Volume 55 - Issue 5

May 2023

The Magazine About Yale and New Haven

To Care for a Community

Inside: Full Disclosure, Unlearning Surveillance, Leaves of Service

Volume 55, Issue 5

Letter from the editors

Editors-in-Chief

Executive Editor Managing Editor

Dear readers,

Associate Editors

A few weeks ago, we hosted our Bulldog Days event in a small room at the top of Phelps Hall. We did not belong there. Still, we set down our things and made it so—half-eaten bags of hot chips, a modest pile of tote bags, and enough Red Bulls to kill someone. We worried if people would come. Slowly, they did, and we welcomed a small cohort of five.

The New Journal began for us this way, too: a small group of editors, a small mess of junk food, and a small table at which we barely belonged.

Over the past year, we have found a home here. This April, we welcomed back the people who have created their own homes in The New Journal, the people who have cared for this magazine over the course of nearly five decades. It seems this home is still as scrappy as they remember.

But as we all do this time of year, we begin as we leave.

In our board’s first issue, our stories interrogate the safe places many call home. Amelia Davidson’s cover story explores an approach to make New Haven a safer place to live—but some envision radically different ways to protect this peace. Megan Vaz parses out efforts to create systems of support against sexual violence, often at the expense of emotionally burdening our cces. Elisa Cruz writes of the struggle to make New Haven Public Schools sanctuaries, rather than sites of surveillance.

While we work to make our existing homes more caring, we may negotiate the things that constitute them, creating something new yet familiar.

Grace Ellis recalls her dear friend Allis’s path to the “irrevocable condition” of home. Connor Arakaki creates presence from absence as she weaves together fragments of her Indigenous Hawaiian identity. And to begin this issue as we end this letter, Ashley Chin introduces us to the found families of Elm City Games and the refuge to be found in play.

We are about to scatter around the globe, leaving some things behind and holding on to others. We hope you’ll take these stories with you as you go.

TNJ Love,

The New Managing Board Abbey, Jabez, Paola, & Kylie

Thank you to our donors.

Neela Banerjee* Anson M. Beard James Carney Andrew Court Romy Drucker Jeffrey Foster David Gerber David Greenberg*

Matthew Hamel Makiko Harunari James Lowe Chaitanya Mehra Ben Mueller Sarah Nutman Peter Phleger Jeffrey Pollock

Adriane Quinlan Elizabeth Sledge Gabriel Snyder Fred Strebeigh Arya Sundaram Stuart Weinzimer Steven Weisman Suzanne Wittebort

*Donated twice. Thank you!

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Naina Agrawal-Hardin Kinnia Cheuk Viola Clune Grace Ellis Aanika Eragram Maggie Grether Samantha Liu

Jabez Choi Abbey Kim Paola Santos Kylie Volavongsa Chloe Nguyen John Nguyen Ingrid Rodríguez Villa Netanel Schwartz Etai Smotrich-Barr Anouk Yeh

Senior Editors

Amal Biskin Meg Buzbee Nicole Dirks Lazo Gitchos Ella Golblum Jesse Goodman

Copy Editors

Zachary Groz Yosef Malka Cleo Maloney Dereen Shirnekhi J.D. Wright

Yvonne Agyapong Connor Arakaki Lilly Chai Mia Cortés Castro Iz Klemmer

Adam Levine Ella Pearlman-Chang Victoria Seibor Lukas Trelease

Creative Director

Kevin Chen

Design Editors

Meg Buzbee Camille Chang Madelyn Dawson Karela Palazio Charlotte Rica Website Directors

Makda Assefa Photography

Nithya Guthikonda Christian Robles

Jessica Sánchez Chris de Santis Miye Sugino Etai Smotrich-Barr

Serena Ulammandakh Nour Tanush

Members & Directors: Emily Bazelon • Peter Cooper • Jonathan Dach • Kathrin Lassila • Elizabeth Sledge • Fred Strebeigh

Advisors: Neela Banerjee • Richard Bradley •Susan Braudy • Lincoln Caplan • Jay Carney • Andy Court • Joshua Civin • Richard Conniff • Ruth Conniff • Elisha Cooper • Susan Dominus • David Greenberg • Daniel Kurtz-Phelan • Laura Pappano • Jennifer Pitts • Julia Preston • Lauren Rawbin • David Slifka • John Swansburg • Anya Kamenetz • Steven Weisman • Daniel Yergin Friends: Nicole Allan • Margaret Bauer • Mark Badger and Laura Heymann • Anson M. Beard • Susan Braudy • Julia Calagiovanni • Elisha Cooper • Haley Cohen • Peter Cooper • Andy Court • The Elizabethan Club • Leslie Dach • David Freeman and Judith Gingold • Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts • Bob Lamm • James Liberman • Alka Mansukhani • Benjamin Mueller • Sophia Nguyen • Valerie Nierenberg • Morris Panner • Jennifer Pitts • R. Anthony Reese • Eric Rutkow • Lainie Rutkow • Laura Saavedra and David Buckley • Anne-Marie Slaughter • Elizabeth Sledge • Caroline Smith • Gabriel Snyder • Elizabeth Steig • Aliyya Swaby • John Jeremiah Sullivan • Daphne and David Sydney • Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather • Blake Townsend Wilson • Daniel Yergin • William Yuen

TheNewJournal

Contents

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point of departure Ashley Chin explores a local game store challenging the gaming community’s conservative status quo. crtitical angle

6 Unlearning Surveillance

As national conversations about policing in schools intensify, some New Haven Public School students question whether school resource officers actually make them safer.

By Elisa Cruz

To Care for a Community

profile

26 Leaves of Service

cover story

Peer-led policing alternative compass has seen a successful rollout in the past five months. But can an organization bankrolled by the City and run by Yale achieve radical aims?

By Amelia Davidson

Eli Whitney student Allis Ozornia grapples with what it means to get a Yale education after ten years of reproductive justice activism in South Texas.

By Grace Ellis personal essay

33 Metamorphosis

A writer reflects on Indigenous identity following Yale’s repatriation of the iwi kūpuna.

By Connor Arakaki

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flash fiction

37 West End Avenue

By Amal Biskin

aside

37 It’s March again

By Kylie Volavongsa

poems

32 Isle of Palms

May 2023

By Charlotte Hughes

38 Transference

By John Nguyen

Full Disclosure

32 Cherenkov

Yale’s cce program aims to revolutionize campus sexual misconduct response, but its student-led approach raises crucial questions about power and accountability.

By Megan Vaz

39 Local Geography, by Adam Winograd.

By Charlotte Hughes crossword

image credits: Christian robles (top, front); etai smotrich-barr (bottom); nour tanush (back)

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Point of Departure

be whoever you are,’” Fantastic explains. he asked for her name. Her mind went “No one’s going to say something, you blank; the little script she’d rehearsed in know, negative or hurtful or even just her head went out the window. thoughtless.”

“I just stood there awkwardly for a Fantastic tells me that over the past moment and explained that I was trans seven years, ECG has been a place where and in between names at the moment,” LGBTQIA+ patrons have felt safe enough she explained to me over Discord mesto come out. Some use ECG to figure out sage. “He was totally cool with it, so rom that very first night I a different way of presenting themselves I took my shot with my favorite of the happened by Chapel Street, I was than they would at work or home or choices I’d been kicking around.” She charmed. Maybe it was the hot pink school. For a lot of players, ECG acts as a told him she was trying the name Brenda. facade that unapologetically spans three safe space to negotiate queerness.

Hearing the other player sound her storefronts. Maybe it was the two lifeElm City Games hosts its online name out back to her abated her initial sized kobolds—a kind of monster from community on Discord, where play- anxieties. “From that moment on, I’ve Dungeons and Dragons (DnD)—that ers mingle, talk smack, and organize been Brenda and I couldn’t be happier.” grumbled at me from the window display game nights. This is where I struck up When I asked what made Brenda with their spears raised, like guardians at a conversation with Brenda W., who feel that ECG was safe enough to come the shop’s front door. It was most prob- requested not to be identified by name out, she pointed to the store’s owners, ably, though, the ambience of Elm City as to not be outed to her parents. She Matt Fantastic and Trish Loter, who Games (ECG) on a busy night: tables by replied to my post, commenting that both had multiple pronouns listed the windows were filled with customers her first experience using her preferred under their Discord usernames, and chatting away, while a giant rainbow flag name as an openly trans woman was at who, in her eyes, “generally cultivated greeted passersby.

ECG: “I never once have had reason to a left-leaning political culture and atti“It’s just our natural state of being,” regret that decision.” tude, both in-store and in the server.” says Elm City Games owner Matt Brenda had mostly been interacting Other stores Brenda had visited didn’t Fantastic, whose larger-than-life last with the ECG community through the feel quite as welcoming; one store in name evolved from a joke gone too far. Discord server, when she started ques- Wallingford was particularly rude to “We’re queer-owned . . . and most of our tioning her gender. She had yet to settle new customers and tolerated homophostaff is some varying flavor.” on a name, a hesitation she explained bic remarks made by other clientele.

Originally founded in 2016 as a cor- was “mostly due to internalized anxiety “Games traditionally have a reputaner inside the now-shuttered Happiness on my part, making me doubt . . . whether tion for being this domain of, you know, Lab café, the business has grown along or not the name I chose was right, shitty men,” Fantastic explained to me, with its community to take on three whether it would feel good hearing other “There’s just this kind of casual shittistorefronts, which now house some people use it, as well as worrying about ness.” ECG aims to upend that. Fantastic of the three thousand items in inven- what would happen if word got back to describes the archetypal board gamer tory that line the store’s floor-to-ceil- my parents.” as the “um, actually” player who’s a real ing shelves. The brightly painted rooms stickler for the rules. Ben Walter, a staff flanking the store’s interior are the game member at Yale’s Office of Diversity café areas where, for ten or twenty bucks, and Inclusion by day and a Magic: the customers are free to play on one of the Gathering (Magic) regular by night, shop’s game nights. recalls the experience of playing at a With their Hell Fire’s Club baseball Magic convention, describing it as “a hat and long unruly hair, Fantastic inirules, lawyerly environment.” A lot of tially struck me as Eddie Munson from the fun in Magic, for Walter, lies in the Stranger Things come to life. Like Eddie, tabletop conversation during which alliFantastic grew up playing Dungeons and ances and rivalries are formed. ECG game Dragons, and evoking Eddie’s famous nights are typically more conversational guitar solo of Metallica’s “Master of and allow players to backtrack, whereas Puppets,” Fantastic had a brief career in official Magic games are played strictly the nineties Brooklyn musicscape, where by the book. If you blurt out any inacthey played in “loud angry bands.” curacies, Walter explains, the “um, actuThough Fantastic nonchalantly ally” gamers are quick to cut you off and answers that the store is queer-owned, recite the rulebook. He pauses, searching the abundant progressive imagery that for the right words to name this impulse. pervades the store—the massive rainbow “It becomes this very mansplainy, massidewalks just outside, the little queer culine desire to prove yourself by being Inside Elm City Games. identity flag stickers for sale—is very right . . . So it’s not fun, honestly.”

She happened to be in for a game intentional. As Fantastic affectionately For DnD game night—the store’s characterizes it, the store’s strategy is to of Armada with another player from the most popular game—Dungeon Masters ECG Discord, who only knew her by her (DMs) are briefed on ECG’s standards. be “aggressively progressive.”

“It’s important to put it really out username. They were making comfort- An institution in its own right, DnD is there that ‘hey, you can come here and able small talk before the match, until a collaborative game in which players

More than Play

Nithya Guthikonda / The New Journal

F

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illustration by kevin chen

Point of Departure

layout design by chris de santis

joined by Mockwind, a grouchy, money-chasing warlock; Garuda, an aloof, novel-writing Owlin Sorlock (a halfowl humanoid of a mixed class combining sorcerers and warlocks); Damion, a brooding hero-type fighter; Ranger, a bumbling Barbarian Dwarf with the catchphrase “It’s Dwarfing Time!”; and Dax, a pint-sized Fairy Ranger who doubles as a sheriff with an on-and-off Southern drawl. Snee, our ventriloquist Dungeon Master, led us through a storyline of his own creation—we six adventurers had been hired to take out a kobold infestation that was terrorizing a town.

attacks until it became my turn. For the first spell I would ever cast, I was ready to bring out the big guns. Under my breath, I announced my plan: “I wanna nuke ‘em.” Everyone pooled together dice for me to roll. It added up to twenty-two, more than enough to end the Kobold King in one blow. Snee grinned at me: “How do you wanna do this?” I described what came to mind: clutching the wand with both arms, I (as Kat) fired a giant orb of magic straight into the Kobold King, completely eviscerating him from the face of the earth upon contact. Complete K.O. The table reacted gleefully, perhaps with a tinge of pride, at the newcomer who dealt the finishing blow on the tough boss. Afterward, I got to keep the wand in Kat’s inventory, a token of triumph.

In the seven years since opening, the ECG community has been a revolving door. Fantastic explains: “We have some people that think they’re coming here temporarily and ended up staying a long time and other people who are here from the start of the first semester and then, two days after graduation, they’re gone. We see people that come to visit again, [although] they may have moved away three years ago.”

Though Brenda lives a town over and can’t drive, she makes it a point to visit the store whenever she can. “I’ve tried to duck back in because finding The front window of Elm City Games. a truly safe and accepting place in the gaming community—or in life in genWe marched through with Damion eral—is hard as hell for me sometimes.” and Dax at the helm, who had a good For her, and for quite a few other regucop, bad cop schtick going. The others lars who commute from out of town, the spewed out catchphrases in character inclusivity at ECG is worth it. (sound effects included) as I lucked out Come May, I’ll be moving out of by roleplaying with sparse words. Over New Haven. I might not see the guys I the course of the four-hour session, the played my very first game of DnD with guys chipped away at my introversion. again (Michael, Andrew, Terry, Roman, Roman, a retiree who commandeered Patrick, and Snee), but we’ve formed Ranger the Dwarf, won me over with a Discord thread named Kobold Cave. packs of M&Ms. As we looted the corpse I like the idea that I’m still tethered to of a champion we’d defeated, Terry them in some way, and that the Kobold interrupted, “We should let the newbies Cave we surmounted lingers somewhere have first pick.” Michael had picked up out there, no matter what. a powerful magic item—the Wand of As we wrap up our conversation on Fish Magic. In a gruff voice, Michael a quiet Sunday afternoon, Fantastic has presented the wand to me: “To congrat- to leave and greet their guests—friends ulate the youngin’ on her first adventure.” from a now-defunct gaming convenAndrew, who had been explaining the tion, coming to catch up over a round of game to me, smiled kindly: “It does a lot games. “We’re a social club built around of damage for a level one character.” games,” Fantastic grins as we walk out, The Wand of Fish Magic proved to “[but we’re] community first.” ∎ be quite pivotal. The final boss, a Kobold King backed by a wizard, had effortlessly thwarted my fellow adventurers’ Ashley Chin is a junior in Yale-nus.

