Note from Patrick who did this interview: At the 6th Week of Action to defend the Atlanta Forest and to stop Cop City, the People’s Tribune caught up with an Atlanta abolitionist organizer known as Kei, to get an update on the movement since the days following Tortuguita’s murder. Read our previous interview with them here. In this round, we spoke about the events since January, the dance of state repression and people power, and what winning is in this context.
People’s Tribune: So we spoke in January. How has the movement been since then?
Kei: When we last spoke it must have been the week after Tortuguita was murdered. It was an intense time. The movement has grown since then pretty drastically both locally and nationally. And then the [5th] Week of Action in March was proof of that. We had a large turnout that both attracted folks from all over the country and also attracted a lot more folks who live in Atlanta that either heard about or became inspired to participate in the movement because of that murder.
During the week of action, the police again were up to no good. And that’s when we had the raid at the music festival where police came in. There was a separate action that happened on the other side of the forest, and police then combed through the woods and then came on the music festival side where folks were out there with kids just hanging out all day – it was beautiful – and just kind of indiscriminately grabbed whoever they could, chased people down, tased somebody, tackled people. They arrested several dozen people at first. They took people out of sight, checked their IDs. And if their ID said they lived in Atlanta, they released them. We think this is to serve this really specific narrative of outside agitators. If somebody had an ID that didn’t say Atlanta, they took them in and charged them with domestic terrorism. So then of course jail support immediately mobilized as soon as arrests began and has continued to mobilize to defend people and their legal defense with their bail money.
That was a hard moment because the police are bringing these really absurd, serious charges, which, of course – the intention of that is to scare people away from movement. I think it backfired a bit similar to all the repression tactics they’ve used before, because people see through it. Because of two years of sustained efforts to try to get any old progressive politician to say anything about the repression the movement has faced, then some progressive politicians are like, “Well, shit, now we have to say something because this has gotten really absurd.”
That was March. But the rest of the week of action continued. People continued to camp in the forest, people continued to move forward with the events that they had planned. And we saw other repression throughout the week as people were doing what I wouldn’t even necessarily call direct actions, even just really simple things like flyering downtown. They were being harassed by police. They are dropping banners and getting detained. Police were going wherever the hell they could. Where they found potential movement participants they were harassing the shit out of them.
The next big thing that happened was the Tear Down House was raided. Three of the folks who work for the Network For Strong Communities, a nonprofit that supports the Atlanta Solidarity Fund [were arrested]. Of course we already know these things, but we got evidence that the stated intention of that raid was to repress the movement. And of course, that’s the case, right, because there’s no other reason to go after a bail fund. I mean, they exist all over the country, they always have. But they’re also a crucial part of movement structure, because if we can’t get them out of jail, then people are going to be less willing to come out to a protest, especially when the movement’s facing such heavy repression. And people are sometimes afraid that if I go to this march and just hand out a flier, might they charge me with terrorism? Or if they see me and I have mud on my boots, might they charge me with terrorism? So it’s extremely important to have that infrastructure in place. And of course, we have many comrades who are still incarcerated and still dealing with the legal system. And so they need that support.
And that raid was horrendous. Again, the state really overplaying its hand because it backfired immediately where even Georgia state politicians like Warnock had to come out and make a statement saying, “Okay, well, I don’t like this movement, but this has gone too far, you’re just going and doing a house raid with a SWAT team in a suburban neighborhood in the middle of Atlanta.”
I think these kinds of repressive tactics haven’t worked, though of course, they’re extremely infuriating and exhausting. You know, they’re trying to wear us down in resources. But it’s a dance, because every time they do that, then the movement grows and we actually get more resources through people power, which is the one thing that’s going to help us win.
