GATHERING OF MOTHER EARTH PROTECTORS

Sovereignty Sleepover: Toronto, Queen’s Park May 26th – May 29.

Rally: Queen’s Park May 26th, 5 p.m. – dusk.

Respect the right of First Nations to say no to economic exploitation and environmental destruction.
No jail for saying no.
Free Bob Lovelace and the KI Six.

On May 26th Indigenous communities and our supporters will gather at Queen’s Park to uphold our duty to protect the land, forest, water, and air and to promote respect for our Indigenous rights to say no to economic exploitation and environmental destruction. It is time to end the jailing and harassment of our people for protecting mother earth and traditional ways. Please come to our large rally on May 26th at the legislature. We are also inviting supporters to join us in four days of ceremony, speakers, workshops, music, and a three night sovereignty sleep-over directly on the front lawn of the legislature.

Right now Indigenous communities across Ontario are taking a stand to assert our right to protect our traditional territories and the future of our peoples. Our communities are peacefully protesting destructive industrial projects that the government is permitting on our traditional lands without community consent.

You Can’t Jail the Spirit

The Movement to Free Political Prisoners

Bryan D. and Tom K.

All too often, when activists raise the issue of our movements’ Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War, it is done with a sense of guilt for how they have suffered. That is not what this roundtable is about. Though the lack of support that PPs and POWs receive from contemporary movements is unfortunate, this roundtable is no guilt trip. The image of martyred revolutionaries languishing forgotten in cages is not our focus here. Men and women on the inside and their comrades on the outside are not charity cases but revolutionaries with hard-learned experiences and present-day perspectives that need to be acknowledged by those of us with less experience.

counterpunch.org

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

The grim story of the Guantánamo suicides--the deaths of three men, Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani in June 2006, and another, Abdul Rahman al-Amri, in May this year--took another turn last week, when, in the absence of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service's long-awaited report into the deaths, Navy Capt. Patrick McCarthy, the senior lawyer on Guantánamo's management team, spoke out in an interview, declaring that all four men had killed themselves with "craftily fashioned nooses."

Arising from and extending the life of slavery’s economy, the modern prison-industrial complex continues to earn the rage of abolitionists worldwide. Like anti-slavery abolitionists before them, prison or penal abolitionists seek to make redundant an institution most people - including many leftists - take as an inevitable feature of human society. In summer 2006, Caitlin Hewitt-White spoke with seven activists within (and beyond) the Canadian state about the struggle for prisoner justice and prison abolition. Peter Collins is currently held in Bath Institution, in year 23 of a 25-year life sentence. He is a politically active prisoner who has done work with communities inside and outside of prison on issues of prisoners’ rights, as well as exposing the corruption and brutality of Correctional Services Canada through his writings, media interviews and political cartoons, which are online at www.buriedaliveillustrations.com. Joint Effort: Emily Aspinwall, Filis Iverson and Sonia Marino are prison abolitionists in Vancouver. They are part of different projects including Joint Effort, Books 2 Prisoners, the Stark Raven Media Collective, prisonjustice.ca and the Vancouver Prison Justice Day Committee. Julia Sudbury is Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College, Oakland, CA. She is editor of Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex (Routledge 2005) and author of numerous books and articles on women’s activism and women’s prisons. She is a founding member of Critical Resistance and former member of the Prison Activist Resource Center. Kim Pate is currently the Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies. A teacher and lawyer by training, she has advocated for criminalized men, women and youth in the Canadian state. Patricia Monture is a member of the Mohawk nation, Grand River Territory, a lawyer by training and a long-time activist. She teaches sociology at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

Thursday February 8th to Sunday February 11th, 2007
William Doo Auditorium, University of Toronto
45 Wilcocks Street, New College

(wheelchair accessible)
www.pjac.org
All screenings are Pay-What-You-Can

(donations of dictionaries for prisoners are welcome – paperback only, please)

prisonersjusticefilmfest@yahoo.ca

Come and join what has quickly become a central space in Toronto to discuss and learn more about issues relevant to prisons and their effects on all of us.

As always the festival will include panels made up of people affected by the prison industry and opportunities to meet other people working for real justice and prison abolition.

by Joe Allen

Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa are not names familiar to most Americans. The longest-serving political prisoners in the United States, these two former Black Panthers have spent more than thirty-five years behind bars for a crime they did not commit -- the 1970 murder of Omaha, Nebraska, police officer Larry Minard.

The American media and the political establishment scoff at the very idea that there are political prisoners in the United States. Yet many sixties militants -- especially Black and Native American revolutionaries -- were deliberately framed by the police and FBI in their efforts to suppress the radical movements of that period. The Omaha Two were also caught in that dragnet. It has been known for decades that they were targets of the FBI's infamous Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), but it is only lately that long thought-to-be-destroyed evidence has emerged that could lead to a new trial for Ed Poindexter.

Robert Seth Hayes is a former member of the Black Panther Party and the
Black Liberation Army who has been imprisoned for the past 33 years. In
this video message he speaks about the Panthers, the struggle of the Six
Nations people and sends a message of solidarity to Trevor Miller, a Six
Nations political prisoner.

Kuwasi at 60
By Kazembe Balagun
December 24, 2006

On December 16, 2006 over 75 people gathered at LAVA in West Philadelphia. The crowd was a mix of Black liberation movement veterans (young and old), anarchist punks and white queer activists from ACT UP. They came together to pay homage to the late Kuwasi Balagoon, who would have turned 60 years old this year. Balagoon is not an immediately recognizable name in the pantheon of revolutionaries, yet he has developed into an underground hero 20 years after his death. This is due in large part to the maze of contradictions that constructed Balagoon’s life.

Robert 'Seth' Hayes speaks via a recorded message to a gathering assembled for the launch of Vol. 3 of the journal "Upping the Anti" on Nov 16th 2006. for more information about the journal please check out:

http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/view/1084

to hear Seth's message, please check out:

http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=20785

for more info: www.sethhayes.org

hey folks,

Seth called me this morning and wanted to pass on some important information about his parole appeal and some harassment that he has been facing lately. I have uploaded the interview that I did with Seth on these issues to the Internet, and you can listen to what he has to say at http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=20492