The College Hill Independent—Vol 47 Issue 6

the

November

03

2023

Volume 47 Issue 06

03 HOMELAND 04 RANKING EVERY VAMPIRE WEEKEND SONG EVER 05 OBSESSIONS

THE COMPOSITE ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

47 06 11.03

This Issue 00 “PENELOPE’S APPLES” KS

02 WEEK IN TRADITIONS BF & NM

03 HOMELAND WM

04 RANKING EVERY VAMPIRE WEEKEND SONG EVER KS

05 THE LESBIAN MOVIE MASTERDOC: A GLIMPSE CB

07 A FAMILY FINDS ENTERTAINMENT CC

08 STRIPES KH

09 WEATHERED IDENTITY & REFLECTION WM

10 MEAT CULTURE MEETS CULTURED MEAT EG

13 COUCH FINDINGS JK, CC, & LS

14 PIECING TOGETHER THE SHERDS OF INDIGENOUS POTTERY BB

16 THREAD COUNT TS

16 HANDMADE & BASEMENT DH

17 VIGNETTE OF A GHOST TOWN. KG

18 DEAR INDY: HALLOWEEN DH

19 BULLETIN QC & ARG

From the Editors Her secret was the same as everyone else’s secret, which meant that it didn’t exist. -AQ

Masthead* MANAGING EDITORS AQ LS WEEK IN REVIEW CP JW ARTS CB NM KS EPHEMERA QE LG FEATURES MC LS ES LITERARY ED TS EMT METRO KB CL NM SCIENCE + TECH MF LKS CS WORLD TA AD AL

STAFF WRITERS AA MA BBK BB DdF KG JG EG YH DH JH AK CL PM SM KM AN LS JV KW ZZ DZ COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS RA EB MD BF AF DG SH BMW NM AN DEVELOPMENT COORDINATORS CL AL ES

X CC JK DEAR INDY SA LIST CB SF

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM JB KB AL KS YS

BULLETIN BOARD QC ARG

COVER COORDINATOR MT DESIGN EDITORS GK AM SS DESIGNERS JC RC SG KH SH AL AL TQ ZRL ES SY ILLUSTRATION EDITORS JC IRD LW ILLUSTRATORS SB AC AD MD AF LF HG SH NK AL ML RL JR MS SS IS LS WEB EDITORS KB HD MD MM MVP LS — The College Hill Independent is printed in Seekonk, MA

*Our Beloved Staff

Mission Statement The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power.

We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and selfcritical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

Letters to the editor are welcome; scan the QR code here or email us at theindy@gmail.com!

01

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

Week in Traditions Friends and Instagram

→ This summer, before arriving at Brown, I read a book about a boy

( TEXT BF & NM DESIGN JC & SS ILLUSTRATION MS & SS )

STRIKE OUT

→ In a stunning upset, the Brown

Daily Herald defeated the College Hill Independent 16-9 in a kickball game between the two archrivals Saturday at Gano Street Park. The loss sent Southern New England’s largest alt-weekly reeling and left some questioning its leadership ahead of a new Managing Editor election later this month.

The match between the two juggernaut publications marked the resumption of a historic rivalry that hadn’t been held for at least four years, according to Indy Senior Editor, resident historian, and all-star right fielder Ella Spungen.

In the past, the rivalry had been dominated by the Herald, with some claiming that the Indy’s focus on the arts distracted it from its athletic objectives. But cracks began showing in the management of the Herald earlier this semester, when the paper dropped its print publication to once a week, a far cry from its peak when it published a print issue—as its name suggests—daily. That, combined with the ardent and bellicose rhetoric in the lead-up to the game from Indy Managing Editor and firstbaseman Angela Qian, had many believing the tides had turned in the Brown University publication kickball scene.

But at the end of the game, it was Herald Editor-in-Chief Will Kubzansky and the rest of the paper’s famed editorial board lifting the trophy—a rack of Miller High Life—while Qian was left struggling for explanation.

“It means everything, it means the world,” Kubzansky said of the return of the Herald-Indy rivalry.

“I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. It sucks,” Qian said, shaking her head.

“I just don’t know where we go from here.”

The Indy jumped out to an early lead in the top of the first inning after a booming triple from the writer of this article scored Qian, who had led off with a hit. The visitors continued their attacking onslaught, plating three more to open a 4-0 lead. But the Herald would quickly strike back, scoring five of its own in the bottom half of the inning to claim a lead that it would never relinquish.

The Indy received a shot-in-the-arm with the arrival of staff writer and centerfielder Ben Balint-Kurti in the second inning, who began galloping across the outfield, turning would-be extra-base hits into outs much like the Herald turns would-be news into tedious drivel.

Arts editor and left fielder Kolya Shields also loomed large in the Indy’s outfield, adding herself to the game’s highlight reel with a sliding catch.

Despite the Indy’s defensive highlights, its offense never matched its early burst. After the first inning, it went scoreless in five of the remaining frames. And moments of inattentiveness from Indy outfielders—including from Spungen, who must have been leaving D2 edits on an article when, distracted by her phone, she let the ball roll past deep into the outfield—allowed the Herald to put up crooked numbers in the fourth and eighth innings.

When the Indy came up for the final time in the top of the ninth, it was down 16-8. A leadoff home run from Balint-Kurti narrowed the deficit, but in the end it wasn’t enough: the bad guys won and journalism is dead.

The Indy will look to bounce back in a game against the Brown Noser next week.

NM B’24 finds losing unacceptable.

who goes to college. He prances about and considers himself and how he is perceived by the social scene that surrounds him. In the end, after graduating into a period of complete self-absorption, he returns to his college campus and cries, “I know myself, but that is all.”

Wow, I thought, what a sad, sad state of affairs! To think only about yourself, so as only to know yourself…how disappointing! Worse yet, for knowing yourself to mean only knowing how you are perceived by the social scene that surrounds you…how truly, truly empty!

Certainly, in college, I’ll think about all the ideas and interesting people around me. Certainly, I thought, this will not become of me… +++ Upon being accepted to Brown, I was very quickly on the @brown2027class Instagram account scrolling day and night. I became rather addicted to the stalk: reading the bios, scrolling through comments, tapping on tagged accounts, one post, then another, then another. Oh, the thrill of tap, tap, tapping!

My own post on the page was brief. I strung together some gerunds, describing different activities I enjoy: “I love reading, singing, playing….” I’m not entirely sure what I meant by “playing,” but I think I was going for whimsy. I continued with things I like: “Frank O’Hara” because I’m so literary, “Sex and the City” because I like to laugh, and “ice cream” because at the end of the day I’m just a normal guy who likes normal things.

My bio was accompanied by three photos: me in a flowy yellow button-down shirt sitting on the curb of a cobblestone street, me and my best friend from home wearing crowns emblazoned with the words “Most Likely to be on Broadway,” and me winking and holding a card that says “GENUINE, 100% PURE, UNTOUCHED, CHASTE, INNOCENT VIRGIN FOREVER.” All of this is, of course, so very embarrassing to revisit. How narcissistic! How posturing! How shallow! But then again, how fun! +++ August 30 rolled around and photos and bios became people and conversations. On the slopes outside Andrews, in the sweaty Miller basement, and in scattered Keeney dorm rooms, I met people whose stories I seemed already to have known. I knew a girl’s favorite book was Franny and Zooey before I even knew her name! I was feeling rather like a small fish in a medium-sized pond who really studied the phonebook.

Connections made in comment sections or DMs tended to simply fade. Because what happens when your perfect coquette, bloke-core, french-girl ‘friend’ only ever wants to do homework? Or, doesn’t understand that everything you say is a joke? Or, just lives on the other side of campus? You simply have to walk away. De-emphasis on simply. It’s hard! She was so cool!

Also, you have to think, what did my perfect coquette, bloke-core, french-girl ‘friend’ think I would be like? And why did I think she would be different than she is? The Instagram did not, after all, reveal very much. Instead, I was constantly forced to reconcile my and my classmates’ online presentations with real life. There was a certain loop of thinking that always ended up back at myself: Huh, they are different than I expected. Hmm, am I different than they expected? +++ One rainy Sunday a few weeks back, my friend and I spoke about self-perception over lunch at the Ratty: “We’re always talking about things that are ‘indie’ versus things that are ‘basic,’” she said.

“Yeah, I guess I’m often thinking about how people are perceived and how I’m perceived.”

“The crazy thing is that when you talk about how you’re perceived you’re usually right. You like…know yourself.”

Oh no! I must have forgotten to think about all the interesting ideas and people around me. I forgot to be nice and present and to put my phone away. I forgot that what matters most of all are friendships that are random and warm and full of conversations like these.

I know myself, but that is all. Good thing I have four years to know the rest!

BF B’27 is from Long Island, lives in New Pem 4, and is thinking of maybe concentrating in English.

