https://settlercolonialcityproject.org Settler Colonial City Project Tue, 28 Sep 2021 01:38:14 +0000 https://settlercolonialcityproject.org en https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/Home-Image-Scroll Fri, 30 Aug 2019 15:50:39 +0000 Settler Colonial City Project https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/Home-Image-Scroll <img width="3600" height="3000" width_o="3600" height_o="3000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b9bac16051b33a8c9e8edc04aee396b8fc9dd259eaebb500638f44cc02f98ec5/Hydrosheds-with-lakes.jpg" data-mid="49588513" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b9bac16051b33a8c9e8edc04aee396b8fc9dd259eaebb500638f44cc02f98ec5/Hydrosheds-with-lakes.jpg" /><img width="1576" height="1145" width_o="1576" height_o="1145" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5db4dfb3dd1582971ffa8075658a7e5a9d383015a2eb5f386e9835c2098a478b/RANDOLPH-VITRINE.jpg" data-mid="49583477" border="0" 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data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f4aef5cdf0d0db5b7ada781a9e04132205cfcee1eb9f3b1ef4bb1602e3d7d668/AIC-GYM-B-W.jpg" data-mid="50566647" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f4aef5cdf0d0db5b7ada781a9e04132205cfcee1eb9f3b1ef4bb1602e3d7d668/AIC-GYM-B-W.jpg" /><img width="2048" height="1024" width_o="2048" height_o="1024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9b13745d8a283dbc9cba3b4f9f52d2e22d257e70cf870fc332abffdc34f3514a/Dakota_Access_Pipe_Line-_Central_Iowa.jpg" data-mid="49587406" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9b13745d8a283dbc9cba3b4f9f52d2e22d257e70cf870fc332abffdc34f3514a/Dakota_Access_Pipe_Line-_Central_Iowa.jpg" /><img width="1632" height="690" width_o="1632" height_o="690" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9b018ab41bcf1cead143d9b6d4eb4e26e038c81a4de9d4369a47b4ac30be415c/GAR-bw.jpg" data-mid="50752120" border="0" 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2021 19:33:03 +0000 Settler Colonial City Project https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/SCCP-in-PIN-UP-30-Legacy SCCP in PIN–UP 30: Legacy <img width="3686" height="2237" width_o="3686" height_o="2237" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f40524ed3f3fe4e60533a05e9b70379215108885cbb02e1674f9b9d77eb2e0dc/UnsettledDebt.jpg" data-mid="111033880" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f40524ed3f3fe4e60533a05e9b70379215108885cbb02e1674f9b9d77eb2e0dc/UnsettledDebt.jpg" /> https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/SCCP-at-Architecture-Beyond-Capitalism Sat, 19 Jun 2021 22:45:28 +0000 Settler Colonial City Project https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/SCCP-at-Architecture-Beyond-Capitalism SCCP at ABC <img width="976" height="1035" width_o="976" height_o="1035" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0d92ef0ac57fea8e6b79eff400abc0d6b419615aac2c1018c643e3ef1f9cf916/EzhGgpLWQAILkwg.jpg" data-mid="111794860" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/976/i/0d92ef0ac57fea8e6b79eff400abc0d6b419615aac2c1018c643e3ef1f9cf916/EzhGgpLWQAILkwg.jpg" /> SCCP presented at The Architecture Lobby’s Architecture Beyond Capitalism School, you can see our presentation below. https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/SCCP-at-Urgent-Pedagogies Tue, 28 Sep 2021 01:38:14 +0000 Settler Colonial City Project https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/SCCP-at-Urgent-Pedagogies SCCP at Urgent Pedagogies <img width="1597" height="922" width_o="1597" height_o="922" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/943275ad384e046b1ed110102bf8209efe483ea8fc870a7b9dc2c690e8ed0c8b/Urgent-Pedagogies.png" data-mid="120055180" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/943275ad384e046b1ed110102bf8209efe483ea8fc870a7b9dc2c690e8ed0c8b/Urgent-Pedagogies.png" /> SCCP presented “Learning decolonization, unlearning architecture” at Urgent Pedagogies“Histories of modern architecture vividly participate in the relegation of Indigenous peoples to ahistorical temporality. Most vividly, perhaps, these histories do this by simply not contending with Indigeneity in the constructions of modernity they narrate.” https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/This-Property Fri, 30 Aug 2019 15:50:41 +0000 Settler Colonial City Project https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/This-Property This Property <img width="1576" height="1145" width_o="1576" height_o="1145" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5db4dfb3dd1582971ffa8075658a7e5a9d383015a2eb5f386e9835c2098a478b/RANDOLPH-VITRINE.jpg" data-mid="49583060" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5db4dfb3dd1582971ffa8075658a7e5a9d383015a2eb5f386e9835c2098a478b/RANDOLPH-VITRINE.jpg" /> SCCP 2019THIS PROPERTY HAS BEEN PLACED ON THE