EN / ES

January 17, 2022
 
Rem Koolhaas
AMO/OMA
Weena-Zuid 158
3012 NC
Rotterdam, the Netherlands

RE: THE WRITING ON THE WALL 
Call to Stop Cultural Appropriation, Race-Shifting, & Self-Indigenization in the Guggenheim’s COUNTRYSIDE, THE FUTURE Exhibition



To Rem Koolhaas and the Guggenheim Museum: 

We demand that you and the Curatorial Team of the Countryside, The Future issue a public apology for the ignorant and racist claims to self-indigenization exhibited on the walls at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum between February 20, 2020 and February 15, 2021.

Secondly, we demand that you immediately stop promoting the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge by non-Indigenous architects, artists, and designers that systematically robs Indigenous Peoples of their human rights and cultural sovereignties. The insidious practice of cultural theft is a virus running wild across western spaces of art and architecture that are broadly platformed by non-Indigenous institutions. This is not only an ethical or political demand, but a legal one: under the auspices of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)—originally signed by the Netherlands and later endorsed by the United States—acknowledging, recognizing, and upholding the sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples, these practices are unacceptable. Any such forms of dispossession can no longer go unchecked; they must be systematically accounted for and dismantled.

 Widespread throughout the
exhibition and accompanying publication are several strategies of dispossession premised on extraction, erasure, and race-shifting. Not only are they the result of cultural extraction of traditional Indigenous knowledge, but their content is premised on the systemic erasure and evacuation of Indigenous Peoples, and the myth of white supremacy that presumes everyone at some point in time and place was Native. This is settler-colonial tradecraft.


 WARNING: contains explicit language related to events that some readers may find  offensive and references to information that may be triggering.


Cultural Appropriation
Is Dispossession of Knowledge.

 
Nowhere are these strategies made clearer than in the exhibition's platforming of self-indigenization. The language of the exhibition’s PRESERVATION section is especially egregious:

“The second [model] proposes a more intensive sharing/mixing of all our territories, as if we moderns could become ‘indigenous’ again. (In fact, a quarter of the Earth’s surface is still husbanded by indigenous populations.)” 

That you then reproduce these white supremacist claims with romanticized images of the bloody botanical expeditions of Alexander von Humboldt is cunning and vulgar. The colonial cartographies of the Prussian naturalist in the exhibition not only gloss over Humboldt’s scientific contributions, but uncritically reproduce the historical myth of the dominance of European imperial science across the arts at the expense of Indigenous knowledge. Humboldt rampaged through lands of Kechwa Nations (and many more), stole lifetimes of sacred knowledge from Andean healers and herbalists without any form of consent, and then mapped and sold them internationally with great acclaim across Europe. Financed by descendants of the same Spanish monarchy that funded the genocidal campaigns of Christopher Columbus, Humboldt’s expeditions through the Andes were nothing short of pillage. What happened on the ground was very different than what was reported on paper. The map was never the territory. 


PHOTO: © John Hill (reproduced by permission)


Two centuries later, the pattern is being repeated. Anglo-European reverence for Humboldt at once stems from and obscures the litany of knowledge smuggled from the Americas and then repackaged for the French, British, Dutch, Germans, and later the Americans. Like the Countryside exhibition, Humboldt’s design is a roadmap for continuing the colonial project of resource extraction and looting of Indigenous lands worldwide; the colonial megastructure that originally served for the first slave plantations in European colonies. Your exhibition is another link in the chain, recapitulating Humboldt’s great unacknowledged claim to Indigenous knowledge neither gifted nor granted, but mined and exploited over and over again. Taken without consent, recognition, or royalty, Humboldt’s maps and the knowledge these encrypt are like the collages on the circular walls of the Guggenheim Museum: a rotunda of extracted intellectual ore.

Indigenous Erasure
is Dispossession of Identity & Humanity.

