Category Archives: Music

May Day 2016 with Peter Linebaugh (repodcast)

May Day 2016 (repodcast)

book cover of "The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day by Peter Linebaugh" featuring a painting of European peasants farming
Download This Repod

We’re happy to share another past episode, this time from May Day 2016, about 4 months before the start of our rss feed for our podcast. I feel it’s notable that this show approaches it’s 13th birthday on the May 9th of this year.

In this show, you’ll hear an interview with autonomous Marxist historian, Peter Linebaugh on essay collection The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day plus some music we curated at the time.

To friends we’ve met, and to those we have yet to meet, I’d like to wish everyone a happy May Day. As we’ll hear in the following hour, this day has a long celebrated history. From its many European pagan roots as a celebration of fertility as the fruits of the spring planting season began to… uh, spring forth. Then on to the repressive winter that fell early on May 3rd and 4th of 1886 in Illinois with, first, the killing of workers striking for an 8 hour work day at the McCormick Works and then the repression of anarchist and socialist workers and organizers following the bombing at Haymarket Square in Chicago of that same year. From there to the taking up of May 1st as International Workers Day by struggling groups around the world and the U.S. adoption of a sanctioned Labor Day in September of the year.

To divide an international working class, The U.S. government, oppressors of that May Day 1886 sanctioned a Labor Day to be celebrated in September, declared the first of May both Law Day (an obvious testament to Irony in respect to the Haymarket 8, all jailed and 4 executed) and, for some, it’s celebration as Americanism Day. Whatever that means. In 2006 & 2007, immigrants rights marches were seen on and around May Days that, for many, re-sparked the importance of this day. The protests and festivals swelled to numbers nearly unmatched in the history of protest on Turtle Island, and were accompanied by school and work walkouts and boycott days.

Whether you’re out there today taking direct action, in repose from the horrors of wage slavery, resisting the carceral state, gardening, dancing around a May Pole or otherwise celebrating the possibilities of this year to come when, hell, we might as well end this system of exclusion and extraction: We wish you a fire on your tongue, love in your heart and free land beneath you.

Continue reading May Day 2016 with Peter Linebaugh (repodcast)

Propaganda By The Seed (with Aaron Parker and Tim Holland)

Propaganda By The Seed (with Aaron Parker and Tim Holland)

Logo for PBTS featuring a tree, the words "Propaganda By The Seed" around te exterior with a circle-A in the roots of the tree
Download This Episode

This week on the show, we feature a chat with Aaron Parker of Edgewood Nursery & Tim Holland (aka MC Sole), who together form the Propaganda By The Seed podcast. You can find the podcast on the channel zero network, Libsyn, and a bunch of streaming services. We hope you enjoy this chat as much as Bursts did. We talk about their project of sharing conversations with various farmers, herbalists, propagators, scavengers, historians and cooks about plants, food autonomy, agriculture mutual aid and a host of other, related topics.

You can find a bunch of Sole’s music at his bandcamp. And, if you want to hear past convos we’ve had, you can find a chat Tim & Bursts had (when Bursts was wicked underslept) in 2017 or Amar & Bursts on the “final” Solecast in 2020.

The podcast that Bursts mentioned but never named is “The Strange Case of Starship Iris“. It’s great, you should check it out.

Continue reading Propaganda By The Seed (with Aaron Parker and Tim Holland)

Dunstan Bruce on The Untold Story of Chumbawamba

The Untold Story of Chumbawamba with Dunstan Bruce

Dunstan sitting by a wall with someone wearing the baby face from the Tubthumper album cover and cartoon hands from "Never Mind The Ballots" album cover
Download This Episode

Dunstan Bruce is perhaps most famous for his lead vocals and listing of libations in the Chumbawamba pop hit, Tubthumping. But there is so much more to him and that band than that one song. For the hour we touch on some of the band’s 30 year history, their relation as a collective, anarchist band to social justice movements around the world and how they used their fame and money to give back, Dunstan’s recently finished documentary “I Get Knocked Down: The Untold Story of Chumbawamba” and his accompanying one man show “Am I Invisible Yet?”, aging and the battle for relevance, staying involved in politics and more. “I Get Knocked Down” is still seeking distribution so not streamable, but keep an eye on the fakebook page for updates on that, and you can find his prior documentary on Chumbawamba published about 20 years ago on youtube, entitled “Well Done, Now Sod Off!

You can find a rather embarrassing mixtape from us years ago on archive.org, expect a replacement playlist for it soon.

Chumbawamaba-related:

Some hijinks from the era:

Other music related projects mentioned:

Dunstan’s Other Docs

Continue reading Dunstan Bruce on The Untold Story of Chumbawamba

Eric King Speaks | 2 Radical Ukrainian Voices

Eric King Speaks | 2 Radical Ukrainian Voices

This week, we’re sharing 3 audio segments on this episode.

Eric King Transferred To High Security Prison in VA

[00:04:08 – 00:23:50]

Info on Eric King + an image of Operation Solidarity in Ukraine
Download This Episode

First up, you’ll hear Eric King, anarchist prisoner whose recent legal victory against the Federal Bureau of Prisons in the US was featured on our episodes from the week of March 27th, 2022. Last week, Eric was suddenly transferred out of Colorado toward United States Penitentiary Lee in the southwest portion of Virginia near Johnson City, TN. This is in spite of the fact that Eric should be held at a medium security facility according to BOP standards, unlike the high security and max prisoners at USP Lee. We caught up with him mid-transfer while at Grady County Jail in Oklahoma where many Federal prisoners stop during cross-country transfers. Eric and his supporters are afraid that he’ll be facing time in the SHU, or Secure Housing Unit at USP Lee for no reason other than punishment for his legal case and his supporters are putting together a call-in campaign to raise Eric’s visibility to keep him safe. There is information about this in our show notes at TheFinalStrawRadio.NoBlogs.Org and hopefully soon at https://SupportEricKing.Org .

This is followed by Sean Swain’s segment [00:23:53 – 00:32:42]

Maria of Anarchist Black Cross Kyiv

[00:33:06 – 01:07:52]

Then, you’ll hear Maria, a member of Anarchist Black Cross Kyiv, just returned from Ukraine and currently in Warsaw, Poland. We talk about ABC Kyiv, mutual aid and refugee support, border crossing, some information about anarchists participating in the territorial defense, NATO, non-violent as well as armed resistance to the Russian invasion, Russian forcibly moving Ukrainians from Mariupol into territories they control and other recent news stories. You can find more on how to support Operation Solidarity at linktr.ee/OperationSolidarity and the Resistance Committee of anarchists participating in armed resistance to the invasion at linktr.ee/TheBlackHeadquarter. You can also find a benefit for ABC resistance to the invasion at ABCMusicalSolidarity.Bandcamp.Com, written up at North Shore Counter-Info.

Mira, leftist punk from Kharkiv

[01:09:06 – 01:41:14]

Finally, you’ll hear a conversation recorded on Sunday, April 3rd with Mira, a member of the street punk band Bezlad and a show booker in the hardcore scene of Kharkiv near the Russian Border. Mira talks about his leaving of Kharkiv to L’viv to aid leftist and punk territorial defense fighters getting protective gear, his experience of the devastation of war on the city he loves and the breakdown of solidarity with antifascist and punk communities across the border between Russia & Ukraine since the war in the Donbass and intensifying today. We’ll play a song by Bezlad after this interview and will link them in the shownotes.

Continue reading Eric King Speaks | 2 Radical Ukrainian Voices

Abolition Mixtape with Chris “Time” Steel

Abolition Mixtape with Chris “Time” Steel

A mixtape audio cassette over a rainy city street background, featuring text "Time Talks, Episode 46: Prison Aboliton Mixtape Feat Bursts of TFSR"
Download This Episode

We are sharing a cross-over episode with the Time Talks Podcast (member of the Channel Zero Network alongside TFSR) where Chris “Time” Steel and Bursts share songs about the struggle for abolition and what they like about them.

Show Playlist:

  1. Dead Prez – Behind Enemy Lines
  2. Archie Shepp – Attica Blues
  3. Vic Mensa – Shelter feat. Wyclef Jean & Chance the Rapper
  4. Zack de la Rocha – Digging For Windows
  5. Ric Wilson – Fight Like Ida B & Marsha P
  6. Invincible – The Door
  7. Apani B. Fly feat. L.I.F.E. Long – Outasite
  8. JP Robinson – George Jackson
  9. Rocky Rivera – Headhunter feat. Bambu
  10. Blackbird Raum – Lucasville
  11. Sole & DJ Pain 1 – FTL
  12. Thin Lizzy – Jailbreak

Asheville Responses to Recent Repression

In relation to the subject matter of our late December interview about housing and homeless camp sweeps in Asheville and persecution of activists weeks later, we have this to share:

We stand in solidarity with the 7 defendants in Asheville currently facing charges brought against them in an act of blatant state repression. On Tuesday February 8th, our comrades will have their first probable cause hearing. As these proceedings continue, our comrades are asking our community to amplify their story and continue the essential, revolutionary work of mutual aid.

You can also offer financial support by checking out Firestorms fundraiser (Twitter, Instagram) and donating directly to the Blue Ridge ABC Bail & Legal Solidarity Fund (venmo: @BlueRidgeABC).

Coming weeks will see a series of online workshops featured by Firestorm Books on anti-repression subjects online for free:

  • Tues, Feb 8th, 7-8:30pm EST, Anti-Repression 101:
    • What to expect during door knocks, arrest, jail, & court.
    • Register here 
  • Tues, Feb 15th, 7-8:30pm EST, Digital Security 101:
    • How to secure phones, computers, and communications from falling into the wrong hands.
    • Register here
  • Tues, Feb 22nd, 7-8:30pm EST, Advanced Directives:
    • How to make a crisis plan when facing state repression.
    • Register here

Continue reading Abolition Mixtape with Chris “Time” Steel

Veronza Bowers, Jr: 47 Years of Justice Denied

Veronza Bowers, Jr: 47 Years of Justice Denied

After more than 44 years in prison, 14 years beyond his mandatory release date, Veronza has faith that with his Freedom Team of top lawyers and the love of multitudes of supporters around the world, he will win his freedom soon. Political prisoners are kept in prison when the “law enforcers” they opposed decades ago carry grudges they pass down the generations, vowing those prisoners will die in prison. But the words of little Pharoah Dawson, who wrote, “Veronza, don’t die in prison!” are more powerful.
Download This Episode

This week, we’re airing a conversation recorded by Eda Levinson on September 12th, 2002, with political prisoner Veronza Bowers, Jr. It originally aired on Youth Speaks Out on KZYX in Modesto County, California, and we re-air this with permission of Veronza and the current producer of the Youth Speaks Out. The show continues to produce youth focused and progressive content available at YouthSpeaksOut.net.

For the hour, you’ll hear former Black Panther Party member Veronza describe to the audience in his own words his upbringing, his experiences of racism, his time in prison, his case, his views on the burgeoning War on Terror, and the situation of political prisoners in the US. You’ll also hear some recordings of Veronza playing the shakuhachi bamboo flute. Veronza was convicted of the death of a US Park Ranger on the word of two prison informants who were paid and received reduced sentences. Veronza continues to claim his innocence and he has been illegally held beyond his mandatory release date of June 21, 2005, based on political pressure by GW Bush appointed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales apparently on behalf of the Association of National Park Rangers, the widow of the dead ranger and the Fraternal Order of Police.

The conversation is very much a product of it’s time, for instance the discussion of the implications of the one year anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Sadly there is a timelessness in their discussion of the brutal war against the people of Afghanistan as well as the continued incarceration of Veronza, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, alongside many other long term, leftist and liberation political prisoners held by the US government. Currently, the Biden administration is discussing some sort of pull out of US troops from Afghanistan on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, in the last year we’ve seen the deaths due to medical neglect and decades of incarceration for political prisoners like Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald, deaths right after release like Delbert Africa, and the endangering of aging political prisoners in their 70’s and 80’s who’ve had bouts with covid and cancers inside like Sundiata Acoli, Dr Mutulu Shakur and Russell “Maroon” Shoatz. Veronza was successfully treated for lymphoma and pneumonia in 2017 and 2018, having hip surgery in 2019 but his death by incarceration only looms a larger possibility day by day.

