Indigenous Established Infoshop in Flagstaff, AZ – Anti-colonial & Anti-capitalist Community Space

A Fire at the Mountain Book Fair

afire-full-emailWhat: A regional anti-colonial and anarchist bookfair featuring discussions, workshops, presentations, films, skillshares, art, & more.

When: November Sat. 16 & Sun. 17, 2013

Where: Táala Hooghan Infoshop, Occupied territories Flagstaff, Arizona.

Who: Indigenous and anarchist authors, speakers, radical book distributors, zine publishers, and more.

Why: Fire at the Mountain Bookfair is intended to inform, agitate, and celebrate anti-colonial struggle and anarchist tensions.

Vendors: PM Press, Little Black Cart, Tucson Anarchist Black Cross, Revolutionary Grounds, & More!

Please contact us if you need housing:
Contact: afireatthemountain@gmail.com

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/511036342317464/

The book fair will be located at Táala Hooghan Infoshop at 1704 N 2nd St Occupied Territories Flagstaff, AZ.

(East Flag just off of Route 66 near 4th st.)


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Admission is free to all book fair events.
Limited parking at the infoshop is available, you can park around the neighborhood as well.
We will be providing free food. Snacks throughout the day and dinner on Saturday and snacks and lunch on Sunday.
We will also be providing free childcare at the infoshop.
We maintain accessibility as a priority though we do not have the most adequate facilities (bathrooms aren’t too big but a large wheel chair can fit through most all of our space). Please let us know if you need additional accessibility while at the book fair.
Space safety & security: 
We intend on doing our best to ensure that the space we hold is a threat to all forms of oppression and oppressive behaviors (read: hetero-patriarchy/homophobia/sexism/settler-colonialism/white supremacy/racism/age-ism/ableism). There will be infoshop collective members and AFTM book fair organizers available if there are any issues, but we welcome you to assist us to make sure to have each other’s backs. We do not welcome drugs/alcohol in our space and ask intoxicated folks come back when they’re sober.

Schedule & Workshop Descriptions:

 

AFTM-SATURDAY-SCHED

 

AFTM-SUNDAY-SCHED

 

WORKSHOPS & DISCUSSIONS DESCRIPTION:

 

PANEL: “We are Ungovernable: A Discussion on Indigenous Liberation, Anarchy & Allies”
Presenters: Ofelia Rivas, Simon Ortiz, Aragorn!, Louise Benally, Michael Paul Hill, Bahe’ Kat, Vanessa.
Saturday | 12:45pm – 2:45pm | Community Space

This panel will share experiences and address topics such as: Indigenous self-determination & resisting the state, when activism reinforces colonialism, intersections of oppression & action, challenges to meaningful support & solidarity, spirituality, and more.

WORKSHOP: “Radical Writing Circle with Writer, Activist, & Teacher Mary Sojourner”
Presenter: Mary Sojourner

Saturday | 12:45pm – 2:45pm | OYBM Screening Room | Limited to 12 participants.
Mary has written books such as Sisters of the Dream, Bonelight: Ruin And Grace In The New Southwest, Going Through Ghosts, Sister Raven, Brother Hare: A Journal for Those Who Honor Animal Power & many more.

 

WORKSHOP: “Loop 202 Resistance”
Presenters: Akimel O’odham Youth Collective
Saturday | 3pm – 4:15pm |OYBM Screening Room
The proposed Loop 202 extension adversely affects the physical and spiritual integrity of Muhadag Do’ag (South Mountain), traditional cultural properties associated with the mountain, and all beings. Both proposed freeway alignments are detrimental to the O’odham & Pee Posh, cutting the bloodline to the do’ag (mountian). We the people of the Gila River Indian Community have formally decreed NO LOOP 202 in 2000, 2005, and 2012. Don’t compromise your beliefs; stand for something or fall for anything.

