Out of a vacant coffeeshop, the collective Okay’é Infoshop is devoted to mutual lend a hand on The United States’s excellent reservation.
About an hour west of the Unique Mexico–Arizona border, an expanse of toll road, sky, and sagebrush-spotted terrain ends in sandstone cliffs. The crimson-orange partitions tumble down into Canyon de Chelly, essentially the simplest nationwide park operated on land gentle owned by the Navajo Nation. This summer, because the per capita fee of coronavirus cases within the Navajo Nation surpassed Unique York inform’s, Kauy Bahe, 19, learned himself standing on the canyon’s edge as he delivered food to a Navajo elder and her family as segment of a mutual lend a hand effort.
“It used to be an unparalleled situation,” Bahe (Navajo) stated, describing the woman’s cornfield and hogan (a feeble Navajo home fabricated from wood and packed soil) outside Del Muerto, Ariz. However “she used to be telling us about the struggles for water, about how they don’t win working water there and how they’ve to power 30 minutes” to fetch it.
Across the united states, activists win answered to the Covid-19 crisis with anarchist programs, enjoy mutual lend a hand. In Window Rock, Ariz.—the seat of the Navajo Nation—the Okay’é Infoshop is one such community, and has been supplying elders, families, and the immunocompromised with food and clinical affords. However the Infoshop’s participants, enjoy Bahe, train their trend of self reliant organizing has distinctly Navajo roots.
In September 2013, Brandon Benallie (Navajo/Hopi) and Radmilla Cody (Navajo/Black) had factual moved to Flagstaff, Ariz., most efficient about 200 miles from the Navajo Nation, when heavy rains flooded towns and destroyed homes all the draw in which by the reservation. Cody, a musician, and Benallie, a cybersecurity knowledgeable who’d grown up staring at his family role up in opposition to useful resource extraction, rapid planned a profit concert and silent lend a hand for these tormented by the floods. The following twelve months, the Assayii Lake Fire forced dozens of Navajo families to evacuate their homes, and Benallie and Cody organized one more concert. Then, factual months later, news broke that three kids had beaten and murdered two Navajo males in Albuquerque, N.M. The incident reminded Cody and Benallie of the assorted tales they’d heard rising up of Indian rolling, the assault or execute of homeless Native Americans in white towns along the Navajo reservation.
After that series of events, Benallie and Cody knew that they needed to utterly decide to mutual lend a hand work, and so they formed their like Infoshop, an anarchist neighborhood inform. They began by developing a tent outside of the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, nevertheless as Indigenous organizing ramped up in 2016 ahead of the Standing Rock demonstrations, they made up our minds they needed a eternal inform.
Exact five minutes from the Navajo Nation government complexes, the Okay’é Infoshop opened its doors in April 2017 out of a vacant coffee shop. Inner, Benallie, Cody, and varied early collective participants painted every wall to correspond with the sacred Navajo colors—sunless, white, turquoise, and yellow—and started stocking the inform with books and zines. In relation to the entrance, they hung a painting of a females’s turquoise-ring-clad hands wrapped spherical jail bars—a half by a member who the community says used to be unjustly arrested in a police raid of the nearby flea market while she shared her lunch with a homeless community. In the serve, they filled bookshelves with titles enjoy Corn is Our Blood, Indigenous Males and Masculinities, and Pink Vitality Rising. And then, all the draw in which by the serve wall, they put up crimson stenciled letters that spelled out, “Okay’é doesn’t discriminate.”
Anthropologists on the total portray good ample’é because the Navajo kinship intention, nevertheless Benallie and Bahe instructed me it’s noteworthy bigger than that. “It’s our theory of all the pieces,” Benallie stated. “It’s our string theory. It’s how we’re connected to all the pieces—nevertheless specifically how that kinship is reciprocated and maintained.”
Okay’é “is this immense overlapping philosophy that the total universe is interconnected,” Bahe explained. “However it indubitably’s additionally these relationships that now we win with one one more and with the sides that exist on this planet, whether or no longer that be the weather or the water or the animals.”
Rising up, Benallie stated he learned about organizing from family and neighborhood participants protesting the Black Mesa coal mines and uranium mining on Navajo land. Benallie stated his grandfather continuously instructed him, “We are all given queer items and talents, and we must attain what we are succesful of to develop for others with our queer items and talents.”