He is currently being held at FCI Butner in North Carolina and can be written at:

Veronza Bowers, Jr. ##35316-136
FCI Butner Medium II
P.O. Box 1500
Butner, NC 27509

You can learn more about his case as well as see pictures of Veronza and loved ones, read his writings, poetry and interviews at Veronza.Org. Some of this is also available by viewing his page on PrisonerSolidarity.Com and you can read many articles about his situation on the SFBayView.com.

Other Veronza Audio Recordings

These are a collection of audio recordings of spoken word and musical pieces featuring Veronza Bowers, Jr, political prisoner since 1974 and former Black Panther Party member in the US. These are being posted with the permission of Veronza and we hope to have them more available for streaming in the future.
  • Healing Heart is performed by Jah Roots (a band of imprisoned musicians featuring Veronza on shatuhachi bamboo flute)
  • Birthing Song is performed by Veronza Bowers, Jr, on shatuhachi flute with overlaid ocean sounds
  • Song for Alexis is performed by Jah Roots (a band of imprisoned musicians featuring Veronza on shatuhachi bamboo flute)
  • To Touch the Spirit is performed by Jah Roots (a band of imprisoned musicians featuring Veronza on shatuhachi bamboo flute)
  • Eulogy was recorded by Veronza “Butch” Bowers, Jr, in memory of his Mama’s passing. As Veronza was unable to participate in his mothers funeral so with the allowance of the then-Warden at USP Coleman, alongside comrades Rev. “One Love” and another comrade, Siakatame “Mountain Heart” Hafoka, the three speak their goodbyes to Dorothy Woodruff and Veronza performs poetry and music in his mother’s memory and family.

Sean Swain talks about the FBI

[01:05:16] 😀

Continue reading Veronza Bowers, Jr: 47 Years of Justice Denied

Maxida Märak and Gabriel Khun on Liberating Sápmi

Liberating Sápmi with Maxida Märak and Gabriel Khun

Book cover of "Liberating Sapmi", PM Press
Download Episode Here

This week we are pleased to present an interview William conducted with Gabriel Khun and Maxida Märak on the 2019 PM Press release Liberating Sápmi: Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North. This book, of which Khun is the author and editor and Märak is an contributor, details a political history of the Sámi people whose traditional lands extend along the north most regions of so called Sweden, Norway, Finland, and parts of Russia, as well as interviews conducted with over a dozen Sámi artists and activists.

Maxida Märak is a Sámi activist, actor, and hip hop artist who has done extensive work for Indigenous people’s justice. All of the music in this episode is by Märak and used with her permission, one of which comes off of her 2019 full length release Utopi.

In this episode we speak about the particular struggles of Sámi folks, ties between Indigenous people all around the world, and many more topics!

Links for further solidarity and support from our guests:

. … . ..

Featured Tracks:

. … . ..

Transcription

Maxida Märak (MM): My name is Maxida Märak, I work as a hip hop artist and producer. I’ve been acting quite a bit before I started to do music, and I’m also known for being an activist in Indigenous groups and especially for the Sámis, cause I’m Sámi. We are the Native people of the Scandinavian north. We live and breathe in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and parts of Russia. So for people who are political, they will probably know me as an activist-artist, I would say.

I don’t know what more I can say, I live in Jokkmokk which is up north in Sweden. I have a daughter, she’s 8 years old, and yeah that’s me. Parts of me.

Gabriel Kuhn (GK): So my name is Gabriel Kuhn, I was born and raised in Austria, then I left the country about 25 years ago, and moved around a lot until I ended up in Sweden in 2007, and I’ve been living here since and work as a writer and translator. And I’m involved in various social and political projects.

TFSR: So, firstly I’d love to start out with a question for Gabriel. We are here to talk about your book Liberating Sápmi, which came out this year (2020) from PM Press. Would you lay out some groundwork about this book, and how you came to writing and compiling it?

GK: Yeah! So the book, basically it’s an introduction to Sámi history with a focus on the political struggle of the Sámi people and anti-colonial resistance. The book is laid out in two major parts, there is an introduction, which I wrote and is called “A Short Political History of Sápmi”, so Sápmi being the traditional homeland of the Sámi people. And that provides general background information, and then the main part of the book which makes up about two-thirds are interviews with twelve Sámi artists, activists, and scholars. So Maxida is one of them.

In addition there are illustrations in the book, photographs, and artwork. And there is a resource guide at the end of the book, which has information about more English language literature and music and film and some online sources that people can look into.

And the reason I got the idea for the book was that I thought such a book was missing on the english language market. There are quite a few books about the Sámi people in English, some of them are very good, but most of them are academic studies, they are hard to find, or they’re quite expensive. So my intention was to do a book that was accessible, easy to read, easy to get, affordable, and that’s how the idea came about.

TFSR: I loved the interview component of the book, the introduction was really well done and I loved it too, but I also loved the intertwining of the interview component in the book and bringing in voices from all over Sápmi and all of these different backgrounds.

GK: That was the most important part of the book!

TFSR: Definitely! And I wonder Maxida if I could ask you, insofar as this is possible would you speak about the history of Sápmi and the history of Sámi people who live on the land?

MM: Wow that’s a big question! Well we are Indigenous people, so we’ve been where we are for what you can tell for over 10,000 years. The hard part is that Sweden always wanted to categorize us as a “minority”, which we are, but not just a minority. We are Indigenous, and I think that one of the hard things has been to proving that because we have a history of not leaving trails. That we are guests in nature, so we haven’t left anything to find really, no big marks. But we are Indigenous people, we have been very isolated because we live in the northern part of Sweden which is for many people I think unknown ground. When you travel far up north in Sweden, and I’ll talk just about Sweden-Norway-Finland, it’s a lot different. The landscape is a lot different from the middle part of Sweden and down to the south. So it’s kind of hard to live there if you don’t know how to use the ground and how to hunt and fish. And so we had been kind of isolated.

Then around 16th century, like in many other places in the world, the Church became very central and started to travel. And to make a very long story short they started to go farther up north and of course tried to get the Sámis into the church for the same reasons as.. I mean they treated the Sámis the same way they treated Indigenous people all around the world. So it was a battle between religions I would say. Only the fact that Sámis never went to war, we don’t even have a name for war in the Sámi language. We’ve never been a people of war.

We’ve been mistreated and killed, and slaughtered, like other Indigenous people. And I can just go on and on about how they have been treating us. I can say that the Sámi culture is very different from the Swedish culture, which is also I mean, what I notice is that it’s hard to combine, the Swedish culture and the Sámi culture, or the non-Sámi culture and Sámi culture because we live a lifestyle where the goal is not profit. We have reindeer, we still do reindeer herding, we are the only people in Scandanavia that does reindeer herding. In Sweden we have no wild reindeer anymore, so it’s just like cattle but they are free. And we have the language, our history of the yoik [traditional Sámi singing and music], like I said I could go into specific areas, so if there’s anything specific you want to talk about I can tell you.

TFSR: I mean, this is a very complex question, because how do you distill 10,000 plus years of history of a people in a short answer to a question. But I think that the groundwork that you laid just now will be very useful for listeners in just conceptualizing the things that we are speaking about. And I do wanna talk about reindeer some more, I wanna talk about music, I wanna talk about a bunch of other stuff that I think will come up organically.

MM: I can tell you one thing that I usually tell people that don’t really know what Sámis are. And that is that I feel more related to my Native American friends and my Inuit friends than I feel related to my Swedish friends. So our culture is very similar to the other more known Indigenous people, and that’s a good way to explain it. That we are not Swedish, the culture is very very different from the Swedish culture.

TFSR: Yeah that makes a lot of sense to me, and there was a question that I had later in the interview about sort of the construction of race and the construction of whiteness as it relates to Sámi folks..

MM: That is a very interesting topic! A very dangerous one too.

TFSR: Especially because of, I was born and raised here on Turtle Island [decolonial name for the so-called US] and my understanding of race is very specific and very culturally rooted here. And I was wondering if you had any words on the construction of race and whiteness as it relates or doesn’t relate to Sami folks or you specifically?

MM: This is so interesting because in Sweden, they never ask me this question because the topic is so toxic. And in Sweden we don’t say “race”, like you can’t even mention it. I’ve been to the US or Canada, and there people will come up to me and say “what race are you?” And you could never do that in Sweden, ne-ver do that! That word is like, bad. Which is for good reasons, often. But for Sámis it’s very interesting to talk about, because one thing that we don’t always have in common to other Indigenous people is that you can’t always tell if a person is non-Swedish, or if they’re Sámi. We look very different.

Like I have friends that are very tall, very light skinned, you couldn’t tell the difference between a non-Sámi person and that person. But that person could still be a Sámi. And then I have friends and my own family who are very dark, like I said, people ask me all the time where I’m from. They can’t really put a finger on it where I’m from. And that is one of the of course terrible things when it comes to racism, that you get categorized in what race you are and valued by the tone of your skin. And that is horrible! But it has also been one of the things that I think has been hard for Sámis sometimes, that we have to hold on so tight to the other cultural things that we have as Sámis because you can’t really tell by just looking at us all the time.

And I know I’ve heard stories from my elders that when Sweden came, and when I say “Sweden” I mean the church or the people who collect the taxes, they would actually tell Sámi women that they think she was cheating, fooling around, because they had kids who looked so different, you could have one kid that was so dark and one that was so light. So, I mean that is a question that I think is even toxic to talk about among Sámis actually.

Of course we have groups in Sápmi that are very against mixing between Sámis and non-Sámis, still! Like that you should keep the blood “pure”. And more areas are more into that than others, and definitely how connected you are to the reindeer herding, I mean only 10% of the Sámi population in Sweden is working as a reindeer herder. That’s not a lot, but it’s still one of the biggest and most important thing in Sámi culture and that becomes very important, the question of are you in the reindeer herding business or not. And how much of non-Sámi blood do you really have, I mean that is definitely a topic but it’s very toxic to talk about.

And do you have a Sámi last name? I belong to one of the people, like I do have a Sámi last name. And many people don’t, and there’s a reason for that, Sweden came and took it!! I mean, we see now the results of what they’ve done to the Sámi people that is very hard for specific groups in Sápmi to “be” a full Sámi. If they don’t have a last name, they don’t do reindeer herding, they don’t have a membership in a Sámi village. And that is nobody’s fault but Sweden’s and Norway’s.

So yeah, definitely, this is something that does exist.

Can I give an example? I have such a good example, like I have a daughter, she is NikkeSunnas, she is turning 8 this summer. I come from a very culturally Sámi family, Märak, and my grandfather, he passed away this December. He was a living legend, and now he’s just a legend, but he was one of the greatest people we’ve had in Sápmi. He was the first Sámi to become a priest, that combined this other religion with the church. He helped so many people, he brought back yoik to the church when it was still forbidden, when it was a sin. So my family’s very known for that part of the Sámi culture, the yoik and the storytelling. And my daughter’s father, his name is Pärak, and he comes from a very known reindeer herding family. They’ve been doing reindeer herding since the beginning, and his grandfather was well known, well known. So my daughter she is now brought up in such a strong mi culture family, like she has 2 heavy last names, and her first name is also very heavy “NikkeSunnas Märak Pärak”. She knows how to ride a snowmobile, a four wheeler, she has reindeer, we have a lot of cottages up in different places in Sápmi. She has the whole package, and she looks like a little elf, you know?

They will never, no one will never question her ever of her heritage, where she’s from. Everybody knows her parents, her parent’s name, grandparents, the areas that we’re from. I mean, the history goes way back, no one will ever question her. She has a friend, and I won’t mention her name, but her mother is, well we say she is mixed. She is a little bit Sámi, a little bit Finnish, a little bit Swedish, a little bit something-something, you know? And her mother, I mean she was searching for her Sámi roots when she was a grown up, so she has not been brought up in the mi culture. She has a daughter with a man from France, so the kid is very mixed I mean she’s amazing. So my daughter and her friend they went to the same preschool, which is a mi preschool for the mi kids and they can speak their language and get a foot into Sámi culture. It’s mainly for reindeer herding kids.

When they were supposed to start school, this friend went to the Swedish school instead of the mi school. And the main reason why she started Swedish school instead is because her parents wanted to spare her from being that kid in the class that is the least mi of them all. She has no cottages, nobody knows her grandparents, she has no connection to the reindeer herding whatsoever. Like she’s just a kid, but she is of course mi! She has mi blood! But she has not been brought up in a mi culture family. Which can actually make it pretty hard, because all the other kids are so connected, we have this – I don’t know what it is – but I mean it’s a special connection, we share everything and all the kids go to the reindeer herding things, and all the kids go to the cottages during the summer and the wintertime.

