Undrowned Study Padlet by Benevolent Ray

Boda and Undrowning

simonpat — 2025-03-11 01:41:07 UTC

"Dedicated to my ancestral mother Boda, who survived the transatlantic initiation and to you Sangodare, my star at sea" (dedication page).

Listening and Echolocation

simonpat — 2025-03-11 01:42:56 UTC

"Most cetaceans have a crystalline lens over their eyes so they can see underwater. The South Asian river dolphins do not... They look instead with their voices." (p. 60)

Angela Davis's Abolitionist Work

simonpat — 2025-03-11 01:45:56 UTC

"I am writing this in honor of my great grandmother Edith who was not the only woman in our lineage to die captive in an asylum." (p. 37)

Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid

simonpat — 2025-03-11 01:47:25 UTC

"One day standing on a dock in the Combahee River, looking for Harriet Tubman on the 149th anniversary of her successful uprising, my partner Sangodare and I saw three Atlantic bottlenose dolphins." (p. 38)

Narwhal Adaptations and Climate Change

simonpat — 2025-03-11 01:48:53 UTC

"There is more than one way to breathe in the Arctic. Ask the narwhal, beluga, and bowhead whales." (p. 26)

June Jordan's Work on Love as Lifeforce

simonpat — 2025-03-11 01:50:41 UTC

"I love you as you change. I love you slowly moving through. I love the tusks I cannot see. I love the way you love your love for your own reasons." (p. 117)

Collaborative Marine Mammal Behavior

simonpat — 2025-03-11 01:53:29 UTC

"The white-bellied/short-snouted dolphins (Lagenodelphis hosei), who travel in groups of hundreds, sometimes thousands (Lesson 1: roll deep) and welcome several 'other species' of dolphins and whales to swim and eat in community (Lesson 2: better together)." (p. 48)

Collaborative Ecosystems and Climate Justice

simonpat — 2025-03-11 01:56:35 UTC

"Yesterday I learned that the breathing of whales is as crucial to our own breathing and the carbon cycle of the planet as are the forests of the world." (p. 28)

Racial Essentialism and Identity Politics

simonpat — 2025-03-11 02:01:22 UTC

"The fact that you grew up not knowing that narwhals were a real animal swimming around in the Arctic right now, is not a coincidence. It is the result of a long and lucrative conspiracy." (p. 81)

Black Arts Movement and Cultural Expression

simonpat — 2025-03-11 02:03:50 UTC

"I love the wild technology of your face. What it says and tells and keeps. I honor the sensitivity of your small significant decisions." (p. 81)

Motherhood and Marine Mammal Parenting

simonpat — 2025-03-11 02:04:53 UTC

"The baby Weddell seal has not grown into her flippers. She is awkward. She does not want to swim. She does not know she can breathe underwater." (p. 26)

Toni Cade Bambara and Community

simonpat — 2025-03-11 02:11:17 UTC

"And as always I think about you. When I can't see the shore I'm here timing my breathing to yours. Knowing collectively we can leap, we can dive, we can practice our faith in each other. Remembering, as Toni Cade Bambara says, 'the seabirds are still alive.'" (p. 49)

Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Marine Conservation

simonpat — 2025-03-11 02:13:04 UTC

"The only dolphin—and, I believe, the only marine mammal at all—who has managed to keep her Indigenous given name lives in the Amazon. Tuxuci, named in the Tupi language, has kept her name through all this colonization." (p. 31)

Interspecies Communication and Listening

simonpat — 2025-03-11 02:18:12 UTC

"Whereas other whales click or sing, they say that Slim is growling at the surface. The ocean's own Black Panther." (p. 110)

Revolutionary Mothering and Care Work

simonpat — 2025-03-11 02:20:29 UTC

"In 2016, reports circulated with evidence that dolphin mothers sing to their babies while they are in the womb, and for a few weeks after so they can learn their names. Not only that, but according to the report, the rest of the pod holds space for that learning, quieting their other usual sounds so this can happen." (p. 32)

Breathing as Resistance

simonpat — 2025-03-11 02:22:17 UTC

"We are still undrowning. And by we, I don't only mean people like myself whose ancestors specifically survived the middle passage, because the scale of our breathing is planetary, at the very least." (p. 5)

Clymene Dolphin and Hybrid Identities

simonpat — 2025-03-11 02:26:00 UTC

"Who is she? A dolphin who escaped the record, only identified as a species in 1981. Mistranscribed when Europeans first identified her in the 1800s and then dismissed as a false identification." (p. 33)

Black Women's Activism in Environmental Justice

simonpat — 2025-03-11 02:27:31 UTC

"Thank you for all the forms of intimacy that teach me what my skin is not and what my armor never was. I wish for you the sacredness of rest, expansive sprawling rest uninterrupted." (p. 120)

The Nap Ministry and Rest as Resistance

simonpat — 2025-03-11 02:29:48 UTC

"A mother gray seal loses thirteen pounds a day while nursing... She does take breaks to eat though. Occasionally she takes a break to eat. Those last about 1–3 minutes, including the time it takes to dive down to the seafloor and come back." (p. 119)