on the cover / By Malcolm Terence

Klamath: Direct Action!

Before eating, a blessing was recited in Yurok language, and the students, exhausted from a day of knot tying and rope climbing, settled into their tables. They traded war stories of the demonstrations they had attended and the room filled with the geography of Klamath country and beyond. If there were tensions between the members of different tribes or between Indians and non-Indians, they were not in evidence. Children played and laughed. A few of them worked intently to complete the picket signs they had begun in the afternoon. There were babies and they were passed from lap to lap.

A film was shown about the tribal campaigns over the Go-Road and at Offield Mountain and when footage came on of Leaf Hillman in his teens, the crowd chuckled. There was a short discussion of whether to continue into the night and KJC veterans asked for a thumbs-up/thumbs-down vote. Time to quit won by a landslide. Tree-climb school is exhausting stuff.

Day three began with a breakfast of biscuits and gravy and juicy steaks. There was enough for seconds but the diner might not want that extra load climbing up a tall Douglas fir.

Farmer, the guest lecturer, started a discussion of blocking roads including stick-figure drawings on a flip chart of structures with varying levels of sophistication. The audience sat in rapt attention as he spoke.

One wall of slash is okay as a road block, he said, but is that as good as strewing miles of a road with debris? “Loggers don’t like driving two miles an hour clearing a road,” he said. “Or they bring in the road grader and then maybe you can block the road with bodies. So the grader operator has to get out of the grader and yell, ‘Hey, you fucking hippies. Get out of the way.’”

He discussed communications used in past actions. A red alert, for instance, meant sheriff deputies were on the way “or some psycho vigilante.”

He touched on pulling surveyors’ stakes and flags and painting over logging marks but reminded his class that some activities are against the law. “Earth First!,” he said, “doesn’t do property damage.” And he shrugged.

Farmer, who confesses that even that invented name has become too well known for his comfort, said that there would be a role play for confronting police and practice structure building later but said it was often useful, even in civil disobedience actions, to avoid arrest. “Some people call it cat-and mouse,” he said. “I call it outreach.”

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