And this kid would be an outsider from that. And she will get questioned when they grow up, like people will start questioning her “how much mi are you? Where are you from? Do you really belong here?” I wont say that that would definitely happen, but there is a risk.

I wouldn’t act the way that her parents did, because I believe that we are actually developing now and are not as harsh as we were before. But I mean, of course there’s a risk, and I don’t think the Swedish people know this. That there is such a cultural difference between the mis and the non-mis that they wanted to spare her from a young age from not being the outsider who wasn’t mi enough. So, that’s just an example. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, like did they do the right thing? I think they should have put her thru mi school, cause she will probably grow up like her mother and wonder like, hey why did you do this? Like I have a connection to this world and you made a choice for me. Because this is in one way a choice, I know this for a fact because I live in Jokkmokk. And in Jokkmokk there is only 3,000 people in this little town, so here it’s very much like “did you go to the Sámi school or not?”

If you didn’t you have to explain yourself, why? Ok, so now you wanna become a Sámi?? you didn’t have to go thru all the shit that we did, that went to the Sámi school, getting bullied and whatnot. But now that you are a grown up, now you want to become a Sámi, and have the traditional costume and.. ok.. you know what I’m saying? I mean, you can see this in different cultures but in Sweden I don’t think the people have any idea of how it is.

TFSR: Yeah, thank you so much for that example. I think that what you’re bringing up is making me think of really just complex currents of understanding and belonging, especially in communities and in people that are heavily impacted by the ongoing violences of colonialism and how complex that can look.

Gabriel, I would love to ask a little bit more about the book and about your process in writing the book, and about sort of how you approached this kind of research and history work as somebody who is outside of the community that you are seeking to uplift and do this kind of work with. And I’m wondering what sorts of things should other researchers keep in mind in your opinion if they are seeking to do this kind of work as well?

GK: So I think this is a very important question. It’s also a question that makes me slightly uncomfortable because just the fact that I decided to do this book as an outsider doesn’t necessarily mean that I know how to do that work, or that I did it the “right” way. So I’m sure there are plenty of things I could have done better, I’m sure that people have very valid criticisms, in general I don’t think there is a blueprint for how to do this.

So I can say in response to your question, it’s all going to be very subjective. Obviously I gave that much thought before I embarked on the project. I mean, this was in many ways but also in this way a very special project for me because let’s say I work on a book about sports, or I work on a book about straight edge, I do not question my validity as an author. If I feel I have a good idea for a book and I find a publisher who wants to release the book, then I get to work and do the best I can. But I don’t really go thru a process of asking myself “is this really my place?”.

Now with this book, that was a very big question, that was the decisive question. At the beginning I felt that I had a good idea but I was not sure whether I was the right person to do it. So the first thing I did, which I guess maybe is the first part of answering your question, the first thing I did was basically to look for approval within the Sámi community. Now the Sámi community is no monolithic block, people have different opinions, there are no individual Sámi who can speak for the whole community. But I was looking for feedback and opinions of people I knew, and people whose thoughts for different reasons were particularly important to me. And I mention this because – oh and I also mention it in the preface to the book – I remember there was one very important phone conversation I had very early on with Anders Sinna, a Sámi painter who Maxida knows well.

And I’m a big fan of his work, and I also wanted him to be one of the people in the book that I interviewed, which then he agreed to. And so very early on in the process I had a conversation with him on the phone and I presented the idea to him and was just wondering what he thought. And quite frankly, had he said at that point “ah, I don’t think that’s a very good idea” or “I don’t think you should be doing a book like that”, I might have dropped the project right away. But he didn’t say that, and he was rather encouraging, and so I reached out to more people who I also got encouragement from. So thru those steps I started to see a path that I thought I could follow and reach a satisfying result.

Now, what was important along that path, I think a lot of that is common sense although I’m aware of the fact that historically people who have written books about communities that they themselves don’t belong to, didn’t necessarily follow those common sense guidelines. But one thing that I felt was important was that I was very clear about my position and what I was able to do and not able to do. So I have no firsthand experience of Sámi culture, I am not an expert scholar on Sámi culture, my approach comes from a longstanding interest in Indigenous peoples and their struggles for justice. And so because of this interest throughout the years, because of travels I did and studies I did and conversations I had, I felt that I acquired enough knowledge that allowed me to basically build a platform in this case for Sámi voices to reach a broader international audience.

So to make this really short, I just felt I could be a facilitator to spread knowledge that I thought was important.

And then the second part related to that, and this is maybe even more common sense, is that in the process of working on the book, obviously I am 100 percent dependent on Sámi contributors and Sámi advisers. And in that process you gotta be respectful, you gotta be honest about your intentions, you have to acknowledge people’s contributions, put the community at the center of the project and not yourself. And again, I cannot speak for how well I managed to do that, but this is what I tried. I can maybe add one more thing that I think helped in this process, which is that this is not a book that I will make a lot of money off. This is not a book that helps me with an academic career that I do not have. And it helped I think because those aspects add yet another layer of ethical questions that I think are difficult sometimes to deal with. So luckily, I didn’t have to deal with those. So I think that also made it in a sense easier.

I think there are very general guidelines that would probably be useful for anyone working on such a project, but then of course it very much how that plays out specifically very much depends on the specific project that people are working on. Where they are and what their position is, what their relationship is with the communities they write about. So, exactly, there is no blueprint, I think there are some general guidelines, but if you decide to do a project like that these specifics you have to work out in that specific project you’re working on.

TFSR: One thing I am curious about, Gabriel and Maxida, what kinds of support for Sámi issues is there among far left and anarchist spaces and anarchist people in Scandinavia and any invitation or provocations that you might have for how people, people around the world but specifically how people on the land can have y’all’s back a little bit better or if they’re doing something really well and you want to name that, I would love to hear.

GK: How about this, I can say something about my experiences here in the broader activist community because that in a sense there was also a, I don’t know if motivating factor is the right word, but it played into my idea of doing this book. And I know that Maxida has things to add to what I’m going to say, and then we can maybe look at more specifically what especially people outside of the Nordic countries can do to support Sámi struggles.

So if I just speak about this, my experience here with the so called activist community, it was very surprising to me when I first came to Sweden in 2007 because from the time I spent in North America and Australia and New Zealand, my sense was that, again very broadly speaking, the activist communities there with all the flaws and shortcomings and mistakes that we all make, at least had a very clear and I felt sincere ambition to be good allies, accomplices, collaborators, whatever the preferred terminology was, to Indigenous people, so to stand in solidarity with them.

And I kind of expected that to be the case here as well, but I don’t think it is. So if you look at the non-Sámi activist communities in the Nordic countries, to me there was – and maybe it has changed since I got here – but I think there still is a surprising level of ignorance. I mean I’m simplifying here, but if you talk to the average leftist radical activist in, say, Stockholm, they’re often very well versed in what’s happening in Palestine, Chiapas, perhaps even on the Pine Ridge Reservation, but they’re very ignorant about what’s happening in Sápmi.

And I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think there are a few reasons for this and I’ve not really come to conclusions so these are kind of guesses, but I mean one thing is that this ignorance is a reflection of general ignorance among mainstream society here about the Sámi people. So in that sense it’s a reflection, but I think there are other issues as well. One is, I think that historically the left (and that reaches from social democracy to the far left) in the Nordic countries was particularly technocratic and “progress” oriented. So industrialization, technological progress, science including at the beginning of the 20th century racial biology, all of that was supposed to be a way toward socialism and was considered progressive. So if you have that picture, Indigenous people like the Sámi are basically a stumbling block, they don’t fit into this picture, so I think that is one thing that you can still feel people don’t really know. Its something that doesn’t fit into this historical leftist ideology and so people have a very difficult time dealing with that.

And more concretely, I think that is then enhanced by what I as a complete outsider because I am not even originally from the Nordic countries, see as a bit of a cultural problem. What I mean by that is that here in the Nordic countries, maybe particularly in Sweden, people often have a really hard time with dealing with conflict. Whenever there is conflict, or there are certain issues that are complicated, people get very insecure and confused. Now if you look at the broad activist communities here, and the views that people have and the issues that are important and the norms that are often attached to it, some of them clash with the realities in Sápmi.

So to take an example, is like animal rights, people here on the left are often anti-hunting. Hunting is a part of traditional Sámi culture, reindeer herds are protected from predators, for example wolves. So here we have one example where that sort of clashes with what is often perceived as an anti-hunting norm. In the left, similar with environmentalism; people are in support of green energy, this is fine. However if you look at how that plays out in reality, wind parks are predominantly established in Sápmi because that’s where they least disturb mainstream society although they majorly disturb reindeer herding. So there you have another conflict that some people on the left find difficult to deal with.

Also things like national identity, a lot of Sámi activists would speak of the Sami as a nation and find that important. We have one contributor to the book for example Aslak Holmberg, who speaks of cultural nationalism as something that’s important. That clashes with some of the criticism of anything that has to do with the nation among the left here. So I think rather than addressing these issues and accepting that this is challenging, and thru dialogue and conversation which can be painful and complicated, modify your position or enhance your positions, people would rather just shy away from that and pretend it doesn’t exist which means that very often, you know, Sámi issues would seem to become too “complicated”. And I can’t just as a final example which I thought illustrated this well, there is a well known Swedish writer who writes a lot about this situation in the northern provinces of Sweden, and urban rural divide, the social injustices implied in that. He doesn’t write anything about the Sámi, and he once explained that saying “oh no, that topic is just too complicated, whenever you write it’ll be wrong” meaning whatever you write someone will criticize you for that, perhaps harshly.

And while that may be true, and I understand on a personal level that you don’t want to put yourself in that position, if most people have that approach you will miss out on debate.

And then a third aspect that I might mention, and Maxida knows a lot about this because she has experienced all of this firsthand, is that if you look at the tactics that again, the sort of average Nordic activist employs, and that’s nothing that’s specific to the Nordic countries that’s true for all of western europe, it is very much based on an urban environment. So you can be a pretty anonymous figure who attends protests and meetings, but if you want to go about your daily life you can do so pretty much undisturbed. This doesn’t work in an environment like Sápmi, or any rural environment for that matter, because people know you and there’s not place to hide if you’re outspoken on certain issues. It also means the risks you’re taking are much higher and the demands are very different, so I think to political activism. And what a lot of people in the urban general leftist activist communities are used to. So I think that creates another complication.

MM: You’ve done your job Gabriel!! Everything that you said is exactly how it is. I mean, that is so correct.

I mean, in Sweden people here are so afraid of conflict. And I’m sad to say that there is not a lot of true activists in Sweden. I have a word for this which essentially means a fake activist. I know a lot of people and a lot of so called activists groups that say that they fight for justice, when you come down to it it’s not about justice at all it’s about making yourself heard, about making yourself look cool, but when it comes to the source like what do we fight for? Or should we really fight, shouldn’t we try to gather? They back out.

So like Gabriel said, there’s a lot of so called activists, that it clashes with the Sami way of living. One example is one of my close friends, he got prison, seven years of prison, because he was accused of killing a wolverine. And I can tell you that his family, they got so thrashed for years from the so called activists, the animal friends. So I mean, we struggle with both the politicians in Sweden, the Swedish government, and the so called activists. A lot of the the Indigenous friendly people are allowed to go to the US to protest, I mean do you know how many people from Sweden went to Standing Rock? We had so many Swedes that went there, for the Native Americans! They want to put a feather on their fucking head and pretend to be some kind of spirit animal. But they would never, never, go up north to do the same for us.

And I think that is also because, Sweden I mean, the history that we have, now you can really tell the difference tho between for example the US and Sweden. Sweden has been pretty protected from war, so the Swedish people don’t know what a revolution is. The people in Sweden that have been abused are the Indigenous people, and the people that immigrate of course into Sweden. But the Swedish people have not been thru trauma. So I think this is a result of that, that when it comes down to it, they get too afraid. They will never choose a side. Like if you ask Swedish people what they vote for, 95% will not tell you. Ever. NEVER will they tell you. And if you do, you have a mark on your head and you will live with that for the rest of your life.

