This interview was conducted between the Affinity Project and an anonymous anarchist settler in Guelph, Ontario in June 2008; Published in July 2008.
*
interviewer: can you start by talking about how you came to be involved with indigenous solidarity in ontario?
when i was young, i was on a trip to kashechewan and there were a lot of problems. there were fires and water problems. i went through fort albany, around james bay, and we saw a police station and a community center which was converted from a residential school and it had been burned down by someone on the reserve. the police were looking for the arsonist, and it seemed like common knowledge that some older person on the reserve wanted to see that place gone. so i got into it like you get into breathing, i guess, it was just around me. for a long time before i was living in toronto, and i was more involved in poverty issues. the intersections of race and poverty in toronto are pretty apparent. that's kind of how I first saw it, without doing anything about it. being up north too, i would hang out with native people -- they're mostly native up north -- and those were just the people you're around, and you talk to people.
i guess the next big thing that was happening was around six nations, which is about an hour south of guelph. there's a reclamation site that everybody knows about, the douglas creek reclamation site. it started in the wintertime, and in the spring of 2006 i went out there and hung out. it was very relaxed and people were really nice to me, i guess i just wanted to get involved in helping out with the land reclamation. i hadn't really done anything like that before and i didn't really have any solid connections with any people. i just went out to meet people. people would ask me, why are you actually here right now? that was a bit of a check for me, because i didn't know how to answer them. i just knew through books and movies and some personal experiences that these people were being screwed over, and in really general ways. i got a crash course on the haldimand tract and how people had been screwed out of that land, and the british-american war that forced the mohawks up north, but i knew it from an academic perspective, and not from the day-to-day ways which people are screwed over constantly, every day. so i went out there and i was talking to people, and one guy was asking me at around the fire, 'why are you here, why are you actually here? what do you want to get out of this, everybody comes for something.' i just didn't even know how to answer him, i kept floundering, and it was embarrassing actually. i felt like i wasn't relating on a human level. i was like, i'm here because i read this stuff, and that's garbage.
before all this happened--i'm backtracking--i met some people from grassy narrows, and i became friends with a woman from the grassy narrows area. i started making some connections with people there, through ways in which we were both struggling, them in their way and me as an anarchist; they were stopping logging truck from entering their territory, and i thought that was pretty cool. they were protecting their land and water, trying to make sure things don't get sprayed by the logging companies, and i felt a common cause. i would just hang out with them and we would joke about silly things, like wearing masks and fighting against big corporations, and we developed some kind of connection. i was really excited about them and thought they were really nice people that i'd never met before. when i went to six nations i was looking for similar people that i could identify with or talk about where our struggles were at.
interviewer: people with that caravan from grassy narrows were talking about, if i remember correctly, going to towns and looking for the anarchists, like 'we want to work with you,' and 'we gotta build a revolution together.'
yeah i don't think she ever said it like that, but there was a connection between us. she was really into me and a few people i came up with, and i think that there's been some great examples of indigenous radical people working in communities with anarchists working in communities. there are lines of common support and common enemies that are pretty apparent and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the ways in which indigenous people are oppressed, by a lot of the same types of people--corporations and the state, mostly... government, police, military-- are also the things that oppress most people, and create the hellhole that we live in, the kind of world we see now.
interviewer: so you were saying you went to six nations to seek out people that you felt an affinity with?
yeah and i found people, i would hang out with the youth a bit more. i never really had time to make very serious solid connections because the day i arrived was the wednesday, april 19 and i slept over. then at four in the morning all the opp raided, and it was everyone on their own. i was sleeping in a teepee and the cops were everywhere. i don't know if you ever heard about how it all went down, but it was a really a screwed up situation. the cops had the whole place circled and people on the ground within seconds. people were running from the fire yelling 'cops cops cops,' and i was in the teepee getting my pants on getting out the door. there was police with guns and tasers and whatever else, way far behind me. i remember thinking, 'go to the front gate, fight off at the front gate.' nobody was at the front gate. there were 30 or 40 people the night before, and then at 4 in the morning maybe there were 10 warriors there, everybody was on the ground. i feel some guilt over what transpired in those next minutes, but i don't even know what i could have done. i felt guilty in not doing anything. i was sleeping 100 feet from the front gate and i was literally alone walking around and surrounded by cops. all these cops telling me to walk around with my hands up, and i felt ashamed by not fighting back in any way. i hope that never happens again to me, i hope i learned from that. at that point there were about 200 cops, 10 warriors and maybe 5 or 6 settlers. in the distance there were atv and police car chases, and it looked like this place was sacked. the cops were escorting me and i was talking shit, but not really resisting.