Even though we’ve all gone through a lot in the last two years, it still feels really powerful and like we’re growing. I still very much believe that we will win. I think sometimes we forget that part of winning is, not to be cheesy, the friends you make along the way, but it is, you know? It’s the networks and infrastructure that we’re building through doing the movement work itself and it’s not just like, “will we stop Cop City?” In my mind, it was always going to potentially be the case that they’ll cut down some trees or that they’ll pour concrete, or that they’ll build the building. But all infrastructure is temporary. Buildings are temporary, and forests can be rematriated. And that’s been a whole part of this movement anyway. We have been trying to rematriate that forest. So just because they’ve gained a little ground on the construction side – or the destruction side – destroying the many, many acres that they have, it doesn’t bother me. We’re going to win. It’s a dance, it’s a back and forth. And we are growing through every time that they come at us, whether that’s through repression or directly cutting down the forest. I think we’ll keep growing.
PT: Sounds kind of like redefining what winning is. We’re creating networks of infrastructure that are going to last beyond this one victory. So getting maybe a little bit more of a big picture: Creating the networks between groups, between tactics – that is so important. So, not only what does winning look like, but what is the enemy’s strategy that we’re fighting in this battle that we’re trying to win – that I also believe we will win as well. I’m curious to hear your take on why the Cop Cities? Why the militarization of the police and what do you think about the broader historical process that has brought us to this battle specifically?
K: I’m gonna answer by doing that thing some people do where they tell a story: I was thinking about the Occupy movement all over the country, and Occupy in Atlanta in particular. Through that movement, you had a whole bunch of people that were taking on a bunch of different things, depending on who you ask, you know. Some people are like, “I’m taking on corporate personhood” and others are like, “I’m here to build a whole new world,” – there were different reasons people came to that movement. But through that movement experience, many people were confronting the police for the first time ever, and through that experience became radicalized to be like, “Wow, the police are really messed up.” This movement is really different. Everyone’s here because they already know the police are really messed up. And the great irony is that as the movement grows and faces heavier oppression, it’s further justifying why it is we’re doing what we’re doing. These are the stakes of the movement. And the repression has raised the stakes for everyone participating in the movement.
So now it’s not just like, yes – we need to stop the expansion of militarized policing everywhere we can. Yes – this has national and international implications for what policing will look like all over. Another layer locally is we’re the seventh most surveilled city in the world, and the most unequal city in America, along racial lines. We have this Black leadership class, Black politicians, but we have some of the highest rates of poverty. People who live here, if you’re working class or poor and live in the city, you know exactly what the hell’s going on when you see it every day, you live it every day. But so the stakes are like all of those things.
But there’s also other stakes now because of this repression – if we let them win, we let them repress this movement so heavily and just crush us and expand militarized policing like this… We’re actually living in a time now where we have this really dangerous precedent set which says that the state can get away with murdering activists in broad daylight. The state can get away with charging people with terrorism because they don’t like what they have to say, or how they say it. People everywhere are seeing that we need to get involved in the #StopCopCity movement, because if we don’t stop Cop City in Atlanta, then Cop City’s coming right over here to my city. Not only are they necessarily going to build a massive police training facility, (which they are trying to do, there was just an announcement about one in Ohio, for instance, and there’s been similar attempts in Texas, Hawaii, and Chicago, of course), not only might they build this militarized police training facility, but even if they don’t build that, they’re going to try the same exact tactics they tried on this movement. Next time we go in the streets and protest, fuck it, charge them with terrorism for protesting. Or next time people try to do a blockade or a tree sit – murder is now an acceptable response to a tree sit? That’s absurd.
That’s a whole new world that we’d be living in in America. Of course, many people all over the world already are living in that world. We know that environmental activists in particular and Indigenous activists in particular are murdered and disappeared all the time. It’s happening everywhere, let’s not let it happen here.
What does winning look like now? It looks like many things. One, is that we were able to successfully stop some of the repressions coming down on the movement or even reverse that repression. So that’s where you have some of the legal fronts, for instance – groups like the CLDC or the National Lawyers Guild and the Legal Defense Fund who are doing things like bringing the state to court in challenging the domestic terrorism statute, for instance, trying to actually get that overturned. So using the repression as a way to do an offensive move to be like, “we gotta get that shit overturned,” which is very important work on the legal front.
