The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights

The fourth episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left is out now. This podcast is supported by The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights. 

This episode focuses on defining what mutual aid is, why it boomed during the COVID crisis, and how it differs from things like charity. While it touches on some similar themes as our article, What Is Mutual Aid?, the podcast goes into much more detail on the formation of Riverside Food Not Bombs and the experiences I’ve personally had in organizing mutual aid in the Inland Empire/Riverside. 

Exit Capitalism, Stage Left can be found at the top of The Maggie Phair Institute’s website and is available for streaming and download. 

We now also have a phone background! You can check it out below and on our downloadables page. 

For the past year in Riverside, CA, there’s been a huge resurgence of mutual aid groups in response to the city, county, and state falling short in its support of people during the COVID-19 crises. While I have the most experience organizing, cooking, and distributing food as part of Riverside Food Not Bombs, I and my other comrades in the area have also worked with multiple mutual aid groups and organizations in putting on a large free market, called the Riverside People’s Free Market. Together, for two or more weekends a month (depending on the organization), we’ve fed, clothed, given out sanitation goods, handed out sleeping bags and tents, wagons, water, first aid, and more to over 100 people per weekend we get together. 

As of right now, there’s two free markets taking place:

The first is in Riverside at Fairmont Park (by the tennis courts – we have it marked on Google Maps) on the second Saturday of the month from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. which includes the following organizations: Riverside Food Not Bombs, Riverside Mutual Aid, CAT-911 (Riverside), Communit(IE), Punks in the Park, SJH Mutual Aid, and the Concerned UUS of Riverside. 

The second is in San Bernardino called the San Bernardino Free Market which takes place the fourth Saturday of the month from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Seccombe Lake Recreation Area (106 E. 5th St., San Bernardino, CA). Many of the same organizations that support the Riverside People’s Free Market also contribute to the SB Free Market and they receive additional help from the HygIEne Project. 

For those that aren’t aware of what mutual aid is and what Food Not Bombs does specifically, here’s the mission statement for Riverside Food Not Bombs:

When a billion people go hungry each day, how can we spend another dollar on cops? Food Not Bombs is an all-volunteer movement that recovers food that would otherwise be discarded, and shares free vegan and vegetarian meals with the hungry in over 1,000 cities in 65 countries in protest to war, poverty, and destruction of the environment. We are not a charity but dedicated to taking nonviolent direct action. Our movement has no headquarters or positions of leadership and we use the process of consensus to make decisions. We also provide food and supplies to the survivors of natural disasters, and people participating in occupations, strikes, marches and other protests.

Delving a little further into how we started our chapter, Food Not Bombs is an international mutual aid organization where anyone, as long as they follow some pretty loose guidelines and health protocols (e.g. vegan and vegetarian food, no dumpster diving, try to avoid capitalism as much as possible when obtaining goods, etc.), can start their own chapter. We’ve personally also taken extra precautions with COVID and have added a layer of prep where everything is made with gloves and a mask in a sanitized kitchen and all the food is individually packaged for distribution.

There is a national website for Food Not Bombs, but honestly, it doesn’t seem to be getting updated with new chapters all that quickly. Riverside Food Not Bombs was revived by community members who have previous experience organizing – IEDSA, the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) Protests at UCR, and other anarchists in the area. To get started, we made an Instagram and instantly we were getting support from the community and people were hitting us up to give us donations. We started meeting regularly over Zoom and asked people that we knew from other organizations like Riverside Mutual Aid, IE Community Fridges, IEDSA, and the Universalist Unitarian Church in Riverside to help us with donations and events to get started. We were lucky to have so many connections, but those are just how we grew so fast – connections aren’t necessary to get started.

The steps on the Food Not Bombs website are pretty solid in starting up your own chapter; first and foremost, get a group of core volunteers you know will be down to do the work. We have that plus people who come and go and it’s worked well so far. Next, create some social media profiles and start doing community outreach and have a meeting to find some community support and additional members. After that, finding food (calling grocery stores and letting them know you’re a “gleaner” looking for goods for donation before they’re put out, reaching out to food banks, connecting with workers in restaurants and getting end of the day food that they can’t reuse, and in an area like ours with a lot of farms, reaching out directly to farms like Overflow Farms.) and set a date and location (parks are always a good place to start) to start distributing it. Pretty soon you have supply lines, a bunch of volunteers, and an org with no official leadership where everyone does their part to support their community.

