Grassroots Media Conference

what is this conference about?
For the past four years, we’ve come together to explore the political dimensions of media and how it shapes our lives. By developing relationships between community and media organizations, the NYC Grassroots Media Coalition is working to re-imagine issues of access to, control of, and power over our media system. That means defining our struggle as a struggle for Media Justice.

Media Justice recognizes the need for a media that comes from, and is responsive to, the people, a media that addresses systemic marginalization and discrimination and that speaks truth to power. Media Justice asserts that our communities and airwaves are more than markets, and that our relationship to the media must be more than passive consumption. Media Justice recognizes that the form of our current media system is not inevitable, but the result of an interplay of history, technology, power, and privilege. Media Justice seeks to integrate efforts to reform our media system with a social justice agenda, in order to create not just a better media, but a better world.

We invite you to join us at the 2008 NYC Grassroots Media Conference as we seek to define our understanding of and relationship to Media Justice as a community, and explore how we can not only envision an ideal world, but to make this vision a reality.

when is it?
Sunday | March 2nd 2008

Hunter College, 68th Street and Lexington Ave | West Building

(Southwest Corner, enter from street or directly from 6 train)

9am–6pm

Hope to see you there!!
For more information and to register visit www.nycgrassrootsmedia.org

Passing Poston

It's been a while since my last post.
I've moved to New York City and I'll update on that later.
But more importantly I wanted to tell everyone about this film,
Passing Poston.

"For the tens of thousands of Japanese Americans forcibly interned during World War II, the scars have never healed.

Passing Poston tells the moving and haunting story of four former internees of the Poston Relocation Center. Each person shadowed by a tragic past, each struggling in their own painful way to reconcile the trauma of their youth, each still searching and yearning during the last chapter of their lives, to find their rightful place in this country.

The Poston Relocation center, built on the Colorado River Indian Tribes reservation, served as one of ten internment camps built in seven states. Between 1942 and 1945, the Poston camps housed over 18,000 Japanese and Japanese American detainees.

Unlike, the nine other internment camps, Poston was unique and was built with a very different purpose. It served as a place to house thousands of Japanese detainees but also the infrastructure created by and for them served to recruit more Native Americans from surrounding smaller reservations to the much larger and sparsely populated Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT) reservation, after the war.

The Japanese detainees held at the three Poston Camps were used as laborers to build adobe schools, do experimental farming, and construct an irrigation system that could later be used by the Native Americans, thus aiding the settlement of the area as planned by the Office of Indian Affairs (known today as the Bureau of Indian Affairs).

- as found on www.passingposton.com -

Watch the trailer here!


Barret, my favorite bakla, and I will be attending the film screening tomorrow at Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue (between 1st and 2nd Street) at 7:30 pm
The film will also play on February 25th at 7:30 pm
But check the website becuase it will also premeire in California, Washington DC, Seattle, and Connecticut!

Everyone needs to watch this film and acknowledge that during World War II America had its own Concentration Camps.

"Although the term “internment camp.” is often applied to the War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps for West Coast families, such as in the official name for the recently designated Minidoka Internment National Monument, the WRA facilities should technically, and more accurately, be termed concentration camps. While they were not “death camps” in the same sense as the concentration camps operated by Nazi Germany during World War II, they nevertheless housed both U.S. citizens and non-citizens who were forcibly imprisoned there and who could not come and go freely. "
- as found on http://www.uidaho.edu/LS/AACC/SENSITIV.HTM -