But even with whatever they do, I think many of us feel like if that movement is squashed then those things won’t be as successful. It’s like we need both. Or even if the lawyers are able to get some of the domestic terrorism charges dropped, we still might see comrades that are serving decades in prison, unless the movement stays strong. So now winning looks like many things. It looks like getting all of the charges dropped, like no repression. It looks like maybe getting this law, the domestic terrorism statute, overturned. It certainly looks like it will always look like stopping Cop City.
With some of the infrastructural stuff. I would say that right now in Atlanta, we’re living in a fundamentally different city than we were two years ago. And I think that that’s because of the movement. The movement has transformed how people in the city think about their city, how they think about themselves and each other, about community. Take something like Food for Life, as an example in the city. It came out of Food Not Bombs during COVID, drastically scaled up and became this massive project with so many people participating in it.
And it was beautiful. Well, this movement has all the things like that, like high levels of participation, people feeling their agency, all of that. But I think it also has shown that it’s able to contend with the bourgeois or mainstream politics in the city and present alternative visions that people are actually drawn to. I’m seeing people’s yard signs and they’ll have the “regulate guns, not women” signs, and then a “Defend the Atlanta Forest” sign next to it. To see folks with generally progressive politics that are into gun control and are pro-choice, then put this sign next to it for a movement that people associate with property destruction, with sabotage, abolition – no one’s going to sit here and say this movement isn’t an abolitionist movement at this point, everyone’s like, “that’s an abolitionist movement.” They’re identifying with an abolitionist movement that has super militant elements. It’s really impressive, and that’s fundamentally different from what has been. Of course, there’s always been radicals and revolutionaries in the city, but the majority of left leaning folks tend to just be very progressive liberals. And I think that’s shifting. People are willing to stand with this movement.
Or even seeing things like the kind of community events that we have, like town halls or neighborhood barbecues. Of course, at the beginning of a movement, turnout is really low. And that’s been the case for organizing here for a long time. It’s just difficult to get people out to something like a community barbecue – but not so much anymore. People are coming out because they really care about the movement. They really want to see this thing stopped. I think those changes will last. You know, it’s not just like that will go away after we stop Cop City or something. People are going to continue to grow and build.
PT: How has the surveillance and police state responded to it and how has that changed Atlanta as a city as this movement has progressed?
K: I think because Atlanta’s already so heavily surveilled, maybe some people have become more aware of the high level of surveillance that we’re constantly under. But largely, I think the surveillance and policing has affected the area around the forest most drastically, which is where I live. Where now there’s just constant police patrols day and night, rolling around parks all up and down three of the main roads around there, rolling around through neighborhoods. I think people who live in the area have been really affected by the policing. And why they’re there, to be clear, is to protect the construction equipment and the actual site. So they’re there to watch capital. And I think a lot of folks who live in the area know that, they’re not under the illusion that the cops are there to protect people from something. With my neighbors, what I heard reflecting back to me when the police presence really started to ramp up, they were like, “Who the hell are they protecting us from?” And I was like, “They’re not protecting us, dude. They’re protecting their construction equipment right there. There’s a hell of a lot of capital on that lot. They’re not protecting us.” They’re like, “Oh, okay.” And they’re like, “From who? The hippies?” And I’m like, “I don’t know what to tell you. They’re really freaking out, you know?” For a lot of the neighbors – they’re tree sitters, and they’re going to have all these militarized police out here day and night watching this site against these tree sitters?