ODAWA, OJIBWE, AND POTAWATOMI HOMELANDS BY THE SETTLER COLONIALISM OF THE UNITED STATES American Indian Center, Chicago As part of its project for the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Decolonizing the Chicago Cultural Center, the Settler Colonial City Project designed this sign for a vitrine on the Randolph Street facade of the Chicago Cultural Center. The sign utilizes the format of the brass plaques that document the placement of the Chicago Cultural Center on the National Register of Historic Places, which are located on both the Randolph Street and Washington Street facades of the building. Instead of inscribing the building into the heritage of a state that disavows its settler colonialism, as these brass plaques do, the sign designed by the Settler Colonial City project points precisely to settler colonialism as that state's heritage. <img width="474" height="320" width_o="474" height_o="320" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6360c0ea7a2012e621d3090a61850cc0917bebcd0264dee5653b7fee467035bb/national-register-plaque.png" data-mid="56256581" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/474/i/6360c0ea7a2012e621d3090a61850cc0917bebcd0264dee5653b7fee467035bb/national-register-plaque.png" /> Shortly before the opening of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Settler Colonial City Project was informed that the biennial's curatorial team felt the Randolph Street façade should just include exhibition-related signage. The Settler Colonial City Project then asked for and received permission from the American Indian Center to display the sign at its building instead. Like the Chicago Cultural Center, the American Indian Center is located on occupied Indigenous land. The American Indian Center is a place where this occupation can be pointed out, critiqued, historicized, and resisted without restriction. Once installed, members of the AIC have further elaborated on the message carried by this intervention. <img width="960" height="720" width_o="960" height_o="720" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d414fe00efac9b02cbed60ce60e8e40b4d398918fb3f76f11e47d5d78c9d2955/IMG_1127.JPG" data-mid="56254863" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/960/i/d414fe00efac9b02cbed60ce60e8e40b4d398918fb3f76f11e47d5d78c9d2955/IMG_1127.JPG" /> Image courtesy of Heather Miller &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/Decolonizing-Marble Fri, 30 Aug 2019 15:50:41 +0000 Settler Colonial City Project https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/Decolonizing-Marble Decolonizing Marble <img width="2977" height="2977" width_o="2977" height_o="2977" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9784c30bba0a6d12b3aa18531c0262c76c2f0c0fd7c093ad88b5af49104b842a/14C2C183-6E39-4F48-8A36-B491DFDCB751.jpg" data-mid="51083497" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9784c30bba0a6d12b3aa18531c0262c76c2f0c0fd7c093ad88b5af49104b842a/14C2C183-6E39-4F48-8A36-B491DFDCB751.jpg" /> THIS MARBLE WAS QUARRIED AND ASSEMBLED BY EXPLOITED LABOR SCCP 2019At Randolph St. Lobby, Chicago Cultural Center &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The use of luxurious marbles throughout the interior of today's Chicago Cultural Center is perhaps the signal contribution to the building's monumentality and grandeur. Some of this marble was extracted from quarries in the United States, in Barre, Vermont and Knoxville, Tennessee, while other marble was extracted from quarries in Europe, in Carrara, Italy, and Connemara, Ireland. Here, the Randolph Street Lobby and adjacent Randolph Square feature pale white Carrara marble, pink-hued Tennessee marble, and horizontally-veined white Vermont marble. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; In the late 19th century, when Carrara marble was quarried for the Chicago Cultural Center, Carrara was the location of brutal labor conditions: quarry workers, many of whom were ex-convicts, were people who could not find employment elsewhere and so were forced to contend with dangerous and unrelenting labor, minimal wages, bare facilities provided for their habitation, and often-cruel supervision. Inspired by anarchist organizers, many Carrara quarry workers rose up against these conditions and system responsible for their exploitation at the end of the 19th century. The Italian state fiercely put down these efforts, leading many Carrara marble workers, along with exploited and disaffected marble workers from Connemara, Ireland, to emigrate to the United States, where many found work at marble and granite quarries in Vermont. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The marbles throughout the interior of today's Chicago Cultural Center, along with the other materials from which the building was constructed, was also assembled by exploited workers--these were construction workers whose submission to labor conditions was enforced by the United State’s most powerful and violent institution--the same institution responsible for the severe violence inflicted on Native American people. <img width="3456" height="2304" width_o="3456" height_o="2304" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a1554672d76c65c284fadbd45436a47a23ae5ccb06bbda105e43dbce013e287a/DSC_0286.JPG" data-mid="51083475" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a1554672d76c65c284fadbd45436a47a23ae5ccb06bbda105e43dbce013e287a/DSC_0286.JPG" /> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Late 19th century Chicago, when today’s Chicago Cultural Center was designed and built, was the site of vibrant resistance on the part of organized urban labor to the exploitation of laborers in industrial capitalism. Indeed, the planning of this building in the early 1890s was bookended by two renowned events in United States labor history: the Haymarket Strike and Massacre of 1886 and the Pullman Strike and Massacre of 1894, each which took place in Chicago. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; For both industrial capitalists and the state, it was useful to approach labor unrest in terms of Native American resistance to settler colonial displacement. For capitalists, the figuring of organized labor’s resistance to exploitation in terms of the seemingly failed Native American resistance to colonialism offered a way to symbolically manage that resistance; according to this figuration, the restive working class would be pacified just like restive Native Americans had been. For the state that depended on and supported its capitalist beneficiaries, the relationship between organized labor and Native Americans was even closer; the military forces that had been assigned to pacify or at times annihilate Native Americans were brought to Chicago to pacify or at times annihilate organized labor. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; In Chicago, the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry was enlisted to manage striking laborers and their allies. The Seventh Cavalry had previously been engaged in violence against Native Americans in the West; in 1890, the Seventh Cavalry killed&nbsp; around 300 Lakota men, women, and children in the Wounded Knee Massacre. Four years later, in the course of the Seventh Cavalry’s deployment against striking Pullman workers, around 30 workers were killed at Pullman’s factory.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The marble in the Chicago Cultural Center thereby draws together Indigeneity and political radicalism as twinned threats to the sovereignty of the modern nation-state and that state’s beneficiaries. As the actions of the Seventh Cavalry revealed, violence against Native Americans and violence against working-class Americans identically protected privileged interests in both Chicago and the United States more generally. This violence was part of the system that kept construction workers on the job as they built this building. <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aab007d215cb9d63a4f59d0b31760d90a90281e5a2b093f0f4b0cef9aa86aab8/IMG_0955.jpg" data-mid="51084555" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/aab007d215cb9d63a4f59d0b31760d90a90281e5a2b093f0f4b0cef9aa86aab8/IMG_0955.jpg" /> https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/Decolonizing-Chicago-s-City-Seal Fri, 30 Aug 2019 15:50:42 +0000 Settler Colonial City Project https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/Decolonizing-Chicago-s-City-Seal Decolonizing Chicago’s City Seal &nbsp; <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f71821e730543242355187bfdb7a79448e489cd56bbe15170ddf9513fcb16c81/IMG_3723.JPG" data-mid="49583548" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f71821e730543242355187bfdb7a79448e489cd56bbe15170ddf9513fcb16c81/IMG_3723.JPG" /> CHICAGO’S CITY SEAL LEGITIMIZES SETTLER COLONIALISMSCCP 2019At Washington St. Lobby, Chicago Cultural Center &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Chicago's City Seal, on the floor of the Washington St. lobby, poses settler colonialism as peacefully replacing an Indigenous world. The process by which Indigenous land became a space of capital extraction, however, was a violent one. At the signing of the first Treaty of Chicago in 1821, Potawatomi chief Metea spoke to assembled representatives of the U.S. government and, pointing to the violence of colonial land seizure, said: You are acquainted with this piece of land—the country we live in. Shall we give it up? Take notice, it is a small piece of land, and if we give it away, what will become of us? The Great Spirit, who has provided it for our use, allows us to keep it, to bring up our young men and support our families ... If we had more land, you should get