He added that at the time, “we didn’t comprehend it as mutual lend a hand, that used to be factual good ample’é.”
Despite the undeniable fact that there’s a distinctly European language to describing fresh anarchism, Benallie stated he believes that the circulate has long been influenced by Indigenous suggestions.
“Being Diné might perhaps well also very well be regarded as anarchist because of we never had chiefs; we didn’t win a hierarchy. It used to be continuously horizontal,” Benallie stated. “Communism and anarchism derived ideology from Franciscan missionaries who got here here within the 1500s and 1600s and studied Indigenous societies. And likewise you would also win Engels, Marx, and Bakunin reading the journals of these non secular figures and how these non secular figures portray Indigenous societies within the within the period in-between.”
Benallie argues that Navajo kinship began to interrupt down because the tribe tried to negotiate with the united states government. “The principle version of the Navajo Nation government used to be called the Navajo industry council,” he stated. “It used to be formed primarily to facilitate the signing of oil and gasoline leases, and coal leases, within the 1920s.”
Once horizontal, Benallie stated, Navajo society turned patriarchal and hierarchical—and that structure facilitated the destruction of land and water for useful resource extraction. That historical previous explains why Diné anarchists enjoy Benallie, Cody, and Bahe were leery of tribal and federal pandemic reduction efforts—and needed to put together their like.
As soon because the coronavirus hit the Navajo Nation, Okay’é’s participants had a conversation about how they might perhaps well also abet. Benallie stated he used to be at the initiating wary of doing mutual lend a hand work—he used to be pondering about the health of collective participants and their families—nevertheless childhood participants enjoy Bahe spoke up and stated they were titillating to fetch the possibility. Okay’é turned to the food pantry it had stocked for weekly cohesion meals with unsheltered neighborhood participants. “What takes us a twelve months to give away used to be long gone in two weeks,” Benallie stated.
First and foremost the Infoshop used to be on my own in its reduction efforts in Navajo Nation, nevertheless by April and Would perhaps perhaps, varied mutual lend a hand projects began to emerge. The childhood-led Navajo & Hopi Households COVID-19 Support challenge raised funds to blueprint aesthetic orders with corporations enjoy Shamrock Farms and organized teams to distribute upwards of 10,000 kilos of food per week all the draw in which by the 27,000 square miles of the reservations.
Bahe and varied Infoshop participants joined the Navajo-Hopi reduction crew working out of Fort Defiance, Ariz.—six miles north of Window Rock. Bahe stated the community mostly served nearby towns, nevertheless occasionally he learned himself miles away, at web sites enjoy Canyon de Chelly.
Because the Navajo government tried to manipulate the unfold of the outbreak, it instituted curfews and preserve-at-home orders that doubtless saved lives, nevertheless made it more sophisticated for families to inch to one amongst the reservation’s 13 grocery stores. Mutual lend a hand groups obtained important worker passes to distribute food after curfew, nevertheless Bahe stated organizers gentle faced pushback from the government.
“We were harassed on more than one cases by Navajo police pulling us over and telling us that our letters and our badges weren’t decent,” Bahe stated. “In one instance the police officer, she sent us home and we had a van paunchy of food.”
Talking about the impacts of the pandemic and rapid enhance of mutual lend a hand groups all the draw in which by the country, Benallie illustrious, “Every time capitalism fails, we land on socialism, we land on anarchism, to fetch care of us.”
“I am hoping it makes folks put a query to who is there for them. Used to be it the $1,200 stimulus take a look at or six months of unemployment? Or used to be it the cultured folks of the earth who were organizing resources and area topic wants to be clear you don’t tumble asleep hungry or that your kids don’t tumble asleep hungry?” he stated. “Capitalism fosters this unhealthy, extremely individualist scrutinize of oneself. Folk began to omit their obligations to every varied, to the land, and started to most efficient difficulty about how noteworthy they might be able to fetch pleasure within the imbalance from broken kinship.”
As organizers retain in thoughts programs to love their communities within the absence of presidency reinforce, Benallie urges them to consider their relationships to one one more and to the planet. “We can’t attain this on my own. We favor all of the cultured folks of the earth to attain serve together.”