Our mission statement is very much our own creation that goes off of the national Food Not Bombs anti-war and pro-community model, and we specifically address the issues we have in our community with police and policing when we say not a single dime of city, county, state, or national funds should go to police and policing.  From what we’ve been told, the previous Riverside Food Not Bombs used to do service in White Park until the Riverside PD shut them down for having “bomb” in their name and being a “terrorist organization” because of it. Apparently, the Riverside Police don’t know what the word “not” means.

We haven’t directly been targeted by police yet, but when we do service at the Riverside People’s Free Market in Fairmount Park police always show up, drive by slowly, and we’re pretty sure are collecting information on our license plates. We wear masks (because of COVID but also it’s standard anarchist practice because of police identification), but the police try to size us up too. We’re just sitting there giving out food and clothes in a public space so, so far, they haven’t been able to say anything to us.

The city, strangely enough, has reached out to us multiple times about providing food and aid to the unhoused in shelters and at various events. We’re an all-volunteer org made up mostly students, be it graduate, recently graduated, or undergrads at both UCR and RCC, and have absolutely no fiscal support for what we do outside of donations from people wanting to feed or shelter their unhoused community members. We’re baffled the city is reaching out to us rather than using public funds to help people. We do what we can, but we should not be a principal provider for the city’s unhoused programs; that’s on the city and how they choose to fund a violent police force over helping the unhoused and other people in need. The city shouldn’t be using us as a charity or approaching us like we are a charity because that’s not what mutual aid is. We do support the city when they do endeavors like the Free Little Pantry program and we actively help stock pantries in the area with excess donations, but our goal first and foremost is to feed people in need and our secondary goal is to avoid doing so through capitalist measures and to instead rely on the community and volunteer labor to provide what the city does not.

Mutual aid is the community taking care of the community unconditionally. If we give you a meal, we don’t care what your background is, where you are from, what your record is, what your income level is, what your housing status is, etc. That’s not true with charity and with city resources. Often, these things come with conditions – you have to have a certain income level to qualify as needing aid, you can’t have a criminal history, you can’t be addicted to anything or must give up what you have in order to get help, you have to be a citizen, etc. We don’t judge. We don’t restrict. We give freely and want nothing in return. What we do is for the community we’re apart of because we see that the community is in need. We’re not paid. We often, those of us that are fiscally more stable and work or have a regular stipend from being graduate students, spend money out of pocket to make aid happen. Charity workers do have volunteers but often their boards are paid and their workers are paid. Money given to charities and labor given to charities does not go directly to the people in need of help.

Without capitalism, charity wouldn’t need to exist but the same cannot be said for mutual aid. Charity is often a tax write off or addresses specific gaps in the capitalist system that exist due to exploitation. Mutual aid, on the other hand, is not about filling in gaps caused by exploitation. The community will always need to take care of each other – that’s the social contract we sign as being part of that community. If your neighbor is in need, you come together and you help. If your community is hurting, you do what you can to make it better. Our motto is step up when you’re able and trust your comrades to step up when you aren’t able. We believe in solidarity, not charity. That should be how all aspects of community function, in our eyes.

The third episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left is out now. This podcast is supported by The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights. 

In this episode, I explore the concepts of mourning within a capitalist state. While this podcast covers similar topics as covered in this post, “Mourning in a Capitalist, COVID, and Necropolitical World,” the podcast goes a bit further with examples both from my own experiences and from the sources cited within the post. 

Exit Capitalism, Stage Left can be found at the top of The Maggie Phair Institute’s website and is available for streaming and download. 

We now also have a phone background! You can check it out below and on our downloadables page. 