more; but our land has been wasting away ever since the white people became our neighbors, and we have now hardly enough left to cover the bones of our tribe... The design of the City Seal is defined in the Chicago Municipal Code in section MCC 1-8-010; this means that Chicago’s Municipal Code authorizes settler colonialism. To reveal and remember settler colonial dispossession and violence, as we begin to do here, is by contrast to solicit a decolonizing future. <img width="2576" height="2576" width_o="2576" height_o="2576" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cff4259409b8a8cbd0a3dba14602579496f4064456337eccd426c925b6589e16/Decolonizing-the-CCC_25072019_V3_Lei.png" data-mid="49583837" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cff4259409b8a8cbd0a3dba14602579496f4064456337eccd426c925b6589e16/Decolonizing-the-CCC_25072019_V3_Lei.png" /> The City Seal includes a depiction of an infant floating over a shell, itself floating over the 19th century Seal of the United States. The infant brings up associations of youth, innocence, and purity to these representations of the colonial nation and the colonial city. These cultural associations do political work: they attempt to replace the violence of settler colonial history, a violence that is nevertheless embedded in the seal’s other elements. The name of the city references a French rendering of the Indigenous Miami-Illinois word for a type of wild onion, the shikaakwa, known in English as ramps. The word was later turned into Checagou or Chicagou, also referencing a type of garlic that grew in the forests of the region. And yet, this indigenous plant is not depicted in the seal—what we see instead is a sheaf of wheat, a crop Indigenous to the Fertile Crescent and brought to North America by British colonialism. This more lucrative crop took over the plains surrounding Chicago as the land was seized from Native Americans and transformed into a site of extraction. Chicago’s Motto ("Urbs in Horto"/"City in a Garden") is prominently featured on the City Seal. The invocation of a “garden” as the site on which the city was founded and developed is one way in which settler colonialism forgets its origins in land theft and frontier violence. In fact, the city of Chicago, like every other city in the Americas, sits on Indigenous land that was seized by coerced treaties and violence by the United States government. <img width="3024" height="3024" width_o="3024" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ed2cdc672dc413b52ac5179d5f8596c31c5fbbbba770234857ae771a8c7b739f/IMG_0034.jpg" data-mid="51083685" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ed2cdc672dc413b52ac5179d5f8596c31c5fbbbba770234857ae771a8c7b739f/IMG_0034.jpg" /> The history of land seizures that yielded the territory on which the city of Chicago developed includes a series of coerced treaties between the United States government and Native Americans; these treaties granted the U.S. increasingly larger swaths of Indigenous territory and yielded increasingly larger dispossessions of Indigenous people. The signing of the last of these treaties—the 1833 Treaty of Chicago—was taken by the United States government as a surrender of Native American claims to Chicago and its surroundings. As inscribed on the seal, the city of Chicago was incorporated in 1837. By marking this year as the city’s point of departure, however, the seal erases the prior history of this land and its people. A two-masted schooner in full sail is depicted as arriving to the city and its supposed garden, but where is it arriving from, what does it carry, and for what purpose? The schooner, a cargo ship, comes to Chicago and takes extracted resources—like the sheath of grain it is headed towards—marking the city’s primary purpose: securing the extraction of resources from the agricultural “garden” and taking them to markets elsewhere for sale. <img width="3456" height="2304" width_o="3456" height_o="2304" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/afc7c6da4f1014780c1c4b3f2692a42819b14998c5b68d6ee01d4b48d294fba2/DSC_0229.JPG" data-mid="51083343" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/afc7c6da4f1014780c1c4b3f2692a42819b14998c5b68d6ee01d4b48d294fba2/DSC_0229.JPG" /> While there are multiple erasures of Indigenous presence within the Chicago Cultural Center, there is only one representation of Indigeneity, here on the City Seal. According to Chicago’s Municipal Code, the Seal includes a depiction of “an Indian chief with a bow and arrow proper.” With these weapons, the Seal transfers the violence of settler colonialism to the only Indigenous figure present in the building. Ironically, this presence, and the very Seal itself, are slowly being erased by the solicitous maintenance of the building. The Seal is cleaned several times a day when the lobby floor is cleaned: a caress that is gradually wearing the brass Seal away. The only objects allowed to touch the sole representation of an Indigenous person in this building are an eroding floor cleaner and the soles of the many shoes that step on it throughout the day. These small aggressions remind us of the larger pattern of settler colonialism, which masks the violence of erasure under the guise of “civilization.” <img width="3024" height="3024" width_o="3024" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c8a10f16959a8a7c6a6165483b8db1a241aa1f57f61c0a10618d0b9fe57c354c/IMG_0094.jpg" data-mid="51095435" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c8a10f16959a8a7c6a6165483b8db1a241aa1f57f61c0a10618d0b9fe57c354c/IMG_0094.jpg" /> https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/Decolonizing-the-GAR-Hall Fri, 30 Aug 2019 15:50:42 +0000 Settler Colonial City Project https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/Decolonizing-the-GAR-Hall Decolonizing the GAR <img width="3024" height="3024" width_o="3024" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6d63275fc5befbbfb2d4bdffec3e00d7f85f066b97fc87cd82076b396d61155b/IMG_0137.jpg" data-mid="51083245" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6d63275fc5befbbfb2d4bdffec3e00d7f85f066b97fc87cd82076b396d61155b/IMG_0137.jpg" /> THE CIVIL WAR WAS ALSO A SETTLER COLONIAL WAR SCCP 2019 At G.A.R. Memorial Hall, Chicago Cultural Center The Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall joined the Chicago Public Library as a part of the original program for what became today's Chicago Cultural Center. In this Memorial Hall, soldiers who fought for the Union in the Civil War are remembered and honored. To memorialize the Civil War, however, is also to memorialize the Indian Wars that were initiated by and connected to the Civil War, each part of the westward advance of the United States empire and the colonization of the west. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The Civil War was not only a conflict over slavery; it was also a conflict over the way in which the United States empire would develop. The victorious Union did not only take dominion in the South, the domain of the former Confederacy; it also took dominion in the West, the domain of Native Americans both ancestrally and more recently, as "Indian Removal" displaced many Native Americans to spaces west of the Mississippi. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; During the era of post-Civil War Reconstruction, many former Union soldiers, along with many former soldiers of the Confederacy, became shock troops redeployed to the frontier as the West was settled. And so, the Chicago Public Library and the G. A. R. Memorial Hall were not only two separate programs; they were also components of one and the same program, the program of the westward expansion of the United States empire accomplished by settler colonialism. <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7ba8407efafa03922535a6c847affdf7847834c4f44590630897695c4d1d48fa/IMG_0138.jpg" data-mid="51083227" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7ba8407efafa03922535a6c847affdf7847834c4f44590630897695c4d1d48fa/IMG_0138.jpg" /> https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/Decolonizing-Preston-Bradley-Hall Fri, 30 Aug 2019 16:30:31 +0000 Settler Colonial City Project https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/Decolonizing-Preston-Bradley-Hall Decolonizing Preston Bradley Hall <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fcdfa72524298373cee5eda81817a4708a432cbf08e1a2181ee837788ebc8a8b/IMG_0144.jpg" data-mid="51082455" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fcdfa72524298373cee5eda81817a4708a432cbf08e1a2181ee837788ebc8a8b/IMG_0144.jpg" /> TIFFANY &amp; CO. RENDERED SETTLER COLONIALISM “BEAUTIFUL” SCCP 2019 At Preston Bradley Hall Foyer, Chicago Cultural Center The Chicago Public Library and the room now known as Preston Bradley Hall were decorated by Tiffany &amp; Co., a world-renowned American jewelry company whose work at the building became one of its most renowned architectural achievements. Tiffany designed and crafted the mosaics and marble inlays throughout the building, as well as the dome in today’s Preston Bradley Hall; constructed from over 30,000 pieces of Favrile glass, this dome was and remains the largest Tiffany-built dome in the world. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Part of the eminence that Tiffany &amp; Co. was endowed with in the second half of the 19th century&nbsp; came from its investments in the mythical imagery of the “noble savage” and the “wild west frontier.” Tiffany &amp; Co. produced ceremonial swords awarded to officers for service in the Civil, Mexican-American, and Indian Wars; firearms displaying such “exotic” scenes as an American “buffalo-hunting expedition”; and decorated Smith and Wesson handguns and Winchester rifles, the latter marketed as “The Gun that Won the West.” After the Civil War, when the concept of the “noble savage” emerged to legitimize the displacement and annihilation of Native Americans, Tiffany &amp; Co. began to create objects that married supposedly Indigenous iconography with white bourgeois taste: a project that historians have affirmed as “a subtle integration of native American themes” into the company’s work.<img width="3456" height="2304" width_o="3456" height_o="2304" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ca4f6ef1da6a505c03ae74f75a99be6d62958606f9dfbfb5bc8d181b7a6f309a/DSC_0213.JPG" data-mid="51084442" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ca4f6ef1da6a505c03ae74f75a99be6d62958606f9dfbfb5bc8d181b7a6f309a/DSC_0213.JPG" /> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; In the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, for example, Tiffany &amp; Co. created a series of pieces that were “inspired” by Zuni and Navajo pottery, Sitka and Hupa basketwork, and Sioux war shields. The designers of Tiffany &amp; Co. partly relied on depictions of Indigenous artifacts like these by white artists like George Caitlin. Beginning in 1837, however, the company also sent expeditions to the west to purchase artifacts from Native American people. And so, just as Native Americans were being displaced by the gold and silver mining that yielded the raw material for Tiffany &amp; Co.’s luxurious products, Native knowledge, culture, and lifeways were being appropriated and exploited by that same company’s designers. Rewarded by settler colonialism, Tiffany &amp; Co. in turn rendered settler colonialism “beautiful.” <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a2dac206bae02a140a3afbc189b0bda1bf6e91aac3e597a0267926f79dd184da/IMG_0146.jpg" data-mid="51084127" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a2dac206bae02a140a3afbc189b0bda1bf6e91aac3e597a0267926f79dd184da/IMG_0146.jpg" /> https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/Decolonizing-Mahogany Fri, 30 Aug 2019 16:42:09 +0000 Settler Colonial City Project https://settlercolonialcityproject.org/Decolonizing-Mahogany Decolonizing Mahogany <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/37187193d23b212541de2ee75bb89dc45743b83e512852ee574de07cf0f8dc7e/IMG_0147.jpg" data-mid="51083154" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/37187193d23b212541de2ee75bb89dc45743b83e512852ee574de07cf0f8dc7e/IMG_0147.jpg" /> THIS MAHOGANY WAS EXTRACTED FROM INDIGENOUS LAND SCCP 2019 At Preston Bradley Hall Foyer, Chicago Cultural Center Many of the sumptuous materials from which today's Chicago Cultural Center was built were only made available by the colonial dispossession of Indigenous people and extraction of resources from Indigenous land. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Most of the stately doors in the building, for example, were constructed in part or whole from mahogany wood. British companies began to extract mahogany from colonized lands in the West Indies, Mexico, and Central America in the 1820s. By the late 19th century, when the Chicago Public Library/G.A.R. Memorial Hall was constructed, logging had depleted mahogany stocks and deforested landscapes in the Americas, leading to the intensification of mahogany extraction in other sites of British colonialism, in particular West Africa and East India. The mahogany used in these doors was taken from East India.<img width="800" height="504" width_o="800" height_o="504" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e85e684804a4c1901ffc78fe57bcf9569bdc21caf40c85d43c5c7bf4ff675cb2/Fruit_with_leaves_at_Branch_Canopy_I_IMG_8673.jpg" data-mid="49584944" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/e85e684804a4c1901ffc78fe57bcf9569bdc21caf40c85d43c5c7bf4ff675cb2/Fruit_with_leaves_at_Branch_Canopy_I_IMG_8673.jpg" /> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Logging in all of these colonial sites devastated the plant, animal, and human systems that harvested wood was enmeshed within. Along with the clearing of forests by logging, forest ecosystems were damaged and destroyed by road building, the harvesting of animals for food for loggers, the dispersal of Indigenous communities that had sustained forests, and many other interventions. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; In short, the mahogany that these doors were built from came from a space of extractive violence intimately connected to the doors’ indisputable beauty. <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/52ae7a92a9f6d18cc4b09d2673495b090f720c98b087936feabb3375dc22a6ab/IMG_0151.jpg" data-mid="51083217" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/52ae7a92a9f6d18cc4b09d2673495b090f720c98b087936feabb3375dc22a6ab/IMG_0151.jpg" />