Damn it! THE BEAVER MANIFESTO

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damn it.

A Counter-Colonial Proposal for the site of Central Park as Retroactive Space for the Unleashing of the Beaver as the Quintessential Landscape Architect of Climate Change for the 21st Century. Here, Central Park—including its Victorian-era Vestiges & Racist Monuments—becomes a Boneyard of Settler Colonialism & Blueprint for the Imminent Retrocession of Lands of the Lenape-Delaware Peoples and the Indigenous Territories of the once and future legacy of National Parks it camouflages.

Central Park belongs no more to the City—either of New York, or of New Yorkers—than National Parks belong to the State—of America, or of Americans.

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Ironically built at the same time, Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park is the doppelganger of John Muir’s National Park System. At the precise moment that this iconic ‘open space’ in the center of the New York Metropolis (Lebensraum americanized) was being planned, cleared, engineered, modeled, bulldozed, regraded, and refashioned with Brit-envy in the imperial-era image of Birkenhead Park, the Indigenous territories of the Yosemite, Blackfoot, Delaware, Lenape, Plains Cree, Dakota, Lakota, Navajo Peoples, and so many more, were being sacked and emptied of Indigenous bodies, with sovereignties violated to make way for Yellowstone in 1872, the first ‘frontier wilderness’ prototype that would serve as a template for the US National Park System that exists today.

Now, as of 2017, Central Park stands tall as a designated site for UNESCO’s World Heritage Preservation, now listed to be frozen forever in its perceived, pictorial sublime and Victorian beauty. In the settler-colonial context of the global metropolis of Manhattan and the continental territories of the U.S. however, Central Park symbolically monumentalizes the environmental violence of Columbus’ landing (and beginning of the invasion) in 1492 and the Dutch-financed theft of Mannahatta by Henry Hudson in 1609, later to be crisscrossed by the cartesian space of urban infrastructures (roads, bridges,

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sewers, signs, lights) and surveyed grid of Manhattan blocks and skyscrapers—a vertical menagerie of colonial excess and property regimes whose vestiges of open space edify the total domination of a burgeoning, bourgeois class in all its incandescent extractivism and unrepentant oppression over what it considered ‘terra nova.’ The Wild West tamed, the Settled East civilized. From rampant Italian explorers and cartographers Giovanni da Verrazzano and Amerigo Vespucci, manufactured monuments and moments in the name of settler colonialism.

Drowning in a Landscape of Captive Colonialism The colonial métropole’s invisible hinterlands are the upstream spaces and vital resources of what the financial empires on the 65th floor and up ignore, overlook, suppress, and mask—settler colonial camouflage: the territories of endless exploitation and extraction that this neoliberal class of merchants and bureaucrats made possible through the institution of the Department of Interior (the DOI) and its Bureau of Land Management (the BLM) formalizing the National Park Service (the NPS) in 1916 to service settler-state space. Entrenched by the Antiquities Act of 1906, the NPS is Roosevelt’s colonial-con-

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servationist gift to the more than 400 sites operated as national memorial sites and national monuments today— from the Statue of Liberty to Mount Rushmore.

The ironic birth of Black Diamond in Central Park Zoo—circa 1893, the captive bison who modeled for the American 5-cent nickel in 1913, is the perfect yet unfortunate semiotic enslavement and symbolic sign of settler colonialism whose central circus was New York City’s Central Park, emblem of the Empire State now revered worldwide as exemplary model of park design: Frederick Law Olmsted forever engrained in the American imagination as the grandfather of landscape architecture, legendary descendant of Victorian, imperial gardeners.

Despite Olmsted’s claims, Central Park’s aim though had nothing to do with any innate or natural American appetite for so-called ‘picturesque beauty’ or ‘frontier wilderness’: that had to be prefabricated, manufactured, and engineered. Set in motion by the French and British, the evacuated picturesque of counterfeit landscapes had to be painted (Gainsborough, Turner, Gilpin, Rousseau), drawn (Catlin, Audubon), or photographed (Watkins, Adams, Muybridge). Central Park was settler colonialism’s grand design—Victorianism 2.0, on a continental scale. Fragile and fake, wild, remote, and empty, Nature had to be fictionalized before it was fabricated.

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Like the National Parks, its location was primarily intent on erasing and exterminating the presence of Indigenous Peoples (and in the case of Central Park, of African Americans as well, living near the Reservoir in the Seneca Village)—the First Nations and Original peoples who occupied the territory, living with and for the land, and whose marked presence—minds and bodies aggressively killed off or pushed away by their removal, away from hunting grounds and cut off of from food sources (plants, animals, waters, seasons) to then be forcibly relocated and relegated to Indian Reservations—the prisons of grass reinforced by Christian settlers’ teachings at Industrial Residential Schools or in Child Welfare Services to erase millennia-long customs and practices. The creation of the National Parks: the equivalent of cultural genocide.

Since land was (and still is) a language, state-sanctioned removal of Indigenous Peoples served as erasure of the memory of pre-colonial territorial governance (as imposed spatial arrogance) —the antithesis of freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Parks, both central and decentral, are the foundations that uphold the status, statue, statute, and state of liberty and the very myth, that is the white, euro-centric dreamland of ‘America.’ Victorian landscaping as veritable form of Indigenous landscalping.

Across city and territory, emptied and evacuated open

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space—scraped and scrubbed—forever serve as a reminder that terra nullius has always been urbs nullius.

Central Park is thus a geopolitical trope, a monumental Victorian effigy bearing the black flag of erasure, dispossession, and dehumanization camouflaged under a politicized picturesque—the dream of a bourgeois society naturalized and neutered under eternally-stabilized green carpets. A dark flag casting long shadows on a vast tabula verde of blood-soaked racial oppression, massive territorial injustices, and ongoing environmental inhumanities.

