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Land Trust (in What ?)
Houseless/Landless/Indigenous peoples Transform Land Trusts into a LiberationOfLandTrust
Land trust ?
Trust in What?
U see my broken unhoused mind is CONfused by
Grant deeds, mortgages, , Probate and leases
All meant to steal
Mama Earth from mama earths peoples- (excerpt from Liberation Not Trust)
“In the US, all the laws around property rights actually are there to serve and support the business interests of developers, speculators and realtors, even land trusts aren’t safe.” the young lawyer who was teaching us houseless/formerly houseless poverty skolaz at POOR Magazine the twisted lies known as real estate law ended his speech and shook his head. We had called him in to help us set up the legal structure of our plan to spiritually and legally un-sell the small parcel of Mama Earth we are building called Homefulness, but now we all felt more depressed than we were before he started.
In this occupied land one of the hardest “lessons” this poverty skola has had to “learn” as a Houseless child and then later as a single parent struggling with eviction, then homelessness, poverty and constant and ongoing gentriFUKation in San Francisco, Oakland and LA is that every single part of the settler colonizer lies ( laws) that govern stolen Turtle Island, protect, support, lift-up, enable and promote the buying, selling and profiting off of Mama Earth.
Beginning with the original “lie of discovery” which is analogous to someone stealing the jacket off your back and turning around and proclaiming they “found a jacket” and making a whole series of fake stories about how they found it, and laws to keep stealing all of your jackets and every other article of clothing you own and while they are at it- you. The road to Mama earth theft and the paper and politricks in place to cover it up is long and intentionally complicated.
From LLC’s to CONservatorShit, guardianship, mortgages, loans, probate kkkort to wills, there is an endless series of codes, regulations, and laws meant to CONfuse, jam up, disorient and cover up the ongoing theft of Mama Earth from Black, Brown, indigenous and poor people.
Folks work their entire lives ( often times in boring/ back-breaking, hard jobs they don’t like) to achieve a success model based on the acquisition and then hoarding of Mama earth, her resources and stacks of paper with dead wite men on them, being constantly told that once they do, as in the case of the Sloan family of North Oakland and the Vasquez family of Fresno, just to name two of literally millions of working class people in this country, the kkkorts and laws steal it away in a bloody river of paper.
Add to this the violent reality of the demolition and eradication of all of the public housing projects through more politricks from the benignly named RAD program, insane gentrifUKation everywhere, the subsequent rise in peoples having to live unhoused and then the criminalization of so-called public spaces so unhoused people can’t even sit or stand while houseless anywhere. The fix is in and continues to get worse. Lately we have SB35 by Scott Weiner enabling the insane high rise condo and rich people rental projects as long as they include an eensy- teensy bit of “affordable” housing which actually isn’t affordable for ANYONE low-income.
This all brings us to the lie of Land Trusts. Which isn’t really a lie even though the two “L’s” sound good together its really what people, organizations and gentriFUKation victims are told - is all we have to combat the ongoing War On the Poor. What we aren’t told is that all of these lies ( laws) and codes even land trusts are embedded in a predatory system meant to power the wealth-hoarders and land -stealers, speculators and bankkksters.
Danza Azteca prayer from Coatlique Calpulli in the all nations Mama Earth prayer at the Bank of Come-Unity Reparations Ceremonial Launch
In the case of a whole gaggle of violent evictions faced by elders and families in gentriFUKation city (SF) and Oakland lately, local land trusts have swooped in with love and respect trying in earnest to save peoples homes so more stories of eviction as elder abuse and ultimately death like Iris Canada and Ron Likkers didn’t happen. Land trusts theoretically take the land off the real snake market so the tenants don’t end up on the street, which is true, but what people don’t know is like all the other colonizer created lies ( laws) they have an expiration date, sometimes short 15, 25 or 50 years, sometimes for 99 years. They are also rife with all the same loopholes that enable wealth-hoarders to hide and protect resources and they also enable the eventual sale, transfer and/or return back to the real snake market when the board transitions, the trust runs out or the entity holding it in trust sells their interest in the land.
What people rarely understand or overstand is the roots of all the devil-oper tree is rotten, the laws on the books are ALL meant to confuse and steal and hide for profit Mama Earth and what actually needs to happen is to purely stop that violence in its tracks, to un-sell and/or re-matriate as the wise land liberators of the Ohlone/Lisjan Nation of Oakland call their work, to spiritually and legally un-sell Mama Earth as we are doing at Homefulness, and hold in what we are calling a LiberationofLand Trust
This is not an easy thing to do, and requires one work closely with a conscious lawyer and equally important work closely with ancestors, poverty skolaz, 1st Nations peoples of the land and set up a stewardship, rather than perpetuate the violence of an ownership. The badass folks at East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative are also trying this notion out, and as of now are still working within the land trust model but at least are clearly offensively liberating tracks of land out of krapitalist ownership.