a few hours later, there was a fire coming up from the back of the reclamation site, and i see something really empowering. i see a bunch of warriors come back onto the reclamation site from the reserve, and they're literally pushing opp lines back with rocks and sticks. they're pushing them a little farther, and a little farther, and there wasn't media or people watching at this point. eventually the cops started getting into their cars, and the cars are getting hit with baseball bats, and the cops are wearing masks and pointing guns at them but still they drove away slowly. it was the most empowering thing i've ever been able to witness in my life, i think. right after that, being back in the site, immediately the barricades went up, the tire fires started, the militia organization with the atvs and the way people had shit locked down, i've never seen that kind of resistance ever. maybe never like that again. the was this paramilitary force organized backfire, and they had stuff locked down in a way i've never seen from any anarchist communities i've been a part of. it was scary and i felt awkward and some shame.
interviewer: so you were waiting to be processed, and not under arrest?
there were two people at the front gates, and cops with weapons asking us to not turn around and walk out the gate. i didn't know what to do. it was telling to see who was getting arrested and who wasn't getting arrested. in the end it was maybe 11 people arrested, and maybe 2 settlers arrested. the second settler was arrested for just mouthing off, like i was doing. it was interesting to see the ways in which some people were talking about being down, including me, and then when it came time and we were alone and surrounded with weapons we didn't know what to do.
when i think of solidarity, i always think that solidarity is shouldering burden. at that time, the cops were the burden, and i wasn't shouldering that. i could explain a whole bunch of reasons why i didn't act: i was confused, it was four in the morning, i was getting my pants on while cops rushed me, and all those things. but my gut reaction wasn't to pick up a stick. maybe it was for the better.
interviewer: when you say that solidarity is 'shouldering burden,' how does that play in with having privilege in a situation... it seems that using privilege in a way that is constructive is different than shouldering burden, because when you shoulder burden you might reject privilege that you have in a situation. do you feel like these things contradict each other? some people will use their white skin privilege on a line to make police violence less likely, if they see settlers there. do you feel like that's a problem?
i think privilege can be a whole bunch of different things. it can be a skill or an ability that somebody else doesn't have, or access. i feel like it's a blanket word that explains a lot of different abilities or positions that people might hold in a society. so white skin privilege specifically and class privilege--which go hand-in-hand a lot of the time--is an issue because they're ways in which people have access to resources or skillsets that other people without those privileges may have. so privilege is something to explore when working with indigenous communities, but i also find it gives people specific positions... like because you're white, you should be doing this, and i'm native so i should be doing this, and it creates weird hierarchies around knowledge and skillsets that people will learn and practice in their daily lives. when people put on the black mask, they shed some of that privilege because people can't tell from the outside what kind of person that is. at the same time, there is a time for lawyers and legal support, as well as people who can obtain resources really quickly. but there's also a time for physical confrontation and extending struggles beyond the legal realm, and privilege can be used there too. white people can get a haircut and walk into places wearing a suit that indigenous people couldn't walk into. even when it comes to putting militant pressure on the state or corporations, white people can still use privilege and shoulder physical burden. it's also a context that indigenous radical communities live in, where there's extreme surveillance and they live those lives. you can't not be indigenous or trade your skin colour, and it's not just police repression, but everywhere. privilege is a weird word, and it's something that's hard for me to think about. i do think that it's important for everybody, privileged or not privileged to escape their comfort zones. if that means having awkward conversations and hanging out with indigenous people that you don't really know, then so be it. it could also be trying to fight back and attack the state and corporate power. nobody wants to face repression, and nobody wants to be faced with colonization, residential schools, racism, nobody wants that. some people don't have as big comfort zones as others, and it's important for settler populations when getting involved in solidarity work to really think about those comfort zones and to challenge them regularly. sometimes that means giving up privilege, and sometimes it means taking a little bit of directive sometimes, in specific situations.
interviewer: maybe you could walk us through about the way the solidarity effort at six nations is organized?
