Will Parrish

Thinking of the thousands of Navajo and hundreds of Hopi people were forcibly relocated from Black Mesa and Big Mountain to create these coal operations starting in the '60s -- and those who resisted by staying on their land, some of whom have now out-lasted the power plant.

Wow things haven't gone so great for TigerSwan the last couple years. Even Energy Transfer Partners is suing them, and founder Jim Reese has "moved on to new ventures." Things I learned from reading @AlleenBrown's latest exposé/decimation of TSwan.* theintercept.com/2020/11/15/…

Final example: The UC is arguably the main driving force behind the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project, a five-acre telescope complex on the northern slope of the sacred mountain of Mauna Kea, the origin place of the Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous people of Hawaiʻi). 10/

A major example is UC-run labs' nuclear weapons tests on Indigenous land in the Marshall Islands, Nevada, and Alaska. Here residents of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands flee prior to a 1946 Los Alamos Lab nuclear blast, which was a brainchild of UC Berkeley scientists. 9/

The UC also played a significant role in the US' bloody settler-colonial conquest of Indigenous Moros in the Philippines, 1898-1913. Former UC President David Barrows was assigned the role of ‘educating’ Filipino elites to eventually rule over the newly-conquered territories. 7/

The UC Anthro Dept. played a big role in elevating the UC’s early stature, digging up ~15,000 Ohlone and other Indigenous bodies, utterly desecrating them while promoting racial science theories that consign Indigenous people to prehistory. Photo: Emeryville Shellmound, 1924. 6/

For early CA elites like the UC trustees/regents, the new university was poised to play a critical part in US imperial expansion. But settler-colonialism also requires continuously renewing, maintaining, and reproducing Indigenous dispossession. 5/

The piece starts in 1866 with Bishop G. Berkeley's line “Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way” -- at the time, popularly associated with the genocidal concept Manifest Destiny -- which led the UC's early trustees to choose the name "Berkeley" for the UC's first campus. 4/

Our piece argues for going further than that. Beyond that initial land seizure, the UC -- like other universities -- has also been engaged in a perpetual and ongoing process of consolidating and promoting settler-colonial forms of domination in various other forms and guises. 3/

Santa Cruz right now, unfiltered.