WHITE NOISE
WHITE NOISE
This design is the opposite of silence…
it is sound.
Silence shrouds sexual assault. As Native language blurs on a word for “sexual assault,” often the natural approach is to remain wordless. The United States is a place where silence amounts to erasure. Here exists an institution of “chronic, pervasive and intergenerational experiences of subjugation that, over time, have been imposed, normalized and internalized into the daily lives of many Indigenous American people.”
An Indigenous woman is strangled into silence, made powerless, and the aftermath is personified by enveloping stillness.
The wave follows the path of the CanAm Highway, aka, the “Drug Corridor” as well as major oil pipelines and provides constant watch over these perilous areas. Coincidentally, in doing so, the wave dissects regions with the most concentrated violence--the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, Northern Plains, and Southwest of America.
Two tribes of violence, the Tohono O’odham Nation villages in Mexico and the Inuit tribe in Iqaluit in Nunavut, Canada illustrate the invisibility of borders with regard to violence. Violence is not restricted by borders, as we are all connected through the vast land as humans. When the privilege of the land is stripped, years of practice, patience, and wisdom dissolve with it. The essence of Indigenous people walks hand in hand with sacred places.
As Indigenous land was stolen, women’s souls especially took a toll. From this Native homeland, the cries of the women’s souls leave a wake of destruction in the form of an earthquake, a quake to the planet, as if to put down roots that scream “this is our land, it cannot be used at your disposal.” The waves sing for Native people, “we were here first…now feel the impact.
Each location along the wave has specific catalysts for violence. Baboquivari Peak Wilderness and other mountain ranges hugging the U.S./Mexico border host drug trafficking, due to their remote nature. Smugglers inflict violence on women of the Tohono O’odham Nation as they secretly travel through the reservation. Aside from the dire environmental impacts of resource extraction on Navajo land, the traumas, angers,and fears from resource mining manifest in rampant alcoholism and drug abuse and domestic violence and sexual abuse. The Fort Peck Reservation in Montana and the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota are targeted by men living in the transient camps. Bethel, Alaska hosts some of the highest crime rates in all of the U.S. Alaska in general has the highest rate of rape in the nation, followed by South Dakota.The entire state is the epitome of loneliness and isolation. When crime occurs, villages and communities are so remote that law enforcement is not readily available. Violence off the Alaskan coast flows into the ocean, rippling across the Pacific Ocean.
The wave begins at the scale of North America, splitting off into many sub-waves and cracks. The waves crack through semi-trucks and other modes of transportation that have indirect and direct correlations to violence. Specifically, the Uhaul Headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona is an epicenter. The crack keeps growing at truck stops and gas stations--stopping goods and resource extraction from the earth. The wave spirals down to the scale of hair width cracks, splitting bags of illegal drugs with which women get caught up in the trafficking process.
a distortion that wakes the memory--
a low moan to haunt one for eternity.
Each and every animal is imbued with spiritual significance in NativeAmerican and First Nation culture. Land, plants, and animals especially, dance with the seasons and cycles of nature and life. The natural world is not a separate entity, but one intertwined masterpiece.
Every organism will absorb the shock of a woman in danger as the wave punctures the Earth and rattles the heart and soul.
285 Hz sings for the passage of time between the initial violence and full healing. This is when the true dissent awakens. It is a frequency reserved for healing our physical and mental wounds. Regeneration comes full-circle.
During this frequency phase, the design uproots the infrastructures that bring predators into the reservations to steal women. Colonized America experiences a life-halting situation, simultaneously to a woman experiencing danger. All land is Native land--down to every last suburban cul-de-sac or crowded city street. The wave shifts suburbia, pushing the dwellers to appreciate their land and privacy. The wave is a disruptor and a uniter.Time will till a melody of human connection.
Hope for Indigenous people lies in 432 Hz.
When 432 Hz “encounters a membrane such as your skin or the surface of water, it imprints an invisible pattern of energy. In other words, the periodic vibrations in the sound sample are converted and become periodic water ripples, creating beautiful geometric patterns that reveal the once hidden realm of sound.”