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02

WORLD

Homeland (2023) Abstraction inspired by the final lines of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, “I Come From There” I learned all the words and broke them up To make a single word: Homeland... ‫ وفككته كي أركب مفردة واحده‬،‫تعلمت كل الكالم‬ ... ‫ الوطن‬:‫هي‬ WM R’27

03

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LIST

Ranking Every Vampire Weekend Song Ever ( TEXT KS DESIGN KS ILLUSTRATION LF )

→ Vampire Weekend is the limit case of

how preppy you can be without completely abdicating from the avant-garde. Privilege drips off their Columbia degrees and their Graceland-lite mix of afro-pop, surf rock, and ska; one critic has called them the “whitest band in the world.” Lead singer Ezra Koenig has always refused this premise, referencing his student debt and Jewishness and the band’s Ukrainian, Persian, and Italian heritage—“Nobody in our band is a WASP.” Beyond demographics, the band’s music somewhat chafes against the Ralph Lauren adorning the cover of 2010’s Contra—even if Koenig himself doesn’t: “I have a god-given right to wear a polo shirt.” The (in)famous “Oxford Comma” is about the classic Ivy League problem of a classmate hiding their wealth, and “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” critiques his peers’ rush into finance and consulting. (Although in fairness to the aforementioned identitarian critique, profitable, aestheticized, internal critique is probably one of the whitest things one can do).

The band has an all-too-familiar downward trajectory. The virtuosic, over-educated cosmopolitan turns darker, knottier, and all the more impressive (2013’s Modern Vampires of the City) until implosion—a declension of semi-rebellious urban millennial angst into the suburbs. See: Koenig’s $3 million Ojai house, his Netflix anime, the departure of Rostam Batmanglij, who spearheaded the band’s innovative, hyper-‘global’ production (and, in going solo, wanted to “speak to Iranians in America, non-white people, queer people”), and the limp universalism of 2019’s jam band pastiche Father of the Bride. But as TA just asked me: “Can you even sell out in the first place if you went to Columbia?” This, perhaps, more than intricate harpsichord arrangements or allusions to the Lydian empire, is why I can’t turn away from Vampire Weekend.

If a few dubiously middle-class Columbia grads making art about going to Columbia and looking like they go to Columbia are “avatars of bourgeois lameness” and “cultural tourists,” (which, yeah, probably), where does that leave me, and this fine newspaper?

Sure, Koenig probably could have benefited from taking a global sociology course, and it’s a little weird and lame that so many of his songs specifically skewer women, but I think art must be able to exceed its artist, and that trying to displace signifiers from their (exploitative) political-historical roots is much of why we make art in the first place.

KS B’24 used to have have a deeply strange crush on Ezra Koenig.

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THE LESBIAN MOVIE MASTERDOC: A GLIMPSE ( TEXT CB DESIGN AL ILLUSTRATION SS )

FEATS + EPHEMERA

→ Writing about ‘fandom’ or ‘obsession’ or ‘collection’ is to me writ-

ing about passion, a word which can only be defined through Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, a short novel about a bisexual with webbed feet.

The novel declares that “passion is somewhere between fear and sex”; passion is “sweeter split strand by strand,” but it is ultimately “gathered up at [...] the last moment.” Detailed below is my passion for the Lesbian Movie Industrial Complex, which I have ‘split’ into categories that offer a glimpse into my highly coveted listicle—the lesbian movie masterdoc: a living document. This is not to be confused with the prolific and Tumblr-driven “Am I a Lesbian” (affectionately known as “The Lesbian Masterdoc”) that is often reductive of sexual fluidity and might instead be called: “You Are Not Bisexual: You Are a Lesbian.”

T h e Wo r k o f t h e A d j e c t i v e : Explores how subtext and so-called queer coding is driven by the word lesbian, a double meaning.

This ‘passion’ of mine is shaped by the malleability of the word lesbian.

For example, it’s a lesbian masterdoc, but she’s a lesbian. Adjective and noun. I often think of these films that way. Bend It Like Beckham is a lesbian movie with, technically, no lesbians.

— Get your lesbian feet out of my shoes!

— Lesbian? Her birthday is in March. I thought she was a Pisces.

See? Adjective. Noun.

I watched Bend it Like Beckham for the first time after finding the DVD at a Super Walmart in Pennsylvania for 99 cents. My dad stuck it into our in-car disc slot and I watched it repeatedly for the next 10 years before eventually bringing the DVD into the house for the big-screen viewing experience. Directed by Guirnder Chadna, the film follows Keira Knightly as white Brit Jules and Parminder Nagra as Punjabi Brit Jessminder, or “Jess.” Facing the ultimate coming of age decision—go to America to play football or become an accountant?— these girls love soccer, cleats, and each other so much that they just about ‘overcome’ their cultural differences. Groundbreaking stuff for little ole me.

So, lesbian shoes aside, why is Bend It Like Beckham part of the lesbian movie masterdoc? There is, admittedly, no exact method to what gets included in my media collection. But I would say that in ’s case, it was Chadna’s decision to leave men in the margins of the stories of two young women constantly subjected to a host of patriarchal and colonial structures. In fact, men are so peripheral to their friendship that even Jess and Jules’s families conjure their lesbianism—in an enormous purple flowered hat, Jules’ mother swears to her daughter: “I saw you with my own eyes! You were kissing after your match! [...] And anyways look at the clothes you wear!”

After watching Bend it Like Beckham on multiple occasions in recent years while sorting through screenshots, saved posts, and script PDFs I stole from Reddit (r/actuallesbians, r/LesbianActually, r/CharacterRant), I have come to the conclusion that the film is inseparable from Mary Wilson Carpenter’s essay “Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me.’’ Carpenter conceives of a sens/sexuality distinct to non-male environments and the consumption of the female body. Or, as I like to call it, lesbian cannibalism. Carpenter argues that a “sisterhood which represses hierarchical differences [...] permits the female gaze to feast on the female form.” See image for my archive of Jess and Jules’s said ‘feast’.

NOTE: Bend It Like Beckham was released in 2002, so it is unsurprising that the movie features a litany of poorly aged statements, including where the soccer-coach-turnedlove-interest equates Jess being called a slur on the field to his experience as an Irishman.

Not so great, but at least it moves him even further into the margins of this honorary lesbian film—into the binding, even.

05

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The Black Lesbian Case: Moves past The Work of the Adjective’s honorary lesbian narratives and dives into Black lesbians that exist under the white gaze.

Although I have made a concerted effort to celebrate BIPOC lesbians in the masterdoc, a disclaimer must be made: as a product of our era’s obsession with universalism—i.e. all things interracial, ultimate mixité, and a simultaneous inability to imagine Black people outside of white queer narratives—an uncomfortable number of the films on the masterdoc are cast like a mixed family Target ad. This is especially, though thankfully not always, true for stories about the Black Lesbian.

In 2021, I watched The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls In Love (1995) for the first time. The Black Lesbian in question is Evie, a young upper middle class girl who eventually falls in love with her neighborhood high school butch Randy Dean. You know Evie is upper middle class because she drives a Range Rover, reads Leaves of Grass, and listens to opera and classical music. You know Randy Dean is working class because she wears plaid and listens to Bratmobile.

— God, Evie, you are so sheltered.

— Well…Unshelter me.

I associate this film with distinct features and phenomena:

1. Its dedication: “FOR MY FIRST GIRLFRIEND. MAY OUR RELATIONSHIP REST IN PEACE.”

2. Its lore: In canonical lesbian fashion, two of the extras in the film are exes of writer and director, Maria Maggenti.

3. Freshman year: Watching the movie for the first time on my Wayland Twin XL sheets.

4. My parasocial relationship with 90s lesbianism: In my 2022 note-

book is the film’s iconic scene, which I’ve titled “who needs to kiss when you can take an intimate drag off each other’s cigarettes against the bathroom sink?”

The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love is more focused on class dynamics and lesbian melodrama than race—there’s only one petty bourgeois lesbian and multiple other working-class lesbians. In the film, this translates to one Black girl and many many white people. So perhaps the film attempts to subvert dominant narratives of Blackness by saying ‘look, they can be wealthy too!’ which instead erases Black class struggle as an integral and historical element of the lesbian experience.

For all the vests, plaid, and folded collars (that I love), this movie remains cemented in a tired tradition of hegemonic queer culture. Racialized lesbians rarely exist beyond predominantly white settings and/or their white partners. Thus the already restricted and fetishized lesbian media industry becomes even further constrained for the marginalized racial figure. In the American oversexualization and desexualization of Black women, combined with the extant centrality of whiteness in Western media, the New Age approach to combating this racial hierarchy ironically reinforces it: give the Black lesbian a white love interest

FEATS + EPHEMERA

and Command+F “Black” in the script to find zero to one results. The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love stands as a Command+F to one result.

Tahara (2020) stars Madeline Grey DeFreece as Carrie and Rachel Sennott as Hannah. Tahara is a Command+F to zero results that Letterboxd kept begging me to watch.

— What the fuck is wrong with you?

