Gratitude
To Tlingit, Haida, Tshimshian peoples and lands for your commitment to the protection of these lands, waters and beings. For your prayers, attention and care. For the privilege to be encountered by the medicine of these lands. May this work serve as a prayer to protect Tlingit, Haida, Tshimshian peoples and lands.
We humbly continue listening for right relationship, accountability and regeneration to these lands and communities. May our practice serve this place and the prayer that Black liberation also requires Indigenous liberation.
On the prayer
Following black feminist scholar Tiffany King’s text, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, CAN I GET A WITNESS is a transmedia project that traces two queer black latinx femmes (brontë velez & Stephanie Hewett) dancing before, and being danced by, the ecology, memory and stories of the Tongass National Forest and Glacier Bay in Southeast Alaska (unceded Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian territories).
Scored by field recordings and music by cellist/acoustic ecologist Jiordi Rosales and interviews from the For The Wild podcast with Tiffany Lethabo King (interviewed by brontë velez), Wanda Kashudoha Culp and Kasyyahgei (matriarchal Tlingit elders and lifelong forest defenders of the Tongass & Glacier Bay interviewed by Ayana Young), the film and constellated media utilizes "dance as a grammar" (Tiffany King) to hold the complexity of it's narrative: tracing connections between melting ice in Alaska and the disappearing Caribbean, the separation of black and indigenous relations, and the critical suture that: black and indigenous femme survival requires the earth's health and "the land's refusal to be separated from flesh" (L.H. Stallings).
Produced by Lead to Life and For The Wild. Creative Direction by brontë velez. Executive Produced by Ayana Young. Videography by Molly Leebove & Jade Begay. Edited by Molly Leebove. Groundtruthing Oracle (Opening Segment) by jazmín calderón torres. Research by jazmín calderón torres. Music by Jiordi Rosales. Graphic Design by Erica Ekrem.
A note on the experience
We are inviting you into the seat of witness. Not to watch but to keep watch with. To behold and offer your attention to the Tongass National Forest, one of the last remaining intact ecosystems in the world, sheltering old-growth temperate rainforest, glaciers, fjords, and muskeg, ancestral territory of the Tlingit, Haida, Tshimishian peoples.
Ecologizing the admonition from Dr. King that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” - we invite you to imagine and connect with the gravity that the Tongass National Forest is deeply connected to the lands you call home, even if elsewhere — This offering will take time.
Can I Get A Witness asks you to dance with them. They ask for your presence before rushing toward “action.” They ask you to couple defense with prayer. They ask you to engage the content slowly, to curb the attention economy, to rest your eyes, to get into your body, to embody the rhythm of glacier.
A note on the offering
A note that this work does not intend to speak on behalf of the Tongass, Southeast Alaska, or indigenous communities of Southeast Alaska at large or offer a comprehensive history of these lands. These images and reflections emerged from the production team’s invitation through Sitka Conservation Society to bear witness to and build relationship with the Tongass National Forest through artist residency and practice in an effort to mobilize our platforms to protect re-implementing the Roadless Rule, removed by the Trump Administration, in fall of 2020.
It is with deep reverence, humility and grace that we continue to live into the practice and inquiry of living in right relationship with occupied places and the privilege and invitation of mobility. We are conscious, and staying with the trouble, of what it means to travel to places that are not our ancestral homelands and we pray this offering reflects our efforts in solidarity across relations and bioregions. We pray it serves the livability of this place and those most connected to the land and vulnerable within it.
Featuring
Wanda Kashudoha
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Wanda Kashudoha Culp is an Indigenous Tlingit activist and advocate, born and raised in Juneau and Hoonah, Alaska. A self-described professional paper-pusher and artist by trade, Wanda is also a hunter, fisherwoman, and gatherer of wild foods. She is the mother of three children, and is recognized as a storyteller, cultural interpreter, playwright, and co-producer of the film Walking in Two Worlds. A long-time forest defender, Wanda currently serves as the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network Coordinator for the Tongass National Forest.
Tiffany Lethabo King
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Tiffany Lethabo King (her/they) is a descendant of African people enslaved in the US South. She grew up in Lenapehoking and currently works/resides on Monacan Lands. King is an associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Virginia. She is also a co-director of the Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute (BIFFI) funded by the Mellon Foundation.
Tiffany is the author of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019). As a scholar and teacher, she is committed to thinking about how centuries long relationships between Black and Indigenous peoples have provided openings to alternative pasts, presents, and futures. Black and Indigenous liberation struggles informed by feminist and queer politics, as well as artistic production, and quotidian acts of survival and experimentation inspires her forthcoming scholarly and community building work.
