ABSTRACT
In August of 2016, amid world coverage of the Olympics and echoes of Donald Trump’s latest absurdities, Black and Indigenous freedom fighters, almost a thousand miles apart, were holding space in revolutionary ways. On the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, Natives were nearing the 150th day of their occupation in an ongoing effort to thwart construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. In Chicago, Black organizers with the #LetUsBreathe collective—a group that describes itself as “an alliance of artists and activists organizing through a creative lens to imagine a world without prisons and police”—had created a living, breathing community space in the shadow of the infamous Homan Square police compound, a facility that some call a “black site,” where people had been held for days on end without being able to contact loved ones or an attorney and where some have been tortured.