— Look I’m…I’m not interested in you at all and…

In the film, Carrie and Rachel are two best friends who grew up going to Hebrew school together and ultimately kiss at their classmate’s funeral in a burst of claymation ecstasy—the liplock transports them from a dimly lit synagogue filmed in square 1:21:1 aspect ratio to a full screen animated version of themselves making out in space. Carrie is perhaps purposely cast unambiguously as a Black American since the movie vehicles much of its attempts at cultural subversion through her: Carrie’s Blackness is a non-issue to the point of colorblindness.

Despite being raised, educated, and socialized in an Ashkenazi Jewish community, Carrie’s race is completely disregarded in a context where it would inherently be highlighted.

MY FAVORITE SCENE: In the synagogue’s library, Carrie pushes her rectangular glasses all the way up while calling Hannah selfish and whispering, “I really liked kissing you.”

Tahara’s Black Lesbian never calls herself a lesbian but is canonically queer through her complete disinterest in men, lez dress (button up all the way buttoned, long socks, big pants), and her constant longing looks at Hannah. The Black Lesbian’s ‘deviance’ is twofold in both racialization and sexuality, and the film exploits this to highlight Sennott’s track record of deadpan Gen Z comedy in her roles as Quirky Girl in Shiva Baby, Bottoms, and Bodies, Bodies, Bodies.

Ultimately, in this Command+F to zero results film, Carrie is Hannah’s experimental object for Sennott’s character to explore her bi-curiosity and ultimately pursue men.

Studs and Bobs Ta ke t h e C a ke I watched Set it Off (1996) for the first time two years ago because it features Jada Pinkett Smith with a really great bob.

Set it Off is a cult classic led by four gals (Smith as Stony, Queen Latifah as Cleo, Kimbery Elise as Tisean or “T.T.” and Viva A. Fox as Frankie) who take on a big time heist. A bank robbery, to be specific. The film displays a spectrum of femininity as the women engage in everything from comedic girl-talk and smoking on roofs to the realities of ‘getting by’ and trying to break out of state-sanctioned police violence, poverty, and institutional misogyny.

Now, where is the lesbianism? It is all over.

Unlike the films of The Black Lesbian Case, Set it Off doesn’t use Black marginalization to vehicle its white characters, nor is it hampered by undertones of hegemonic queerness. There are, of course, the required button-ups, collars, khakis, and cargo pants. But more than this, Queen Latifah embodies the film’s iconic on-screen stud as Cleo. Cleo rallies the girls for their first bank robbery, leading to a slew of other successes. Alongside these robberies, Cleo develops a romance with bleach-haired femme Ursula, who becomes an honorary member of the robbery-prone group.

Cleo Wielding Cornrowed Charisma Pictured Here:

Set it Off is not a perfect movie; neither is it a perfect lesbian film. But, the film never resorts to subtext as the sole means of advancing its queerness. Instead, it flips the mixed family Target ad approach of The Black Lesbian Case on its head. To be queer is to be deviant, and Cleo is effortlessly so. Beyond Queen Latifah’s stud portrayal, the Black feminocentric approach of the film always takes precedence— Stony, Cleo, Frankie, and Tisean’s commitments to each other ground and catapult the film and, most importantly, convinced me to replicate Jada Pinkett Smith’s braided bob.

A Living Document The category of ‘lesbian’ is a fearful concept for some, a porn category for others, and, for me, an adjective and a noun. The lesbian movie masterdoc is a living document because it is the start of something larger—more coming-ofage lesbians, heist-driven lesbians, annoying lesbians, horror lesbians: more columns in the document. There is endless room in the lesbian movie masterdoc because what lesbian is and who lesbians are is constantly becoming.

CB B’24 is lurking on r/Norway.

1. In an early scene, Cleo makes her car

2.

3.

‘hop’ up and down while saying “oh shit now, watch it, watch it honey, here we go now” as Urusla playfully wipes the vehicle down.

In an attempt to get her job back at “Luther’s Janitorial Services” and keep up appearances after the first heist, Cleo calmly says to the abusive owner, “now I know you gonna give me my old job back coz nobody take shit the way I take shit.”

As the police block Stony, Frank, and Cleo from escaping when they’ve been caught in their final heist, Cleo gives the other two women the chance to take the money they’ve stolen and run, saying “don’t worry, I’ll catch up to y’all later.”

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06

FEATS + EPHEMERA

CC B’24

07

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FEATS + EPHEMERA

fig 1.

Notes on “Stripes”

fig 2.5 You can really tell it’s my favorite from how stained and dirty it is...

Just another reason why it’s the most French..

My first striped shirt. It has the classic French sailor white shoulder, which you really can’t go wrong with, even in red instead of the usual blue.

And here began my passion for horizontal stripes.

Everyone always says that they make you look shorter, but secretly they make you look chic-er than everyone else. They’re all just jealous of your stripes.

fig 2.

Best striped shirt I own.

The most French, the most sailor.

And what more could you want? note: MUST be worn inside out.

fig 4.

I tried to “punk” this one by cutting the neckline; instead it ended up looking even more sailor-y than the rest, a happy accident.

fig 3.

My most recent stripe aquisition. .

I look like a circus performer wearing it and it never quite goes with anything I own but I wear it anyway.

Because some days I am a circus performer.

Mentally, at least.

fig 4.5 This isn’t me wearing the shirt, but I think it’s a good example of how it can make one look like they should be sailing the seven seas with the sea breeze rustling your hair and sweat rolling off your brow as you swab the deck.

Or to just look good at a rave.

fig 5.

I’ve always been on the fence about this one.

But in the end I just can’t get rid of a striped shirt.

I keep it even though it has horribly unbalanced, asymmentrical stripes instead of awesome equal sized ones.

fig 6.5 me partying

fig 6.

This was originally my favorite striped shirt. It’s good, but the blue stripes are too thin, and it’s very small on me.

Still good for partying though...

fig 7.

I aquired these little boy underpants after becoming possessed by the spirit of stripes while at S*vers and subsequently shoving them in my bag and walking out. They were too perfect to pass up.

Bold red emphasized by a muted gray and a tasteful pop of blue!? With equal sized stripes!!?!?

Nothin’ like it.

KH R’24 has a

French penpal.

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08

WORLD

Weathered Identity (2022) Self-portrait Graphite, pen, and burnt newspaper collage We may not live in Palestine, but Palestine lives in us.

Reflection (2022) Mixed media My grandfather was born in Safad, Palestine, in 1939. During the 1948 Nakba, he, alongside over 750,000 other Palestinians, were forcefully displaced from their homes. Seventy-five years later, he still hopes to return to our rightful home—and so do I.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WM R’27

S+T

Meat Culture Meets Culture(d) Meat

( TEXT EG DESIGN SY ILLUSTRATION AF )

What the FDA approval of lab-grown meat might mean for us

→ Inside the glass hull of grocery store freezers, carcasses animate the

shelves with a red freshness. Their packaging abstracts: enough to no longer render them as live animals, and at the same time, immediately identifies them as delicious. Inside the glass hull of grocery store freezers, carcasses animate the shelves with a red freshness. Their packaging abstracts: enough to no longer identify them as live animals, and at the same time, immediately marks them as delicious.

Our relationship to food, especially animal products, has rarely been simple. Questions gnaw at every action: did we ever decide if we were okay with GMOs? Are we not going to eat that because it contains methylcellulose (which we can’t pronounce)? More importantly, who is eating meat, and why? Who can afford to make these choices? Who profits from our meat consumption?

There is such a deluge of information to account for when making choices as a consumer in the current food industry that it might feel futile to try to hold onto all of it. Your hand, outstretched, choosing which cut of chicken to pluck from the aisle, seems entirely detached from the meaty body of the food industry. +++ When I heard about the USDA and FDA approval of cultured meat, or lab-grown meat, for public sale in the U.S., my first feeling was relief: this was going to upend the meat industry, we wouldn’t be driven into the Asphodel Fields of scarcity by our own plow, and (admittedly self-centeredly) I could sink my teeth into a slab of beef again.

The urgent need for more sustainable systems of meat production has been apparent to many within and outside the industry. The current global meat industry produces 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, making livestock raising one of the largest-emitting industries. Animal farming operations also often pollute local waterways and generate vast volumes of manure waste. With the vast quantities of antibiotics used when raising livestock at scale, there is an increased danger of spreading viruses and increasing antibiotic resistance in our food supply networks.

Many animals live out their days in confined, inhumane conditions of disease and overcrowding. It is estimated that a global 80 billion animals die for our consumption every year.

Meanwhile, the $125 billion-valued meat market in the U.S. is projected to grow more than $30 billion in the next five years. With the population of affluent people growing, the global demand for meat products is expected to rise 15 percent by 2031. The Food and Agriculture

Organization estimates that 70 percent more food is needed by 2050 to keep up with the increasing global population. There is, therefore, a serious cause for concern that demand for food—especially meat— may overwhelm the current industry. Both conventional solutions of increasing crop yield and expanding cropland area have finite limits— ones that might be met long before the world’s food needs are. It’s also clear that the current industry will continue to raise ethical and environmental questions if its exploitative nature isn’t changed.