something that's been happening is a massive influx of settlers coming out to support the resistance that was happening. that brought a lot of problems. these semi-professional radical settler groups started taking on the responsibility of dealing with the settlers that were coming in and almost processing them and giving them directive. instead of people coming to build tangible relationships with indigenous people, it became this, for a while at least when it was hot there and there were a lot of people coming in. there was a lot of stuff to do so it wasn't really a time for building relationships, and people were busy working on whatever. at that time, there were a lot of settlers and this group--ocap (ontario coalition against poverty)--took on a settler processing role where they started tasking people. they started mediating the relationship between settlers and indigenous people; so what came out of that was that many settlers weren't building solid relationships with some of the indigenous people.
it was also a complex situation. there's a whole spectrum of political philosophies of the indigenous people at the reclamation site; some people lean more anarchistically, some people are all about non-violence, some people are pro-violence, some people are about mediation and negotiation, some people recognize that as a crock and a scam and how it'll never happen. so it depends who you talk to. so there's not a homogenous indigenous political entity or voice, or even opinion about the goals of that site.
interviewer: just to bring you back to the settler side, it seems to me that during this pressure point of conflict, the whole political organization of the settlers coming in was captured by almost a marxist-leninist approach or makhnoist war-time anarchist approach--being generous--so why did anarchists allow themselves to get force-fed into that system as opposed to demanding that there be more consensus decision-making about exactly what we were going to do, having it be a more anarchist approach to how things went down?
i think that's a really complex question. i feel like a lot of people were really trying hard, anarchists and non-anarchist settlers, trying really hard not to step on people's toes, and didn't know the history of how things are organized around there. people weren't comfortable going to indigenous organizing meetings, or weren't invited to them. it's often easier for settlers to talk with other settlers, instead of branching out and building relationships with indigenous people who had been there for a long time.
i was there the day before and the day after the raid, so i know what the drastic change was. the day before there wasn't an ocap house, there were only one or two people there from ocap who were just sitting there hanging out, but there wasn't the same divide and the differences in opinions between indigenous people were more apparent with not as many settlers around. just talking to people straight up was easier then. i think the ocap-style organization happened because people were already into following the lead of 'the native people' and the indigenous leadership was replaced with the ocap leadership.
interviewer: did you get a sense that there was any cohesion about who ocap was talking to on the indigenous side, because i got the sense that there wasn't really a unified six nations voice about what was going to happen at the reclamation site. was ocap presenting to settlers that there was a unified vision and if so, where did that come from?
that's a hard question to answer. i don't know who they were talking to, i don't know what their political connections are there and who they feel close to. i don't know how to answer that.
interviewer: how would you have liked, in a perfect world, for that to have played out? and how would it be, from an anarchist perspective, possible to get to that way of doing things?
yeah that's a difficult situation. i think a lot of things were learned in that scenario. and i do think it's important to build relationships with other communities that are struggling against things that you're struggling against. which is not to say that you're the same, because indigenous people and anarchist people have specific histories and sometimes they get confused together. but i think one thing that came out of that for anarchist communities was the recognition that there were specific people who shared anarchist views, and it wasn't the most common idea at the reclamation site. to recognize that all the same things that happen to indigenous people--development, quarries, poisoning the rivers--they happen in everyone's backyard too.
i think something that's come out of that critique is that people have started acting more locally when it comes to indigenous resistance, shouldering burden. shouldering burden doesn't have to mean hanging out on the front lines or blocking up and fighting with other indigenous warriors (when it's asked for). when communities are under distress, like at six nations or tyendinaga, is the pressure is put on the police locally and the fight is extended to our communities, and the police and the state feel that. there are lots of examples in guelph, like when tyendinaga was last raided race lines were crossed. not just the other mohawk territories responded in soldarity, but in vancouver you had indigenous and settler radicals holding the intersections. and in guelph, the day tyendinga was raided, a number of trucks were set on fire. a few days later, blockades went up in guelph. that was brief, but the opp came out, and there was a bit of a struggle. to me and people in my community, that's the direction people are going in. it's not about waiting for leadership but about forming relationships with people you feel comfortable with and share politics with. recognizing privileges and oppressions and acting outside your comfort zones with them and in your own communities. indigenous politics are really complex, and i don't even know anything about it, but for settler populations who come at it from weird angles, like they don't understand the band council system or the afn (assembly of first nations), it's really difficult and a long learning process. it's really hard to figure out all that stuff other than by forming relationships with people and doing research on it, and finding affinity with people. i can't stress that enough. i think i a perfect world, there would be a lot more people i found affinity with--indigenous and non-indigenous--but most people i find are doing indigenous solidarity are still looking at solidarity work from a weird angle, that they can help out and stand back at the same time. whereas i think this fight needs to be extended, and there needs to be more action, everywhere, all the time; indigenous and anarchist, and those boundaries need to be crossed. i'm not advocating for direct action all the time, but there needs to be more pressure put on this state, and maybe that can be done if people have affinity with indigenous radicals, and maybe that can be done with settlers finding their own affinity amongst themselves.
