ABSTRACT
Emboldened by Donald J. Trump’s skeptical stance regarding the reality of climate change, the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and Trump’s embrace of corporate capitalism, the mining industry is forcefully lobbying congress to rescind the status of federally owned and protected public lands and weaken environmental protection regulations. Succeeding in these efforts would make millions of acres of land available for mining development opportunities. In this chapter, Adetty Pérez de Miles explores the work of street artists whose art interventions, in dialogue with Indigenous communities, expose the conditions of environmental injustice, specifically the legacy of abandoned uranium mines and nuclear contamination on Native lands. Icy & Sot examine societal oppression and people’s hopes and dreams for a better future. Jetsonorama makes art that deals with day-to-day life and the environmental struggles of Indigenous people. Pérez de Miles proposes that these artists contribute to public discourses of resistance against human indifference, corruption, and cruelty and make concerted efforts to explicitly create platforms that facilitate, in the context of socially engaged art and cross-cultural perspectives, possibilities for (inter)actions with others, in ways that reflect on our connection and responsibility to the larger world.