 

WORKSHOP: “Second Wave Anarchy – An introduction to anarchist ideas since 1968”
Presenter: Aragorn!
Saturday | 3pm – 4:15pm | Community Space
Prior to the Spanish Civil War anarchists generally aspired to an anarchist communist society that abolished wages, and posited voluntary association as the end goal of a social transformation that anarcho-syndicalism would be the mechanism of. After the failure of the Spanish Civil War, anarchism as a particular body of thought, as an ideology, largely disappeared.

The Situationist International, while not anarchists (they were in fact harsh critics of the anarchist organizations that existed at the time, such as they were) brought a modern analysis to the same questions that anarchists had been asking a hundred years earlier. Additionally, the SI benefited from being in the lineage of the radical art movement, framing their politics in the experience of daily life and the events of May ‘68.

We will discuss the SI’s influence on Primitivism, Green Anarchism more generally, Hakim Bey, post-Anarchism, Fifth Estate and Crimethinc, Post-Left Anarchy, and Insurrectionary Anarchism. We intend to honor the history of the ideology of anarchism and discuss the possible future of the second wave of anarchy.

WORKSHOP: “Sovereignty among the Peoples and on the Lands”
Presenter: Bahe Katenay

Saturday | 4:30pm – 5:45pm | Community Space
Bahe Katenay, besides his full-time salary job, currently volunteers to facilitate network activities between Dineh (“Navajos”) and non-Native supporters in order for Dineh to maintain cultural residency on lands slated for coal mining. On a part time basis, he advocates and researches as he focuses on historical/pre-historic eras, indigenous culture elements, ecological and religious relationships, sovereign interventions, and decolonization of Dineh. His community is Big Mountain located in northeastern Arizona on Black Mesa, a community impacted by federal land partitioning law of 1977. This law did not only disrupt the Dineh-Hopi relations, but it has been proven that this forcible Indian removal policy is intended for coal extraction rather than to settle an intertribal conflict.

Along with background knowledge in traditional practice and independent historical ethnography, Bahe has help generate the multi-faceted humanitarian aid that spans from community network and resistance outposts to native intertribal spiritual assembly since 1977. He relied on collaborative approaches for on-land actions of resistance, community sustainable initiatives, and the maintenance of non-Native solidarity. He still tries to motivate his community toward self reliance in order to maintain morale and the revitalization youth interest in their roots.

 

WORKSHOP: “Activist Writing: Up Front & In Your Face”
Presenter: Simon Ortiz

Saturday | 4:30pm – 5:45pm | OYBM Screening Room
Simon is an Indigenous writer of the Acoma Nation, and one of the key figures in the second wave of what has been called the “Native American Renaissance”. He is one of the most respected and widely read Native American poets.

 

WORKSHOP: “before all else fails us: an invitation to trans-people and cis-women to have each others’ backs amidst the threat of gendered violence from within our communities”
Presenter: Vanessa
Saturday| 6pm – 7:15pm | OYBM Screening Room | Only open to trans-people and cis-women
there are many debates among radicals about how perpetrators of sexual and intimate violence should be treated after getting called out — and for this workshop, we are going to put those debates aside.

we are going to focus, instead, on how when intimate abuse and sexual violence are happening within close communities, the relationships among the people most systemically targeted by patriarchal oppression are often severely damaged as a result, further traumatizing individual survivors and communities at large. we will be discussing some of the reasons why these barriers to solidarity exist, and ways that we, as trans-people and cis-women, can avoid hurting each other when faced with triggering and painful information.

this is about developing preemptive defenses against the wreckage that gendered and sexual violence can cause by further dividing us; the idea being that we have the ability to lessen the impact that patriarchal violence has on our communities, with or without the cooperation of the people causing harm in being accountable for their abusive behaviors.