PT: It’s been interesting seeing the tactics of the Earth-First! movement and the radical ecological movement getting transplanted into a city, and not like any city, but a southern, majority Black city with its own history of extremely radical politics. You all have been successful in bringing those tactics into a broader narrative of why we need to stop Cop City, and people who wouldn’t otherwise care or support those tactics now are like, “We’re all on the same team.” And probably we’re going to see more and more of that. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the local politics of it, like Andre Dickens and the kind of phenomenon of people who are like, “he’s a progressive Black mayor,” and then immediately turns to being one of the champions of Cop City.
A movement elder of mine who lives here was talking about this phenomenon of these Democrat politicians who are laying the groundwork for fascism. There’s this long history of police reform and “public safety training,” and all it is is really this trajectory of these Democrats being the cover for an advancing fascist offensive from the right. Where are we at in this process? What are your thoughts on fighting even as it obscures itself?
K: I’ve been a big proponent from the beginning that one of the things that this movement and that all movements always have to do is think about the ways in which the state attempts to disarticulate our movements and turn it back on them. We actually have to disarticulate, divide the enemy. And I think specifically, this is part of the fear. Sometimes I forget, like, oh yeah, there was an attempted coup a couple of years ago, right? And 2024 is coming. It’s right around the corner. But we do see the march of fascism in this country and all over the West. And locally.
What that looks like is Andre Dickens so-called progressive mayor – I would argue his platform was never particularly progressive. There’s just a way in which people can just run for office in Atlanta and then are labeled progressive and like, what did he even do that was progressive in the first place? He always supported Cop City. He and then the city council as well, many of whom are Democrats and label themselves as progressives, have like thrown all of their support behind Cop City or have said that they’re going to oppose it and then when push comes to shove, they can’t even do the most simple thing, call a vote to be pushed into the future. It’s like all you guys can do. The only power you actually have right now is to vote No on this thing. And if you know the vote will pass regardless of you voting No, then your job is to delay the vote. Right? Use your fucking power as politicians. And they couldn’t even do that. And it is scary because they are locked up right there with Kemp and with the state level: Georgia state level prosecutors, the GBI, Homeland Security and all of that. And we even saw in the last few months the DeKalb County CEO who was trying to stay out of it switch gears and line right up with Dickens and line up with the chief of police of the Atlanta Police Department and line up with APF. And so essentially, the state has been largely blocked up together around this.
It doesn’t matter, Republican-Democrat, anything. So I think one of the roles of any movement has to be to fraction those blocks, to not only call out the Democrats for providing this cover for fascism, for really severe repression – but actually trying to fracture them. Not just in a moralistic way, “I can’t believe you’re doing this!” But finding those cracks where we can break them apart and not lining up. So we started to see some progress around this, like the DeKalb County D.A. Sherry Boston dropping out, saying she’s not going to be involved in the domestic terrorism cases, largely because she disagreed with the decision to charge a legal observer with terrorism, which is a particularly absurd decision. But I think also, Terry Boston sees what way the wind is blowing and is realizing that she’s potentially going to put her career down the drain because people are upset about these charges and she’s looking really bad if she continues to pursue them. But that’s a crack. That means the DeKalb County DA is breaking off from the Georgia state level strategy. Good. Who else can we get to break off?
And a lot of people are focused really heavily on city council. I think at this point, it’s a pretty lost cause, maybe we’ll have one or two defects, but they’re pretty much lined up.
And I think it’s a similar pattern that we see all over the country because at the end of the day, of course, the Democrats also want to increase policing. Atlanta has been run by Democrats for a hell of a long time, and had Black mayors since the first one in 1973, Maynard Jackson. And in that time the police budget has increased, increased, increased. Now policing takes up a third of the budget of the city of Atlanta. And after the 2020 uprising, they increased the budget for policing. So, of course, they’re lining up behind the cops. And a lot of people are trying to parse out, what is that relationship exactly? Is it that the Atlanta Police Foundation is running shit? I would say yeah, that’s actually a big part of it. And we saw that also in 2020 with the “blue flu” sick out the police did after the officers who killed Rayshard Brooks were fired and charges were brought against them. Then the chief of police was forced to resign, basically, and the cops went on strike who refused to report to duty, which on the one hand: positive, there is less policing in general. Particularly positive in that it actually allowed the uprising at the time to continue without facing that heavy repression because there was no police to repress it. And so that’s when we had established an autonomous zone at the site where Rayshard Brooks was killed, by people from the community. But on the other hand, I think what that showed is that the police are really willing to flex their power however they can to get the city in check. And they did. They checked the city so hard and the city backed down. And that’s when some local politician had brought a bill to withhold police funding until there were community conversations or something, to not to vote on additional money for them. And it failed horribly. The city was like, oh, no, no, no our police just went on strike, we’ve got to line up right behind them. We got to take their lead. And they did. And then they increased the police budget.