Sous le parc, un territoire.

Under the park, a territory.

Blood soaked space of the Oppressed.

We the People, not a Declaration of Independence, the anthem and image of the Oppressor.

If, then, “the city is a condition first, and a place second”, as the foreshadowing Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas claimed, and to which the majority of delirious architects still submit to, then its indisputable, indivisible, and perhaps inconvenient truth is land. In this 500-year old context, there is therefore no design without decolonization.

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Decentering the Dubious Natures of Park Design Beyond the meaningless acts of reconciliation or shortsighted claims of coastal adaptation across Manhattan through which a *contemporary* design could be fashioned for the park and New York City’s coast for that matter, how can the site, space, and settler colonial system of the Victorian Central Park—and all the state administered territories of the National Parks it has come to represent—be redressed and retroactively transformed?

Concentrating, mobilizing, and summoning all major monuments of the settler state—from colonialism to slavery to confederacy, Central Park becomes a central promontory, a mausoleum of Manifest Destiny in the image of the graveyards of the Post-Soviet Blocs—heritage turned on its head, falling from below. Shrine to the unattainable and last vestige of neoliberal, real estate Ponzi schemes.

A zoo of white supremacy whose dusk is coming. Container of settler colonialism whose lies lay buried in the fake sand of the baseball fields or soaked in the mud of grassy meadows or submerged underwater of engineered reservoir systems—imperial heritage gone amuck, whose surroundings surrendered effects yield to tremendous territorial transformations: back rents and retroceded lands lead to mass evacuations of neoliberal and financial élites

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(the floors of those speculative skyscraper were empty anyway), allies begin to build anew with returning LenapeDelaware Peoples and Indigenous knowledge of the elders, amidst forested wetlands and wet meadows that once thrived in the region but whose water supply system ironically leaks today at a current rate of 36 million gallons every 24 hours.

The carved up lands (not property lots) create an entirely new, yet retroactively present ground where its legal status as different nation and international territory creates opportunities as free trade zones, with other peoples, communities, clans, countries, and states. What was once a financial empire becomes nothing more than a neoliberal boneyard of petro-capitalist skeletons that make way for alternative trading territories and charged spaces of immense fluvial, cultural and estuarine potential: oceans and tidal energies return along the rivers and shorelines— Mahicantuck, the river named by the Lenape Peoples over ten millennia ago that “flows two ways”.

Like a metaphor for the impending rise and fall of settler colonialism and the imminent doom of racial domination, forces that go up, eventually have to come down.

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Decentral Park: A Counter-Manifesto Here, we present for the first time in the history of professional design following the re-appearance of the first beaver in nearly 200 years in the Bronx (named José, in honor of U.S. Representative José Serrano) and one of the most neglected and vilified rodents of the past five centuries—Castor canadensis: the beaver as landscape architect par excellence to reclaim, refashion and reconnect the fresh, sweet waters of the principal streams of Central Park and Central New York City by naturally damming and rejuvenating the wet meadows of the park’s herbivory: from the strawberry fields of the Great Meadow and The Ramble to the upland woodlands of The Upper Woods and Harlem Meer. By impounding parts of Harlem Creek at the north end, and at the Pond, at the south end that flow through and under Fifth Avenue, at the precise location where John Randel Jr. pinned down and planted the first survey monument for Manhattan’s grid and the engineered Reservoir in 1811, a living infrastructure of life-size rodents takes over the upstream freshwater reaches of a decentralized and deconstructed Central Park, hijacking its headwaters, and naturally descending to lower reaches of the city, dismantling and disfiguring— along the way—the 18th century grid iron of Manhattan’s

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streets and unabated vehicular flow. Instead of manipulating the vegetal and topographic landscape and preserving its monuments as per the program brief, a new semiaquatic process of littoral land transformation and infrastructural intervention is triggered through the intermediary of the almighty beaver. Salt bans, light restrictions, traffic diversions, land use setbacks, mowing deterrences, are all part of a practical, manageable, and immediately implementable maintenance regime and regeneration program that work-around the beaver’s nocturnal even secretive living habits, territorial requirements, and mating seasons across its 25 to 40-year lifespan. Night life, a way of wild life.

The Park, Be Damned. In these new, territorial, and transnational waters reclaimed by the powers of the beaver and the peoples of the aspen woodlands, the American Museum of Natural History (emblem of colonial anthropology) is gutted and lobotomized for a relocated and revamped National Museum of the American Indian becomes a Lenape Language Educatorium while the MET Museum becomes an International Consulate for the assertion of Lenape sovereignty and Indigenous selfdetermination. A reunion of dislocated and displaced nations: a united landscape front on the surrendered lands of Central Park, land that was stolen from people that were tricked in the first place.

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In the wake of alarming regional sea level rise, urban heat islands, and complex climate change, the beaver stands in as a strategy that changes the system not the climate. These biometrics and parametrics of beaver ecology thus lead not to more preserves, reserves, or reservations, but rather territorial retrocessions and reclamations: lands that stand in, through, and amidst current right-of-ways built on the defunct economies of petro-capitalism and resource extractivism, while serving as recovered, reclaimed and regenerated territories led, maintained and managed by communities of Indigenous Peoples and First Nations with an alliance of urban settlers and territorial builders to confront and challenge fossil fuel futures that threaten communities towards self-determination and freedoms of unborn generations. an Open Systems project presented to the National Park Service and the American Society of Landscape Architects on this day of October 8, 2018, Indigenous Peoples' Day, the counter-celebration held on the same day as the U.S. federal holiday of Columbus Day

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