I mean so, that is like Gabriel said, it clashes. We have a lot of so called activists in Sweden, but to be honest, there’s not a lot of real activism going on here in Sweden. And I can just agree to everything that he said and it was very interesting to hear him speak about it, he can see it from an outside perspective, because I think that Swedish people would probably not agree. And that is also why, it’s kind of hard to live in this world because sometimes it feels like we have everyone against us, we can never do anything right. The whole culture and the way that we live and breathe up here just doesn’t combine to anything else in Sweden. We have the same temple and this is of course the Swedish government has been very good at keeping quiet, like not teaching Sámi history. So when we claim our rights, people don’t even know that we exist, it’s kind of hard to claim your rights if they don’t know that we exist. And then we get questioned about that.

So everything that Gabriel said is completely true. Which is sad! It’s very sad.

TFSR: It is, and it’s making me think of sort of something that happens here a lot, there’s a running, not a saying but, but the Indigenous people here who have been kind enough to talk to me about issues of decolonization is lean into the discomfort, because colonialism affects everybody and it affects you, the colonizer as well, and it disproportionately affects people who are impacted by the ongoing violences of colonialism and colonization, but it affects everybody. Decolonization is an uncomfortable process. It’s not like sunshine and rainbows and puppy dogs, it’s a very uncomfortable process so like, that’s making me think of conversations that are happening here about the specific situations that are happening on this landmass. But thank y’all so much for going into that!

I’m wondering if you have any ideas on, or if you even want to have more of a solidarity with the far left and what do you think that will take if that’s a desired thing.

MM: Definitely, but still I think it’s also a bit dangerous because you still want the right people to be on your side. The far left can also be fucking crazy. And that’s one of the things that I try to tell people who come out and ask us is you have to stop the fight. People love to put themselves into different groups and just fight among those groups, the more groups the better. And I try to remind people that what is the goal? My goal is to get people to be on my side. And if I just stand there and scream and disrespect people, and expect people to know everything about me already before they open their mouths. So you want to have people from both sides to have our backs.

Of course not the far right, right? But I feel it’s dangerous to categorize a whole culture to just be on the left, I think the goal is for people to understand that this is our norm and we need people on every political party – except for the racists – to be on our side. And not just activists, but normal people you know what I’m saying? People that are non-activists, people that don’t dare to be an activist. You can’t expect everyone to be the way that I am, I am very outspoken and I’m very unafraid, but people are not just like that. Everyone is not like that. So of course the goal is to get people on our side, but for the right reasons and in the right way.

And you have to aim high. You have to aim for the Swedish government. You can’t just be a grassroot, you know? That’s what I said when I started as an artist, and some people started to question me when I went to big events with all kinds of people like known artists and politicians, like ‘why is she there, she used to be in the woods screaming?’ yeah I used to be in the woods screaming, but my goal was to be in on the fucking round table!

I have to be up there with the big horses, to speak out because I need them on my side. Not just the grassroots community, you have to aim high. So I want the Swedish government, that’s my fucking goal, to get them on our side. And hopefully the next generation are smarter, but it’s important to not just look at the leftists, cause then we put ourselves in that little group one more time. The group needs to be bigger and more welcoming. The rights that we claim, they are weird! Like why shouldn’t we have our rights? it’s common sense. I mean if we start to educate people in Swedish history, colonization, what is actually been done to the mi people, what is happening NOW to the mi people, a lot of people will understand.

Cause I believe in the good in people. The dangerous thing is when you believe that most people have bad intentions. If that is what you think about everyone you’ve already lost. And I have to believe in the good in people. Maybe I have to say things ten times before you get it, but the tenth time, maybe you’ll get it. And then you will come over to my side. Cause in the end it’s about human rights, you can rape a person, you can kill a person, and the police talk to you for fucking 24 hours and then you’re out again. But if you kill a wolverine, you get two and a half years prison?! And that’s only for reindeer herders, cause our cattle are free, so that’s why we aren’t allowed to protect them, cause they’re free. Like if we had them as cows or pigs, that is different rules. But only mi people have free cattle, so we have different rules. I mean, that’s just an example of how it looks today.

And when you tell people this, a lot of people actually understand. I’ve met all the big politicians in Sweden, I’ve done TV shows with a lot of them. And I’ve been criticized for sitting with people who vote for different parties than I do. I’m very left, my heart is to the left. But I have friends that are from different parties, and of course there are parties in Sweden that I would never ever socialize with. Like any racist party, I would never do that. But I’ve been criticized for having friends who vote for different things than I do.

But then I tell them, they meet me and I’m the first and only Sámi they will ever talk to, and they hear my history, maybe I will change someones political views. Maybe they will think different the next time the question about mining industry comes up, and they will remember me. And they will remember that I respected them, and they will remember my story. And maybe the outcome will be different.

So I just think that love and respect, I mean it sounds very cliched but that is actually very true. The dangerous thing with activists is the people who do it for the wrong reasons. Just for the fight. And in the end we don’t want the fight, we want peace. We have to live next to each other, we have to know how to combine different worlds, that is the only way that we can survive in the end is to get along. Not to kill each other, not to fight. So I think that the true activists need to have that in mind. That of course I want the left to be on my side, but I also want the right to be on my side. And if they are on my side, they will become left!

TFSR: You know, the whole love and respect thing being a cliché, people really respond to it positively. And I see people from all over the world saying it, we just need to understand each other. So thank you for saying that.

MM: Of course I wanna say too, Nazis and racists are a completely different question. Just to be clear.

GK: Just real quick, since we are not at the peace stage yet, but there are struggles ongoing, I just wanted to get back real quick to what you said earlier, what was implied in your question about how people can concretely support Sámi struggles today if they wanted to. I was wondering just a very practical thing, when this is going to be aired can you add links? Cause there are cases that are ongoing about resistance to development projects, mining, there is a big plan for a railway that is supposed to be built on the Finnish side of Sápmi. And there are ongoing court cases about different things, land rights, hunting, the forced culling of reindeer herds, so there is information that people could access and they could spread it. Very often the is very concrete information on those websites, about how to get involved.

TFSR: I would be interested to hear from both of y’all about, Maxida you mentioned far right Nazis and racist political parties. We have all seen the rise of a street level and government level far right, alt right, and fascism all around the world. I’m wondering what kinds of impacts that has had on Sápmi and on y’all specifically.

MM: It’s very ironic! Because a lot of people are like yay, because we have the Swedish Democrats (a racist political party). And I often get the comment that ‘oh they will love you Sámis because you are the native Swedes!’ And that is definitely not the case, no no no. They are against probably everything that we do and especially the reindeer herding. And like all the parties, except for the left ones unfortunately, are for for example the mining industry. And the Sámi people especially the reindeer herders take up so much land.

I mean, they are against everything that is not “really” Swedish culture. And we are I think, when you start to talk about what Swedish culture is, is where you can really see that the Sámis are different from the Swedes. So I mean, of course we are affected by it, and if they would get more power than they have it would be a definite issue for the Sámi villages and for the reindeer herding industry, definitely. They want to open up the Sámi villages, and this is kind of hard to explain because then I’d have to explain what exactly a Sámi village is, but you could almost call it a tribe. And in this so called ‘tribe’ you have to have a membership, and only if you have a membership can you have reindeer. And we have specific areas in Sweden for every village which can have reindeer on. And on those areas, for every specific village or tribe, we have fishing and hunting rights. And we are the only ones who actually can fish and hunt there, because we are the so called protectors of it. So people won’t come there for vacations or a sports trip, or whatever. And so that’s one example, they want to open up the Sami villages and make it free for everyone to have reindeer, and everyone to fish and hunt.

And the result of that would be catastrophic! We would lose everything! So I mean, yeah we are definitely affected, and affected in ways of course that they are just racist pigs that hate everyone that is not white.

GK: So if I can add one thing that I think is interesting, if you observe the especially the far right parties that now are in all the parliaments of the Nordic countries, so the Sweden Democrats here in Sweden, and the so called ‘Progress Party’ in Norway, and the True Finns in Finland. I think if you look at their policies toward the Sámi, it’s interesting because it reflects a trend on the far right that goes from let’s say traditional very crude forms of racism based in biology to you know, what is sometimes referred to as ‘ethno-pluralist’ or basically cultural forms of racism. I find it interesting that sometimes you can have representatives of those parties pay lip service to cultural traits of the Sámi – the language, or traditional clothing, or whatever – something that appeals ideologically to their idea of national coherence and unity and whatnot.

However, at the same time all of those parties explicitly deny any special social or political rights to the Sami as Indigenous peoples or just minorities –

MM: Exactly!

GK: – So what you end up with is they are allowed to be part of the nation state project of Sweden or Norway or Finland, as some kind of exotic spice or possibly a showcase of how supposedly ‘tolerant’ those people are, because they let these ‘minorities’ who don’t speak their language or whatever.

But what it essentially means on the ground is that you deny them all civil and democratic rights which are essential as a foundation of sovereignty and self determination. Or if you want to put it the other way around, the only way that Sámi can get civil and democratic rights is if they become fully assimilated as citizens in the nation state project.

And this is a very deceptive, and thereby also a very dangerous form of, and I would speak in terms of ongoing racism in that case that these parties represent. But also as Maxida said you can see that very concretely here in Sweden, for example the Sweden Democrats are very clear in wanting to take away the exclusive right to reindeer herding from the Sámi. In Norway, the Progress Party is very clear about wanting to abolish the Sámi Parliament, which is one of the most important at least symbolic political institutions of the Sámi, and they want to turn it into alternatively a museum or a hotel or whatever.

So those attacks are very clear, this is nothing hidden, but there are sometimes accompanies by as I said these statements ‘oh but of course the culture is great and the culture is beautiful’ so this is very dangerous.

MM: Yes this is coming back to that question that you asked before about race, cause here it becomes very important that we have to claim our rights and they question like, either you are Swedish or you are not. What are you? So we get questioned, like Gabriel said, they want to take our rights away. Because if we live in Sweden and we claim to be Indigenous, then why should we have special treatment? That is one thing that they really push out, like, no special treatment for you guys. And this is just history repeating itself. And this is also why some people have memberships in Sámi villages and some people don’t. There are Sámis that did reindeer herding before the Swedish government and the history, they let them keep their membership in the Sámi village, and if you did not do reindeer herding you got kicked out from the village and lost your membership.

And this is the same thing that the Swedish Democrats are doing now, like, either you are Swedish or you’re not. You claim to be Sámi, then get the fuck outta here. If you want to still be in Sweden, then ‘act Swedish’. I can just see history repeating itself once again.

But like I’m saying, this is also very interesting, we live in a time now of climate change for example, and now we have this fucking coronavirus just taking over the world. And I can almost laugh and say they’ve been trying to kill us Indigenous people for ever! But they never fucking succeeded, and why is that? Because in the end the knowledge that we have is the most important knowledge. That is one thing that I notice now in Sweden, now people are starting to get more interested! Like ‘how do you live up there?’ and they want to learn, even vegans are thinking about learning how to hunt. Because we see that when the world collapses, money and guns don’t work, you have nothing!

That is a war that everyone is prepared for. So if you have guns and money and power, you can fight a war. But with climate change and a virus?? The most important things to know is Indigenous knowledge, that is how you survive. I just want to say that because that is a change that I see now, that now for the first time I hear people becoming more interested in how we live. This is also probably history repeating itself, and this is probably why they never succeeded in killing us. Because something always happens in the world, like catastrophe and trauma, and when it comes to that it’s a special kind of knowledge that you need to know. It’s a special way of living that you need to know that will make us all survive. And I just find that quite interesting actually!

TFSR: That is really interesting! This gets into a question that I had specifically about reindeer herding. I was interested in reading Gabriel’s introduction to Liberating Sápmi, sort of horrified to read that Sweden, or like the colonial governments, were sort of gate-keeping Sámi identity, and maybe this is a misrepresentation and please let me know if so, but gate-keeping Sámi identity by saying essentially that if you don’t herd reindeer you’re not Sámi? Is that correct?

GK: What is true specifically in Sweden you have this strong distinction which comes from a law from the early 20th century between reindeer herding Sámi and non-reindeer herding Sámi. There were some particular rights granted to reindeer herding Sámi that were not granted to other Sámi, and that is a classical example of a colonial divide and conquer strategy that has caused big problems also within the Sámi community which maintain to this day. So I think this is the part that you are probably referring to.

