Jen Delos Reyes speaks on collaboration & creativity
A presentation given earlier in the same day struck a similar chord to Kung’s, emphasizing community, connection and collaboration with the systems around us, struck a similar chord.
“We are the institution,” Jen Delos Reyes, a self-described creative farmer, educator, writer and radical community arts organizer based in Chicago, began. In their talk, “There Are Other Ways: Less is Enough and Other Approaches to Radical Reduction,” Delos Reyes shared their relationship with societal institutions as well as their vision on institution building and enacting cultural change.
Through their life experiences, Delos Reyes gained a tolerance for working with institutions, recognizing that institutions can be tender and vulnerable because they are built, upheld and maintained by people.
Delos Reyes was a first-generation low-income college student who faced financial and housing insecurity. Their experience of poverty and having a single immigrant mother were formative factors that made them “resourceful, adaptable and persistent.” Through their life experiences, they gained a tolerance for working with institutions, recognizing that institutions can be tender and vulnerable because they are built, upheld and maintained by people.
Delos Reyes founded Open Engagement, an organization created to support the creation of “socially-engaged art,” as described on Delos Reyes’ website. Their work as the organization’s director aimed to provide funds to economically disadvantaged artists. Delos Reyes emphasized the importance of neighborly and community bonding in the face of world crises including climate change. Open Engagement went on hiatus in 2019 after 12 years of large-scale organizing, allowing Delos Reyes and their colleagues to gain some much needed rest from the burnout associated with that level of organization.
In 2021, after using gardening as a coping mechanism to grieve their partner’s death in March 2020, Delos Reyes founded Garbage Hill Farm, located in McKinley Park in the city of Chicago. For Delos Reyes, the opening of Garbage Hill Farm meant creating a space for the surrounding community to use and where artists could rest and recharge, while also helping people see the value in the things around them, particularly in garbage.
For creative lifelong learners seeking to incorporate art into their life, Delos Reyes affirmed that making changes within systems involves considering institutions as inherently human. They emphasized the importance of community, stating that “together is better.”
However, Delos Reyes also reflected on the importance of knowing one’s own identity in a way that was not defined by the institutions around them. They emphasized the importance of self-knowledge, stating that “[everyone has] what [they] need” to give themselves agency and a sense of identity.
Sustainable Skills Workshop teaches sewing basics
Many of the sentiments invoked in both Delos Reyes and Kung’s presentations were exemplified through the Sustainable Skills Workshop, held on the third day of Earth Week.
Hosted by Jordan Lassonde ’16, assistant director of the Miller Worley Center for the Environment, the workshop focused on teaching basic sewing skills to make participants’ closets more sustainable. By fixing pre-loved clothes, creating new clothes entirely or adding embellishments to existing clothes, attendees learned how to reduce individual contribution to waste by reusing pre-existing materials and giving them new life.
Taking place in the Fimbel Maker & Innovation Lab, the three-hour workshop allotted time for detailed step-by-step instruction of both hand-sewing, stitching and sewing machine basics. Participants practiced these skills to repair or embellish either their own clothing or the provided clothes sourced from the free bins in student residence halls around campus.
Small, sustainably-created sewing kits were provided to all who attended the workshop, giving all participants resources to continue using their skills for future clothing. All kits were contained in reused glass jars and included instructions for making your own pincushion as well as starter needles, thread, pins, a tape measure, a thread clipper and starter buttons.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo gives keynote speech
The last event of Mount Holyoke College’s Earth Week activities was a keynote presentation featuring Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a Lubicon Cree activist from Northern Alberta, Canada. As an Indigenous woman, she stated that she, her community and family are impacted by the effects of colonization and capitalism every day.
“Our way of life is being replaced by industrial landscapes,” she said. Laboucan-Massimo emphasized this point with a statistic: out of seven billion people on the planet today, about 390 million Indigenous people are protecting 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity. Her organization, Sacred Earth Solar, was founded based on her and her community’s personal experiences while living near Alberta, Canada, close to a current tar sands excavation site, a notoriously environmentally destructive practice.
According to an article by Melissa Denchak for the Natural Resources Defense Council, tar sands are large deposits of sand, water and black bitumen, which is used to make synthetic oil. Excavating these pits is energy and water intensive, involving the strip mining of forests. Tar sand excavation was described by Stephen Leahy in National Geographic as “the world’s most destructive oil operation,” and is impacting all aspects of the environment and Indigenous communities in Alberta, including Laboucan-Massimo’s community.
During the keynote speech, Laboucan-Massimo explained that she and many others are impacted by not only the tar sands, but by many other injustices actively harming Indigenous communities around the world. In referencing healing justice, a term that acknowledges the impact of violence on Indigenous communities and aims to create solutions that work to heal this trauma, Laboucan-Massimo stated that the future involves “reclaiming our sacred connection and responsibility to protect Mother Earth.” She emphasized how the protection and healing of Indigenous communities is directly associated with the healing of damaged land and the wider climate.
Laboucan-Massimo also presented an interview she did with CNN, wherein she stated that the disproportionate numbers of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, girls and two-spirited people, have had a staggering impact on her own life as well as thousands of Indigenous families. Laboucan-Massimo’s sister was found murdered only a few months after her college graduation, and has yet to receive justice. During the video she presented, her interviewer from CNN stated that in America in 2016, more than 5,700 cases of MMIW were reported, while only 14 cases were investigated.
Highlighting the legacy of residential schools on Indigenous communities, Laboucan-Massimo said that she was the first generation in her family not to attend one. Created by the Canadian government, residential schools were boarding schools where Indigenous children were forcibly sent to be stripped of their culture and heritage for the purposes of assimilation into Euro-Canadian and Christian societies, according to the First Nations & Indigenous Studies Program at the University of British Columbia’s website. Laboucan-Massimo’s closest kin to survive these schools was her father.
Concluding Earth Week 2022, Laboucan-Massimo provided attendees with resources to further their education and allyship to Indigenous communities, including books, podcasts and organizations fighting for Indigenous and climate justice.
“Decolonization is a personal, systemic and collective process,” she said. “The future looks like self-determination through healing the land and healing ourselves.”
