Carnegiea

Literary Magazine

Winter Webzine Release

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HOT OFF THE PRESS: Carnegiea Lit Mag’s Winter Webzine! While we started with a focus on a printed form of our magazine, today’s world requires we adapt to a digital format to exhibit our community’s art. We are so grateful to be able to share the wonderful work of 40 talented young artists from Southern Arizona. We’d like to thank all of you who submitted, as well as the members of the Carnegiea Team for their hard work in putting this together.

We recommend viewing the webzine in full screen. Right click to shift the perspective of the zine, and disable “Smart Pan” in the settings to view the full 3D book. For slower connections and older hardware, use our simple viewer.


Pomegranates

By Mireya Quiroz (MAQ)

This painting was inspired by the subject itself. I also wanted to have the gaudy essence of winter to accompany the subject.

Facadé of Dreams

By Mia Ellis

Tik tok, tik tok
Goes the clock
As time goes by
While everybody says hi
I stand on the side
And try to hide
Every emotion I left behind
Knowing the contract I signed
Losing myself in the faith of falling
Knowing I won’t be able to fly
Away from everything
And listen to the angel sing

And I know the price I’ll pay
Because of my ways
In a flash
I will dash
To the stream
And watch it gleam
In the moonlight
At night
Always screaming
Always dreaming
Always screaming from the pain
Always dreaming for a little gain
Finding a way to see my forgotten fame

Facade of Dreams is about myself and part of my life that i wish i had the guts to tell people about, but to understand what i was feeling you need to read between the lines of the poem.

Facial Recognition

By Maya Partha

Came at a time during quarantine of self-reflection, it reminds me to take time to feel introspective and do the things that I like doing.

An Anti-Colonial Manifesto: America’s Bureaucratic War against Environmental Policy

By Daniel Velasco

In 1851, Henry David Thoreau (and lifelong crush of Louisa May Alcott) wrote the short story Walking, where he opens with the statement, 

“I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil–to regard man as an inhabitant or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society.”

In reality, 170 years later, Thoreau’s message as an avid believer in the concept of transcendentalism, or the idea that a very real and tangible force of spiritual truth, moral law, strength, and creativity is present within the natural world that surrounds cars, streetlights, asphalt, buildings, and any number of bluetooth devices you have surrounding you. This is ridiculously far from becoming the true utopian reality in comparison to the offset way public, environmental, and trade policy is created within developed western nations today. 

The existential irony of the Thoreau’s statement itself is that even his ideas about environmentalism were in many ways, butchered up western regurgitations of what indigenous communities had been advocating to the federal government for generations:  

Kinship, solidarity, and union between the human and nonhuman variables of the environment. 

While Thoreau’s ideas acted as the catalyst for American counter-cultural movements that centered around finding the concept of a higher presence in nature, the ways it did so always involved distilling the image of Indigenous values, culture, concepts, and the ontology itself into some novel idea that always resulted in the oblivious belief that these communities were caricatures of what they really were, ambiguously assuming of their own extinction.

Which is to say that environmentalism has always avoided the real problem: addressing colonialism as intrinsically immoral.  

Today, America’s relationship with the environment at the level of the federal government has always involved the commodification of its natural resources for capital gain. At this point, it has warped itself into a hellscape reality that has only been hammered into the collective psyche of the public through every ear-piercingly abrasive public policy change by Trump over the course of his entire administration. 

Whether it be Trump’s poor attempt at catering to private interest groups by reversing over 70 different environmental rules and regulations, to the bureaucratic warfare he waged over the field of science, each effort made towards the further exploitation of reason has resulted in real measurable and uncomfortable impacts.  

The degradation of credibility towards federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, has resulted in a doublethink level of miscommunication, as the Union of Concerned Scientists reports that: 

“61 percent (258 respondents) reported that the expertise of EPA scientific advisory committees has deteriorated over the past year”, while “82 percent (345 respondents) agreed that the level of consideration of political interests hinders the EPA’s ability to make science-based decisions”. 

In a chaotic, yet subversive year of failed republican conspiracy coups, and successful, gamer-led financial protests against the 1%, there has never been a more critical time for us to decolonize the ways in which our federal government operates on the level of policy. 

Structuring the way in which the environment is managed through the prioritization of the economy (i.e. expediting the publication of Environmental Impact Statements so that the public has no idea what’s being done in their backyard) is not only unsustainable, but further reinforces the idea that the concept of land is meant to be purchased, owned, settled.

In fact, this month marks the fifth anniversary that The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved its plan to encroach part of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota for the sole purpose of extracting natural resources (such as oil) while further exploiting the individual communities that belong to it. There is a violent display of the many ways in which the federal government continues to view the natural ecology of our globe as a commodifiable product, begging to be manufactured, and, in its eyes, just asking to be made a profit of. 