Nithya Guthikonda / The New Journal

roleplay as adventurers of their own creation, banding together to take on a journey spun by the DM. Fantastic explains that during gameplay at ECG, general swearing is okay but casual homophobia, misogyny, or any hate speech is “like super not cool.” Fantastic continues, “Really it’s about having fun . . . We want people that are excited to share their love of DnD with new people.” They emphasize that “welcoming players of all backgrounds is a big priority to the organizers.”

In this spirit, ECG organizes the Elm City Adventure Squad, a beginner friendly, in-house program for DnD. Though Luke Mastalli-Kelly, software engineer by day and DM by night, is no stranger to running campaigns, he admits that there’s a lot more consideration that goes into programming a session for ECG than for the typical DnD campaign. “It needs to be inclusive in a wide variety of ways,” Mastalli-Kelly writes over Discord message. “I’ve [run DnD] games for everyone—from a kid who hadn’t played much DnD and mostly wanted to fish, to folks who have been playing since the very first editions of the game and are focused adventurers.” It strikes me how thoughtful Mastalli-Kelly has to be to include everyone in the game. For the fishing-obsessed kid, he had to find a way to have fishing advance the plot: “I think he eventually caught a fish that was grabbed by one of the Sahuagin [or a half-man, half-sea creature monster] stalking the boat. Gave him a unique reason to care about the threat!”

I couldn’t help but think back to the groups of friends I had seen through a window that very first time I happened by in one of the game rooms. MastalliKelly and his fiancée had gotten involved with game nights almost as soon as they moved to New Haven in January 2020.

He also hosts a separate DnD game night, spun out of friends he made from previous Elm City Adventure Squad games: “That’s how I actually met folks who turned out to be neighbors in my little apartment complex before I moved into a house.”

At this point, I was itching to join a game night at ECG. As luck would have it, a spot had opened up with the Elm City Adventure Squad. For my very first foray, I revived a character I had imagined from my 13-year-old fanfiction days: Kat—a hot, emo, dark magic-wielding, half-demon type of few words (officially, I was a Tiefling Warlock). Kat was

TheNewJournal May 2023

5

Critical Angle

Unlearning Surveillance As national conversations about policing in schools intensify, some New Haven Public School students question whether school resource officers actually make them safer.

By Elisa Cruz

L

ess than a mile from Yale’s central campus stands my alma mater Hill Regional Career High School.

There, it was normal to have a security guard blow a whistle in my face and bark at me and my friends to go to class because our lunch conversation lingered for a minute after the bell rang. School resource officers (SROs) patrolled the hallways, lunchrooms, and even bathrooms. Amidst this surveillance, I was confronted every day by the school’s lack of resources. Teachers often bought class materials out of pocket. The building lacked proper air conditioning. Hardly any school psychologists existed to match the needs of students. It was hard to accept that within this tight budget, money was used to fund more policing rather than more material support.

Starting in 1994, New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) established the SRO program—the integration of a police officer into school—to increase both security and support within school districts. SROs differ from security guards in that they are armed police officers. While security guards are not sworn police officers, they still participate in the surveillance of schools.

There’s a lack of available public data on SROs, including an explanation for what prompted NHPS to implement SROs in the first place. Now, the SRO program spans seventy school districts across Connecticut.

From my first day as an NHPS student, I was readily aware of our SROs and security guards. Our SRO was usually stationed downstairs, monitoring students as we walked through the metal detector. We 6

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also saw SROs outside in our hallways and bathrooms. I wondered if everyday tasks like finding a bathroom or walking to class needed to be policed. Whether we liked it or not, NHPS students were constantly confronted with surveillance. Yet it wasn’t until I was a junior that I was introduced to our psychologist and social workers. In some sense, it was clear who the New Haven Board of Education (NHBOE) wanted us to know.

students who felt uncomfortable around SROs and what the SROs represented: a system that allows officers to be brutal. This mainly stems from the sheer power they have over us—students, but most importantly, kids.

Last year, I witnessed our SRO—a fully armed police officer—slam a teenage girl against a brick wall, handcuff her, and lead her into a police car after a school fight.

My school’s SRO was twice the age and size of the girl. I cringed watching him seamlessly slam her against the wall. More concerning, we never received an explanation “You can’t be in for the severity of the SRO’s actions. I found this lack of transparency strange. How your neighborhood were we to rely on SROs for safety when without the police their actions seemed so arbitrary? Aside being there and can’t from the violence, the sight of an SRO’s navy blue uniform and police badge will be at school either,” always create discomfort for students who Jamila Washington, a have witnessed police brutality—either in their own lives or through the media.

20-year-old community SROs will always be a symbol of fear even organizer for Citywide, if they are not always putting their hands told me. “So, where’s on teenagers.

In my school and beyond it, students your safe place?” began organizing against SROs. Citywide Youth Coalition is a group of NHPS students demanding disinvestment in SROs While SROs never approached me and reinvestment in mental health supin a standoffish manner, I likely bene- port. Citywide hosted a district-wide fited from being labeled as “good”—I was walkout last May, where I joined a crowd heavily involved with extracurriculars and of seven hundred students from thirclose with staff, meaning I was not labeled teen high schools across New Haven. an “at-risk” kid. I am a Southeast Asian Chants of “Care not cops!” rang through woman, a demographic that doesn’t bear the streets, and the protest pressured the the main brunt of racialized police brutal- NHBOE to actualize their plan promised ity. However, I still stood in solidarity with back in April 2021: to implement more

social workers, counselors, and support personnel. We envisioned a better future for our schools through investing in restorative and transformative justice. We insisted that New Haven end its memorandum of understanding (MOU)—a written, legal agreement between NHPS and the New Haven Police Department (NHPD).We demanded a reallocation of six million dollars from this police budget to anti-bias and anti-racist social workers in NHPS, phasing out the SRO program.

After seeing how unwilling NHBOE was to meet with Citywide executives and students, Citywide worked with statewide coalitions to introduce Senate Bill 1095 into Connecticut’s legislature in February 2023. With this bill, Citywide and other state coalitions hope to increase the transparency of the SROs by having the MOUs and the job performance of SROs visible to each school. In light of nearly a year after this walkout and the implementation of this bill in July 2023, I sought to hear how students and other community members felt about the future of SROs in NHPS.

of students arrested each school year— feeding the school-to-prison pipeline. In the 2018 to 2019 school year, Black and Latine students were three times and one point six times more likely, respectively, to be arrested than their white counterparts.

The average percentage of Black students arrested in schools with SROs present was over seventeen percent higher than those without SROs. In this sense, SROs seem to be more adept in criminalizing students— the main demographic of NHPS—than creating a safer school.

Even then, the NHPD is no stranger to such brutality, employing officers like those who left Randy Cox paralyzed in June 2022 and tackled Shawn Marshall, a bipolar man, during a manic episode in January

Searching for a Safe Place ou can’t be in your “Y neighborhood without the police being there and can’t

be at school either,” Jamila Washington, a 20-year-old community organizer for Citywide, told me. “So, where’s your safe place?”

Seven years ago, Washington started organizing with Citywide after being invited by a friend to join Citywide’s “Dinner and Dialogue,” a program where New Haven residents have round table discussions about social issues over a meal. She told me she joined Citywide as a “socially anxious” NHPS student, but as we talked and joked, I could see the joyful and confident 20-yearold community organizer she’d grown to be.

Washington doesn’t support SROs in schools due to her lived experiences in NHPS, but her distrust in the system builds upon a growing body of information. Research by Connecticut Voices for Children demonstrates that SROs do not make schools measurably safer or improve academic outcomes, but their presence does greatly increase the number layout design by kevin chen

2021. This danger extends to SROs, employees in the same system. Upon a simple Google search, I found an Instagram promotional video from my SRO urging people to become good leaders for the New Haven youth. But the link before it was an article about a New Haven police officer who assaulted a man at a Fairfield bar. A mixture of shock and discomfort contorted my face as I confirmed that the police officer charged with this violent encounter was the same one who roamed our hallways. I found it almost dystopian to see this duality play out side-by-side online. There have been too many instances in which police officers have been unnecessarily aggressive for me to find it possible to connect with them.

Washington works alongside Alyssa Marie Cajigas, a director of the Citywide Youth Coalition. Cajigas is an NHPS alumna who has since dedicated her time to community organizing with Citywide.

As she chats with me enthusiastically about the work Citywide continues to do, her love for the NHPS community is evident.

“We believe that violence should never be the answer,” Cajigas told me, “and police should never be the first resort for discipline in schools.” She explained how police were called to address nonviolent situations such as a class interruption, which could easily be mended with proper social support.

A dual enrollment student at Hillhouse High School and Yale, Elsa Holahan, echoed Cajigas’s worries about policing. Perhaps she owes her conviction to her mother, who is a social worker, or to her own belief in schools where students “feel heard and create their most authentic self.” Regardless, Holahan chose to walk out to the Citywide’s protest last May. “There are power dynamics and it disrupts trust,” Holahan said about SROs before referring to the broader police system. “Students have had negative experiences and trauma.”

Holahan’s words remind me of Washington’s story about a teacher at her school would threaten to call SROs against the typecasted “bad” students—including those who skipped class often—to get them to “behave.” Holahan is adamant about the removal of SROs from Hillhouse.

After seeing the police cars parked outside and knowing there are students who have had negative experiences with the gun-wielding SRO, Holahan finds it impossible to ever develop any relationship with SROs. After all, there is no police officer roaming the hallways of the Humanities Quadrangle at Yale— another place where Holahan attends class.

I couldn’t help but chuckle at her joke that SROs are “glorified hall monitors.” I asked her if it would be possible to connect with SROs on an emotional level. Without hesitating a second, Holahan confidently answered “No,” before we both giggled at her eagerness.

But Cajigas emphasized that establishing a connection with SROs—whether a friendly relationship or one for mental support—can feel like the only option for some students when the officers are the TheNewJournal May 2023

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most accessible and visible choice. “There is [almost] no other resources for students in the schools ...to look for support and peer mentorship,” Cajigas told me. “Of course, they’re gonna rely on the only system available.”

Cajigas noted that despite these positive relationships formed out of necessity, SROs are part of an oppressive system that is tied to even the well-intended people: “The truth is that Black and Brown folks are oppressed because of a system, not because of individuals. These individuals just so happen to be a part of a horrible system.”

A Network of Support? ithin this complicated web W of systemic fault but individual kindness, SROs do embody useful support

systems for some members of NHPS. But these views often come with acknowledgments of the tension between individual trust and trust of the larger institution of the police force.

“I think he’s a nice person,” Ayush Patel, a senior at Hill Regional Career High School, says about his SRO. “We were setting up for a robotics event, and he was able to find a table for us.”

I saw a piece of myself in Patel. We both went to a predominantly white primary school and, as a result, we didn’t experience the surveillance of SROs until high school. His face tenses up as he scratches the back of his neck. He hesitantly admits that “[SRO presence] feels somewhat 8

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protective, but the fear of just weapons in general in school—even if it’s not within students—it’s just frightening.”

Patel’s experience highlights a contradiction. He knows that his SRO is not inherently evil. At the same time, he feels troubled knowing the SRO wields a gun and taser—weapons that disproportionately harm people who look like him and his peers.

Some students sympathize with New Haven’s vision of SROs and believe that they are effective protectors. Alex Aguirre, a junior at Hill Regional Career High School, recalls when a student got jumped by a group of other students during school dismissal. He believes that his SRO acted as a sign of “authority that can actually stop them [fighters],” and pulled students away, ultimately intervening midway through the fight. Aguirre views sros as the second line of intervention—only there if something “crazy” such as physical altercations happens, while social workers can deal with the “small” issues such as arguments.

A school psychologist I spoke with, who requested to remain anonymous due to concern over the security of their job, explained that they view social workers, school psychologists, and SROs all as a team of trusted adults. This team, in theory, acts as social support for students and reaches out based on whatever the student’s individual needs. A safe school climate, according to the psychologist, comes from building relationships between teachers and the mental health support team. The

psychologist expressed a fervent hope for increased mental health support as a way to provide more time and care for students’ specific needs. More importantly, they underscored that the students’ opinions in this conversation about SROs and mental health support will ultimately be the most vital, as they are the biggest stakeholders in this conversation.

Like the school psychologist, Patel and Aguirre both seemed to agree that SROs represent a degree of safety within NHPS. In a perverse cycle, however, this safety is temporary. We often observed a fight, saw the SRO and security guards help break it up, and then waited for the next one. Watching this, many students came to associate SROs with safety since they were a reactionary measure to immediately resolve a situation. But even if SROs do break up school fights, the underlying roots of this violence are not resolved. Often the fight continues off school grounds—including near our school bodega, where I’ve seen student videos circulating.

Despite differing views on SROs, both Patel and Aguirre supported Citywide’s protest, with Aguirre attending in solidarity with his friends who demanded better mental health support. Across their varying stances on SROs, the students I spoke with all just wanted to feel safe at schools and have an investment in more mental health services.

Dr. Wendy Decter, a teacher who recently left NHPS after seventeen years, echoed these fundamental concerns.

Decter explained how an ideal world

Unlearning Surveillance

would have more mental health resources to keep kids on track. She emphasized the importance of having as many people in school buildings to make student life easier. She hopes that SROs can be a reassuring presence for people as they are another route of adult support for students. She noted that some SROs become ingrained into the community, becoming familiar with students and their families.

“I think the SRO was a wonderful resource, they knew [students] from a totally different perspective than the teachers and the school administration,” Decter said, alluding to the idea that SROs come from students’ own communities. “There should have been hiring of as many social workers, school counselors, school psychologists as possible, and making them as available to the students in school as easily as they could be made.”

