This week’s webinar ‘Working GROUNDS’ prompted the panelists, Corrina Gould, Mario Sifuentez, Hanna Kim and Ashante Reesé, to explore a wide range of topics: the loss of control of native lands, the Westlands Water District, the Sugar Land 95, a deep analysis of the words ‘working’ and ‘ground’, and a day in Baltimore this past summer during the Black Lives Matter protests. It is not every day in zoom-land that you can figuratively feel the energy leap off the screen, but this was definitely one of those days. Similar to the previous ‘Material GROUNDS’, I was struck by the passion each panelist brought to this conversation and by just how much can be learned in ten minutes. As an attendee, I was transported from Los Angeles to Oakland to Fresno County to Sugar Land and finally to Baltimore. Two weeks ago, I wrote a play-by play-breakdown of the conversation series. This week, I wanted to shake things up a bit and instead will share some of my classmate’s questions and responses alongside a brief synopsis of each speaker’s presentation to demonstrate the remarkable ripples produced by this one conversation in hopes that you too, the reader, might join in as well. In case you missed the lecture, I encourage you to watch it, linked here. My amazing classmates come from my Contemporary Theories of Landscape Architecture class, instructed by Alison Hirsch, the co-creator of this bi-weekly series and the moderator of this event. Memory, history, trust, care, cultural heritage and of course, the ground were all big themes for the evening.
Alison Hirsch, an Associate Professor and the director of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the USC School of Architecture opened the second conversation of the grounds series with an acknowledgement of the ground upon which we all speak. She informed the audience that this conversation on working grounds acts as an outgrowth or extension of our first conversation on material grounds, and each conversation in the series moving forward will continue to do so. She then provided a framework for the evening, stating, “Working Grounds will focus on both the care of the ground as embodied practice, and the conflicted and often violent relationship between labor and land.” Hirsch made clear that “we cannot universalize a single human, especially in the context of work and instead, the conversation tonight will focus on a highly differentiated sense of human and human bodies, particularly as they are gendered and racialized.” One of Hirsch’s goals for the evening was to tackle the lexicon of ground, land, work, labor and care, words often intertwined with violence and oppression as well as resistance, recovery, liberation and justice. Hirsch explained that this specific conversation was designed to mainly explore two different narratives: the ethics of care, particularly feminist ethics of care and the violent and exploitatative products of capitalism and colonial domination. She states, “each participant this evening has a narrative to share that includes both sides of that binary” and indeed, they did.
Corrina Gould, the co-founder and co-director of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust presented first, and spoke of her ancestors, the extermination of native people, the rematriation of stolen lands, the importance of living in reciprocity with the land, and the establishment of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. I was especially struck by what she called, “a paper genocide of [her] people”. Gould stated, “This history was erased. People in the Bay area had no idea who we were… we had been here for thousands of years, but we were erased by continuous colonization of our lands.” To begin, she read a piece from Rowen White that said “my body is a cartography of stories of ancestors asking not to be forgotten. We are not a conquered people.” Gould explained how our bodies are part of the land from which we come from and how all across the world, indigenous women bury their baby’s placenta and umbilical cords back into the ground. To give you, the reader, just a taste of Gould’s amazing presentation, while discussing the return of the Lisjan Land to her people and of Him’Metka, she told the audience, “These ancestors I believe are always giving us these ideas of miracles… Him’metka is a place where people gather together. A place for us to be good hosts again. A place to bring back Chocenyo language and cultural revitalization and working the land, not just with indigenous people but with people from all walks of life, to renenage people back into the land, to remind us what our place is with the land, to remember what Robin Kimmerer says in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, “Once human beings engage with the land, after about seven or eight minutes we begin to hum and sing because it is part of our reciprocity with the land that has always taken care of us.”” It seems like the entire class agreed— if we could listen to Gould speak all week, we would.
In response to Gould, Dani Velazco, MLA Candidate ’22, asks, “What does it mean to be deeply rooted in place? What does it mean to flourish amidst oppression?”
Some classmates considered how landscape architects fit within the conversation. Lucia Bayley, MLA Candidate ’23, writes, “As landscape architects, we should inform ourselves about the story of the land we are working on and try to gather as much knowledge as possible before creating our designs.”
Mario Sifuentez, Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Humanities Center at the University of California, Merced, spoke next. Rachel Ablondi, B.S. in Geodesign Candidate with a minor in Landscape Architecture ’22, summarizes, Sifuentez’s “presentation about reimagining the way water and land are understood in California politics was quite educational… This discussion demonstrated just how bad the working and living conditions are for the essential workers who provide food for our tables, and the infuriating irony that the essential workers cannot provide food for their own tables or have access to clean water to drink.”
