#indigenous women against the sex industry

[datura-tea]

still thinking about filipinos in the fallout wasteland, but now in the context of my headcanon that fallout america annexed the philippines in 1946 instead of granting the nation its independence.

what made me think of this headcanon? the timeline between our world and the fallout world splits at about that period, and, well, there's precedent for the annexation: in real life, there were 50 years of american occupation, and there's ongoing american intereference in our politics, economy, and culture (essentially making the philippines an american neo-colony, but i digress), and considering how fallout america is just america turned up to 11, these things will just be magnified, and so: the philippine annexation of 1946.

now, there's nothing in fallout canon about the philippines except for a brief off-hand comment from the newscaster at the beginning of fallout 4 about american troops in mambajao (an island in camiguin) but this already tells me that, by 2077, if american military presence in the philippines has managed to reach that part of mindanao, the american occupation has intensified.

that little nugget already paints such a vivid picture of what's happening in fallout philippines - an american military base in mindanao tells me that more indigenous communities were displaced (real life example: the aeta and ibaloi communities in luzon, who still, to this day, cannot return to their ancestral lands), that sexual exploitation of women and children was rampant (irl: the sex industry in angeles city, among other areas), that american soldiers were free to enact violence on filipinos without facing any consequences (irl: jennifer laude's murder at the hands of joseph pemberton), that american imperialism is thriving in the archipelago, and that the sino-american war is serious and ramping up.

but let's see what the newscaster actually says:

"It would also appear our troops stationed overseas are experiencing some unusual weather, as well. On the Island of Mambajao the nights are cold. Unseasonably so for Southeast Asia. But for the 5th Infantry, that's as comfortable as an Autumn jamboree. All the easier for our mechanized hellcats to drive any screaming Commie meanies right into the Bohol Sea."

"screaming commie meanies" tells me that there's a significant communist presence in the philippines, which i am taking to mean that the communist party of the philippines and the new people's army are alive and well and fighting against the american occupation. i really don't think there'd be many chinese communist spies in the philippines at this time since filipino communists are against chinese imperialism as well, but tbh this part isn't solidified in my brain as much... anyway

essentially, fallout philippines has the problems of current, real life philippines, just amplified. american occupation on one hand, chinese imperialism on the other, unusual cold weather (which tells me that climate change was also a problem in the fallout universe), the threat of nuclear war... all with ordinary filipinos in the middle. would it be a stretch to say that a lot of them fled to america and established their own communities there? that those communities would have thrived and retained our creativity and sense of community/pagkakapwa abroad? that those communities would have survived the bombs and banded together and kept themselves and their culture alive, in the apocalypse?

[blacksapphhicmaddonna]

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH, ALPHABET MAFIA

just a few reminders:

- first pride was a riot

- black & BIPOC queer people are the foundation of our entire nation and the global culture

- we owe most of our rights and progress to BIPOC trans women/femmes and different communities of lesbians, trans/gnc folks and elders.

- trans people have always existed, they are ancient and indigenous to many cultures and places and are SACRED.

- I’m glad you’re here and there is community out there for you, waiting with open arms. Don’t give up just yet, please.

- rainbow capitalism isn’t liberation

- we are all we have, be fucking better to each other

- lesbians have done so much for lgbtqia+ people and should maybe idk stop being erased for no reason

- biphobia is real and just bc your ex cheated on you doesn’t make it bi folks fault, you’re projecting babe

- being queer doesn’t dissolve white privilege, pls touch grass

- be safe at pride. they’re coming for us all and we need to protect ourselves.

- not everyone wants to use the word queer/dyke/fag etc. I’m glad you reclaimed the slurs used against you, me too, but not everyone wants to and you need to respect that. LGBTQIA+* exists for a reason.

- the black and brown belong on the flag.

- the A is for asexual/romantic or agender, not ally.

- get some pussy (or whatever you do (or don’t do)) and make space for joy! because black/queer joy is revolutionary and fucking righteous just as much as our anger is, too

- Juneteenth coming up too, issa parade in my city fr

- asexuals/aromantics belong at pride. Period. Full stop.

- safe sex is the best sex

- get tested!

- it’s okay to not watch the news. america is hell, go take a nap

- people 100% know themselves better than you ever will, people are who they say they are and you don’t get to decide that for them. respect pronouns, identity, etc. or argue w ya mama/god/someone else cause it ain’t finna be me ❤️

- you deserve relationships that feel safe and actually are safe. Don’t settle.

- learn your queer history. they won’t teach us. they took our elders from us.

- Black LGBTQIA+* history IS Black History.

- we all need to be thankful to the house mothers and the ballroom scene and those who gave us what we have now, regardless of who you are.

- don’t call yourself a stud if you’re not BLACK. wit a capital B and at least one BLACK parent.

- not everyone is out. happiest of pride month to y’all. you’re still gang and we love you just as much. 💗

- our collective liberation lies in the fact that we are all tied to each other. if you’re down for the gays but not the theys, you’re not as decolonized as you think you are.

- shout out to fanfiction writers who have been single-handedly providing queer art/content/representation for years while the industry continues to make a mockery of us or intentionally leave us out. one thing we gonna do is help someone find their queer awakening, and get that story right. love us 🤪 go team

- your life means something. it’s important beyond comprehension. you look good. your ass is fat (if you want it to be). get the mullet as a lil treat.

- LGBTQIA+* people across the board have ALWAYS existed in literally every culture and every continent (and Antarctica counts if you count the cute lil gay penguins😌). Don’t let them tell you different. We are not a “mInOrItY”, we have been MINORITIZED. we are not small, we are great and mighty and have ALWAYS been here. And we always will. We exist in the future just as we have existed in the past. We stand on the shoulders of MASSIVE collective ancestors. If that’s not an indication to keep going, keep fighting, keep laughing, dancing, voguing, and keep showing up authentically - then I don’t know what is.

- it’s gonna be ok baby. pinkie promise.

[magnoliamyrrh]

even in the context of an american discourse and not slavery in the world this blows my mind. what about all the (mainly) south americans that have their papers stolen or passports or have no papers and are barely paid or not paid at all for grueling work, threathened w violence or no food or deportation? you know, that modern day south american slavery which actually keeps a lot of the economy of this place going, especially the agricultural economy? what about sex trafficking??? hello? sex trafficking, that thing thats actually a hugeee issue in this country which affects mostly women and Girls, kids for gods sake from poorer and at risk communities (oh wait sorry, we call that a conspiracy, or progressive sex work bs nowadays and supporting the industry dont mean ur supoorting and benefitting slavery to jack off ur useless dick)?? what about how the clothes we wear and the technology we buy is unfortunately often made possible by slavery in other countries??? the minerals in our technology the people which make our clothes?

i swear the most we get is "the prison system is modern day slavery" and yea sure but damn actually theres a lot more going on than that too. outside of that like i swear were always going on about here about slavery as this thing of the past and surely the legalized slavery in this country of africans and indigenous ppl (which everyone forgets even while we talk abt reparations in california, a state which never had african slavery but had indigenous slavery) and the indentured servitute of irish ppl (which eveyone forgets were also sold and treated horridly, many times killed or never freed, also brought against their will) (while everyone also forgets some black ppl owned slaves and not just to save family members, some indigenous ppl owned slaves, and most ppl frankly regardless of race did not own any at all),,,, , , like surely the history is absolutely bloody horrible and painful. But What About T O D A Y. NOW. TODAY. In the year of our lord 2023 WHEN THERES MORE SLAVES THAN EVER ON THIS GLOBE. WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO ABT THE ONE WEVE GOT T O D A Y

[bisexualvalve]

A study released last month shows links between Canada’s resource extraction industry and violence against Indigenous women and girls, and it links ‘man camps’ in this country to incidents of gender-based violence and crime.

The study was first announced by the Standing Committee on the Status of Women back in April, after originally being requested by Winnipeg Centre MP Leah Gazan.

Results of the approximately eight-month-long study were released in mid-December, and the study states there is “substantial evidence of a serious problem” regarding the resource industry and its employees and its links to violence against Indigenous women, girls and gender-diverse people across the country.

Included in the study is information about and detailed concerns regarding what are commonly referred to as ‘man camps’ which are temporary villages built to house primarily male workers who are working at a site temporarily, often on resource development projects.

It states there is evidence of men at these types of camps in Canada preying on Indigenous women and girls who live in the areas where camps are set up, and often doing so because they have little or no connection to the area where they are living temporarily.

“This increased rate of violence is largely the result of the migration into the camps of mostly non-Indigenous young men with high salaries and little to no stake in the host Indigenous community,” the study states.

The report also says there is evidence these ‘man camps’ are linked to increased rates of sex offences, and sex industry activities in communities nearby where they are set up.

During a news conference in Ottawa last month, Gazan said there needs to be more accountability within the resource extraction industry to combat violence against Indigenous women and girls, and she also called on the federal government to take steps and to put pressure on the industry to reduce those types of incidents.

“This study wasn’t about whether we agree with resource extraction or not. We have different opinions on that,” Gazan said. “But one thing we agree unanimously on is that we must have zero tolerance and we must stand united against violence against Indigenous women.”

The report also states the feds could be doing more to force changes within the industry to combat gender-based violence and sexual exploitation.

“This can be done by requiring companies to establish workplace safety plans and policies, track and report incidents of gender-based violence, educate workers about gender-based and sexual violence, cultural safety, and the effects of colonization on Indigenous peoples,” the report states.

According to Gazan, the study was conducted as a response to the report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which was released in 2019.

And according to the National Inquiry’s final report, there is evidence of “transient workers” in Manitoba, and specifically in northern Manitoba, being linked to incidents of violence against Indigenous women and girls.

