Krow Released from Jail & Transferred to 6 Months of House Arrest & Court Ordered Counseling; Read Krow’s Post-Release Statement.
After four months of battling uncertainty with my probation officer & hollow intimidation from “authorities”, I’m very thankful to be released to six months of house arrest with court ordered counseling. Throughout my various stints of incarceration, I’ve been the grateful recipient of sanity-maintaining rad prisoner support, most namely communicative connection; this has strengthened my resolve in both practicing and advocating non-cooperation with the state & their “authoritative” lackeys, fighting my revocation! I deeply missed the wild and my comrades ideologically; being coercively caged up with cop apologists, white supremacists, and “prayer bears” who truly believe police brutality can be merely prayed-away always proves most challenging. The acknowledgment of intersectionality between land defense, prisoner support, & other struggles has also changed for the better, with yet still room for improvement.
As always, it remains a paramount duty to organize as many people as possible in our respective communities, & be on point with the many fronts of land defense & prisoner support, ensuring the maintenance or creation of local legal/bail funds for ALL people, & to do outreach deeper into our communities outside our sometimes insular rad bubbles, in order to promote & create points of agreement akin to that of the “St. Paul Principles” or “Penokee Principles”. Both of these community-created agreements serve to support & protect each other, safeguarding us from peace police & simultaneously growing our rad team in general through active radicalization, not just during campaigns or crisis.
The St. Paul Principles were initially shared with the greater public prior to the 2008 RNC, & the Penokee Principles in 2013 in response to political & police repression during the struggle opposing the world’s largest proposed open-pit iron mine, located in occupied Ojibwe Territory. These principles aim to connect diverse groups of people through a shared combatance of various oppressions via agreeing to keep dissent internal to the struggle through a culture of consent, including but not limited to posting any form of media publicly of individuals or groups who may hypothetically be pictured, videoed, or interviewed pertaining to collective struggles for liberation. Whilst the greater government aims to disrupt our struggles by spreading disinformation & encouraging in-fighting, we can withstand their blows by accepting a diversity of tactics, & NOT accepting the vilification of our comrades by the villainous gov’!
As there is often seemingly more public support and discussion surrounding prison abolition & reform, I will turn my focus for this statement to jails. As we work toward their obsolescence, local communities can rally in the present around outdoor recreation
accessibility for ALL inmates; improvement in fresh produce options; access to any and all needed health & dental care that is also NOT billed to one’s canteen account; the offering of more programs & general freedoms IN county jails for ALL inmates not just SENTENCED trustees, & the prioritization of SIGNATURE bonds over cash only bonds… We’re poor god dammit! Lack of access to the aforementioned components of a healthier life is anything but rehabilitative; these facilities are also usually highly toxic, wasteful, & quite generally non-eco-friendly. Fuck jails and prisons and all those who THINK they need them. As always, we need COMMUNITY NOT incarceration; the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement of today still has some of my favourite things to say about incarceration being an extension of slavery (as granted by the 13th Amendment) and suggestions for how to abolish it.
In regards to the scores of people who are wearing their alleged involvement in the #NO DAPL struggle in Standing Rock like a merit badge, though we can all learn from each other in some capacity, for better or for worse, I would be wary of anyone who uses it to further their position. I suggest folks watch Submedia’s first documentary in the newer series “Trouble: Killing the Black Snake- Behind the Scenes of the No DAPL Struggle. I find this documentary more helpful and telling than most of the INNUMERABLE Facebook live-feeds and/or “documentarian” efforts; DIY is awesome, but most of it is sadly “DIE”, “Do-it-EGO”.
As a deeply spiritual persyn, I will say it was heartbreaking, frustrating, and at times infuriating to see people using spiritual abuse to gain control & power, & often coerce people through sometimes colonized “prayer-bear” mentality to either stand down, or perpetuate group mentalities that only embrace one tactic or one interpretation of a situation, instead of embracing a diversity of tactics for the diversity of peoples present, with a variety of key indigenous elders & “olders” that could be deferred to in the mix, there should have been room for MORE of a VARIETY of choices for both action & non-action alike for all people present; and there should NOT have been room for unnecessary condemnation of diversity. Grassroots indigenous organizing is NOT the same as IRA-enforced tribal government, and having developed relationships with people BEFORE you show up to their land/territory is NOT the same as randomly showing up & “picking” random elders to defer to. We ALL have room for improvement!
In relation to prisoner support, it was interesting this time around how many white liberals vociferously support me under the label of, “victim of police brutality,” but, in contrast, some have said they considered my “approach” during the Penokee Mine Struggle too aggressively opposing destruction & oppression… In my experience, those who simply attempt to ONLY pray-away police brutality & destruction of the land have proven to be largely unsuccessful; as always, we need to embrace a diversity of tactics; there IS room and NEED for BOTH prayer & action in our fight against destruction, servitude, & capitalism. Take it from Nelson Mandela, a well-known organizer against apartheid in South Africa, as he reminded the public that the police were the people’s common enemy. We need to focus on collectively fighting our common enemies, not each other; through this we can also literally & metaphorically build community.
We got a long road ahead of us, so let’s make it worth it! As Maria Nikiforova believed that if [systemic government] power still exists, we still had work to do, so it is obvious that until every humyn & non-humyn creature are free, none of us are free, yo! Let our
love be like the love Assata Shakur describes as an acid that, “eats away bars.” With that being said, we must remember to reach out to comrades still enduring legal battles from the #NO DAPL Struggle, to J-20, and so on!
NO borders. NO Nations. NO prisons or Jails. NO pipelines. No industrial Agriculture or Resource Extraction. NO prejudice. No Compromise!
Yer’ Comrade in Struggle, For the Wild, & Constant Decolonization,
Krow
July 19th, 2017