Against this backdrop, there is important imagining to be done: what will cultured meat mean for our shared climate, food culture, and own plates? +++ The process of developing the cultured meat industry has been well underway for around two decades. Its proponents advertise the industry as an environmental and ethical solution for current food production systems. Producing cultured meat uses far less land compared to conventional animal farming, and can be completely slaughter-free, which means animals can be raised under much more humane conditions.

Yet the cultured meat industry faces no shortage of challenges moving forward. One of the main concerns is the industry’s energy consumption. The facilities needed to culture the cells require huge inputs of power—it’s estimated that even by 2030, the manufacturing process will use about 60 percent more energy per kilogram than conventional beef production. The actual volume of greenhouse emissions that the cultured meat industry would produce is ambiguous since it’s possible to offset this by using renewable energy sources, but this depends on the will of the C-suite.

Despite being touted as a cruelty-free process for animals, almost all of the start-ups initially used fetal bovine serum (FBS) as part of the culture medium because of its effectiveness to promote cell growth. FBS is obtained from the blood of a dead calf, which not only entails animal slaughtering but also constitutes a huge limiting factor for scaling up production.

In fact, growth media currently constitutes 90 percent of the cost for production materials, and commercial viability for average consumers remains a distant desire. In a hopeful scenario for the future, a kilogram of cultured meat costs $6 compared to $2 per kilogram for conventional meat. Yet less optimistic outlooks forecast prices up to $37 a kilo, which makes it a completely inaccessible option for consumers facing financial instability. Finally, there is a shortage of research on the health effects of consuming large quantities of in-vitro meat, as well as how different culture mediums impact the nutritional

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value and safety of the final meat product.

Although this is a nascent industry and governments around the world are pouring in around $1 billion to fund public research, the question of whether the industry can live up to its promises remains. All technology is only as good and effective as the systems it builds on top of and surrounds itself with. So often, these systems are constructed with the interests of corporations and governments as foundations, even if they claim to abide by ethical regulations, commitments to equity, and checks against power monopolization.

Though the cultured meat industry advertises itself as an alternative to the conventional meat industry, it’s crucial to interrogate how much this holds up against present and future realities. +++ At the beginning of eighth grade, most of what I knew about the behemoth of the food industry and my own consumer choice came from watching Kurzgesagt videos about GMOs and reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore's Dilemma. In other words, not much.

In science class later that year, we would calculate a rough estimate of our carbon footprints. I became aware of the impacts of flights and red meat beyond my own enjoyment. Articles multiplied like fruit flies around whichever new heart-beating, rotting discovery came out that month. Recycling was out. Now it was back in. Wait, no, it’s back out again!

At the beginning of ninth grade, I started hearing about the news of the Amazon rainforest being burned down for animal agriculture and cattle ranching. My friend and I made a pact to stop eating beef until the Amazon rainforest stopped burning, or, more accurately, being burned. This decision arose from a synthesis of what I knew: rainforests were being deforested by beef companies and Jair Bolsonaro’s government, and I was consuming red meat, like beef, that contributed significant greenhouse gas emissions. Like the archetypal consumer, my response didn’t really address the issue, nor was it going to bring about any impact. But I was grasping onto the conviction that if our actions were causing climate change, then it would have to be our actions that brought about new change.

It wouldn’t be until years later that greater complexities entered my ecosystem of thinking, such as the entrenched systems of resource mining and usage; or the awareness of individual action being negligible compared to corporate change; or how even our own choices are perhaps choreographed by invisible, capitalist systems. Despite all evidence against it, though, some part of me couldn’t let go of the conviction that as consumers, we have both an ability and responsibility to effect change. +++ The essence of pure, rugged Americanness: smoky backyard barbecues, Joey Chestnut scarfing down 62 hotdogs at Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, a blanket of mashed potatoes and a big ol’ slab of marbled steak: the very culture of consumption in the U.S. cannot be dislodged from the grasp of meat.

What’s to account for this pervasive carnivory? There are two widespread, digestible theories about how meat became such a naturalized aspect of American and, more broadly, Western culture: the biophysical and the political-economic. The biophysical principle emphasizes how human meat consumption during the Paleolithic era was fundamental to brain development, and its proponents argue that humans are genetically wired to need meat in their diets. This theory persists in mainstream thinking despite the false assumptions that it is built upon: the

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existence of universal diets, for example, and the lack of continuous evolutionary change (humans developed grain and lactose tolerance after the Paleolithic era).

Meanwhile, the political-economic theory of determinism contends that consumers are essentially pawns within the meat industry, and everything from agricultural subsidies to fast food marketing to economic inequality already predetermines our (non)choices. Indeed, these issues greatly dictate consumer ability and are worth much more consideration than the biophysical theory—for example, the U.S. government heavily subsidizes the meat industry. In fact, a 2023 study shows that animal farmers received 800 times more funding than meat alternative groups, which artificially lowers meat prices to the point where consumers will often choose a cheaper beef burger over the other options. However, both the biophysical and political-economic paradigms erase any free choice that consumers may have and therefore absolve them of responsibility.

Globally, most of us have bought into the meat industry and implicitly accepted its complications, whether environmental or ethical.

Meat consumption, as a culture and industry, continues in part because of the cultural roots of meat eating, such as operations of desire: rituals, signals of cultural status, ingrained habits. At the very least, it is partially our complex economy of desire that enables the meat industry's current power and ubiquity.

These theories, in spite of their flaws, continue to shape the way people think about meat eating today.

A recent article in the journal Appetite identifies four ways that people commonly justify their decision to eat meat, the 4Ns: natural, normal, necessary, and nice. If we are genetically programmed, or complete puppets to producer-side control, then of course eating meat seems only natural and even compulsory. Research has shown that consumers who hold these perceptions of meat within their diets tend to experience less guilt about their choices. It’s one of the solutions to the “meat paradox”—instead of changing their actions to align with their morals, people can manipulate their beliefs and attitudes to justify their actions. This cognitive dissonance arguably disengages the consumer from understanding what it means to eat what they do, as well as disincentives them from considering the implications of meat’s evolving role in global production systems and their own diets.

Around the world, as global diets become increasingly Westernized, meat eating culture is expanding too. Despite meat-alternative movements being at an all-time high in some places, the demand for meat is rising in other regions, such as the Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, and South America. For instance, per capita meat consumption has more than doubled in

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

South America from 1960 to 2020, and it has increased more than sixfold in Asia. China saw a 15-fold increase in per capita consumption during that time.

In Western countries, meat consumption and its associated cultural power has been historically linked with the rise of a capitalist and industrialized society. Along with undeniably gendered implications, meat eating has an inseparable relationship to class and capitalism.

In 1800s Europe, nutritionists such as Carl Voit began to advise working men to eat certain quantities of meat for its protein and therefore muscle-building properties. Meat was reserved for men who fit these laborer standards, thus deeply intertwining it with the construction of the capitalist state. Even long before this, meat was (and continues to be) considered a luxury commodity mainly exclusive to the dominating

The conventional meat industry in the U.S. operates through five main phases.

THE RAISING: it is estimated that 99 percent of farmed animals in the U.S. are raised in factory farms, where they’re kept inside feedlots, barns, or cages, and all of their forage or feed is brought to them.

Many factories use antibiotics, growth hormones, animal by-products, overcrowded confinement, and forced breeding techniques to maximize meat output.

THE STUNNING: to prepare for the slaughtering process, animals are restrained and then stunned to render them unconscious. This is partly to ensure a more humane end to their lives, and partly to reduce stress so their meat quality isn’t impacted.

THE SLAUGHTERING: animals are hooked up to a conveyor belt and exsanguinated, or drained of most of their blood, by severing their carotid artery or jugular vein. Depending on the livestock, they are usually skinned. Carcasses are preserved in a cooler.

THEINSPECTIONANDGRADING:TheFoodSafety and Inspection Services (FSIS) branch of the USDA inspects the operation’s meat products for wholesomeness for human consumption. They also examine factors such as processing, sanitation, facilities, and pathology.

THE BUTCHERING: the meat product is cut into primal and sub primal cuts (traditional cuts that consumers are familiar with, such as flank or loin) that can be packaged and then sold to retailers around the country.

The end result? Real, animal meat sizzling between pick-a-carb-any-carb, or saran-wrapped inside your local grocery store.

class, in part because of the high fat and protein content, and in part, because of high production costs. Meat is undeniably intertwined with capitalism. Today, this impacts who has access to it as well as why and how we consume it.

As more countries industrialize and expand their middle and upper class echelons, it makes sense that meat consumption, and desire for the status it has historically signaled, would rise too. Cultured meat companies, when thinking about market expansion beyond Singapore and the U.S.—the only two countries where cultured meat is currently on the market—will aim to capitalize on this desire for buying meat products. So too will the farmed meat industry try to capitalize off the enduring power of meat culture. Both industries are deeply staked into the flesh of meat culture and its inherently capitalist systems. Without seeing how one operates within a culture of meat, it can be difficult to critically evaluate the implications of how it is used to advance corporate goals and maximize their profits.