 

DISCUSSION: “Infoshops & Radical Spaces”
Presenter: Táala Hooghan Infoshop, Various

Saturday| 6pm – 7:15pm  | Infoshop
Topics will include: Starting and sustaining radical spaces, strategies of infoshops, problems with “allyship”, creative funding sources, the fetishization of accountability, & more.

 

WORKSHOP: Hip Hop is Resistance: Let’s Make Beats!
Presenters: Shining Soul
Saturday | 6pm – 7:15pm | Community Space

 

FILM SCREENING: “Homotopia” (During Dinner)
26min | Directed by Chris Vargas & Eric A. Stanley, 2006

Film followed by discussion.
Saturday | 7:15pm | OYBM Screening Room
Set sometime in the future-present Homotopia chronicles a group of radical queer’s dedicated to exposing the trouble with gay marriage, dismantling the State, undoing Empire, while looking totally fierce. Woven into the story of Yoshi’s adventures in love, resistance, and sex, is a critique of the crushing violence of homonormativity and its deadly perpetuation of US patriotism, conservative kinship structures and affective accumulation. Homotopia holds cinematic assumptions hostage through its motley assemblage of never-passing crew. Race, gender, ability and desire are reworked through an anti-colonial take of queer struggle creating a visual rhythm of melancholic utopianism that knows there may be no future but still hopes today is not their last. Love revolution, not State delusion, Homotopia.

 

SUNDAY

 

WORKSHOP: “Card Weaving”
Presenter: Alex the Weaver
Sunday | 10am | Infoshop
Card (or tablet) weaving is an ancient form of technology for weaving straps. Some materials will be provided, but if you can please bring yarn.

 

PRESENTATION: “Anarchist – What We Need To Be”
Presenter: John Zerzan

Sunday | 10:30am – 11:45am | Community Space
John Zerzan is an anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of hunter gatherers as an inspiration for what a free society should look like.

Some books he’s written are Elements of Refusal (1988), Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994), Running on Emptiness (2002), Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections (2005) and Twilight of the Machines (2008).

 

DISCUSSION: “Decolonization & Anarchism: Historical Interventions”
Presenters: Drew
Sunday | 10:30am – 11:45am | OYBM Screening Room

 

WORKSHOP: “Anarchist Strategies Against the Police”
Presenters: Tucson Anarchist Black Cross
Sunday | 12pm – 1:15pm  | OYBM Screening Room
Tucson Anarchist Black Cross will facilitate a discussion on how anarchists can better integrate an explicitly anti-police analysis into radical social movements, particularly no borders movements and movements for prison abolition. We’ll briefly examine recent uprisings against the police throughout the U.S. while considering the specific circumstances here in Arizona. As those of us working with Tucson ABC do not claim to have any particular expertise, grand vision, or ideal solutions, we only hope to open up space for conversation and strategizing. Fuck the Police.

 

WORKSHOP: “Spiritually, Green Anarchy and Cultural Appropriation”
Presenters: Marc Jackson & Jamie McCabe

Sunday | 12pm – 1:15pm  | Community Space

PANEL: “A Discussion on the Diné, O’odham, Anarchist Bloc”
Presenters: O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective, former Phoenix Class War Council, & Taala Hooghan Infoshop

Sunday | 1:30pm – 3:30pm  | Community Space
In January 2010 more than 200 people took to the streets responding to the following call that was made for a united Diné, O’odham, anarchist/anti-authoritarian bloc at an anti-Arpaio march in Phoenix, AZ: “We are an autonomous, anti-capitalist force that demands free movement and an end to forced dislocations for all people. We challenge with equal force both the systems of control that seek to occupy and split our lands in two as well as the organized commodification of every day life that reduces the definition of freedom to what can be produced and sold where and to whom, and compels our social relations to bend to the very same pathetic formula of production and consumption. Capital seeks to desecrate everything sacred. We hold lives over laws and human relations over commodity relations.” Full statement: http://firesneverextinguished.blogspot.com/2010/01/call-for-dine-oodham-anarchistanti.html