Kasyyahgei
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Ernestine “Kasyyahgei” Hanlon-Abel is a respected Tlingit knowledge keeper, a master spruce root and Chilkat weaver and spends each spring and summer gathering roots from the Tongass. She is a fierce protector of her community and village of Hoonah, and has spent decades fighting against industrial-scale logging and for the protection of the old-growth trees within the Tongass National Forest. In the 1980s, Kasyyahgei brought a lawsuit against the National Forest Service for logging in Hoonah and, since then, has continued to stand with unwavering integrity and courageously speak truth to power.
brontë velez
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brontë’s work and rest is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). as a black-latinx transdisciplinary artist, curator, trickster, educator, jibarx and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration, death doulaship, and the necessity of comedy.
they embody this commitment of attending to black health/imagination, commemorative justice (Free Egunfemi) and hospicing the shit that hurts black folks and the land through serving as creative director for Lead to Life design collective and ecological educator for ancestral arts skills and nature-connection school Weaving Earth. they are currently co-conjuring a mockumentary with esperanza spalding in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and practicing pastoral care as a co-steward of a land refuge in Kashia Pomo territory in northern California.
mostly, brontë is up to the sweet tender rhythm of quotidian black queer-lifemaking, ever-committed to humor & liberation, ever-marked by grief at the distance made between us and all of life .
Stephanie Hewett
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Stephanie Hewett (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist from the Bronx, New York (Lenapehoking territory) currently residing in Oakland, CA (Ohlone-Chochenyo territory). She is a graduate of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts in New York City and has studied at the Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. She holds an MFA in Dance Studies and uses both music and movement to access pathways towards resistance and liberation rooted in spiritual, physical, and sonic defense. Hewett DJ's and produces electronic music under the moniker, Madre Guía. Her Afro-Caribbean roots guide her towards polyrhythmic potentialites of intergenerational healing.
Jiordi Rosales
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Jiordi (hebrew variation of the river jordan, meaning to descend or flow down) encounters himself most deeply in places of confluence and immersive study — attentive to the forms of learning that most permit joy, humor, mystery, and contradiction. Traced by xicano lineages, by way of East L.A. to the Sonoran desert in Northern Mexico, and romani/jewish migrations, Jiordi is most granted breath by inquires into sonic imagination — as a luthier and instrument designer since childhood, he is theologically entangled in the ways that sound is created, how it travels, and the variance of forms through which it is perceived and given meaning.
Jiordi’s current season of work is in discipleship to that which evades the archive. He is the course manager for Bayo Akomolafe’s We Will Dance With Mountains, curator for The Emergence Network, wildland firefighter for Northern Sonoma County Fire District, and holds an M.A. in Ecology & Spirituality from the University of Wales. Currently living and attending to sanctuary at the headwaters of the gualala river, he and his kindred are focused on the rematriation of indigenous prescribed-fire practices / lifeways back to kashia territory and the north coast.
Oracle as a site or place
Jiordi Rosales, who crafted the score, gathered the field recordings for the project on-site during our witnessing, and played live for the dancers, shared with the Can I Get A Witness team that ancient oracles were once not considered people but places - physical sites of prayer and mantic practice often built on fault lines, sites of fracture, places where the earth might give way.
We invite you to encounter the glaciers, the shoal, the old-growth forest, the cave, the moraine, the clear-cut as oracle - perhaps you let the oracle flow in a linear way, perhaps you divine and choose the phenomena of the earth that is calling you towards them and then see where the journey seeks to take you next. Perhaps you choose one today and a different one tomorrow - this is a practice we ask you to take time with and to let these images divine you.
We invite you to rest your eyes if you are engaging visually in-between witnessing and let the images and sounds digest before choosing the next oracle.
The Oracles
We invite you to encounter the glaciers, the shoal, the old-growth forest, the cave, the moraine, the clear-cut as oracle - perhaps you let the oracle flow in a linear way, perhaps you divine and choose the phenomena of the earth that is calling you towards them and then see where the journey seeks to take you next. Perhaps you choose one today and a different one tomorrow - this is a practice we ask you to take time with and to let these images divine you.
We invite you to rest your eyes if you are engaging visually in-between witnessing and let the images and sounds digest before choosing the next oracle.