Within the status quo, some still believe the police to be the most effective form of safety. This is despite the fact that, as Cajigas pointed out, SROs have not been able to deter school shootings, even as far back as Columbine. In a hundred ninetyseven instances of gun violence at U.S. schools since 1999, SROs intervened successfully in only three instances.

Creating Safer Schools hen I imagine a safer and more W just school, I envision a police-free space. Imagining NHPS without SROs

can be difficult because surveilled schools are all that the majority of my peers have experienced—we have gotten desensitized.

While I have the privilege to draw upon my knowledge of an SRO-free school before high school, this position does not fix the widespread lack of students’ understanding about how the disinvestment in SROs will improve school health and culture.

At my middle school, much like NHPS, we would attend class, socialize with friends, and work in the library. But we did all these things without a police car parked alongside the school, police officers roaming the halls, and entering through a metal detector. These two experiences still coexist with one another. I have friends who have never experienced police in their schools, while others view it as unquestionably the norm. This tension raises further questions as to why SROs are still viewed as trusted and necessary figures by some groups in the NHPS community.

“What the hell does better New Haven Public Schools mean? For me, and for a lot

of my peers, it means having schools that nourish our souls in a way that actually matters,” Dave Cruz Bustamante, a youth community organizer and current NHPS student told me.

This pattern of SROs’ surveillance hasn’t shifted much since my or Washington’s years at high school. Although more SROs are allocated in larger schools, the students I talked with revealed that it didn’t matter their student population: each school had only one to three social workers—the same way I left the school.

With the staff ’s limited numbers and emotional bandwidth, it seems inevitable that NHPS students would experience mental exhaustion. Despite the seven hundred student turnout at the Citywide pro-

Imagining NHPS without SROs can be difficult because surveilled schools are all that the majority of my peers have experienced—we have gotten desensitized.

test, Cruz Bustamante, who now serves as an NHBOE student representative, told me the NHBOE “is taking very small steps like revising the MOU with the police department ...almost not noticeable at all.” They even admitted that by the end of their term, nothing entirely revolutionary would likely be changed about SROs due to the bureaucratic inactivity in the NHBOE. Instead of relying on reactionary figures like SROs, NHPS should instead look to preventive measures including hiring more healthcare professionals. Mental health professionals can intercept an issue before it manifests into something more harmful. This is especially vital as those with incomes below the federal poverty threshold and individuals, the main demographics of NHPS, are disproportionately

represented in the American carceral and legal system. Cajigas and Citywide have set out to transform this inequity, especially within the context of legislative work.

Washington and Cajigas both told me that their campaign against SROs is “only phase one”—they plan to rethink community security as a whole. Cajigas explained that Citywide is reflecting on other forms of monitoring, including if older community members were employed as monitors in the place of SROs and security guards. In practice, this intervention could look like a community member with no affiliation to the police entering the school, rather than pulling in outsider cops from neighboring towns. Cajigas emphasized the need for NHPS students to be served and protected by members of the same community, disaffiliated from a system that notoriously harms BIPOC. As an NHPS alum, I’ve now become disconnected from the experience of SROs I had a year ago. I no longer have a fully armed police officer watching every move my peers and I make out of fear we will break into a fight. Security guards no longer view my lunch container as a “weapon” since it’s glass. Yale is only a fifteen-minute walk from my old high school, yet my status as an Ivy League student has exempted me from being as surveilled by the police as I was in high school. At Yale, even when police roam around Cross Campus, they aren’t hounding students who are skipping lectures. The rationale behind this massive shift in surveillance has weighed on me.

Functioning for a year both at Yale and since the walkout prompted me to question whether we need SROs for a safe school environment. And though I went to an SRO-free school for most of my academic life, my four years in a surveilled school still linger within me. At my predominantly high school, we would rarely have toilet paper and grew accustomed to seeing police cars when we walked in through a metal detector. Now, I inhabit the world of a predominantly white Ivy League where students know truffle season in Milan and the most consistent police presence is guarding the exit to our libraries.

Though I am what feels like a world away, I still carry the same habits I did in high school, unzipping all six zippers of my backpack for a security check in libraries and speeding up when I walk by police cars.

I doubt I’ll lose them any time soon. ∎ Elisa Cruz is a first-year in Berkeley College.

TheNewJournal May 2023

9

To Care for a Community Peer-led policing alternative COMPASS has seen a successful rollout in the past five months. But can an organization bankrolled by the City and run by Yale achieve radical aims?

By Amelia Davidson

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layout design by Chris de Santis

left: nour tanush; Above: Christian Robles

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n the top floor of a converted Victorian home, in the heart of New Haven’s Dwight neighborhood, lives the city’s attempt at an alternative model to policing.

The old home is peaceful when I visit, its rooms awash in sunlight. Tenants putter from one floor to the next, their footsteps creaking against warm hardwood floors. This is a crisis respite house run by the nonprofit Continuum of Care, which provides refuge and short-term beds for people in crisis. “Some, but not enough,” says John Labieniec, one of multiple co-vice presidents at the organization.

Labieniec’s mild manner and casual dress— sweatshirt, long hair tied back—fit right in as he guides me upstairs to what could be mistaken for an attic bedroom. In this room, a new organization has moved in: Elm City COMPASS, short for “Compassionate Allies Serving Our Streets.” The initiative has been years in the making, envisioned as a clinician- and peer-led alternative to traditional policing in mental health and substance use crises. COMPASS has worked with three hundred and four people since its November 2022 launch (as of March 1), through a mix of responding to 911 calls and conducting proactive outreach.

Although COMPASS’s office has a distinctly cozy and communal feel, New Haven’s biggest institutional forces are at work in this Dwight home. Yale University manages COMPASS in a partnership with the New Haven city government, having secured $3.5 million of city and federal funding to administer the program. Yet, Yale’s name has been largely omitted from the COMPASS rollout.

COMPASS is one of the few initiatives across the country that is tangibly moving toward peerbased alternatives to policing. Yet its collaboration with New Haven police and its integration with some of New Haven’s most entrenched institutions—the city government and Yale University— alienates some long-time harm reduction advocates. COMPASS’s launch then begs the question: can an organization meant to disrupt the policing system still do so in collaboration with mainstream institutional mammoths?

“As bulldozers rolled over the tents that had once housed sixteen people, the COMPASS team members worked to find beds for those who were getting evicted.”

AN ALTERNATIVE TO POLICING OMPASS emerged from a time of “multiC ple pandemics,” Jack Tebes, COMPASS director and Yale Professor of Psychiatry, told me, “one hundreds of years old and one more recent.”

Tebes’ two pandemics—one being centuries of racism and police brutality, and the other being COVID-19—intertwined in the summer of 2020, as masked protestors marched in the streets and called for police abolition in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. In response, the city of New Haven appropriated funds for a civilian crisis 12

To Care for a Community

response team that would follow a new model of law enforcement and community care, soliciting applications from organizations up for the task.

Tebes and his colleagues at Yale’s Consultation Center had long worked on crisis response matters and were selected to spearhead the new initiative.

In the years of planning ahead of COMPASS’s launch, the initiative strove to involve New Haven residents as much as possible. Representatives from the city and Yale conducted focus groups and community forums, ultimately consulting more than two hundred and fifty community members, according to its website. Yale also subcontracted with Continuum of Care, long established in the world of New Haven crisis response, to provide what Labieniec calls “boots on the ground” for the COMPASS operation. With this collaboration, Labieniec became the coordinator of COMPASS’s crisis response team.

COMPASS was slated to begin in mid-2021, but the launch was delayed over four times as the city struggled to find a subcontractor and finalize its contract with Yale. The city also contended with police and fire unions who wanted to bargain over COMPASS’s plan of operation and the role that police and fire officials would play in its implementation. In August 2022, the police union filed a state labor board complaint saying that the city was going forward with the COMPASS launch without providing the launch plans to police.

Ultimately the bargaining was resolved, but it did delay COMPASS’s launch yet again through the later half of 2022.

When the crisis response operation did launch, it did so in the form of a “secondary response” team, one that would only go out on a call if requested by police and fire operations. This ongoing collaboration with police, although temporary, is leaving its mark.

In March, when city officials and police arrived at the West River, off Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, to clear the three-year-old Tent City encampment, COMPASS’s signature green jackets were present alongside them. As bulldozers rolled over the tents that had once housed sixteen people, the COMPASS team members worked to find beds for those who were getting evicted. One Tent City resident, Barry Lawson, told The New Haven Register: “I was going to get arrested, but then I got offered a place [to stay] on Edgewood” by the COMPASS team.

Despite the care COMPASS provided, in moments like the Tent City clearing, said housing advocate Mark Colville, “the roles get a little weird.” Colville’s organization, Amistad Catholic Worker, is based nearby in The Hill neighborhood and helped organize and sustain Tent City for years. He believes that COMPASS’s alignment with the city during the mass eviction—even while they were just administering care to the evicted— exemplifies the danger of a harm reduction TheNewJournal

Nour Tanush / The New Journal

The front of Amistad Catholic Worker on Rosette Street.

organization that works alongside police and city government.

“What I saw [during the Tent City clearing] was people from COMPASS accompanied by police in uniform and with guns. So to me, that sort of invalidates the whole thing,” Colville explained to me over the phone.

Colville’s model of community care is different from COMPASS’s, as he lives in a home directly alongside those he works with, including the former residents of Tent City. This generates a horizontal model of care in which neighbors help neighbors—without necessitating the involvement of police.

People who are unhoused from all over the state come to The Hill, Colville says, because “we take care of our own.”

May 2023

Amistad Catholic Worker runs a house to which anyone can come eat, pray, and receive donations. Following the Tent City demolition, they also allow unhoused people to camp in the backyard. The organization’s mission statement reads: “We seek to be a safe haven and a public nonviolent witness in our neighborhood, and always try to blur the distinction between the people who are serving and those being served.”

“That’s what we’re doing here, and we simply need the city to get out of the way and let us show them how to do it,” Colville emphasized.

At COMPASS, crisis response occurs only after police referral, generating a major departure from Colville’s model. Yet

To Care for a Community

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Chrisian Robles / The New Journal

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To Care for a Community

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there are aspects of COMPASS that do resemble forms of horizontal community care, such as the involvement of peers on their response teams. Two people from COMPASS respond to crisis calls: a licensed clinician and a peer recovery specialist who has experienced homelessness and/or substance use.

Between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., each two-person COMPASS team can respond to a call in an average of thirteen minutes.

When they do, COMPASS peer recovery specialist Nanette Campbell told me over the phone, the clinician will often take the immediate lead on crisis response, while the peer is there to relate to those in crisis and approach them in a more accessible manner than police or clinicians may be able to do.

Campbell is the primary peer on the COMPASS team and has been working in the field of peer crisis response for twenty years. She emphasized the importance of having a peer respond to a crisis, rather than just a clinician or an armed force: “It’s just different walks of life, and [police] don’t know what we know as far as mental health issues, substance issues,” Campbell told me, exhaustion in her voice at the end of her work day. “Me myself, I’ve lived that life. So just knowing about different things and what people are going through and meeting them where they are.”

COMPASS also does proactive outreach to areas that it deems crisis hotspots: “where there are drug overdoses, folks who look like they’re in need, folks who may be congregating during cold winter weather and may need to get to a warming center,” Tebes explained. During these outreach sessions, the two-person team distributes care packages and can respond if they see someone in distress. These efforts tend to be concentrated on the New Haven Green, along a stretch of Ella T. Grasso Boulevard in the Edgewood and West River neighborhoods, and at the end of the Boulevard south of The Hill. All are majority BIPOC and low-income neighborhoods with the exception of the Green, where demographics are affected by its close proximity to Yale.

COMPASS conducts its outreach without any police presence.

Yet Colville feels like the ongoing partnership with police— especially given that it is the only way the group responds to crisis calls—keeps COMPASS from being able to help in areas that do not want a police presence.

“I doubt that anyone on my block, except for me, is really aware that [COMPASS] is a thing,” Colville told me with a sigh.

“That’s fine, you know, it’s in its infancy. But in this neighborhood . . . we have a standing policy here, we don’t call the police.

So who knows if we will ever see [COMPASS].”

Both Tebes and Labieniec made it clear that this secondary response phase is temporary, and that there are plans for COMPASS to independently respond to crisis calls as soon as this summer. However, COMPASS would still remain a part of the 911 system. Tebes explained that Public Safety Answering Points (PSAP), which runs the 911 dispatch, would direct relevant 911 calls to COMPASS rather than uniformed police. In order to reach that point, however, COMPASS must collect enough data to understand where it would succeed as a solo actor, and with that data, draw up a standard to be used by 911 dispatchers.

This data comes with time, and the more COMPASS referrals that come from police and fire officials, the more useful this data can become.

Cover: The front of compass’s headquarters in New Haven’s Dwight neighborhood.

Top: The ornate bannister inside the building.

Bottom: A compass worker sits in the office.

May 2023

“In New Haven, it was always planned that COMPASS would grow into that [independent role],” Labieniec said. But that process takes time. Labieniec has traveled and met with leaders from Colorado and Iowa’s statewide non-police crisis response systems. And in both cases, “it was a process” to become disentangled from their existing police systems.

“If you’re not in it, you don’t realize how complicated it is,” Labieniec said.

On a later call, I asked him if he was concerned that the current phase of police partnership might alienate communities like Colville’s in The Hill. He responded that it would be impossible to get this project off the ground without collaborating with police. In order to help those in crisis, he believes the project needs to begin—even if it starts with the police.

“I don’t think you can effectively do what everyone is seeking for us to do without collaborating at some extent with everyone. And I think that includes the police,” Labieniec said emphatically. “If we don’t have positive relationships with the police and with the city and with everyone, we’re not going to be as successful for the people that actually need the help.”

Labieniec and Campbell both expressed to me their belief in the ways that COMPASS has helped, and will continue to help, people on the individual level. Campbell described a woman who refers to the team as “her saving angels” after they helped her get clean. Labieniec pointed me to a New Haven Independent story about a woman who COMPASS helped safely relocate off the street.

But COMPASS is not just the two-person response team, nor the house in Dwight. It is also an experiment in policing alternatives that is continuously debated in City Hall and litigated

by Yale and city lawyers. And at that macro level, some activists have begun to grow concerned—even those looking past police presence.

