An exploration of the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny, its continuing impact on multicultural communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, as well as its legacies of inherited and perpetuated violence, trauma, addiction, and the outgrowths of resistance and resilience to Manifest Differently
Manifest Differently is a multifaceted project featuring 38 multigenerational artists and poets. Using literary, visual, and media arts storytelling in conjunction with public programming, the collaboration will interrogate the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny, its continuing impact on multicultural communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, its legacies of inherited and perpetuated violence, trauma, and addiction, and the outgrowth of resistance and resilience – giving fire to movements for social change. As recognized in Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons in 1983, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, and others that have followed, we must acknowledge and witness the impacts of our history before we can move forward, otherwise the same injustices will be repeated, as we have seen most recently in the case of Israel’s genocidal treatment of Palestinians.
Storytelling is a powerful tool to help provide deep witness, compassion, and inspiration.
Manifest Differently was conceived and developed by poet/artist Kim Shuck and CAMP co-director/ artist / writer Megan Wilson and is co-curated by Shuck, Wilson, Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, Amy Berk, and Katayoun Bahrami with support from California historian Barbara Berglund Sokolov, CAMP communications director Veronica Torres, and humanities advisors Mary Jean Robertson, Kyoko Sato, Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Anita Chang, and David A.M Goldberg. Audiences were introduced to the history of Manifest Destiny and the forward vision to Manifest Differently through the lens of a diverse multigenerational team of artists and poets, whose histories and experiences include those of American Indian/Indigenous, Asian American, Pacific Islander, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Southwest Asian, and North African (SWANA), and white/European American descent.
The project was exhibited in 2023/24 in collaboration with the following presenting partners – Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP,) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), Artists’ Television Access (ATA), Minnesota Street Project (MSP), San Francisco Public Library, Book Castle, the Beat Museum, Book Castle, San Francisco State University, and Stanford University.
Participating poets, artists, and humanities scholars include:
Poets: Aileen Cassinetto, Avotcja, Clara Hsu, Dena Rod, E.K. Keith, Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Genny Lim, Josiah Luis Alderete, Kim Shuck, Lauren Ito, Linda Noel, Lourdes Figueroa, Mahnaz Badihian, Maw Shein Win, MK Chavez, Stephen Meadows, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Tureeda Mikell, Voulette Hattar
Visual and Media Artists: Adrian Arias, Afatasi, Amy Berk, Anita Chang, Barbara Mumby-Huerta, Biko Eisen-Martin, Carolyn Castaño, Chris Gazaleh, Katayoun Bahrami, Kim Shuck, l. frank manriquez, Marcel Pardo Ariza, Megan Wilson, Rene Yung, Shaghayegh Cyrous, Shonna Alexander, Vaimoana Niumeitolu, Victoria Canby
Humanities Scholars: Dr. Anita Chang, Dr. David A.M. Goldberg, Dr. Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Dr. Kyoko Sato, Mary Jean Robertson
Manifest Differently Curators’ Statement
Manifest Differently began as a dream of cross community dialog about ongoing damage resulting from colonialism and empire building. The idea had its roots in a phone conversation between Kim Shuck and Megan Wilson. Three years, metric tons of politics, global pandemic, family tragedies, community collaborations, gallons of paint, late night poetry sessions, joyful public printing events, miscommunications, group mural painting, loss, births, more caffeine than is probably healthy for any of us and some tantalizing flashes of hope later we offer up the work.
– Kim Shuck and Megan Wilson, Curators, Manifest Differently
Manifest Differently Humanities Programming
Manifest Differently was accompanied by a series of public programs relating to the origins of Manifest Destiny, its impacts, and the move forward to Manifest Differently. All events were FREE and included complimentary food and drink.
Minnesota Street Project
The exhibition at Minnesota Street Project was also accompanied by six humanities presentations to provide context for the work exhibited. All the events were free and included complimentary food and drink:
1. Manifest Destiny – Its Origins and Persistence – Maristella Tapia, PhD, in conversation with Jen Myhre, PhD, moderated by Barbara Mumby
2. Sovereignty – panel discussion between Kim Shuck, Christina Azocar, PhD, and Brian Oney, moderated by Manifest Differently humanities advisor, Mary Jean Robertson
3. Palestine Louder !! Challenging the False Narratives, Censorship, and Silence – panel discussion with Dena Al-Adeeb, Sholeh Asagary, Lucia Ippolito, Nora Barrows-Friedman, and moderated by Manifest Differently artist Chris Gazaleh
4. Trans Labor & Practice – panel discussion with Whit Guerrero, Star Amerasu, Kenya Boudreaux, moderated by Manifest Differently artist, Marcel Pardo Ariza
5. Speculative and Radical Solidarity in the Age of Generative AI presentation by Manifest Differently humanities advisor, David A.M. Goldberg, PhD
6. Next Gen Speaks Out – presentation by youth in the Artivate program, moderated by Manifest Differently education curator and Artivate lead, Amy Berk
San Francisco State University
Pasifika/Oceania Activism & Art Talanoa/Talk Story – in conversation with Sophia Tupuola, Luseane Tutoe, Loa Niumeitolu, Kim Shuck, and Ponipate Rokolekutu, PhD, moderated by Manifest Differently humanities advisor Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, PhD was presented at San Francisco State University on February 22, 2024.
