Weelaunee – the Zone to Defend
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LITTLE TURTLE CARRIES THE WORLD
01 THE OUTSIDE
None of us wanted to wake up on January 18th to the news that a forest defender in Atlanta’s Weelaunee Forest named Tortuguita, known to the Law and its death system as Manuel Teran, had been murdered by police during a morning raid. It was the last thing that we wanted to hear. Tears came to my eyes while reading the news of their killing before their name and picture had been released, and later after seeing an image of them glowing, smiling, luminously full of life I thought of how much more devastated I would feel if I had known Tortuguita, if I had heard their voice, felt the warmth of their presence, knew them as a friend, as a fellow anarchist and a comrade, how utterly broken my heart would be if they were my child, if I had raised them lovingly and spoke to them almost every day on the phone, as their mother Belkis had.
The deeply symbolic nature of Tort’s murder by some trigger-happy cops also immediately struck me, containing a cosmological metaphor illustrating the meaning of our times – a young forest defender named Little Turtle, by all accounts a gentle and dignified soul who took their name to honor the celebrated indigenous Miami warrior who lead a confederacy of Native fighters to victory against the US Army in 1791, born while the Sun passed through the astrological sign Taurus, which is believed by some to be the sign most deeply associated with our home planet, Earth, is shot down in cold blood for blocking the construction of a hated police training facility and defending the land of this continent which is said by many Native peoples to be carried on the back of a turtle through the universe. Turtle Island. Time and the meaning it contains sometimes flows like a river, sometimes encircles us like the tides of an infinite sea, and sometimes it connects us like the web of an invisible spider, the strands of which, when plucked like the strings of a harp, create transcendent and unforeseen resonances. There are no coincidences.
For those of us aligned with the defense of the Weelaunee Forest the grief quickly turned to anger, burning rage, vast and terrible like the black hole said to be at the center of our spinning galaxy. The call went out – they would have wanted fierce and direct action against those responsible. In addition to an unknown number of beautiful public and private memorial rituals in the weeks since then, there has also been a massive wave of rituals of another kind: attacks and acts of sabotage against police infrastructure as well as contractors working with and financial institutions funding Cop City – the forces working to bring their hellish and widely hated training facility into our world. Images and stories of the riot which followed Tort’s murder in Atlanta and the damaged facade of the Atlanta Police Foundation girded our spirits, the widely broadcast picture of a burning police SUV serving as a fitting memorial to the fallen comrade.
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