UNDER THE SHADOW OF YALE AND THE CITY ehind COMPASS’s slow, methodical, and data-driven B approach to policing alternatives—an approach that frustrates more radical, anti-police advocates like Colville—is Yale

and the New Haven government.

Last spring, Yale quietly became a driving force behind the COMPASS project. A publicly available, 36-page contract between Yale and the city shows that, in exchange for over $3.5 million in funding, Yale agreed to set up and run COMPASS for at least three years. More specifically, The Consultation Center at Yale University, which Tebes runs, would subcontract with Continuum of Care to launch the COMPASS team, and would then be able to collect data from the initiative for research purposes. This data includes COMPASS’s clients’ demographics like race, ethnicity, gender identity, and income—all of which Yale collects and shares with New Haven.

The Consultation Center has, for the last forty years, researched best practices for mental health crisis intervention, according to a video on the center’s website. The center partners with external organizations or bases projects off of affiliated faculties’ needs. One of these projects included running a culture and diversity training for the New Haven Police Department.

According to Tebes, Yale has made in-kind contributions, such as new hires and equipment, that will amount to up to

To Care for a Community

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$750,000 over the three-year duration of the contract. Continuum of Care has made additional in-kind contributions that will total around three hundred thousand dollars, Tebes said. As COMPASS’s main representative from Yale, Tebes manages the entire budget.

The partnership between the city and Yale, and the lack of publicity surrounding the matter, raised alarm bells for some. In May 2022, when the contract became public, Nichole Roxas and Alice Shen, two former Yale Psychiatry residents published an op-ed in The New Haven Independent titled “COMPASS Critics To City: Be Transparent.” They wrote that “as two community psychiatrists, our patients tell us they do not trust the police in New Haven and, more than that, they do not trust Yale.”

“How did Yale sneak in on the cut? Did the city solicit community input about who would receive the money and how it would be spent?

Would reported concerns be addressed?” the pair asked.

When I asked Tebes similar questions, he pointed to COMPASS’s Community Advisory Board as an important check on Yale’s involvement. The board currently contains nineteen New Haven residents from all walks of life, including one unhoused person. It meets four times a year in addition to separate small-group meetings and comes to decisions via group consensus on policies ranging from maintenance of the COMPASS website to what community resources it should provide. These meetings, according to Tebes, also ensure that Yale does not make any unilateral policy changes.

“We begin with humility, listening to community members, sharing any credit, centering our community, not centering Yale or ourselves,” Tebes added.

Faced with those same questions in the COMPASS office, Labieniec thought for a moment, and then quietly shared that he has not seen COMPASS’s affiliation with Yale as an alienating force when COMPASS helps out in the community.

“There’s been nothing but warm, welcoming, positive excitement,” he said. “I personally have not seen anything, and I’m very involved.” Labieniec oversees the team every day, and occasionally accompanies them on calls.

Colville would say otherwise. In his opinion, by taking up a huge amount of city land and then refusing to use their forty-two billion dollar endowment to help the citizens they displace, Yale has become a catalyst of homelessness and poverty in New Haven, making their sponsorship of COMPASS come across as too little, too late.

“It is the university and the city government that are sort of colluding in promoting this myth of scarcity,” Colville said, “as if land and resources are too scarce to take care of the most low-income people among us.”

Unlike Colville, David Agosta, a New Haven 16

“It is the university and the city government that are sort of colluding in promoting this myth of scarcity,”

To Care for a Community

disability rights activist and former member of COMPASS’s Community Advisory Board, takes no issue with Yale’s involvement in COMPASS. “We recognize that Yale has the smartest people in the world,” he said. “When they do something right, they do it right.”

Yet Agosta recently resigned from the board due to frustration with a different partnering institution: the city of New Haven. Although he repeatedly expressed his admiration for everyone involved in COMPASS, Agosta said that he could not remain on the board so long as the city refused to provide adequate beds and services for people without housing. He likened the COMPASS project, with the lack of current city resources for unhoused people, as “building a structure without a foundation.”

“It’s not about COMPASS; it’s that the mayor has not done his part to allow COMPASS to succeed. That’s why I resigned,” Agosta said. “If you talk to the folks there, there was evident frustration at the fact that there was no housing. You can’t really talk about it from the inside, so I had to do it from the outside.”

Colville also expressed concern at the city’s involvement with the project. Despite everything, he sees COMPASS as “a good concept.” However, he is critical of the current framework of New Haven’s government, and that within it, COMPASS will be unable to turn into the radical alternative to policing that it was originally envisioned to be.

“This happens all the time in New Haven,” he told me. “Is this just another liberal idea that usually tends to fizzle out at some point, especially when the cops start pushing back or when we get the next ‘law and order’ mayor?”

The current contract only guarantees COMPASS’s funding through June 2025, at which point New Haven, Yale, and Continuum of Care will have to renegotiate. A mayoral election is approaching, and as time passes from when public calls for policing alternatives had peaked in 2020, it is possible that COMPASS’s funding could dry up.

If it does, Labieniec will not let that mark the end of the initiative. Although Yale and the city of New Haven are large conglomerates, whose whims could change when it’s time to renew the contract in 2025, Continuum of Care is still a grassroots organization, and it is committed to COMPASS for the long run. Labieniec told me that he has already looked into alternative grants that could keep COMPASS up and running, should New Haven or Yale step out of the picture.

“Our agency is invested in this,” he said.

A solely nonprofit version of COMPASS, without the financial backing of the city or the datadriven work of Yale, might look radically different.

A non-Yale, non-governmental COMPASS would be missing a significant and consistent source of funding, the guidance of a city-run advisory board, and the data-driven operational approach TheNewJournal

Chrisian Robles / The New Journal

The side of compass’s headquarters.

that Labieniec says could not happen without the help of Yale.

But it might not have the same incentives to work closely with police, and could instead call directly on the city to provide more housing services and beds, as Agosta wants. Meanwhile, there would be a greater emphasis on Continuum of Care’s horizontal modes of aid, including the peer response team and the location of their respite centers.. This is the version of COMPASS that resembles a radical nonprofit organization—the version that is on full display in the Dwight attic office.

JUST THE BEGINNING? till shy of the six-month mark, COMPASS is only Steams beginning its work, as Tebes was quick to point out. COMPASS still only respond to crises during the daytime, and they

and fire officials. Both of these are on a timeline to change by the end of the summer. And with that time passing, Labieniec and Tebes both said, collaborations should continue to grow between COMPASS and the myriad harm reduction and homelessness organizations that exist in New Haven.

“We want to create the structure that this will be able to be going on for years to come,” Tebes said. “It’s very rewarding. It’s difficult, but it’s a good kind of difficult that we all want to do.”

But speaking to me from a communal home in The Hill, rather than a Yale office, Colville’s doubts remain unassuaged.

“Until [Yale and the city government] change their policies, I don’t see how they can be part of the solution,” said Colville. “. . . in terms of what their role should be, they should get the hell out of the way.” ∎

still act only as a secondary response for 911 calls, behind police

May 2023

To Care for a Community

Amelia Davidson is a junior in Pauli Murray College.

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FULL DISCLO

Yale’s CCE program aims to revolutionize campus sexua its student-led approach raises crucial questions about 18

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OSURE

al misconduct response, but t power and accountability.

By Megan Vaz layout design by etai smotrich-barr & kevin chen cover illustration by ETAI SMOTRICH-BARR

Editor’s note: K. requested that their identity be anonymized due to the sensitivity of their story.

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t the start of the Spring 2022 semester, K. was sexually assaulted.

They can’t recount everything that happened that night, due to the impacts of alcohol and post-traumatic stress disorder, but they remember meeting an older student from a campus club they were in at a fraternity party. They talked. It was suggestive. The two went back to his room. They weren’t in the right state of being to consent—and they didn’t consent.

K. had also just started their new job on campus. As a Communication and Consent Educator (CCE), they’d spend the rest of the semester attending trainings hosted by institutions like Title IX, planning events to educate students about sexual misconduct, and flipping through readings in preparation for weekly CCE meetings—all in the hopes of creating a healthier social and sexual culture at Yale. After they were raped in high school, K. spent years working to build more supportive structures for survivors of sexual assault at their school and local community. The opportunity to continue this with Yale’s CCE program was a large factor in their decision to enroll.

Specifically, K. kept working to make Yale a more comfortable environment for survivors of sexual violence with the CCE Survivor Support team, one of four “project groups” that CCEs serve in alongside their respective residential colleges.

Despite their time learning about and educating others on sexual misconduct as a CCE, they had trouble recognizing their own experience of sexual assault. They’d only begun processing the events of that night several months later on a summer trip to Europe—when they weren’t “CCE-ing,” they told me. Although they’d started to come to terms with their experience that summer, they tried to keep their trauma out of sight and out of mind come fall semester, avoiding thinking or speaking about it.

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In retrospect, K. asked: “Why do I not give myself the same care and concern as I would give literally any of my friends . . . especially as someone who is paid to talk about these kinds of things with people?”

the seminar discussed the DKE incident and that the program came amid the flurry of Yale’s responsive actions, Elmileik denied connection to the public uproar.

The first class of CCEs trained for their new roles in the summer of 2011. They held their inaugural he CCE program emerged partly in response first-year orientation workshops that fall. to widespread scrutiny of Yale’s sexual climate “These are difficult issues and require frank, both on and off campus. The program signaled thoughtful conversations—the kind of discussions an accountability shift inwards—toward a peer-to- students are often most willing to have with other peer system managing sexual misconduct and away students,” Boyd stated in a News article when the from the more bare bones administrative Title IX CCE program first kicked off. procedures.

Today, the student-led CCE program, which Melanie Boyd, Yale College Dean of Student the OGCC oversees, stands unique among other Affairs, helped launch the program in August sexual misconduct education and support systems 2011, about four months after the Department of at Yale. More than fifty undergraduates, distribEducation’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) began uted throughout all fourteen residential colleges investigating Yale for violating Title IX rules. The and diverse areas of student life, serve as CCEs. In headline-making Title IX complaint, raised by a an effort to change the campus’ social and sexgroup of sixteen Yale students and alumni, alleged ual climate as a whole, they hold “interventions,” that the University fostered a hostile sexual climate including informal conversations and more forand mishandled several cases of misconduct in mal workshops, like the mandatory Bystander recent years.

Intervention training for first-years.

The complaint highlighted several campus Deputy Title IX Coordinator Katie Shirley events, many of which remain infamous at Yale wrote to me that the Title IX office provides “guidmore than a decade later. In 2008, Zeta Psi pledges ance” on the primary content of CCE workshops. held a sign reading “We love Yale sluts!” outside of But it is typically fellow undergraduates that are the Women’s Center. In 2009, male students circu- responsible for educating their peers on how to prelated the “preseason scouting report,” a mass email vent sexual violence themselves—despite the heavy ranking dozens of female first-years by how many topics at hand and the complex web of sexual misbeers it would take to sleep with them. And in conduct policies and response systems at Yale. The October 2010, pledges of the Delta Kappa Epsilon University’s professionally staffed programs like fraternity (DKE) marched around Old Campus Title IX and the Sexual Harassment and Assault chanting “No means yes, yes means anal!” and other Response & Education center (SHARE), which misogynistic remarks. provides crisis support, counseling, and health and The day after the 2010 DKE incident, Boyd’s wellness care referrals for survivors, take a more Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) indirect role in outreach. seminar “Theorizing Sexual Violence” met at Title IX offers its own customizable workshops their usual time and place at the Hall of Graduate and training for campus organizations that request Studies, which is now the Humanities Quandrangle. them, according to its website. Shirley did not But instead of discussing the week’s scheduled cur- address my inquiry into what Title IX’s own trainriculum, the Yale Daily News reported, Boyd urged ing looks or whether these are mandatory for stustudents to reflect on a “script-breaking response” dents on their own. CCE Zoe Kanga ’24, who is on to campus sexual violence and imagine communi- the Title IX Student Advisory Committee, told me ty-oriented ways to respond to such incidents. that there are opportunities for students to speak Later that year, the University’s Task Force directly with the Title IX office about sexual mison Sexual Misconduct Education and Prevention, conduct at Yale, but that these opportunities aren’t composed of Yale faculty, convened in response to well advertised beyond CCEs’ workshops with firstthe DKE incident. They released a report recom- year students. mending that Yale “expand the pool of well-sup“We do, of course, advertise those resources ported, well-educated student educators” and “raise during our interventions. But I think after that it the level of student knowledge through mandatory kind of falls out,” Kanga said. “And I doubt that educational programs,” among other ideas. While anyone in their junior year after experiencing somethe CCE program began to take shape, Yale adopted thing is going to go dig through their archives and a flurry of other sexual misconduct response pro- find that one slip of paper that they received in their grams, including the University-Wide Committee CCE training first year.” on Sexual Misconduct (UWC), which investigates In her email to me, Shirley only described and adjudicates sexual misconduct cases. opportunities for student leaders employed by A proposed CCE program, according to Interim Yale—including CCEs, First-Year Counselors, Peer Assistant Dean of Student Affairs and Director of Liaisons, and Transfer Peer Advisors—to speak with the Office of Gender and Campus Culture (OGCC) her during open office hours. She added that she is Eilaf Elmileik, “grew out of ” Boyd’s WGSS seminar available to meet with CCEs one-on-one if they are in the fall of 2020. Though the News reported that interested in speaking about a particular area of the

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office’s work further. Despite the chances to connect mentioned by Shirley, CCE Aiden Magley ’25 told me that beyond trainings, collaboration between the CCEs and Title IX is sparse.

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“We have a tendency to over-intellectualize our experiences in a way that can be challenging to give enough space for the human, personal elements of those experiences,” K. explained.

“I have all this hefty consentbased vocabulary that I can use in an academic context.

But where does that leave space for my rage, and my pain, and my sadness?”

March May2023 2023

s their fall semester back to campus continued, K. couldn’t control the visceral reaction they felt when they saw their assailant in spaces they once felt safe in. Right before Thanksgiving break, they began speaking with Shirley, whom they were familiar with through CCE training, to secure a no-contact agreement between themselves and their assailant. They’d learned a little about no-contact measures through CCE training, but the intricacies of the process were still unclear.

