Abolition & Abundance as Method
Our course series, “Abolition and Abundance as Method” explores the diverse critical theories,
histories, and activisms generated by Black and Indigenous peoples across periods, geographies,
disciplines, and methods. By shifting conversations of Black and Native experiences under empire
from a focus on scarcity, loss, and decline to the rearticulation of kinship and relations of abundance in
a place-based context, our courses posit anti-statist and anti-patriarchal imaginations of future
liberations. The classes present abolition and abundance as analytics that counters colonial forms of
world-making. Contesting disciplinary boundaries, our course series centers Black and Indigenous
pedagogies and ethics that prioritize relations among seemingly distinct areas and peoples as the result
of transit and migrations; reciprocities between humans, non-humans, lands, and waters. Examples of
caring labor expressed through collective fishing and farming among other land- and water-based
practices detail the complexity and continuity of Native life and the strategies by which communities
wrought abundance from their environments in the face of ongoing global colonialism.
Our courses investigate the spaces, relations, and knowledge politics that emerge from digitally
mediated images in moments of Indigenous refusal across a continuum of Black and Indigenous
peoples’ resistance. Indigenous refusal is an embodied spatial practice that refutes all forms of settler
colonialism and white supremacy. In particular, our courses offer student the opportunity to investigate
how the American Indian Movement and Native Hawaiian kiʻai protectors engages in land-based
refusal across place-based conjunctures, including their reciprocal support for global and local social
movements, such as Standing Rock, Black Lives Matter, and Idle No More. Our approach centers the
concept of place for the purpose of foregrounding Black and Indigenous peoples’ land-life relations as
fundamental to understanding the stakes and impacts of digital inquiry, including the temporal and
material implications of mediated representations.
Through our previous collaborations during the 2019 Summer Institute on Global Indigeneities
and ongoing coursework in Indigenous Methodologies and Theories as part of the Graduate Certificate
in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, we have learned the value of working across our
disciplinary boundaries. However, we have found our groundings in History and Geography to
complement each other’s research and teaching interests and provide fruitful avenues for identifying
and advancing solidarities against colonial violence. Co-teaching in CHID will allow us to reach
beyond the methodological trappings of disciplines and reach students and engaged community
members beyond academia in ways that destabilize hierarchies and promote the growth of planetary
abundance and abolition futures.
Course Offerings:
Fall 2021:
Writing the World, the Digital & Otherwise (Rivera)
Indigenous Storytelling and World-Making in the Global Pacific (Bourgette)
Winter 2022:
Abolition Geographies (Rivera)
Environmental Histories and Futures of Indigenous Abundance (Bourgette)
Spring 2022:
Abolition & Abundance as Method (Combined)
Course Descriptions:
Abolition & Abundance as Method (Spring 2022, Combined)
This class situates abolition and abundance in geographical and historical context. Drawing from
the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) internationalist origins, this course foregrounds Indigenous
nations’ political orders as the starting point of resistance. This course will train students to think
critically about the proliferation of borders, including its vectors that exist as infrastructures of empire,
such as military bases, forts, railroads, and prisons. Further, the course will posit worldviews of cultivating abundance through balanced relations with beyond-human communities, rejecting scarcity-
driven, humancentric models promoted by racial capitalism. With a particular focus on Turtle Island (North America) and Moana (the Pacific), this class will train students to counter-map, and
methodologically understand the contours and parallels of abolitionary struggle and Indigenous peoples’
efforts of self-determination. By engaging with texts and invited guest speakers from the American
Indian Movement and Pacific Islander communities, this course aims to enroll students as active
participants in pursuit of relational and reciprocal engagements for planetary liberation and freedom.
Writing the World, the Digital & Otherwise (Fall 2021, Rivera)
How does the digital produce the world? This class situates digitality in racial capitalism and
settler colonialism for the purpose of understanding how the digital mediates how and what we know
about the world. This course draws from the critique of racial capitalism and settler colonialism for the
purpose of understanding the politics of knowledge production that circulate throughout digital
platforms. In doing so, this course illustrates the stakes and material impacts of digital and visual
representations of Indigenous peoples’ lands and bodies.
