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In بيان الصعود إلى السماء, flight manifesto, a collective of hearing and Deaf arrivants and settlers engage in long-distance work with hard-of-hearing Palestinian musician Dirar Kalash to design and enact a silent walk in three parts over 13 months up the Nooksack River: an anti-survey and visceral confrontation with foundational architectures of settler-colonization in Whatcom County (US), territories of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) and Nuxwsá7aq (Nooksack) nations. Kalash retroactively scored the walk in his family home in Kfar Qari (IL), composing and recording from the river to the sound from the sound to the sea, an 8-hour / 8-channel sonic work, during the Gaza genocide.
Starting from home, work, or a place otherwise fundamental to their lives, the بيان الصعود إلى السماء, flight manifesto collective 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, and 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 and 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 consent, and removed in 2022 through a collaboration between Lummi Nation, Nooksack Tribe, and 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.
بيان الصعود إلى السماءtried to form everyday acts of transnational listening, walking, and 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”: abrupt departure; deportation; statelessness; marronage; dispossession; pauperization; mob violence; houselessness; state siege; impossible, impassable, or improbable ascent; and nonhuman witness. Flight is a place where core struggles, crimes, relations, and paradoxes across populations under settler-colonialism approximate and converge.
Credits
Director: Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman
Co-authors: Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman, 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.
Research, organizing, technical support: 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 and Justice Center, Benjamin Kersten, Aisha Mansour, Tamyka Bullen, Raj Singh, Clovis B.
Material support: Simon Fraser University, Western Washington University, Square One Foundation.
FILM
Writer/Director: Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman
Assistant Director: Wil Henkel
Editor: Miguel Azuaga
Camera: Wil Henkel, Paul Helmich, Cynthia Camlin, Brel Froebe, Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman
Research/production support: Justin Collins, Cynthia Camlin, Ashanti Monts Tréviska, Kristina Lee Podesva, EJ Colen, Jessi Radovic, Sally Scopa, Yanara Friedland, Matter Bryant
Sound: excerpts of "from the river to the sound from the sound to the sea" by Dirar Kalash (2024-25)
Collaborator Biographies
Dirar Kalash is a musician and sound artist in Palestine whose work spans musical and sonic practices within a variety of instrumental, compositional and improvisational contexts. He is active as a touring musician and produces many solo and collaborative albums, sound installations, live audio-visual performances, field recordings and a soundscape composition series under the title Sonic Front.
Professor of Drawing and 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 and environmental history.
Cascadia Deaf Nation is a social cooperative built on a hybrid model created for and by members of the BIPOC Deaf community. CDN offers services + support for those who are identified as BIPOC Deaf, Hard of Hearing, DeafBlind, and DeafDisabled, and sometimes helps incubate and support BIPOCD-led businesses
Justin Collins is a descendent primarily of Anglophone colonizers; parent and 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 and their accompanying day-to-day gestures.
Brel Froebe is an educator and community organizer in the occupied Lummi and Nooksack territory of Bellingham. They are interim executive director of the Center for Responsible Forestry Management and have spent the past decade facilitating youth-led action through restorative justice, critical pedagogy, art, and outdoor education.
Harlin/Hayley Steele is a former foster youth, genderfluid genderqueer activist, and PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at UC Davis, receiving a dual designated emphasis in Performance and Practice and Science and Technology Studies.
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