In بيانالصعودإلىالسماء, flight manifesto,a collective of hearing + Deaf arrivants + settlers engage in long-distance work with hard-of-hearing Palestinian musician Dirar Kalash to design + enact a silent walk in three parts over 13 months up the Nooksack River: an anti-survey + visceral confrontation with foundational architectures of settler-colonization in Whatcom County (US), territories of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) + Nuxwsá7aq (Nooksack) nations. Kalash retroactively scored the walk in his family home in Kfar Qari (IL), composing + recording an 8-hour, 8-channel sonic piece during the Gaza genocide.
Starting from home, work, or a place otherwise fundamental to their lives, the بيانالصعودإلىالسماء, flight manifestocollective walked on 27/2/22 to the US military’s inception point in Whatcom County, the former Fort Bellingham, now a neighborhood, in a place called Tl’aqatinusin the Lummi nation’s language, Xwlemi Chosen, + Klek’tines in the Nooksack nation’s language, Lhéchalosem, ending in the river’s mouth. On 25/9/22, in the wake of a devastating flood, the collective walked between two ethnically cleansed villages, from the fishing village of Marietta to a local chain grocery store in the city of Ferndale, a village site called Sq ‘elqx ‘enin Xwlemi Chosen + Sq’elaxen in Lhéhalosem. On 22/4/23, the collective filled their own everyday cups at a length of the river called Nuxwt’íqw’em in Lhéhalosem, at the site of a former drinking water diversion dam, built in 1962 by the city of Bellingham without pre-, prior-, or informed-consent, + removed in 2022 through a collaboration between Lummi Nation, Nooksack Tribe, + City of Bellingham. From what is now named the Middle Fork Nooksack River Fish Passage, the collective walked carrying the water to land the Department of Natural Resources had just clear cut, once a towering second growth forest many of the walkers had attempted in the months before to defend.
بيانالصعودإلىالسماءtried to form everyday acts of listening, walking, + route-making in Whatcom County as a potential site for what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, in an Anishinaabe context, calls “flight to escape colonial reality… [into] another present.” Such sites of flight are concealed or mended, metastasized or hydrated along the contours of different populations’ memories and conditions of flight, what Achille Mbembe calls the “fugitive character of life”: of abrupt departure; of deportation; of statelessness; of marronage; of dispossession; of pauperization; of mob violence; of houselessness; of State siege; of impossible, impassable, or improbable ascent; and of nonhuman witness. Flight is a place where core struggles, crimes, and paradoxes of populations under settler-colonialism approximate and converge.
Credits
بيانالصعودإلىالسماء flight manifestowas directed by Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman+ co-authored with Dirar Kalash, Brel Froebe, Harlin/Hayley Steele, Cascadia Deaf Nation (Ashanti Monts Tréviska, Rei Lung, Gareth Magiskog, Chell Hull, Gabriel Perrusquia), Cynthia Camlin, Justin Collins, Yessenia Moncada, Andrew Babson, Yanara Friedland, Vanessa Malapote-Blandino, Elizabeth Kerwin, Jillian Froebe, Zoë Fassett-Manuszewski, Carly Lloyd, Sophie Cortes, Paul Helmich, Emma Blakslee+ received research, organizing, or technical support from Joshua Olsen, Julie Mauermann, Pro Bono ASL, Tli’nuk’dzwidzi/Althea Wilson, X’welwelat’se William John, Mary Tuti Baker, Melodi Wynne, Regina Jeffries, Peter Rand, Dolores Calderón, Kusemaat Shirley Williams (Whiteswan Environmental), George Adams, Josh Cerretti, Whatcom Human Rights Task Force, Whatcom Peace + Justice Center, Benjamin Kersten, Aisha Mansour, Tamyka Bullen, Raj Singh, Clovis B+ received material support from Simon Fraser University, Western Washington University, Square One Foundation.
بيانالصعودإلىالسماء flight manifesto (9’21”, 3-channel video, 2025), was written and directed by Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman with the assistance of Wil Henkel + edited by Miguel Azuaga. Wil Henkel + Paul Helmich served as director of photography. Justin Collins, Cynthia Camlin, Ashanti Monts Tréviska, Kristina Lee Podesva, EJ Colen, Jessi Radovic, Sally Scopa, Yanara Friedland + Matter Bryant provided research + production support. The epigraph in silent walk from a place fundamental to one’s life through the site of Fort Bellingham to the Nooksack River’s mouth was sourced from the film, Inaugural Treaty Day Recognition (2020), created by Children of the Setting Sun Productions with the Ferndale School District. Lhaq’temish, Nuxwsá7aq, + settler place names were sourced from Nooksack Place Names: Geography, Culture, and Language by Allan Richardson + Brent Galloway (UBC Press, 2011), Lummi SquolQuol(Lummi Nation, August 2024 issue), + conversations with above-mentioned persons.
Collaborator Biographies
Dirar Kalash is a musician + sound artist in Palestine whose work spans musical + sonic practices within a variety of instrumental, compositional + improvisational contexts. He is active as a touring musician + produces many solo + collaborative albums, sound installations, live audio-visual performances, field recordings + a soundscape composition series under the title Sonic Front.
Professor of Drawing + Painting at Western Washington University, Cynthia Camlin has made landscape-based work motivated by climate change for 20 years. Her current practice probes the entanglements of social + environmental history.
Cascadia Deaf Nation is a social cooperative built on a hybrid model created for + by members of the BIPOC Deaf community. CDN offers services + support for those who are identified as BIPOC Deaf, Hard of Hearing, DeafBlind, + DeafDisabled, + also sometimes helps incubate and support BIPOCD-led businesses
Justin Collins is a descendent primarily of Anglophone colonizers; parent + spouse; wage labourer in America’s nonprofit machine; person desirous of the means whereby property regimes may be dismantled; person pursuant of anti-colonial rites + their accompanying day-to-day gestures.
Brel Froebe is an educator + community organizer in the occupied Lummi + Nooksack territory of Bellingham. They are interim executive director of the Center for Responsible Forestry Management + have spent the past decade facilitating youth-led action through restorative justice, critical pedagogy, art, + outdoor education.
Harlin/Hayley Steele is a former foster youth, genderfluid genderqueer activist, + PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at UC Davis, receiving a dual designated emphasis in Performance + Practice + Science + Technology Studies.