Stanford University
Anita Chang – Taiwanese American filmmaker, media artist, writer, scholar, and professor of Communication at Cal State East Bay Presenting: “Cine-poetics of Archipelagic Relations and Decolonization” with a video screening of ‘What We Never Forget For Peace Here Now’
Kyoko Sato – Japan-born scholar teaching and serving as associate director of Stanford University’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, examining technoscientific governance in Japan and the United States. Presenting: “Representing, Normalizing, and Erasing Global Hibakusha: The Politics of Nuclear Governance and Manifesting A Different Future”
Dena Montague – Environmental Justice Lecturer with the Earth Systems Program at Stanford University Presenting: “U.S. Militarism and the Question of Environmental and Climate Justice”
Craig Santos Perez – Chamoru poet, scholar, artist, and faculty in Ethnic Studies at MiraCosta Community College in San Diego, CA. Presenting: “Poetry Readings From from unincorporated territory [åmot]”
Wesley Ueunten – Third-generation Okinawan born and raised in Hawaiʻi, musician, writer, scholar, and professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. Presenting: “Diasporic Okinawan Identity within US Global Militarization” with a sanshin performance
Co-sponsored by
Stanford Program in Science, Technology, and Society
Earth Systems Program Environmental Justice Working Group
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
The Artivate youth program under the direction of Amy Berk and Chris Treggiari printed both their designs and designs by Manifest Differently at YBCA every Saturday, July 22 – September 30.
Poetry Readings
In addition to the exhibitions, there were four poetry readings, organized by Kim Shuck. All events were free and included complimentary food and drink:
1. Book Castle on September 30, 2023 – Genny Lim, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Kim Shuck, and MK Chavez
2. Beat Museum on October 7, 2023 – Stephen Meadows, Linda Noel, Dena Rod, and Kim Shuck
3. San Francisco Public Library on January 11, 2024 with Josiah Luis Alderete, Maw Shein Win, Lourdes Figueroa, and Maw Shein Win
4. San Francisco Public Library on February 8m 2024 with Avotcja, Aileen Casinetto, Clara Hsu, Mahnaz Badihian, Lauren Ito, and Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu
Manifest Destiny —> Manifest Differently
Barbara Berglund Sokolov
Away, away with all these cobweb tissues of rights of discovery, exploration, settlement, contiguity, etc.….The American claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of liberty and federative self-government entrusted to us. It is a right such as that of the tree to the space of air and earth suitable for the full expansion of its principle and destiny of growth….It is in our future far more than in our past or in the past history of Spanish exploration or French colonial rights, that our True Title is to be found.
-John L. O Sullivan, New York Morning News, December 27, 1845
And with that, journalist John L. O’Sullivan coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny.” He was writing about the ongoing dispute with Britain over boundaries and the right of the United States to claim Oregon, but his words had much more far-reaching implications. O’Sullivan was an outspoken member of the group of intellectuals and politicians who developed a new, voracious ideology of American expansionism in the 1840s. By the following year,1846, theirs had become the dominant national position with the Manifest Destiny-fueled policies of President James K. Polk and the Mexican American War, when the United States invaded Mexico and took half its territory, which became much of what we think of today as the American West (California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas plus parts of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado).
Growing out of O’Sullivan’s turn of phrase, the ideology of Manifest Destiny powerfully and effectively justified the United States’ western expansion across the continent and the genocidal displacement of Indigenous people, the ecocide of the natural environment, the extension of slavery, and subsequent claims to Pacific islands as well as other imperial domestic and foreign policy stances that came in its wake. Driven by assumptions about the morality, divinity, freedom, and presumed superiority of a white America, through the lens of Manifest Destiny, western expansion was viewed not only as a triumph for the spread of liberty, but it was also seen as foreordained and inevitable. In the face of the claims of divine providence, the legal claims of other nations, let alone the unmentioned claims of American Indians who lived on western lands, were mere “cobweb tissues” to be brushed away.
Manifest Destiny is thus foundational to the origin story of the American West, California, and San Francisco. A rich body of humanities scholarship has critically analyzed the histories and legacies of western expansion that the ideology of Manifest Destiny enabled. But Manifest Differently takes the position that much of the general public, while likely familiar with the phrase Manifest Destiny, has lacked the tools to think deeply about its historical and contemporary meanings and implications. To remedy this, Manifest Differently combines the insights of cutting-edge humanities scholarship and the powerfully evocative work of visual, literary, and media arts, to wake people up to the history of Manifest Destiny, how it was expressed in California, and how it impacted, and continues to impact, California’s multi-ethnic and multi-cultural communities. Manifest Differently flips the script from the still often typical focus on railroad barons, industrialists, and hardy, white pioneers to all the people on the other side of the story, to grapple with their complex experiences and responses to Manifest Destiny’s realities and legacies, providing much-needed tools for manifesting a different future.