Initially, K. believed that visiting the Title IX office would fix all of their problems. As a CCE, they directed people to the office all the time. But as they sat across from Shirley at each meeting, tackling the logistics of academic accommodations and social arrangement conditions in the new no-contact agreement, K. gradually understood they weren’t going to receive the emotional relief they needed.

Title IX’s supportive measures—and all of their limits—are laid out to CCEs during training and made accessible on the office’s website. Shirley and most Title IX administrators aren’t trained as therapists. Despite this, K. came into the process expecting more support than logistical accommodations.

They’d ultimately walk away emotionally unsatisfied, even though they’d later describe their experience in itself as “neutral.”

When students come to CCEs with disclosures of sexual misconduct, CCEs respond with a script designed by the OGCC. Usually, the CCE begins by informing the survivor that they are an educator, not a counselor. They emphasize that they’re available as support, but they aren’t trained to give advice or to offer solutions themselves. As someone talks through their experience, CCEs make sure to mimic their language as part of the motivational interviewing method, which prioritizes guiding students toward their own conclusions on their experiences.

During each conversation, the CCE presents the array of resources on campus available to students who state they have experienced sexual misconduct. If you’re looking for something like emotional counseling and cognitive behavioral therapy, SHARE may be the way to go. If you need to move rooms to distance yourself from your assailant, or even an ex, Title IX can help arrange accommodations.

And if you want to hold your assailant accountable through disciplinary consequences, you can book a consultation with the UWC. But the process may be lengthy.

As mandatory reporters, CCEs inform their OGCC supervisors of all disclosures, which are then reported to Title IX. Shirley then sends the survivor an email with resources and opportunities to follow up with the office, which they may or may not respond to.

As they navigated their own process, being a CCE made K. feel “helped and not helped.” From Full Disclosure

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SHARE

Sexual Harassment and Assault Response & Education Center Crisis support, counseling, and health and wellness care referrals for survivors Counselors are available any time at the 24/7 hotline: (203) 432-2000

Title IX Office Part of Yale’s obligation to respond to sex- and gender-based discrimination as required by federal law Compiles and reports disclosures of sexual misconduct Can provide accomodations such as a no-contact agreements

UWC

University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct Investigates and adjudicates sexual misconduct cases, with the power to discipline assailants Process involves a trial with evidence, lawyers, and cross-examination

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their own training, they recognized Shirley’s kindness toward survivors of sexual violence. Still, K. felt strange about approaching someone related to their job. They remembered thinking, “Man, this is really fucking weird.”

K. also initially felt awkward telling their bosses about the assault—after all, they were a University employee, and the OGCC coordinators were the ones who signed their paychecks. They ultimately grew comfortable enough to be vulnerable with them after a CCE friend reassured them that the nature of their work is to understand situations like theirs. Their friends in the program supported them through their experience, often offering them a place to talk through their emotions while providing a shoulder to rest on.

“We have a tendency to over-intellectualize our experiences in a way that can be challenging to give enough space for the human, personal elements of those experiences,” K. explained. “I have all this hefty consent-based vocabulary that I can use in an academic context. But where does that leave space for my rage, and my pain, and my sadness?”

When students process their feelings about a sexual situation, CCEs take care not to use words like “rape,” “harrassment,” or “assault” if the person does not do so themselves.

“If someone’s talking about a ‘really weird hook up,’ we just help them work through a ‘really weird hook up,’” Kanga explained to me. “We have the skills and the trainings to just be a validating and listening ear that I think really helps.”

Unlabeled incidents that are concerning to the CCEs—which CCE Maya Fonkeu ’25 called “events of concerns”—wouldn’t be officially reported to the OGCC or Title IX office, even if they’d be considered sexual misconduct based on Yale’s definitions. So, students would never get that email with supportive resources from Title IX, unless they labeled their experiences of misconduct on their own.

Naina Agrawal-Hardin ’25, an Associate Editor of The New Journal, works with the national organization Know Your IX, which aims to end sexual and dating violence in schools through education on survivors’ rights through Title IX. Because the CCE program and SHARE are often successful at providing students individual attention and support, Agrawal-Hardin said, many people may decide against going to Title IX or other administrative bodies for accommodations.

“On the one hand, it’s really excellent that students are able to circumvent these systems that often are traumatizing, are really lengthy, or really exhausting, or don’t always turn out in your favor,” she told me. “On another level . . .Yale has a lot more discretion about what numbers it discloses, and how it represents the scale of the issue on campus.”

Since privacy concerns and confidentiality rules govern Title IX and the UWC, it’s difficult to know how many people who make disclosures to CCEs ultimately end up going to the Title IX office for a follow-up. Most CCEs I spoke to estimated that the May 2023

majority of students who come to them do not continue onto Title IX, but stated that they couldn’t be completely sure. Shirley told me in her email that “many students who receive initial outreach from Title IX do follow up,” but declined to share more about numbers. Even if students decline to follow up with Title IX, the office’s official reports still include their disclosures.

Outside sexual misconduct surveys might provide more clarity. In the spring of 2019, Yale participated in the Association of American Universities’ Campus Climate Survey, which estimated that 38.7 percent of the women and 15.4 percent of the men at Yale College experienced some kind of sexual assault. The 2018-2019 student body totaled 5,964, indicating that at least 1,600 students experienced sexual assault. But from fall 2015 to spring 2019, Title IX received only two hundred forty-six disclosures of sexual assault, according to its semiannual reports on sexual misconduct cases.

Because Title IX is two semesters behind on releasing its reports, their most recent statistics on sexual misconduct at Yale date back to 2021. That year, there were a total of one hundred fifty-two disclosures of sexual harrassment, sexual assault, intimate partner violence, stalking, and other recognized forms of misconduct reported to Title IX, the UWC, and the Yale Police Department (YPD).

Seventeen of these disclosures involved the YPD, while ten primarily involved the UWC. Of the eight resolved UWC cases, the UWC found sufficient evidence of sexual misconduct in five. The outcome of those five resulted in “respondent-focused responses” including written reprimands, sexual consent awareness training, suspension, and expulsion.

When K. was weighing their options, they reckoned with their general beliefs against the punitive UWC system and the raw pain they experienced following the assault. K. knew ostracizing perpetrators didn’t necessarily call for a “growth mindset.” They believe putting perpetrators through the punitive system, whether it’s the UWC or the carceral system, can reproduce harm in the long run. But these beliefs didn’t change the fact that their assailant had harmed them, too. For a while, they struggled to reconcile their broader ideological beliefs on punishment with their personal feelings toward their assailant.

“I felt like being a CCE seems so much more like the former to me, and being a person felt like the latter,” K. confessed.

Although the CCE program and UWC were both created in 2011 in response to the public reckoning with sexual misconduct at Yale, the UWC representatives only spoke directly to the CCEs this past semester. The experience was “exciting” to CCE Josephine Cureton ’24.

“It definitely was not your typical CCE meeting at all,” she said.

During the usual CCE training at the start of each semester, representatives from SHARE and Title IX directly speak to the CCEs, with explanations of the UWC usually handled by the Title IX Full Disclosure

They believe putting perpetrators through the punitive system, whether it’s the UWC or the carceral system, can reproduce harm in the long run. But these beliefs didn’t change the fact that their assailant had harmed them, too. For a while, they struggled to reconcile their broader ideological beliefs on punishment with their personal feelings toward their assailant.

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representatives. They also tended to give far less extensive information on the process. When I asked Cureton about what she learned, she whipped out a notebook and flipped through a list of the complicated factors that go into the UWC’s investigation process: types of text and video evidence they accept, the amount needed to reject or move forward with complaints, students’ ability to hire their own lawyers, policies on the cross-examination of witnesses, and more.

The consultation with the UWC changed the way Cureton discusses paths forward with those who make disclosures. She wasn’t previously aware of much of the information presented, including the UWC’s “rigid” application of Yale’s definition of sexual misconduct to accept or reject complaints.

In order for a complaint to move forward with the UWC, investigators need to believe there is above a fifty percent chance that the event actually happened. They can also choose to reject evidence—for example, if investigators feel that a text message doesn’t say enough, they can toss that piece of evidence. Cureton never tells people they should go to any specific place, but the consultation confirmed to her that some institutional bodies are more likely to meet students’ immediate needs than others.

“I think normally if someone wants to go somewhere, SHARE is the place to go first because they are a lot better with guiding them with resources,” Cureton said. “I don’t think I can tell anyone in good conscience that the UWC is gonna solve all of your problems.”

Ultimately, healing for K. did not involve pursuing a response for their assailant through the UWC, but elsewhere. Meanwhile, they still wrestled with impostor syndrome when they reflected on their assault, often feeling torn between their identity as a CCE and their identity as a person. If anyone else had come to them as a CCE with a similar experience of sexual assault, K. told me in retrospect, they would have felt far more concerned about them than they did for themselves. They began to question whether they were good at their job, especially as they tried to balance their personal feelings towards assault with the education they received during CCE meetings.

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eyond their own experiences with sexual violence, CCEs’ special roles as both employees and students can put them in tricky or emotionally taxing situations when disclosures are made by people they know—or about people they know.

“Oftentimes there’s this feeling of ickiness,” Cureton told me, noting that her feelings usually depend on the specific situation. “It’s really hard to put into words.”

Magley, meanwhile, described situations where people he knew were perpetrators as “shocking, and scary, and sad, and disappointing.”

Because CCEs play a dual role of employee and student, their work status often impacts the ways they navigate friendships with other students. As soon as YCC President and CCE Julian Suh-Toma ’25 24

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In the spring of 2019, Yale participated in the Association of American Universities’ Campus Climate Survey, which estimated that 38.7 percent of the women and 15.4 percent of the men at Yale College experienced some kind of sexual assault. The 2018-2019 student body totaled 5,964.

From fall 2015 to spring 2019, Title IX received only 246 disclosures of sexual assault.

finished his CCE training, he informed his friends Cureton said. “But it still feels really awful and disthat he still wanted to be as intimate and support- heartening to hear some of these stories.” ive of a friend as possible, but that he was now a mandatory reporter on cases of misconduct. If they oing through the Title IX process spoke about any such experiences in front of him, changed the way K. interacted with the sexual they could end up receiving an email from Shirley. violence survivors who came to them for supReceiving and reporting disclosures, though a port. As a CCE, they began drawing clear distinctions clearly outlined aspect of CCEs’ responsibilities, can about the expectations people should have coming take a heavy emotional toll on students. YCC Vice into each support system, stressing that nothing President Fonkeu said she hadn’t initially imagined is a one-stop shop and that survivors can choose the range of duties and challenges the job would the resources they receive depending on their speentail, including the impacts that receiving disclo- cific needs. K.’s own path toward healing is of their sures would have on her own life. own making—involving the no-contact agreement, The distinction between the type of support cathartic conversations on friends’ common room CCEs are meant to give survivors and what they floors, visits to Yale Mental Health and Counseling, aren’t is murky, especially as CCEs themselves often and chats with their residential college dean. go to OGCC staff to check-in on their wellbeing, talk In the beginning, K. viewed the work of a CCE through their feelings, and encourage them to seek as having a more one-off approach, pointing people professional emotional support resources. to resources, maybe checking back in, but otherwise “I’ve definitely leaned on OGCC a lot of times having finished their portion of the job. But, K. told when those disclosures start to get heavy and sort me, their outlook on these conversations now signiof start to pervade into the other parts of my life,” fies “an ongoing relationship.” “[If a CCE-chat] does something for you, you’re Magley said. “The support that I got from staff members during various periods of more intense not done yet, come back to me as a CCE,” K. said. emotional labor from disclosures was really helpful.” “I’ll help you with step two.”

Instead of listing off resources for supElmileik wrote to me that CCEs may step back from the program if they feel doing so would be port as “or’s,” K. began to list them off as “and’s.” best for their wellbeing, and that it is possible for Understanding this would have helped them trestaff to assign them alternate office work if finances mendously when they came into the Title IX office are a concern. K. confirmed this to me—although expecting to be emotionally healed. they did not step back from the program when they CCEs, according to Elmileik, are supposed to be went through the Title IX process, Shirley men- liaisons between student survivors and administrationed taking a step back and performing alternate tive support systems—not primary point-people.

But CCEs themselves spoke to different levels of work as an option for them.

It’s difficult to determine the number of sexual engagement with students after initial disclosures. misconduct incidents that any CCE is told about, as Some told me that due to the confidentiality rules defined by Yale policies. Because CCEs don’t impose governing the Title IX process, they usually let their own definitions of what constitutes sexual students go their way with little continued contact, misconduct onto students, they sometimes talk leaving check-ins up to the survivors themselves. through the events of concern, which aren’t techni- Others said that they continued to check in after cally disclosures. In the past, Fonkeu has been trou- the disclosure through their own initiative, whether bled enough by some of these instances that she’s it be through text updates about new resources or a gone directly to her OGCC bosses for help, receiving coffee date where the assault is never even brought guidance in how to address the concerning dynam- up.

Ultimately, the challenges CCEs face go beyond ics through follow-up conversations.

Because CCEs must keep conversations with the already hefty responsibility of representing Yale students confidential, I didn’t ask her what the and the program well. Toeing the line between outcomes of these follow-ups could entail, nor did employee and student comes with a set of expecI push the CCEs to give me information on how tations from the students they serve, especially as specific disclosures impacted their individual rela- organizations sometimes rely on them to ‘fix’ a toxic tionships. But the overall impacts of these conver- culture. But at the end of the day, CCEs are students sations lingered. who experience the social and sexual climate at Yale The number of disclosures Cureton receives the same way the rest of us do. And no one’s an fluctuates over a given period of time based on expert. the social spaces she inhabits. Back when she was “Oftentimes, it’s easy to forget that we are stua member of a Greek life organization, she tended dents like everyone else,” Magley told me. “And to get more disclosures than she does now. She we go through similar things. And we struggle emphasized the difficulty of navigating disclosures in similar ways as some of the people that we’re from people she knows personally, and that people talking to.” ∎ tend to spring them on the CCEs at any time.

“Yes, you might be helping someone come to terms with and advance justice, and come to Megan Vaz is a sophomore in terms with something bad that happened to them,” Pierson College.

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Leaves of Service

Eli Whitney student Allis Ozornia grapples with the meaning of a Yale education after ten years of reproductive justice advocacy in South Texas.

