Riots emerge from voices unheard—reflections on Martin Luther King Jr.’s dictum guide us to sites of uprising and industrial toxicity on Turtle Island, a.k.a. North America.

(un)mutable channels #3

It was Martin Luther King Jr. who said that riots emerge from voices unheard. Across various districts and suburbs of the city of St. Louis, amongst them Ferguson, which nationally propelled the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, Bah Asmin shares the prophecies which foresaw the uprising’s resonances through the continent and the world—as streams flowing from the heart of America. We hear the technicity that mixes methane from the inextinguishable subterranean radioactive waste fires at Weldon Springs, with the gaseous atmosphere at ground level. Researchers and activists in the region describe efforts to manage this military-industrial “nightmare” and its entanglements with corporations. Industrial toxicity, millennia of Native American history and disharmonious urban dynamics shape the pace of audio streams flowing from the region just south of the convergence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.