Learning from the past,
building actions for the future.
The Call to Action
A vanguard generation of progressive activists is approaching advanced age just as many of their 1960s era defining battles are taking on renewed political urgency. These actors link a vital web of fight genealogies filled with strategies, values, lessons, memories and cautions largely unknown to current and emerging activist communities.
Preserving and growing activist networks require an intentional effort to prioritize the social relationships and knowledge-building work that anchor their missions across time and space.
Existing institutional archives offer interesting but limited opportunities to investigate the stories and actors of the near political past. This data intervention galvanizes a coalition of activists, residents, archivists, students and local leaders to source a new archive of activist histories, hacks and stories that trace their beginnings to multiple land fights rooted in the civil rights, anti-war, student, women’s and counterculture movements of the 1960s.
The Problem
Epistemological hierarchy and social exclusions inherent to the Archive. Ephemera.
Social networks and cross-generational knowledge sharing practices pulled apart as a consequence of land-based displacement, dispersals and migrations & wealth extraction
Archive as a site of containment, erasure, exclusion, violence and opportunity for progressive activist histories and actors
Archive’s inaccessibility to broad audiences committed to preserving and sharing activists stories
The 50th Anniversary Event
Photos by Georden West.