April 2023 | Brown Water Utopia

In this episode of Partisan Gardens, we explore the competing utopias at stake in the struggle to stop Cop City in Atlanta. Cop City is itself a grim utopia, a vision concocted by cops and politicians of a depopulated, fake city that will actually bend to their will.  On the other side are the diverse utopian dreams of the movement to defend the Weelaunee forest, which connect that forest to visions of Black liberation, collective care, food autonomy for the surrounding neighborhoods, and a world without police.  Underlying all these dreams is the long historical reality of Muscogee inhabitation and stewardship of that land.  The effort to defend the forest has helped initiate an indigenous re-migration to the land.  This longer history, concealed since the 1830s by white supremacist violence and settlement, is in turn enriching the movement’s idea of what it means to stop Cop City, to win.