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (the most English major source to cite, I know), mourning is (3.a.) “to feel or express sorrow, grief, or regret,” (4.a.) “to lament or grieve over a death,” and (4.b.) “to lament, grieve, or sorrow for (someone dead or someone’s death); to express grief for.” Going further, the OED notes a connection between mourning, the appearance of mourning, and a time for mourning in later definitions of the word; (3.c) notes mourning as “to exhibit the conventional signs of grief for a period following the death of a person” and (3.e.) contributes to this idea of time-specific mourning with its definition “to pass (time) in mourning.”

Since appearance of and a specific time frame have been included as part of the commonly understood definitions of mourning, I want to explore these questions within this post: what is the appropriate amount of time for mourning? And do we, as subjects under a capitalist system, have the space and time necessary for mourning?

Within our current economic system, grieving is limited to how much time off we’re able to take from work. There is bereavement leave, vacation time, and unpaid time we’re able to take off (if we can afford it, as workers), but beyond those measures, there’s little to no way to support ourselves if our period of grieving extends past those time allowances created within the work-for-pay and pay-to-live system we currently occupy.

Going further, part-time workers and non-traditional workspaces (self-employed, at a new start up without established norms or HR, or, like me, in upper academia), sometimes don’t have the same access to time off, resources, or are not clearly told when we’re able to take time off and when we’re still expected to work. Additionally, a lot of shift-workplaces, like Starbucks, require workers to find their own coverage for sick time or family leave, which puts an extra burden and barrier on workers who are already in a vulnerable state due to illness or loss.

Using myself as an example here, I lost a lot of people in 2020 and 2021 – none of which were directly related to COVID-19. In the summer of 2020, my longtime friend, comrade, fellow organizer, and past educator for the Maggie Phair Institute, Mimi Soltysik, passed from cancer. My paternal grandfather passed shortly after that in the late summer/early fall. Following that, a fellow campus activist passed away in November unexpectedly. In April, my maternal grandmother passed after battling cancer for a handful of months.

How many losses are too many losses to take bereavement leave? Additionally, as an academic worker, it was never made clear to me who to contact in the case of direct family members dying. I have a union and I have support from the department I research in and am getting my degree in, but none of that information transferred clearly into the program I teach for. I had no idea who to contact to have my classes covered, nor how to catch them up on what my class was doing since we have no direct supervisors – only a set of standards we must meet. I am lucky in that my committee members were understanding and let me work on my dissertation at my own pace, when I was able, and that I could push back my testing. But having space to mourn and grieve as workers (and doing graduate research is a form of labor and should be coded as paid work even though academia often doesn’t grant this as paid labor to its graduate students) shouldn’t depend upon the kindness of those in supervisory positions because that makes this not a right and not a guarantee but a gamble on those in positions of power feeling sympathetic.

While my family and comrades did not die of COVID, my ability to grieve, to mourn, and to come together with a shared community that loved and loss these people too was severely impacted by the pandemic. There were no funerals to physically attend save for my grandmother’s, but my sister and I lived too far away to attend the quiet, 6 a.m. service up in Oregon a few days after her passing. We also didn’t have the funds to get last-minute flights and transportation up to Shady Cove and neither of us could afford to or had the ability to take time off of work and drive up to say goodbye.

And I am not alone in facing an immense amount of loss during 2020 and 2021. I am just one of many who have faced these limitations to mourning and grieving under capitalism which have further been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from the Delta variant are spiking in the U.S. As I write this post, the U.S. alone has had 34.9M cases and 612K deaths (sources for those numbers come from Wikipedia, The New York Times, and Our World in Data). As noted in the World Socialist Web Site, or WSWS.Org:

“This fundamental socio-economic contradiction—i.e., the irreconcilable conflict between the capitalist class and the working class—finds its most obscene expression in the correlation between the number of dead, unemployed and impoverished, and, on the other side of the ledger, the explosive rise of share values on Wall Street.

Since the passage of the multi-trillion-dollar bailout in late March, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen approximately 35 percent. The Nasdaq index is at its 2020 high. During the first 10 days of May, while the number of dead rose by approximately 15,000, the Dow gained more than 600 points.

The more terrible the reports of death and human suffering [during the COVID-19 pandemic], the more ecstatic the response of the capitalist markets. The contrast between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” is so extreme that it is now being commented on widely in the financial press.”

