it.

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FEATURES

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ON TERRITORIES Raphaela Posner ILLUSTRATION BY Maria Cano-Flavia BY

There’s always a moment in an art museum when I want to reach out and touch my companion. Often this urge occurs in doorways, when his shoulders are outlined against a canvas as he steps into the next room. It isn’t a desire to feel him in any erotic way, rather a hope of creating intimacy so that I won’t feel so alone in front of the brushstrokes.

I’ve never done it. Touched an arm in the museum, I mean. I haven’t reached out to any of the boys I’ve brought along with me, instead relying on the casual sharing of shoulder space that sometimes occurs when we try to look at something small at the same time. +++ When I was nine, I only liked museums if they explained the blood pumping through the capillaries in my wrist or the universe we lived in. I especially loved the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. I enjoyed pulling my mom between delicately framed butterflies and exhibitions on the Mars rover. The best part of the Denver Museum was the Hall of Life. It was a parent’s nightmare—interactive displays touched by too many tiny palms to ever fully be sterile. Mom always tried to divert me, but the exhibit was too exciting for me to ever be swayed.

When I followed my parents along the Museum of Modern Art’s lightly stained wood floors at age 13, I only cared to look at what I knew: Monet’s water lilies, which I knew through the stories my mom gave me in the hopes of fostering an early appreciation for art. Or Degas’ ballerinas who wore pointe shoes that were still pale and pink, unlike the pair my friend scribbled on for me in case she ever got famous for her pirouettes. The impressionists illuminated ponds and houses along the countryside with a palette knife. Across the hall, Rothko’s color fields illuminated nothing for me. I enjoyed the vibrancy of the colors but the absence of a concrete narrative made the work feel inherently ungraspable in my mind. Unlike the paintings with tan stucco buildings and figures bent over a river, just downstream of the water wheel, his paintings didn’t take me to another world.

I first flirted with abstraction when my brother Max made up a game so I wouldn’t get bored as our family meandered through the MoMA during a trip to New York when I was in eighth grade. I don’t remember exactly what the game was except that it was fun and it made it so I didn’t pull at my parents begging them to let me look in the gift shop. The precise rules of the game are fuzzy now but I remember the process clearly. Each time we came to a new piece we were supposed to say what it made us think of, a Rorschach-like divination akin to searching for stories in tea leaves. It was a game of free association, turning abstraction into something that I could hold in my sticky palms. I’m sure most of the things that came to my mind were animals. Or stuffed animals. Perhaps my brother spoke of the college architecture class he was taking at the time, or poetry, or something more perceptive than “it looks like a sleepy cat.” Instead of counting down the minutes until my parents would give me a few dollars to buy a cookie at the grab-and-go café, I was set on winning the game.

Max never told me there was no way to win, that that wasn’t really the point. He breathed life into the museum in the hopes of getting his baby sister to keep quiet in the contemporary galleries. I would try to think

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of connections faster than he could, pouncing at his shoulders when I thought my idea was going to be better than his. Perhaps he laughed, or gave my parents a look that acknowledged a hope for quiet and solitude. I like to think he listened carefully—storing my associative patterns to talk about in a few years when I would call him to talk about a painting I had fallen in love with. Through the game I was connecting not only with the abstract forms of a painting but with my brother, listening to his thought process and realizing that despite the age difference we were able to exist on a similar plane inside the museum. I think that’s why we sought out art museums. They brought my family into the same physical space and allowed us to project our individual feelings onto the same object.

Now when we go to a museum we wander at different speeds. My father moves quickly, letting the colors of one piece blend into the next as he creates a story of the exhibit as a whole. My mother spends time at each painting, cocking her head to the side and reading every description. My brother and I have similar tempos, and I wonder if in some ways I am still mirroring his museum meandering. We look at the exhibit and find pieces that pull us to them. We cross our arms and lean slightly to the left.

Standing in the MoMA, I realized that the way I saw the Mondrian was different than Max’s experience of the piece. As a result of playing with him, I started to think of the paintings not simply as finished pieces, but as canvasses in which I could continue to be immersed, my relationship to the piece and the people standing next to me transforming as I age.