PT: I’m curious to know also how Buckhead secession plays into it, and this kind of hostage situation and the false scarcity that is being portrayed.
K: Right now Buckhead secession [Buckhead is a disproportionately white and wealthy area of Northeast Atlanta], falsely touting the supposedly rampant crime in the area doesn’t seem to be on the table anymore. It failed the legislative session for basically the second time. At this point, it could come back up, but the person who was leading those efforts, some fascist piece of shit, has since moved out of the state, and it seemed like he was the one with all the connections. He was the one that was able to get on Fox News and talk about Buckhead secession. Which, at a national level, I think this is a particular far right strategy: to get different municipalities to secede from cities to essentially do another wave of white flight by barricading yourself off and keeping your neighborhood white and rich. I was one of the people that did think Buckhead secession would crush the city because objectively, funding wise, it was going to be really bad. It’d be like white flight overnight. It was going to gut the public school system and our public schools are already suffering – probably because a third of the budget is going to policing and not to the schools and not to infrastructure.
Yesterday there was a sinkhole on Ponce, one of the main roads. There’s a photo of a car in the sinkhole because the infrastructure, and this is true all over the country, is falling apart. And I don’t mean to be too technical with it, but this is part of the crisis of social reproduction that’s happening everywhere. Capitalists and the state are refusing to invest back into infrastructure. And so roads are falling apart. They’re not building trains. There’s investing more into policing. This is part of the analysis, like their plan for climate chaos, their plan for problems of the food supply chain, is to keep us in check. It’s all connected in that way.
Buckhead definitely played a role in Cop City. And that’s partially because of the kinds of demographics of Buckhead, which tends white, and tends wealthier. Also, if you look at an excellent map, came out by this map maker Taylor Shelton, who has a blog called Mapping Atlanta, where he took the board members of the Atlanta Police Foundation, the Atlanta Committee for Progress (which is one of those like private/public partnerships, the way that capitalists actually plan the city), several other folks that are behind Cop City, and mapped out where they lived. They don’t live anywhere down here, near the actual site of Cop City, of course, you know, but it’s a nice visual – they live up in Buckhead and North Atlanta, and that’s where they’re concentrated. So they’re the clear reason why folks like that want a thing like Cop City, both because they want to appease the police who are acting out by striking and quitting. And because they actually want the increased policing. Specifically, Buckhead wanted more cops to keep Black people out of Buckhead. You read what they’re saying, it’s very clear why you want cops. And part of the Buckhead secession movement was a threat, saying if you don’t build Cop City, then Major Buckhead CEOs will support this secession because we want policing and we’re going to get it however we see fit. You don’t give us more police, we’re going to have our own privatized police force – which they already do have their own kind of privatized police force, but they’re going to do more of that. Once they became a municipality, they’d be able to collect their funds together and build their own military. So it definitely played a role.
Now, it’s less important because it failed. There was actually a poll, somebody who did a poll from Emory University, Michael Lee Owens, who showed that actually a lot of Buckhead residents didn’t even want Buckhead to secede. So it’s actually pretty unpopular in the community itself. A lot of Buckhead residents are just people, they’re not CEOs, they’re not total assholes.