MM: Yeah I mean, parts of this definitely still exist. Like I said before, you have to have a membership in a Sámi village to have reindeer for example. And with having a membership you get specific rights, and if you don’t have a membership you don’t have the same rights. And that is also a part of that whole history and what Gabriel talked about, and that has definitely been – and still is! – a very toxic conflict in Sápmi, that forces Sámis to fight against each other because we still have families that try to get back their memberships in these Sámi villages, but there’s not enough space for them to have reindeer. We are only allowed to have a certain amount of reindeer, because we only have this and this much land to be on.

So I mean the conflicts that we have in Sápmi are horrific, and that is a definite result of the Swedish history and how they’ve treated us. Now we are left to solve all this without any rights as an Indigenous people, and it’s very hard to solve these conflicts. So that definitely still exists, that the reindeer herders have rights that non-reindeer herders don’t have.

GK: But then one could add maybe that the rights of the reindeer herders are also controlled by the government. So that’s where the forced culling comes in for example, because the number of reindeer that a specific Sámi village can have is still determined by the nation state government. If the numbers are too big, the government will come in and say ‘ok, you have to slaughter – whetever – 20% of your herd because your herd is too big’. And this is one of some of the most current, prominent examples of conflicts in court between Sámi and the governments.

TFSR: It’s really reminding me of the government of Canada and how that government really gate-keeps and detrimentally affects the lives and identities of the Indigenous people who live there. I would be interested in hearing y’alls take on, so Sápmi is a pretty large territory, it spans many hundreds of miles, and it gets crossed by several colonial borders, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia.

I know in Canada, there are many peoples, the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Mohawk, and Coastal Salish and others, all those territories are crossed by a very heavily militarized colonial border, to say nothing of the colonial border in the South. And I’m wondering how that colonial border has affected the relationships between folks who are Sámi who live in Sápmi. I wonder if y’all have any words on that?

MM: I would say that this a beautiful thing with this culture, is that we still see Sápmi as, if we could say, one land. So for us we know, I mean I am Lule Sámi, which is one type of Sámi, and my people we go way into Norway. So I speak the same language and have the same traditional clothing as a lot of people in Norway, so for us they [the borders] are non-existent. We really see Sápmi as one area without borders, but of course we know that they are there! It affects the reindeer herding a lot. But I think for us, that is one of the most beautiful things in the Sámi culture is that we don’t have any borders, we have family in every country, and travel like nomads did before over the borders and everyone knows everyone.

Politically, we definitely notice it.

GK: The practical problems, just right now I mean with the pandemic-

MM: UGH oh my god!!

GK: – you know with the European Union and special treaties with Norway, since that opened up the borders generally, I think they’ve lost some of the significance they’ve had up to 20 years ago. But just right now, I mean all the borders came back up. I just emailed or texted with people a few days ago who live along the Tana River which for a very long stretch, maybe 100km, marks the border between Finland and Norway. And you have Sámi families literally on the opposite sides of the river, so some of them live in Finland and the others in Norway.

And suddenly you now have the borders coming up it becomes very difficult for them to visit one another. So obviously the practical complications that these borders create and have created, they were partly responsible for forced migration historically. As Maxida points out, that would have been my impression from talking to everyone, every Sámi I’ve talked to in connection with the book, the stress that for Sámi identity those national borders don’t matter.

And that would also include the Sámi community in Russia, which especially in the 20th century with the Iron Curtain, was very isolated from the rest of the Sámi community. But my sense is, and Maxida I would assume would confirm that, is that they are a clear part of the Sámi family and community because of the strong historical and cultural ties.

TFSR: Yeah, thank you for talking about that, and thank you so much for your time and your willingness to come onto the show, it was an absolute honor to get to speak to y’all about the work that y’all are doing and your experiences. Is there anything that we missed in this interview that you want to give voice to in closing?

MM: Shoutout to my Natives!!

I think one of the powerful things is that in percent, we are not that many Sámi, and there are not that many Inuits in Greenland, and whatnot, but wow what a huge group we are as Indigenous people. And that is so powerful to see, some of my closest friends are Indigenous from different countries. And when we ally and hold each other’s backs, I mean the government should fucking beware this new generation coming up, and just how easy it is now to have contact with one another! I mean you know Tim “2oolman” Hill of A Tribe Called Red? He is one of my closest friends, and just to see how powerful it is when Indigenous people gather as one is just amazing. And I just want to say that I am so grateful for being in this community because it is so powerful and so loving, and they can just keep on trying to kill us but they will not succeed. So never shut up, my Natives!

TFSR: And that was our interview with Sámi hip hop artist and activist Maxida Märak and author and activist Gabriel Kuhn about Kuhn’s 2019 release Liberating Sápmi; Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North available now thru PM Press. If you are interested in learning more about Sámi struggles, which cover a lot of ground between government’s forcing reindeer culling and anti-mining campaigns, check out our show notes for links from our guests.

Sima Lee on Resistance, Repression, Hip Hop, and Creating New Worlds

Sima Lee on Resistance, Repression, Hip Hop, and Creating New Worlds

Download Episode Here

This week we are super pleased to present an interview done with Sima Lee, who is a queer Afro-Indigenous hip hop artist and community organizer of long standing, about a recent raid that occurred at Maroon House in DC this March. We speak about Maroon House, its story and what it is in the process of becoming, the ask for support in helping this movement build and heal from the brutal police repression, her newest album Trap Liberation Army, and many more topics.

Sima Lee has given some interviews recently about her political trajectory, her life, and relationship to anarchism in detail. Rather than having a repeat of those words, we are going to link her past interviews below!

Link to Bandcamp where there was an ask for monetary donation to help support the Maroon Movement and the Food, Clothing & Resistance Collective.

Ways to get and stay connected:

Further interviews:

Independent artists and labels:

. … . ..

Music for this episode:

. … . ..

Transcription

TFSR: Sima Lee, thank you so much for coming on to The Final Straw Radio Show. It’s a huge honor to get to talk to you. Would you just introduce yourself for listeners? Name, pronouns, anything you want listeners to keep in mind as they like hear your words?

Sima Lee: Thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. I’ve definitely checked out some of the other podcasts in the past and really enjoy them. It feels good to be up here to be able to talk about what’s going on.

I’m Sima Lee the RBG. I am a hip hop artist, radical hip hop artist, organizer, revolutionary, I founded Maroon Movement, Maroon House and Food Clothing Resistance Collective, which has been operating since 2015. We are mutual aid, direct action, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anarchist, autonomous maroon squad, basically just trying to show how we can cooperatively, collectively, communally have dual power as we build up to take down this empire.

Whether that’s us helping to feed the community, helping to give out free clothing and other items, or making radical music, or creating a space for people to be able to come together to organize, to have culture, to talk about alternative medicine and alternative herbs and other things of that nature. That’s the work that I’ve been deeply embedded in. In addition to helping to do anti-gentrification work, just building up in these urban centers as we try to take down the prison industrial complex, the military industrial complex. It’s a full time job just trying to not be oppressed. To put it frank, that is what I do. I try full time to not be oppressed. I appreciate to be able to be on the program.

TFSR: Yeah, thank you so much. I really resonate with that as well. As the world is moving more and more and more towards… it’s always been chronically unstable for folks who are more marginalized by systems of power, but becoming more unstable as far as our climate goes, as far as our systems of infrastructure go. So I really appreciate projects like Maroon House, and the Maroon Collective for just taking power and taking care of themselves in the face of a lot of instability.

You’ve given a lot of really amazing interviews in the past, as far as your personal history and political development goes. You’ve talked about Maroon House a lot, but I’d love to hear a little bit about how that project got started and about the meaning behind the maroon part of Maroon House.

SL: Well, what came first in the process, to give a sped up version, I’m originally from Norfolk, Virginia. That is pretty much surrounded by the military industrial complex. The largest naval installation in the world is Norfolk, Virginia, and Hampton Roads area in general. So, from an early age, this is what I saw. I saw the military industrial complex, for what it’s worth. In addition to that, I saw everyone else suffering from low wages and oppression.

Virginia is where a large amount of liberated people who were once enslaved escaped into the swamps, and in particular the Great Dismal Swamp, and connected with other people who escaped harsh conditions. Sometimes they were deserters from war, sometimes it was other indigenous groups that were native to the land. They would build, what we would call today, dual power within those swamps, creating a community of resistance. So when other people would escape, they had an oasis, a place to go. They made their own rules and regulations and created their own law of the land, outside of the rule of the day, which still was legalized slavery.

So, much of how I developed my thought came from being from that area of Virginia, and the history from 1619 until, and the history of Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser and other others who basically took it upon themselves to try and liberate themselves, and in conjunction with others and strong abolitionist movements that were built and upheld in Virginia. I took the concept of people working together and coming together. Of course, maroons are not just in Virginia. Maroons were everywhere Europeans dropped African bodies. There were maroons in Haiti, and maroons in Jamaica, and you have the Qilombo’s in Brazil and you have the Garifuna in Honduras. There’s just about everywhere that you go in Latin America and the Caribbean and other places that Africans created independent resistance and community.

When I came to Washington, DC, I attended quite a lot of other people’s events showing solidarity, just trying to learn the history and processes of what was going on locally. But I felt that there needed to be a place where people could come together from other organizations, from within the community, to be able to have a place to build and create and express themselves and have culture. Similar to many other spaces that have been like that in the past. It’s not a model that we invented. This is usually something that many people do in order to survive. Basically, a space where survival programs can be done, is what I felt that we should have.

So, after the Peace House split from the particular house that we were living in (which is another longtime mutual aid, direct action, anti-capitalist group) we continued, or I continued, in that same space in Washington, DC and named it the Maroon House. So Maroon House was intentionally Black, intentionally queer, and intentionally radical and all encompassing of what was going on at the time in Washington, DC. Which meant also cannabis advocacy and education. This will lead directly to why we got raided.

I don’t know if that’s the lead in questioning, but this is just giving a background of how we started and previewing to how the space ended, because we did have all these different radical elements within it, as well as entertainment, and as well as (as I said) cannabis education and advocacy after the passing of Initiative 71 that legalized cannabis in Washington DC.

Maroon House basically operated in the middle of a neighborhood and connected everyone. So that we could open up community gardens and have free stores and free schools. It was just a beautiful flourishing village. I wanted something that I didn’t see in other spaces. I think it’s very important for us as organizers to do that, because quite often we read books, and we see what others do. Outside of our imaginations, we blindly tried to imitate that, instead of creating new models that fit our reality. So I felt that it was important, whether it was successful or whether it failed, that it was important to hold down a space and operate it on our own terms, something that we felt reflected us.

The movement aspect of it, where we’re at transcends from a Maroon House to a movement is trying to get others to duplicate it and replicate that. To have their own houses and centers and co-ops and collectives and communes and farms, to be able to, again, have dual power and be free within this very, very oppressive system that is just pushing us all down. These are traditional, indigenous ways of resistance as well as anarchist. I can’t just say it’s all just anarchists models that I’m using. But it is a combination of a bit of both.

That’s how maroon House came about. It was very much needed. It was very successful. We got to a year before we were raided. It was actually not long after our one year anniversary that we were raided by the Metropolitan Police Department on the context of a neighbor’s complaint. Well, we knew that wasn’t true, because one of the things that we did not want to do was gentrify an already gentrified, Washington DC. So, we made sure that the core of what we were doing is building up the community. When I say building up the community, I mean the community within the community, meaning connecting everyone because there are always separate communities within community, but to have a hub where everyone could come together and we could talk to people about what’s going on within the neighborhood, within the larger Washington DC area… that’s what was important to me. There was no way we were going to set up there and just have events without having connections to our neighbors.

So, our neighbors would come to our free stores and the People’s Pantry. Our neighbors would come when we would have events. Our neighbors would even come when we would have classes or concerts or cannabis education events. It was a broad spectrum of people that would come through, because we made sure that everyone felt comfortable as long as you weren’t oppressive to others. We knew that the neighbors had not called because we actually knew our neighbors.

It was basically just intimidation. The actual sergeant who came in and this was a violent raid, mind you, they had AR-16’s and red beams on us. This was a violent raid. This was meant to terrorize the community and us. To set an example. But the police officers told us that they knew of our work, they were aware of our work, they respected our work, and then offered as they’re taking people out in cuffs (at the same time that they’re doing that) offered to donate to us for our free clothing giveaway. They actually did. The very next day, they dropped clothing off. As insult to injury, after they’ve terrorized our home and brought dogs and pointed guns at us. They offered us some of the clothing that they had and donated it.