i don't know what would have happened at six nations in the perfect world, but i would have preferred if ocap hadn't taken over. i don't know if they were asked, but i could have seen them being asked. literally when i was there, the next day there were hundreds of settlers on buses showing up, who don't know the cultural norms or what to do if the cops came in, they were like sitting ducks. it was stressful and weird, and if ocap was being asked to do that they should have relinquished that power shortly afterwards, but they didn't. i feel like it was a bit self-centered, that they were trying to improve the status of their own organizations, with the ocap house and being the 'cool people.' there's a lot of good people in ocap, but being in ocap doesn't mean yo have good politics in any way, shape or form. they also had this leadership with some of the members who became the settler advocates, who were talking very publicly about the reclamation, and would do press conferences. the very first day i saw this one ocap guy talking to all the cameras, and they sort of assumed that role as the settler representatives, kind of talking for everybody and guiding people. it's not my politics. i think if they weren't there, there might have been more real interactions that crossed racial lines, but i don't know. it's weird, because i recognize a lot shit that people went through historically, but at the same time i don't have the politics of the mass majority of that reclamation site, and i recognize that. the best that i can do is find those people that i share an affinity with, and hook up and have barbeques with them. hang out together, work on projects together...
i'm slightly involved with anti-fascist work, and that's a good in because there's a lot of fascist organizing going on in caledonia. it's a way i can relate to people on a common enemy; some people don't want anything to do with it, but some people want to go find them in their houses. some people are all into getting intel, and that's a skillset i have and an ability. finding links through common enemies.
interviewer: what about common identifications? what makes up many indigenous self-identities is through certain relationships with land, and a lot of anarchist communities are talking about decolonizing our own communities and reconnecting with land and dealienating ourselves. we all have indigenous histories to ourselves, whether we're indigenous to somewhere in europe or whatever. but there are difficulties in that the land has been generally colonized but also stolen from a particular nation or community. do you find a dilemma there?
yeah i think you're right. a lot of anarchist communities are working on that, you put it as decolonization efforts, and a recognition that people have been socialized into believing a lot of half-truths about the world we grew up in. it comes down to a common sentiment, i think, and people are starting to relate in anarchist communities more to the land bases that they come from or live on; the water that they drink, maybe the forest that they used to inhabit. it depends where you are, too. in guelph there is still some forest left. it's still pretty obvious that this was at one time a wild place, or semi-wild. maybe it's harder to identify that in toronto. i feel like that is a common identifying point with some indigenous people, people who are into traditionalism or into learning about folk medicines or eating wild food, traditional practices that used to exist. settler people trying to figure out the history of their own colonization and their genealogy of their families being kicked off of land, ways in which they ended up here.
interviewer: why is that important?
i think it's important because i think in some ways, people can realize that they're the enemy but they're also not the enemy at the same time. they're trying to figure out solutions about how to live differently; i'm getting into my own politics i guess, but i feel like industrial civilization is destroying the earth very quickly, and i feel like it's important to build skillsets around living a life that is less reliant and more autonomous from industrial civilization, like getting off of power grids and off of water grids and learning how to cook your own foods. showing communities how to live autonomously from the state. throughout resistance to colonization, and still strongly in indigenous communities i've been in, people are always showing these skillsets to youth and people are learning how to live without industrial civilization. one of the most interesting things i've heard is when people say, 'the problem with colonization is the indian,' the problem is the history itself and the access a person has to that history, and the ways in which they're not 'modernizing' at the speed the rest of industrial civilization moves, and many don't want to.
interviewer: it's similar to the 'jewish problem.' like, 'the problem with the jews is that the jews haven't converted or died.' i actually think there's a historical link between the colonial process developed towards others in europe and how they were applied around the globe, colonizing people.
