Category: women

The Community Table

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August 29th, 2013

I get to work often with groups who want to bring others to the table, wherever that table might be and whatever the people around that table might be doing. Usually the folks they want at the table are different from them in some notable way. They’re often younger. Maybe they have a smaller income. Many times the people with the table have pale skin and the people they’d like at the table have some shade of brown skin.

Increasingly, I’m challenged by that idea of bringing people to the table. I see a couple problems with it. First, it presumes that the people being invited don’t already have their own table that is just as good that you’ve just never seen. Secondly, it keeps the host in the host role. There’s no marriage of equals here. One person/group owns the table. The other is a guest.

We live in a world filled with unhealthy power dynamics around class, race and ethnicity, age, gender, and the list goes on. If we want our organizations and our organizing to not be a reflection of the sickness of the world, we have to do something different.

Step away from the table. Meet the people that you want to work with on shared turf. What are your shared needs and concerns? Know that you may be turned away for a myriad of reasons. Some of those reasons will have to do with your personal actions and some with all the stories of histories of oppression. Show respect. Show a willingness to learn. Show a willingness to fall and get back up again. Know that it will take a long time, maybe forever to build a trust.

Get a new table, one that isn’t yours or theirs, but instead that you fashioned together out of shared dreams. Know that this table will look different than your old one. Maybe it will be stronger and maybe it will be a little off balance. Who knows? It will be larger and have many carvings of great stories hard and beautiful.

How do you step away from your table? Here’s just a couple quick pointers that I’ve found helpful over the years:
1. Diversity of whatever sort isn’t a side issue. It is THE ISSUE. Being welcoming, supportive, and representative of all people that you want to be together at the table has to be central to everything you do.
2. Look at whatever you are working on from many angles. Why might others care about this same thing? Why do you care about it? What do you share with others?
3. Keep looking at yourself and your own actions. We are all products of history. We all need to hold ourselves accountable to act in ways the future can be proud of
4. We are all learners, teachers, and leaders. Allow yourself to be each of these with everyone.
5. Be there. When you are called to be supportive to those you want to work with and who are struggling in whatever way do so in whatever way you are able.

That’s a short clip, no where near the whole story. But, maybe there’s something there to consider. Mull it over and share. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

organizing as a learning tool– thinking about the anti mine fight in the 90’s and today.

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 July 10, 2013
As I considered creating this blog as a means of moving toward developing a community organizing school,  I asked friends what I should write about and what they’d like to read.  One suggested to me writing about the anti-mining movement in Wisconsin in the 1990’s and that movement here today.  I was intrigued by that idea.  Today I’d like to take on just a little piece of it from my own perspective.

I’ve been thinking some about not just organizing training, but organizing as a means of education.  In the early 1990’s when I became involved in the anti-mining movement in Wisconsin,  I was a young and naive college student.   My understanding of the world was largely limited to my life growing up in rural southeastern Wisconsin.

When I got to college I started getting involved in environmental organizing as well as in some student rights issues.  I started to connect with other students and activists around the state and began going to meetings, events and rallies around the state.  Getting involved in statewide work and especially in the work around the Crandon mine started opening my mind and heart to the different experiences and lives of folks around the state.  Most notably I started to understand that Native peoples in Wisconsin weren’t just a story in my history book.  They were and are quite alive and some have much to share about understanding this place in which we live and who we all are.

I was at a rally against the mine one time on the capitol steps in Madison.  There was an Anishanabe woman,  Frannie VanZile I think her name was, speaking that day.  She stood up on those steps surrounded by girls and young women and her voice rang through the bullhorn.  “You women, you women out there.  You are the keepers of the water.”  Twenty some years later I can still hear her echoing in my ears.  Those words defined my course in life.  She taught me a central piece of who I am.

Somewhere along the way between then and now I went from being that young and naive college student to being the middle aged woman who gets to tell the tales of “back in the day” and I ask myself; “How do we teach?  How do we inspire? How do we hold the hands of young activists who will carry the fight for decades to come?”

Today Wisconsin is fighting to protect the water as we were back then.  This time the proposed mine is in the Penokee Hills in the northern part of the state.  A few weeks ago some young activists got in a bit of tangle with some folks on the mine site.   From all I’ve heard it doesn’t sound like any bigger of an action than one that my friends and I would have engaged in during the 90’s.  The response was different though.  A young woman, Katie, is facing a felony charge and Gogebic Taconite, the mining company, has hired mercenaries from Arizona to guard the site.

Two things float in my mind now about this incident.

The first is about violence and nonviolence.  I’ve been a proclaimed pacifist all of my adult life.  Yet the other day when I was reading Myles Horton’s autobiography I came across the idea that the question is not really about violence or nonviolence, but about what is the lesser violence?  Katie and her friends engaged in a direct action that some might have called violent.  In fact, the company is using that as their excuse to hire these guards.  My understanding is she threw a soda can and tried to take a cell phone away from someone who was filming.  Maybe that is violence, but armed guards to protect the company that will destroy the land and water,  bankrupt the economy, and devastate the cultures of the area is that not the greater violence?  How do we decide what is warranted?

The other is  how do we hold Katie’s hand and that of her friends as they grow as activists and leaders who will take this fight on for the decades to come?  When I started out in the 90’s there were a few of us young folks involved in more “radical” direct action organizations.  Our insights were largely welcomed.  We were pulled into the larger fight.  We got to stand with the elders who had fought for years before us and learn.  Some of us were sort of golden children, loved and cared for by some very wise people who knew we’d fight more effectively if we were stronger and that they could give us that strength.   I’m not always sure that’s happening today and I wonder how we make it happen.