 
The general failure to recognize the violence and aggression enacted and executed by your acts of cultural appropriation and glib claims to self-indigenization is particularly enraging, and perpetuates the very erasure and extraction animating the exhibition. Carolyn Kormann’s March 9, 2020 coverage in The New Yorker (“Rem Koolhaas’ Journey to the Countryside”) amplifies your claims:

“The separation [between preservation and development] would not necessarily be between pure nature and the impure rest,” Koolhaas said, but instead would require the sharing and mixing of territories, and for “people to behave like the indigenous cultures that were able to inhabit spaces without destroying them.”

In the Guggenheim exhibition as well as The New Yorker article, you double-down on glorifying Humboldt’s redesign of Indigenous life and land into a colonial “cosmos”:

“This [geological, botanical, and hydrological map of Humboldt], for me, represents maybe the most inspiring form of collecting elements of nature, analyzing nature, and loving nature … This is emblematic.” In 1810, “von Humboldt could still ‘discover’ unmolested nature; even when inhabited, indigenous peoples lived lives that depended on nature without destroying it.”

And then finally, in the same article, you insist on exploiting Indigenous strategies by slyly repeating claims to self-indigenization and dismissing Indigeneity in the same breath, shamelessly re-authorizing erasure from inside out:

“But to impose better behavior on the entire world is equally tough. As if we moderns could become indigenous again.” 

This practice of self-indigenization dates back centuries to colonial contact, where colonizers and settlers assume Indigenous identity as a method of subsuming their enemies in a way that historian Philip J. Deloria calls “playing Indian.” And yet, you do so without any political connection, community, relation, or kin; as if identity is an interchangeable avatar, or that citizenship can be self-claimed, or that nationhood can be disposed of at will. Self-indigenization is the tip of the spear for European and American conceits of white saviorship and its constitutive hyper-masculinity. It fails to recognize—let alone honor—Indigenous Peoples as living, present, politically-organized nations when they represent over 5% of the world’s population. Five million Indigenous Peoples form part of over 500 tribal nations across what is known as the United States, holding less than 2% of the 5.6 billion acres of lands that were stolen. In essence, the erasure of Indigenous Peoples in your one-year exhibition reveals the centuries-old racist treatment of territorial identities, squeezed out of the countryside and out of the consciousness of settlers. Is it not precisely the Euro-American concept of nature and its trafficking of white nationalism that continually destroys Indigenous worlds?

Race-Shifting
Is Dispossession of Sovereignty.


Furthermore, your casual and careless use of the universalizing ‘we,’ ‘us,’ ‘our,’ (even the qualified use of ‘   ’ as an orthographic alibi, a settler move to innocence) follows the age old mission civilisatrice of architecture: enclosure, assimilation, indoctrination on the one side; incarceration, impoverishment, and eradication on the other. The hegemonic use of a homogeneous ‘we’ is not only arrogant and presumptuous, but also disingenuously assumes a wholesale consensus to fulfil a grand unifying vision. As if ventriloquizing a majority opinion, the ‘we’ establishes a position of cultural and intellectual superiority for the Curator, the Museum, the Publisher, and the Research Universities that produced the content of the exhibition and the book. By what process of community consultation, territorial engagement, or intercultural dialogue do you dare assume this collective position? Did you not stop to consider that your positionality as a self-styled anthropologist was neither neutral nor objective? Worse, did you feel free from all such obligations? Or did you simply not care?

Your disengagement from communities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communicates purposeful intent and bias. Rather than engaging in a process of consent and consultation—a way of entering into relation with Indigenous Peoples, locally, regionally, or internationally—the exhibition not only excludes Indigenous participation, but completely suppresses two key pieces of international policy of human rights: the
2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the entrenchment of the 2016 Principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) as a “pre-requisite for any activity that affects ancestral lands, territories and natural resources” and “to guarantee everyone’s right to self-determination” that recognizes the sovereignty of Indigenous lands and traditions.

Moreover, not only does the exhibition place Euro-American voices at the peak of an assumed cultural discourse but, at the base of this intellectual mountain of yours, it entrenches Eurocentric views, marginalizes alternative perspectives, and quashes dissenting voices seeking to uproot the unequal distribution of wealth and unjust conditions of labor underlying territorial exploitation. While no doubt the masquerade of the Countryside exhibition serves well as a gigantic love letter to the growing cabal of petty tyrants in tech, real estate, finance, and government to build the next gigafactory, server farm, or mega-prison, the weaponization of knowledge to your own ends is nothing less than greed, manipulation, and exploitation on a massive scale. White skin, white walls, white lies.

