Reblogged from The Dreamer Propulsion Project:

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I’ve been a visitor in these various occupied Coast Salish territories for the past 5 years, for which I am very grateful. This is where I’ve learned the most about local history and of colonialism, which admittedly, is not much yet.

Most of my knowledge of local history comes from books and papers written by white anthropologists and historians, though I have gleaned a bit of information from local and visiting indigenous people about our shared history.

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Chris Johnson on colonialism in Victoria--to be published in the next issue of No Fun City (Victoria's newest awesommest FREE magazine)

Camas Books, 2590 Quadra St, unceded Lekwungen Territory

Victoria is on colonized land, so what does this mean for settler-indigenous relations, politics, and everyday life? What can theory and history teach us about colonialism and how to respond to it? This workshop will explore these questions through an article by Penelope Edmonds, entitled “Unpacking Settler Colonialism’s Urban Strategies: Indigenous People’s in Victoria, British Columbia and the Transition to a Settler-Colonial City.” The article is pretty dense and written in an academic style, so Nick will cover some of the main points of the article and then we’ll discuss it collectively. If you can read the article beforehand (or have a look) that’s great, but not entirely necessary. Don’t be discouraged if you have a hard time with this article–it IS hard, and that’s why it’s great to discuss it and figure it out together. You can download the article here and you can photocopy your own copy at Camas Books for free. After the workshop discussion, we’ll explore possibilities for other workshops, lectures, or activities around colonialism and decolonization: Creating a regular anti-colonial reading group? Organizing a set of freeskool workshops on colonialism? Creating a research collective? Nick is a white settler and he is not an expert on colonialism or decolonization; he wants to learn more about it, with other people, like you.

When these regimes are suspended, even for a short time, life rushes in.  The grass grows longer and produces seeds.  Flowers and other plants creep in, attracting bees, wasps, and other insects.  Eventually shrubs and trees start to take root, making homes for birds, bats, and other animals.  Under the surface, micro-organisms, insects, and fungus teem with life, intensifying fertility and decay.  Most of the time, none of this is allowed to happen.  The civilized grass chokes out other plants, with the help of mowers and chemicals.

Most of everyday life in Victoria is a big green lawn.  Life here seems normal enough, but we know it needs intensive and ongoing interventions to stay the way it is. Businesses, schools, governments, and police are the groundskeepers of Victoria, and the lawn needs maintenance everywhere.  What forms of violence are needed to keep Victoria stable and civilized?  How are intruders, invaders, and aliens classified and kept at bay?  How do we good Victorians police ourselves and each other, keeping our own little lawns alive?  What do we ignore by pretending that everything is OK?  And where are those spaces, insulated or defended from this violence, where diversity and life has begun to thrive again?  How are they hidden or defended?  How do they ward off the lawn that creeps from within?

Victoria needs your help: kill the lawns inside your head, and the ones outside your house.  We all have some lawn in us, but we have our wild spaces, too.  It is never a question of one or the other in Victoria: no pure wild spaces, none purely civilized.  But one thing is certain: there is too much lawn.  How can we make more space for other forms of life?  How can we sabotage and suspend the processes needed to keep Victoria’s civilized lawns alive and dominant?  Maybe most important: how can we forge alliances between diverse ecosystems, never being content with our own little taste of the wild?

Reblogged from Genderbitch: Musings of a Trans Chick:

Just found this... interesting critique of "calling out" -- and NOT because it 'alienates people' or 'chases away allies'... "If it is just a call out, a simple call out by itself, then you have failed in the central aim of activism. Because the aim of activism isn’t revenge. The aim of activism isn’t getting an apology. The aim of activism isn’t upsetting those in privilege (that’s just a side effect). The aim of activism is to make change. And calling out is one single, very limited tool and it cannot and will not create change on its own. We don’t try to cut down trees by shooting them with a handgun. Why are we trying to use call outs alone to fix the world?"