Incorporation Practice
In your own way, give thanks for the water who kept watch with you. We invite you to offer a small vow to the water for how you will honor the spirit and integrity of water in the place you call home. We invite you to either offer the water blessing to the land where you are or imagine your body as an extension of the land where you call home and drink the water as an offering to re-belonging your body to the body of the earth.
Oracles
Tap or hover over the images below to choose, or be chosen by, a land oracle.
S H O A L
neither land nor sea; unmappable; unpredictable; a site of rupture and refuge; shapeshifter
Click Image to Watch Oracle →
M O R A I N E
the accumulation of glacial remains overtime crafting their own landforms; glacial afterlives
Click Image to Watch Oracle →
O L D G R O W T H
significantly undisturbed forest — a forest given space to live out their magic and wisdom; protected trees, protected habitat, protected memory
Click Image to Watch Oracle →
C L E A R C U T
the grave of old-growth elders, of wisdom, of the memory stored in trees; no tombstones but wreckage
Click Image to Watch Oracle →
C A V E
a weathered place carved by water and the moon; womb space; fugitive space
Click Image to Watch Oracle →
G L A C I E R
ancient elder ice constantly moving under their own weight; now also pressurized by moving under the weight of capitalism, extraction, settler colonialism, climate change, etc; a persistent body
Click Image to Watch Oracle →
Incorporation Practice
In your own way, give thanks for the water who kept watch with you. We invite you to offer a small vow to the water for how you will honor the spirit and integrity of water in the place you call home. We invite you to either offer the water blessing to the land where you are or imagine your body as an extension of the land where you call home and drink the water as an offering to re-belonging your body to the body of the earth.
Reciprocity
Reciprocity for this offering can also be a form of incorporation. Here are ways to practice reciprocity:
Support Tlingit matriarchs, Wanda Kashudoha and Kassyehgei, who are protecting their homelands by donating here. Please be sure to add the note to your donation, TONGASS ELDERS, before pressing the Donate Now button. All donations will be shared between Wanda Kashudoha and Kassyehgei.
Support the creators of this offering by donating to Lead to Life and For the Wild.
Support Tiffany King’s work by donating to Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute and Dark Laboratory.
Support Sitka Conservation Society who invited our team for the residency and their efforts to protect the Tongass National Forest. In 2019, SCS was gifted a remote property near Pelican, Alaska by artists Eric and Pam Bealer. When they left their property to the organization, Eric and Pam requested that we use it "to protect the place that we so loved.”
Continuing the artistic legacy of Eric and Pam, SCS has been developing the homestead to host creative retreats connecting diverse artists, writers, and activists involved in environmental work to the Tongass National Forest – people who will take the inspiration afforded to them through their experience, share it widely through myriad mediums, and advocate for the Tongass. You can support this project by giving to The Living Wilderness Fund, an endowment for Sitka Conservation Society that was established to ensure long lasting advocacy and protection of designated wilderness areas and wild places for future generations.
Deepen your study
Listen to these For The Wild interviews that are featured in CIGAW:
You can read a reflection brontë wrote on the team’s time in Alaska on Sitka Conversation Society’s website here.
Groundtruthing
We learned about the phrase groundtruthing during our travels across SE Alaska with sailors, Erik DeJong, Frances Brann and Heather Bauscher, who so graciously donated their time to craft the travel that ensured we could bear witness to the land with safety and enchantment. They made sure to design a trip that ensured the land could enchant us to dedicate our efforts to their and their people’s protection and care.
Groundtruthing has a host of meanings but the sailors used the language to describe interrogating what data or information had been collected about specific sites against information collected and intuited from one own’s personal presence and experience to verify those statistics, data and information.
This opening offering is our groundtruthing of being encountered by the Tongass. This groundtruthing oracle is our land acknowledgment that protecting the Tongass is not a siloed conservationist endeavor but tied up with the lifeways of the Tlingit, Haida and Tshmishian peoples. The Tongass will not be protected if there is not also atonement and reparations for the impacts and harms of settler colonialism, the tourism-industrial complex, extraction, racialized capitalism, indigenous displacement and genocide, utilizing black folks as surrogates to continue the military project in Alaska and further separate black and indigenous relations. GROUNDTRUTHING ORACLE is crafted, researched and edited by jazmín calderón torres.