Let’s be clear: self-indigenization is a direct assault on Indigenous humanities, sovereignties, freedoms, and rights to self-determination. Settler-colonial claims to Indigeneity—through the extraction of Indigenous culture and knowledge—is nothing less than twenty-first century race-shifting: claiming and assuming Indigenous identity through some primitivist proclivities without any historical relations or current ties to Indigenous community or nationhood. Race shifters, explains
anthropologist Circe Sturm, are “individuals who have changed their racial self-identification … a form of appropriation, an expression of a desire [by non-Indigenous Peoples] to be something they are not.” When race-shifting is performed for “symbolic, [political,] or material advantage,” it not only fails to confront and challenge toxic constructions of whiteness, but commits “outright ethnic fraud.”

The fraud of self-indigenization and race-shifting are predatory practices rooted in a virulent, yet fragile whiteness. Not only do your claims contravene autonomous protocols of nationhood, but they also obviate deep relations of kinship altogether. Not surprisingly, these are the very relations you try to expropriate, sanitize, and resell for your visions of “change.” There’s no way that you can rhetorically distance yourself from the words on the wall, nor outsource the blame, nor hide behind a veil of research to excuse these transgressions. Even if you don’t care, we are here to make you (and the countless architects that mimic you) aware and accountable.

This two-pronged strategy of dispossession––suppression of Indigenous rights and race-shifting—is even more bewildering given the affiliation and identity of former Guggenheim Curator of Architecture and Digital Initiatives, Troy Conrad Therrien. The
Canadian-born citizen of the Métis Nation of British Columbia states in his introduction to the exhibition catalog how he invited you to the Guggenheim to conceive and engage in a curatorial partnership at the onslaught of the exhibition concept, back in 2015.

What happened in those five years? Did you not witness the countless blockades on Indigenous lands opposing oil and gas pipelines in the so-called countryside? Did you not notice the massive opposition to man-camps that giant mining companies were building? Where were you when refugee children were being unlawfully detained and inhumanely caged as they were being violently separated from migrant parents at international borders? Were you not aware of the exploitation of prison labor and immigrant work forces in the “countrysides” that feed billions of peoples? Are you not paying attention to the leadership of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who are risking their lives on these fronts to stop the racial injustices entrenched in the settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, eurocentrism, and white supremacy that you represent? What more can be stolen?

Your 1978 book Delirious New York is longstanding evidence of how urgent this demand is. Relegated to the “Prehistory” section, you both denigrate and ignore the contemporary reality, cultural presence, and political sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples (specifically of Lenape, Shinnecock, and Unkechaug Nations that have inhabited New York since time immemorial, notwithstanding the many Indigenous Peoples who call the city home). Tellingly, you parrot the characterization of Indigenous Peoples as models of “North American barbarism” not in admonishment, but to house your own speculations on the “reenactment— architectural this time— of the New World’s primordial tragedy, the massacre of the Indians,” as an engine for the city’s recursive reinvention. Your cynical rhetoric has not aged well, souring now into the prophecy and pronouncement it has always been. You recognized too that such a narrative expresses a “need to mythologize its past and rewrite a history that can serve its future”—and then, like now, you appointed yourself the new, winking demiurge of settler urbanism. This constitutes more than a mockery or tokenization of Lenape Peoples, it erases—and thereby dehumanizes—urban Indigenous communities at large. Your 1977 Architectural Design article “Life in the Metropolis, or The Culture of Congestion” that you later reproduced in your 1995 book S,M,L,XL, naturalizes colonialism as the metropolitan condition. In turn, it trivializes intergenerational trauma and entrenches territorial dispossession as the precondition for the making of settler-space. Big and small, settler urbanism is Indigenous erasure. So it’s no mistake that the hegemony of spatial violence in settler-colonial space is absent from the entire spectrum of your work, in the same way that Indigenous erasure is omnipresent throughout the Countryside exhibition at the Guggenheim.