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layout design & cover illustration by jessica sánchez

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By Grace Ellis

wenty-three years after her remained hers alone. For Allis, the abiloperation, Allis and I are sitting ity to retain the power of decision-makround 11 p.m. one night in ing in matters of reproductive healthcare together at the kitchen table of her November 2000, 16-year-old Allis defines reproductive justice. In 2013, she apartment in downtown New Haven.

Ozornia felt a sharp pain in her started advocating for her community in On the table between us, an accordion abdomen. By 8 a.m. the next morning, San Antonio, Texas. Her work as a doula, folder bursts with the records of her half of her reproductive system had been a community healer, focused on equip- activism: a laminated guide to forms of surgically removed. ping patients with the knowledge they birth control, a flier for a queer cumWhen Allis first mentioned the pain need to ensure their consent to medical bia dance party, a photocopied diato her mom earlier that day, she gram titled “aparato reproductor wasn’t alarmed: “Oh mija, this is femenino útero”—female reproducyour period. You’re getting cramps.” tive system uterus. A member of the After Allis fainted, they went to the Class of 2025, Allis is an Ethnicity, hospital, where “almost everyone Race, and Migration major and a [she] interacted with” asked if she full-time healthcare coordinator at was pregnant. She knew how irrelIntegrated Refugee and Immigrant evant the question of pregnancy was Services (IRIS) in New Haven. for her, and she tried to communiWith a Google Doc full of cate that to the doctors. “I came out questions and a half-eaten samosa, shortly after my recovery . . . and I I nervously shuffle around and drop went full-force lesbian.” my claw clip on the floor, twice. It’s As her doctor approached her not every day that I ask one of my with a second pregnancy test and a friends if I can turn a conversation raised eyebrow, Allis also knew that we would usually have over dinner “something was wrong.” Looking into a formal, on-the-record interback, Allis now understands that view. We decide to start with somethe doctor’s refusal to listen reduced thing familiar: the class we took her medical case to a stereotype together last semester. of Latine people. “To him, I was One day in September, Allis just a pregnant border teen,” Allis walked out of the classroom halfway through the seminar and didn’t says. “That was my first experience in not being heard by medical return. I remember the flash of her professionals.” yellow beanie disappearing through After her pregnancy tests came the doorway. When I ask her now back negative, her doctor found a why she left that day, she tells me tumor on her right ovary and told about how tired she was. Allis was her that he would perform an emeroverwhelmed, struggling to see the gency hysterectomy. “I was precopoint of continuing classes at Yale. cious enough to understand that “Going to school seemed unimportthis meant that I wasn’t going to be ant in the grand scheme of things able to have babies.” This is when because I was missing my family, my the hocicona in Allis kicked in. Her community, I was missing my dogs.” mom’s nickname for her, hocicona, She missed home. literally translates to “blabberHome, for Allis, extends beyond mouth.” Allis explains, “I have opinLaredo, the rural town in South ions and I say them.” Allis insisted Texas where she grew up. When that she wanted to have children, she thinks about home, she hears first explaining, then crying, then the chicharras, the dense whir of the yelling, while her doctor stared cicadas’ song swelling through “the blankly over his clipboard. smell of wet earth after it rains on a Top: Allis at Central Park during November break, 2022.

Bottom: Allis’ work space in downtown New Haven, April 2023.

An hour or so later he returned hot summer day.” She hears clatters of with a new plan: they would remove laughter over the cumbia music driftonly half of her reproductive system. He procedures is informed. ing between the stucco walls of her house didn’t explain why the surgery was necThroughout the two-thousand tens, on Mulberry Street in San Antonio. She essary, what would be removed, or what Allis’ activism led her to protests at the hears the squeaking of her bike’s ungreased steps Allis would need to take to heal. Texas State Capitol, to the front of wheels as she rides her bike through She woke up the next day with a “gash makeshift classrooms where eager stu- Oakland. “There’s this James Baldwin that ran from the top of [her] vaginal dents learned how to find their cervixes, quote ...I can’t really remember,” she tells wall to [her] belly button.” to the bedside of patients seeking abor- me. We find it later in her dog-eared copy Allis’ advocacy for herself that night tions and, eventually, to a class called of Giovanni’s Room: “Perhaps home is not in the emergency room ensured that the “Education and Empire” at Yale. That’s a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

For Allis, education is at the center decision to have or not have children where I met Allis.

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photos from allis ozornia

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Leaves of Service

emergency room. “I was reminded of 2022, she was rejected. what it felt like to have somebody else According to Professor Talya tell me what to do with my body,” Allis “TZB” Zemach-Bersin, who teaches “Education and Empire” and lectures remembers.

The surgery left Allis with one less in the Education Studies department, ovary and questions that still blink at her there were around ninety applications to like hospital fluorescents through the the class. On the Fall 2022 Canvas page darkness of her bedroom in the hours for “Education and Empire,” prerequibefore she falls asleep. Why had his first sites were listed as “None (Preference for thought been sterilization? Who were students who have already taken EDST 110)”. Allis had spent a decade teaching his other patients?

She wonders, “What happened to health literacy, but had not taken EDST the women who didn’t get a chance to 110, “Foundations in Education Studies,” and she had not expressed an interest in speak up?” the Education Studies program in her application. A few hours before Add/ Drop period ended, Professor ZemachBersin emailed her: there was an open spot. In the second week of the semester, she attended her first class.

The surgery left Allis with one “I’ll never forget on my first day TZB less ovary and questions that said heg– hag– ah, I can’t even prostill blink at her like hospital nounce it now! Hegemony.” Allis raised her hand to ask what the word meant, fluorescents through the Professor Zemach-Bersin explained, darkness of her bedroom in the and the class moved on. It seemed like hours before she falls asleep. everyone else knew the word, responding quickly with thoughtful connecWhy had his first thought been tions to the dense readings and other sterilization? Who were his o word salads. “I felt immediately that I other patients? llis launched Hojas de Servicio wasn’t supposed to be in that space.” in 2013 after the Texas State After the first day, though, Allis kept Legislature passed House Bill 2 (HB 2), coming to class, and eventually got off expanding statewide restrictions on the waitlist. Every time she stood on reproductive health care and abortion Wall Street before class, marshaling the providers. The ratification unearthed nerve to go inside, she reminded herself Allis’ memories from that night in the These are the questions that guided that she wanted to learn. And, she reaAllis’ work in the reproductive justice soned, wasn’t that why she came to Yale Allis offered massages through movement. After HB 2’s ratification, the in the first place?

Leaves of Service. number of women’s healthcare clinics Well, part of the reason. In her that offered abortions reduced by half health advocacy work, she noticed the in the span of three years, and patients power knowledge could hold. By the who couldn’t afford healthcare or find time Allis applied to San Antonio a clinic near them sought alternatives. Community College (SAC) in 2018, Allis Through her work on Hojas de Servicio, had worked as a doula for five years, seeAllis offered an alternative in the ing firsthand how information about form of conversations and pamphlets birth control and obtaining safe aborexchanged between friends with a con- tions could change her clients’ lives. The crete, practical goal: expanding access knowledge she learned and shared in to informed health care. Knowledge, in her work as a doula, though, had not Allis’ view, was something to share. earned Allis a stable income. In higher At Yale, the knowledge that Allis education, she searched for the currency, had cherished in her work as an activist intellectual and literal, that she needed took a distorted form. It was compressed to build a more financially stable life. into 250-word Canvas discussion posts While Allis was studying biology and castle-side classrooms. Allis found at SAC, the word “teratoma” unboxed a that Yalies trade knowledge, too, but memory. Allis finally grasped the scias currency: a well-written paper in ence behind what happened to her in exchange for an A, an oozing email 2000—that her tumor, a teratoma, was in exchange for acceptance to a class. born in her reproductive cells. There, the When Allis applied to “Education and teratoma grew as it collected nearby tisEmpire” during spring registration in sues into a dense mass.

of the irrevocable condition she calls home. Through the ten years she spent organizing in the reproductive justice movement, she was a student and a teacher. She learned from fellow activists in late-night conversations and cross-legged knowledge-sharing circles.

She taught her students reproductive health literacy in living rooms, massage studios, and abortion clinics.

“This is how I started.” Allis gestures to a flier in the middle of the table that advertised what she considers her first foray into mutual aid work as a doula.

Under the title, Hojas de Servicio, white flowers bloom on a black background. It reads: “Leaves of Service.” The services Allis offered included massages, consultations on contraceptives, and tutorials to help her clients understand their anatomy.

In exchange, she accepted any amount clients could afford to pay, or any item they could barter (on one occasion, three bottles of kombucha). Allis’ flier summarizes her goal: to “make alternative therapies accessible to the San Antonio community who are unable to afford holistic health care.”

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Leaves of Service

Gathering this information cleared the shame and confusion that had obscured her memories of the surgery.

“It was a relief for me.” Beyond relief, Allis began to feel she had control over her understanding of the surgery. At SAC, Allis realized the knowledge that she learned in a higher education space could make her feel powerful.

Encouraged by her experience at SAC, Allis applied to four-year colleges in Texas, wanting to stay close to home. Her top choice was the University of Texas at Austin. But she knew she couldn’t afford to pay for tuition, so she Googled “undergrad for nontraditional students big endowment,” and the Eli Whitney program popped up.

It was the first time Allis had thought about Yale since the nineties, when she watched Jessica’s meltdown after the Ivy League rejected her in the sitcom Saved by the Bell. When Yale accepted Allis with an offer that would cover her tuition and rent, she figured, why not? “I was tired of being broke.”

A year into her time at Yale, Allis felt far away from home and far away from the power in knowledge she found at SAC. She was battling new questions: Why did she come to Yale, and why should she stay here?

These are the questions we mull over while we sit across from each other in Allis’ apartment. The awkwardness of our interview subsides, and we talk about how Allis’ years of reproductive justice work connect to her life as an Eli Whitney student.

After HB 2 passed in 2013, Allis didn’t launch Hojas de Servicio right away. The shape her activism would take was not clear to Allis until she got a call from her friend and reproductive justice activist, Serpentina. Allis met Ser when she was living in California in 2010. Across the dance floor at a West Oakland music festival, Allis saw “this beautiful statuesque person.” Ser stands over six feet, Allis adds, raising her hands over her head to demonstrate: “like, tall.”

“I went up to them and just started dancing with them, and that was the beginning of our friendship,” Allis says. At the time, Allis was training in massage therapy, and Ser was working on their undergraduate thesis at the University of California, Berkeley: “Forced Sterilizations in Peru during the Fujimori Dictatorship.”

Before Allis met Ser, she approached college students with some suspicion. “All throughout my

Allis and Ser outside of Allis’ house on Mulberry Street the morning after “Know Yo Self ” in San Antonio, Texas, September 2013.

“[Ser] was the first academic that I didn’t feel that with,” Allis explains.

They were a radical activist who orgaAt Yale, the knowledge that nized against institutional structures of oppression, and they were a sharp critAllis had cherished in her ical thinker who leveraged institutional work as an activist took power to achieve their goals.

Allis remembers staying up late with a distorted form. It was Ser, “talking feministy stuff.” While they compressed into 250-word were talking about Ser’s research on sterCanvas discussion posts ilization, a question that had lingered in Allis’ mind since the night of her surgery and castle-side classrooms. resurfaced. If it was possible to save half Allis found that Yalies her reproductive system in the end, why trade knowledge, too, but had sterilization been her doctor’s first course of action? as currency: a well-written Through her conversations with Ser, paper in exchange for an A, an Allis learned about the romance between oozing email in exchange for eugenics and reproductive healthcare for Latine patients in America. She learned acceptance to a class. about the widespread sterilization of Puerto Rican women throughout the twentieth century by doctors who advertwenties,” Allis remembers, “I was tised la operación as the only available the person basically telling people birth control. She learned about the that college wasn’t needed to measure “twenty thousand patients recommended someone’s intellect.” She perceived a for sterilization between 1919 and 1953” divide between radicals, who learned in California, patients who were disprofrom their communities, and academ- portionately Latine. She learned about ics, who learned from a bank of pre- how the funding Margeret Sanger and Planned Parenthood provided for the scriptive knowledge.

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Leaves of Service

Allis and Awa meet for brunch in the Salamanca district of Madrid, Spain, June 2022.

Puerto Rican pill trials in the nine- institution that had endowed students teen-fifties and the history of feminists with knowledge they leveraged to harm who dismissed Latine patients’ agency, the communities she had advocated to minimizing the experiences of those protect. who willingly chose sterilization.

The disconnect that Allis perceived Through the lens of her new knowl- between the Eli Whitney program and her edge, Allis was able to view her brush “matriarchal, queer, activist, artist” commuwith sterilization in context of this col- nity from Texas deepened her hesitations. lective history. With Ser, Allis pieced She remembers that the first event, a dinthrough these accounts, the current state ner for accepted Eli students, “felt very of sterilizations in the U.S., and the ques- cis male, hetero, military—just the total tions that these realities raise about race, opposite of the world I was coming from.” gender, and bodily autonomy until the At that dinner, Allis met Awa, an sun turned the Oakland skyline shades Eli Whitney student studying Molecular, of orange.

Developmental, and Cellular Biology.

Allis hoped that, at Yale, she would Awa remembers Allis’ “very bubbly,” continue the critical conversations that enthusiastic voice responding, “wow, she had started with Ser in Oakland, but like water?” when Awa introduced herher suspicion toward academia hadn’t self. Reflecting on that moment, Allis subsided. Academia was central to the thinks it’s fitting that Awa’s name transstructures of power that Allis aimed to lates to water “because she has been like disrupt through her healthcare advo- water for me in this experience [at Yale]. cacy. Yale, she knows, is deeply rooted She’s been necessary, and I’m so grateful in these power structures. The American for her and to her.”

Eugenics Society was headquartered at Awa resonated with Allis’ experiYale from 1926 to 1938, and supported ence of coming to Yale with knowledge legislation that permitted involuntary that did not fit a Western standard. Awa sterilizations while Yale-educated doc- had worked as a nurse in Senegal for tors put law into practice. Allis strug- five years before she immigrated to the gled to see how she would learn at an U.S. in 2018. Finding that her credentials 30

May 2023 TheNewJournal

didn’t transfer to the American medical system, Awa enrolled at Georgia State to study biology. When she noticed a message from the Eli Whitney program in her inbox, she thought it was a spam email. Like Allis, she only knew Yale from American TV dramas where hot, rich teenagers agonize over acceptances.