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The U.S. per capita consumption of meat substitutes is projected to increase by 62.5 percent from 2022 to 2028. There is a growing hunger On GOOD Meat’s website, a strip of bold black for meat alternatives here in the States, and the text announces “The future of meat is here” cultured meat industry wants to satiate it. next to high-definition photos of familiar, if Companies are presenting cultured meat glamorized, chicken dishes. By just scrolling as an umbrella solution—it’s for the person through the visuals, the website could be miswho watched a chicken slaughtering and turned taken for the artsy Pinterest board of an aspiring vegan a decade ago and the person who’s home-chef. Perhaps we are to understand that slightly concerned about how much methane a huge food revolution is underway, but not to cows produce. It’s for the person who scoffs at worry! You won’t even notice it. Meanwhile, Impossible and Beyond meat and the person UPSIDE Foods proclaims “Cultivated meat. It’s who would kind of prefer a real steak. At least, this science (but not rocket science).” is the vision that these companies want to sell Both San Francisco start-ups were foundto as many investors and consumers as possied in the early 2010s and have since reached ble—a vision aimed to be consumable and thus important milestones for the industry. Besides profitable. being the two companies that have gained FDA Like current alternative meat options, and USDA approval to sell a selection of their cultured meat will have to compete against chickthe farmed meat industry for market share. But what distinguishes cultured meat from plant-based alternatives or even movements to reduce meat consumption is that to expand their market, they don’t need to persuade THE EXTRACTING:a biopsy, or sample of cells, is consumers to choose taken from a live animal. Specifically, stem cells are their product instead culled for their self-renewal properties and ability to of meat. They aren’t differentiate into specialized cells. fighting an uphill THECULTUREMEDIUMTREATING:thestemcells battle against the are placed into bioreactors containing a cell culture massive, enduring conducive for growth, which can include adding vitamins and amino acids to reproduce the environment meat culture of the of an animal body.

U.S.—they arguably want to appeal to the THE DIFFERENTIATING:dependingontheculture media, the stem cells multiply and differentiate capitalist production into muscle, fat, or connective tissue. systems the current meat industry and THE SCAFFOLDING:the specific cells are bound together to form long fibers. The scaffolding at this culture rests upon. stage refers to the edible material that will support As Mar Post, the the cell structure or “cut” of the final product, whethcreator of the world’s er that be a simple patty or more complex steak. first cultured beef THEINSPECTIONANDGRADING:culturedmeat burger, puts it: “If is held to the same FSIS, USDA, and FDA standards meat-loving habits for meat products. This includes inspections of cell prove too hard to harvesting and cell cultures, as well as examining sanitation and facilities standards. shift, the obvious solution is to replace meat with meat.” The cultured meat industry’s long-term game may not actually be presenting an alternative—it may be opening up the sector to profit themselves. Though some scientists and researchers conduct cultured meat research in attempts to address the exploitative and unsustainable systems of current meat production, the en products, they’ve corporate bodies actually bringing the also reached unicorn valuation ($1 billion as a product onto market have very different prioriprivate company), partnered with Michelin-star ties. chefs, and are moving into actual restaurants accessible to the public. They both tout them+++ selves as the brighter future for food compared to the current meat industry.

When I ask people if they would eat cultured or However they decide to aestheticize their lab-grown meat, their response most of the time business, every company still operates with a is nah, I’m good. Usually there is some shivering philosophy of maximizing profit. Amy Chen, of revulsion across their expression. There’s the the chief operating officer at UPSIDE Foods, question of unnaturalness and—for some—why promotes their products to the “conflicted would I, when there’s real meat? carnivore.” There is a certain audience that It’s a fair question. What we choose to eat, these companies want to capture: American including whether or not to eat cultured meat, consumers who are anywhere on the range from is an intensely personal choice, one that may feel dissatisfied to disgusted with the current meat individual. It’s based on cultural upbringing and industry. This includes many people who have our own values. Nevertheless, the current world turned vegetarian, vegan, or otherwise reduced we live in is one of interconnected industries. their meat consumption in recent decades. CurWe don’t—and can’t—eat in isolation because rently, 10 percent of the American population is our food doesn’t appear from a vacuum. This vegan or vegetarian, and a further 15 percent are doesn’t mean there is always a right choice pescetarian or ‘flexitarian’ (a mostly vegetarian that exists, or, if there is, one that we’re able to diet with occasional meat or fish consumption). make. But it does mean that we must pay close +++

The cultured meat industry in the U.S. operates by five main phases.

The end result? Real, animal meat sizzling between pick-a-carb-anycarb, or (sometime in the future) saran-wrapped inside your local grocery store.

attention to our roles as consumers in the food industry.

That being said, it can be difficult to navigate our position as consumers.

Activists and politicians alike encourage “voting with your dollar”—the idea that, as an individual consumer, what you choose to spend money on will influence companies’ decisions on what to produce. The very concept of voting with your dollar is deeply entrenched in a capitalist system. ‘Good’ corporations love the sentiment because it makes them money, and it imbues the average consumer with a feelgood, individualistic empowerment—your choice actually matters! Don’t mind us, you’re doing good, doing enough! Keep up the good buying! The reality is that your dollar is most likely inconsequential relative to the many billions more that the elite possess. The industry will listen to the movement of money, but they are listening to the wealthiest, most influential sliver of the population actually moving it.

This concept diverts consumer attention from thinking about corporate accountability, from taking collective action such as pushing for legislative change. Empowerment within a capitalistic framework is contradictory: the notion of buying something as ‘doing’ something, not to mention the problematic class and financial limitations of that. Though cultured meat might eventually improve the environmental and ethical conditions that consumers care about, what the industry cares about is winning our money.

It isn’t wrong to feel that you are making a good choice, or even to want to make a good one, but recognizing how these companies might be manipulating purchasing power to their favor is one of the most important things we can do as vigilant consumers. +++ Despite the recent FDA and USDA approval, being cleared for sale is not the same as being for sale. Cultured meat is coming, but it’s coming—in the mass, commercial sense—on a potential timeline of decades. Yet there is already so much narrative, messaging, and marketing around the product. Conflicted carnivores, open up (your mouths and wallets)! The future of meat is here.

Many people have reacted like I first did: relief and excitement for a sustainable alternative to the dominant meat industry and culture. It’s understandable to hope for an, if not easy, then at least straightforward solution for our environmental and ethical concerns. There is potential for hope, but its delivery demands that consumers and governments are willing to bite into and understand the difficult questions of motive and accountability. Our responsibility (not only as consumers but as voters and as people) is to critically interrogate the actual relationship between the cultured meat industry, and its promises, against the traditional industry and its current operations.

EG B’26 is not chickening out!

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JK B’24 LS B’24

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Couch Findings

CC B’24

13

1. BACKING FROM TAPE

13. GUM WRAPPER

25. PEELED PAINT

2. BENT NAIL

14. GUMBALL IN WRAPPER

26. PENCIL

3. BUTTON

15. HARD RUBBER BAND

27. PLASTIC THROWING STAR

4. CARABINER

16. HERSHEY’S KISS WRAPPER

28. PLASTIC WRAP

5. CHAPSTICK CAP

17. KIT KAT WRAPPER

29. POCKET LINT

6. CHOPSTICK

18. KNITTING NEEDLE

30. SCOTCH TAPE

7. CHRISTINA’S LUGGAGE TAG

19. LEAVES

31. STRING

8. CROCHET HOOK

20. LOST KEYS

32. SUPER BUBBLE GUM

9. DIRT

21. MADEIRA LIQUORS RECEIPT

33. SWEETARTS

10. DUST

22. MTG CARDS

34. THREAD

11. GRAY LEGO

23. NAIL CLIPPER

35. TWIST TIE

12. GROSS STICKER

24. NAVY LEGO

36. YELLOW LEGO

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Piecing Together the Sherds of Indigenous Pottery Authenticity and capital in private collecting markets ( TEXT BB DESIGN ES )

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The shelves in front of me housed hundreds of works of Pueblo pottery, ranging in size from figurines only a few inches tall to jars and bowls several feet in diameter. Lustrous and matte blacks, deep reds and browns, and crisp whites and creams color each object. As I step closer to the racks, I can make out delicate linework and sculpting: images of flora and fauna, and patterns that spread out across a piece with the intricacy of a spiderweb. A few of them already sport hairline cracks and marks of glue, reinforcing the sense that these pristine objects could turn to dust with any slip.

Although some of the American Indigenous art pieces at Heritage Auctions, a multinational auction house, were created within the last 30 years, these collections do not reside in the Modern Art sections of the company’s art warehouse. Instead, all pieces made by Indigenous potters, ranging from antiquity to the late 1980s, belong to a hazy category entitled ‘Ethnographic Art’—an incoherent smattering of works from the Americas, Africa, and Oceania. It is in this department that I worked during the summer of 2023, in a cubicle lined with Navajo rugs, Maya jade, Vanuatuan swords, and Igbo statues. Since my term of employment coincided with the year’s biggest sale of Pueblo pottery, I became most acquainted with works from the Acoma, Hopi, Zuni, Santa Clara, and San Ildefonso traditions.