The Sogorea Te Land Trust, led by native women has clearly stated in their purpose statement, a completely different way to conceptualize use of Mama Earth
Sogorea Te is an urban Indigenous women-led land trust based in the SF Bay Area that returns indigenous land to Indigenous people. Through the practices of rematriation, cultural revitalization, and land restoration, STLT calls on native and non-native peoples to heal and transform legacies of colonization, genocide, and patriarchy and to do the work our ancestors and future generations are calling us to do.
For us landless/houseless, incarcerated, bordered, criminalized, disabled, evicted and gentrifUKed, multi-nationed, multi-cultural Black, Brown and pan-indigenous poverty skolaz at POOR Magazine, the LiberationOfLand Trust is what we are slowly manifesting, building, and realizing. Which isn't to say it is just houses for houseless families and elders ( which it is) but it is also a consciousness shift away from the harmful, extractive system that is Krapitalism ( capitalism). The LiberationofLandTrust is rooted in all the things we are intentionally un-taught in krapitalism's cult of individualism, scarcity models and separation nation, which isnt good for anyone but is especially bad for poor people and worse for houseless people and even worse for Mama Earth herself.
In the LiberationofLandTrust, we take Mama Earth off of the realEsnake market for good in a combination of legal, cultural and spiritual work to protect Mama Earth and her earth peoples, with the knowledge that if we stopped buying and selling mama earth we wouldnt have homelessness, or fires in the amazon, or extraction in the Jamaica or sacred site desecration or gentriFUKation or removal or....
The LiberationofLandTrust is launched first with permission, prayer and leadership/inclusion from 1st Nations peoples of wherever that part of Mama Earth is, a long prayerful process culminating in a Peoples Agreement is created among the peoples that launch it, and Multi-nationed prayer ceremonies from the peoples traditions of the neighborhood and the residents of that neighborhood, and is ultimately rooted in the poor people theory we call Poverty Scholarship as well as love, mama earth protection and humility. Most importantly all the peoples involved have to commit to the value of life not profit and that all residents agree to never submit/convert to the lie of "rent" so that a contribution to the costs of un-selling and stewarding Mama Earth will be shared but rent will never be charged and equally importantly the violence of "speculation" and development will never be perpetrated and the state (aka poLice/politricksters) will never be called in to "solve" our problems for us.
After all the spiritual and cultural labor, which is intense, then an entity or group must also focus on a matrix of legal manifestations to protect their small parcel of Mama Earth from the lies put in place to steal, destroy, hoard, extract and profit off of her. These are not easy and will take the work of a papered and a jailhouse/community advocate like so many of us Po folks have to become to survive, all to ensure that as many bases are covered as possible to prevent the future speculation. (A template POOR Magazine poverty skolaz shares with other poor and indigenous groups as a workshop)
And lastly but definitely not leastly includes the tireless hard solidarity work of conscious folks with race, class /formal education privilege, working together, sharing resources, blood-stained dollars and something we at POOR Magazine call "Community Reparations, which we teach on in the Poverty Scholarship textbook and at PeopleSkool, which we share with anyone who is interested in the concept of Radical Redistribution and helped to launch the herstory-making Bank of Come-Unity Reparations
These might seem like utopic ideas or some cutesy hippie notion but they are actually rooted in the shared extreme terror of the state, of the eviction Nation and the impact of removal, homelessness, criminalization, speculation and land/resource theft of poor , Black, Brown, indigenous and working class people that happens Everyday in amerikkka.
While Mama Earth's forests are intentionally burned and un-contacted indigenous peoples are uprooted and evicted from their ancestral lands from India to the Amazon, from East Oakland to Kashmir, please listen when i shout that we are all in "statesofEmergency" so there is truly no More time to keep doing things the same old same old- it is time to lead with decolonial, degentriFUKing values, so we can collectively hold onto, lift up, liberate the small parts of Mama Earth that are still here, for her ancestors and all of us.
Land trust ?
Trust in What?
U see my broken unhoused mind is CONfused by
Grant deeds, mortgages, , Probate and leases
All meant to steal
Mama Earth from mama earths peoples- (excerpt from Liberation Not Trust)
knives made of paper called treaties and LLCCCC’s
Created by colonizer stealers
Bloody history
Led by wite Jesus toting missionaries
Endless theft of mama earth
gilded with false dieties
Claiming discovery of something already inhabited, cared for centuries by Original bodies
527 years later we have indigenous children and elders kept in cages
Eviction of 100 year old African sages and the violence of bulldozers
destroying our homes, stealing our belongings and incarcerating our babies
To contact tiny you can reach her at poormag@gmail.com or go to her website at www.lisatinygraygarcia.com. to listen to Tiny's podcast go to https://www.spreaker.com/user/povertyskola