The raw emotion, and deep cuts made by a complete systemic disregard for communities that do not prioritize capitalism over the preservation of ancestral roots is the very basis for the investigative work of minds such as Nick Estes who was on the ground during the #NODAPL protests. He exposed the ways in which our government’s policy failed to secure the rights of the Standing Rock Sioux community in his book, Our History is The Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. In chapter 7, Estes explains the reality that, 

“Indigenous resistance is not a one-time event. It continually asks: What proliferates in the absence of empire? Thus, it defines freedom not as the absence of settler colonialism, but as the amplified presence of Indigenous life and just relations with human and nonhuman relatives, and with the earth.”

However, in the face of an administration that has amplified every outlet for the roots of colonial power to rise from systematically gutting key ancestral indigenous sites such as Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent, the backlit solace of the dystopian circumstances that have led to events such as the unprecedented attack on capitol hill, is that as Estes claims,

“the answers lie within the kinship relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous and the lands we both inhabit.”

In the case of these relationships, one key obstacle that prohibits any environmental policy from effectively creating a cooperative outlet for non-Western concepts of thought is the neglect of epistemological divide between western world views and indigenous world views. 

In this example, Epistemology is defined as the philosophical principles that drive how knowledge is exchanged. 

In a separate case study of the colonial structures in which environmental policy operates underneath, the Confluence of the Little Colorado and Colorado Rivers acts as a prime example of the legal hurdles and challenges that are involved with establishing a geographical area as “sacred” in relation to a given community that has deeply rooted cultural ties to it.

Many indigenous communities [The Hopi, Zuni, Navajo (Diné), Havasupai, Southern Paiute, Apache, and Hualapai] have long been victim to unnecessary, marginalizing, systematically oppressive, and downright Kafkaesque bureaucratic processes straight out of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, in their collective efforts to legislatively establish an area referred to as “Sipapuni”, as a “sacred site of cultural emergence” in the eyes of the federal government. 

The bulk of the dim light at the end of the tunnel that is continuously fading in and out through the monotonous and frustrating legal process highlights key differences in worldviews contributing towards the impacts and threats that colonial thought poses to the confluence. According to the case study published by the Journal of Water Research and Education, these factors are: 

  1. A Western concept of land and water devoid of spiritual meaning 
  1.  Federal management of land and water resources stemming from colonial power dynamics
  1. The Treatment of water as a commodified property lacking spiritual/cultural purpose
  1. Hopi and Navajo Nation (Diné) tensions stoked by colonial territorialization
  1. Unsustainable and unregulated groundwater withdrawal in the LCR basin. 

Along with potential strategies for protecting the area are:

  1. Relationship building between tribes, NGOs, agencies, and stakeholders
  1. Advocating for inclusion of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in resource governance.

While the challenges laid out in the case study illustrated the groundwork needed in order to facilitate an effective sociological impact on indigenous communities in relevance to resource management, the article also highlights potential ways in which the confluence can be protected as well (i.e. relationship building between tribes, NGOs, agencies, and stakeholders, advocating for inclusion of Indigenous Knowledges (IK) in resource governance, invoking federal trust duty to protect resources vital to a permanent homeland, strategically adapting colonial policies to achieve anticolonial protections). 

In an effort to answer the question on why and how these circumstances came to be, the control that industry groups have had on our politics through the social status granted to them through colonialism is an uncomfortably disturbing variable behind why such unbalanced power distribution exists in the first place. 

In fact, as a marker of today’s political climate of natural resource management, over 33 private corporations and industry groups exerted their power in a very direct and public display of their influence in a letter sent to the CEQ. In the letter, entities such as the Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum Institute urged chairman of the CEQ, Mary Neumayr to 

expeditiously proceed” with efforts to “modernize” National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations.” 

This will inevitably result in an open outlet for federal agencies to become less transparent about the potential environmental degradation occurring in cooperation with private industry groups, due primarily to the fact that NEPA rollbacks favor more pollution and less community input, meaning that federal agencies can no longer evaluate the “cumulative” effects of projects—such as their impact on climate change—or how multiple projects collectively affect a community”.

The reversal of historically bipartisan environmental policies pose an immense threat not only on the lives of Americans today, but the lives of every organism that makes up our surrounding natural environments, and the environments of planet earth as a whole. Decolonizing environmental policy on the federal scale requires self‐determination, autonomy, and sovereignty to be established as inherent rights to self‐governance, independence, and freedom which needs to include the inherent right to make decisions about traditional waters and lands, according to Indigenous Political Discourse

If the tedious legal processes, reversal of bipartisan environmental policies, commodification of land resources, and upheaval of immorally degrading systems of governance act as anything, they should be a living testament as to why public policy making with the intention of capitalist gain only serves to benefit the elite class, while contributing to the cycle of socio-ecological exploitation that has only repeated itself through the racial chokehold it maintains on differences in power dynamics created from concepts such as settler colonialism. 