The argument here is pretty simple: the creative, grassroots, solidarity-building efforts going on in pipeline organizing are different from conventional environmentalism, and that’s a great thing, because conventional environmentalism sucks.  The ‘how’ of anti-pipeline organizing looks much different when people move beyond traditional strategies of environmental organizing and campaigning.  I’m talking about organizing efforts in Victoria because that’s where I live and what I know about, but there are parallels everywhere.  Like all alternatives, the creative departures are partial and emergent, so there’s no way to talk about ‘all’ pipeline organizing.  So here are some examples of the exciting currents of anti-pipeline organizing that are creating and sustaining community resistance:

1) Pipeline organizing is about more than protest.  This Sunday, April 15^th there’s a rally and teach-in to contest the proposed Enbridge pipeline.  The rally is the conventional part, and it’s what usually happens after rallies that make them so sad: everyone goes home (Sunday will be different).  Everyone is familiar with protest conventions: everyone meets in front of a building, chants slogans, marches to a different building, there are some impassioned speeches, we chant at the building for a while… and then we all go home.

Protests can create excitement, a sense of unity, and they can be fun.  But they don’t create much space for people to think through problems together, or to figure out what to do next, and how: often that work is reserved for the ‘campaigners’ (the people who organize the rally and make all the decisions) and the rest of us are just a big mass to be mobilized and then dispersed.  April 15th will be different: after the rally, there’s a whole series of workshops and panel discussions on topics like alternative energy, direct action, anti-oppression, indigenous solidarity and much more.  Maybe most importantly, there will be space for people to form working groups, so that we can be more than just a momentarily-mobilized mass together.  These kinds of practices create space for people to get involved in meaningful ways.  This is the same thing that made the “#OCCUPY” movement so important (and so threatening): beyond the vague denunciations of the 1%, there was genuine space for people to come together and talk to each other, connect the ‘big’ political problems with everyday life, and figure out how to take action together.

2) Pipeline organizing is about more than Enbridge.  The diverse workshop themes reflect the insight that this is about much more than Enbridge, or other pipelines, or oil.  They help dispense with the fantasy that ‘we’ are all the same and that there’s a single enemy ‘out there’: they create space to talk about oppressions that divide communities, connecting everyday life to the pipeline and the institutions that support it.  They connect the pipeline to much longer historical processes like colonialism and enclosure that make the pipeline possible, and they remind us that these processes are ongoing rather than something that happened ‘back then’.  This unsettles conventional environmental narratives that ‘we’ are the good guys, often pointing to the embarrassing fact that this ‘we’ is often settlers who benefit from continuing colonization and resource extraction.  The implications of colonialism and our involvement in it is a problem to be worked through, which makes collective space and discussion all the more urgent.  Workshops include speakers who unpack colonialism and connect it to resource extraction.

This Sunday’s rally doesn’t seem to include your standard roster of speakers: the prominent politicians and environmental NGO directors are nowhere to be found.  Why?

3) Pipeline organizing is community-based and non-professionalized.  Centuries of capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy has left most Canadians pretty stunted in our politics, and mainstream environmentalism is no exception: it tends to funnel us back into practices that promote isolation, individualism, and dependence on government and politicians.  Plus it’s kind of boring.  Over the past 3-4 decades, environmentalism has become professionalized and institutionalized in NGOs that need to demonstrate quantifiable success through measurable goals (how many petition signatures?  Did you achieve your campaign objectives?  How many donations did your campaign receive?)

This kind of environmental politics can be effective, but in a very limited way: it’s great at generating a coherent and unified message, getting favourable coverage in mainstream media, and gathering a huge list of names for email updates.  Sometimes this can achieve short-term objectives: if a government thinks it will cost them too many votes, they might change their minds about a particular project.  Derrick Jensen is famous for mocking this kind of politics, where protests and press coverage can become ends in themselves, making it harder to imagine other forms of resistance…

Mainstream environmental politics is about the ‘masses’: mobilizing the masses, disseminating information to the masses, and often urging the masses to undertake discrete, individualized action (send a letter to your MP and tell them you oppose the pipeline!)  But that’s about it: the masses stay masses, with few opportunities to talk to each other, formulate problems collectively, and figure out how to do stuff together.  In contrast, (parts of) anti-pipeline organizing in Victoria is creating space for horizontal and diverse political responses.  It’s not focused on criticizing or dismissing more conventional environmentalism, but instead on creating space for other, more creative forms of environmentalism to take root.  The organizers behind the April 15th rally aren’t rejecting the conventions of rallies and protests: they’re making brilliant uses of them.  Hundreds (hopefully thousands) will be ‘mobilized’ later this week, but after the rally is over, the energy doesn’t have to dissipate: it can be channeled into the workshops and working groups to keep momentum going and open ways for people ways to stay involved.