In other words, workers are the ones at risk and being asked to shoulder the risk posed by COVID to keep the economy, and the wealthy elite in the U.S., afloat while we drown in our fears and sorrows. This creates a perpetual state of danger and a perpetual state of loss in addition to the alienation the standard U.S. worker feels from being perpetually exploited at work.

David W. McIvor, Juliet Hooker, Ashley Atkins, Athena Athanasiou, and George Shulman recently published an article, “Mourning work: Death and democracy during a pandemic” in Contemporary Political Theory that highlights how this pandemic is not just further alienating and exploiting workers, but is also targeting communities of color who have already been placed in a perpetual state of mourning in the U.S.:

“The differential vulnerability to death and mourning during the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed enduring racial and class divides in the USA and clarified the impact of spreading inequality. For Hooker, in particular, the pandemic has clarified patterns of racialized precarity to which political theorists and social actors have not adequately responded. Disavowed precarity also calls into question the supposedly recent phenomenon of ‘democracy grief’ in the global north or what Hooker refers to here as the ‘civic sadness that has arisen with the recognition that the USA is a democracy in need of repair’. Such recognitions are belated – and, like the owl of Minerva, may have come too late – and they elide the experiences of black citizens who have been paying the ‘psychic tax’ of democracy grief for generations, and who are paying a steep price once again during the pandemic.”

This article also reaffirms that those without traditional workspaces are more vulnerable to exploitation during this pandemic and have an inability to take any time off for grieving:

“Hooker and Atkins also take up the relationship between democracy and sacrifice. Democratic theorists such as Danielle Allen and Anne Norton have argued for an inherent link between democracy and sacrifice, yet both Hooker and Atkins challenge the logic or the value of this link, albeit in different ways. For Hooker, calls for sacrifice often overlook the facts of who is being asked to sacrifice, or – more pointedly – who is being sacrificed for democracy. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the so-called essential workers – many of them, including grocery store workers, nursing assistants, farmworkers, and delivery drivers, lacking paid sick leave, a living wage, or health benefits that are not linked to their employment – are positioned as sacrifices to the relatively well off and protected.”

I would argue that these above manifestations of capitalism’s control over our ability to mourn, work, and survive all ties into what Achille Mbembe termed the necropolitical and the state’s real source of power being not in grating the means to live but in its ability to control and deny people access to things that grant life. Comrade Teen Vogue elaborates in their article, “What is Necropolitics? The Political Calculation of Life and Death:”

“Why does COVID-19 impact marginalized communities disproportionately? I think the answer is rooted in necropolitics. Marginalized communities face immense access barriers to healthcare, education, and opportunities for professional advancement. In his book Against the Terror of Neoliberalism, cultural critic Henry Giroux lays bare that the most vulnerable people in the United States are considered “disposable, unnecessary burdens on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves.”

These disparities are exacerbated and compounded through the COVID-19 crisis. Take Dr. Susan Moore’s harrowing story. Moore, a physician, made a viral video while undergoing treatment for COVID-19. The video cast a spotlight on the way her white doctor handled her case. She posted that after she complained of pain, the doctor said he felt uncomfortable giving her more narcotics and suggested that she be discharged. “I was crushed,” Moore said. “He made me feel like I was a drug addict.” She added: “I maintain if I was white, I wouldn’t have to go through that.” Just two weeks later, Moore died of coronavirus-related complications. (At the time, a spokesman for Indiana University Health, the hospital system where Moore was a patient, told the New York Times that privacy laws prevented them from commenting on her specific case, but added that the organization investigates any allegation of discrimination and is “committed to equity and reducing racial disparities in health care.”) Necropolitics renders stories like Moore’s all too common. Medical bias can be fatal for Black women.

At its core, I see necropolitics as a manifestation of capitalism and its related institutions of violence: white supremacy, the prison-industrial complex, cisheteropatriarchy, and colonialism. Capitalism bleeds us all. It quantifies our lives. It predestines our deaths. In the sinking-raft scenario that opened this article, I would argue that a capitalist will choose the CEOs life over yours or mine in every instance. Capitalism drives necropolitics through the scarcity myth — that, during a global pandemic, for example, there are simply insufficient resources for us all, so some of us have to die. But that doesn’t have to be true. If we prioritize redistributing wealth and taking care of each other, there might be enough for everyone.”

