Land Acknowledgment

This work’s impetus comes from present-day Portland, Oregon, United States of America – the Indigenous land of the Chinook people, who were colonized and spread across multiple federally recognized tribes in Oregon, Washington and Idaho including Cowlitz, Siletz, Wasco, and Yakima.

Chemical weapons are a common tool among imperialist regimes. The events cataloged in this book occur at many locations across the present-day United States and internationally, with specific references to Canada, Mexico, and Vietnam, where colonizing forces of (predominately Northwestern) Europe have used forced labor from enslaved Black people to impose significant force on Indigenous cultures and individuals.

No words can fully encompass the place in which each of the stories told in this book occur. I will work to add important contextual information and acknowledgments, and please remember that each use of a thermal fogger or other brutal police force described here impacted many, many lives.

I ask you to take time to reflect on the countless individuals from communities, tribes, peoples, and cultures around the world that have been fogged with some chemical agent whose names we will never know, whose stories we will never hear.