Recap of the past week

Last week I mentioned that many of the activities that I’ve started doing through this Challenge are ones that I want to continue to do for the long haul, and so I’m having difficulty doing a new thing every week. Because there are so many longer-term actions already on the go, this week I decided to go back to my list of more contained, one-off actions so I’m still stretching myself to try something new every day.

In the first part of the week I did a number of the actions I had planned out:

• Marked the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and learned more about the rebuilding of New Orleans by watching 10 Years After Katrina: ‘Resilience’, ‘Recovery’, and REALITY. The film, produced by the Greater New Orleans Organizers Roundtable, exposes the spin doctoring behind the 10th anniversary celebrations, documenting the US government’s attempted opportunistic use of the hurricane to advance an agenda of gentrification, displacement of communities of colour, and privatization of public places and public services in New Orleans and other storm-damaged communities of the Gulf Coast region; and the lived experiences of African American, Vietnamese American, and Latino community organizers defending human rights against a tide of disaster-profiteering and displacement.
• Attended trans* Buddhist virtual meditation and participated in post-sit video chat. The stories of violence, disrespect, and marginalization trans people have experienced from their Buddhist communities, and the continuing impacts, were painful to hear. I was reminded (yet again) how fortunate I am to have a Zen sangha that is inclusive and respectful.
• Did research on rain barrel setup to help divert roof water away from the storm sewer system. Unfortunately it’s looking like we won’t be able to pursue this as from the type of roof we have the regional district recommends only using the water for non-food plants, and having turned almost all of our space into a food garden that’s all we’ve got at this point. Will continue to sleuth options to see if there is something we can do on this…and definitely will be looking at alternatives to asphalt roof tile the next time we are needing to repair a roof!
• Went on a date with my sweet spouse to a local organic food store to try to source plastic-free alternatives to food that our usual grocery store only carries in plastic packaging. This was a bit of a bust as although they have a great bulk food selection their jars and bottles all have the same plastic seal as our regular grocery store – will have to keep sleuthing.
• Talked with the farmer who I’m volunteering with about ways to promote her CSA program in the next growing season.
• Attended the first session of BCALM’s Art of Living Mindfully course (an 8 week course that “provides participants with a firm grounding in mindfulness based strategies useful in navigating stress and in recognizing patterns of thought, speech and behavior that may be contributing to stress and suffering”). The setup totally didn’t work for me — doing body-centred work is often tricky for me both around gender dysphoria and also trauma, and doing it in an unfamiliar setting with unfamiliar people and squished in so close that the guy next to me kept touching my leg, I was a triggered dissociated panicking mess for 90 minutes. So, I won’t do the rest of the course but am happy that one of the 800 (!) people on the waitlist will have a chance to do it – there are so few resources in the public mental health system. The experience, and the resulting reoccurence of agoraphobia for the first time in a month, was a good lesson for me about how difficult I still find it to recognize and respect my boundaries, and the difference between unhelpful avoidance behaviour (which can > agoraphobia) vs. unhelpfully staying in a situation that doesn’t work for me.

And then on Wednesday Nilufer Demir, a Turkish press photographer, was snapping a picture of Pakistani migrants by the coast when she noticed 3-year-old Alan Kurdi’s tiny fragile body washed up on the beach. Alan, his 5-year-old brother Ghalib, their mother Rehanna, and 9 other Syrian refugees drowned when the boats they were in capsized on its attempted journey to Greece.

This horror is not new. The United Nations refugee agency (UNCHR) estimates that there are currently more than 51 million people who have been forced to flee their homes as a result of war, violence, persecution, oppression, environmental disasters, climate change, and extreme poverty (16.7 million people who have fled their home country and 33.3 million internally displaced people). Every day an estimated 42,500 new people become refugees. And as wealthy countries such as Canada, the USA, European nations, and Australia have become increasingly hostile to refugees, increasing both physical and financial barriers to people seeking asylum, people are forced into more and more precarious means of trying to find refuge. Thousands of Eritrean, Somali, Syrian, Yemeni, Nigerian and Balkan refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean, with the United Nations estimating 3500 deaths last year and 2500 deaths thus far this year. Following last year’s expansion of Border Patrol searches along the US-Mexico border, there has been an increase in the number of people drowning while attempting to cross the Rio Grande as the expanded patrols and surveillance have caused people to try to cross the river in more dangerous and secluded areas. Earlier this year hundreds of Rohingya people from Burma and Bangladesh died at sea and on land-based human smuggling routes, refused entry by multiple countries.

But the story of the Kurdi family — the family photos showing the children full of life and beautiful bright smiles, the photo of a tiny toddler’s lifeless body being carried by a Turkish paramilitary officer, the anguished interview with husband and father Abdullah Kurdi who described how his wife and children slipped out of his hands as the boat capsized, the news that Canadian family members had been trying to bring the family here but had been thwarted by the bureaucratic nightmare that is the Canadian government application system — made directly and viscerally real the human face of the suffering, and the complicity of affluent countries. As one friend put it, “people woke up to what is happening”.