“A regional cumulative-effects assessment of hydroelectric development in Manitoba revealed that the arrival of a large transient workforce in northern Manitoba resulted in Indigenous women and children being targeted for racial and sexual violence,” the National Inquiry’s final report states.

— Dave Baxter is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of the Winnipeg Sun. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.

[imaginarianisms]

i genuinely think that misa would've tried to use her platform for humanitarian causes. yes, she's the second kira & yes, she's a serial killer & a mass murderer, but she firmly believes in justice & helping other people & only punishes people who do, like, really awful horrible shit like child abusers, animal abusers, sex offenders, traffickers, people who abuse sex workers, people who beat their spouses, corrupt government officials, especially those who explicitly makes laws against marginalized groups, people who've done racist, homophobic, transphobic or otherwise queerphobic, ableist & religious hatecrimes, in self defense to protect herself, to protect people she cares about & loves or to avenge herself when she's wronged. especially because her own government & her justice system wasn't there for her.

misa was very well loved & her fanbase is entirely aware of her traumatic background which is why they ride so hard for her. i genuinely think that she'd use her fame, influence, & platform to raise awareness about important social, environmental & humanitarian issues & gives back to various charities, particularly queer people bc i think she'd publicly come out as bisexual which would likely shock a lot of people as while there's not as much moral or social weight to orientation or gender as the west, the government of japan is relatively conservative & thus people who're members of the LGBTQIA+/queer community in japan still face significant discrimination & prejudice to the point where it's hard for many people to come out, same gender marriage & same gender couples can't legally adopt children still isn't a thing over there but misa doesn't give a shit & keeps advocating for queer people locally & internationally, sex workers rights considering she was one herself, supporting the education of young women, & community growth both locally & internationally by supporting people who were wrongfully detained & tortured, domestic violence survivors who often go unreported due to social & cultural concerns about shaming the family name, homeless people, refugees & displaced peoples & their families & advocating for mental health, animals & giving knowledge to outcast animals that have been neglected, mistreated & misunderstood, supporting minorities in both japan like with the hisabetsu-buraku, the descendants of outcast communities of feudal japan, the ainu & okinawans (whom she also shares heritage with. btw), the indigenous peoples of northern & southern japan respectively & gaikokujin / foreigners & non-japanese people in the country & internationally & helping the environment & promoting diversity in the beauty & fashion industry because she's the type of person to do that, she's literally around a shinigami constantly 24/7 & doesn't blink an eye, & pays visits in hospitals including children's hospitals & spending time with them especially because she has a soft spot for children because she wanted to be a mother herself eventually, & sends a lot of her money to relief funds when natural disasters strike both in japan & other places around the world. bc like. yeah misa is morally questionable in the sense that she's an international star & a model & an idol secretly moonlighting as the second kira but her heart is in the right place.

[radfemblack]

Feminist sex trade researchers cite Indigenous women and girls as “Canada’s first prostituted women.” These women and girls were sexually exploited as “country wives” and through brothels near early forts and military bases. Constructed as “squaws,” Indigenous women and girls are seen as savage, subhuman and disposable. They are depicted as women and girls who always want sex and are sexually available to men at all times.

Despite their over-representation in street prostitution, Indigenous women occupy marginal positions in sexual exploitation discourse. This research posits the sexual exploitation of Indigenous women and girls as a site to understanding expressions of colonial male violence and their impacts on Indigenous women and girls. Engaging feminist Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, I will explore connections between various forms of male violence against Indigenous women and girls, and seek feminist solutions to influence policies regarding this crisis.

[coochiequeens]

“Remember my face,” Sii-am Hamilton told the crowd gathered on Finnieston Street near the high fencing that surrounds the Cop26 summit on Tuesday morning. “Remember because it’s not if, it’s when you will go missing, if you are involved in land rights.”

The rally for murdered and missing indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people heard a painful litany of lost loved ones from witnesses from Alaska to the Amazon, and the legacy of their absence for families and communities.

“Say their names,” said Delee Nikal, a Wet’suwet’en activist. “Do not forgot our sisters who have been stolen.” Like her fellow speakers, she was explicit: “The femicide is directly linked to the ecocide … there needs to be more awareness that these extractive industries, all that is affecting our climate and destroying our territories, is intertwined with violence against our women and girls.”

In Canada, Indigenous women and girls are targeted for violence more than any other group, and are 12 times more likely to go missing or be killed. In the US, the justice department found that Native American women faced murder rates more than 10 times the national average.

But this abuse does not happen free of context: in 2019, Canada’s national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls accepted the link between “boomtown” and “man camp” environments that emerged around resource extraction projects and violence against Indigenous women and girls, as well as increased sex industry activities in those areas.

And still this has yet to translate into genuine recognition by the leaders at the UN summit or indeed the wider environmental movement, Hamilton, from British Columbia, said after the rally. “At larger international events like this one and even at home, I don’t think that people understand just how dangerous the lives of Indigenous women have gotten. Our conversations shift towards catchy phrases like ‘net zero’ or ‘1.5’, which don’t represent just how violent the experience of growing up in an extractive world has become.”

The fear Hamilton expressed at the rally was, she said, “really natural”. Over the past year she has been involved in direct activism at Fairy Creek, protesting against the logging of old-growth forest in southern Vancouver Island. “And this year alone I’ve watched so much violence, towards specifically young Indigenous women and girls, at the hands of the police. I’ve watched so many people have their bones broken, their hair ripped out, their eyes gouged.”

She said articulating and sharing these struggles with women from different countries and communities could be at once reassuring and devastating. “It makes you feel less isolated when you’re meeting so many other people who are experiencing similar forms of violence. No matter what kind of extractive industry is attacking a community, it has same rippling effect on women.”

She added: “It makes you feel less lonely, but at the same time it creates this different type of rage that I really can’t describe – knowing that there are so many women missing, it’s not just in Canada, and it’s not just in Mexico, it’s all over the world. Wherever you find people that are struggling for the land, you will find missing women.”

[funkyness]

Regarding your post about radical feminists agreeing on certain topics for the ‘exact same reasons’, what reasons are those exactly?

I'm assuming this was asked in good faith. the post:

the core of terf ideology is gender essentialism. basically: the belief that a person's personality traits and behavior is inherently linked to their biological sex (of which they only recognize 2). men (penis) are biologically stronger, bigger, violent, aggressive, sexual. therefore by comparison a woman (vagina) is weaker, smaller, peaceful and submissive. a man is what a woman is not. a woman is what a man is not.

therefore the existence of trans people, the idea of sex as a spectrum and gender as a social construct goes against the very basics of their ideology.

this is literally the same shit that makes conservatives go: man strong works, woman weak in the kitchen.

how this ties to white supremacy? well obviously this is an incredibly reductive way to view gender, that is constructed from a western colonial perspective. a man is what a White woman is not. a woman is what a White man is not. what happens when someone doesn't fit into this narrow idea of gender? chinese women olympic athletes get called men. women of colour have to overperform femininity to be recognized as women. terfs take characteristics they consider to be inherent sex characteristics such as

and weaponize them against people of colour. and not only physical traits, because gender essentialism considers personality traits to be gendered as well. woc get called manly and aggressive just for being assertive, outspoken or openly sexual (shit like megan thee stallion getting called a "masc butch" when you've never seen her without a full face of makeup on). black and indigenous men get villainized and oversexualized, while considering east asian men submissive and asexual.

going to focus on the sexual part here to address the porn and prostitution bit. to recap:

sex = biological. penis = man. man = sexual and aggressive. woman = poor little meow meow.

this way, sex with a penis becomes a form of violence in an of itself (cue political lesbianism but I'm getting into that). a woman cannot choose or consent to sex work, and paying for sex is rape. they consider sex work to be inherently more violent than any other type of work.

now, I'm not gonna sit here and defend the porn industry, the same way I'm not gonna defend any other industry. sex work can be oppressive just like any other type of work under capitalist exploitation. passing legislation to ban sex work only hurts the sex workers (a huge number of them trans and poc). turning them into criminals doesn't help disband the systemic issues that maybe pushed them into sex work, and performing sex work clandestinely only forces them to accept shittier working conditions and puts them at risk of abuse.

this went on a bit longer than i expected but I'm really not saying much, this is a VERY brief overview of huge ass topics lmao. btw I'm not gonna debate anyone if you come to the notes with dumb takes im just gonna block you haha ok 😜

[rf-times]

So insidious the way that creepy male OBGYNs and their apologists compare women wanting a female healthcare provider to white patients refusing to be treated by a doctor of colour, not just because of the obvious that sex is directly relevant to the field, but also because it suggests women are the oppressors in this situation, and avoids the more obvious parallel of people of colour wanting treatment from other people of colour.

Even when thinking about the abuse committed by men against women in the medical industry, it is hugely racialised. From eugenic sterilisation to gynaecology's beginnings as the inhumane torture of Black women and Black women's massively increased maternal mortality rate.

And it has been shown that people of colour have vastly better health outcomes being treated by other people of colour and culturally informed practices (for Indigenous peoples around the world especially) which has been taken into account by many healthcare systems worldwide to good effect.

In conclusion, the ability of vulnerable and marginalised people, especially women of colour, to receive treatment from healthcare providers they trust and feel safe with, is super important and entitled doctors and OBGYNs can fuck off.

[earthly--truth]

What I believe in

These are my beliefs as someone who aligns with democratic socialism and progressivism. Feel free to critique it, challenge it, even just a few sections, whatever, but this is what I believe will make the world a better place, because people (and animals) deserve to live the best possible lives they can live with the only chance at life they got. This is going to be super general and long, and not get into nearly everything, but I hope it sheds a positive light on leftism.