Southwest communities’ artistic pottery practices reach far back into prehistoric times, yet the techniques currently used in these Pueblo communities mainly originated in the late 19th century. Prior to this point, Spanish and American colonial expansion stifled Indigenous trade networks, causing artisans to suffer; production of intricately decorated pottery gradually declined as artists shifted to fulfill more practical purposes.

In the late 19th century, American archeological interest in the Southwest led to a series of digs at Pueblo sites. Alongside white archeologists like Jesse Walter Fewkes were poorly paid laborers, many hired from the region and often Indigenous. In the early 1890s one of these workers, a Hopi man named Lesou, was able to bring home a collection of pottery sherds from an excavation at Sikyátki, a Hopi village inhabited between 1375 and 1625. His wife Nampeyo was then able to study these artifacts and the techniques used to produce them as the dig carried on.

Already an experienced potter, Nampeyo began experimenting with incorporating facets of the older practices into her own work. The ancient patterns copied down into her notebook soon made their way onto her pots, and by changing the type of the local clay used, she exchanged the conventional white slip style for the patina background common in ancient works. With this composite of archaic and modern techniques, Nampeyo brought about the Hopi Revival style, drawing American attention to precolonial Indigenous art practices. As she passed down the tradition to her daughters, her family caught the attention of collectors. The family now includes eleven widely collected potters and counting. This sustained interest in the family also demonstrates the collecting world’s thirst for Indigenous art with a recognizable name attached, an identification that indicates continuity with an older, and thus supposedly more ‘authentic,’ origin.

H O UC ENL B S TI O C I

+++ The entry of Indigenous pottery into the national market occurred in the early 20th century, when prominent buyers like John D. Rockefeller poured funding into New Mexican artistic research institutes. This infusion of capital, prestige, and attention caused the predominantly white art-collecting world to turn to the Southwest. Buyers were now attracted to pottery, weaving, and crafts that they deemed naïve and primitive, a categorization that art historian Karen Lucic deemed indicative of a fetishization of “an imaginary world of social integration, primary emotional intensity, and instinctive religious awe.” Researchers, collectors, and archaeologists were interested in what they saw as Indigenous art’s opposition to fragmented modernity: wholeness, spirituality, purity. This patronizing sentiment was obsessed with locating a preindustrial mode of living, more determined by collectors’ and researchers’ projections of an idealized past than rooted in the specificity of Pueblo traditions.

It is this perceived primitivism that made up much of the arts’ commercial value. For collectors, the most desirable pieces were those that were the most ‘authentic,’ either recovered from or mimicking ‘traditional’ styles of Indigenous communities. It was

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this market that brought about Nampeyo’s acclaim, as her first commissioners hired her to replicate pieces from the ancient Sikyátki site. Importantly, pieces by other artists that incorporated more modern styles and non-local materials were derided by anthropologists like Elsie Clews Parsons, who described this hybridization in 1939 as the result of “a very rapid disintegration of traditional art forms.”

With this early 20th-century emphasis on ‘authenticity’ by collecting institutions of the Southwest, archeologists became more coercive in their pursuit of Indigenous artifacts. They particularly sought out ancient, often ceremonial objects passed down through tribal history, which were seen to be more precious than the contemporary secular pottery produced by artisans like Nampeyo. With so much white interest in a vague, essentialist conception of Indigenous spirituality, archeologists turned their attention to places conceived of as untouched by civilization, such as the Zuni tribe, due to its relatively remote location in the Zuni River Valley in western New Mexico. Working in tandem with and often supported by violent colonial projects, archaeological researchers amassed collections of artifacts through a mix of intimidation and stealth. Their interactions with the Zuni are especially well documented: in some instances, for example, white traders bribed and intimidated their way into possession of secretly stored ceremonial fetish pots, eventually taking nearly all of these objects and causing outrage among tribal leaders. This isn’t to say that all ceremonial artifacts were acquired through illicit means—many tribes sold objects for hefty sums of money.

Some Indigenous artists working in the first decades of the 20th century were able to profit off of the demand for ancient ceremonial pieces by creating secular works replicating these older styles. San Ildefonso artist Maria Martinez was commissioned by Santa Fe-based researcher, museum founder, and dig leader Edgar Hewett to replicate ancient glossy black pottery found in a nearby dig. In doing so, she and her husband Julian discovered an ‘oxygen deprivation’ technique that they used to create a unique black style, one that mixed matte surfaces with polished ones, creating patterns influenced by and popular in the Art Deco movement. As her reputation developed, she shared her process with other potters of her pueblo, a decision that created revenue for her entire community.

With growing popularity, Martinez was able to display her pieces at the St. Louis and Chicago World’s Fairs in 1904 and 1933, respectively, as well as at other exhibitions across the country. In these events, she was expected to act as a representative for American achievement among representatives from the international community. This self-congratulatory display of Native art on the world stage was concurrent with a genocidal policy of forced assimilation: shortly before, in 1887, the American government had passed the Dawes Act, which fragmented collective Indigenous self-governance and stole away 90 million acres of Native land. Across the 19th and 20th centuries, Indigenous children were forced to attend racist ‘American Indian boarding schools’ that operated with the direct intention of stripping Indigenous children of their cultures. The research and collection of Indigenous artifacts was inextricable from the dispossession of Indigenous land and cultural practice.

The collection, distribution, study, and display of Native art stemmed not from purely aesthetic ‘appreciation’ but was an integral part of this forced assimilation. Rapidly modernizing, urbanizing 20th-century America required the production of a homogenized, efficient capitalist workforce and demanded the violent transition from collectively-managed tribal lands to individual plots. The idea of linear cultural progress—which in practice meant the enforcement of colonial, capitalist norms like privatization of land and standardization of education—constructed Indigeneity as a static and solely historical phenomenon. This myth of the “vanishing Indian” (think The Last of the Mohicans and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), the expansionist idea that Indigenous people were destined to sacrifice their land and culture for the justified and inevitable making of America, excused and enabled ruinous imperialist practices by presenting the elimination of Indigenous tribes and sovereignty as predestined. Under this ideology, if white Americans did not intervene to preserve objects within settler-colonial archives, collections, and museums, then some sort of ethnographic knowledge would be lost to the world. As anthropologist Virginia R. Dominguez argues, Indigenous art was collected as “metonyms for the people who produced them.” In this way, collectors were able to argue that their possession and exhibition of art was somehow for the future benefit of Indigenous communities, the same groups targeted by genocidal, assimilationist practices.

This preservationist desire prizes the reproduction of a limited range of Indigenous artistic production in service of maximal ‘authenticity.’

At Heritage Auctions, newer pieces and ones that strayed from traditional styles were undervalued or even flat-out rejected. The art market typically prizes novelty above all else, with collectors perennially searching for the newest, flashiest artists in order to drive speculative investment and raise resale values. Contemporary artists are expected to, above all else, be cutting-edge and original. Yet the fetishization of the ‘traditional’ in the “Ethnographic Art” market favors artistic production as perfect mimicry. Artists like Nampeyo and Martinez, with their technical innovations, were able to break out of the mold of convention. But still, both artists’ careers began from commissions for pieces in ancient styles, and both used their connections to ancient communities like Sikyátki as selling points for white buyers.

With millions of dollars worth of art valued for its historical ‘purity’ flowing through Heritage Auctions every week, one expects that the ethics of provenance would be central to the Ethnographic Art department’s mission. But such discussions were nonexistent during my time there. The company never questioned the series of exchanges that led to the Native art object before them, nor did they reflect on whom they were selling this art. From my observations, current individual buyers of Indigenous American art, including those buying looted objects—I remember a centuries-old Navajo weaving being one of the most ethically dubious sales of my tenure—are almost exclusively white residents of the American West. Just like the collectors from the past century, these contemporary buyers seem to be in the market for an image of the old West, hence the valuation of traditional works and devaluation of Indigenous art which doesn’t live up to stifling standards of ‘authenticity.’

The answer can never be a rejection of ‘traditional’ methods of production, but rather, the end of valuing Indigenous art for ethnographic ‘purity.’ Artists that move beyond the homogeneity of traditional forms should be treated as figures worthy of attention, an attention that does not subsume their work into a static conception of Indigeneity.

While artists like Martinez and Nampeyo were once judged by the restrictive lens of ‘authenticity,’ they are proof of how Indigenous art can evolve as a complex, irreducible practice. Giving proper appreciation to current Indigenous artists isn’t just a matter of increasing their visibility in the art market but of rethinking the way Indigenous art is categorized in the first place.