What was important to me is that they told us that they knew the work that we were doing. Which means that they had been watching us. I don’t know how long they had been watching us, but they they definitely had. That is something that happened in March of this year. And as a consequence of it, we had to revamp the type of events that we had, because we knew that they were looking at events, anything of a cannabis nature, in particular.

TFSR: Yeah, that is a lot. I’m so sorry that y’all were forced to endure something so heinous. And to add insult to injury, the cops being like, ‘Yeah, we’ll donate to your thing.” I shouldn’t be surprised at the ridiculous, inhuman nature that cops move through the world in.

But I really connected to what you were saying about the flexibility of the organizing model that Maroon House had, where you said “that people read about stuff in books and they try to copy it verbatim or word for word.” I think that that kind of tends to perpetrate a lot of the problematic patterns that people have visa vie settler colonialism, or toxic whiteness, or what have you. They’re like, “Oh, we’ll just go back to the land and buy some land that we have no relationship to and that we have no idea who whose land it is actually.” So I really connected with that.

SL: It was very important that our space, even though it was ran by Black queer women and femmes, it was very important that it was brown and indigenous centered in addition to that, and it very much was. So the Black and Brown unity aspect was something that was always in effect, as well as bringing in white leftists. We felt that our job, to be quite frank, was to make sure white leftist left feeling a little less toxic, a little less settler-ish, a little less centered. Because you cannot be the center of an imperialist movement when your ancestors were the imperialist. When your current family members are the imperialist, there’s something has to give, when we are on stolen indigenous land and indigenous people are not at the forefront of what we’re doing. Or they are but you’re not listening to them.

So part of what we had to do within that Maroon House was to treat every white leftist who came into that space and white anti-racist as the potential next Marilyn Buck or John Brown. That’s how I looked at it. So when you leave, if you did not feel that way when you came in, I want you to feel that way when you when you go out. If you came here as an ally, I want you to leave as an accomplice.

The space was so important. It wasn’t just because of mutual aid, it was because of the living teaching. I am an early childhood educator, and I give lectures, and I teach adults as well but it’s the living model that people need to see. It’s the communication that they don’t always get. That was very much important about this space. So, I talk about that space a lot, because I want to see others, again, recreate spaces like this and for people to help do the work of building it up. It was extremely difficult to do that work, to open your doors and select strangers and is a lot. There are different models to do it. That was just the way that we chose to do it to open up our home, but there are different ways to do it. But because we lived there and we worked there and we taught there and we played there, when the police came they disrupted all of that.

So, right now there is is no Maroon House DC. It’s not because we were not able to sustain the events that we had that kept the space up. We had to revamp them, but we continued to have events, we continued to have people coming, because I refused to let them destroy what we’re doing. This is the anniversary, not long ago, of the killing of Fred Hampton and that was the raid that happened. We know how they raided the Los Angeles Panthers with the first use of SWAT. We know how they raided the Philadelphia Panthers. Infamous pictures were taking up them in their underwear to humiliate them. They do things of this nature to shake you and break you.

Because things had changed a bit within the demographics of the people who were in the collective, with some members having already left, new people being added who we really probably hadn’t vetted the best, and things that pretty much seemed like sabotage from within now not just coming from the state. So you have sabotage from within, from newer people, newer faces that we don’t really know as much. I made the tactical decision to retreat. So that I would not end up the next freedom fighter who has been murdered in their sleep by the police, or sabotaged from within by new members that we hadn’t vetted or hadn’t had a chance to vet as much. So now we’re in Baltimore, we’re no longer in Washington, DC, but the work continues. We do want to get another Maroon House. That is the goal.

TFSR: Absolutely. That’s amazing. That’s that’s really making me think of an interview that we did a couple of months ago with a rad space in LA called La Concha. They were having a lot of trouble being infiltrated by like authoritarian Maoist, state-communists, basically. They were talking about that as being something that they were really keeping eyes on infiltration from the State as well as infiltration from other ‘leftist groups.’ I feel like anti-authoritarian leftist resistance and energy is building on Turtle Island. And so resistance to that from bad actors is also building.

But I’d love to hear how people are holding up who were working in Maroon House? How are people doing and how can listeners help support y’all? How can listeners send you love if they are inclined to do so?

SL: Well, I’ll be honest, because I think about, again, in history we’ve learned from people who have gone through things and we look at it and try to relate to it. I think about how, so often a lot of the revolutionaries that we’ve studied, especially those from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, they would go through these horrible things of State repression or infiltration, or even sometimes… and I have to be careful when I say infiltration because I invited people to live within the perimeters of this space because they fit the model of what we were doing. But it’s not always some strange person walking in. It could be people that you know who end up doing a 180 of whatever they were doing when they originally met you, or said the right things to get into the door, and then change what they were doing afterwards. Or there is sabotage by way of not helping, not assisting. There is sabotage by the way of doing things to suck the morale out. There is sabotage by ways of leaving doors unlocked when you’re in the middle of military situations, or leaving windows open. Things that are odd. You find something might be in your food that originally wasn’t in your food or in your drink. There are different ways to sabotage that may or may not even be connected to the State.

For me, I don’t know if those things happen from the State 100%, or if it was just personal or other things. But all of these things are important when you’re thinking about having open memberships into into your space.

So for us, it has been rally our comrades get support to be able to get out of the space, which we totally absolutely did with a lot of people across the country supporting us so that we could get to another space in Baltimore. Originally our first space was in Baltimore and so we were returning back to Baltimore. Our first Maroon House was actually in West Baltimore. Right now what we’re doing is healing because, we feel that we got to just keep going and we don’t have time to heal from the everyday trauma. It is important to heal your body and your mind after you’ve been through something violent and we deserve that. I say we, meaning revolutionaries, we tend to think, “Oh shake it off, my ancestors had so much worse,” but we’ve got to take care of ourselves or we’re not going to be here, as the indigenous folks say (as myself, Afro indigenous) for the seventh generation. We’re not going to be here to leave a legacy for them if we burn out.

So what we’re doing now, first off trying to heal. We’ve just now talking about what we went through. This happened in March and it was so traumatic, we didn’t want to talk about it, because we had no idea if there was another raid coming. Was there more sabotage coming? We are also learning to trust again. I’m learning to be able to let my guard down a bit and still attend other events and speak with comrades and meet with them, even though one would be extremely paranoid after all the things that happened. I am extremely cautious right now.

But that’s what’s going on right now. We’re healing, revamping, rebuilding, and refocusing. We’re doing different things, basically, to be able to come up with a new space. However that that plays itself out, we’re trying to connect with more people on social media. We may set up a blog and start doing some art connected projects, some zines, just to be able to put out more information to tell our story. People can follow us on social media. Food Clothing Resistance Collective is on Facebook and it’s on Twitter and all the major social media sites. Maroon movement is also and myself, Sima Lee.

Some of our main core comrades are no longer within the vicinity of the space, but we still keep in good contact with each other. They’re treading on with what they’re doing as individuals. We’re looking right now for the first time to actually expand and recruit because we always kept it within the house, the members, because it was a little easier for me to feel that we could make sure that we knew everybody. That didn’t necessarily work, but at least for the first year it did. So right now we are actively looking for the first time to expand and recruit outside of the house. I’ll be working on that, probably for the next couple of months, what I want that to look like as far as the process, and what we want it to look like as far as the process of how we go about doing that and how we go about letting people know. But right now we’re just trying to add more people on social media and get people to reach out to us there and then we can connect in person.

TFSR: That’s awesome. And thank you so much for giving voice to something, this very complex and difficult to articulate phenomenon in leftist circles of sabotage by way of not helping out or sabotage by way of doing odd stuff. I feel like that’s not something that we have so much on our radars. So thank you for speaking on that, because I feel like it’s not spoken of enough.

SL: It should have been talked about really, really, really a lot after Occupy. We dropped the ball and went right into more pushing. We did not unpackage all of the things that we saw that was very weird, very sporadic, random types of acts that just didn’t make any rational sense towards the movement and we didn’t unpack that. I’m saying that as anarchists, we really should have talked about that and what it looks like to vet comrades and to find out more about each other. Still not wanting to invade on people and not to be authoritarian, but this is important. We’re doing radical work in major urban cities or in rural areas where definitely everybody knows everybody, and who are these people coming into this situation and we really need to be more careful. I know we get into this theory a lot, but the praxis is so important when you get into acting out what you’ve learned. You’ve got to be cautious with security. Our security culture is lacking across the board, not just anarchists. My revolutionary socialist comrades as well, our security culture really needs to be tightened up with everything that we know from COINTELPRO. We should know better by now.

TFSR: Absolutely. That resonates with me really hard. You mentioned COINTELPRO and learning about our own revolutionary history is the first step to understanding what kind of threats we face from the State and learning how to walk a line between not trying to be… Paranoia is a healthy thing sometimes, like there’s healthy paranoia, because sometimes there’s really bad actors out there. But there’s a sort of overblown paranoia that tends to be exclusive or exclusionary, or paranoia for paranoid sake, and learning to walk the line of being safe and getting yours and your comrades backs…

SL: There’s a thin line between healthy skepticism and then these rogue maoist units that are beating up comrades. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about when I say that we need to have a better security culture, in fact, those things raise red flags of provocateurism. It’s just a part of study, and it’s just a part of growth. This is what you have to deal with, when you’re organizing. We’re in the heart of the empire, what makes us think we’re not going to be scrutinized and watched every step of the way? What makes us think that they’re not watching our social medias? I just gave mine out @SimaLeeRGB on Twitter and on IG. Sima Lee on Facebook.
I know that they’re already watching those things, so even when we put out public information, watch what we put out. How much do we want to give face to face? How much do we want to give electronically? These are all things that we should constantly be thinking about, because they’re constantly after us. Whether we know it or not, they are. They’re not gonna make an announcement. They didn’t announce that they were coming to our house. They just came and then they went away. Incidentally, all charges were dropped from that raid. I didn’t say that part. So, no one has been charged. There are no charges. No one’s in jail. It was just a complete disruption. Just a violent act just for the sake of doing it.

TFSR: I’m glad no charges, but obviously, there’s enduring trauma as there would be naturally if you have that kind of shit happen in your house.

So, you are a musician and you are a hip hop artist of some long standing. There was a call for people to download your most recent album Trap Liberation Army and there was a call for donations via that platform. I’d love to hear about that album, your process in creating it and some themes that it focuses on.

SL: Trap Liberation Army is an homage to Black Liberation Army, which was an underground fighting unit that splintered off, some from the Black Panther Party, but there are members who are also members of Republican New Africa and other Black liberation units, who felt that the above ground fight could desperately use arm resistant units in the underground. They worked in conjunction with brown liberation movements and white liberation movements. I mentioned Marilyn Buck, and David Gilbert, and so many others, Laura Whitehorn, so many others were a part of actions taken with the Black Liberation Army.

I thought of the proliferation of trap music, that’s the sound of the time. So, I thought I could combine the two concepts. “Why don’t we have a trap Liberation Army?” That’s more of a modern type of a twist on the same thing. Trap being the hood, the ghetto, and in particular, drugs. As far as peoples using drugs to make an income in an oppressive, imperialist setting. The colonized people might have to take measures to make money by any means necessary. With Trap Liberation Army, it’s about “how about we don’t do that? How about we look for alternatives, by any means necessary not just for income, but for liberation.”

It’s just a twist on it. There are good and bad things within the hood. I’m from the hood. I’m from the trap. I’m from the concept of not necessarily drug dealing, but it was surrounding me it was completely engulfed in the community that I was in, it was in the middle of the crack era. I always wanted to be liberated from that paradigm of suffering and pain. This is not to shame people who use drugs by any stretch of the imagination, but there was much suffering and pain and it led to the mass incarceration of my people. We’re still dealing with it right now.

So, Trap Liberation Army is a project that talks about the community, talks about the hood, talks about liberation and what it looks like, gives homage to those who fought in the past, because Black Liberation Army definitely used to fight against the surge of drugs that was coming into the Black community. My elders were a part of some of those units that taught me as a youth when I was in the community of the Umma movement which was connected to political prisoner Jamil Abdullah al-Amin.

