Future Memory

Episode 46 of Future Memory features artist, scholar, and composer, Nathan Young. Young is a member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians and a direct descendant of the Pawnee Nation and Kiowa Tribe, currently living in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. His work incorporates sound, video, documentary, animation, installation, socially-engaged art, and experimental and improvised music. Young is also a founding member of the artist collective, Postcommodity. He holds an MFA in Music/Sound from Bard College's Milton Avery School of the Arts and is currently pursuing a PhD in the University of Oklahoma's innovative Native American art history doctoral program. His scholarship focuses on Indigenous Sonic Agency. Nathan talks with Co-host Li Sumpter about his art and practice and a public art project at Historic site Pennsbury Manor entitled nkwiluntàmën, funded by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and curated by Ryan Strand Greenberg and Theo Loftis.

Future Memory welcomes El Sawyer and Jon Kaufman of MING Media. MING stands for Media In Neighborhoods Group – words that speak to WHERE Jon and El have been focusing their documentary work and the community-centered stories they’re known for telling. It’s been almost 10 years since the debut of Pull of Gravity, their first film and breakout project that shaped their future path in collaborative filmmaking. Pull of Gravity offers a rarely seen perspective on the prison system and those it impacts through the process of re-entry and the almost inescapable force of recidivism. In this episode, El and Jon share their own story of how they met, their style of collaboration and documentation, and how their non-linear, “human” approach to storytelling has taken them to neighborhoods around the world and ultimately changed both of their lives. We also talk about MING’s recent work with Monument Lab on projects like Re:Generation and Beyond Granite that underscore both partners’ connections to the power of truth-telling and the understanding that like monuments, the permanence of media can be hurtful to those it represents or misrepresents and to the communities who will remember its record.

*NOTE: The title of this episode is a nod to the iconic phrase “The medium is the message” coined by communication theorist, Marshall McLuhan. It refers to how the form of a medium or communication platform is ingrained in the message being communicated and creates a “symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived”.

In this episode co-host Li Sumpter receives a history lesson from Jesse Hagopian, Seattle-based educator, activist, and die-hard advocate for antiracist education. He shares childhood memories that impacted his view of himself, his future path, and his role in the Black Freedom Struggle – a fight that has deep roots in Seattle and the very high school Jesse attended as a youth. He is a true master of the art and science of education guided by great icons of critical pedagogy like bell hooks and Paulo Freire. Jesse is an organizer with the Zinn Education Project, author of the upcoming book Teach Truth the Attack on Critical Race Theory and the Struggle for Anti-racist Education and co-editor of the books Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice and Teaching for Black Lives.

Concluding the Plot of Land series, we look at the work being done across the United States to repair our relationship with the land, from the Tongva conservancy in Los Angeles to the Sea Islands of South Carolina. What will it take to imagine a radically different future? With the stakes rising along with the temperature, what is the scale of change we need to shift power and build a more just world?

We return to Louisiana and the Joneses, where in recent decades family members have moved away for work and to escape the increasingly toxic air and water leaking from the neighboring chemical plants of Cancer Alley. As stronger hurricanes and vanishing wetlands reconfigure Louisiana’s topography, new industries continue old patterns of environmental harm. What will this mean for the future of Jonesland? What can their story on the front-lines of climate change teach us as the nation faces the dire consequences of extractive economies?

We learn the incredible story of Sedonia Dennis, a woman once enslaved in Louisiana, who came to own a piece of the plantation that had once claimed ownership of her family. And we explore how, over time, the plantation economy gave way to the petrochemical industry. Join us as we spend time with Sedonia Dennis’s descendant, Jazzy Miller who is documenting her family’s fight to exist at the intersection of each of these forms of extraction.

We’re looking at what happened after subsidized affordable housing programs expired in the 2000s on New York’s Roosevelt Island. Some residents managed to buy in, build equity and stability. Others experienced precarious tenancy or displacement while an ongoing influx of wealthier residents is changing the face of the island. We ask the question, can Roosevelt Island’s past guide state and federal investments in multi-racial, multi-income neighborhoods for the future?

New York’s Roosevelt Island was imagined as an idyllic, multi-racial, multi-income community, developed as part of the social housing movement in the 60s and 70s. But by the 1980s, socially-minded investments in housing were overtaken by neoliberal policy. We talk to current-day and displaced residents to see how this change affected them, while looking back from the point of divergence to find the decisions that created and dismantled housing as a human right.

At one point Oklahoma had 50 Black townships and 1.5 million acres of Black-owned farmland. Today only 13 Black towns survive and the majority of Black farmers have retired or lost their land, discouraged–and broke–from an industry plagued by racist lending practices. What can Boley’s rise and more recent decline teach us about how biased policies have shaped who gets to own what land?

We spend time in Oklahoma with the Bradford family whose fourth-generation cattle ranching operation, G-Line Ranch, is facing the same struggles and discrimination as many Black farmers and ranchers across the country. G-Line Ranch sits just outside Boley, once the largest and wealthiest Black town in Oklahoma. Boley was founded by Creek Freedmen and African Americans escaping Jim Crow violence and disenfranchisement. Join us as we trace this history, its legacies, and the future Boleyites are creating.