Bonding over their commitment to healthcare and their confusion about their sudden transformation into Yalies, Allis and Awa became close friends.

When Allis is thinking about something she learned in class, when she needs someone to give her a ride, when she needs a sounding board for her frustrations about Yale, she calls Awa. “Awa has been everything for me.”

Allis remembers how Ser captured that “everything” feeling too. More than an academic, Ser was “a punk, an artist, a radical thinker, and [a] critic,” and they were the friend Allis turned to when she felt frustrated and confused after HB 2 was passed.

In July 2013, Ser called Allis with an idea: would Allis help them host a knowledge share? By then, Allis had moved to San Antonio, and Ser flew down from the West Coast to join her.

Leaves of Service

They started planning “Know Yo Self,” a see how much power can be shared in day-long workshop where Allis and Ser a non-academic way.”

By the time Allis came to Yale, she taught participants skills for reproductive health literacy, ranging from mas- knew how powerful knowledge could sage techniques to information about be outside an academic space from her healthcare advocacy as a doula, and she menstruation.

Of the roughly twenty people who had a sense of how powerful knowledge participated in “Know Yo Self,” some could be within academia from her were full-time community organizers experience at SAC. In “Education and while others worked at reproductive Empire,” Allis didn’t find that power healthcare clinics. Some had children again until she read A Third University while others had no interest in becom- is Possible by la paperson in late October ing parents. Allis describes the commu- last semester.­­­ I ask Allis about the book while nity she built around “Know Yo Self ” as “tight-knit,” knotted together at the we sit outside of the Beinecke, a week heart of San Antonio by their queer- after our first interview in her apartness, and their commitment to making ment. She takes it out of her backpack.

Its exterior is unimposing, a bright reproductive healthcare accessible.

The group of attendees gathered for blue cover holding a thin seventy pages, “Know Yo Self ’s” main activity: a lesson hardly bigger than my hand. The intein how to use a speculum to perform a rior, though, is a dense work of scholself-exam of their cervixes—the muscular tissue that connects the uterus to the vagina. Some gynecologists advise against checking your cervix, since it can be difficult to understand how the tissue should feel, and doctors will usually perform the exam during regular visits.

“I wanted people to But for communities that can’t access know what’s going on consistent health care, Allis emphasizes in their bodies before the important gap in knowledge that self-exams can fill. “When you can’t they let anyone else afford to go to the gynecologist,” she handle their insides.” explains, people “learn to do things their own way . . . People are going to stick things in their vagina. People are going to have abortions.”

Allis emphasizes that there can be a risk in a self-driven approach to healthcare if your speculum isn’t sanitized or you don’t understand your anatomy: arship full of obscure allusions to film “That’s why education is so important.” theory and sentences like “we have the By teaching workshop participants how pitfall of anthropocentrism.” It is the to examine themselves safely, Allis and kind of book that Allis would have Ser offered them practical reproductive once dismissed as stuffy philosophy, far health knowledge—the ability to know removed from the practical knowledge how their body usually looks and feels, that she considered empowering.

One quote in Allis’ copy is underso that when something doesn’t feel lined deeply enough to indent the page: right, they can seek help.

At “Know Yo Self,” Allis saw her “The university is an assemblage. It is cervix for the first time, and she cried. a giant machine composed of myriad “I cried because I was seeing a part of working parts, multiple systems. Each my system that was handled many part can still be thought of as a disyears before by strangers.” In that crete organism to be unplugged and moment, Allis’ desire to help members replugged somewhere else.” In the marof her community advocate for them- gin, Allis noted, “Thinking of myself as selves crystallized. “I wanted people part of an assemblage . . . helps ease the to know what’s going on in their bod- mounting pressure of success that this ies before they let anyone else han- place perpetuates.”

She explains her note to me: “I dle their insides.” The workshop was a turning point for Allis. “It ignited think ultimately the first weeks I was in something in me that allowed me to TZB’s class . . . I felt confused because up

until that point I had interpreted success in this place on what we see like on the pamphlets and what we see at orientations, becoming the next Ian Shapiro.” When she read the book, the knowledge Allis understood from her life as an activist and the knowledge she learned at Yale clicked into alignment.

“Thinking of myself as just this piece of an assemblage where I can plug and plug whenever I want gave me so much agency.” The pressure Allis felt to fit what she perceived as the Yale version of success lifted. “[The book] kind of gave me my power back.” For Allis, this power resides in her ability to retool the knowledge she absorbs from texts like A Third University is Possible and classes like “Education and Empire” to suit the version of success she strives for in her advocacy.

Now, Allis’ successes branch through New Haven. At IRIS, Allis works with the Services for Undocumented Neighbors team to help immigrants who are new to New Haven navigate the healthcare system. At an academic forum in April, Allis read an introduction for Awa before she presented her biomedical research on malaria. At Professor Zemach-Bersin’s house, Allis throws a ball for TZB’s frenetic Boston terrier, Frankie, while they catch up on life and work.

Allis and I became friends after she read A Third University is Possible, when she reached out to me to ask if I wanted to get a coffee. It was early November, and we sat outside of the Blue State behind the business school with our laptops between us, chatting and workshopping ideas for an upcoming paper.

By the time we finished talking, Blue State was closed and we were both significantly puffier, having layered on hats and sweaters when the setting sun dragged the temperature down with it.

As we sit outside of the Beinecke five months later, a breeze lifts the warbles of returning birds over the rumble of traffic from York Street. Behind us, the Schwarzman Center announces itself in an incontrovertible wall of stone, but we are too busy to notice, laughing over the story I tell Allis about my first pap smear.

It’s one of the first days of spring, and the leaves are budding.∎ Grace Ellis is a sophomore in Benjamin Franklin College.

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Isle of Palms After “Giverny” by Ian Pople Summer pollen settled on the taupe plywood fence you leaned over to pet the neighbors’ full-grown pig, its belly dragging the ground in the yard covered with rusted toys and inflatable pools. You stained your best white swimsuit.

Then, through the pale pink and green of the pier, we saw the umbrellas in yellow stripes and the rainbow candyfloss ones, all in front of the mural of a woman looking at the ocean through a telescope, the sides of the telescope painted grey and flat because the glass, the reflection, the clarity, was complicated, and so the patch was painted over and repainted several times, to perfect the mistake, and so the woman was looking at nothing at all, except her own face— round like a full moon over the Gulf, but mostly blank. You declared the mural super, remarkable, then sprinted into the Atlantic, grinning as you showed me a discarded styrofoam cup you found in the waves, as if it was (?) a trophy.

I feel like this is an important detail.

That night we ate linguini on the porch

Cherenkov Each blueberry broke its thin shell and bled, turning the whole pancake sick.

I tossed it, tried again, facing the window With an egg-blue frame that revealed The sea silently breaking and the boys Tossing a navy object, squirming in the air like a fish.

I called them boys though we were the same age. In the private sphere I was a woman; In public, a girl. Meaning I was Both trusted and instructed to make breakfast.

I held the bowl with both hands And poured the dough into the pan.

Blue floor, blue fan, blue air around the blue Walls with the blue lesion showing The blue sea and sky—the entire room Covered in expectations for me Like the light of radiation whose hue Eclipses everything, even its own name.

Charlotte Hughes

during a summer thunderstorm, and you were laughing while branches were falling in the backyard, covering moss green spots with grey flashes, and I was looking at you as if I was peering through that woman’s telescope, a telescope warped by the girls who had held it, who had sung of its sight, who had sung of brief love in the summer.

Charlotte Hughes 32

illustrations by charlotte rica

TheNewJournal

Personal Essay

Metamorphosis A writer reflects on Indigenous identity following Yale’s repatriation of the iwi kūpuna.

By Connor Arakaki

not see the iwi kūpuna1, but We could not have completed this repa- iwi are collected. Ayau and Tengan outI did their presence hollowed my bones. triation without the passage of the line common justifications for the colBeside me in the cramped backseat Native American Graves Protection lection of iwi kūpuna: use in eugenic

of a minivan, beneath the exhausted light and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, studies and anthropological studies of a of a New England autumn afternoon, which, by U.S. federal law, mandates “disappearing race,” sales to collectors or beneath layers of carefully wrapped black “the return of human remains, funerary educational institutions, and removal as cloth, beneath a box, lie the mandibles objects, sacred objects, and objects of a consequence of urbanization. Preceded and teeth of unnumbered, unidentified patrimony to lineal descendants, Native by the repatriation work of contempokanaka maoli2. The gray sky framed by American tribes, Alaskan Natives, and rary Native Hawaiian leaders, October’s the car window becomes my imaginative Native Hawaiian organizations.” In 2014, repatriation is indebted to the strength canvas for the iwi; the cultural protocol the Peabody intended to repatriate these and perseverance of all the kanaka maoli of traditional Native Hawaiian repatri- specific iwi to Hawai‘i; however, they were who have repatriated before us. ation prohibits wahine3 from any direct unknowingly separated from their larger Although the seed of a lineage, this interface with them. Josh, who is able to shipment and remained in museum stor- repatriation was the first at Yale to be led handle the iwi, describes them to me as age. Eight years later, Professor Hobart by the kanaka maoli of the University’s cold, stripped of humanity by the scien- found the iwi during a Peabody tour and, community. The increase in kanaka tific method, displaced for the sake of decisively, held the museum account- maoli involvement during this repatriamuseum archival preservation. I consider able to initiate another repatriation. tion compared to those past is not only it a blessing that cultural protocol shields October’s repatriation comes from reflective of Professor Hobart’s leaderme from seeing this forced displacement a lineage of contemporary Native ship, but also of the unprecedented numfrom all axes of existence, though I per- Hawaiian repatriation work that aims to ber of kanaka maoli now at Yale. The four sist to imagine their vitality. heal the wounds of a violent colonial past. of us kanaka maoli met daily to learn On October 4, 2022, Hi‘ilei Hobart, In their essay “Ka Huaka‘i O Nā ‘Ōiwi: lyrics, practice reciting our mo‘okū‘auAssistant Professor of Native and The Journey Home”, Native Hawaiian hau4 for as many generations back as Indigenous Studies, participated along- repatriation scholars Edward Halealoha we knew, refine intonation and pronunside undergraduates Kala‘i Anderson Ayau and Ty Kāwika Tengan write that ciation, and most importantly, harness ’25, Joshua Ching ’26, and I in a Native colonialism has alienated kanaka maoli our voice. Preceded by a dense week of Hawaiian ceremonial repatriation of from their lands, histories, and gods. At cultural programming—including the iwi kūpuna housed in the Yale Peabody the epicenter of this alienation is the memorization of anchor pule5 and oli6 Museum since the eighteen-seventies. desecration of gravesites, through which that totaled over eighty lyrical lines of †

1

Translation note: ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i is a multivalent language that engenders layers of context, rendering the English language insufficient to wholly capture and convey meaning. For the sake of clarity, English definitions and contextual explanations of the ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i used in this essay will be provided. Unless otherwise noted, translations are from scholars Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert for Hawaiian Dictionary.

Iwi kūpuna means “ancestral bone”.

May 2023

2

3 ⁴

Kānaka maoli refers to “any descendant of the seafaring people who arrived nearly two thousand years ago at ko Hawai‘i Pae ‘Āina (the island chain known today as the Hawaiian Islands). Over hundreds of generations, our language and culture evolved, shaping us into a distinct people referred to today as Hawaiians”.

Wahine means “women”.

Mo‘okū‘auhau means “genealogy”.

layout design & cover illustration by kevin chen

33

Metamorphosis A portrait of Connor’s great grandmother, Leina‘ala Poepoe.

I am the negative space of my lineage, lost somewhere between my future and past.

‘ōlelo7—the completion of October’s repatriation is indebted to the teachings of cultural practitioners Mana Caceres, Kalehua Caceres, and Halealoha Ayau.

It is the day before repatriation, and I am the only customer in Atticus Bookstore Cafe. I trade out my annotated copy of Aeschylus’ Oresteia for the twelve pages of repatriation cultural protocol that I need to have pa‘a8 in a matter of hours. Though a plurality of identity is stitched into my seams, it threads the distance within myself. Every line of Greek tragedy I read spins a web between New Haven and Hawai‘i, and every missed diacritical and mispronounced word in ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i bares my entanglement.

I mouth Pule Ikaika—the first prayer of the ceremony, which asks for the strength of our ancestors to support the work of repatriation—in a hushed voice, like a secret. E ho‘ōla iā mākou i nā mea Hawai‘i kūpono / E ho‘āla iā mākou i ka na‘au pono no kēia hana / E ho‘ohui iā mākou i ho‘okahi mana‘o. Grant life to us in the true Hawaiian sense / Awaken within us the true depth of this work / Allow us to become one in mind.

The irony is not lost on me. Plurality is self-canceling. Plurality is paradoxically alienating.

I am silent, but returning to my corroded mother tongue provokes sobs that 5 ⁶ ⁷

34

can be heard from Hawai‘i. I am the words I don’t speak. I am the memories of home I don’t remember. I am the logical gaps of my freshman year philosophy, yearning for a satiating ontological proof in a college whose history is antithetical to my own existence. I am the negative space of my lineage, lost somewhere between my future and past.

The morning of the ceremony, I dress in all black. Josh and I eat breakfast together in silence. We meet Kala‘i and Professor Hobart. There is not much said between us kanaka maoli, but I know we are together. The outside is bright, and the inside is dark. We enter the room at the Peabody West Campus where the iwi are housed. All the lights are off. The day is young, and the room is ageless. Kala‘i immediately flicks pī kai9 containing ‘olena1⁰ sea salt from Hawai‘i onto us and all. Drops of home trickle down my forehead. We begin. Kala‘i and Josh together cut the cloth that will be wrapped around the iwi to keep them in Pō11. We recite the oli and anchor pule.

We recite our individual mo‘okū‘auhau to tell the iwi kūpuna whom we come from. Josh and Kala‘i take inventory of the iwi kūpuna, and there is an error. Inconsistent labeling. But because we are all together, we are calm and we continue. Kala‘i and Josh together clarify

Pule means “prayer, magic spell, incantation” Oli means “chant that was not danced to, especially with prolonged phrases chanted in one breath, often with a trill at the end of each phrase”. ‘Ōlelo means “language”.

