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.