Strong unions so that workers (the majority of people in society) have the ability have better footing to negotiate better wages, work hours, vacation days, benefits, etc. I also believe that in instances where it’s pragmatically viable that there should be a push for more worker co-op’s, in which every employee has a stake in the company they work at, and the ability to give their input (all companies should strive for more democracy). Both of these contribute to healthier, happier, and, and better payed people.

Raising the minimum wage in the U.S to $15 an hour. The current wage of  $7.25 is way too low. It’s just not a livable wage. There’s a reason why McDonald’s and Walmart are called corporate welfare queens, and it’s because they’re employees require welfare to survive, despite being the biggest corporations on the planet with multi-billionaire CEO’s. The richest in society should also pay more in taxes.

Stop investing so much in the American military, cut it by a third if you can. (Firstly this frees up a lot of money for other things) Get the military out of the middle east, and create other more peaceful avenues to ensure it doesn’t crumble like every single time the military pulls out and doesn’t try to actually fix the mess they created. The people in the middle east deserve to be able to rebuild and they’ll need help to do that (just not the type of help where america installs their own leaders).

Healthcare should be universal, paid for by taxes. Every developed nation is capable of doing it. Many developing countries are doing it. Americans pay more in taxes for healthcare than so many other countries, yet a trip to the hospital still can put you in debt for the rest of your life. That is inhumane, and people shouldn’t have to choose between crippling debt and their health.

There’s also an argument to be made for free/way cheaper university, since countries like Canada or America force people to get a degree if they want to live a decent life, yet in order to do that you have to pay $15,000 a year for university. A system like that either forces people to skip out on uni, or again go into major debt. If Europe can figure it out, I think the U.S and Canada can figure it out too.

Black Lives Matter. To be more specific, I want police/criminal justice/prison reform. I want police de-militarized and to stop acting so abusive towards to civilians and real justice for the police that do, I want an end on the war on drugs (this helps drug addicts get help and delivers a blow to gangs and the cartel). I want an end to mass incarceration and laws that make it easier to throw people in jail for years for basically nothing. I want an end to for profit prisons. I want an end to the policy of retribution rather than rehabilitation for inmates (countries who rehabilitate are way more successful at non-returning inmates). I want an end to treating prisoners like slaves so corporations can get cheap labour. I also want the government to actually start caring about the poorest communities, many of which are predominantly black and latino (in cities anyways). (Also the indigenous in Canada). Better infrastructure, better public works programs. These all contribute to the proliferation of these communities and helps lessen the potential for criminality by making their lives better.

The dismantling of gender norms and roles, and de-stigmatization of LGBTQ+ people. I want people to be whoever they want to be. For far too long we have expected men and women to act a certain way. Women have come a long way, but there are still remnants of the old way of looking at things. We still have a lot of social stigma about how women should look, and that they are not worth even paying attention to if they aren’t conventionally attractive. We still have social stigma about sexuality and sex work. We hyper sexualize women in the media, yet shame women as sluts if they have a lot of sex. We shame women who choose abortion as murderers, yet don’t offer any support for the mother once the child has arrived. On top of that, the positions of power are still predominantly very old men. I also believe in helping men. Men are lonelier, men are increasingly staying sexless (not by choice), men are getting more suicidal. I want to address this two ways. One, by tackling toxic masculinity (not masculinity itself, just the bad parts). TM is telling men to man up and not to cry, TM is telling men not to act feminine or gay. TM is telling men to bottle up their emotions and resolve their problems through violence. The second way to address this is through my beliefs about workers. Men are the most suicidal in countries where there is a heavy work culture, like Japan and South Korea. Where they can’t have lives, and live to make money for the company they work at. That isn’t good.

When it comes to LGBTQ+ people, we need more positive representation in the media. We need people to see gay, trans, and non-binary people as normal people. When it comes to trans people specifically, we need to end the constant wars against them. Whether you’re talking about bathrooms, or sports, or children/teens receiving trans affirming healthcare. Let trans people be the gender that they say there are in the places they want to be, and allow them to receive the healthcare they need which is just the overwhelming medical consensus. This, combined with more supportive parents. all goes a long way to reducing the suicide rate amonst trans people.

The proliferation of the developing world. I want developing countries to be more autonomous, and to stop being under the boot of western corporations. I want an end to sweatshop labour or borderline sweatshop labour. I want the west to stop treating these actual people like their robots for pennies to produce our ungodly amounts of junk, and to actually pay these people decent wages. I want the world bank to stop giving money in an exploitative way to poor nations so that they cave to western business interests. These are people, human beings, and they deserve to develop and live good lives just like us. I also want them to fight for democracy in their countries.

Environmentalism. To go off the last section, 100 Corporations are contributing 71% of greenhouse gases. That needs to change. Corporations are participating ungodly amounts of devastations to eco-systems and the atmosphere. Ecosystems destroyed, and the exacerbation of the climate crises. I want a green and blue earth, and that can start by a) changing to green energy as much as humanly possible; solar, wind, and even nuclear (and whatever we come up with in the future) are far better than the fossil fuels we use now, which we’ll run out of anyways. And second we need to hold corporations accountable for destroying the planet. If we don’t do this, we risk the climate crises getting really bad. Oceans rising which will flood coastlines, creating millions of refugees, more periods of extreme dry (no water/bush fires) and extreme cold (look at what happened to texas). Something needs to be done about it.

Finally, veganism, for many reasons. One, the switch to veganism will be a big contributor to saving the planet. Whether you’re talking about the devastation we do to places like the Amazon Rain forest and other ecosystems to clear the way for animal farming, or whether you’re talking about reducing emissions. Most emissions and waste from agriculture are from the production phase of animal farming. So much food, water, and energy is wasted by giving it to billions of animals that we purposefully breed into existence, then slaughter, rinse and repeat, every single year, when we could just grow food and give water to people and skip out the middle man (think about how many people are hungry and without water in the world).

Philosophically, it is also wrong to kill a living creature that desires to live, that is able to connect with other living things and it surrounding, to form bonds. A cow, pig, chicken, lamb, sheep, are no different than a dog, cat, or rabbit, and they should not be killed, exploited, and tortured (confinement, abusive conditions in industrial farms) for pleasure. I know it’s pleasure for most people, because vegans are living proof that you can live happy and healthy lives without animal products. Vegans are statistically healthier than non-vegans, and we can get all the nutrients we need, even on an inexpensive diet. There are exceptions of course. A very small portion of people literally cannot eat plants and can only eat meat, and the developing world doesn’t have the same access to vegan products as the developed world does. Those people are valid, but many many people can make the switch and they should, especially in the developed world

All I see from this is making the world better. Hopefully you can too.

[comrade-meow]

The commodification of women and “enclosure” of sexuality through prostitution, widespread porn and the resulting fallout led to the next frontier: biology itself, womanhood itself. Transgenderism leverages the mind/body split that rape culture promotes by introducing a new form of biological enclosure. With transgenderism, the reality of sex is no longer something natural that we simply share in common, but a place for Big Pharma to set up shop in the name of “identity.”

I have a “big picture” brain. I’m unsatisfied with superficial explanations of current events and political trends, and only understand them once I’ve placed them in the context of deeper historic trajectories, social patterns and human drives. Without these explanations, I remain unsatisfied and questioning (and can’t be sold on false solutions either).

Transgenderism is one contemporary political trend that requires big picture thinking to comprehend—because there are no casual explanations for why, in less than a decade, people all over the world have started to accept a set of bizarre and contradictory ideas: that sex is a spectrum, that sex can be changed, and/or that sex is not real at all, only gender identity is—all to justify the political mantra, “transwomen are women.” This mantra is simply an assertion of male privilege, that men should be able to claim female identity if they want to, without needing sound justification. How did it spread so fast?

I have just finished writing a series of books called the Brief, Complete Herstory (2021) which offers a continuous narrative of history from the Big Bang to neoliberalism. It discusses pre-patriarchal cultures around the world, and the creation of patriarchy, church and state, capitalism, and neoliberalism. Only the last volume mentions transgenderism, but writing these books has helped me put the transgender trend, among others, in context.

One thing that is clear to me is that the idea that men can become women is not new—it began when patriarchal religions insisted that God, the creator of life, is male. Before this, if “god” had a sex, it was commonly female: she who birthed the world. The idea of god as male-produced all sorts of weird stories and myths to capture the imagination: like the one about Aphrodite being born out of Zeus’ head, and Jesus being born after an “immaculate conception” involving a male sky god and Mary, a sexless virgin (trans activists might call her an “incubator”).

Another thing that strikes me, taking this long view of history, is a succession of waves of “enclosure” or colonisation that cause enough social and economic fallout to prepare the ground for the next, more intimate, “enclosure.” The pattern begins earlier, but if we start with the enclosure movement of the 15th and 16th centuries, also called the “privatisation of the commons,” it is easy to place transgenderism in the context of a historic trajectory. I’ve discussed this before, in a talk on YouTube, but here I want to cast a wider net.

The 16th century saw the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern capitalism while the Tudors reigned in England. The Tudors used the Reformation as a way of breaking from the Catholic church in order to act without, or against, the pope’s approval. After breaking from Rome, they seized church property, privatised the commons, and colonised Ireland. For centuries, peasants had used common lands to graze milk cows and gather water, edible and medicinal plants, and wood for construction and making fires.