But that’s definitely why Cop City’s not being built there, right? It’s being built down here in this “devalued land” – or what capital views as devalued land, because it’s unutilized, but it’s also land they’ve used for a dumping ground for many decades. And it’s a place where they build prisons to lock people up and put the waste treatment plant, and don’t worry about testing the water of the river as it gets increasingly worse and worse.
PT: There was that whole plan about the South River Forest that was really inspiring. The goal of rematriation, the goal of integrating the city and the forest, the forest and the city is all so inspiring and I think set an example for like how urban places can look, and also how we can fight for those things in the face of what the ruling class wants to do with land. What can we do to end militarization and policing?
K: Right now my answer is doing this that we’re doing right now. I have no room to think about anything outside of this movement lately. But also I think the movement has come really far in trying to help vision what it is that we can do. And I appreciate that you brought up the connection to the land because that’s been really crucial to what we’re doing here. It’s not just that we’re fighting policing, but through first holding that land and having spaces like the Living Room where people are able to gather and form that personal connection with that particular piece of land, and that people are also then forming community with each other.
I’ve been an abolitionist for a long time. I hear a lot of people talk about, “well, what about the alternatives to policing?” I don’t like this phrase, because police don’t actually do anything that helps us, literally ever. All they do is respond after harm has occurred. And occasionally their response means that somebody goes to prison, which is just more harm anyway. But most of the time they’re not preventing harms from happening and they’re not even responding to harms after they happen. What is the point of policing? The point of policing is to protect private property, to protect capital, and to keep certain bodies out of certain places. So instead of that, I like to think about what are the ways in which we’re learning through movements like this, how to take care of each other in ways that are lacking elsewhere in our everyday lives? A lot of people through movement are coming to that experience and saying, “it’s not actually a question of what do I do if I can’t call the police?” You start to realize that I was never going to call the police for this in the first place. Or even if I did call the police, what the fuck are they going to do?
It’s like a funny tweet yesterday about the sinkhole on Ponce. Someone said, “I want to be earnest…” Because the city of Atlanta tweeted out, “Don’t worry, the police are on the way.” Like, how are the police going to help with our infrastructure crumbling? That’s so goofy! How do they help with questions like domestic violence or interpersonal violence? They don’t. They make it worse. They harm survivors over and over and over. I think that’s part of it is like people coming into their own in their community agency being like, we actually need to form the structures to help each other. And seeing, for instance, some of the local medics. Medics are another one of those infrastructure that’s just grown like infinitely through the movement. The last Week of Action, they had an ambulance that was able to go out to protest, to come to the woods, to go to wherever you might be, anywhere in the city, and provide you emergency medical care. And it did have to happen that week several times, because, of course, it always has to happen. But folks in the movement particular are not going to call 911 – maybe the police show up. So they could go and provide that medical care. And not only were they responding to protest related injuries, we’re also living in a pandemic. So if people got sick with COVID or sick with anything else. I think at some point the medics were out there because people had gotten poisoned ivy just from being in the woods, so they could then respond to those needs. It’s not just that we have a group of experts with those skills are responding, but they’re also constantly and consistently training up more folks. You get that particular set of skills that then people are able to take back to wherever it is that they live, work and play, and share and spread those skills.
We simultaneously have to be organizing against the power of policing – for instance, get our big unions to kick cops out of our unions, get cops off campus, to be organizing with our comrades who are inside of these facilities, whether that’s immigration detention centers, jails and prisons and doing that inside outside solidarity work – we also at the same time, through all of that, through movement, we have to be like learning to do for ourselves. Because we need it with or without police. Police don’t help. We need those skills really desperately, especially as the world is facing ongoing climate chaos and will be for the rest of all of our lifetimes. So we’re just going to need those skills.
