Excursion: The Black Snake Tour of Aurora

About The Event

The Black Snake Tour of Aurora: Petrocapitalism and Resistance in the Global Suburb

How is Aurora connected with Indigenous struggles against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Bakken Oilfields, Tar Sands & other extractive industries? Join us for a people’s tour of petrocapitalism in Aurora, IL as we activate knowledges and memory to unsettle the mechanisms of this global suburb.

Participants will visit a data center that is vital to the functions of global financial markets, walk along an Enbridge petroleum pipeline carrying Tar Sands oil, and visit train routes carrying fracked Bakken crude from the Dakotas. We will look at transnational logistics operations as contemporary systems of colonialism. We will also explore precolonial earthworks, enduring indigenous geographies, pathways of migration, and resistance to forces that have shaped our present and seek to manage our futures. We will provide water and some fruit. Please bring a lunch for the community garden gathering.

Excursion schedule:

11:45 PM   Meet at the METRA Aurora Station
12:30 PM  Cyrus One Data Center
1:30 PM     Enbridge Line 6A
2:30 PM     Indigenous Burial Mounds
3:00 PM    Rail, Bakken, migration
3:45 PM    Gathering at El Jardin Community garden*

 

Coming from Chicago via Metra?

Depart Western Ave at 10:45 AM, arriving Aurora at 12 noon
Depart Aurora at 4:20 PM, arriving Western Ave at 5:24 PM

This trip is facilitated by residents/researchers/troublemakers Ulysses Diaz (Caracol), Ze, and Rozalinda Borcilă, in conjunction with the Petcoke: Tracing Dirty Energy exhibition.