The simultaneous confiscation of the commons and church property cast many people into poverty because the lands were a source of sustenance and, under feudalism, it was the church that had given aid and shelter to the poor. Women were especially affected by the double whammy of enclosure and lack of poverty alleviation. In her biography My Own Story, British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst traces her feminist awakening to witnessing women in the homeless shelters and workhouses that queen Elizabeth I eventually established to address the crisis.

Looking back, we can see that the enclosure movement provided the preconditions for Britain’s industrialisation. When common lands were privatised, they largely became lands for grazing sheep used for wool in the textile industry, the biggest industry of the early industrial revolution; and it created a class of people desperate enough to work up to 18 hours a day for a pittance in dismal conditions, in the factories or “satanic mills,” as the poet William Blake called them. Most textile workers were women. Urbanisation also took place in tandem with the rise of prostitution, with many women forced to choose between that, factory work or domesticity.

In her book, Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women(2018), Silvia Federici connects the 16th- and 17th-century witch hunts in England with the rise of capitalism and the privatisation of the commons. She writes that “women were the most likely to be victimised” by enclosure, pauperisation, and the “disintegration of communal forms of agriculture that had prevailed in feudal Europe,” because they were “the most disempowered by these changes, especially older women, who often rebelled against their impoverishment and social exclusion.” She notes that some women participated in protests, pulling up fences enclosing the commons, and explains:

[W]omen were charged with witchcraft because the restructuring of rural Europe at the dawn of capitalism destroyed the means of livelihood and the basis of their social power, leaving them with no resort but dependence on the charity of the better off, at a time when communal bonds were disintegrating, a new morality was taking hold that criminalised begging and looked down upon charity.

The premise of Federici’s book is that this very same correlation between privatisation and “witch” hunting can be seen with neoliberal privatisation. She shows how witch hunts have escalated dramatically following the neoliberalisation (or “re-colonisation”) of the African continent and the privatisation of lands there, for instance in Tanzania, where more than 5,000 women per year are murdered as witches and in the Central African Republic, where “prisons are full of accused witches.” In Indian tribal lands, “where large scale processes of land privatisation are underway,” witch hunts are also increasing, as they are in Nepal, Papua New Guinea and Saudi Arabia. Describing the way witch-hunting frames the female sex, Federici argues that, “we have to think of the enclosures as a broader phenomenon than simply the fencing off of land. We must think of an enclosure of knowledge, of our bodies, and of our relationship to other people, and nature.”

Federici considers her analysis of the correlation between privatisation and witch-hunting to be ongoing, a work in progress—but I think her project is hamstrung. Her conclusions will remain sorely limited as long as she maintains the position that there is such a thing as a “sex worker” and a “transwoman,” because these ideas are central to the neoliberal “enclosure of knowledge, of our bodies, and of our relationship to other people, and nature” today. The term “sex worker” was coined by the global sex trade lobby on the back of women’s poverty and the normalisation of prostitution under neoliberalism.

In his book Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2010), human trafficking expert Siddharth Kara shows that neoliberalisation leaves indigenous women especially vulnerable. He unveils a pattern of neoliberal government reform followed by land confiscation, leading to domestic poverty, and then prostitution in Asia, Europe and the United States. His book covers the period of the 1980s and 90s when the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were handing out “structural adjustment packages” all over the world. These are financial loans conditional on land and infrastructure privatisation, cutbacks to health and welfare spending, and removal of legislation protecting workers and obstructing profit.

In The Shock Doctrine(2007), Naomi Klein argues that this neoliberalisation requires disaster to disorient people and render them sufficiently immobilised to have their rights stripped. Once implemented, just like enclosure and colonisation, neoliberalism creates its own fallout. As Klein explains, neoliberalism began to enter more intimate territory after September 11, 2001, when surveillance culture began to “enclose” our privacy in unprecedented ways. This led to an age where internet companies, which are best positioned to track and collect data, reign.

History shows us a continuous pattern that goes all the way back to the Tudors and before: disaster followed by enclosure creates more disaster that allows for further, more intimate, enclosure. This is precisely why Federici’s argument that we need to define enclosure more deeply and broadly, is so important: otherwise we cannot properly track the pattern and we will fail to notice when neoliberalisation starts claiming new frontiers.

Combine the internet age with prostitution and you have today’s growing porn industry—and porn creates its own fallout. As feminist author Gail Dines points out in Pornland(2010), the average age boys start watching pornography is at eleven years, and porn brainwashes them into objectifying women by linking the image of rape to orgasm. There is hardly a more efficient way to condition somebody than through orgasm. Social conditioning normally involves a system of punishment and reward by some external body—but when men learn to objectify women by watching porn, their own penises dispense the rewards. After that, nobody needs to offer them any other incentives to keep repeating the behaviour.

The fact that porn not only depicts rape but drives it is well established. We can see the link in high profile rape cases like those involving Brock Turner and Larry Nassar. Turner took photos during his assault, and shared them with friends; Nassar was found to be in possession of at least 37,000 child pornography videos and images. New Zealand women’s organisation the Backbone Collective’s report on child abuse "Seen and Not Heard" shows that for 54% of abusive fathers, pornography is a factor in the abuse of their children.

The fallout from rape is dissociation. The human stress response is designed to allow us to run from predators, or to overpower them if we judge ourselves as capable. It is not designed to deal with entrapment and cruelty, and when faced with these situations, women often freeze, our minds shutting off conscious awareness of what is happening, whilst the subconscious absorbs it for dealing with later. This mind/body split is at the root of patriarchy and patriarchal religion because patriarchy relies on it: it requires men to detach from their own humanity and cultivate the dissociation, body hatred and dysphoria that rape culture fosters.

The commodification of women and “enclosure” of sexuality through prostitution, widespread porn and the resulting fallout led to the next frontier: biology itself, womanhood itself. Transgenderism leverages the mind/body split that rape culture promotes by introducing a new form of biological enclosure. With transgenderism, the reality of sex is no longer something natural that we simply share in common, but a place for Big Pharma to set up shop in the name of “identity.”

Trans activists assist this commodification of sex by excitedly censoring, blacklisting, firing, harassing and abusing women as “TERFs” (“trans-exclusionary radical feminists”). “TERF” is a now well-known misnomer for feminists who have not forgotten what sex is, and, whilst trying to tear down the fences transgenderism erects around it, get in the way of the rollout of this new form of enclosure. With respect to her work, it is almost mind-boggling that Federici does not take into account this neoliberal “witch-hunting” that trans activists participate in.

If this terrifying trend exists as part of a broader trajectory—how far can it go?

The first volume in my Brief Complete Herstory argues that the most basic quality of life is sensitivity. Water has a miraculous capacity for storing information, for picking up the qualities of all it encounters. Even the smallest, single-celled organisms share with human beings the capacity to sense and respond to light, movement, and other environmental patterns and changes. Yet the more people are tethered to our phones and smart devices, our behaviour mined as “data” and sold to those who profit from predicting and manipulating our movements, the more numb and desensitised we become. I sometimes worry that as privatisation and dispossession advance in what Shoshana Zuboff calls the Age of Surveillance Capitalism(2019), this is the current frontier: our very sensitivity.

If we listen to spiritual teachers and visionaries throughout the ages, the seat of human sensitivity is the heart. Indigenous cultures have always recognised this, and herbalist Stephen Buhner taught me that this is not a metaphor: our bodies are surrounded by an electromagnetic field generated by the heart, and this field is five thousand times more powerful than that created by the brain. In The Secret Teachings of Plants(2004), Buhner writes that this means that the “[a]nalysis of information flow into the human body has shown that much of it impacts the heart first, flowing to the brain only after it has been perceived by the heart.”

If this is true, then in an era of desensitisation, the heart is the new frontier of enclosure. Can it be captured and domesticated? Or is there a freedom in the heart that simply cannot be enclosed?

One thing the long view of history shows us is that freedom does not exist in the hands of politicians who will deliver it after they tidy up the aftermath of the latest crisis, as they like to promise. I would also suggest it shows us that not only is the very idea of a patriarchal state incompatible with human freedom by definition—the tactic of negotiating with governments to have our “rights” and freedoms delivered has proven ineffective through centuries of trial and error. History shows us that governments are irredeemably deaf to the voices of women, and when they appear not to be, it is short-lived. Between the era of enclosure and the present day, women won the right to vote. Today, we may officially still have that right, but as womanhood is redefined beyond meaning, so has the relevance of the vote to our lives.

I am not saying that people should not lobby governments to promote the recognition of their rights, or that changes in the law have never benefited those who fought for them. I am also not suggesting that you can save the world by sitting under a tree and searching your heart. What I am saying is that in an era characterised by noise and desensitisation, there is no better time to tune out for long enough to discover whether you do carry within you a freedom immune to enclosure—because if you do, if this is part of our make up, surely there could be no better advisor in the decisions you, and we, need to make from here. There cannot be a better guide in the defence of freedom than freedom itself.

[northernindigenousbeautyhailey]

TAMRA JEWEL KEEPNESS.

FEW CHILDREN IN CANADA JUST VANISH. Fewer still stay gone for longer than a couple of days. Some are found alive, others are hurt or killed, but rarely does a child simply disappear. The RCMP’s National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains database lists 147 missing children, in a country of more than 35 million people. Of the sixty children under the age of twelve, a quarter are thought to have been abducted by their parents. A large portion of the others were lost to apparent accidents or misadventure, falling through ice or swept away in the pull of wild rivers, their bodies never recovered. The database shows twenty-four children in the past sixty years who have inexplicably disappeared. Because there are so few, we know them. In Edmonton, there is Tania Murrell, six when she vanished while walking home from school for lunch in January 1983. In Toronto, Nicole Morin, eight when she disappeared from a condominium building in July 1985. Michael Dunahee was four years old when he went missing from a playground in Victoria in 1991. In Regina, there is only Tamra Keepness.