People really are transforming. Cheesy Marx quote, but “consciousness grows through the experience of struggle.” That’s where we actually see transformation. I was talking to a friend last night who has a disability and they’re like, “At what point do I get to stop talking to people who disagree with me around policing about how they feel about policing because it’s like harmful to me to be talking to them all the time.” I said look, “They’re probably not going to change their minds in this conversation with you. They’re actually going to go through an experience.” So it’s just going to take time and through the experience of probably sadly, their own personal struggles. Either with dealing with policing directly or realizing that police don’t help, or seeing, like, the 2020 Uprising. I think so many people are transformed through that experience of seeing police brutality on screen. Like, “Oh wow, my kid could be out there protesting right now, or my brother could be out there protesting.” It’s going to take something like that. They’re probably not going to transform their consciousness just through arguing with you about it on the Internet. So don’t worry about it, take care of yourself! You know, go hang out with your friends and, like, do some medic work instead of having to deal with grumpy people online.
PT: Thinking about the crumbling of infrastructure we see everywhere. Basically what’s happening is they’re trying to create policing and the military as the only infrastructure that we have to turn to for anything. Building those relationships, building our own infrastructure, and sharing-out skills are kind of the only options we have. What has Atlanta done differently to make these resources happen continuously for the last two years?
K: It’s a mixed bag. I guess on the one hand, of course, something like Jail Support with the Solidarity Fund, there’s been a massive outpouring both from people in the city who are donating, including ongoing sustainers that do a monthly donation, and then people nationally and internationally who are moving resources to Atlanta. I don’t know if this is true in the last two years, but I know that it’s been a pattern in the U.S. that when particular movements are happening, happening in like one city or area, the other bail funds in the country say, “Okay, well, we can spare this amount. We’re going to do a grant to that bail fund to support that movement over there.”
So I think some of it’s like moving resources around the world to support what’s happening in Atlanta. But a lot of it is coming from the abundance that already exists everywhere in the city. So something like food: a lot of people here have the experience under COVID and the pandemic of learning how to gather food from grocery stores and redistribute it, and food feed massive amounts of people, or cook these massive meals to feed large amounts of people. A lot of that’s just coming from right here that just is going into dumpsters normally, because we live in an extremely wasteful society. So it’s repurposing that food to actually nourish us.
For medics, probably many of them have full time jobs working as medical workers, and they’re doing it in their free time. But I think for a lot of people, like I include myself in this, if my option is to get off work and go drink beers on a bar patio – and don’t get me wrong, I like to drink a beer – or, it might be to go be in intentional community with my friends doing something that is going to make change in the world…I’m going to go do that. I think a lot of people are having that experience, through all waves of this movement, where they’re like, “Yeah, we’ll get a beer after this. Before we get our beer and chill for a minute, let’s do something intentional together.” And that often looks like us moving and redistributing the resources that we already have, whether that’s small amounts of food per person that’s contributing to a larger pot, or donating money instead of spending it on whatever you might usually spend it on, you know. People are crafty with how they get access to resources. There’s knitting circles this week as part of the movement. People are learning how to make their own clothes or repair their clothes so they don’t have to waste and they can have more things to be able to share with others.
PT: I come from an agricultural/gardening background, and hearing about the Weelaunee Food Autonomy Festival and the week of actions that have been filled with sharing that abundance, giving away native fruit and nut trees and giving away those skills, making mushroom logs – it has been really amazing to watch from a distance. We actually have all the things that we need to survive, whether they are being produced right now and we just need to distribute them, or whether they’re not being produced right now, but we know the skills we need to fix that. We know that land use needs to change and we can work with that. Having that all be a part of the same movement is really important.
K: There’s a foraging collective here that has gone and knocked on doors in neighborhoods. They’ll see like a fruit tree or nut tree in the yard and knock on the door and say, “Hey, we’re a foraging collective. What we do is we gather trees and nuts and herbs. Any edible plants from your yard, can we take it?” And the overwhelming majority of people are like, “Yeah, no problem. Come any time. Don’t even worry if I’m here. Just go through the gate and forage.” And then they take those fruits and nuts and herbs, and they have a community cooking and eating time where they show folks how to make acorn flour pancakes for example, and then they have a meal around it. And that’s actually one of the people who is involved, they’re named Abundia, and they’ll be like, “Well look at all the abundance around this, and we can do this all the time.” Most people are passing fallen acorns every day. But that’s all they know. And don’t get me wrong, acorn flour is extremely labor intensive. But I think people are realizing, we have to learn these skills.