I think that’s why I keep bringing boys to art museums. It’s a way of placing our relationship in a new territory, winding through makeshift walls and talking occasionally about what catches our eye or what that figure in the center—yes, that one slightly to the left— reminds us of. I brought a boy along with me to the Miró exhibit at the Denver Art Museum last summer and found myself fidgeting. We walked to an uncomfortable rhythm of talking and silence, constantly brainstorming the next thing to say. Within a week, I’d return to the Miró exhibit, whispering commentary into a new ear and hoping the energy of this boy’s nervous fingers would propel us as we wandered through the canvases. Standing in front of a painting we were able to glance pieces of each other’s lives, using free association as an entry point to creating the intimacy I longed for. We were playing the game. +++ I wish I could bring them all to visit my favorite piece.

I want to share it with them. I’d bring them into my sanctuary for a moment as I try to understand why the piece is called Mooring. It’s a 1972 painting by Joan Mitchell in the RISD Museum nestled in the folding corridors of an old colonial house that has been gutted to make room for the kind of slick white walls I once dreaded. Positioned catty-corner to a large Twombly, the periwinkle and black and teal of Joan’s painting always overwhelms me. It fills the whole wall and even

my peripheral vision is edged with the colors. The textures of the paint change across the canvas, heavy in some places and spread thin elsewhere to create contrast not only in hue but density as well. The first time I visited I thought I saw a boat in the lower right corner of the canvas. I love this painting because it hasn’t let me beat the game yet, the one my brother made up. I still find myself perplexed by the thickness and opacity of the pigments and the way the title demands interpretation, recognition of Mitchell’s mastery of abstraction.

There’s no clear association that comes to mind when I visit. I find myself lost in its layers.

Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925 and spent a significant portion of her life painting in New York and France. She is thought to be one of the most successful women of the abstract expressionist movement and was a part of its second generation. It was a generation that broadened the movement to more fully include female painters, a role that she negotiated throughout her career. Mitchell says the piece is one of her territory paintings, a category applied to paintings she created in the 1970s. These paintings are an attempt to appreciate her time in France and the villa near Monet’s that she inhabited for a while, looking at the ways in which physical space is reinterpreted through abstraction.

I’ve played the game long enough with this piece that I feel I can almost speak for Joan in the present tense.

We’re on a first-name basis, you see. I’m not sure territory is strictly a spatial parameter, something that she is taking ownership of between the periwinkle and orange. Standing in front of the painting, territory becomes more a delineation of the spaces we occupy, both emotionally and physically. It is the multiple spheres of our lives, overlapping with the experiences of our companions or sometimes leaving us alone in our own territory wondering if we’ll ever be able to share it with someone else. I want to watch the boy’s peripheral vision become overwhelmed by Joan’s handiwork, but I’m not sure whether that is out of a desire to share the piece or to see if Joan approves of him.

“I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me––and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would more like to paint what it leaves with me,” says Joan in a 1958 interview with John I.H. Baur. I am trying to write what Joan leaves with me, what I hope will be left when I take a particular boy (the one who seems to be special) to the painting.

I haven’t brought him to Joan’s piece yet. Maybe there hasn’t been a boy who’s worthy. I wonder if the picture of him standing by the painting is better in my head than it might be in reality, as if I were cutting around the edges of the sweater one of them wore when we visited the Clyfford Still Museum and gluing him in front of Joan. In my mind he breaks the barrier between us and rests his hand on my waist, pulling me in to show that he understands that there is some unnameable energy to the piece—bringing us together in that silence.

Or maybe we will just walk in and stand there. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to bring him into my museum territory. It’s a part of the game I am making up as I go.

RAPHAELA POSNER B’18 is territorial.

SEPTEMBER 30, 2016

CHA N G I NG O U R S K I ES Atmospheric geoengineering and the future

BY Fatima

Pollution sunsets, with their exquisite range of colors and other photogenic qualities, are not only here to stay, but may soon be intentionally created.

As humans continue to influence the climate of our planet, we must look to other options to mitigate our influences due to the lack of progress made in cutting fossil fuel emissions. Some scientists have developed a predilection for geoengineering—the science of engineering the Earth to relieve the effects of manmade climate change.