Loss, death, and mourning are all a part of life but within the confines of a capitalist system, we are given limited time off and even more limitations on how much time off we can take in order to grieve – an essential and inescapable part of living. But, as Teen Vogue suggests, when we address the root of the state’s power, necropolitics, we can redistribute what our society needs to live and ensure that all of us have core rights – the right to life, the right to housing, the right to food, the right to clean water, the right to healthcare, and the right to mourn, among others.

Whatever world we build after capitalism, we have to keep in mind that humans are social creatures and when our networks of friends, family, and community experiences a loss, we all need time to process. A day or week off from labor may not be enough – a lifetime may not be enough but forcing people to perform work in exchange for money, which is the mode of being able to survive under capitalism, must not continue if we are to take people’s mental health and ability to mourn and grieve seriously and as an inalienable human right.

One way to address this pitfall now is to advocate for a universal basic income where everyone’s needs are met without having to work in order to survive. With this system of support in place, people aren’t faced with double alienation (being alienated from the fruits of their labor in a capitalist, exploitative system and being alienated from their selves and their feelings of grief and loss) because they’d have the means to take as much time as needed to process their emotions and feel connected to themselves, their kinship networks, their friends, and their communities once again.

While I mentioned above the loss of my comrade and fellow MPI educator Mimi, The Maggie Phair institute has also recently loss its founder and namesake – Maggie Phair. Another member of the MPI, Kielan Hammans, wrote “The Life of an Essential Activist: Maggie Phair, 1930-2021” which was published in CounterPunch. During her memorial service, the same comrade noted three lessons he learned from Maggie that were an essential part of her activist philosophy and how she related to others.

The first was education – and not in an academic sense, but to be a lifelong learner, to use the Socratic method, to always be reading, and to engage with the central question when it came to a problem that arose, “what do you think we can do about this?”

The second was generosity, in every sense of the word. Maggie was generous with her time, with the spaces she had, and with the things she owned. One comrade noted her opening up her home and allowing people to stay over, others noted how generous she was with food and how she always made sure comrades were cared for.

The third was her humanity and her belief in humanity. Maggie was a firm believer in solidarity, in people power, and accepted people where they were at. She believed in people over politics and was a figure that could talk to anyone and guide them, gently, towards sharing her belief in people, community, and humanity.

As a way to end this post and discussion (that could really go on for much much longer) and to celebrate the life and work of our comrades Mimi and Maggie, here are some of their works centered on education available here for download and distribution.

This is Mimi Soltysik’s Activist Reading List

And here is Maggie Phair’s Guide to The Feminist Process

All of these and more can be found on our Education tab, which is constantly under expansion and development. This is a resource for both teachers and activists alike. There are lesson plans being developed for educators and handouts like reading lists and pamphlets being created for activists.

While we can all fight for time and space to grieve, we can also fight to keep our comrades and their works in the public consciousness. One thing Mimi taught me was that our fight is an intergenerational fight. We may not see results in our lifetime, but the work we do while we are here isn’t about us – it’s about our community and those who fight alongside us and who carry on organizing after we leave. As long as I’m here, I’ll remember, appreciate, and spread the lessons taught to me by comrades, past and present, and do my best to share that knowledge with my peers and future activists I engage with on every platform made available to me.

The second episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left is out now. This podcast is supported by The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights. 

In this episode, special guest Matt Millholand from the Inland Empire Democratic Socialists of America as well as the United Auto Workers Union sits down with me to discuss human rights within a capitalist system and alternatives to capitalism that are more conducive and inclusive of human rights. 

Exit Capitalism, Stage Left can be found at the top of The Maggie Phair Institute’s website and is available for streaming and download. 

In 1945, Ms. W. Whitby, a Black woman working in the Richmond shipyards as part of the war effort, came back from a trip to her mother’s to find the door to her war housing dormitory apartment padlocked shut. She had just separated from her husband and was planning to have her three children and mother come live with her. 