THE LAST TIME anyone saw Tamra, she was five years old, with bobbed black hair and soft, round cheeks. In one picture, she wears a T-shirt dotted with flowers, standing against the colourful collage of a classroom wall. Her smile is broad and open, her eyes lively. She was so smart that her mother called her “my little Einstein,” so feisty that when a little boy pushed her once, Tamra shoved him right back, and harder. She liked playing Mario Kart on Nintendo and climbing her favourite tree, down the block from her house.

July 6, 2004, was the first time Sergeant Ron Weir would hear Tamra’s name. He was getting ready to leave on vacation that day when he got an urgent call back to the police station. Weir was a veteran cop with the Regina Police Service and head of emergency services, which included search and rescue. In a meeting, officers from the major crimes unit laid out what they knew: sometime between the night of Monday, July 5, and the morning of Tuesday, July 6, a five-year-old girl had gone missing from her home in central Regina.

Weir had been a police officer for twenty years. He knew that kids often went missing and turned up safe a short time later. Sixty-five percent of missing children and teens are located within the first day, and almost 90 percent within the first week. But Weir also knew that Tamra was too young to get far as a runaway. Patrol officers had already checked the neighbourhood to make sure Tamra hadn’t wandered away or ended up at the house of a playmate or relative, as was often the case with missing children. They’d found nothing. Even in the early hours of the investigation, Weir suspected this case would be different.

TAMRA LIVED with her mother, stepfather, and five siblings at 1834 Ottawa Street, a shabby brown-and-white two-storey with a windowed porch at the front. The house stood between 11th and 12th avenues, just east of downtown Regina. The neighbourhood was a mix of long-time elderly residents, young families drawn by low prices for heritage houses, and ramshackle homes where residents struggled with poverty and addiction. The area was sometimes known as the “low stroll,” a place where women and girls sold their bodies for drugs or booze and men drove around looking to buy them, circling the neighbourhood in trucks and station wagons. Many of the women and girls who lived or worked in the area were First Nations, like Tamra. Long before calls for a federal inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women would dominate the political conversation, women were going missing from those streets. It was from that same area that nineteen-year-old Annette Kelly Peigan disappeared in 1983, followed by eighteen-year-old Patsy Favel in 1984 and Joyce Tillotson in 1993. Two years later, two young white men picked up a woman named Pamela George, sexually assaulted her, and beat her to death.

The last public development came in November 2014, when a Reddit user posted to the website a scrawled map with the words: “Location of Tamra Keepness, check the wells.”

Tamra’s house was less than a block from the Oskana Centre, a halfway house for federal parolees, and not far from the Salvation Army’s Waterston House, a residence and shelter inhabited by former inmates and men struggling with drugs, alcohol, and psychiatric issues. Residents of both facilities had been responsible for serious attacks in the past. Just four months earlier, convicted violent sex offender Randy Burgmann had lured a woman into his room at Waterston House with alcohol, before violently sexually assaulting her and leaving her beside a dumpster to die. The Oskana Centre had previously been home to both serial rapist Larry Deckert and Billy John Francis Whitedeer, who began committing violent sexual offences on children when he was ten years old. A few blocks farther was the Ehrle Hotel, one of the worst bars in town, from which patrons spilled soggy and staggering onto the sidewalk, and which appeared regularly in police reports and court testimony.

Police also had serious questions about what was happening at 1834 Ottawa Street. There was a broken window and blood spatter in the porch. Social Services had been involved with the family since not long after the oldest child was born in 1993, and there had been more than fifty reports made to crisis workers, most often about Tamra’s mother’s use of alcohol and drugs, and neglect of the children. Her mother’s boyfriend had a history of violence and domestic assault. In most cases, investigators knew, children are hurt by people closest to them.

POLICE STARTED with a thorough search of the area immediately around the home, then cast their efforts outward in an expanding grid. As the sun rose on the morning of July 7, 2004, the search effort intensified. First, there were ten officers, then twenty, then more. Some officers accompanied trained volunteer search teams; others questioned family members and potential witnesses, going door-to-door gathering leads or chasing down tips. The RCMP training academy provided cadets, and members of the public soon began arriving on their own to help.

Police set up a command-centre bus in the parking lot of a nearby church, from which Weir co-ordinated the search. Though it was an urban environment, the terrain posed serious challenges. The area was filled with overgrown yards, empty houses, piles of garbage. Tamra weighed forty pounds, and stood three foot five. There were so many places a child could hide or get trapped or be held, where a child’s body could be concealed or dumped. Searchers in orange vests worked in grids, knocking on doors, inspecting junked cars and crumbling garages, peering under discarded mattresses and piles of wood, looking down manholes. Police stopped garbage pickups, checking all the bins in the neighbourhood, the trash putrid and reeking in the summer heat. Some bins had already been emptied, so plans were made to search the dump as well.

And what if she had been taken farther? Not far away were industrial areas, large abandoned lots and buildings, Wascana Creek, and beyond that, the vast Prairie. With a thirteen-hour head start, someone in a vehicle could have had Tamra in Vancouver before she was reported missing.

When they were not speaking to police, members of Tamra’s family waited anxiously on the fringes, watching the searchers, eyeing the growing assembly of reporters and news crews holding out microphones and pointing camera lenses. “It’s not like her to go off by herself,” said Tamra’s father, Troy Keepness, sitting on the front steps of his ex-wife’s house, his voice tight with worry. “We’re trying to do our best to get her back.”

Weir worked in the command-centre bus, surrounded by maps and whiteboards. A scribe logged every aspect of the search in real time, recording ideas and progress. No one wanted to break, not for food or rest. Everyone knew the situation grew more serious with every passing hour. As the heat of the day gave way to evening, Weir stood outside and looked up. A strong wind had come in, and storm clouds were spreading, darkening the Prairie sky.

The next day, police strung crime-scene tape around Tamra’s house and the one next door, drawing it through the back alley and across six garages, long slashes of yellow dividing the street. Officers guarded the perimeter while forensic investigators went in and out of the house in boots and masks. “While we don’t have any direct evidence that Tamra has come to any harm, we also don’t know where she is,” police spokeswoman Elizabeth Popowich told reporters. “And if, in fact, this comes to a point where we determine that she’s come to some harm and it’s because of a criminal act, this location could potentially be the scene of some evidence.”

THERE WERE three adults in the house that evening: the children’s mother, Lorena Keepness; her boyfriend, Dean McArthur; and a family friend named Russell Sheepskin, who had been staying with the family. All three had come and gone during the night, and investigators were starting to question their movements. There were no signs of forced entry to the house, and there were gaps, inconsistencies in their timelines that didn’t make sense to investigators.

The story the three told publicly, compiled from various interviews, was that Lorena and McArthur got into an argument while watching a movie on Monday evening, and McArthur and Sheepskin left the house around 8:30 p.m. to go drinking. The men returned briefly to drop off a bottle of formula for the baby, then left again. Lorena went out around 11 p.m, kissing Tamra goodbye before she went. The oldest child in the house was ten-year-old Summer, the youngest was Lorena and McArthur’s nine-month-old baby. Lorena returned briefly to check on the children and then left again around midnight. At about 3 a.m., Sheepskin returned home drunk and saw Tamra sleeping on the couch. Not long after, McArthur got back to the house and assaulted Sheepskin on the porch, punching him through a window and then stomping on his head. (Both men later said the fight had nothing to do with Tamra.) Sheepskin walked alone to the hospital to get stitches, and McArthur went to stay at his aunt’s house a few blocks away. Though it should have been a short walk, he said he got lost and kept passing out as he walked there. He didn’t arrive for at least two hours, until 5 or 5:30 a.m. Meanwhile, Lorena got home around 3:15 or 3:30 a.m., climbed in through a window, and passed out on the couch. She said that she got up to undo the latch on the door for her mother around 8 or 9 a.m. and that the two eldest children, Summer and Rayne, left on their own in the morning to attend a summer day-camp. Lorena didn’t realize Tamra wasn’t there until about three hours later, when the five-year-old didn’t come downstairs. At 12:16 p.m., a family member called the police and told them Tamra was missing.

Rayne, who was eight, said he had gone to bed squeezed into the space between the wall and mattresses piled on the floor in an upstairs bedroom. He told his mother he felt Tamra get up at some point, the slight movement of a child’s weight. All he could remember was that it was light outside.

FRIDAY WAS hot again and wet from the previous night’s rain. An odour of decay hung in the air around Ottawa Street. Tamra had been gone three full days and become national news. Her picture seemed to be everywhere, hanging on street poles and store windows. In news stories, she became “missing five-year-old Tamra Keepness,” but more often she was just Tamra, as if we knew her. The front page of the Regina Leader-Post spoke directly to her, asking, “Tamra, Where Did You Go?”

Tips flooded in to police. On the street, there were rumours that Tamra had been seen at a dollar store with an older woman. Business owners in the neighbourhood said detectives had been looking for a middle-aged white man named Roch or Rocky, but police wouldn’t confirm whether that was related to the search. Lorena and McArthur said they gave police the names of five people they thought could be suspects, including a man who had befriended Tamra and later been discovered to be a pedophile. For a while, there was even a theory that Tamra had never existed at all, that she had been a scam to get extra money from Social Services. (Hospital records proved that was not the case.)