Geoengineering targets greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, which trap heat radiated from the Earth’s surface, creating the greenhouse effect.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, influenced by manmade carbon dioxide emissions, currently stand at 402.24 ppm according to the Global Monitoring Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). There is little to no indication based on previous trends that these levels will decrease in the near future. Human effects on the climate have been so vast that many scientists unofficially refer to the current geologic epoch as the Anthropocene—defined by anthropogenic, or manmade, effects on Earth’s ecosystems. Striking pink, orange, and yellow sunsets, caused by the presence of pollution particulates in the atmosphere, are only one of the less terrifying consequences of manmade climate change.

In an attempt to lessen anthropogenic influences on Earth’s climate, scientists have developed a method of geoengineering called solar radiation management, which manipulates Earth’s ability to reflect incoming light radiation from the sun, also referred to as albedo. Snow, cloud cover, or bright sands can influence albedo, as lightly colored surfaces tend to reflect more solar radiation than darker surfaces. This ultimately means that a lighter colored earth is also a cooler Earth. If less heat is radiated onto Earth from the sun, then the planet will heat up at a much slower rate.

cades—further highlighting the implications of pollution by falling balloons.

Commercial airline systems also offer the potential to deliver sulfur aerosols. They already travel in the lower layers of the stratosphere, and including sulfur in the fuel of the plane could allow sulfate aerosols to be dispersed during transit.

Though this proposal is appealing due to its convenience, there are major problems with this delivery method because it does not guarantee that the aerosols will be formed in the stratosphere where they would make the most impact because it is limited by existing flight patterns.

Modified fighter jets provide a more precise method of delivering the aerosols to specific locations. For delivery in the stratosphere above the tropics, existing military jets capable of traveling at the appropriate altitudes and speeds to allow for optimal aerosol delivery could be employed.

After all, the aircrafts necessary for this already exist. However, it’s important to consider the sheer magnitude of aerosol delivered over time necessary to begin cooling Earth. Approximately 1 megaton of aerosol gas per year would need to be delivered by these small jets, totaling extensive airtime and fuel costs. Remember, the Pinatubo eruption that caused the cooling we desire delivered 17 megatons of sulfur dioxide in a single eruption event.

Modified military artillery can also be used to deliver the precursors. The ranges and strengths of rifles can be manipulated in order to shoot aerosol precursors to the desired heights in the stratosphere, where they can immediately begin to reflect radiation. Again, the issue of how many rifles need to be shot, and how often, looms. As with the military aircraft, the main disadvantage of using enough modified artillery to deliver the precursors is a multi-billion-dollar price tag.

+++ Solar radiation management was not always intended to fix humanity’s mistakes. The idea was initially proposed during the mid-to-late 20th century as a means for controlling climate for military purposes—as weather warfare. By manipulating weather conditions, tactical advantages could be increased on-ground. The United States military actually

employed weather warfare tactics during the Vietnam War to artificially extend the monsoon season during Operation Popeye. The ethical ramifications of weather modification are questionable, but there is no official law or treaty explicitly banning the practice. Weather affects entire populations and ecosystems, so who is designated to give consent to weather modification? Additionally, climate patterns are still not well understood, and manipulating climate before understanding how it fully functions could be risky. It’s a dangerous game.

In the realm of atmospheric geoengineering, solar radiation management is considered a major player due to evidence of its cooling tendencies during the natural Mt. Pinatubo eruption of 1991 in the Philippines. The eruption released 17 megatons of sulfur dioxide, which turned into reflective sulfur aerosols in the stratosphere and in turn increased Earth’s albedo, leading to temporary global cooling. Injection of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere from a point source—a volcano in the Philippines— caused planet-wide cooling. If a natural injection of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere at a single point yielded the cooling results we desire, and we’ve learned how to manipulate weather before, then why not purposely inject sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere to help us now?

Since it took an impressive 17 megatons of sulfur dioxide to cause temporary cooling back in 1991, let’s explore the ways we can get sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere that will allow for more long-term cooling in the future.