Lastly, because the scope of colonialism in capitalist politics stretches beyond systematically manipulating individuals by race into systems of complacency, it’s important to acknowledge the haunted warnings of forces that predetermine your life, and false sense of free will, even if they come from a source of uncomfortable truth and reality.

In his painfully cathartic exposition of addiction, Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs created the concept of “Total Demoralization” to explain the legislative efforts his characters endured when being interrogated, brainwashed, and controlled in this statement:

“The Subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct.”

This piece is a thought journal consisting of a mix of research between my classes, work, and personal interest that I’ve been putting together. I wanted to feature some ideas I’ve had about the issues that are currently in the way of successful progressive environmental laws being passed. I also wanted to feature some photography I took while doing fieldwork in Utah, and some of the social issues I saw happening during my time there.

Untitled

By Denise Valverde

This artwork was to explore a more space theme and to see what I was capable of if I just let my hand do whatever. I really like the piece, mostly because it’s so happy and it’s of a pretty woman.

melancholic cries

By Natalie Leon

@absolemn9

I. 

tonight, 
music does not distract my worries, 
creativity does not console my sadness, 
& community does not relieve my fear, 
tonight, I am human, 
& I feel vulnerable, 
tonight, 
I turn my sight to the sky, 
& to the ground, 
I give my knees. 

II. 

life will surge, 
& life will fade, 
& life will burn immense again, 
& die, 
ashes will rise into dust, 
phoenix will burn up, 
stars will cry, stars will die, twinkle twinkle, 
through cat black skies, 
where do butterflies go when panic infests, 
what do birds do when no crumbs fall, 
what sanctuary is yours, 
what miles have you crossed, 
for a gust of air, a catch of breath. 

III. 

oh traveling symphony, 
remnants of life will dance across the gates of time, spreading wildflowers on grave sites,
in futures distant we know not what holds, 
resonating among the trees, 
water flowing through their veins, 
life will live loving death, 
gratitude will resurrect, 
remember what it is like to live, 
turn to the sky, & wonder, 
what it may, 
what it might, 
be like to live by candle & moon, 
with one less spoon, cup or bowl, 
remember what it is like to see, 
your neighbor or your enemy,
as your own,
as a whole,
as a person,
just like you.

Melancholic cries was written during the breakout of the pandemic in 2020 & reflects hints of fear, hope, solitude, solidarity, and love of life/humanity.

flora

By Elizabeth (Liz) Louis

@lizarts

this piece was an exploration in line, pattern, the female body, and the human face + its expressions. i let my creativity flow free without restrictions of realism or expectations.

Alone on the Swing Set

By Arpi Schlesinger

@arpiiiiii

In the middle of the park, a girl sat alone on a swing set. She sat suspended above the mahogany bark dust like a sword hanging by a thread, slowly rocking back and forth in the soft but frigid breeze. Rust consumed the chains holding the rubber swing like an infection, creaking in a steady cadence that sliced through the silence in the rest of the park. Shadow covered the green fields of grass like a goose-down blanket, untouched by the sounds of crickets or field mice. No ducks paddled through the river to the west; no frogs croaked on its bank. But sound was not the only thing that escaped the park. Light seemed to as well. No street lamps guided wandering passersby, only darkness perfect for housing bats, raccoons, and other nightly monsters—not that this park had any. The icy air of winter repelled congregating fireflies and forced them to burrow in their warm nests. Like the fireflies, the people in the surrounding  neighborhood burrowed as well; they shut their blinds and turned off their porch lights. The neighborhood was asleep, surrounded by the silent and lightless atmosphere and embracing it like a mother with her children. 

But this park was not completely consumed by darkness and silence. There was the moon, and there was the girl. The moon beamed its harsh, white light onto the girl, revealing a thick head of raven-black hair that dangled in the air, almost touching the bark dust below her feet. The light reflected off the girl’s pale skin, giving her arms and legs a soft glow, a contrast to the darkness of her hair. Her head drooped and cast in shadow, avoiding the moonlight like the plague. She stared blankly at her bare feet in silence. The swing continued to sway back and forth, indifferent to the pale figure that sat on it. The creaking of the rust marinated chains was not the only sound in the park, however. The girl’s stomach spat out a symphony of howls and growls that masked a constant, low hum. But this sound wasn’t enough; the symphony was suppressed. The park was still quiet. The girl was still alone.

Ash and Kristofferson

By Lin Clark

@the_annus_artist

Fantastic Mr Fox is my favorite movie and I just absolutely love it. It’s so aesthetic and comforting and this piece really just made me happy and I love the characters so much.

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