The Sogorea Te Land Trust

An urban Indigenous women-led land trust that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people

Call for Proposals: Detours Decolonial Guide

by

Detours: A Decolonial Guide to the Indigenous Bay Area is a co-edited volume in the Detours series of decolonial guidebooks at Duke University Press.

Photo is the Tule in the Sky Mural  by Cece Carpio with the Berkeley Skyline and Bay. 

Spanning the stolen, ancestral, traditional, and unceded territories of numerous Indigenous peoples, Northern California’s Bay Area is a place with deeply layered associations, entangled dispossessions, and possible futures. From Coast Miwok territories in the north to the Ramaytush Ohlone territory of Yelamu (San Francisco); from Lisjan Ohlone land in the East Bay to Amah Mutsun land in the south, Indigenous peoples have been rooted here sice time immemorial, surviving waves of colonialism and genocide from Spanish missions to the present U.S. occupation. As with other collections in the Detours series, this multidisciplinary collection will include several genres, including mapping/cartography, written and visual narratives of place, essays, visual art, tour itineraries, and other forms of media and cultural production. 

The Bay Area is a deeply layered place; simultaneosly a site of settler colonial, imperial, and racial/techno-capitalist dispossession and one rich with Indigenous presence and a long history of anti-colonial movements. It has long been home to large urban Indian communities, in part due to federal policy that relocated thousands of Native people from rural reservations to urban centers in the 1950s and 60s. While it is and will always be Indigenous land, migrations of many kinds have led to the Bay Area because of its centrality to settler colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism in the region and globally as a colonial frontier, port, military base, and node in transnational flows of people, power, and capital. While we center California Indian peoples, geographies, and movements, this collection is attentive to the many anti-colonial histories that constitute the Bay Area. 

We invite submissions of writing, visual arts, maps, and other genres on topics including but not limited to: 

  • Urban Indian experiences and broader Native American histories in the Bay Area
  • Anti-colonial relationality, such as Japanese/Indigenous solidarity during WWII
  • Diasporas of Pasifika, Palestinian, and other Indigenous peoples 
  • Black geographies, social movements, and stories of place
  • Historical and present connections between decolonization and abolition
  • Ecological and environmental justice
  • Relations to land, water, and place
  • Rematriation/ land back initiatives
  • Stories of resistance to imprisonment across Spanish missions, jails and prisons, immigration detention historically and in the present
  • Sacred sites protections 
  • Role of the Bay Area in trans-regional, trans-national flows and nodes

Ultimately, the Indigenous, anti-colonial, and place-based knowledge throughout Detours Bay Area will challenge the “consumption” genre of the traditional guidebook by displacing dominant renderings of the Bay Area and centering the visual, cartographic, activist, and artistic work of Indigenous futurity and linked struggles against racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and displacement.

Types of Work To Be Included 

Short form prose:

  • 2000-3000 words (including notes and references) with an emphasis on general/non-academic readership (use of narrative, “talk story,” and/or descriptive language is highly encouraged).
  • Should aim for fewer than 5 references
  • Should incorporate the writer(s) and/or storyteller(s) into the narrative to anchor stories

 Creative Form (written):

  • Creative written work in line with one or more of the text’s themes
  • Examples include: poetry, songs, chants, lesson plans, oral histories, how-to guides, youth activities, recipes, games, manifestos, and others

 Creative Form (visual):

  •  Creative visual work in line with the one or more of the text’s themes 
  • Examples include photographs, illustrations, collages, sketches, memes, maps, infographics, coloring pages and other visual media

Deadlines:

300 Word Abstract or Proposal Due  October 1, 2023

Contributors Notified by December 1, 2023

First Draft of Submissions Due March 1, 2024

Detours Bay Area Editorial Collective includes:

Inés Ixierda (Sogorea Te’ Land Trust)

Caitlin Keliiaa (UC Santa Cruz) 

Savannah Kilner (UC Santa Cruz) 

Beth Rose Middleton Manning (UC Davis) 

Please send submissions and queries to detoursbayarea@gmail.com.