Liberation movements and the struggle for land rights often necessarily intersect—especially in the U.S. context. Nina Ebner, an advocate with the Detained Migrant Solidarity Committee (DMSC)/Fronterizx Fianza Fund explained in a workshop-style event how centering abolitionist organizing on the US-Mexico border helps us to better understand the material and ideological role borders play in evolving racial-carceral regimes in the Americas. This is just one example of the ways liberatory struggles have taken on new forms in the past few decades. An early conversation with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor about the Combahee River Collective Statement, underscored how anti-racist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s fundamentally inform today’s activism. In a similar vein, Courtland Cox, Naomi Nelson, and Wesley Hogan spoke about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Legacy Project. The SNCC Legacy Project offers creative solutions to many of the Lab’s fundamental questions such as: how to preserve the forms of knowledge production that have been achieved among activists in a movement context; how to conduct co-research on the history of a social movement; and how to bring the lessons of movements of the past to young activists today. The Lab has engaged with ongoing land rights activism among indigenous groups in the United States and Canada. This included a focus on the Algonquin in the context of broader First Nations struggles in Canada in addition to a conversation with members of The Red Nation, Andrew Curley and Nick Estes where they discussed how this larger platform seeks to counter the marginalization and invisibility of Indigenous struggles within mainstream social justice organizing.