Searchers were coming from around the province to volunteer, streaming into the city from towns and First Nations communities, motivated by the faces of their own children or grandchildren to help in whatever way they could. “I’ve got a boy, and he’s twenty-one,” said Jerry Scott, one of the volunteers who joined the search. “And if he left, I’d go nuts, too.” Around the city, people organized vigils and barbecues, brought water and snacks for the searchers, wrapped ribbons around trees to show their support. Some left teddy bears and angels on the steps of Tamra’s house. Days of intensive searches had turned up lots of items that seemed as though they could be connected—clothing, a child’s shoe—but none of it belonged to Tamra. “I’m starting to go on different conclusions, like maybe someone took her, I don’t know,” Troy Keepness said. “I just hope nobody would hurt my daughter.”

WHEN Tamra had been gone a week, police announced they were suspending the ground searches. At a press conference, Regina police chief Cal Johnston announced a $25,000 reward for information and vowed, “We will find Tamra.” Police questioned sex offenders living in the area and obtained surveillance tapes from convenience stores, bars, gas stations, and the Greyhound bus depot nearby. Johnston confirmed that “criminal interference with Tamra is a distinct possibility” and drew attention back to Tamra’s house and family. “There were comings and goings from the house that night that remain not fully explained to our satisfaction, and we continue to ask those questions,” he told reporters. He would not elaborate.

Tamra’s family was growing increasingly angry at the police, and the strain of the situation was starting to show. Lorena told reporters she’d signed consent forms for police to search her house and had given her DNA, but still she felt as if they were focusing too much on her family and not enough on trying to find Tamra. She was angry that police hadn’t closed the highways out of the city and that there was no Amber Alert because police said it didn’t meet the criteria. “I’m fed up,” she told reporters. “They are wasting time. This is my little girl we’re talking about.”

The family was growing frustrated with the media, too. Lorena’s mother yelled obscenities at reporters one day, and on another, members of the family nearly came to blows with a TV reporter doing a live update from the front lawn. They had been watching the news inside the house when they heard the reporter imply what many in the city were already wondering: If not someone in that house, then who?

On July 19, two weeks after Tamra had been reported missing, police charged McArthur with assaulting Sheepskin the night Tamra disappeared. McArthur told reporters he had been interrogated for twenty hours, not about the assault, but about Tamra and about what had gone on inside the house that night. “It was always the same questions, and they were assuming that I knew the answers to those questions, but I didn’t know the answers, and I still don’t know the answers,” he said. “I would never hurt a hair on that little girl’s head.”

Two days later, Tamra’s brothers and sisters were removed from the home by child-protection officers. Tamra’s twin sister wore messy pigtails and clutched a colouring book and a yellow blanket as two women led the children away down the front steps of the house. Neither government officials nor police would say whether the children’s seizure was related to Tamra’s disappearance. When the children were gone, police searched the house again.

One night late that summer, Tamra’s father, Troy, showed up at the house with a baseball bat and confronted her stepfather, McArthur. Troy was charged with assault, though McArthur later said police “got things misunderstood.” “Everybody’s looking for answers,” he said. “We more or less talked.”

LORENA KEEPNESS was fourteen years old when she ran away from her home on the White Bear First Nation, 200 kilometres southeast of Regina. She had been in residential school for about three months, but that wasn’t what did it. For her, it was the same ugly stuff at home. She found her way to Regina. When her mom tried to take her home, Lorena wouldn’t go. She lived on the streets instead.

She had her daughter Summer Wind when she was twenty, her son Rayne Dance not long after. It was after the ultrasound for her third baby that she walked home in a daze and told her husband, Troy, “We’re having twins.” She kept repeating it until it sunk in, and then they just stood together in the kitchen and laughed. Her mother said “Way to go!” but Lorena told her, “They came from God. Not like I planted those in me.”

The babies were born on September 1, 1998. Fraternal twin girls, each weighing more than six pounds, carried almost right to term and curved around one another like pieces of a puzzle. Lorena and Troy split up when the twins were little, and after that, the girls stayed sometimes with their mother, sometimes with their father or with other relatives. Lorena and Troy each struggled with substance abuse, and their lives were sometimes too troubled and unstable to have the children with them. At five, Tamra was bold and courageous, and protective of her twin sister. Once, Lorena heard a soft knock in the middle of the night and opened the door to find the twins standing there. The children had left their father’s house and walked four blocks back to Lorena’s in the middle of the night, Tamra leading her sister by the hand as they found their way through the dark. REGINA POLICE received more than a thousand tips in the first six weeks after Tamra’s disappearance. At one point, a Volkswagen van that had been stolen the night Tamra disappeared was found burned outside the city. A jail guard told police she and a former inmate had stolen it, picked up Tamra, and then dumped the child’s body in a ravine on the Muscowpetung First Nation. Ron Weir led a week-long search on Muscowpetung, draining multiple beaver dams with compressor pumps, while searchers slogged through water up to their hips. The jail guard later confessed she had made up the story. She was charged with mischief and wrote a letter apologizing to the police. In court, her lawyer said she had been trying to get her abusive boyfriend locked up again.

Returning from medical leave to the police department in the fall of 2004, superintendent Troy Hagen could feel how Tamra’s disappearance was weighing on his colleagues. Hagen noticed it in everyone he spoke to, from the police chief down, whether they were involved with the case or not. Sergeant Rod Buckingham, one of the lead investigators, was among those who felt the growing frustration. “It’s a mystery,” he would say. “And I don’t like mysteries.”

Officers had spoken with more than 6,000 people by then, but there had been no arrests, and leads were drying up. Shortly after, a special task force was struck to re-examine the case, to see whether anything had been missed. The name of the project was iskwesis ayishowak e mamayahi, a Cree term meaning “little girl bring people together.”

TWELVE YEARS LATER, Lorena Keepness spends her days doing odd jobs and picking bottles, trading them in at the depot for cash. She is forty-three and lives with her eldest son in a rundown shack of a house on Victoria Avenue, a fifteen-minute walk from Ottawa Street. Lorena’s children were never permanently returned to her custody after the disappearance, and the three babies she had after that were all taken by Social Services, too. Tamra’s twin sister is seventeen now. Lorena says she is an athlete, smart and beautiful. Lorena lost her family pictures when someone threw all her stuff in the garbage a few years ago. The only photos she has of Tamra now are the ones on missing-child posters.

Tamra’s twin and her older sister, Summer, don’t want to be interviewed. Neither does Tamra’s father, Troy. McArthur couldn’t be reached. Lorena needs a six-pack of Black Ice beer to talk. She doesn’t really want to be interviewed either. She has never liked reporters or their questions, and it hurts to talk about that time. “But part of me wants to,” she says, as her face crumples. “Part of me needs to share what the fuck happened. Someone stole my child.”

Lorena has heard many theories about what happened to her daughter. Some believe Tamra wandered away and was abducted by a driver cruising the area or that she got lost, then crawled in somewhere so small she has never been found. Other theories focus on the adults in the house that night. Some officers will say off-the-record that they think Tamra is in the dump but that they just couldn’t find her in the mountains of debris. Many in the city believe that Lorena and McArthur sold or traded Tamra to pay off a cocaine debt. Lorena has heard that one the most. One night, she was at a bar and heard some women talking, loud enough so she could hear. “Yeah, she sold her kid for dope. She has a whole bunch of babies. She has kids just to sell them for drugs.” Her friend told her not to listen, but Lorena couldn’t ignore it. She swore at the women, promised she would get them for even thinking she could do that to her child. They met at the same bar again the next day, and that time they fought, a tangle of hair and fists. One of them had a knife and slashed her twice on the back of her arm. More scars to wear for life. It wasn’t the only time. One night, she was attacked in Moose Jaw. Not long ago, a woman shouted “Baby killer!” at her across the street.

Lorena and Dean McArthur are still together, on and off—“more on than off,” she says. Police tried hard to turn them against each other, but she always believed him in the end. He may be all kinds of things, she says, but he’s not a baby killer. “If I thought he did something to my daughter, I would have killed him myself,” she says. “I think the police were just so sure. They figured, ‘These guys are a bunch of nobodies. She did her own child.’ They already had their conclusions drawn before they even tried to look for anything.”

The suggestion she could have had something to do with her daughter’s disappearance still pushes Lorena to the point of violence. You can see her eyes flash, her muscles tighten at the question. But she holds back— it’s not worth going to jail. She’s had enough of the police, has grown used to the accusations. In the past twelve years, she’s repeated her story publicly many times, and it has never really changed.

REGINA POLICE have never released full details about the investigation into Tamra’s disappearance, on the grounds that it remains an open case that they still hope to solve. In an interview, Troy Hagen, now Regina’s police chief, would not speak about any working theories or confirm any specifics of the investigation, including whether one of the people questioned about Tamra’s disappearance had failed a polygraph test. Instead, Hagen echoed what police have said since the beginning: That there remain important unanswered questions about the comings and goings from the house on Ottawa Street that night. That they will continue to investigate every tip. That they won’t stop looking for Tamra until they find her. He pointed to cases in the United States where children have been gone for years, sometimes decades, and then been found alive. In Canada, twelve-year-old Abby Drover was held in an underground bunker in Port Moody, British Columbia, for six months after being abducted by her neighbour in 1976. There was an intensive search of her community—including by her abductor—but she had been only feet away from her house the entire time. She was found alive. It seems impossible, but it happens. “I refuse to lose hope,” Hagen says.