BB B’25 wants a pottery wheel.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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Thread Count → She peels the tissue into its three-ply layers. Kleenex isn’t hard to

come by anymore, but the virus spreads despite the temperature checks and double masking. She checks the patients in, directs them to the waiting room, and readies their massage beds. Trying to temper the stateof-emergency small talk, she cycles between spa music and whatever Pandora considers “folk” these days. Only the teenagers and their PTA parents are left in town, earning her some vague nods of recognition and double-takes behind the front desk. Keep count of the room numbers, the minutes left of the laundry, and the number of appointments until closing. Tuck the split sheets into your pocket, and make them last the afternoon. Against the apocalyptic backdrop, hers is a single-tissue type of grief.

( TEXT TS DESIGN ZRL ILLUSTRATION JR )

She locks the petty cash box before heading downstairs to deal with the day’s laundry. The last patients are waiting for the rain to stop, having left their umbrellas in the car or the mudroom or the self-checkout. She holds herself in the unfinished basement. Between the wash and the dry, the cycles sync once in a while. You can grow this desperate awareness of how your fingers pucker when you pinch a sheet. How deep the cotton presses into your tissue, when it stops, how to narrow the difference.

This house is four floors steep, with plenty of crown molding and plenty of mirrors. She doesn’t remember when it turned into a wellness center, but she didn’t pay much mind to it before. She cleans the glass, restocks the linens, and tallies the cans of Lysol. When the last headlights pull out of the lot, she changes the spa music to last year’s alt. This place can swallow you whole. Turn the speakers to full volume, shut off the lights, and feel your way around in the dark.

TS B’24 is eroding her fingerprints.

Handmade ( TEXT DH DESIGN ZRL ILLUSTRATION JR )

→ The devil is spun from rough cotton. He rests on burlap aprons and

rubs salt into his skin each morning. He hopes this will help with the scarring, pressing flakes of ocean onto his legs, his arms, his pointed tail, his aging horns.

The industrial workers embroider bits of cinnamon into him, and his fabric skin cracks. They wear gray polyester and it splays like hardened water across their chests. Pale wooden looms line an industrial warehouse floor, neat rows of uniformed weavers churning sin from yarn, inhaling sawdust and something like dried paint.

They work silently, creating the fragile, tainted thing he is. He has considered praying to God.

Basement → the washing machine exhales and

my mouth fills with detergent and my throat fills with cotton t-shirts and Someone’s lost socks are lodged inside my windpipe they came all the way from last

January can you close that book, please, we both know you’ll never separate your elbows from your forearms why do you think you can treat this place like breathing, I ask as I extract things from your Old Navy boot-cut jeans and why do you think my hum is something other than a threat I ask as I rinse my tongue with Tide Instant Stain Remover and why do you keep exhausting the mildew words reflected in the door of the laundry machine which still has two green minutes left can you close that book, please, we both know neither of us can decipher those sentences those plastic chairs those things that were homespun DH B’24 ripped her Old Navy boot-cut jeans sophomore year, and she was pretty sad for a while.

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vignette of a ghost town. → An elderly man with a sallow face and sad eyes stands silent

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in the corner of the laundromat. He wears a brown leather vest, a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, black boots, and spurs.

Through the reflection of a lint-lined dryer window, I can see him looking at me. Black vomit spills over his lips and onto the linoleum.

I put in a quarter for my bedsheets and walk out into the heat. +++

+++

It is the end of August and I am drinking Pepsi from a glass bottle. The bubbles taste like some Billy Joel song I’ve forgotten the name of. In the windowsill of the local diner, a congregation of tittering insects drum their fractured wings against the pane.

So let me lie and go on sleeping, and I will lose myself in palaces of sand.

“I’ve always preferred Coke,” my mom tells me.

We fight less these days.

Today, when I open my washing machine, a ton of pearly white teeth spill out. They clatter loudly and skid under the adjacent machines, granting me dirty looks from the local patrons. My face flushes slightly and I quickly try to scoop up all the teeth and pour them back into the machine.

As I’m starting the load over again, I find my first baby tooth I lost on the playground of the elementary school. I pop it in my mouth and swallow.

+++

+++

“Excuse me?” A woman taps on my shoulder in the snack aisle of the Buc-ee’s.

“Do you work here?”

I begin to reply but suddenly find that my mouth is overflowing with sand. Do I work here? I look down at my name tag and yellow apron. All I can remember is ordering a blue raspberry slushie, and I never left. +++ There isn’t much that grows in the barren Texas soil, other than spindly cacti bursting through cracks in the pavement of the Tom Thumb and wildflowers crawling up the side of the highway. We live in a land of sex shops and slaughterhouses, of fairgrounds and fault lines. Downtown, the silos climb like smokestacks into the sky.

The ocean feels like a fairy tale some days, when the groundwater starts to seep into the soles of my shoes and telephone poles begin sinking into the clay. I must remind myself there are such things as whales and glaciers and a world beyond the I-45. +++ It is a Tuesday in November and there is an angel in the laundromat.

The angel hands me a dryer sheet. They are wearing rain boots. +++ My history teacher is lecturing about an outbreak of yellow fever in our town sometime during the 1940s. In the back of the classroom, a boy with shaggy hair is trying to pierce his own ears with a paperclip.

I’m thinking about how my insides probably look like a forest, with intertwining roots and vines and creatures with too many eyes. Maybe tomorrow I will take the scissors to my stomach, the purple craft ones with the crenulated edges; I will temper this wilderness and turn it into something beautiful. +++ We are sitting on the roof at midnight in April when my friend tells me she is the messiah. What she means to say is she’s a 17-year-old girl.

I sometimes feel as though these things—these fragments of time—shared between people, like running barefoot in the brown grass or taking drags above the old courthouse, were reserved for other people and not for me. Time passes in ripened fruit and bloody gums and I’m still waiting to meet me; growing up sometimes makes me feel like a false prophet.

We blow smoke out into the starless night and a million crickets sing a hymn to childhood.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The ghosts are crowding the bus stop again.

I don’t know how to tell them the bus won’t be coming.

It never does. +++ I’ve been home for a little over a week now and sometimes when I’m lying in my bed my heart feels so heavy it starts to sink through my chest and stain the mattress pad. And all of a sudden it’s closing in on me: the bruised shins on the cul-de-sac, the soft humming of my ceiling fan, the wind turbines against a desert sky, the street signs, the strangers, and the idea of going missing.

Somewhere, beneath the pillowcase, my roots are taking hold.

I’m going to have to do laundry again.

KG B’25 wants to be an urban legend when she grows up.

DEAR INDY

Halloween

E S, ROL IFTER H TO S S E T AN SHAP DIE W IN D N A __ PLAY, EXY__ BE A S

Because few spaces are more sexually free, ethically dicey, and flirtatiously galvanizing as Halloweekend on a college campus, every year the holiday brings up countless questions: What potential hook-ups can my friends and I rally? How little fabric on my body is still appropriate? Is appropriateness an appropriate question? Should I be reading into people’s costume choices? Can I still take free candy from stores? Is sexy schoolgirl weird? (Few; close to nothing; no; yes; yes; yes.)

Yet while I always expect Halloweekend to be a modern day bacchanal, the past weekend reminded me that much of the holiday is just about getting very drunk and avoiding getting poked in the eye by someone’s fairy wings. There were group costumes to coordinate, papers maliciously due on Sunday, and groceries to get, as always.

But even if Halloween wasn’t 100 percent the roaring festival of debauchery I imagined it to be, I’ll still call myself a believer in its magic. Interesting things happened, certainly…. So when I listened to “Halloween” by Phoebe Bridgers this morning, and she crooned “Baby it’s Halloween / and we can be anything,” I still felt like she was sort of right. Maybe we can’t be anything anything,, but there’s still something to be said about trying to be.

Dear The Mom Friend, Dear Indie

To start with, I’ll say that roles always get assigned when friend groups form.

Someone becomes the person who brings the speaker; someone starts volunteerI feel like I’ve fallen into the role of the ‘mom ing to drive to Dunkin; someone decides that they’ll hook up with just enough peofriend’ of my friend group, and while it was ple to keep it interesting for everyone else. But your situation sucks in particular, fun at first, now I feel like it’s keeping my because it seems like you got the worst one. actual self from coming through. Help me get out of this maternal box!

And I also get why it was fun at first! Especially when we’re making new friends in college, it’s relieving to have a label to cling onto, where we can imagine Sincerely, that our friend group needs us—after all, we tell ourselves, who else could possiThe Mom Friend bly have the capacity to make a dinner rez? To own Tylenol? To go with someone to the bathroom? We often lean into labels when they’re given to us, because it feels good to have a place and like you’ve got it all together. But then one day, I’m assuming, you found yourself cleaning up your friend’s post-Halloweekend vomit, and you knew you were in too deep.

If I understand correctly, the main staples of the ‘mom friend’ are, generally: being ‘put-together,’ having supplies that keep the friend group running, and maybe being somewhat patronizing. So to get out of this role, you have to dismantle these features. Don’t be afraid to let your friends see your messy room, or to give them access to your impulsive thoughts. Stop cleaning up other people’s messes (both literally and figuratively), and start putting your needs above other people’s, for once.

