Winona LaDuke is a leader in cultural-based sustainable development strategies, renewable energy, sustainable food systems and Indigenous rights. Her new book, To Be a Water Protector: Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers, is an expansive, provocative engagement with issues that have been central to her many years of activism. LaDuke honors Mother Earth and her teachings while detailing global, Indigenous-led opposition to the enslavement and exploitation of the land and water. She discusses several elements of a New Green Economy and outlines the lessons we can take from activists outside the US and Canada. In her unique way of storytelling, Winona LaDuke is inspiring, always a teacher and an utterly fearless activist, writer and speaker.

Click here to read more and pre-order from the publisher’s website.

In March of 2017, the Whanganui River in the North Island of New Zealand was granted its own legal identity, with the rights, duties and liabilities of a legal person after a hard fought battle by the region's Māori people, who now have the shared legal authority and responsibility to enforce these rights on behalf of the river. The River Is Me documents the political and ecological complexities of the Rights of Nature movement, a system for environmental protection based on the premise that our more-than-human neighbors have equal and inalienable rights to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate their vital cycles.

Watch the full film here.

The New York Times recently asked a dozen Indigenous leaders and experts on and from the Amazon river basin and rainforest regions to provide first-hand accounts of what’s happening in those regions now and the implications of deforestation, wildfires, and infringing further on Indigenous peoples’ rights in the future. In four parts, this series explores the reasons for which trees are still burning, oil is still spilling, and dams are still being built decades after we started talking about “saving the rainforest.” Today the people of the Amazon are living through the most extreme versions of our planet’s most urgent problems.

Click here to read more.

LN3: Seven Teachings of the Anishinaabe in Resistance shines a light on Indigenous-led peaceful resistance to Enbridge's Line 3 pipeline which is planned to go directly through Anishinaabe territory, threatening Lake Superior, the Mississippi River and its watersheds. In this film, water protectors employ many different creative forms to express their political dissent in town hall and government meetings and at the sites of pipeline construction. In this poignant portrait of persistence and loss, the teachings of the Anishinaabe people become a testament to the enduring power of resistance.

Watch the full film here.

Working from her own lived experience in a New Mexico village and inspired by gravel pits in the landscape, Lucy Lippard weaves a number of fascinating themes—among them fracking, mining, land art, adobe buildings, ruins, Indian land rights, the Old West, tourism, photography, and water—into a tapestry that illuminates the relationship between culture and the land. From threatened Native American sacred sites to the history of uranium mining, she offers a skeptical examination of the “subterranean economy.” Featuring more than two hundred gorgeous color images, Undermining is a must-read for anyone eager to explore a new way of understanding the relationship between art and place in a rapidly shifting society.

Click here to read more and order from the publisher’s website.

The Local Love podcast is all about supporting local by highlighting the work of Omaha-area makers, artists, and contractors. In a recent episode, 2020 Alternate Currents Working Group member, Sarah Rowe sat down to talk about drawing inspiration from her Ponca and Lakota heritage, creating immersive viewing experiences, and the healing potential of ritual.

Listen to the full episode here.

Forms of Reparations: The Museum and Restorative Justice, is a speaker series focusing on the present state of decolonization within museums, identifying and articulating the many subtle ways by which cultural institutions sustain white supremacy, imperialism, and exploitation.

This series invites leading scholars, activists, and artists to present lectures, workshops, and participate in panel discussions, addressing questions such as: What exactly does it mean to decolonize the museum? Has the recent currency awarded to the term decolonization taken away its original revolutionary intent? Can institutions and activists work together, or are they doomed to occupy opposing sides? Is it possible to genuinely decolonize museums?

Click here to read more and register.

Based in Lincoln, NE, Vision Maker Media empowers and engages Native people to share stories. The provide project funding and professional development to support the creation and dissemination of Native stories on film and the public conversations they generate. For the first time, Vision Maker Media is hosting an online, five-week-long celebration of American Indian, Alaska Native and worldwide Indigenous films from August 31 – October 5, 2020. Accompanying the films, our festival will host a collective of inspiring filmmakers in engaging digital conversations, creating a space for both healing and learning.