So it’s just a way of me like mixing the old with the new, and pro-cannabis, pro-sarcasm, but very anti-imperial. Something you can nod your head to, because sometimes anti-imperial music is kind of boring. I mean, it is. It can be. To make it more interesting to give it a little bit of funk, to reflect the background that I come from. I call myself a trap or ghetto intellectual, because I don’t run away from my poor background. I think we tend to look at poverty as something that reflects us as opposed to something that is done to us. So I’m celebrating the beauty and the ugliness that comes within the trap, and the ability to liberate ourselves and look for a better future. I guess a lot of people call that Afrofuturism. But that is what the album is about.

Through Bandcamp, we’ve been able to get a lot of new followers and people who want to support the project. Also Bandcamp will recommend other music to you. So it’s a way that you can find out “If I like this particular song, can you recommend me something else?” So it’s a way, I hope that they found new artists after they listen to my music that are similar to the vein of what they’re doing. But I feel like we need freedom music right now, we need a revolutionary background to what we’re doing. While we’re tagging and feeding people and doing everything that we’re doing. So, I’m looking forward to introducing my music to some more new people, but also creating hopefully some new music and 2020 to put out there. So people like Franklin Lopez can stop asking me where my next album is out. [laughs]

But I’m really proud of the fact that he’s digging my music and also that it was featured in the documentary on Sub.Media in the documentary “And You Don’t Stop” for Trouble. I got to get introduced to some comrades that I’ve liked their music for a while and I didn’t really know them, but I got to talk to them and stuff after that, like Lee Reed and Sole. So that was pretty cool. Music is a cultural weapon and I’ve been involved in hip hop for a very, very long time. It’s always been my favorite expression. So just using it like Dead Prez, Public Enemy, X Clan, other groups that inspired me to help and boost the morale of the people.

TFSR: Absolutely. I loved that episode of Trouble that focused on hip hop. It was so awesome and La Marea and I’m forgetting who else was in there.

SL: Mic Crenshaw…

TFSR: Are you listening to anything right now that is giving you strength or other artists that you want to plug?

SL: I always say the same thing: I want to plug independent artistry and labels and collectives that I know of, that I’ve been a part of, because they are the ones that inspire me. Three different entities, collectives, independent labels that I’m connected to are Soul Trust Records out of Virginia Beach, Virginia, which is who I released Trap Liberation Army out from. These are comrades that I’ve known for a very long time. They’re my friends, really good friends, but we decided to have a space for independent artistry together. We put out some really good work so Soul Trust Records is just one big mass of incredible artists that people should check out.

Beat Conductors is a local collective in DC, Maryland, Virginia area that has a lot of Beat contests as far as like producer displays and battles. I mean, some really incredible instrumentals are played at these events. A lot of artists from across the country are gathering, it’s a competition but it’s more a building up of a family of musicians and artists, traveling together and explaining and working together, how we create in our creative processes, tutorials and classes. It’s been pretty cool working with them as well.

Then also Guerrilla Republik, which is a clothing label as well as a massive collective of artists that the brother Rob and Iz have been doing this for quite some time now. The people have really resonated. It’s been really heavily focused on Black and brown resistance and inspired by the Haitian Revolution. That body of revolutionary clothing and revolutionary art and music combining has been a beautiful thing. The artists that people might most associate with Guerrilla Republik would be Immortal Technique. But there are many, many, many talented artists that are affiliated with Guerrilla Republik, and I’ve had a pleasure to work with some of the comrades in Washington DC. I would tell people, if you’re looking for radical music to inspire you to definitely check out Soul Trust, Guerrilla Republik, and Beat Conductors.

TFSR: Thank you for that. One of the last questions that I had scripted out is about any words that you had on like your relationship to queerness and the relationship that queerness has to Maroon Collective, and to the Food Clothing and Resistance Collective? You as somebody who’s moved through and navigated and worked in a lot of political and social spaces, what things have come up for you visa vie queerness? And how have things changed over the years that you can locate? If that makes any sense?

SL: Change has been dramatic from losing spaces. The culture of queer visibility is a bit different now. Queer people are taking it upon themselves, I mean, as they always have, to be able to represent themselves, but it’s connecting in a different way. Where I see, on the one hand, there is more of a social acceptance via visibility, it doesn’t necessarily reflect all the time within movement circles and what leadership looks like. But people are loud and out there and they’re doing it. I’m very proud of the development of the queer folks that are out there and really getting it. Queer, trans non binary, gender non conforming, such as myself, we’re really taking it upon ourselves to attack the hetero patriarchy that has been the foal of so many movements.

Something that really pushes people away is a lack of feeling like they can be themselves in far too many leftist circles. There is homophobia, transphobia, and sexism. The importance of me being myself, and being comfortable… I decided a long time ago, either I was going to just be myself or I was going to play a role to fit in, and the choice I made very early on was to just be myself. So, I’ve never had to deal with a lot of resistance to me, as far as anyone saying anything to me in a hurtful manner.

I know I’ve been excluded from certain things, though, because of my my sexual orientation, and probably even more so my gender nonconformity as a masculine woman. But I really don’t give a damn because they couldn’t have been my comrades if you’re going to make such superficial choices, not to judge me by… I’m not going to say morality… principles, and ideological realness, because a lot of us say that we have ideological followings, but we don’t act through with them. So my integrity, wouldn’t allow a lot of people to come up to me and say certain things and oppress me. But I know that I’ve been left out of certain things because of my queerness.

We’ve had incidents within white queer spaces where we did not feel comfortable as Black and brown queer bodies. I see how my trans sisters are treated, and I see how my trans brothers are quite often just ignored and forgotten. Across the board, I see how people are taking it upon themselves to create their own Houses, their own scenes, their own films, their own music, and this body of resistance is coming out from queer people. That is a continuation of what we’ve been doing for over 40 years. It’s passing from one generation to the other to keep it going.

It’s not easy in Pan African circles, to be openly queer. It’s not easy. I’ve navigated through Pan African socialist circles, Islamic circles, revolutionary socialist circles, and again, quite often queer people, trans people are not centered in the circles. So, I’ve always felt that I would be that lance that was strike in the middle of that, and you’re gonna have to deal with me, and you’re gonna have to deal with my comrades, and you’re gonna deal with us, not as us feeling like we’re waiting for your acceptance, but you’re just gonna have to get with our program.

That’s how I’ve always felt about it. I’m not begging for acceptance, I’m taking my stake in this world that is all interconnected. In that aspect, my visibility is my weapon. I want you to see this masculine body, who’s not toxic, and who’s not following by the gender norms that you profess so well every day and the hetero patriarchy were my visibility, the visibility of my comrades and a collective that was ran by Black queer women and femmes was very important. It is very important. So I will continue to do this work even though I know that I’m probably not wanted in certain spaces. I’m not going to ask.

I’m not going to ask, “Can I be liberated? Can I be free? Can I be treated like anyone else?” I’m going to take it. So that’s always been how I viewed it. I have been a victim of hate crimes. I’ve been assaulted. I’ve been brutalized. I’ve had a lot of things happen to me as far as sexual and physical and mental violence. I am a survivor. I would tell any other queer youth that are out there and who are organizers to make sure that you build an intentional family to protect you, and to buffer you, and to laugh and to cry with because it’s very, very important. We’re trying to make worlds within worlds within worlds. It’s okay to create that. It looks like nothing that has been done before. It’s alright. It’s okay. It’s okay to create something new, and to be relentless with that.

We met a lot of queer people that came to the space and I didn’t realize until after we were packing up just how many different people that we touched with this work. So, I’m so eager to get another space so that queer people can feel that way in Baltimore as well with a particular spot. Not saying that there aren’t spots already, but to add to it. Because Baltimore is an incredible resistance town, and I just want to add to it with another space and reach out to the queer, Black and brown people here and trans Black and brown people here and gender non conforming non-binary comrades.

We’re on the verge of changing the reality. No more, would you see our faces on the front of newspapers as some things to be objectified and laughed at. You will respect us and that’s just what it is. So that’s how I take my day to day life as a queer activist. Not an activist, really just I’m queer and you’re going to deal with me and you’re going to respect me. This is how it is and we have a right to live and exist. It’s not very easy, always, especially if you’re visible. But is this is the work that must be done so that we can be free, because nothing’s given to you, you kind of have to take it.

TFSR: Yeah, thank you so much for that. I really resonate with that as somebody who’s subjectivity is a mixed race trans man who either gets as near as I can figure coded as either white or Arab depending on who is doing the coding and what kind of situation is going on. So, I very much resonate with the taking space, carving out safe space. And also, I have seen queer spaces become a bit less toxic, a bit less white, a bit more taking queerness as history as something that was very much like spurred on given energy by and created by Black and brown queer people, as you know, and is something that has been tried to be co-opted into like HRC, gay rich white kind of circles. But we have a long way to go still.

SL: A lot of the reason that that gets co-opted is because of the economic situation that queer and trans bodies are put into, because of the oppression that we face. So oftentimes, we feel like we’re unemployable. Or we’re easily fireable outside of the nonprofit industrial complex. So, here comes the nonprofit industrial complex. Some of our greatest queer and trans minds right now are working at jobs at nonprofits and they hate them. But they have to eat, and sex work is criminalized, and and you can’t do this and you can’t do that. So it’s so many things that that you can’t do, you can’t have events and have a space in the middle of Washington, DC and just be self sustainable, apparently. So people end up in non-profit industrial complex and their ideas are stolen. They’re not respected, and they’re still underpaid. Still whiteness is centered at the end of the day. It’s still white supremacy. It’s still a platform for the othering of people while they’re using these people. They will bring in, it’s almost as if they have a checklist, “Okay, I need one queer Black woman, I need to trans man…”

Trans people are speaking up for themselves and people are starting to really, really, really, really resonate with what’s going on. So let’s get a bunch of trans people in and you don’t respect those trans people that you’ve got to come in. You’re not paying them what they’re due. You’re taking their ideas and you’re literally using queer and trans bodies. It’s a big problem. But I don’t know how we get around around that other than creating grassroots orgs of our own, and not giving all our great ideas to these nonprofits? Maybe? I don’t know.

But that’s a serious thing. I feel sorry for my comrades, I see you out there. I know you’re drained. I know you don’t want to be in these spaces. It could even be just a different type of nonprofit that isn’t queer, but you feel drained and you feel used, and you feel marginalized, with people that saying they’re doing social justice work. I know, that hurts. I hope that you can liberate yourself from that, because it’s not a good feeling.

TFSR: Yeah, it is not a good feeling. I think creating projects like La Concha, like Maroon House, like Maroon Collective, is a really viable step in the direction of real queer liberation from white supremacy. Real liberation period from white supremacy, because white supremacy gave us all of this shit that we’re dealing with.

SL: …and capitalism, and so it all has to be toppled. So while I’m educating the hetero patriarchy, I’m educating white queer and trans folks, as well. Because you’re not separate from that. You might not be embraced fully as you might want to be. Sometimes I think people just want to be embraced more by the Empire, like when we were fighting to have trans or queer people be in the military, that’s not an advancement for queer and trans bodies, to be in the military. But I understand why some people do it, because this is the only way that they can get medical and other things.

We’re often put into these situations, because again, we’re not free and we’re not liberated. While we’re organizing and losing spaces, more spaces are popping up. So we’re just gonna have to keep pushing for our independence and autonomy and to to be heard and to lead even as we’re talking about horizontal leadership or temporarily. It’s still important to have Black, brown, indigenous queer trans two spirit bodies in these spaces. And I don’t see that from a lot of white leftist groups. So people are organizing their own and a lot of the new groups that I see popping up are led by queer and trans people. I just say, “What’s up? Keep doing it. Power to the people.”

TFSR:  Well, if you if you ever come through Asheville, it’s been noted before, both on air and off air that pretty much literally all of the anarchists here are queer or trans. Like it’s notable when you find a cis-het person who’s an anarchist, we’re like, “Oh, it’s the unicorn!!”

SL: That interesting, but that’s what I’m saying. Create your own reality. We can flip the reality around and that is wonderful. Now I need to go to Asheville.

TFSR: Yeah, come through, come through. Yeah, we’ll show you a good time. We have all the vegan barbecue you could ever eat… or any kind of barbecue, whatever, people should eat what they want.
Sima Lee, those are all the questions that I had scripted out, but is there anything that’s on your mind that you want to give voice to or any words that you’d leave listeners with as a parting words?