May 2023 TheNewJournal

⁸ ⁹ ¹⁰

the error with the Peabody staff. They, together, wrap the iwi. Kala‘i flicks pī kai again onto us and all that surrounds us to cleanse the space. We leave together as one, iwi in hand.

From New Haven, we drive to Poughkeepsie, New York, inbound to Vassar College. There, we will perform the repatriation ceremony again with Halealoha Ayau and another kanaka maoli student, so they can return the iwi back to Hawai‘i. In the backseat of the van, I try to imagine the iwi kūpuna.

Restless in a small city called New Haven, an ocean away from home, they were here centuries before I could even fathom my existence in the Northeast.

Their remains are also in Vassar College.

And in Harvard University, Dartmouth College, the Smithsonian Museum, and more institutions spanning continents. It is only my sixth week at Yale University, and the iwi kūpuna, a devastating testament to my institution’s colonial history, are tightly strapped in a seat belt next to me.

And for the rest of fall semester, I struggle to commit to that world. The tragedy that repatriation was predicated upon permeates my consciousness, alienating me from academic work at Yale.

Reading the Western canon has become a dispossession of identity, but on a

Pa‘a means “finished, learned, kept permanently”.

Pī kai means “to sprinkle with sea water or salted fresh water to purify or remove taboo”.

‘Olena means “turmeric”.

Metamorphosis

rare November afternoon, I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses on a bench overlooking Science Hill until I can no longer see the pages. Mortal Hyacinthus dies to Apollo’s discus like a broken flower, his head snapped down so he faces the earth—it is through the nature of his death that the namesake flower emerges.

A name immortalizes death, what’s more, a story: Ovid writes, “a valiant hero shall be known by the same marks upon its petals.” In complete darkness, my feet crunch the dead leaves below. The great are buried, and their afterlife of greatness buries what’s native. Here in New Haven, all of my heroes are fading, and I do not know how to forgive myself for my complicity.

In my literature seminar the following morning, Assistant Professor of Classics Erika Valdivieso explains how burials in the epic tradition mark privilege. The burial of Hyacinthus, like many others in Virgil’s Aeneid, memorializes male heroes in place. Even the exceptional female warrior Camila in the Aeneid is bereft of this memorialization in place. Professor Valdivieso cites an article by Dr. Georgia Nugent entitled “The Women of the Aeneid–Vanishing Bodies, Disappearing Voices” and points, “Where do the bodies of women go?”

This is a question that exists beyond epic

myth, an unresolved reality for which marginalized communities demand an answer from the world.

Instead of our usual fall semester morning seminars, it is a spring afternoon—a new sunlight is upon us in the Humanities Quadrangle courtyard.

Professor Valdivieso and I discuss ways to read the epic tradition resistantly, an empowering mode of literary reception that her academic career in the classics and colonial early Americas has inspired me to uphold. A text’s longevity doesn’t come from language, but rather its reception: “close reading allows you to see the sutures, the slips, the bumps, in the fabric of texts,” she tells me, “ . . . you as a reader, work to unstitch the ideological projects of texts.” Reinterpretation brightens what greatness has shadowed—even in the dark, one can still imagine.

For what is absence if not a search for relationality, loss if not a presence of duty?

The vanishing bodies of women in the Roman epic remind me of the reasons for repatriation—to unstitch and restitch the narratives of marginalized communities that history has failed in doing––and I hear Pule Nā Kūpuna12 echoing back. Na mākou e mālama i nā iwi o ko mākou kūpuna / Na nā mo‘o e mālama i ko mākou iwi / A ho‘omau ka lōkahi o kākou no laila / E hō mai ka‘ike.

We will protect the bones of our ancestors / And our children will protect our bones / As we continue this interdependency, thus / Grant us knowledge. Unlike close reading, however, unstitching history is predicated upon community. Restitching history is predicated upon a generation.

For who are kanaka maoli today, if not a rope of lineage, realizing our future together is intertwined with our predecessors?

Interdependency is a continuum, and it is this powerful Indigenous relationality that heals. It has sustained my vitality at Yale and has been my proof of existence. In the parking lot of the Peabody Museum’s West Campus, Kala‘i ties my kīhei13 tightly before the repatriation ceremony. At the end of the ceremony, the six of us kanaka maoli share two bowls of fresh ‘ahi1⁴ and rice on the floors of Vassar College in relief.

A month later, Josh and I race to the shore at Lighthouse Point Park, our bare, shriveled palms touching sand for the first time since leaving Hawai‘i. Another month later, he strums my ‘ukulele in my suite, and we sing into the winter night until it no longer tastes bitter. When New Haven freezes over at the start of February, Professor Hobart hosts Pacific Islander students in her apartment, and together, we eat her homemade saimin

In this transitory period that is college, I measure my life in these beautiful moments of interdependence, because they point homeward.

The repatriation group standing outside of Peabody West Campus. Left to right, Professor Hi’ilei Hobart, Kala’i Anderson ’25, Connor Arakaki ’26, and Joshua Ching ’26. ¹¹

Pō means “night, darkness, obscurity; the realm of the gods”. In her doctoral dissertation, Dr. Joyce Pualani Warren explains that “Polynesian epistemology and cosmology dictate that all life and existence come from Pō, generative, liminal darkness. Pō can be temporally expansive, producing a view of time that is spiral rather than linear.

¹² ¹³ ¹⁴

Within Pō, time and space are not necessarily discrete categories.”

Pule Nā Kūpuna means “prayer of the ancestors.”.

Kīhei means “shawl, cape, afghan”.

‘Ahi means “Hawaiian tuna fishes”.

TheNewJournal May 2023

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Metamorphosis

on a roundtable. In this transitory period that is college, I measure my life in these beautiful moments of interdependence, because they point homeward.

For myself and other kanaka maoli at Yale, this recognition of interdependency as essential to ourselves began with repatriation. Six months after the repatriation ceremony, Josh and I are alone in the Stiles Buttery on an April night. We ruminate here often together.

“Repatriation,” he says, “in a very surface level sense, is the definition itself of giving and helping out without any expectation of receiving because there is no physical way to receive something when it is returning the dead.” Though now relieved from repatriation’s distress, recovering these memories is cathartic, and he believes it will always be.

“Despite being a culture and a people who have experienced so much loss, losing those relations to each other through all of the history Hawaiians have had to endure, it is that grounding in our responsibilities to each other that have kept us going,” Josh tells me.

Repatriation has blessed me with a beloved friend whose soul is native soil, and whose voice replenishes it.

And I am most replenished in the presence of my Native heroes. In an academic panel hosted by New York University’s Asian Pacific American Institute that I attended during spring ¹⁵

Koko means “blood”.

break, Dr. Mary Tuti Baker prefaced her segment by asking the audience to tell their neighbor whose spirit they have brought with them to the panel. I tell the unfamiliar NYU student next to me that the spirit of my deceased great-grandmother Leina‘ala Poepoe is with me, the oldest relative in my mo‘okū‘auhau with

Unlike close reading, however, unstitching history is predicated upon community.

Restitching history is predicated upon a generation.

koko Hawai‘i1⁵ I knew and will ever know in my lifetime.

She has followed me across Moananuiākea1⁶, across state lines, and subway lines she had never crossed. Her spirit was with me during the repatriation ceremony, in the car ride watching over my shoulders as the iwi kūpuna are ¹⁶

beside me, finally in Pō. When I was three years old, she held my hand as we walked through her garden on the lush mountains of Puna, Hawai‘i. Fifteen years later, I reach out for her palms in the withering autumn. I do not know what the iwi kūpuna look like, but she eases my imagination.

Despite my authorial attempts, any image of the iwi kūpuna is four times removed—once by colonial dispossession; twice by the osteological work of the Yale Peabody Museum that sterilized and shelved the iwi away from history; a third time by the dialogue between Professor Hobart, Josh, and Kala‘i, who all saw or handled the plasticized iwi, and myself who had not; and a fourth by my own language in this piece to you, the reader. In spite of—or precisely because of—this chasm that separates our existence from our history, there is a demand for us to imagine.

Through imagining my iwi kūpuna, my way of knowing is no longer linear, but circular.

My backbone is no longer rigid, but spiral. My selfhood is no longer a stitched thread, but a woven rope. And the ending is no longer a burial, but a revival. ∎ Connor Arakaki is a first-year in Morse College.

Moananuiākea means “Pacific”.

Fitness Center 285 Nicoll Street, New Haven CT 06511 203-936-9446 www.mactivity.com

Flash Fiction

West End Avenue

The first time I came home after being gone, I felt as if I was meeting myself for the first time. The apartment was the same—cluttered, askew, and dense with the scent of bodies being bodies.

My father glanced up from his desk when he heard the door open.

“You’re back,” he remarked. “We’re eating at 7.”

I used to believe that my home was hiding things from me. I had strange dreams about secret rooms tucked behind racks of clothing in my parents’ closet and treasure hidden in the folds of winter blankets.

“Are you looking for something?” my mother asked when she noticed me trying to dislodge a drawer sealed shut with old paint and humidity.

“I just wanted to see what was in there.”

“I think it’s empty. It’s been stuck for as long as I can remember.”

My parents were wary of leaving me alone as a child. I was sure that a bookshelf would fall on me or my popcorn would catch fire in the microwave, and I had a bad feeling about the man who lived on the 14th floor. At eleven, when I had long outgrown a babysitter, I went exploring in earnest.

Alone, I found a dusty key at the bottom of a bowl of oranges and several paperback books of poetry in my father’s sock drawer. The inscriptions on the first pages read To David and To David, again. But I already knew that my father’s first wife was a poet, and none of our locks yielded themselves to the key. In the closet, I burrowed into the musky folds of old coats with my arms outstretched, but all I found was a chalky wall that left white residue on my fingertips—no hidden rooms. Eventually, I gave up looking and tried on my mother’s nightgowns and undergarments. I imagined a time when I too would smell powdery and dress like I had something to hide.

As I spent more time alone, I lost interest in finding something hidden. When I finally left, I worried that I had left something behind.

Now that I was back, I felt a new heaviness in the air.

The wooden doorframes had warped so the only way to shut doors was to slam them, and a spot of rust on the refrigerator had spread like a rash. The dogs twitched nervously when my mother clanked down the hallway on her new crutches. She had broken her leg falling in the snow.

“A glass dining table represents an unstable family,” she declared at dinner.

I carved a circle in the cloudy grime on our table’s glass surface, which was scarcely visible under piles of outdated papers.

“I thought you might want to read them,” my father said, as if the news did not reach me where I had been.

May 2023

When my parents left for work the next day, I felt the familiar desire to discover something buried. The bookshelf seemed like a dull place to hunt for secrets, but a leatherbound volume on the bottom shelf caught my attention. Surely I had seen it before, but it must have seemed so uninteresting that it did not even register in my memory.

The book was heavier than I expected. On the first page were pasted photographs of young people at a party, grinning and strewn about in the manner of those who know they are beautiful. The paint on the walls behind them was flaking off in long, mournful strips and beer cans stood precariously on leaning towers of books. As I flipped the page, I noticed how the threshold of the kitchen jutted out just so—it was undeniably our apartment. And the posture of the woman in the back corner of the photograph was undeniably that of my mother.

In the following pages, I watched her pose at the top of a mountain and kiss men I had never seen before. I noticed the way her cheeks pushed up past her eyes and her nose sunk below her top lip when she smiled. I hated these features of my own face, but on this stranger, they were charming. Most of the pictures were taken in our apartment, where the only recognizable features were the moldings and electrical outlets.

Disheveled men leaned against walls now covered in my baby pictures.

I always knew, in a vague sort of way, that my mother had lived here long before I came around, but I had not considered the weight of accretion. The very floor and walls— my floor and my walls—were the site of her parties and bygone friends, the ones she sometimes talked about as if she had been alive forever.

Amal Biskin

Aside

It’s March again I keep my window open when I’m afraid to go outside.

But the weather’s been good—warm and honest, in that when one day is seventy degrees, the next few are too. And I like this, the idea of going out, knowing what to expect, and getting what I want.

I have also been dishonest. Dishonest, in that I believe I will want to go outside and feel the first breeze of the year and see everybody I know. I’ll step out of my dorm and open its big iron gate with the full lean of my all body weight. The sounds of College Street traffic will truck me, roaring mufflerremoved beater cars, horns, motorbikes, sirens, and some pounding, bass-boosted song I remember from online.

I will walk to Cross Campus, because everybody I know would too. And it will be just as I imagine: everybody I know, all at once. I sit with this part the longest. I keep my window open.

illustration by charlotte rica

Kylie Volavongsa 37

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The New Journal, founded in 1967, is a student-run magazine that publishes investigative journalism and creative nonfiction about Yale and New Haven.

We produce five issues a year that include both long-form and short features, profiles, essays, reviews, poetry, and art.

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Transference St. Paul, Minnesota Returning from a walk, we reach our house and see the light burst a hole through the living room window, sidewalks and roads glazed with ice, mailboxes tight-lipped.

I look up at mother, watch the snow rest on her eyelashes.

Around us, the snowblowers and snowplow-trucks begin once more, another morning.

My father’s part of the crew as well.

In the distance, a train just visible above the treetops.

The women enter the house, stay there. Wanting to help my father, I go in, change into snowpants, then run back outside, hop toward my shovel, which is leaning against empty pots and the gutter.

It has a plastic red blade, like a matchstick— In this scene, like others to come, I am a child up to no good.

See for yourself: how I grab the shiny handle, how unevenly the yard ignites.

John Nguyen

www.mactivity.com/free-pass

The healthy whole body cryotherapy that everyone is talking about!

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285 Nicoll Street, New Haven, CT 06511 (203) - 936 - 9446

38

TheNewJournal

Local Geography

Puzzle by Adam Winograd

Local Geography

Adam Winograd

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Highwe time? disease, ser!” right of share 33 W I F I the P ASS W Oside R D CRAP O U T E RECY Today, The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. One thousand copies of each rial for sharp AS 34 100 centimos short issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven community.

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Massachusetts; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. Office Address: P.O. Box 3311, New Haven, CT 06515.

While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All contents Copyright ©2023 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors in chief is prohibited. Recycle Icon from Flaticon.com.

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