It Could Happen Here - Rural Organizing Part 2 Ft. Andrew and Black Flower Collective

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

Andrew and Mia finish our chat with Black Flower Collective and discuss connecting rural and urban organizers and the benefits of sharing resources and knowledge.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. Joining me again for this second part of a two-parter uh uh sherry ann and sprout from the black flower collective in aberdeen washington as they've joined us to discuss the dichotomy between urban and rural political organizing last we spoke they gave us some background on exactly how the black flower

collective began and what sort of motivating factors there have been in their development as an organization, as well as some of the dichotomies that they've experienced between urban and rural political organizing. Now we're going to take a moment to explore some of the other material conditions that they have faced in their city, or rather in their small town.

Sharyan? As we were talking about in the last episode, there's a huge difference between the modes of socialization in big cities and then versus small towns like our own. Here, we socialize more in our houses. You meet friends at the homes of other friends' houses. Where in the bigger cities, it's more so that you went to a club, you went to an event, concert, class, what have you. And these are definitely things that have evolved and developed based on the different material conditions.

There's not as many classes around here and events and stuff like that because A, people just don't have the money to go to them. And B, nobody has the money to really put them on or any of that startup capital. There's not enough money coming through the town that's why the far right are always trying to push this homeless narrative because they're trying to make like turn this town into like a tourist town or something which makes no goddamn sense to me there's nothing in this town to come here for but like the only reason you're coming to this town is because you're driving through here to go to the ocean. That's it. The highway dumps out here, and then it's old highways back to the rest of the ocean.

Sounds pretty isolated. It can be pretty isolating out here, but it doesn't disconnect us from the overall struggle. Throughout our organizing, we've discovered that there's a lot of things that we can do for urban comrades through our mutual aid. For example, rural people can do anything that is virtual, such as graphic design or web support. We can also offer up rural spaces for rest and recuperation for frontline activists in urban areas. While we may not be present in the heat of battle, we can make our isolation a strength as often people abused directly by the system require peace and solitude to recover from such trauma.

We can also use our local networks to identify enemies and report this to the wider radical community. Out here, there is a huge number of, out here and in the Pacific Northwest in general, there's a huge number of white supremacists and neo-Nazi militias and organizations. And so they generally organize in small towns like Aberdeen. You see a lot of that here. And so people living in those towns bear the responsibility, we think, of reporting on the activities of those groups to the wider community. Because a lot of times what you see is, you know, it's kind of like the police coming in from the suburbs. The extremists often come in from the outlying rural areas, either in protest scenarios or, you know, usually in protest scenarios. We saw a couple instances in which our local right-wing neo-Nazi group went out to CHAZ and was filming videos out there and collecting information for their organizing back here.

So we can also be doing the same throughout the interim and collecting information on those groups for our comrades in urban areas. Right, right. and collecting information on those groups for our comrades in urban areas. Right, right. That sounds like some really viable and potent ways to build that sense of urban-rural solidarity. Yeah, because there's definitely a lot of people out here that need some notes taken on them. For example, during the of the uh 2020 protests um there was a small solidarity protest um that was essentially just five women that you know holding a couple signs and which resulted in a line of reactionaries and their assault rifles the you know the harassing and threatening this very small group of women of you know if it's saying how antifa

was coming to the town they were going to burn the town down and all this stuff um you got people like in uh in walla walla for example you have uh henry contrera who um utilizes what uh connections and whatnot that he has out there to like call other white supremacists around the nation and essentially be like, Hey, you know, move here. We'll get you a job.

We'll get you a house. We'll get you all set up. Just come here and organize with us. And we kind of have our own version of that here in Aberdeen with Cash McCollum, the leader of the Pacific Northwest Wolf wolf pack our local neo-nazi group and people like that i think it's not just them it's a whole group that that uh they're a whole social setting that uh follows them and us being in rural communities are going to have the

best opportunity to keep tabs on that kind of stuff and warn the wider community. Right. Yeah. That's, that's absolutely vital. And, you know, one of my questions that I'd prepared in coming to meet with, with you all, I was going to ask actually, you know, how can we avoid this sort of idea that a lot of people have in their heads, all radicals have in their heads, sort of the distant commune trap, you know, this idea that, you know, radicals, they move out to the country, they set up their happy little commune, it either falls apart, turns into a cult,

or just like pulls away from the broader struggle. But it seems like in some ways, y'all have been able to utilize that distance as a sort of a strength. And you've spoken quite a bit about how rural communities, different ways they've been able to help urban communities in the broader struggle. But now I just want to turn the tables a bit and ask what sort of ways urban radicals can support the struggles within rural communities? Well, one way that we've seen a lot of solidarity from urban comrades has been in the

topic of harm reduction. It's really hard to access services out here where we're at. There's really only one player in town and they are highly bureaucratic and the line to get any sort of social service from them is a mile long so also fun note uh that cash mccullum person i talked about earlier is on the board for that social service as well as long as as well, as long as, as well as other people who are part of the SOAP group. Yeah. So we've seen a large show of solidarity from urban comrades sending us harm reduction supplies, such as Narcan, which has literally saved dozens of lives since we started that program. Healthcare in general is a, is a tough issue for rural areas. Transportation distances, lack of providers, lack of services, all of those things compound to make it really difficult to get appropriate healthcare.