Right now, in the United States, many people need and are searching for tools to understand the racism, sexism, and injustice that they are being forced to confront through the efforts of social movements like Black Lives Matter and #Me Too as well as the open white supremacy of groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Schools often teach ‘discovery’ and ‘manifest destiny’ but skate over the core disconnect that centers those ideas in ignoring the humanity of various othered communities. And people, in general, are not offered a way to process how something like Manifest Destiny is part of their own personal narratives, their individual, familial, ancestral, and/or community stories. The 1619 Project is one very powerful response to this need, albeit with an East Coast focus. With similar intent, Manifest Differently seeks to both reveal and revise America’s origin story on the West Coast, to give people a wide variety of ways to connect with and explore the history of Manifest Destiny, from a range of diverse perspectives, what it meant in the past and what it means today, and to motivate people to engage with the past in ways that open their eyes and reshape how they see and relate to the present and the future.
Despite how quickly Manifest Destiny’s ideological power grew, Americans were divided over expansion in the 1840s. Differing opinions about expansion were evident in the refusal, between 1836 and 1844, of the United States to annex Texas. The Mexican American War, with its explicitly expansionist aims, was the source of bitter divisions and conflicts over the extension of slavery into new territories that culminated in the Civil War. And since most of the people living on the western lands were people of color, in a country that was loudly and proudly racist, the absorption of large numbers of nonwhites was not a popular proposal. Fear of incorporating non-whites into the American body politic – either through the expansion of slavery or the annexation of areas of Mexico (and later Hawaii and other Pacific Islands) – was ultimately resolved by Manifest Destiny’s entrenchment of white supremacy and accompanying beliefs in the inferiority of the conquered and colonized.
With the United States’ conquest of California in 1848, San Francisco and Manifest Destiny essentially grew up together. The assumptions embedded in Manifest Destiny not only justified the territorial acquisition, but they also drove California’s economy, the population boom that gave birth to San Francisco as a city (from a Mexican pueblo of approximately 900 people in 1848, by 1875 San Francisco had become the most important city in the West with a population near 150,000), and the race and labor relations that would prevail in the state.
The ideology of Manifest Destiny provides a powerful way to think about the logic through which California, as part of the United States, organized itself and developed. The state’s earliest legislation quickly began delineating who belonged in this new society and who did not. In 1849, California’s State Constitution decreed that Mexicans could be granted citizenship because they fell under the rubric of the category “white” whereas California Indians were considered nonwhite and thus could not be citizens. A few years later, in 1854, the California Supreme Court in People v. Hall denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants by decreeing that they “were generically ‘Indians’ and therefore, nonwhite.” The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, passed by the state legislature in 1850, denied California Indians the right to testify in court and allowed them to be held as indentured servants, a euphemism for varying types of slavery. In 1856 California’s government issued a bounty of $0.25 per Indian scalp that was raised to $5.00 in 1860. Foreign Miners’ Taxes, aimed at Chinese and Latin American immigrants, were passed as early as 1850. And Mexican land grants were no match in American courts for the miners, squatters, and homesteaders who overran Californio land.
While tens of thousands of California Indian people died in the Spanish missions, and by the time the United States took control had already been subjected to close to eighty years of enslavement and dislocation, it is crucial to understand that under U.S. governance, California Indians died at an even more alarming rate. The people who poured into California mined, logged, and otherwise appropriated Indigenous Californians’ remaining places of safety in their homelands. American civilians — supported by the state and at times the nation’s military — inflicted organized vigilante violence and outright massacres. Pollution of ancestral lands from mining and other industries was also a form of violence. Between 1846 and 1870, the population of Indigenous Californians plunged from around 150,000 to only 30,000. By 1880, census takers recorded that just under 17,000 Indigenous people remained. But, in the face of this genocide, indigenous Californians survived and, with strength and resilience, kept alive their cultures and traditions. They did not disappear. They defied the Manifest Destiny-infused evolutionary logic of the day.
This litany of legislation and the trauma it inflicted starts to flip the script, to shift the focus to the people who were the subjects of these laws that codified the removal, enslavement, displacement, and disenfranchisement that Manifest Destiny’s vision of progress through landed empire necessitated. Manifest Destiny left indigenous people, people of color, and many wage workers outside of the body politic, without rights or rights that needed to be respected.
It is from this position, of recognizing the histories and experiences of those who have not benefited from the legacy of Manifest Destiny, that Manifest Differently begins.