Even according to your own
 autobiographical narrative, your motives can only be assumed to be—not unlike those of Humboldt some two hundred years ago— extractive. Now, over four decades after Delirious New York, you persist in normalizing an architectural culture of extractivism shared widely by architects for which they are rarely, if ever, held accountable for. Your alloying of ignorance and impunity, as if a colonial carte blanche, legitimizes injustice.

Given the immense cultural platform that the Guggenheim Museum has built with over 1 million visitors per year and the far-reaching social impact that you have from your seventy-year career, the time to end this practice of cultural appropriation is here and now.

Cease & Desist Now. 


Adopting traditional forms of Indigenous knowledge (and platforming them) under the banner of cultural inspiration or innovation is reprehensible. Whether it is in the Vitruvian trope of the ‘primitive hut’ or the modern myth of the ‘noble savage,’ (or in recent compilations of traditional, low-tech, Indigenous technologies by a host of white academics and design professionals), such practices of intellectual and material extraction are not new, but they must unconditionally end. Cultural appropriation exploits oral tradition as well as embodied knowledge, and then consumes and exploits it as commodity. Colonial anthropology and imperial science undressed. Technological red face in plain sight.

Legitimating the extractive gaze of white researchers and curators is similarly perverse. The financial and infrastructural support that the Guggenheim Museum has garnered for (and by) the exhibition makes them equally accountable for amplifying and glorifying this white gaze. Your duplicity commits and confirms settler desires for race-shifting and indulges in an age-old colonial fantasy of pretendianism at the very root of US culture, from the Boston Tea Party to the Boy Scouts of America. That systemic pattern not only excludes, but furthers attempts to extinguish Indigenous Peoples as part of the settler-colonial project predicated on a multi-faceted and ongoing program of dispossession. Cultural appropriation by a dominant white majority in a racialized attempt—as you claim, “to become Indigenous again”—upholds the curatorial hegemony of white supremacy. Your exhibition proves that settler-colonialism is not only planned and executed, it is also curated.

So this letter is not only about calling out denigrating acts of appropriation, but to bring to an end the dehumanizing practice of Indigenous erasure that is part of settler-colonialism’s strategy of cultural genocide and ongoing dispossession. In the context of so much land and culture that has been stolen and continues to be taken from Indigenous Peoples and Tribal Nations—notwithstanding the widespread use of Indigenous symbols as American mascots—the disproportionate rates of over-representation of Indigenous men and women in prison populations, the intergenerational legacies of Indian Residential Schools, and the alarming rates of Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), how much more can be taken and extracted from Indigenous People—living and past?

The consequences of such actions, when left unchecked, set dangerous precedents for younger settler scholars and immigrant designers trained in the racist design institutions of the so-called civilized western world where this practice is rampant. This is why we are writing to you now. This practice not only perpetuates vicious cycles of domination, it also sanctions white supremacy through financialized resources and applauds it through awards and recognition. Emulating, appropriating, tokenizing, or worse, extinguishing of Indigenous knowledge in exhibitions like Countryside at the Guggenheim or How Will We Live Together at the Venice Architecture Biennale this past year is incendiary, spreading like wildfire in design institutions, schools, exhibitions, and professional associations where protocols of consent and consultation are completely ignored and overlooked in spite of codes of ethics like those of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and affiliated design disciplines represented by the American Planning Association (APA), the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

As a white, non-Indigenous, European curator and Dutch architect whose home country carries legacies of exploitation and colonial violence dating back well over four centuries, you cannot possibly question the future when your patriarchal rhetoric consistently chooses to misinterpret the present; an era that for many communities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color represents unending spatial injustices, oppressions, and in some cases, wars.

To these ends, we demand your full accountability and immediate apology as head of the Curatorial Team to cease and desist the misrepresentation of traditional Indigenous knowledge and abuse of cultural sovereignty. No more paper-thin plans like the Guggenheim Museum’s Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion Action Plan or any empty promises of decolonizing the institution. What’s put on paper is always different to what’s done on the ground or put up on the walls. The Museum’s own staff even called out some of their own injustices in 2020 during the Countryside exhibition in The New York Times (“
Curators Urge Guggenheim to Fix Culture That ‘Enables Racism’”). As Curator, Museum, and Publisher—in all these roles, you encompass the platform and need to take action.