At the American Physical Society Meeting in Denver in May 2009, Professor Alan Robock of Rutgers introduced the idea of using balloons to get the aerosols into the atmosphere. Essentially, balloons would be filled with a mixture of helium and hydrogen sulfide gas, which would, when the balloon bursts in the stratosphere, be released into the surrounding air and form the reflective sulfur aerosols we desire. In order to withstand bursting during transit, it is likely the balloon would need to be constructed out of a durable material—meaning it would not be biodegradable. This poses issues regarding pollution: when the balloon bursts, who is responsible for the debris that falls back to Earth? Additionally, preliminary estimates of the amount of balloons necessary to deliver the correct amount of sulfate aerosol precursors to produce cooling effects is estimated at 20,000,000,000 balloons over de-

Husain Pia Mileaf-Patel

ILLUSTRATION BY

+++ Geoengineering requires intricate and thorough consideration. Before sulfur aerosols can be properly considered a viable means for climate geoengineering to lower global temperatures, it is crucial to evaluate the methodology behind the geoengineering experiment, with specific consideration of delivery method. It’s appealing to hear of proposed catchall solutions when geoengineering is proposed, but there simply isn’t enough data out there to support the claims of widespread climate mitigation.

Currently, geoengineering, like all other Earthwide experiments, remains theoretical. Though modeling and analysis of geoengineering methods sheds light on the possible benefits and dangers of the experiments, and countless hours of discussion amongst scientists and philosophers have been dedicated towards understanding the ethics and methodology of geoengineering, the most important questions about geoengineering have yet to be answered: what does it say about humankind’s efforts to mitigate anthropogenic climate change?

Why must we resort to considering geoengineering, rather than promote behavioral changes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Maybe we can think about it as we look to our pink skies.

FATIMA HUSAIN B’17 thinks Hollywood needs more geoengineering.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SCIENCE

16

THE HORCHATA MAN

Micaela Burgess ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz BY

My papa lived to bring happiness with his horchata. Everyday he made barrels of it to serve to his family and the people in our neighborhood. As the drug wars peaked, spirits were low and humanity seemed almost lost. But even then, his horchata revitalized the people of our barrio. We witnessed torture and executions too often. Unidentified bodies lay in our streets and blood ran into our sewer drains. When we found two men strung up dead on an overpass with the message “plata o pomo” graffitied onto the highway sign we were not fazed. Rejecting both the violence and our acceptance of it, my papa made more horchata. He wanted to bring life back to the living, and for a short time, he succeeded.

We knew it was inevitable that papa would be caught in the crossfire of the drug wars, but I guess we never thought that he’d actually die. He seemed immortal, my papa—already an angel, incapable of death. But he was just a man, kind and trusting of the people around him.

Horchata had a different taste after he died. Instead of the usual sweet milk and cinnamon, there were hints of heartaches and secrets. I knew he was a good man, but there wasn’t much else. He helped raise me yet I couldn’t seem to remember anything about him aside from the horchata.

Papa’s wake was held on a hot day— hardly ever the weather for mourning. Through the stained-glass windows of Jesus suffering on the cross, a kaleidoscopic light shined into the church. I went up to take one last look at my papa’s face before everyone showed up to pay their respects. It was a miracle that the bullets pierced only his lower body, leaving his face untouched, a faint smile on his lips. His body lay empty, yet it seemed as if he were still inside, taunting me. “Who am I, mija?” “Oh pobrecita niña! She only knows me as the horchata man!” “How sad that she’ll never know who her own papa really was!”

“Nada que hacer ahora.”

I couldn’t stand it, all the questions that emerged from his unmoving mouth. And the final parting thought: “Nothing to do now.” As if he was content with just being the horchata man, as if I were content with all of his unanswered questions. I glared at him as he goaded me more and more and.

“Yadira, why do you stare at your papa that way?”

Father Ignacio was looking at me with concern in his eyes. “We are about to start the mass. If you could please take your seat so I can begin.”

My gaze moved from Father Ignacio to the pews behind him, packed with so many people I didn’t know or recognize. How could all of these people know my father?

17

LITERARY

SEPTEMBER 30, 2016

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