Indigenous film goes beyond the online film festival. Vision Maker Media offers a large variety of titles by and about Native Americans through digital streaming and DVD’s.

Learn more about Vision Maker Media and their first online Indigenous Film Festival here.

In Underland, Robert Macfarlane dives deep into the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. In her review of the book for The Atlantic, Rebecca Giggs writes:

“What keeps coming up, everywhere, is evidence of our influence. The themes of captivity and claustrophobia point the reader toward Macfarlane’s overarching subject: how to live in a world of collapsing horizons. For much of Underland, we are made aware of existing inside a capricious nature that is, now more than ever, of human making. Standing on new and spiritless edge-lands exposed by retreating ice in Greenland, Macfarlane observes the uncanny symbolism of unwanted human omnipotence.”

Click here to read more and order from the publisher’s website.

All My Relations is a podcast hosted by Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) and Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation) that explores relationships to land, to creatural relatives, and to one another. In the final episode of their first season, they talk about the colonial settler imposed notion of “blood quantum” as an example of one of many federal US policies intentionally designed to decimate Native populations. Matika and Adrienne talk with their production team members, Brooke and Nita about navigating finding partners, racist federal/tribal policy, and how they’ve had no choice but to consider how blood quantum affects their children, families, and nations.

Listen to the full episode here.

We the People offers powerful portraits of communities across the United States that have successfully organized collective efforts to ban environmentally destructive corporate projects at the local level. Through acts of refusal and self-determination, ordinary citizens and activists fight fracking, mining, dumping of toxic waste, and industrial agriculture, among other environmental assaults that favor corporate profit over local sustainability. Their methodology situates communities as seats of power in governance and models legal strategies that surmount corporate political power and legal entitlement.

Click here to read more and order from the publisher’s website.

Woman at War tells the story of Halla, a woman leading a double life as an environmental activist secretly waging war on the local aluminum industry. As her actions grow bolder, from petty vandalism to outright industrial sabotage, they increasingly disrupt negotiations between the Icelandic government and a corporation building a new aluminum smelter. Her moves to plot one final attack that will deal the aluminum industry a crippling blow eloquently draw into question the ethics of fighting for environmental justice and planetary survival.

Woman at War is streaming now on Hulu and Magnolia Pictures’ website.

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster. In Hope in the Dark, “she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, [she argues] that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable.”

Click here to read more and order from the publisher’s website.

Philadelphia poet and musician Camae Ayewa, as Moor Mother, uses sampling, electronic distortion, and searing lyrics to describe a world teetering between warning and catastrophe. On Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, she deftly employs all of the above to connect racial equity and ecological justice in a cyclical narrative of history that is both then and now. In “Shadowgrams,” one of the album’s standouts, Ayewa says, “The end is happening and it keeps happening, and you keep looking at the clock as if time ever protected you.”

Read about Moor Mother here and visit her bandcamp page for more music.

Praised as one of the most resonant films of 2019, Honeyland, directed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov, documents the life of Indigenous Macedonian bee hunter, Hatidze Muratova. Singing and talking to the bees constantly, Hatidze’s relationship to them foregrounds a rich nature / culture complex in the face of encroaching chaos. New York Times critic, A.O. Scott named it the best movie of 2019 and calls the film “a luminous neorealist fable, a sad and stirring tale of struggle, persistence and change.” Read the full review here and visit the Honeyland website to learn more.

Honeyland is now available to stream on multiple platforms including Hulu and Google Play.

