How to unsell Mama Earth

Liberation doesn’t happen in one generation..

 liberation doesn’t happen in a chant or one dance or a happenstance or a colonizers nervous glance….

 or a settlers grant or a phlanthro-pamp…

 or a romance….

 or a hustle or a dream or a scheme

… or being in a CONfused krapitalist trance…

Liberation is a quiet prayer, a big shout, a demand from an elder aqui estamos – NO you are not kicking us out…

….  a rock thrown by a 10-year-old in Gaza…. or an indigenous mama saying no more lies about our border terrorized mamaz…

liberation is what you dream…

what you know u can live to see…

liberation can be mamafested by you..

 and us… and all of we….

We “unsold” a small part of Mama Earth on Black August 10th at 1pm in the occupied Ohlone/Lisjan village of Huchiun the settlers call Oakland.

I call it unsold because all of Mama Earth is viewed as a marketable commodity, which is actually traded on commodities markets across the world, like wheat, or plastic, or iron. And locally, we use the system of “real estate” to buy and sell her everyday. 

I overstand and agree that We are stewards of the land- we, the landless, houseless, indigenous, poor peoples who launched Homefulness & our children & childrens children and generations beyond-  who thanks to Homefulness are now Homeful-  DO NOT OWN MAMA EARTH. None of us who live here own the land, and never will.  

Excerpt from the Liberation Easement and Peoples Agreement of Homefulness

Over hundreds of years of settler colonial theft, genocide and subsequent “rule” of indigenous lands, the mass acceptance and use of krapitalism (as i call it) as the economic system, which is built largely on the buying, selling, renting, evicting, extracting and policing of Mama Earth, the subsequent  implementation of neo-liberal policies of trade, extraction, and desecration, the incessant and  violent, poisonous commodifying of Mama Earth and corporate take-over of everywhere, we have now normalized all of this buying and commodifying as just the “way it is.”

“Two hundred years ago, before colonization there wasn’t even a concept of homelessness,” said the talking chief/spokesperson of the confederated villages of Lisjan/Ohlone and co-founder of the Sogorea Te Land Trust and Family Elders Council member of Homefulness.

Now we just blindly move though this system, never thinking of the roots and the origins. We dehumanize the people impacted and get mad about “the homeless problem,” and routinely police poor people for being poor, demanding people be swept like we are trash, raising the lie of rent so high no one but the rich can afford it, enabling mass gentriFUKation, displacement, and eviction of elders, redlining entire communities of color, blighting neighborhoods, extracting precious water, air, minerals and resources and buying and buying and selling and re-selling Mama Earth every day, everywhere, for profit.

But that’s not how it always was, as all indigenous nations and Mama Earth protectors teach us, from the Caribbean to Turtle Island and Mama Africa, including all Northern and Southern European indigenous communities and so many more. Mama Earth reverence was centered in all indigenous peoples’ creation and origin stories. Mama Earth was and still is revered, respected, loved, honored, and protected through ceremony and daily life and was never bought and sold. Commodification of the source of everything sacred would have been considered a great act of sacrilege or violence and still is by indigenous communities and peoples. 

And as I write, this thousands of indigenous land protectors are currently engaged in powerful land-back land rematration (as named by Sogorea Te Land Trust) efforts, and resistance to more environmental desecration and theft of our air, water, and land. 

What we did at Homefulness on BlackAugust 10th was introduce a new, never-before-used document called a Liberation Easement. This easement was and is a tiny act of resistance to this violent system of settler colonial commodification of Mama Earth on the stolen Ohlone/Lisjan land. 

The Liberation Easement was created by us houseless peoples at POOR Magazine listening to and asking permission from Ohlone/Lisjan leaders of this land from Sogorea Te Land Trust, combined with the liberation theory of poor and houseless people we call Poverty Scholarship, created and conceived by me and my houseless, disabled mama when we were on the street for so many years chronically houseless in doorways and bus shelters, criminalized and hated and bouncing between evictions and sweeps and tows of the cars we sometimes slept in, which we later turned into a whole theory of change with fellow houseless, indigenous, disabled peoples and released as a poor peoples  liberation textbook in 2019: Poverty Scholarship; Poor People-led Theory, Art, Words and Tears Across Mama Earth.

“This is the most creative, unusual, and moving legal document I have seen,” said Sustainable Economies Law Center Attorney Janelle Orsi. “The words of the Homefulness residents brought members of our legal team to tears.

The Liberation Easement was codified and contained in a settler legal document created by liberatory lawyers from Sustainable Economies Law Center working in tandem with POOR Magazine/Homefulness and Sogorea Te Land Trust over several years. 

The Liberation Easement will permanently remove this small corner of settler colonized Turtle island we houseless peoples call Homefulness from the commodities market  

The Liberation Easement was signed with First Nations elder leaders of this land who are on the Homefulness Elders Council, and by houseless/formerly houseless residents of Homefulness who agreed for themselves and their descendants to maintain the right relationship with this small part of Mama Earth, which means they are not “owners or renters, they/we are stewards or care-givers, not landlords. 

This means none of us own the land and never will, and none of us or our descendants can ever sell, rent, extract or evict anyone at Homefulness, and we all have committed to maintain the sacred principles laid out in the Peoples Agreement/MamaFesto created over many years of HomefulnessHerstory and that if anyone who is part of this poor people-led movement did try to evict, sell, or rent any part of Homefulness, the land would immediately revert back to First Nations stewardship. 

The Liberation Easement was committed to in a powerfully sacred “signing” ceremony where we also “signed” this small part of Mama Earth and prayed from all four corners with all our ancestors of homelessness and colonization on this stolen land. 

 “For years, the leaders at POOR Magazine have been asking us how to legally ‘unsell’ land, to ensure that it is never again treated as a commodity for sale,” said Orsi, “Our legal system makes it hard to liberate land from the speculative market. The Liberation Easement is our effort to use the legal system’s tools to permanently ‘unsell’ the land.”

Homefulness is a homeless people’s solution to homelessness created and led by poor and houseless, disabled youth, adults and elders and now the permanent, rent-free, healing residence of 25 houseless elders, families and youth. 

Homefulness has only been made possible by housed communities who created their the Solidarity family of POOR Magazine after attending PeopleSkool’s degentriFUkation, Decolonization Seminar where they begin the unlearning journey of extractive models of capitalism and enact and implement the concepts of radical interdependence and comeUnity reparations in their lives, both of which are a direct resistance to hoarding, buying, selling and stealing that settler colonial capitalism teaches us all to do to “succeed” in this destructive system.

Homefulness is a template for self-determined healing housing solutions for houseless/poor people everywhere and we are currently sharing the Homefulness model and supporting fellow houseless povertyskolaz in Tovaangar (LA) and Duwamish lands (Seattle)  and Yelamu (SF).  
This liberation easement will serve as an important commitment document with all of the other Homefulness projects and can be shared with anyone else who overstands the dire need to stop profiting off of our sacred Great Mama Earth.

To learn more about how to support/learn or get involved in Homefulness, or become a radical redistributor consider registering for the upcoming DegentriFUkation/Decolonization Session of Peopleskool on BlackAugust 23rd & 24th at poormagazine.org/education or go to www.poormagazine.org/homefulness   In addition we will be holding a press conference at the Oakland Recorders office for the Sacred Filing Ceremony of the Liberation Easement on October 23rd at 1:30pm for more information on this email poormag@gmail.com