By Sako Chapman
Front page of the Counter Point Journal volume 1 Issue 2, May 2009. The story “Evergreen Under Military Occupation? Or… Criminal Charges and lawsuit threatened against street theater performance” reports on a Mock Israeli Defense Force (IDF) checkpoint set up by students in front of the clocktower on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009. As this article details, Evergreen Police Services suggested criminal charges against the performers some days later. Newspaper Photo Caption: “Demonstrators staged a mock checkpoint in front of Red Square with a painted representation of the West Bank wall and a voluntary detainee (Photo by Andrew Sernatinger)” From the Evergreen State College Archives.
This spotlight comes to you as a notice for some impending additions to Evergreen’s Digital Archives Collection!
The COUNTER Point Journal (CxPJ) ran as a monthly publication between April of 2009 to 2013. Following the publication of a sizable zionist think piece and string of back-and-forth Letters to the Editor around the Gaza Massacre (Gaza War), the 2009 Cooper Point Journal (CPJ) editors decided to bar any further letters or articles concerning Palestine from publication. Frustrated by the zionist platforming and the censorship of Palestinian news perspectives, this politics oriented alternative paper came together from a combination of dedicated community members and frustrated former CPJ staff. In their active years, the CxPJ covered much more than just anti-zionism and TESC Divestment initiatives (see the archived tescdivest.blogspot.com), using their position as an alternative community paper to raise marginalized campus voices and relevant news.
The first time I encountered the Counter Point was a screenshot of their “brief history of Evergreen police” timeline in the CPJ writers chat my freshman year. It detailed campus police from 1995, the first official proposal for armed police on campus, to 2009, the first official proposal for AR-15s. But there were never any more pages, just fragmented stories from upper classmen and scattered references in post-2017 era CPJs. As a part of the 2023 Disorientation Manual efforts, I returned to the hunt for the Counter Point. Through google, I found page after page of dead links— barring the discovery of the underpopulated “Olympia Public Records Collective” WordPress which provided the original screenshotted document of the timeline. Even the Wayback Machine, the website archiving tool hosted by archive.org let me down, capturing the main page but none of the included pdfs.
Luckily for any curious parties who had previously, like me, hit a wall, the Counter Point Journals have been retrieved from the depths of the archives basement and will soon be available to all through our digital archives collections! If you are in possession of any physical CxPJs that you do not see hosted online, please consider donating or loaning them for us to scan.
As with all of our archive spotlights, we hope that you are encouraged to seek out more information on the topics and shed some light on the forgotten materials that have been so carefully taken care of by our resident Archivist Liza Harrell-Edge. If you are interested in visiting the strange and twisted world of the Evergreen State College archives, go to evergreen.edu/offices-services/library/contact-us to book a research appointment via microsoft bookings! And make sure to keep an eye on the library newsletter for any word on archival workshops. Check out all of the digitized archive materials available at collections.evergreen.edu.