Like many other people I was horrified by the story and wanting to do something constructive with all of that emotion, both to express my grief for the family and also to call attention to the Canadian contributions to the conditions that caused their deaths. “The things that happened to us here, in the country where we took refuge to escape war in our homeland, we want the whole world to see this,” Abdullah Kurdi told reporters. “We want the world’s attention on us, so that they can prevent the same from happening to others. Let this be the last.”

Through Facebook I found out about an event being organized by a few local activists as part of a cross-country mobilization organized by various organizations and movements across the country.

Although support for recent immigrants and refugees have been part of my personal, cultural and political landscape for as long as I can remember, and No One Is Illegal has definitely helped shape how I’ve approached anti-colonialism work with respect to Indigenous solidarity and anti-Zionist work, I have not been directly involved in organizing specifically for immigrant, refugee, and migrant worker rights. I’ve written in earlier posts about having to come at activism as a beginner again after so many years away, and in this movement that is even more true.

So, I have been very grateful to new friends for helping me figure out some things I could constructively do to support the action (the lesson for this week: “There is always something you can do”), and for providing me with a sense of connectedness and confidence to be able to have some difficult public and private conversations with a number of people relating to how to address the many things that are fucked about Canadian immigration laws without reinforcing colonial control of Indigenous lands. This week I have been getting tons of practice calling in, and hopefully am getting better at constructively discussing when there is something I disagree with. Helping fold booklets and paint the banner in the photo at the top of the blog post, and then sharing food and laughs and discussion around a big kitchen table with a group of very thoughtful, smart, funny, and caring people, was wonderful. I have so missed that! The action itself was, as is usually the case for me, pretty overwhelming with a lot of people packed into a small space so we stood at the back the whole time and didn’t stay for the march, but it was good to do something to contribute, even if all the things I did were small contributions.

And it was also fun to engage with a Conservative Party canvasser who is probably wishing he did not come to our house… 🙂 My intention was to practice engaging with him in a respectful and firm way, and not just beak off at him, but try to genuinely find out why on earth someone would support that party. We had a very interesting discussion about the party’s stance on immigration and Canadian nationalism and xenophobia and he admitted at the end that he didn’t actually support the party’s policies, he just believed that the other candidates were professional politicians and he wanted to support someone who he felt was more grassroots. Surreal!

Looking ahead to the next week

It is so important not to just do a one-off action and flit from crisis to crisis in a superficial way. The experience this week affirmed for me that anti-colonial, anti-racist activism is where my heart is. So, I’ve thought a lot in the past couple days about what the next steps could be in the upcoming weeks. Here are some ideas:

• Continue to learn, in various ways – reading, having conversations, observing, practicing, and learning from my mistakes. This week my goal is to finish reading Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview and Principles of Tsawalk: An Indigenous Approach to Global Crisis (both by Umeek – E. Richard Atleo) and read the NOII Vancouver Principles and Statements. I am also looking forward to reconnecting with an old friend who I worked with on Palestinian solidarity some years ago, and curious to talk more with her about what if anything is happening in the Jewish community on this.
• Contribute funds to support a local group that is working within the Canadian refugee system to sponsor a Syrian family of 5 to come to Canada.
• Continue talking with local folks who are interested in ongoing work, to discuss what next steps might be to support the beautiful vision articulated in Urbane Adventurer: Amiskwacî: “What does it mean to build solidarity between racialised peoples desperate to find refuge here while also asserting Indigenous self-determination?…What would Canada look like if we centred the solidarity between self-determining, self-governing Indigenous peoples and those people also violently displaced by neo-colonial wars, resource projects, climate change?”
• Pitch in to support a Unist’ot’en solidarity event – not sure yet what that might look like but open to doing any kind of logistical support (e.g., making copies of posters and putting them up to help advertise the event, room setup/cleanup).
• Attend the Our Place series Transformation Through First Nations History to learn more about local Indigenous history and resistance to colonialism. This will be a big challenge for me to be in a space that is unfamiliar (and a church to boot), with people who I don’t know and nobody accompanying me for support if I have a panic attack. But I have been reminded again this week that my own personal mental health healing is inextricably entwined with communal political healing and that even though it is scary to stretch in these ways, it is important to do so, both for accountability and also for my own sanity.

And there are also some other actions that are important to me in the next couple weeks:

• Support my sweet spouse through return to work and the start of a new school year – nourishing and sustaining our family is super important. It is going to be a huge change of pace and lots of ambiguity/uncertainty as support staff can be moved all over the place for the first month.
• Make knishes. I have been really missing my grandparents and hankering for Jewish food lately, and we have beautiful potatoes from this year’s harvest.
• Participate in my sangha’s annual strategic planning session and help sustain the long-term viability of my spiritual community.
• Work on my draft chapter for the Trans* Buddhist anthology.

And what about you?

I would love to get feedback from you. What do you think of all of this rambling? What resonates with you, and what doesn’t? Are you trying your own sustainability initiatives and if so what are you learning?

Have a great week!