Our ongoing climate crisis impacts every aspect of our existence, seen and unseen. It is critical, in efforts to work toward environmentally- and climatically-just futures, to critically engage with the stories and powers that have enabled injustice and unbelonging. In the United States, this is particularly relevant for Black Americans, who have both generationally inherited environmental exclusion and who advocate for environmental resilience and community-building. This project, heavily informed by Black and Indigenous American environmental scholarship, aims to demonstrate how environmental epistemologies in placemaking influence Black communities’ internalization of unbelonging that is also manifested among nonhuman community members – specifically, rivers. Homing in on my hometown of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, I draw on placemaking policy and strategies from the City of Oklahoma City to uncover settler colonial rhetoric within river infrastructure planning that parallel Black environmental restrictions that have sought to erase the identities within Black environmental belonging and the Oklahoma River. The motivation for this erasure, as evident through rhetorical analyses of river infrastructure policy documents; placemaking; and mapping practices, is revealed in its commodification for economic growth and glory for the City. Though these efforts commodify, displace, and systematically oppress Black identities, community coalition-building in Oklahoma City’s Eastside neighborhood demonstrates hopeful and resilient environmental and climatic futures. Oklahoma City’s comprehensive policy plan, planokc, offers an entry point through its supplemental adaptokc plan for such environmental coalition-building and recognition to be forefronted in future Oklahoma City placemaking policies and strategies. Through adaptokc – as a living document that recognizes the exigence of environmental care and awareness – Oklahoma City placemaking has the potential to, in the face of this climate crisis, build and set an example of co-led futures in which Black and nonhuman, environmental belonging are woven into the fabrics of “place.”
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