Ms. Whitby was new to the dormitory. Not long before she moved in, the Richmond Housing Authority, who managed the apartments, had finally been forced by civil rights advocates to open its doors to Black women. Despite the order, the housing authority was intent on limiting the number of Black tenants, and where that failed, segregating and harassing them, with the hopes of driving them out.

As one of the first Black women to move into the dormitories, Ms. Whitby was a prime target. When she was away, officials conspired to illegally evict her, arguing that as a single occupant, she was no longer eligible for housing even though she had already moved in and paid rent.

The racism that Black residents at the shipyard dormitories like Ms. Whitby faced didn’t stop with those who managed the apartments. Black families also had reason to fear their white neighbors. Earlier that month, a white man had shot a Black child on dormitory grounds, allegedly because they had a disagreement over hot water.

For people in Ms. Whitby’s situation, finding alternative safe housing was not easy. The real estate market was filled with racial housing covenants: contracts written into deeds forbidding future owners from selling to, renting to, or at times even letting Black people onto their property. As Ms. Whitby’s case shows, public housing wasn’t much better. The San Francisco Housing Authority, for instance, kept tightly segregated facilities and only allowed Black people to live in one low-income building.

The ACLU News archive, dating back to 1945, documents the various forms of legalized housing discrimination leveled at Black people in Northern California, and also charts severe backlash to progress, whenever it was made. It provides a snapshot of the ways that businesses, the state, and individuals partnered to exclude Black people from the accumulation of wealth through dispossession and the denial of their means to secure a home.

Read more at: https://www.aclunc.org/blog/exploring-aclu-news-archive-fight-against-housing-discrimination-california-story-progress-and?fbclid=IwAR39fe8s6G3u8I_1b3CYWNEshzZxo-9pGLhxci-mdSm0EwschiO7QDhoXN4

The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights has put out its first podcast – Exit Capitalism, Stage Left, run by me, Manda Riggle, the new educator for the institute. This podcast explores various subjects related to human rights and democracy under a capitalism system. 

The first episode of the podcast is dedicated to Mimi Soltysik, a dear friend and comrade who held the previous position of educator here at the Maggie Phair Institute before he passed. This episode explores Mimi’s previous blog post on here, An Economic Bill of Human Rights, in addition to further explore the idea of human rights under a capitalist, exploitative system that is, by design, adverse to human rights. 

Exit Capitalism, Stage Left can be found at the top of the Maggie Phair Institute’s website and is available for streaming and download. 

And, for those curious about my qualifications, here they are: I am a longtime activist that is versed in both theory and praxis. When I was part of the Socialist Party USA, I was managing editor and later co-editor-in-chief of The Socialist. I am currently one of the co-revivers of Food Not Bombs in my local area as well as a co-organizer for our local free market and have been engaged in mutual aid work since the onset of the pandemic. Outside of activism, I am a PhD student studying early modern literature and the struggles that manifested into the transition of feudalism, a horribly exploitative system based on inherited rank, to capitalism, a horribly exploitative system based on wealth that is often inherited. I have a BA in English education with a minor in political science and an MA in literature. 

I hope you all enjoy the podcast. I am new to this format but learning. In the future, we will have episodes featuring local members of the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) as well as episodes exploring what mutual aid is, why it is needed, and how it exists outside of a capitalist framework.

You’re interested in learning more about socialism and its history, but you aren’t sure where to begin. There’s just so much information out there, and some of it, particularly where theory is concerned, can initially appear quite complex. Intimidating even. And when you find yourself in spaces with those who appear to have a fair understanding of the information, it can be easy to feel alienated, as though you don’t belong in the “club”. know that I did. I often still do. 

Personally, I found that taking the time to learn on my own, at my own pace, was extraordinarily helpful. Being able to review introductory information free of judgment or scrutiny helped me build confidence. This doesn’t mean that all learning should take place outside of a group environment where teaching takes place and ideas are challenged. But setting aside personal time to gain an understanding of the basics can greatly benefit your experience when you do participate in a group environment. 