Maria Thereza Alves works to create spaces of agency and visibility for marginalized cultures through relational practices of collaboration that require constant movement. During a 2019 conversation with Antonia Alampi, she talks about concrete ways in which “the surplus value produced by artworks in the art market—artworks inspired by or engaging with the social, cultural, and political contexts of vulnerable communities needing economic support (for example, engaging with environmental matters)—can, in one way or another, give back to them and avoid an otherwise very extractivist logic.”

Read the full conversation here and visit Alves' website to learn more about her work.

What would governments do if black and brown lives counted as much as white lives?

“In Copenhagen in 2009, African governments argued that if black lives mattered, then 2 degrees of warming was too high. By disregarding this basic humanist logic, the biggest polluters were making a crude cost-benefit analysis. They were calculating that the loss of life, livelihood and culture for some of the poorest people on the planet was an acceptable price to pay to protect the economies of some of the richest people on the planet.”

Click here to read the full article.

Emergence Magazine is an online publication with an annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. Their podcast series features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, and stories that reveal new opportunities to connect with each other and the living world. In this interview, science writer David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, speaks about the root causes underlying the current pandemic and explores the ways in which viruses are embedded in the same systems of ecology and evolutionary biology that we are. As we disrupt wild ecosystems and shake these viruses free, COVID-19 offers an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with the natural world.

Listen here.

Donna Haraway is a passionate storyteller best know for her groundbreaking work on gender, cyborgs, interspecies relationships, and post-colonialism. This film is structured around a series of discussions held in her California home on subjects including capitalism and the anthropocene (a term she "uses but finds troubling"), science fiction writing as philosophical text, unconventional marital and sexual partnerships, the role of Catholicism in her upbringing, humans and dogs, the suppression of women’s writing, the surprisingly fascinating history of orthodontic aesthetics, and the need for new post-colonial and post-patriarchal narratives. It is a remarkably impressive range, from a thinker with a nimble and curious mind.

Rent or buy the film here.

This new online project brings together digital commissions, podcasts, films, texts, images and audio that draw on indigenous traditions from the Amazon rainforest; alternative perspectives on Western scientific rationalism; and new thinking around plant intelligence, philosophy and cultural theory, to investigate the significance of the plant kingdom to human life, consciousness and spirituality across cultures and through time. It positions the plant as both a universal symbol found in almost every civilization and religion across the globe, and the most fundamental but misunderstood form of life on our planet.

Visit the online exhibition here.

In his essay “Parallel Futures: One or Many Dystopias”, writer Pedro Neves Marques looks at the films of Adam and Zack Khalil to question the reductive notion of a singular world, and its singular future. Two of the Khalil brothers’ films, Empty Metal and Inaate/se (It shines a certain way to. To a certain place. It flies. Falls) reveal “sidelined” and “invisible” future worlds that exist outside capitalist modernity, specifically Indigenous ways of living that have survived centuries of colonial subjugation.

Click here to read the full essay.

If you have a public library or university library card you can watch the Khalil brothers’ film Inaate/se (It shines a certain way to. To a certain place. It flies. Falls) on Kanopy.

More than a few ACWG members have seen this documentary about the regenerative power of fungi and the essential roles they play in planetary ecosystems. Without a dull moment, Schwartzberg’s film suggests that natural systems offer models of cooperation and co-becoming rooted in an ethics of mutual care.

Don’t miss this one and support local businesses and Omaha’s arts community by streaming on Filmstreams’ website.

In this podcast, naturalist and activist Terry Tempest Williams examines links between erosion and evolution; shadow and light; death and regeneration to center feelings of “solastalgia,” or emotional distress caused by a changing environment. She also delves into histories of privilege, religion, and identity in Utah, and talks about how reconciling her experiences with these cultural strands have shaped her work in environmental justice.

Listen to the full episode here.

This beautifully accessible collection of essays by botanist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Robin Wall Kimmerer, is another one that has been on ACWG members’ minds. Each essay reveals ways of knowing and making kinships with other species, while moving toward the central argument that “the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.”

Visit the publisher’s website to order a paperback copy or download the ebook.