That’s a lot of the community organizing that we have to be doing if we’re building relationships. A lot of folks in movement often don’t have much. They don’t have industrial sized kitchens. But when you’re organizing in neighborhoods and you’re linking up with, for instance, a network of schools in the area, and then you have folks who work at and who run the schools who are like, “come in and use my industrial size kitchen.” We’re all benefiting from that because then they’re involved in participating in and leading parts of the movement. And we’re showing them how we do things. We cook large amounts of food, for large amounts of people to make things free. And also often, going back to the question about calling the police, for instance, I always say that most working class people already have these experiences, but these experiences aren’t necessarily going directly to a movement to abolish policing in the way that sometimes we as leftists think about those things. But most people already in working class areas know not to call the cops because the cops don’t do any good, right? Most people already are cooking large meals for their extended families or their neighbors or whatever it may be, all the time already doing these things. So it’s a matter of linking up together and finding shared purpose and intention, and then directing these activities towards that shared purpose and intention.
PT: How has that gone? What does that look like making those interconnections? What has, if any, conflict looked like in that process? It’s almost kind of easier when there is this big thing that you’re all uniting against, like cop city. The urgency is there, but for people who don’t have an imminent large cop city in their backyard, do you have any advice for how to make those inroads with each other?
K: Look at the movement, some of the connections that exist between folks with resources, whether it’s like, “I have a building, like a church building,” for instance, or “I have an industrial sized kitchen.” Some of those preexisted the movement, of course, because it was just folks who were good people, who already themselves often were running some kind of mutual aid. There’s a church that is not just supportive of, but involved in the movement that already had mutual aid projects that were happening out of the church, and already the preachers preach about abolition. But now, being involved in movement means that people are able to use that church for movement activities and church congregation members are involved in movement activities. So it’s like an organic link.
Another similar one is like with the network of preschools, for instance. The preschools already were teaching their children about settler colonialism, about policing and police violence, and so it was totally a natural connection to them when they heard about cop city and they’ve heard about the struggle to defend the forest to be like, “Oh, yeah, we’re teaching the kids about that and we’re learning from the kids about this. Let’s link up with that struggle,” – because they’re not hypocrites. They mean it. They mean what they’re talking about. This is the exact way in which we want the kids to be like coming into the world and learning more about the world.
Part of it is something that happens through movement. But also what I hear you asking is, what are the ways that we can be linking up with churches, schools, workplaces, prior to a large movement like this popping off.
We have to be rooted, to be cheesy about it. I lived in the same neighborhood for eight years, I come to this coffee shop all the time, have had conversations with the owner of the coffee shop and workers at the coffee shop about the movement. Right now with the week of action being in the park, the first day, porta potties were brought out and set up. And apparently APD didn’t seem to care. The city didn’t seem to care, but the Parks Department was really upset about the porta potties. You just never know how the police are going to react or the Parks Department is going to react. The Parks Department came and got the porta potties removed, and then it was a scramble – where are people going to use the bathroom? Well, a bunch of us went around this neighborhood and talked to people that we know that own manage or work at the bars and explain to them what was going on and said, “Is it cool with y’all? Bathrooms generally around here are open for unsheltered neighbors, but just FYI there might be a lot of people that look like they’re camping coming through. Is that going to be “chill?” Everyone we asked said yes. A lot of us spend a lot of time in the neighborhood and we just know folks. I trust you so that’s no problem. And at this point of course they’ve heard about the movement, they support the movement.
Part two of this interview will be posted soon!