Indigenous Storytelling and World-Making in the Global Pacific (Fall 2021, Bourgette)
The historiography of Pacific history has changed markedly in the last few decades. Whereas
historians of the maritime Pacific world once focused primarily on male heroes and villains who sailed
the seas, technological innovations in seafaring, and European voyages of “discovery,” this course will
highlight the vibrant interconnections between story and place told across the Oceanic world. Blending
oral histories with written discourse of the peoples Indigenous to our “Sea of Islands” we know today as
the Pacific, this course will provide another lens into transnational approaches popular in world
histories. More than antiquated stories confined to the archival record, Indigenous storytelling provides
living communities today with avenues to communicate directly with ancestors to co-create futures
beyond empires and exploitation of life beyond humans.
Abolition Geographies (Winter, 2022 Rivera)
This course engages what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “freedom as a place.” This course
foregrounds abolition geographies as a place-based practice aimed at spatializing the presence of
collective-social life. By exploring a range of place specific struggles for abolition, including from the
Black Radical Tradition and the American Indian Movement, this class introduces students to the life
affirming practice of abolition. From prison abolition to environmental justice efforts, this course
provides a space for unlearning the language of punishment, and for building life affirming institutions
instead.
Environmental Histories and Futures of Black and Indigenous Abundance (Winter 2022, Bourgette)
Native Hawaiian ways of knowing, in common with worldviews cultivated by Black and
Indigenous populations across the world, highlight abundance as a life-affirming frame by which
communities enact abolition futures in their own time. Expressed through genealogical relationships to
lands, waters, and communities, Black and Native populations cultivate abundance through providing
care and mutual aid to each other and their environments. The course provides a framework for
observing abundance created with Black and Indigenous communities both in historical and ongoing
contexts through engaged readings of critical texts and embodied practices of storytelling through art.
By rejecting models of scarcity and loss of knowledge and power projected by five centuries of colonial
violence, students will build a practical toolkit for creating abundance in everyday life.
Bio:
Isaac Rivera (Chicano, Huichol) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at the University
of Washington, member of the Colorado American Indian Movement and council member for the
Fourth World Center for the Study of Indigenous Law and Politics. He participated in the 2019 Summer
Institute for Global Indigeneities, 2019 Simpson Center Summer Fellowship on the Digital Humanities,
and is currently an AIIS Scholar with the Center for American Indian & Indigenous Studies (CAIIS).
Alika Bourgette (Kanaka Maoli) is a PhD student in the University of Washington Department of
History. His dissertation research investigates Native space-making, gender, and kinship in Kakaʻako,
Honolulu in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He participated in the 2019 Summer Institute for
Global Indigeneities, 2020 Simpson Center Mellon Summer Fellowship for Collaboration in the
Humanities, and received the 2019-2020 Yale University LGBT Studies Fellowship. His upcoming book
chapter, titled “Kanaka Waikīkī: The Stonewall Gang and Beachboys of O'ahu, 1916-1954,” has
received publication in Keith Camacho’s Reppin’: Pacific Islander Youth and Native Justice with
University of Washington Press (April 2021).
Faculty (in Alphabetical Order):
Chadwick Allen, Rick Bonus, Jean Dennison, Carrie Freshour, P.
Joshua Griffin, Bettina Judd, Moon-Ho Jung, Tony Lucero, Dian Million, Chandan Reddy, Josh Reid,
Ileana Rodríguez-Silva, Stephanie Smallwood, Chris Teuton, Adam Warren, Megan Ybarra.
Departments Engaged: American Ethnic Studies, American Indian Studies, Comparative History of
Ideas, English, Gender, Women, and Sexualities Studies, English, Geography, History, School of
Marine and Environmental Affairs
Events:
Mutual Aid Seattle collaboration, Book launch for Katz Distinguished Lecturer Ruth Wilson
Gilmore, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the case for Abolition with Haymarket Books,
Book launch for Keith Camacho, ed., Reppin’: Pacific Islander Youth and Native Justice with UW
Press.