Diana Nightingale, MLA Candidate ’22, writes, “If you are a researcher, curator or designer you are respected by the public and your peers. But if you use a shovel or a hand saw on a daily basis, you are pitied or disregarded as replaceable – another tool in the landscape. What would it take for us to change this socially ingrained prejudice against [people] working the land… as being of less worth to our community than others? How can we give greater respect to them? Are the stories we learn and share about them really helping the way we would hope they would?”
Joining us all the way from Cambodia, Hanna Kim, artist, Soros Equality Fellow and non-resident fellow of Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, presented third and discussed convict leasing, the Sugarland 95, and how she uses art and design to illustrate pieces of a “bitter history that hid in plain site for so long.” One quote of hers in particular stood out to me— “Perhaps when people are in denial, our ground will speak truth instead”. She also read a piece from Bryan Stevenson who states, “Truth and reconciliation are not simultaneous. They are sequential. Tell the truth first, and it’s the truth that motivates you to understand what it will take to recover, repair, endure– to reconcile.” Kim’s presentation prompted an emotional reaction among students of other untold stories still hidden in the ground.
Yige Ma, MLA Candidate ’23, echoes Kim, “With the development of the times, the past history of the land may be forgotten by people, but the memory carried by the land will not be obliterated by time.”
As we saw with Gould, students again turned inward and considered landscape architecture’s position in the conversation. Ablondi states, “It was a difficult story to hear… but a story that is not unique as so many histories have been erased and covered up with a false narrative. Her talk brought up crucial topics of representation and memorialization of a landscape whose memory has been wiped and asks the question of how can we use the landscape to remember the past.”
Zehra Rizvi, MLA Candidate ’22 writes, “As landscape architects, our role goes beyond that of an environmentalist. We must talk about the correlation and coexistence of humans with nature (other species and the ground) as human’s perception of land and the emotion they associate with it changes the meaning of “their” working ground. What plays more of a major role in defining or remembering working ground– physical evidence like the evidence uncovered in Sugar Land or sentimental/innate attachment?”
Kim concluded her presentation with the following, “Confronting that truth will be our collective struggle for justice. And we can hope that as Reginald Moore (director of non-profit Convict Leasing and Labor Profit) often quoted from the bible, the truth will set us free.”
In the final presentation for the night, Ashante Reesé, Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas in Austin, dissected the words ‘working’ and ‘ground’ and pulled the audience out of their computers and into her world through a narrative ethnography and a sample of music.
Hannah Flynn, MLA Candidate ’23, states, “Dr. Reese talked about obstructive forces that affect the comfortable use of spaces by marginalized people — like the police helicopters hovering aggressively over the protests of the summer of 2020.”
Reese mentioned in her presentation, “Helicopters don’t get the final say.”
Flynn continues, “Sometimes these obstructive forces are the same institutions that turn around and demand collaboration for large-scale problem-solving. I’m thinking specifically about asking the Black community to solve police brutality, or western scientists demanding ecological knowledge from indigenous authorities to help combat species lost and climate change. These are problems that are pressing to solve, but the knowledge sharing involved is often one-sided – extractive, even. In these scenarios, how can the communities in question address these situations on their own terms? What types of alternate thinking can be employed to work towards their liberation and towards solving big problems?”
Yifan Yin, MLA Candidate ’22, writes, “I think artists and historiographers/social activists should put up their “weapon”: storylines, drawings or other types of media to defend those fragile but valuable histories from being forgotten.”
Reese ended the evening with a truly ripple-inducing thought, one I wanted to share as we continue to think about the GROUND. She states, “We are touching soil. We are getting our hands in the dirt. But someone cried there. Someone bled there. Someone could have possibly died there. Someone lived a life there. Someone’s dreams are in that soil. It is not that we are moving dirt around to find something— the dirt is already the thing. Every grain of sand already has a story. Every grain of dirt has a story.”
To conclude, I want to thank Alison Hirsch, Aroussiak Gabrielian, Jared McKnight and Hannah Flynn for organizing the GROUND conversation series, to the panelists Corrina Gould, Mario Sifuentez, Hanna Kim and Ashante Reesé for their time and incredible presentations, and finally, to my classmates for their generous words.
And our conversation continues. Ancestral GROUNDS is on March 25th. Hope to see you all there.
Leslie Dinkin, MLA+U ’23