And so anytime anyone has any actual injury in town, they just send them to Seattle. Our hospitals out here are really terrible. And so training, I think, would be a really vital need that we could benefit from a lot out here. If we could get these sort of medical collectives and the harm reduction collectives that exist in these more urban areas to conduct rural training workshops, I think that that would be a huge benefit to not only just Aberdeen, but any rural area that that was to take place in, because that would allow those communities to start employing harm reduction and general first aid in their communities and prevent transportation out to these more metro areas. Yeah, the more we could do skill shares, the more we could do workshops, the more we could do radical classes or anything under the idea of kind of unschooling

that we could do for rural communities is imperative because outside of high school, unless you're going to college for something specific, there's just not much for learning out here. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast what about the next generation what about that uh site of struggle in education well i believe sprout could probably delve into this a bit more but it definitely would say that our ideas for you know education was in the next generation as much as everything kind of goes under this uh i i forget um the name of it but it's this idea of the like uh

seven years generation um in in our planning and the like what what would this look like for the next uh next seven generations right seven generations sustainability or seven generation stewardship is another term used i think education uh is central to a community it's really the same sort of you know you're going to get the same answer with all of these health care addiction poverty they're all interrelated out here and because education is so crucial we have focused the black flower collectives initiatives on a lot of educational programs, so we're trying to get this space set up so that we can start having some revolutionary coursework that we can offer there. We

would really like to develop it into a real campus for learning, both for youth programs and for continuing education, GED and college level kind of stuff. We think that the unschooling method is pretty cool, where people can kind of just pace their own learning and decide what it is they want to learn. So that's the method that we would go with. And we think that that allows for a lot more diversity in the styles of learning that are employed. And through that, you can kind of learn, you can kind of learn new ways of learning, I guess, which helps add resilience to any community.

And I think that a lot of those skills offered at a place like that, like, like Sherry, I was saying skill shares. I think a lot of that could come from, will need to come from urban communities because we don't have a lot of that out here of our own. Right. So hopefully when we get our, when we get our space set up, we can host all manner of gatherings and

start bridging that divide between the rural and the urban yeah and I mean I've been learning more about your space, did a bit of research on it prior to the episode when we first started talking, very inspiring stuff, very much in the vein of

something that I plan on doing locally here in Toronto and Tobago. Let's pretend that this is a revolutionary version of Shark Tank, right? Let's just pretend this is an anarchist Shark Tank. Give me your elevator pitch for this piece. What is the plan there? Okay, our plan is twofold. The property would be divided into two separate sections. The public-facing section would be dedicated to the social center we've been speaking of, and the rest of the property would be what we're calling an eco-village where residents would live. The social center will be where we centralize community resources, and the self-governeded ecovillage would have immediate access to those shared resources.

The plan is to run the social center as a bit of a small business incubator for various community initiatives that we've been talking about. And as well for the residents of the eco village to start their own small personal businesses. Because in our discussions with people on the streets, you know, everyone has an idea of how to make money. And it's just always some small barrier like paperwork or permits that gets in the way of them starting to, to have their own income and that sense of independence.

So we want to be able to help with that. It would also obviously be a central hub for preparing and serving food, which has been the basis of all of our organizing so far is the coming together and sharing of meals. We want to have an internet cafeteria and a community kitchen there. We want to have an internet cafeteria and a community kitchen there. We would also hold space for the mutual aid network to store supplies and conduct its work both on and off site. We want to have enough space to have a meeting hall for potential unions and start pushing on the unionization locally with the IWW. All of these spaces would be rentable to the public. So the union hall, for example, would be a great venue for an event that someone wanted to throw or perhaps a wedding even.

And so that could be one source of revenue for the social center, as well as the back-end bookkeeping services that we're going to have as part of the business incubator and the permaculture design services that we're going to have as part of the eco-village. It really sounds like a lot of the different ideas that i've had converged on my channel for some time now you know this idea of a sort of a library economy in this idea of the eco villages the sort of permaculture spaces and moods and centers of community outreach and

education i'd be lying if I didn't say that we're a huge fan of your channel, actually. Appreciate that. Appreciate that. And I'm honestly, in turn, this project is something that really inspires me as well. Yeah, I'd like to say that none of this is from us. We've taken so much inspiration from other projects

to cobble together this plan that, yeah, it's been a real joy to just go through all of everyone else's different content and kind of see like, oh, this could fit with that and this could fit with that and come up with a plan that we really think could start to solve some of these issues that we're seeing in town. Right. I think that's the real, one of the few beauties of the internet these days, you know, the fact that it's still able to connect people and ideas from all over the place. Yeah, for sure.