These spaces aren’t just about building a group of people who oppose the pipeline in principle: they’re spaces for figuring out collectively how to organize, oppose, and stop the pipeline–and how to dismantle the institutions and structures that support and reinforce it.  And these spaces are way more inspiring and fun than protests and petitions.  Anyway, that’s why I’m showing up on April 15th: because after we’re done chanting slogans, there’s space to sit down together, learn from each other, and do politics collectively.  Hope to see you there!

There is an article on it here, and the Executive Order can be found on the Whitehouse website here.

1.  It’s free.  The creators solicited submissions, promoted, edited, and formatted the thing all on their own time, and they even paid to print it themselves.  No ads, no sales, no profits.  Awesome.  No website yet either, but they’re on facebook.

2.  Submissions encompass art, culture, and politics in Victoria.  Victoria neeeeeds more writing, ideas, and publications that aren’t beholden to advertisers and objectivity.  At its best, NFCcould help form connections between disparate communities, activities, places, and politics in Victoria.

3.  In an effort to keep the publication free, they’re going to run fundraisers, and the first one is a launch party at Camas Books, on April 1, featuring Compassion Gorilla (an awesome local band) and readings from the first issue of NFC.  That means their model depends on us to come out and support this publication… not just with money, but also by reading, submitting our own writing or art, and circulating it.

And when capitalism falters, other economies grow and develop in its cracks.  People start sharing, trading, bartering and creating alternatives.  In Greece, people are developing alternative currencies and systems of barter and exchange.

“It’s an easier, more direct way of exchanging goods and services,” said Bernhardt Koppold, a German-born homeopathist and acupuncturist in Volos who is an active member of the network. “It’s also a way of showing practical solidarity – of building relationships.”

These economies are often messy, and there are no guarantees about equality or fairness.  But capitalism makes none of these guarantees either, and it has a crappy record when it comes to meeting peoples’ needs in Greece (and the rest of the world).  As politicians continue to impose austerity measures in an effort to bail out sovereign debts and resolve (or defer) capitalism’s latest crisis, it’s encouraging to remember that the end of capitalism isn’t the end of people making things, trading, exchanging, or doing stuff for each other.  In fact, capitalism often makes it harder for us to do that stuff together.

Talks or lectures about food on Vancouver Island tend to begin with the mantra that only a tiny fraction (2%-5%) of the food consumed on the Island is produced here.  Of this, another small fraction is grown without chemical pesticides and fertilizers.  Local, organic food is extremely expensive.  It’s obvious that more food should be grown locally and organically, but the major barrier is that potential farmers can’t get access to land.  It’s too expensive.  Skyrocketing land values are at the root of the crisis of both housing and farming.

Land has been commodified on Vancouver Island since the mid-19^th century when it was surveyed, divided, and sold through colonialism.  Over the 150 years since then, colonialism hasn’t gone away; it has changed and intensified: Victoria and the surrounding region are now increasingly marketed as a destination for tourism and retirement for rich people around the world.  Land on Vancouver Island is now an international commodity, and it has attracted speculators, landlords, developers, and others who profit from the property market.

The speculative real estate market has driven up the cost of housing, and most people who live in Victoria will probably never be able to afford a house here.  For most of us, that means renting.  There has been almost no new rental housing built in Victoria, because developers make more money building condos.  As a result, rental rates in Victoria are also incredibly expensive.

