Written by: Majority World Internationalist Solidarity Coordinating Council of Communities Of Resistance (MWISCCCOR)
531 years since the war against our peoples and Mother Earth commenced, we honour our ancestors, our martyrs and all those that resist to defend life. We honour them today because we recognise that our lives are the fruits of their resistance and evidence that this barbaric genocidal mission is not stronger than our peoples’ love for life.
Today, what we are witnessing is a process of reparations unfold as colonised communities across the world are being compelled into resistance. Freedom fighting forces like those in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso are taking back their lands from French imperialism; Palestinians in Gaza are struggling for self determination; the Otomi community in Mexico City mark three years occupying the National Institute of Indigenous People, transforming it into a space that serves the people; Pueblos Unidos of the Cholulteca Region closed down transnational Bonafont-Danone water bottling factory as they exerted their own peoples’ justice process; indigenous nations like the Gbetowo and their Ablodedunovisiha organisational Spearhead in West Afrika, the Mossi-Gur, the Hausa in the Sahel of Afrika, the Ovaherero in Southern Afrika and the Mapuche in southern Abya Yala are pushing for plurinational indigenous self-governance and challenging the colonial borders that were imposed upon them; organizations like the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) and the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) are demonstrating what it means to build up peoples’ institutions that are based upon ancestral forms of organization; peoples’ in Ayti, Peru and Pakistan have risen up in defence of true peoples’ democratic process, rejecting western imperialist intervention and colonial constitutions; Afrikan heritage communities in the diaspora are reclaiming their Afrikan stories of resistance like the Panteras Prietas are doing in Palenque de Bioho; indigenous and grassroot resistance in Colombia mobilised to secure the election of their first left-wing government in 200 years and indigenous communities are restituting ancestral knowledges in contested spaces like the University of Newcastle, Australia and through community educational institutions like Sankofakuumba, Vidya Ghor and the Yachay Wasi. Each of these wins are spreading ripples into the hearts and minds of colonised peoples globally and with them a process of self-repair is being enacted as our bodies begin to feel that our emancipation and liberation from this decadent system that destroys all life and that subdues our peoples to a white supremacist system of domination, is near.
We are clear that leadership comes from the people and that as a people we have the capacity to transform our material conditions, as well as govern ourselves under our own peoples’ institutions in line with our own ancestral traditions and customs. In all of our territories we are developing programs to defend our Peoples’ and Mother Earth rights: including our right to life, to self determination, and to sovereignty.
Now we must begin to glocalise these processes, through the intercommunity grassroots effort to build up the UbuntuPachaVidya Peoples’ Communiversity of Planet Repairs Action Learning (UPCOPRAL), one of the main initiatives of MWISCCCOR. The UPCOPRAL seeks to facilitate the interconnection of communities of resistance globally so that processes of education for liberation can be realised cross continentally and so that we can develop understandings of our different contexts and stages of struggle in order to coordinate and harmonise shared strategies and tactics towards the social and national liberations of all our colonised communities and nations against all forms of colonialism, imperialism, genocide and ecocide
This process of true internationalist power building begins with us learning each other's names, faces and process of resistance. For example we should know the names of our different political prisoners like: Mumia Abu Jamal, Ruchell Magee and Leonard Peltier in the USA; Amit Chakrabarty in India; Manuel Gomez, Walid Daqqah, Michael Amushelelo in Namibia, Saan Dekuwine, Kodzo Gameli, Ben Agordzor, Johannes Zikpi and Donya Kafui Ezor in Ghana and Julian Assange as well as our martyrs like Adan Linares Silverio, Fredy Campos, and our ancestors like Kwame Nkrumah and Che Guevara.
And we should also be holding up freedom fighters from other communities, as our own, so that governments and corporations know that there will be repercussions from communities everywhere if they touch one of us anywhere.
In our communities, schools, universities and homes we should have the banners and symbols of different communities of resistance on our walls and we should be recognising and celebrating our different advances cross continentally. Our children should be learning songs of resistance from other communities in their schools and we should be promoting our children to share correspondence with children in other communities of resistance. We must rebuild internationalist networks and institutions that are able to unify our peoples’ power throughout the global majority and re-member that our people have a history of unity and that we are all one same humanity struggling for a world in which all life can flourish - a multipolar world of global justice also known by Afrikan communities as Ubuntudunia or as the Zapatistas say, a world in which many worlds fit.
The contradictions of this imperialist system are everyday widening, the conditions of our peoples everyday are becoming more dire and fascism and ecofascism are on the rise but with every attack that imperialism wages, we are only gaining more consciousness. At this stage it is clear that our resistance is inevitable and united our victory is too.
Indigenous Resistance is leading this direction and we have a duty to our ancestors and to our future generations to be their hearts and minds and to be their arms and legs and continue to walk together, finding our different brothers, sisters and siblings across the world that are also taking up this direction and building peoples reparations for Planet Repairs as they struggle for life and a just peace in their territories.
Today we do not remember the colonisers, we remember our ancestors. Those who struggle for life never die. The seeds that our martyrs have left will bloom and the flowers of liberation will be our vengeance.
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