The years since Tamra’s disappearance have exposed the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. Suspected serial killers are facing charges in the Prairies, but there has been no public indication that Tamra’s disappearance may be connected to any of those cases. Hagen said police have also explored a possible connection with thirteen-year-old Courtney Struble, who disappeared from Estevan, a city 200 kilometres from Regina, four days after Tamra was last seen. Investigators initially believed that Struble was a runaway, and she had been gone for seven years before RCMP announced that her case had become a homicide investigation. No one has ever been charged, and her remains have never been located. Hagen says it’s strange to have two unsolved missing-children cases linked so closely in time and geographic proximity. He says the possibility of a connection was “very much” explored by police, but there doesn’t appear to be a correlation. The police investigation into Tamra’s disappearance is one of the largest and costliest in Regina’s history, but Hagen says it has never been about the money. If there were more leads or work for investigators, the police chief says he would reconvene the task force “in a heartbeat.” But the flood of tips has slowed. The reward for information that leads to finding her, now $50,000, sits unclaimed. The last public development came in November 2014, when a Reddit user with the name MySecretIsOut posted a scrawled map with the words: “Location of Tamra Keepness, check the wells.” The person later wrote that the map belonged to their grandmother and had come from a great-aunt who had visited an inmate in Alberta. “We, like many others, haven’t forgotten about you, Tamra, and continue to search and hope you are found,” the person posted. Police searched twenty-one wells around Muscowpetung but found nothing.

Sheepskin died on January 1, 2009, “with his family by his side,” according to his obituary. Many of the police officers who worked on Tamra’s case have retired or moved from the department to other jobs. Hagen says he thinks of Tamra whenever he is walking through the forest, not looking for her but always half expecting to see her there. Sometimes he looks at people he passes on the street, examining their faces and imagining what Tamra might look like now.

THROUGH THE YEARS, Lorena has developed her own theories about what happened to her daughter. These days, she mainly wonders about a drifter who used to stay with them, a woman Lorena knew from when she was a girl. A woman who sometimes told people she was pregnant even though she wasn’t, who Lorena knew by one name but whose medical documents said something else. The woman was around so much that Lorena’s children called her Big Auntie. Big Auntie had been staying at the house before Tamra disappeared, but left after she and Lorena had a falling out. Lorena says it took a long time to realize Big Auntie wasn’t coming around any more. When she did, she put word out on the streets, but no one there had seen her either. Big Auntie didn’t even show up for her own sister’s funeral in Regina a few years back. Lorena says she told the police about Big Auntie many times, but doesn’t know whether they ever found her, or whether they even looked. “She’s just gone now,” Lorena says. “Same time as my child.” Maybe it’s something. Or maybe Big Auntie is missing, too.

When I ask Lorena whether she thinks Tamra will ever be found, she struggles for an answer. “I don’t know,” she says. “But can I tell you about a dream I had?” There are two, both so vivid it’s as if they were real. In one, Tamra is inside a big house in a city Lorena has never seen. There are silk clothes draped around, and broad windows, and Tamra is upstairs, sitting on the edge of a bathtub putting on stockings. She is grown, with dark, shiny hair like her mother’s but cut straight all around. In the other dream, Tamra is still a little girl, running into her mother’s arms. “There you are!” Lorena says. “There you are!” She picks up her child and holds her, until Tamra wriggles free and is lost again.

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

 The natural center of Indigenous society are the women.   Everyone is equal and has a voice.  The mind is independent.  The Europeans developed a system where a boss orders around scared obedient people.      

Pure sex is a known creative impulse.  The state wanted to stimulate and control sexual energy from birth, to destroy free will and conscience. Sex had to become perverted and guilt-ridden.

Dr. Albert C. Kinsey, a eugenicist, [1894-1956] researched sex in males and females at Indiana University.  The government funded him through several foundations, Rockefeller and Carnegie and Hugh Hefner.  They later funded the change to the education system.

Kinsey falsely stated that no sexual behavior with infants, children and animals is abnormal.  It is natural to the human animal from birth.  

He published two books in 1948 and 1953 on his findings. Media was blitzed.  Books on the sexual revolution advocated abolishing sex crimes and that predators get therapy, instead of life terms or execution.  

His unethical research lead to altering laws that once protected women, children and marriage.  

Kinsey worked with Nazi pedophile, Dr. Fritz Von Balluseck, for over 30 years, before, during and after WW II.  Nazis extensively studied abuse of children.    

Kinsey worked closely with an American pedophile [Rex King] for over 20 years.  King reported his sexual abuses of over a thousand victims.    

Kinsey never reported them to the authorities.  He designed technical reporting systems for them to provide him with minute details of their sexual abuse of children from 2 months to 16 years of age.  They said that infants and children are orgasic.

During the 1930s Canada invited Nazi doctors to experiment on Indigenous children who were attending church run residential schools.  55,000 perished.  We were their guinea pigs while churches were protected.  

Marriage was seen as power and ownership by patriarchal society rooted in capitalism.  The state wanted to solidify its power.    

Perverted sex was used to control advancement, innovation, winning in games of dominance and class; and to compel people to carry out war and aggression for their masters.  Winners are rewarded and losers are punished.  

The normal “firewall” against moral corruption had to be eroded to divert and direct the sexual impulse.  

A culture of greed, sensual pleasure and perpetual dissatisfaction was designed and directed at young people.    

They were shown how much to enjoy, the desires they can give into, how many sexual partners they can have, provocative dressing, walking and talking and the computer games and phones they need.  They were encouraged to let down their guard and rejoice in immorality.

Critical thinking had to be bypassed.  Education changed from analytical thinking to the dog training rote learning method.  

The central government took over education, media and all influential institutions.  Government funds were tied to including Kinsey’s corrupt secret findings in the basic design, especially in early childhood development.  Teachers were retrained.    

Sex education had been taught by parents.  The state took over using graphic erotic material.  Sexual diseases and disfunction skyrocketed.

Kinsey put one chapter in the 1948 Report “Sexual Development of the Male” on pedophilia.  

Judith Reisman in “Kinsey:  Crimes and Consequences” exposed his scientific fraud, criminology and abuse of thousands of vulnerable babies and young boys.  

Government probably knew he was depraved.  They needed his knowledge.

His twisted fantasies were the basis for the 1955 “Model Penal Code” MPC which reduced prison sentences for 52 major sex crimes; and the development of the sex education curricula after WW II.  Crime quadrupled.  Social and legal systems remain gravely damaged.

The goal was to destroy free will and women as the center of the family.    

In the 50s unwholesome media fare, mainstream porn, erotic and violence based entertainment and games, drugs and alcohol were aimed at young minds.  

The Sexual Revolution was based on bogus sex data by a sadistic bihomosexual psychopath.  He lobbied to bring together big sexology, big porn and big pharma to create the global Sex Industrial Complex.  

Our ancestors told us that such people without natural affection are not Ongwehonwe, real human beings.  We were to keep our distance.  

[radfemblack]

Feminist sex trade researchers cite Indigenous women and girls as “Canada’s first prostituted women.” These women and girls were sexually exploited as “country wives” and through brothels near early forts and military bases. Constructed as “squaws,” Indigenous women and girls are seen as savage, subhuman and disposable. They are depicted as women and girls who always want sex and are sexually available to men at all times.

Despite their over-representation in street prostitution, Indigenous women occupy marginal positions in sexual exploitation discourse. This research posits the sexual exploitation of Indigenous women and girls as a site to understanding expressions of colonial male violence and their impacts on Indigenous women and girls. Engaging feminist Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, I will explore connections between various forms of male violence against Indigenous women and girls, and seek feminist solutions to influence policies regarding this crisis.

[coochiequeens]

On May 15, a woman met a pipeline worker at a bar in Minnesota and agreed to go to his house, but when they arrived, there were four other people there and she felt uncomfortable.

“She wanted to leave, she tried to leave,” said Amy Johnson, executive director of the Violence Intervention Project (VIP) in Thief River Falls, who spoke to the woman on the phone. “It was very scary with those other men there. She said he had her in the bedroom and she couldn’t leave.” The woman finally got out of the house.

The Canadian company Enbridge is building the Line 3 oil pipeline through Minnesota, a $2.9bn project that replaces a corroded, leaking pipeline, and increases its capacity from 390,000 to 760,000 barrels a day. The project has brought an influx of thousands of workers who are staying in hotels, campgrounds and rental housing along the pipeline route, often in small towns like Thief River Falls, and on or near Native reservations.

Before Minnesota approved the pipeline, violence prevention advocates warned state officials of the proven link between employees working in extractive industries and Before Minnesota approved the pipeline, violence prevention advocates warned state officials of the proven link between employees working in extractive industries and increased sexual violence. Now their warnings have come true: two Line 3 contract workers were charged in a sex trafficking sting, and crisis centers told The Guardian they are responding to reports of harassment and assault by Line 3 workers. Johnson said VIP, a crisis center for survivors of violence, has received more than 40 reports about Line 3 workers harassing and assaulting women and girls who live in northwestern Minnesota.

Enbridge spokesperson Michael Barnes said it has “zero tolerance for illegal behavior by anyone associated with our company or its projects,” and said anyone caught or arrested would be fired. Barnes said the two workers facing trafficking charges were fired by the contractor. He also said before construction began, the company worked to raise awareness of human trafficking by partnering with contractors, Tribes, local officials and Truckers Against Trafficking, which combats human trafficking.

After a lull in construction due to muddy spring conditions, workers are now returning to Minnesota. Enbridge chief Al Monaco said Line 3 is on schedule to be completed by the end of the year, but Indigenous groups and environmentalists are attempting to stop the project through peaceful protest, divestment campaigns and court action.

Advocates warned of violence

In 2018, the state’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) held hearings to decide whether to approve Line 3 permits. Sheila Lamb, an Ojibwe-Cherokee city councillor for Cloquet and member of the state’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Task Force, testified that extractive industries were linked to human trafficking and disproportionate violence against Indigenous women.