I wanted to ask, as you mentioned, these sort of eco-villages and that whole idea, having spaces for housing and benefiting the people in that community, developing that sort of sense of interdependence. I wanted to, you know, you can't really talk about urban and rural, rural and urban without bringing up the fact that urbanization, you know, seems to ever crawl into the rural space.

You know, like there's always this sense of the encroachment of the city on the surrounding rural regions. What is your take on that? Yeah, it does seem to be a one-way street. I think the model that we're trying to push is one of degrowth, where you would see sort of a reversal of that trend of gentrification or urbanization. And you would see more of like a ruralizing of urban spaces to start having more green spaces, more growing of their own food

and more production of agricultural products right there in the urban centers right you know which is kind of what we want to do with the eco village is provide a bit of a model for how a community organizing of how a community could organize itself around ecological principles prefigurative politics and action exactly another note uh that i guess i want to bring up before we start to come to the clues uh is you know, we've been speaking a lot about the urban and the rural, but one element, except in a, you know, sort of a passing sense of our discussion of the police, one element that's kind of been lost in that, and that I know people might be asking about is what about the suburbs? You know, like, do you see a space for organizing there? Where does that fit

into that urban rural dichotomy? What sort of focuses do you think suburban organizers might want to tackle? Well, I think suburban comrades are probably going to have a bit of both worlds, as it were, because they're not in the downtown core of a city where most protests or sites of struggle happen. But they're also not out in the boonies in a rural environment. So, you know, they might have police that are a bit more preoccupied with

the actual community, and actually from the community. And so they might need to take some lessons from the rural center or from the rural areas in that regard and try to diversify their group into multiple different roles, multiple different channels so that they aren't having continuous backlash against a group that's just trying to feed the homeless. But at the same time, you know, they have a lot of resources that rural people don't have access to. And so they could be coming into rural areas and providing those same sort of trainings and workshops that urban comrades could. And they could also be going into urban centers and learning and providing workshops

and skill shares in those scenarios. I think they're kind of a, maybe play a bit of a buffer zone between the two. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories

inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So what does the future look like for black cloud collective you know what projects are you planning on tackling in the here and now a couple months from now a few years down the line and how can folks support well right now we are definitely focused on securing funding. The housing market is horrible. Property prices are going up. And when there is a good deal on something, it's gone, usually within a day, within hours. money on hand to be able to jump on a piece of property when it comes up because we need a good deal and we need a good amount of land to make sure that we have the room to grow and build various projects in the future. Yeah. So the projects that we're focusing on right now immediately is the

permaculture design services. And so if anyone wants to have us design their farm or garden or house or balcony they can go to blackflower permaculture.noblogs.org and get started through that process there hopefully once we get land as were saying, in the next five years, the permaculture design services can grow into a permaculture design course that we could actually start offering people to come and do like a two-week intensive study on the building techniques that we're using on site in the eco village and on how to apply those back at home. Another project that we're currently working on is the bookkeeping. This is sort of the bedrock of the business admin side of things that we're going to be folding into the business incubator once we get that going. And we are looking into a couple of different grants for that.

But as Sherian said, you know, right now we're focused on fundraising. So we are, we do have a couple of different platforms that we're collecting donations from and we are starting to plan a few benefit shows here locally in Aberdeen. benefit shows here locally in Aberdeen. So if anyone is in a band and wants to roll through and play a show for us, that would be much appreciated. They can just get a hold of us through our website. So our role in Black Flower is

trying to spread awareness, help with this fundraising, give them free advertisement in order to help their growth. Mean Sprout and our podcast Molotov Now are from the Sabo Media Collective, which once things are going good with Blackflower, we're hoping to be housed by them to help grow our media efforts. But if another good way to help in supporting Blackflower is to go to our website at sabotmedia.noblogs.org

and share our podcast, Molotov Now. Check us out on social media, on whatever social media you are on, from Collectiva, Mastodon, to Facebook at Aberdeen Local 1312. We have articles that we write on the Harbor Rat Report,

and a whole host of other content for people to check out and share with donation links that all go to Black Flower's efforts. That's fantastic, and I would encourage folks to check out and share with donation links that all go to black flowers efforts. That's fantastic. And I would encourage folks to check out what they're doing and all these different platforms.

And well, that's been it for it could happen here. It's been great to have you both from black flower collective. I've been your host for today. Andrew of the YouTube channel Andrewism, which you can follow youtube.com slash Andrewism on Twitter at underscore St. Drew and on patreon.com slash St. Drew. All power to all the people. Glad to have you on. Thanks for having us. Thanks for being on.

Thank you, guys. Great recording with you. Thanks for having us. Thanks for being on. Thank you, guys. Great recording with you. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.