Gas and Oil, Dirt and Ghosts: Landscape and Histories of Extraction in Indiana

Event Details

No landscape is ever just insensate rocks and silent dirt. How do social histories of race, migration, and labor become embedded in the very ground we work on? How is the environment as much a social place as it is a geologic one? This talk travels through points of time in Indiana’s environmental history to illustrate how narratives about landscape are never just about landscape. We visit the gas boom of the 1880s; the Calumet region’s steel industry up through the 1980s; “deindustrialization” and toxic vulture industries; and fossil fuel “reindustrialization” today. We trace geological upheavals that remake landscape and social reality, from the 1830s genocide of Native Americans that cleared land, to the Great Migration of Black Americans, to Central American immigration for work in “sacrifice zones” in Indiana today. Logics of resource extraction show ideas about what is “natural,” what belongs where, and to whom.

Ava Tomasula y Garcia grew up in northern Indiana, where much of her family has been for four generations. She spent two years as an immigration and labor organizer at Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, a worker’s center in the industrial region spanning Southeast Chicago and spilling over into the Calumet region of Indiana. She previously worked at an environmental human rights organization in Mexico City, and recently returned to school in the Anthropology PhD program at Columbia University in NYC, where she learns about illness related to industrial toxicity. She also writes nonfiction and fiction.

This talk is free and no pre registration is required. It will be held in Meeting Room B.