Partners
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queer collective exploring the prophetic practice of alchemy as a medium to reimagine justice. We’re asking: How can black, eco-feminist public ritual and transforming guns into tools to heal and repair ceremony and land, shift our relationship to matter, memory, place, time, and trauma? leadtolife.org
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Sitka Conservation Society is the oldest conservation organization in Alaska. SCS protect the natural environement of the Tongass National Forest while supporting the development of economically, socially, and environmentally sustainble communities within Southeast Alaska. sitkawild.org
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For The Wild is a female-led, progressive media organization focused on land-based protections, co-liberation and intersectional storytelling rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth and consumerism. For The Wild is an anthology of the anthropocene. forthewild.world
Production Team
Ayana Young
Executive Producer
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Ayana is a podcast and radio personality specializing in intersectional environmental and social justice, deep ecology and land-based restoration. With an undergraduate degree from Loyola Marymount University including a double major in Art History and Theology and a minor in Philosophy as well as education through Columbia University in Ecology and Eastern Religions and Restoration Ecology at the University of Victoria, Young has a strong academic background at the intersections of ecology, culture, and spirituality.
Post-graduation dividends, from her early career allowed Young to conserve 500 acres of coast redwood and salmon habitat in Northern California, where she has been living for over five years. Living for the first years, in a tent with no electricity or running water while she established a homestead, and broke ground on a native species nursery and research center.
A budding filmmaker, Young is no stranger to the medium having spent her childhood as a prolific working actor, working alongside the likes of Steven Spielberg and Meryl Streep. Young’s debut film, When Old Growth Ends is an ode to the complex interweaving of the irreplaceable Tongass National Forest during its last stand as a distinctly wild place in Southeast Alaska. As Director, Producer, Narrator and Featured Cast Member of the film, Young wore many hats in midwifing this compelling and poetic story of struggle and beauty surrounding the Tongass National Forest.
Young leans into her vast experience on the other side of the camera, along with her intersectional approach to ecological restoration to guide her process as the Founder and Executive Director of millennial media organization and nonprofit For The Wild. Learning deeply from the critical dialogue she’s shared with over 100 guests on the For The Wild podcast, including Chris Hedges, Sylvia Earle, Vandana Shiva, Jill Stein, Winona La Duke, Terry Tempest Williams and other thought leaders (including some of the brightest activists, political thinkers, and scientific minds of our time) Young approaches her mission with For The Wild with critical thinking, deep reverence and artistry.
brontë velez
Creative Director / Producer
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brontë’s work and rest is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). as a black-latinx transdisciplinary artist, curator, trickster, educator, jibarx and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration, death doulaship, and the necessity of comedy.
they embody this commitment of attending to black health/imagination, commemorative justice (Free Egunfemi) and hospicing the shit that hurts black folks and the land through serving as creative director for Lead to Life design collective and ecological educator for ancestral arts skills and nature-connection school Weaving Earth. they are currently co-conjuring a mockumentary with esperanza spalding in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and practicing pastoral care as a co-steward of a land refuge in Kashia Pomo territory in northern California.
mostly, brontë is up to the sweet tender rhythm of quotidian black queer-lifemaking, ever-committed to humor & liberation, ever-marked by grief at the distance made between us and all of life .
Molly Leebove
Videographer / Editor
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Molly (she/her) is a multimedia artist and storyteller in devotion to a life-sustaining future based in Detroit, Michigan.
Jade Begay
Videographer
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Jade, Dine and Tesuque Pueblo, is a filmmaker, a storyteller, a communications strategist but above all, Jade is a woman who has cultivated a deep and fierce passion to protect land, air, and water. In order to accomplish this mission, Jade has committed her life’s work to amplify the voices and knowledge of Indigenous Peoples, so that the world can remember who the original caretakers of this earth are and who have maintained balance and harmony for time immemorial. It is Jade’s hope that once we recognize and honor Indigenous leadership, we can move towards healing hundreds of years of oppression.
Jade currently works as Climate Justice Strategy Director for NDN Collective. She has worked with grassroots and Indigenous communities, from Standing Rock to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Arctic to the Southwest. She is also a facilitator and trainer in anti-oppression work.
jazmín calderón torres
Groundtruthing Oracle Creator
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jazmín calderón torres (they/elle) is a trans-nonbinary mutli-racial boricua guided by their Black, Taino, and Spanish lineages. They are a transdisciplinary artist and Lead Producer, Curator at Lead to Life (An Allied Media Project). They have supported pre production visuals, treatments, and/or writing on film projects by Ummah Chroma Creative Partners (Terence Nance, Jenn Nkiru, and Bradford Young), adidas, Damon Davis, Julie Dash, KESH, and Esperanza Spalding Productions, LLC.