Just Fuckin’ Stop.


This is therefore a generational call to stop this settler-colonial fraud and to end this culture of dispossession. There can be no more violence and aggression from the vile appropriation of knowledge and race-shifting running rampant in the culture of western art and architecture.

The Board of Trustees of the Guggenheim Museum and Taschen Publishers are cc’ed here with the proviso that a different history of the future can be written, should the exhibition travel to Arc-en-Rêve Centre d’Architecture in Bordeaux (France) or anywhere else. In the future, if it is to genuinely reshape its executive and curatorial leadership, the Guggenheim Museum must enroll assistance from, consult with, and receive consent from local Indigenous communities and leading Indigenous rights organizations such as the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Amazon Watch, the Indian Law Resource Center, the Indigenous Environmental Network, and Land Rights Now.

To this effect, we’ve attached a summary list of texts on cultural appropriation, exploitation, self-indigenization, and race-shifting that explain in greater depth the terms and concepts referenced here, along with their longstanding histories, consequences, and impacts. Read them, internalize them, engage with them, and act on them while reflecting on how those legacies are exacerbated by current realities, including the disproportional impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tribal communities. In the process of your own transformation, you’ll understand that the best place to start is with yourself; with honoring the lands you are on—Lenapehoking—and the retroactive engagement of your roles and responsibilities to the Peoples and Treaties that those lands are privy to.


Signed & Authored by:

ANGEL A ANGELE, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá
Pedro Aparicio Llorente, APLO/Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá
Alexander Arroyo, University of Chicago
Daphne Bakker, Failed Architecture
Rod Barnett (Māori), Aotearoa New Zealand
Liz Barry, Public Lab, New York
Pierre Bélanger, Boston
Hernán Bianchi Benguria, University of Toronto
Tiffany Kaewen Dang, University of Cambridge
Vineet Diwadkar, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok
Erin Genia (Sisseton-Wahpeton), Boston
Ghazal Jafari, University of Virginia
Namik Mačkić, Counterfactual, Oslo
Marc Miller, Penn State University
Mahtowin Munro (Lakota), United American Indians of New England
Jean-Luc Pierite (Tunica-Biloxi), North American Indian Center of Boston
Manuela Silva, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá
Samantha Solano, UMass Amherst
Zoe S. Todd (Métis/otipemisiw), Carleton University



cc:   The Board of Trustees of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Taschen Publishers
att:  A Primer on Cultural Appropriation, Race-Shifting, Self-Indigenization, & Dispossession in the context of Settler-Colonialism



A Primer
on Cultural Appropriation, Dispossession, Race-Shifting, Self-Indigenization in the Context of Settler-Colonialism.