Farmers are in the same boat: they may never be able to afford even a small farm, especially if farming is their only source of income.  A lot of land on Vancouver Island is in the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR), a piece of provincial legislation designed to tax people who owns arable land that they aren’t farming.  If you own land within the ALR, the idea is that you’ll farm it, or pay big taxes.  But as an international commodity, a lot of ALR land is currently owned by wealthy people who’ve built huge country estates.  They often lease a portion of their land to be farmed, so that they meet ALR minimums for farming, and get their tax break.  Farmers who lease this land find themselves in precarious lease agreements, with land they can’t live on, and with no long-term stability.  A lot of would-be young farmers have picked up and moved off the Island, or they’ve abandoned farming altogether.

The crucial problem here is that land has become privatized and commodified, and now circulates as an international commodity.  This means huge profits for landlords, speculators and house-flippers.  It also makes it increasingly difficult for poor people to afford to live here, and for farmers to access to land.

Community Land Trusts have been an important response to these problems in other places.  CLTs will not solve these problems, and they do nothing to address the general enclosure of land that continues to underpin colonialism, but they could mitigate the most extreme consequences of private property and real estate speculation.

CLTs remove property from the market and hold it in perpetuity.  A CLT is a non-profit organization that acquires land and then leases it on a long-term basis (often a 99-year lease).  Through the lease model, the CLT continues to own the property, and they lease the land (in the case of farmland) or the dwellings (in the case of housing).  These leases can be sold or transferred, so in effect they become a new commodity.  The crucial difference is that the terms of the lease regulate its resale value, which means that lessees can’t make a big profit from selling their lease.  Because CLTs are non-profits rather than government initiatives, they’re insulated from election cycles and can’t be dismembered by a right-wing majority.  There are a few CLTs in BC, and there’s a Farmlands Trust on Vancouver Island, but the really successful CLTs are in the U.S.

Here’s an example: I live in a collective house, and we pay about $1600 in rent.  The other side of the duplex pays about the same amount.  That’s roughly $3200/month into our landlord’s pockets.  On the other hand, a CLT could buy this duplex and lease it to us.  Our lease fees would help pay off the CLT’s mortgage, and eventually the CLT could own the property without debt.  As lessees, we could sell our lease and get some of our lease fees back, but we wouldn’t make much money.  That’s a good thing: CLT-owned properties become totally worthless to speculators, investors, house-flippers, and others who profit from buying and selling property.  The lease model (often called mutual home ownership) is only attractive to regular people who actually want to live in the home or farm the land.  CLTs often also lease dwellings to non-profit organizations that provide affordable rental housing, or to housing co-operatives.

Now imagine if a significant portion of property was held by CLTs, rather than owned privately.  The properties couldn’t be sold, and lease prices would be regulated, so that they’d be insulated from the skyrocketing cost of houses and farmland in the region.  All the people making big profits off the housing market would be out of the picture, making housing and farmland more affordable and accessible.  CLTs could help make farming more viable, too: farmers could have access to land through stable, long-term leases which would allow them to invest time, energy, and resources in improving the soil, building infrastructure, and other long-term projects.  If they sold their lease, they’d get back what they paid for plus a little to account for inflation and improvements, but they wouldn’t make big profits.

So why aren’t there more CLTs?  There are lots of answers to this question, but a major barrier is money.  CLTs need money in order to buy the properties in the first place.  But the major difference between CLTs and other non-profit housing providers is that CLTs hold the land in trust and then don’t need ongoing subsidies.  So where could the money come from?  Some CLTs have relied on private funding and donations, but to work on a big scale, CLTs need money from governments.  If municipal or regional governments taxed landlords, real estate speculators, and others profiting from the property market, they could generate revenue which CLTs could use to buy properties and remove them from the market.  CLTs would also benefit from access to low-interest mortgages, so they wouldn’t have to buy property up-front.  These possibilities will likely be on the table over the next few years in Victoria and at the Capital Regional District (CRD).  If the CRD approves a region-wide levy to support CLTs, it would have a big impact on farming and housing on Vancouver Island.

CLTs will not solve the crises of housing and farming, but they would definitely help make farming more viable and housing more affordable.  Furthermore, CLTs don’t challenge the way in which land on Vancouver Island has been enclosed, divided, and sold.  The crucial possibility they open is an alternative to private property, where land is insulated from the pressures of the real estate market, making it easier to grow food locally and live here without being rich.