so knowing your own genealogy and history can help you recognize that you can build a community and live autonomously--and all of our ancestors have--without relying on modern conveniences. would you rather have a poisoned river and a beef factory, or a clean river and no beef factory? sometimes it's hard for people to recognize those modern conveniences, people are just born with them. that's a scary thought. not only do you lose information and skills and knowledge which provide a healthier community, you don't forget but get to the point where you can't learn again, because those ideas disappear. the big issue is that this is all native land, and to not recognize that--or to recognize that and not do anything about it!--is a serious problem.
i don't advocate for people to go back to europe. there was someone here who decided after years and years that the only thing they could do was to go back to switzerland. they decided that that's where their family's from, that they're going to leave because they're not meant to be here, it's not their land. that's an extreme position.
interviewer: most people don't have a straight line. i'm going to blow up into a million pieces and fly all over the place.
yeah he was second generation, so it was a bit easier for him (laughs). that whole back-to-europe philosophy is obviously not going to fly. people have been here for generations. it's also a problem because i say that, but that's exactly the arguments used by people living around the haldimand tract. people who live in kitchener, or wherever that's specifically not on native land but actually granted to native people by the government in these contracts and treaties that they made years ago. if you even want to listen to the treaties; to me it's all native land, it doesn't even matter what treaty was made 100 years ago, or 200 years ago. so these people are saying, 'we've lived here for three generations, fuck you. this is our land, as much as it's anyone else's.' so people really have to process what it means to be a settler and what it means to be indigenous... i'm trying to answer this question...
interviewer: there's no clearcut answer. i think this is on the edge of everything... there aren't books written about this, the books are being written right here and now.
i mean if you listen to taiaiake alfred, he says that the problem with decolonization is--and he's talking specifically to indigenous people--he says you're not ready to decolonize. there a history of being strong, having community, having knowledge and hope and strength, different abilities that existed before the colonial process which have been basically destroyed. these things that made indigenous people originally so strong are no longer there anymore, and have been replaced by colonial messages and knowledge, and all sorts of garbage. people want to decolonize but they have all this shit in them still, and that's an issue that extends beyond indigenous people everywhere; if we talk about decolonization holistically, what it means to decolonize this country or state or north america or whatever, it's everywhere. what's the colonization in all of us? i guess first of all, you have to know your history, and second of all you have to know where you want to go and in which ways you've been led astray. for me, anarchism's all about growing strong, autonomous communities. with those communities you're able to deal with problems that arise. i'm talking really idealistically.
interviewer: i always felt that the decolonization question when applied in this regard is difficult because some people--i'll just take myself--when you trace your genealogy, you trace it to people who have been colonized a hundred times over, and even in europe it's a huge mix of african, german, celtic, all these mixes of these processes. even then, the question might not stop... so when some people start to think about it, it's perplexing and impossible. it's not like everybody's from switzerland and know that they've been there for thousands and thousands of years, and not much has changed. i think a lot of people look at people in europe and make that assumption and that in itself is a sort of inter-white misconception or discrimination even, concepts of who people are.
totally. it's a complicated question, and i don't think there's an answer. i don't believe in people necessarily going back to whatever mythical place they once came from, but i do believe there is historical information and knowledge, a timeline in which these things don't exist anymore, and this knowledge is important for the future communities that we can try and build, hopefully across racial lines.
interviewer: so what do you think the future of this tenuous, but now i think established link between indigenous communities and anarchists could look like, or is going to look like? what do you hope for?
the way i feel about it, anarchists all over, especially on the west coast, have been involved in mutual aid relationships with radical indigenous communities. you can go all across the country, to gustafsen lake, and it's happening a lot more right now. anarchists in squamish territory on the west coast, there's been a long history of relationship-building and co-struggling, and now with six nations and tyendinaga it's been the same way, at least in guelph. i hear about people all around ontario and quebec doing the same thing. i feel like this relationship is going to keep growing, maybe even for generations. i hope that as repression gets more intense, that these communities interdepend on each other a little more, because we have common struggles and enemies. it's of extreme importance, even from a tactical point of view, to have radical people in another community. if indigenous people get wiped out, i feel like we're screwed, and if we get wiped out, they're going to be feeling it a lot harder. i think that realization is important.
again, there are very few people who are towing the line between both indigenous and anarchist--gord hill is one of them--but he recognizes them as different historical movements and he doesn't really like to combine them. there are a few people--like red dawn from six nations--you always see him trolling infoshop or whatever (laughs). but there are only a few people towing that line right now. there will probably be more in the future, because the struggles are similar. but for me, i stress the distinction between the two, and not taking on other people's problems, and instead realizing the common vested interests there.