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“Land is Life:  Settler Colonial Governance of National Parks and Hunting in Taiwan”
Speaker:  Jarita Chen

This thesis situates Taiwan as a settler colonial state by examining the discourse around national parks and the criminalization of Indigenous hunting in Taiwan. Jarita Chen will examine the narratives around three cases: the controversial and ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the Maqaw National Park, the Tumpu Daingaz buluo’s struggle with the Yushan National Park, and the Tama Talum Indigenous hunting constitutional reinterpretation case. In this presentation, Jarita will focus on the story around the Maqaw National Park. This story reveals how settler narratives and environmentalism perpetuate settler colonialism through the assumption of access over Indigenous land, cultures, and knowledge. However, Indigenous voices reveal a through-line of ongoing resistance and resurgence. While settler narratives portray and encourage a limiting path, alternative Indigenous narratives show that there are expansive ways for Indigenous self-determination, futures, and land relations.

“The Abolitionist Presence of Food in Oakland, CA Food Deserts”
Speaker:  Ayize James

This project takes an abolitionist approach to the study of food deserts. Carceral abolition is about creating lasting alternatives to violence in the face of the systematic abandonment of people and land by the state and capital. This project asks two questions: (1) How do interconnected processes of abandonment create food deserts? and  (2) How does abolitionist praxis make food present in a food desert? To understand how organized abandonment creates food deserts, Ayize James considers the history and present-day context of spatially-uneven food inequities in Oakland and the East Bay. Ayize will then present three case studies to argue that abolitionist organizing by Black and Indigenous peoples in Oakland has continually made food present in places demarcated as food deserts.

To-Go refreshments served at the end of presentations.