Rod Barnett, “Designing Indian Country: Suppose Native America is not over, that there is no “after colonialism.” How do we create public spaces that enable true contact between cultures?,” 2016
Nicholas Blomley, “Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid,” 2003
Natchee Blu Barnd, Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism, 2017
Nicholas Brown, Sarah E. Kanouse, Re-Collecting Black Hawk Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest, 2015
Desmond Cole, The Skin We're In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power, 2020
Glen S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, 2014
Dark Matter University, Lessons in Anti-Racist Design Pedagogy, 2020
Marcia Ellen DeGeer, Biopiracy: The Appropriation of Indigenous Peoples Cultural Knowledge, 2002
Design as Protest Collective, You Are Antiracist, 2020
Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian, 1998
Adam Gaudry & Darryl Leroux, “White Settler Revisionism,” 2014
Erin Genia, “Decolonization and Cultural Responsibility,” 2020
Erin Genia, “The Landscape and Language of Indigenous Cultural Rights,” Arizona State Law Journal, 2012
Mike Gouldhawke, “Building Blocks,” 2021
Aaron Glass and Jolene Rickard, “Met Roundtables: Boundaries in Native America,” 2019
Red Haircrow, “‘Native Hobbyism’ is Modern-Day Colonialism”,
Laura Harjo, Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity, 2019
Phineas Harper, “Architects are Experts on Cultural Appropriation,” 2018
Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage Project, “Think Before You Appropriate: A Guide for Creators & Designers,” 2015
Cole Harris, “How Did Colonial Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” 2004
Adrienne Keene, “Native Appropriations,” All My Relations Podcast, 2019
la paperson, “Settler Colonialism Is a Set of Technologies,” 2017
Ruth Hopkins, “Boycott a Repeat Offender of Cultural Appropriation,” 2019
Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy, 1990
Wanda Lau, “Tammy Eagle Bull: Let’s Reconsider That Indigenous Tattoo,” 2019
Darryl Leroux, Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity, 2019
Darryl Leroux, “'We've been here for 2,000 years': White settlers, Native American DNA and the phenomenon of indigenization,” 2018
Darryl Leroux, “How 'race-shifting' explains the surge in the number of Métis in Eastern Canada,” 2017
NYC Stands for Standing Rock, #StandingRockSyllabus, 2016
Nick Martin “There’s Nothing More American than Native American Mascots,” 2020
Tiya Miles, “Dispossession,” The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones, 2020
Dylan T. Miner, “Makataimeshekiakiak, Settler Colonialism and the Specter of Indigenous Liberation,” 2015
Deborah A. Miranda, “Teaching on Stolen Ground,” 2007
Louis Mokak, “Architecture and Appropriation,” 2018
Pierre Moret et al., “Humboldt’s Tableau Physique revisited,” 2019
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, 2015
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 1992
Patrick Anthony, “Mining as the Working World of Alexander von Humboldt’s Plant Geography and Vertical Cartography,” 2018
Stephen Pearson, "The Last Bastion of Colonialism: Appalachian Settler Colonialism and Self-Indigenization,” 2013
Caroline Picard, “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd,” 2016
Grace Redpath, “Is Mainstream Sustainability Appropriating Indigenous Knowledge?”, 2021
Jolene Rickard, “Absorbing or Obscuring the Absence of a Critical Space in the Americas for Indigeneity: The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian,” 2007
Jolene Rickard, “Indigenous Visual Sovereignty,” 2021
Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense, 2013
Audra Simpson, “Ethnographic Refusal: Anthropological Need,” Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States, 2014
Audra Simpson, “From White into Red: Captivity Narratives as Alchemies of Race and Citizenship,” 2008.
Michael Slenske, “How Can the Design Industry Avoid Appropriation,” 2018
Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 1999
Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, “Respect, Responsibility, and Renewal: The Foundations of Anishinaabe Treaty Making with the United States and Canada,” 2010
Gina Starblanket & Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, “Towards a Relational Paradigm—Four Points for consideration: Knowledge, Power, Gender, Land, Modernity,” Resurgence & Reconciliation, 2018
Circe Sturm, Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-first Century, 2011
Drew Hayden Taylor, Searching for Winnetou, CBC Hot Docs, 2017
Zoe Todd, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” 2015
Owen Toews, Sowing Apartheid: The Export-Agricultural Vision,” in Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg, 2018
Julie Tomiak, “Contested Entitlement,” Settler City Limits, 2019
Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” 2009
United Nations, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Resolution adopted by the General Assembly, 2007
Sócrates Vasquez and Avexnim Cojtí,Cultural Appropriation: Another Form of Extractivism of Indigenous Communities,2020
Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, 1999
Yellowhead Institute, Cash Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper, 2021




This letter is available in 3 formats:

GOOGLE FORM VERSION:* https://forms.gle/i4HLDbjYhUSBU4Nx6

ONLINE HTML VERSION (English/Spanish): https://whiteskinwhitewallswhiteli.es/

DOWNLOADABLE PDF VERSION (English/Spanish): https://bit.ly/3FwyVft

CONTACT: settlercolonialismiscurated@gmail.com


*You can lend your support to this effort by endorsing the Open Letter originally published on January 17, 2022 by filling out the form field at the bottom of the page (updated daily) of the GOOGLE FORM VERSION.