Ultimately, to unlearn the ‘mom friend’ mentality, I think you need to realize that it’s okay to be a baby sometimes: be useless, always cute, a little bit needy. Cry! Let your friends see that you’re just as much Dear Indie, a mess as they are, and hopefully they’ll give you a title beyond ‘mom friend.’

Dear Shape Shifter,

I feel like I’ve changed a lot since high school, and every time I go home and hang out with my old friends, I feel like I’m forced to confront the difference—am I a fake at college? Was I fake in high school? Who’s the real me?

I get you! Because now that I’ve somewhat figured out how to do my eyeliner, am eating breakfast foods other than Cheerios, and find sitting on linoleum floors less tolerable, I often feel like a totally different person than who I was in high school. College, as they say, changed me.

Sincerely, And when I returned home for Thanksgiving a year or two ago, I was expecting this Shape Shifter change to be noticed. Sitting in a friend’s room, perched on her bed while others were splayed out on the floor, I waited for someone to comment on my super cool new look. I wanted to scream “Look! My hair’s really short now! And I wear different pants!” But apart from a brief compliment on my haircut, the Truly-sponsored night progressed with little discussion of my awesome change.

So I started to question myself a bit. Discreetly sizing up my friends, I saw that they weren’t that different from who I knew in high school. Sure, some had acquired a new piercing (or two), had developed an interest in slam poetry and/ or a capella, but in a lot of ways, these changes all made sense. The girl who’s now a vegan was once a vegetarian, the guy who’s super into layering was once experimenting similarly with scarves. And then I got to thinking that if they hadn’t changed that much, then maybe I hadn’t either.

So while I definitely get the temptation to say that we’re totally different from our past, cringier selves, I think that’s always going to ring a little false. Yes, I’m a super cool advice columnist now, but I’m also still someone who enjoys a good Cheerio breakfast, and just yesterday I spent the better part of a night seated on a floor with a sparkling alcoholic beverage. So trust that you aren’t and were never ‘fake’; you’re just growing with the seasons.

I’ll leave you with a line from Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” that I always find myself repeating: Do I contradict myself?

Very well then… I contradict myself; I am large… I contain multitudes.

Neat, huh?

( TEXT SA DESIGN SS ILLUSTRATION SS ) Questions edited for clarity.

VOLUME 47 ISSUE 06

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( TEXT QC, ARG DESIGN GK ILLUSTRATION GK )

BULLETIN

Upcoming Actions & Community Events Saturday 11/04 @9AM-1PM: Winter Season begins for Providence Farmers Market To celebrate the start of the winter season at the year-round Providence Farmers Market, come by for string band music from Sundial, marble carving from Tracy Mahaffey, and Mexican folk dancing by Ballet Folklorico at 11AM! Enjoy these performances while perusing 60+ vendors.

Location: Farm Fresh RI, 10 Sims Ave, Providence, RI 02909 Saturday 11/04 @2PM-4PM: Doulas of Rhode Island Meet and Mingle Meet fellow members, get to know new members, brainstorm new ideas, and ask questions to doulas of Rhode Island! Come share space in this biannual meeting.

Location: TBD, see Instagram @doulasofrhodeisland Saturday 11/04 @4PM-9PM: OysterFest In this annual event, come celebrate Rhode Island’s unique oyster culture! Enjoy fresh oysters, live music, food trucks, and drinks. Tickets are $15 the day of; pick up tickets by Friday 11:59 PM to enjoy a $5 discount.

Location: Farm Fresh RI, 10 Sims Ave, Providence, RI 02909 Sunday 11/05 @10AM-11AM: Outdoor Adventures – Bird Walks in Roger Williams Park Swing by for a guided bird walk in Roger Williams Park! Birdwatchers will be looking for year-round birds in Rhode Island, as well as species that overwinter in the Ocean State. Wear comfortable shoes and bring your binoculars! The event is $3 per person and free for museum members. Pre-registration is required through the Outdoor Adventures program at providenceri.gov.

Location: Museum of Natural History and Planetarium, 1000 Elmwood Ave, Providence, RI 02907 Monday 11/06 @5:30PM-7PM: Gender and Marxism Join the Gender and Marxism reading group for their first session this week! Swing by Small Format to study and discuss the patriarchy, ongoing liberation movements, and contributions women and LGBTQ+ people have made to Marxism. The next two sessions will take place on 11/13 and 11/20, and the registration link can be found in @cpusa.ri’s Instagram bio. Masks encouraged!

Location: Small Format, 335 Wickenden St, Providence, RI 02903 Tuesday 11/07 @6:30PM-8PM: A Conversation with Bhaskar Sunkara Join Brown/RISD YDSA for an evening conversation with Bhaskar Sunkara, founder and editorial director of Jacobin. Sunkara is also the president of The Nation and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in An Era of Extreme Inequalities. This event will lead with a discussion on what being a socialist means today, and a Q&A will follow.

Location: Robert Center Petteruti Lounge, 75 Waterman St, Providence, RI 02912 Thursday 11/09 @5PM-6:30PM: Pumpkin Smash Composting Event Bring your jack-o’-lanterns, gourds, or any other compostable items to help kickstart this composting project sponsored by Groundwork RI and Harvest Cycle Compost! Drop-offs of compostable items will also be accepted in the week leading up to this event.

Location: Washington Park Library, 1316 Broad Street, Providence, RI 02905

Arts Saturday 11/04 @10AM-1PM: NaNoWriMo Write-In Author Maria Mutch, author of Know the Night, is offering two 15-minute meditations for writers to help them with the writing process. The meditations will focus on alignment at 10AM, then break at 12PM for another session on allowing. This workshop is free and open to all to participate! RSVP on Instagram @litartsri.

Location: 400 Harris Ave Unit E, Providence, RI 02909 Do you have an event, action, or other information for the Providence community that you’d like to see shared on this page? Email us at indybulletinboard@gmail.com!

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Saturday 11/04 @11AM-3PM: Opening Events for the Pop-Up Langston Hughes Reading Room and Event Series Curated and produced by the Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading Committee (LHCPR) and Blackearth Collective & Lab, come kick off the month-long series of events about Hughes’ connection to water with live music, poetry readings, and a conversation with Shawn Christian, Associate Professor of English at Florida International University. The Langston Hughes Pop-Up Reading Room will be open through November 25.

Location: 150 Empire Street, Providence, RI 02903 Sunday 11/05 @8PM: Hardcore Punk in the 401 Join Search Warrant, Pocket Rocket, Vicious Ritual, and Music is Noise for a heavy and loud concert open to all ages. Doors open at 8PM, and music begins at 9PM. Tickets are $10-15 sliding scale.

Location: 115 Empire St, Providence, RI 02903

Mutual aid* & community fundraisers *Mutual aid is “survival pending revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to institutions that have failed or harmed our communities. + Sunday 11/05 10AM-2PM: Bring the Cemetery Pond Back to Life!

Volunteer with Sunrise RI to clean up North Burial Ground Cemetery this weekend! This community cleanup will remove blockages from pond flow, pick up trash, and weed out invasive species. Other activities include setting up bird and bat houses, planting native seeds in the area, and learning about species diversity and environmental preservation!

Wear sturdy shoes, long pants, work gloves, and bring sunscreen!

Link: bit.ly/StreamCleanup Location: 5 Branch Ave, Providence RI 02904 + Milagros Project Annual Community Meal The Milagros Project is hosting their annual community meal on November 18 and are aiming to raise $1,500 to help feed an expected 200 people. To contribute, send funds specifically to JBL Mutual Aid’s Venmo or CashApp. If you’d rather send ingredients, DM Milagros Project on Instagram to ask about what they need!

Instagram: @jblmutualaid | Venmo: @rijbgc | CashApp: $rijbgc | Instagram: @milagros_project

FEATURE: Gender and Marxism Celebrating 104 years of fighting for social and economic justice in 2023, Communist Party USA works to meet the everyday needs of working class America, with satellite chapters in each state. The Rhode Island CPUSA club collaborates with community partners like Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE) and Providence for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) to organize demonstrations, join conferences, and lead conversations relevant to the pursuit of communism and socialism through grassroots activism. Recent events include All Out for Palestine, a rally to demand the cessation of American arms and resources sent to the Israeli military, and Health Without Care, a discussion about the harms of the healthcare system in the U.S. This month, CPUSA-RI is convening at Small Format cafe for a three-week reading group: Gender and Marxism. Their objective is to “discuss the special oppression non-men face in our society, how patriarchy takes form, historical and present liberation movements, as well as the contributions women and LGBTQIA+ people have made to Marxism.” Previous CPUSA-RI reading groups include the macabre Weird Marxism and the anti-imperialist Marxism in the Global South.

The Gender and Marxism reading group will meet on Mondays (November 6, November 13, and November 20) from 5:30PM-7PM. Masks are encouraged. Reading materials will be provided via email.

Registration is required and can be completed at https://shorturl.at/fGMR0.