I’ve compiled a list of resources that I feel to be essential components of a broader understanding of socialism (and its history), colonialism, capitalism (and the oppressions inherent to capitalism), and resistance to exploitation. A few of the pieces are challenging, particularly the Himani Bannerji book, which I’d recommend reading after you’ve completed at least a few from the list. This list is hardly exhaustive, and undoubtedly, there are many other titles that perhaps should have been included. Drawing on a decade of organizing, activism, and educational work, this is a list that I feel comfortable sharing. When possible, PDFs were shared.

Mimi Soltysik – Educator, Maggie Phair Institute

The list:

“The Wretched of the Earth” by Frantz Fanon (PDF) – http://abahlali.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Frantz-Fanon-The-Wretched-of-the-Earth-1965.pdf

“The Assassination of Fred Hampton” by Jeffrey Haas – https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6561790-the-assassination-of-fred-hampton  

“An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz – http://www.beacon.org/An-Indigenous-Peoples-History-of-the-United-States-P1164.aspx

“The Socialist Imperative” by Michael Lebowitz – https://monthlyreview.org/product/socialist_imperative/

“Assata: An Autobiography” by Assata Shakur (PDF) – https://libcom.org/files/assataauto.pdf

“Open Veins of Latin America” by Eduardo Galeano – https://monthlyreview.org/product/open_veins_of_latin_america/

“Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation” by Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams – https://monthlyreview.org/product/creating_an_ecological_society/

“Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism, and Anti-Racism” by Himani Bannerji – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/627138.Thinking_Through

“The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs” by Ray Ginger – https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/839-the-bending-cross

“October” by China Mieville – https://www.versobooks.com/books/2731-october

“Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire (PDF) – https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/freire_pedagogy_oppresed1.pdf

“Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements” by Victoria Law – https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=502

“Ya Basta!: Ten Years of the Zapatista Uprising” by Subcomandante Marcos – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3618._Ya_Basta_

“Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches” by Audre Lorde – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32951.Sister_Outsider

“The History of the Russian Revolution” by Leon Trotsky (PDF) – https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/trotsky/history-of-the-russian-revolution/ebook-history-of-the-russian-revolution-v1.pdf

“The Assassination of Lumumba” by Ludo De Witte – https://www.versobooks.com/books/792-the-assassination-of-lumumba    

“Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United States of America—”from California . . . to the Gulf Stream waters”—are interred the bones, villages, fields, and sacred objects of American Indians. They cry out for their stories to be heard through their descendants who carry the memories of how the country was founded and how it came to be as it is today.” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

In the United States, we should all know that we are living on stolen land. Unpacking what that means and honoring those who colonized by the settlers can be a challenge. How do we honor the history of our indigenous communities? One way is to learn the history of the land we inhabit. In the case of the Maggie Phair Institute, which sits on Hauser Street in Los Angeles, that land belonged to the Gabrielino-Tongva peoples.

We know that the Gabrielino-Tongva tribe inhabited the Los Angeles Basin for roughly 7,000 years. When the Treaty of Guadalupe was signed following the Mexican-American War, California (including its indigenous population) was ceded to the United States. Treaty provisions mandating an allocation of land for California’s indigenous peoples (8.5 million acres) were rejected by the United States Senate following lobbying efforts by the state’s business community. Subsequent efforts to compensate the indigenous were criminally inadequate. According to the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe, “Acting to “recognize the equitable claims” of the Gabrielinos and “all the Indians of California”, the Court awarded 7 cents an acre as compensation for the 8.5 million acres of land which was never set up as reservations under the 18 “lost treaties”.  From this sum was deducted the cost of administration of the claims.  In 1850, some 94 years earlier, no public lands were purchased for less than $1.50 per acre.  The Court of Claims awarded no interest for the 94-year period between signature of the 1851-53 Treaties and payment of the monies in 1944.”

To learn more about the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe, visit http://www.gabrielinotribe.org/historical-sites-1/

If you’d like to find out more about the history of the land where you currently live, the following map offers a breakdown of indigenous lands throughout the country – https://mashable.com/article/indigenous-map-america/