SL: Feed the people. Go out and feed people, go out and give people clothing, sabotage capitalism, like sabotage it. You see it cracking, you see it breaking, you see it lashing out across Latin America and the Caribbean, and here, and Asia, and the Middle East people are lashing out because capitalism is no good and we see it. Whether it’s Chile, or Bolivia, Ecuador, Haiti, Paris, people are resisting. It’s time for Turtle Island, so called North Amerikkka to start sabotaging the wheels of the empire. Because other people need for us, within the belly of this beast to do that.

We need it for ourselves, first and foremost. I’m living in Baltimore, Maryland, which is segregated. It is very much segregated. It has a higher population of men in jail, Black men in jail in Maryland, more than in Mississippi. Again, I’m gonna say it again, it’s segregated. We’re living in segregated cities. We’re living in a place where food stamps are being cut from the masses. We’re living in a place where corporations we’ve known since children are closing. We’re living in a time where what it looks like to make money is changing. Hasten what work looks like, redefine what work is, redefine bartering, redefine what family looks like. We’re redefining everything, gender, everything. Redefine it, evaluate it. It’s good to learn from the past, but also learn from the mistakes.

I’m just anxious to see what 2020 looks like as we go into these ridiculous elections and all of this stuff that’s going on. Whether they impeach Trump or not, as long as we have imperialist capitalism ruling over us, it doesn’t matter what the figurehead is. So, I just want to see my comrades across the country, across the globe, to hasten the fall of imperialist capitalism, of racism, of sexism, of ableism, all of the things that have been impeding us and holding us back. Get your trans power, get your queer power, your Black, your brown, your indigenous power, and even Fred Hampton said, “you poor white people get your power too.” It cannot be on the back of your comrades and on the platform of white supremacy, we need you to be your European descended selves. Whiteness has to go, as far as a category of social political oppression.

So we would like to see the abolition of whiteness, and bring back the greenness of our land, and the blues of our water and our skies, and deal with this ecology that is just crying out for humans to just chill. This is where we are, we have so much work to do. I don’t know how to give any one thing other than to say, “Push it all.” If you think you’re pushing too much. I tell you, you’re not pushing enough. Push, push. Let’s see the end of this oppression and let’s create a new reality.

TFSR: I love that. I love that. Yeah. Thank you so much for your words and your energy and your heart and your mind. Like it’s been a beautiful experience for me getting to talk to you. And I hope that we get to like build and fight and work together in future.

SL: Absolutely. I plan on going as much as possible up and down the east coast, down south, and I’ve been invited a couple of times out west so maybe I might finally get to Cali and Seattle and Portland and other spots. I know the comrades are always doing their thing. I’m looking forward to meeting anybody and everybody who’s down to really push anti-capitalism as far as we can, in these colonized territories.

Goth, Punk, “Selling Out”, and Being #DarkAndFlirty; an Interview with Secret Shame

Secret Shame on Secret Shames

Download Episode Here

This week William had the chance to speak with 3 members of the Asheville based goth/darkwave/post punk band Secret Shame about their politics, their music, what ails and what’s good about Asheville in general, the tensions of living under capitalism, the recent attention this group has been getting, and many more topics.

You can learn more about them by following @secretshameband on Instagram, and hear more of their music at secretshame.bandcamp.com

Before the interview tho, here is an announcement on behalf of Mutual Aid Disaster Relief:

When catastrophe strikes, those most impacted and their neighbors are the real first responders. Mutual Aid Disaster Relief is a growing movement that amplifies the efforts of frontline communities and scrappy yet strategic grassroots projects.

After last year’s nation-wide training tour spanned over 50 communities in 25 states, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief will continue its Building the Movement for Mutual Aid series in the Northeast this October!

Friends in New England, please check out events in Albany, NY, Portland, ME, Montpelier, VT, Worcester, MA, and New York City. The two-part training includes storytelling as well as a fun, fast-paced, and participatory workshop. Facilitators will describe lessons learned through diverse experiences of d.i.y. crisis response and the power of Community Organizing as Disaster Preparedness. They’ll guide conversations that give participants opportunities to share their knowledge and build camaraderie with others in the community.

MADRelief trainings are free to all! Sliding-scale donations for t-shirts, zines, books, and posters help the team cover food and fuel and keep their powerful message on the move!

For more details, visit MutualAidDisasterRelief.org/events or follow @madr_tour on Instagram.

. … . ..

Music for this show by:

Araabmuzik – American Greed

Secret Shame – Who Died in Our Backyard?

Secret Shame – Calm

Nomadic War Machine – The Fields Lay Fallow

Move 9 Speak, Yellow Finch Tree Sitters, and Pansy Fest//ACAB 2019

Download Episode Here

This week we feature three segments. As it is literally packed with jam, we suggest you check out our podcast for free online at our website or any number of streaming sites for longer, more detailed conversations on the topics plus, again, Sean Swain’s segment for this week.

Move call for support for Delbert Orr Africa

First we have a couple of shorter segments. Respectively, you hear the voices of Janine Phillips Africa, Janet Holloway Africa and Eddie Goodman Africa of the Move 9, a political and religious group that follows the teachings of John Africa and have faced heavy repression from the state of Pennsylvania over the last 50 years, who are recently released after 40 years in prison on some bull charges. The three are requesting peoples support calling in to the prison administration in Pennsylvania and to two hospitals to get contact with their fellow Move 9 prisoner, Delbert Orr Africa. Delbert has a parole hearing in September and has suddenly been heard to be suffering from swelling and possible prostate cancer. His blood daughter, his lawyer and his family members in the Move organization are concerned that so-called authorities aren’t letting Delbert communicate with them. As they say, two other members of the Move 9, Phil and Merle, died under mysterious circumstances in the dungeons of the PA prison system that has sought to bury Move and it’s supporters like Mumia Abu-Jamal, with an announcement of sickness that quickly turned to the death of their family members. It’s also good to note that Chuck Africa of the Move 9, while support in this moment is not being directed at him, is also still incarcerated after more than 40 years. More info at OnAMove.Org, OnAMove.com, Move9Parole.blogspot.com or the fedbook page, “Justice For The Move 9

There’s a statement from Move in our show notes, near the bottom of the post for this episode with more details. Those notes don’t include the number for Wilkesbury Hospital at 5708298111

Yellow Finch Tree Sit Against MVP

Then, we’ll hear from an anonymous tree-sitter and Dusty who are both in trees blocking the path of the Mountain Valley Pipeline cutting through Appalachia and threatening the immediate health of the forests, waterways and communities it passes by as well as the the wider future of life on earth as a project to pull fossil fuels for burning out of the soil for the profit of a few hucksters. More information on the Yellow Finch Tree Sit at AppalachiansAgainstPipelines on fedbook, InstaGram and Twitter or send them some money at bit.ly/SupportMVPResistance.

As a quick update, the efforts by EQT’s attempt at extending an injunction around the Eminent Domain for the Mountain Valley Pipeline to also criminalize tree-sitters, their supporters and lawyers have failed and the federal judge, Elizabeth Dillon, meaning that the construction will have to move from Cove Hollow around to the other side of Poor Mountain, ostensibly increasing the cost of building the pipeline by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Consider visiting them and congratulating the tree-sitters

. … . ..

Pansy Fest and Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair 2019

Third up, we got to talk with members of the fast approaching Pansy Fest and Asheville Anarchist Bookfair, which is an exciting collaboration happening over the weekend of August 23-25. We got to talk here about this colab and many more things, if you are listening to the radio version and want more content that will be up at our blog thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org.

To get in touch with these projects, for logistics and information, you can go to pansycollective.org and email them at pansyfestavl@gmail.com.

To donate to Pansy Fest, you can Venmo @cecilia-martuscelli

Instagram: @pansyfest

fedbook: facebook.com/pansyfestavl/

For the bookfair, their website is acab2019.noblogs.org, email acab2019@riseup.net

To see those shirts and totes, go here!

Instagram: @acab.2019

Facebook: facebook.com/AshevilleACAB2019

For housing inquiries for both events email housing.avl2019@gmail.com !

Announcements

Sean Swain Address

We want to share that the wrong address for writing to Sean was up at his support site and announced in his segments. You can actually write to him at:

Sean Swain #2015638
Buckingham Correctional
PO Box 430
Dillwyn, VA 23936/

Tom Manning

This week saw the passing of long-time political prisoner, alleged member of the Jonathan Jackson Unit and the United Freedom Front and revolutionary, Tom Manning. Tom’s death came after literally years of medical mistreatment and neglect at the hands of Federal Bureau of Prisons, ending at USP-Hazelton in West Virginia. The system had it in for Tom, that he would die inside, for even though he only had about a year left in the Federal System, he was bound upon release for the NJ state prison system, a system renown for it’s vendetta against prisoners accused of killing cops. We’ll link in our show notes to a recent writeup by Ray Luc Levasseur on It’sGoingDown.org. If you want to hear our interview with Ray Luc which touched on his relationship with Tom and Tom’s treatment by prison officials, we’ll link that in the show notes, too.

Jason Renard Walker on Kite Line

So, you heard the Kite Line jingle today. Due to this episode being a behemoth already, we’d like to direct you to hear the voice of prison organizer and Deputy Minister of Labor for the New Afrikan Black Panther Party (Prison Chapter), Jason Renard Walker on the August 2nd episode of Kite Line. In the future we may feature some of Mr. Walker’s audio essays to get them on the airwaves further. You can also find his articles, for which he’s been punished by the Texas prisoncrats, at the SF Bay View Newspaper.

Delbert Orr Africa

ONA MOVE

The MOVE Organization would like to bring to people’s attention a very dangerous situation that is currently occurring with our Brother Delbert Africa . For the past two weeks Delbert has been suffering from severe swelling from the bottom of his waist all the way down to his toes . For the past two weeks prison officials at SCI Dallas has ignored Delbert’s request for medical until this past week when several calls were made to his counselor . A medical visit was finally scheduled for this past Wednesday 7/31/2019 where it was explained to Delbert that he has a fluid build up which required to be drained Delbert was immediately taken to an outside hospital, where as of today 8/3/2019 we still do not know where Delbert is .

For several days now Delbert has been kept incommunicado from calling his MOVE Family , His Blood Daughter, and even his lawyer . Prison officials and also hospital officials will not give any one information pertaining to where Delbert is at . Something very suspicious is happening here and it appears the same pattern that occurred with Phil Africa in 2015 where a simple stomach virus turned to A weeklong trip to the outside hospital held incommunicado from family and friends to return back to the prison and be placed in hospice care and to only die a day later. In 1998 Merle Africa who had a stomach virus was forced in her cell and told she was dying only to die a couple of hours later .

This system has no issue with murdering MOVE people and that’s what they are trying to do with Delbert now . They have already given ground by letting innocent MOVE people out on parole and they do not want to do this with Delbert . As we said before this system has always saw Delbert as the leader and isolated him and this latest tactic is no different . Delbert is set to go before the board this September after winning his appeal now this happens . As of now we have heard from Delbert’s attorney where he has stated based on the medical report given from Outside medical they are stating that Delbert has Anemia , High Potassium , High Psa’s , Acute malignancy of lower intestines , Kidney Trouble , and Suspicion of prostate cancer . The only thing that Delbert has agreed to with any treatment or exams is the submission of a catheter to be used Delbert has requested a phone call to his MOVE Family which the prison and Also Hospital will not allow . We are highly suspicious that this prison has done something to Delbert to bring on these symptoms on so quick . They could not kill Delbert August 8th after the brutal beating they gave him and now they want to finish the job before he can come home on parole .
These officials are so arrogant this is the same way they murdered Phil Africa and Merle Africa .

As we have stated before they have isolated our Brother So they can kill him. They won’t let know one speak to him and this is very Dangerous we need people now to call

SCI Dallas Superintendent Kevin Ransom 570 675- 1101

Geisenger Hospital 570 808-7300

We want people to demand that Delbert Orr Africa Am4895 be allowed to call his MOVE Family and let them know what’s going . Even Though it’s the weekend we are still asking people to call and Monday we are going full blast .

The MOVE Organization

People can reach
Sue Africa 215 387-4107
Carlos Africa 215 385-2772
Janine Africa 610 704 4524

. … . ..

This episode, we feature WIMP from Boston, MA, with the track AlwaysForwardNeverStraight. WIMP will be performing at PansyFest 2019 in Asheville.

Playlist