”There is no way that Enbridge or the unions can monitor these workers 24/7 and hold their hands,” she said.

Before the PUC approved the pipeline, it acknowledged in its environmental impact statement that “the addition of a temporary, cash-rich workforce increases the likelihood that sex trafficking or sexual abuse will occur. Additionally, rural areas often do not have the resources necessary to detect and prevent these activities.” The PUC approved permits on the condition that the company create a public safety escrow fund so crisis centers could apply for funding to respond to anticipated violence.

Thousands of workers arrived in Minnesota in late November 2020. Gabrielle Congrave, north-west regional navigator for Support Within Reach, which helps survivors of sexual assault, said women in the small town of Gonvick, Clearwater County, told her that a surge of pipeline workers had arrived in town, and the workers were sexually harassing and following them in vehicles. Congrave said they were “creating an aura of intimidation toward women.”

Clearbrook-Gonvick police and Clearwater County sheriff Darin Halverson said police had not received any reports of harassment or stalking this year.

Johnson said VIP had heard reports ranging in severity from pipeline workers “grabbing buttocks and breasts,” harassing women who work at hotel bars, and following women, to more violent incidents. VIP serves five north-western Minnesota counties. Red Lake and Kittson County sheriffs said they had not had any reports of violence related to Line 3; the other counties did not reply to requests for comment.

In February, VIP applied for reimbursement of funds from the Enbridge account after responding to three assaults by Line 3 workers, according to records Johnson shared with the Guardian. In one case, Johnson said a pipeline worker had assaulted his partner who had traveled with him to Minnesota from another state. In the other two incidents, Line 3 workers sexually assaulted women at hotels, Johnson said.

The reimbursement was for the cost of transportation and hotel rooms for the women to get them to safety. However the reimbursement request also says: “We are having challenges finding safe hotel rooms for clients because almost all of our hotels are filled to capacity with pipeliners.”

Johnson said VIP had responded to several other domestic assault and sexual assault incidents by pipeline workers. She shared a safe hotel receipt for one such domestic assault that occurred on April 14. In another case, she said the center helped a woman who ended up in hospital after she was sexually assaulted at a hotel party attended by Line 3 workers.

VIP records also state that young daughters of VIP staff had received “sexually explicit drop texts” when they were at a gas station close to the Enbridge campground in Thief River Falls. Johnson said the girls were minors, and the texts asked if they liked older men, and invited them to party at a camper van.

In February, police set up a sting operation targeting buyers engaging in sex trafficking. They charged seven people after suspects responded to ads and spoke to an undercover officer posing as a 16-year-old girl, according to the Duluth News Tribune. Two of those charged were Line 3 workers from Missouri and Texas employed by Enbridge subcontractor Precision Pipeline.

Susan Barney, an Ojibwe woman from Fond Du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, works for Precision Pipeline. She said the workforce is mostly male. She said most of her coworkers treated her “like family,” but one coworker from Florida repeatedly made “vulgar, inappropriate remarks” to her.

Jason Goward, who is also from Fond Du Lac and used to work with Barney, confirmed her story. “She said, ‘he’s really creepy, but if I stand next to you, he doesn’t do it as much,’” Goward said.

Barney reported the harassment to her managers and they told her he was previously reported “for making rude remarks toward women.” She said management dealt with the issue swiftly and the harassment ended.

Other genders also report experiencing violence. A man, who did not want to be named, said he was assaulted by a Line 3 worker in a Bemidji bar in February. He said they were both intoxicated and engaged in a heated conversation that escalated when the pipeline worker hit him. “He beat me, he attacked me,” he said. “He kept hitting me over and over again, even though I wasn’t doing anything to hit him back.” He said his head and ribs hurt for weeks and he felt emotionally distressed.

“I’ve worked in that industry before, I’m not trying to demonize anyone for working and providing for their family, but unsolicited violence is not good,” he said.

Preparing for more reports

Minnesota organizations 180 Degrees, the Link, Support Within Reach and VIP all received funding from the Enbridge account to prepare for violence and trafficking related to Line 3, according to records obtained by The Guardian.

Some expressed discomfort about requesting reimbursement. “It feels a lot like they’re pre-paying for trafficking our citizens,” said Lauren Rimestad, communications director at the Minnesota Coalition Against Sexual Assault. Johnson felt torn about requesting reimbursement, but said VIP ultimately decided, “It would be like leaving money on the table.”

Enbridge spokesperson Barnes said exploitation and human trafficking have a long history in Minnesota communities. Several anti-trafficking organizations echoed that statement, but said the influx of workers adds to the problem.

“There’s certainly connections between how we treat the land and how we treat the women,” said Nicole Matthews, executive director of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition.

She said the dynamic connects to the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women; more than 5,700 Native women have disappeared in the US and thousands more have been murdered or vanished in Canada. Matthews said the crisis is exacerbated by the fact that tribes do not have jurisdiction to prosecute non-Native offenders on tribal land.

The Link and 180 Degrees said they had not responded to trafficking associated with Line 3, but they expect to receive calls in the future. “We are getting prepared for that,” said Beth Holger, chief of the Link. Richard Coffey, program director of 180 Degrees, explained that buyers of sex trafficking are most often affluent white men who are away from home, and traffickers target those buyers, whether it’s the Super Bowl or pipeline work.

Johnson is concerned that students are out of school and working hospitality jobs, including at hotels frequented by pipeline workers. “We will constantly be on that squeaky hamster wheel of hearing about it after the fact,” she said.

The women spoke up years before the pipeline came in and they were ignored and companies like Embridge did nothing to lesssen the impact.

[kny111]

Due to the recent protests against police brutality and its continued occurrence in our communities, I’ve been revisiting the military, prison and police industrial complex  (the big three currently securing white supremacist establishment since slave patrolling days) under the context of abolishing them and what their merits are. I found this website ‘8 To Abolition’ simplifying and centering around this conversation and getting to some of the main points the abolition movement has been attempting, clarifying the goals for those who don’t understand. In the next following blog posts as a part of teaching myself and relaying the info to others as well on the specifics of how to decolonize and what it means, this is a start to that:

While communities across the country mourn the loss of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Jamel Floyd, and so many more Black victims of police murder, Campaign Zero released its 8 Can’t Wait campaign, offering a set of eight reforms they claim would reduce police killings by 72%. As police and prison abolitionists, we believe that this campaign is dangerous and irresponsible, offering a slate of reforms that have already been tried and failed, that mislead a public newly invigorated to the possibilities of police and prison abolition, and that do not reflect the needs of criminalized communities.

We honor the work of abolitionists who have come before us, and those who organize now. A better world is possible. We refuse to allow the blatant co-optation of decades of abolitionist organizing toward reformist ends that erases the work of Black feminist theorists. As the abolitionist organization Critical Resistance recently noted, 8 Can’t Wait will merely “improve policing’s war on us.” Additionally, many abolitionists have already debunked the 8 Can’t Wait campaign’s claims, assumptions, and faulty science.

Abolition can’t wait.

At its root, policing is a system designed to uphold oppression. One thousand people are killed by police every year, and Black people are murdered at three times the rate of white people. Up to fifty percent of people murdered by the police have disabilities. Up to 40% of police officers have perpetrated intimate partner violence, and sexual violence is the second most common form of police brutality, primarily targeting Black women and especially those who are sex workers and drug users. Many of these incidents of police violence are undocumented by studies and only uplifted through grassroots movements. Black people who are women, trans, gender non-conforming, sex working, and queer are often criminalized for actions they take to survive gendered violence, as we have seen in the cases of Tracy McCarter, Chrystul Kizer, Alisha Walker, GiGi Thomas, Marissa Alexander, Bresha Meadows, Cyntoia Brown, and many others. We reject the notion of a “perfect survivor”; we do not believe anyone deserves to be caged, nor do we prescribe to the state’s notions of “innocence” and culpability. We recognize that the system of policing is heavily intertwined with the military industrial complex, both here and abroad. In abolishing policing, we seek to abolish imperialist forms of police, such as militaries responsible for generations of violence against Black and brown people worldwide.

As abolitionists, we recognize that reforms that do not reduce the power of the police–including those proposed by 8 Can’t Wait–simply create new opportunities to surveil, police, and incarcerate Black, brown, indigenous, poor, disabled, trans, gender oppressed, queer, migrant people, and those who work in street economies. We believe in a world where there are zero police murders because there are zero police, not because police are better trained or better regulated—indeed, history has shown that ending police violence through more training or regulations is impossible.

We also recognize that all police and prisons will not disappear tomorrow. Instead, we believe in the strategic importance of non-reformist reforms, or measures that reduce the scale, scope, power, authority, and legitimacy of criminalizing institutions. We also recognize carceral agents’ constant attempts to co-opt and rebrand abolition through the language of harm reduction, as we are currently witnessing with the #8CantWait campaign. We envision abolition as not only a matter of tearing down criminalizing systems such as police and prisons that shorten the lives of Black, brown, and poor people, but also a matter of building up life-sustaining systems that reduce, prevent, and better address harm. We seek a reparations model, wherein our communities that have been harmed by policing and mass criminalization for centuries are given their due from every corporation and institution that has profited from policing.

To build an abolitionist world that prioritizes the lives of Black people, we have drawn upon decades of abolitionists’ work to compile this list of demands targeted toward city and municipal powers. Honoring the long history of abolitionist struggle, we join in their efforts to divest from the prison industrial complex, invest in our communities, and create the conditions for our ultimate vision: a world without police, where no one is held in a cage, and all people thrive and be well.