Shannon Francis (Hopi/Dineh)
Executive Director
Spirit of the Sun, Inc.

Lucy Molina
Environmental Justice Activist
Commerce City, CO

Ana Miller
Advocate/Organizer
Housekeys Action Network Denver (H.A.N.D) 

The Colorado Geographies event will feature a panel of community leaders, elders, and activists living, working, who express the everyday ways of enacting life affirming geographies in the here and now. Indigenous community leader, Shannon Francis brings a wealth of wisdom on the everyday care taking of elders, Native ecologies, and models for enacting youth education. Latine environmental justice leader, Lucy Molina brings decades of knowledge on enacting community environmental monitoring and organizing for ecological and racial justice. Ana Miller is an organizer with Housekeys Action Network, a collective of advocates for the unsheltered community. Ana brings a decade of experience in advocating for the needs and desires of the unsheltered community. The culmination of these speakers expresses the multiple ways Colorado communities are already enacting life affirming geographies.

Panelist Bios:

Shannon Francis

Shannon Francis, is Hopi and Dineh from the Southwest homelands of Arizona and New Mexico. She is from the Towering House clan born for Red Running into the Water clan. Her Hopi clans are Massau', Bear, Sand, and Snake Clan. Shannon comes from twelve generations of farmers, ethnobotanists, and seed keepers. As a certified Permaculture Designer and Instructor, Shannon weaves TEK Traditional Ecological Knowledge with innovative science. She loves to educate on caretaking of land, water, and soil resources; preserving Native heirloom GMO-free seeds, zero-waste philosophy, and how to live more harmoniously with nature. Shannon is the Executive Director for Spirit of the Sun, Inc. in Denver. Shannon served on the Four Winds council as Board Chair and continues to serve on the Leadership council for American Indian Movement of Colorado (AIM). Shannon is currently a 2023 Livingston Fellow through Bonfils Stanton Foundation. Spirit of the Sun received the 2020 Human Rights Award from Youth Celebrate Diversity. Shannon received the Justin B. Willie humanitarian award (2014) on the Navajo Nation as well as the Cesar E. Chavez female leadership award (2015) for her work with Indigenous, food justice, and community building projects. Shannon has six wonderful children and four amazing grandchildren that are her inspiration to make this a better world for all future generations to come.

Lucy Molina

Lucy Molina is a dedicated environmental justice activist from Commerce City, CO, renowned for her tireless efforts in advocating for cleaner air and healthier living conditions in her community. As a prominent figure in the fight against environmental racism, Lucy has been a pivotal voice in highlighting the disproportionate impact of industrial pollution on marginalized communities. Her activism gained widespread recognition with her compelling appearance in the film A Good Neighbor, where she passionately shared the stories and struggles of her community.

In addition to her role in the documentary, Lucy has been featured on PBS and various local and international news outlets, amplifying her message and reaching a broader audience. Her work has earned her significant accolades, including recognition from environmental organizations and community awards for her unwavering commitment to justice and equity.

Lucy's passion for her community is evident in every endeavor she undertakes. She has organized numerous rallies, community meetings, and educational campaigns to raise awareness and drive change. Her relentless advocacy has not only brought attention to the environmental challenges faced by Commerce City but has also inspired many to join the fight for a cleaner, healthier future.

Ana Miller

Ana-Lilith Miller (she/her 🏳️‍⚧️). Ana is a 43 year old trans woman with 12 years experience living on the streets. She is an advocate/organizer with Housekeys Action Network Denver (H.A.N.D.) coming up on 3 years with them. We are a houseless rights group that advocates with the houseless community to give them a voice in their treatment. She believes that "Housing Is a Human Right For All", and that the best way to achieve systemic change is by uplifting the voices of the houseless themselves. 

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Cindi Katz
Professor of Geography, Women’s and Gender Studies, and American Studies
Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Abstract:

Practicing hope keeps the possibility of change alive—a methodology against fear in dismal times. And while the dismal touches all too many places in multiple registers these days, countertopography is a way of marking the common effects of, and responses to, large-scale processes in disparate locations. Drawing out the common grounds and entanglements of such shifts as global economic restructuring, deskilling, state violence, or dispossession as they play out in distinct and dissimilar places offers a new geographical imagination for political organizing and action. Its ‘contour lines’ intended to incite new political imaginaries and spur alternative geographies of action and activism, potential spaces of hope in an expanded field. In this talk I will look at some of the experiences, practices, and challenges of grassroots organizations negotiating complicated place-based struggles while simultaneously engaging their translocal aspirations as critical to understand in building social movements at once global and intimate, sustainable and targeted, grounded and boundary crossing. Their actions create contour lines for practice and trace topographies of hope at different times and places making the imagined possible despite the dangers and displacements associated with the mobilities of capital accumulation, racialized state violence, and neoliberal land grabs.

Speaker Bio:

Cindi Katz is Professor of Geography, Women’s and Gender Studies, and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research concerns social reproduction, the production of nature, the workings of the security state in everyday environments, the privatization of the public environment, the cultural politics of childhood, and the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination. She has published widely on these themes as well as on social theory and the politics of knowledge. She is the author of Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives (2004) which won the American Association of Geographers Meridian Book Award for the Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography. She is the editor (with Janice Monk) of Full Circles: Geographies of Gender over the Life Course (1993), Life’s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction (with Sallie Marston and Katharyne Mitchell) (2004), and The People, Place, and Space Reader (with Jen Jack Gieseking, William Mangold, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert) (2014). The 2024 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Honor and the 2021 recipient of Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the AAG, Katz held a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2003-4), and the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professorship in Gender Studies at Cambridge University (2011-12). She is working on two book projects: Childhood as Spectacle and a collection of her writings on social reproduction tentatively titled Vagabond Capitalism: Social Reproduction in Crisis.

Want to know more about the bond between people and place?

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Dr. Robin Roth 
Professor of Geography 
University of Guelph 

Abstract: 

The Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership is a Canada-wide network of Indigenous thought leaders, scholars, conservation organizations, Indigenous governments, and conservation practitioners united in their commitment to supporting the establishment of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas and the transformation of existing protected areas. This presentation will discuss the work of the partnership as applied political ecology. I will discuss how key tenants of political ecology - 1) power is relational and multi-scalar, 2) the social and natural are co-constituted, 3) accepted categories of modernity need to be destabilized, and 4) transformational change is needed- are activated in the work of the partnership and, by extension, the work of decolonizing conservation. 

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Dr. Aída Guhlincozzi 
Assistant Professor of Geography 
University of Missouri 

Abstract: 

This presentation covers the recent work in health geography focused on vulnerable populations by Dr. Aída Guhlincozzi and colleagues. Specifically, this will cover the ongoing movement of the field in a direction of better encapsulating the needs of communities and populations previously overlooked and underserved by U.S. healthcare systems. This talk includes recently published results on Latina women’s healthcare access, discussions of race and ethnicity in the Latine community, and critical disability geography work regarding Autism and healthcare access. A key intervention recommended includes a brief discussion of the value of community geographic theoretical frameworks and methods.

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