They currently serve on the Stewardship Council for an emerging community through the Nuns & Nones project. jazmín is an apprentice to relationships to their boricua lineage, bomba drum making, the more-than-human world, wildlife track and sign, & indigenous land tending. They have a BA in Art Practice, New Media and Ecosystems Management & Forestry from UC Berkeley.
Film Credits
Producers
Lead To Life, Sitka Conservation Society, For The Wild
Creative Director
brontë velez
Performance Artists
brontë velez, stephanie hewitt
Videographers
Molly Leebove, Jade Begay
Editor
Molly Leebove
Voiceovers from For The Wild Interviews
Wanda Kashudoha, Kassyehgei & Tiffany Lethabo King
Groundtruthing Oracle
jazmín calderón torres
Archival Research
jazmín calderón torres
Score
Jiordi Rosales
Field Recording
Jiordi Rosales
Sound Design & Production
José Rivera
Moraine Oracle Poem and Voiceover
brontë velez
Clear-Cut Oracle Poem and Voiceover
stephanie hewitt
Graphic Design
Erica Ekrem
Coloring
TBD
Executive Producer
Ayana Young
Producers
Heather Bauscher, Frances Brann, Erik DeJong
Special Thanks
Eric & Pam Bealer, Frances Brann, Erik Dejong, Krystina Scheller, Andrew Thoms, Heather Bauscher
Quotes
The following quotes from the Groundtruthing oracle and Shoal oracle voiceovers are excerpts from the preface of Tiffany King’s The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black Native Studies, published by Duke University Press in 2019. The excerpts were quoted by brontë velez during Tiffany King’s interview on For The Wild.
“I trust the radical and always shifting ground of Black freedom dreams. I also trust Black freedom dreams when they consider Native freedom.”
–Tiffany King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, Duke University Press, 2019.
“When I felt around and realized the new and unfamiliar about the slavery with which I had become so comfortable, it changed me. And I do not mean changed in a neat, orderly or containable way. It unmoored and disassembled me in ways that I and others did not expect. I could no longer be accountable only to myself, my ancestors, and my story of experiencing blackness and it’s slavery that had been passed down over my lifetime. When I say unmoored, I mean I could not continue life as I knew it.”
–Tiffany King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, Duke University Press, 2019.
Archival Footage & Imagery
Alaska State Archives, Alaska State Library
Alaska State Archives
ASA-A11-RG111-AS35395-Fd2-4-1
ASA-A11-RG11-SR603-PF3-Logging 1
ASA-A11-RG11-SR603-PF3-Logging 2
Alaska State Library Photo Collection
Industry-Whales-Whalers-Whaling-19
Port Armstrong-2 – P01-4409
Sitka-Aerial Views-12
Auke Bay Laboratory Photo Collection– P446-590-[no.]
B.B. Dobbs Photo Collection– P12-180
Curtis Shattuck Photo Collection– P511-08
David & Mary Waggoner Photo Collection – P492-II-021
Dr. Daniel S. Neuman Photo Collection– P307-048
Edward Sheriff Curtis Photo Collection– P49-14
Fred B. Dodge Photo Collection– P42-100
George A. Parks Photo Collection– P240-258
Harriman Alaska Series, 1899 Photo Collection– P305-[no.]
Mrs. Allen (Agnes Swineford) Shattuck Photo Collection– P27-103
Paul Sincic Photo Collectio– P75-144
Trevor Davis Photo Collection– P97-08
U.S. Forest Service Photo Collection– P207-30-1
Wickersham State Historic Sites Photo Collection– P277-005-077
William A. Langille Photo Collection– P123-33
Winter & Pond Photo Collection– P87-[no.]
William Norton Photo Collection– P226-867
Vincent Soboleff Photo Collection– P1-052
U.S. Forest Service Photo Collectionn– P207-21-15
Alaska and Polar Regions Collections and Archives,
University of Alaska Fairbanks:
Charles Sheldon Papers– UAF-2009-123-586 /UAF-2009-123-585
Falcon Joslin Papers UAF-1979-41-232
Jack Dillon Photographs– UAF-2006-24-82
Perry D. Palmer Photograph Album, ca. 1903-1913– UAF-2004-120-19 / UAF-2004-120-29
Additional Footage used under license from Shutterstock.com
Songs
“Who'll Be A Witness For My Lord” by Richmond's Harmonizing Four
The Orchard Enterprises; ℗ 1996 Document Records