Datelines
Collett, Anna Sochocky and Catherine Siegner, Fred Turner, Holly Metz, and Merrill
DATE LINES Citizens Organize Against Neo-Nazis COEUR D'ALENE, IDAHO "People keep saying we don't have a problem here, we've taken care of it. But there are Nazis here and they're killing my...
...They're stabbing Native Americans...
...Here I learned first what a community of women could do even when we were called the scum of the Earth...
...I was raised that people should make a change in their world," she explains...
...Before the military crackdown, he tried to buy an airplane ticket home...
...Holly Metz (Holly Metz is a free-lance writer in Hoboken, New Jersey...
...Buy Bonds, Save Rain Forest was the headline on an editorial in The New York Times...
...Despite that risk, though, many Chinese students here are gearing up for a protracted struggle against the Chinese regime...
...Until the military crackdown, Chinese students here could send funds and information directly to student leaders in their homeland...
...Why Should They Die and We Liver BOSTON Just a few months ago, Yu Mao Chun led a quiet life...
...Cut off from their friends and colleagues in Beijing, Chinese students who once rarely left their campuses are now staging demonstrations and frantically trying to spread word of events throughout China...
...As Feng Xu Dong explains, "The massacre has made Chinese students [here] more determined to fight long term...
...Lesbians who do not follow a prescribed mode of behavior "are distanced and told we are not feminists, even though many of us have spent years building the movement...
...To this end, Goitia aids the Bolivian government in overseeing timber cutting in the Chimanes Permanent Forest, the largest of three areas that make up the buffer zone created by the debt deal...
...Our friends [in China] are risking their lives...
...They can no longer work within the government...
...In that way, she suggests, Chinese students here can pick up the struggle for democracy where their colleagues in Beijing were forced to leave off...
...They take it upon themselves to say that those who want to explore another territory, one of sexual complexity and independence, should be silenced...
...It's the same principle, it's the same idea, and as a Native American woman I can really understand this as being part of the same struggle...
...It's crucial for the Chinese people to learn the truth," says Yu Bin, "because the government is continuing to fool the people with their propaganda machine...
...I usually work from the angle of educating about the issue...
...We're risking our futures," Yu Mao Chun says...
...When logging trucks and sawmills started arriving in the Chimanes Forest in 1987, the Indians living peacefully there—an estimated 25,000 people—were shocked...
...When it elects its first national leaders, she says, it will become not only the first nationwide Chinese student organization in the United States that's free of Chinese government control, but also a model for democratic institutions back home...
...Joan Nestle also came out as a lesbian during the 1950s, a time when police vice squads routinely raided New York City's gay bars...
...Bolivian lumber companies have made and broken reforestation pledges in the past...
...Should the hard-liners in China manage to retain power, many Chinese students here say they would have little choice but to stay in America, joining a long line of Chinese intellectuals and politicians who have been exiled abroad...
...Eventually, Feng hopes to bring that sense of unity back to China...
...Joan Nestle considers her writing revelatory—"the breaking open of the earth to see something that needs to be seen...
...If you voice any different opinion than the government's you would certainly be in serious danger...
...But Nestle's critics, who have never agreed to meet her face-to-face, object to her frank depiction of lesbian butch-femme relationships and threaten her with the "enemy list" if she persists in "putting forth in a positive light an exploitative heterosexual way of relating," she says...
...As Feng Xu Dong explains, "At first we felt helpless...
...Insisting that they were acting to "save women," WAP people even testified before former Attorney General Edwin Meese's commission against pornography—right alongside sheriffs upholding their raids on gay bookstores...
...I think it would take a dramatic upheaval in order to get people to stop thinking that law enforcement is protecting us...
...I feel completely outraged and angry...
...Although it claims more Latin Americans on its staff than any other U.S...
...Nonetheless, about 2,000 people took part, marching against racism from Coeur d'Alene to Hayden Lake...
...Some lesbian opponents of pornography want to ban from women's bookstores magazines that feature Nestle's explicitly sexual writing, along with other "unacceptable" contributions...
...The buffer zone begins about a hundred miles west of Trinidad, capital of the northeastern department of Beni...
...Paul...
...Nestle and other students protested at its meetings, cheering those who refused to testify...
...The Moxos say they don't want anything of the kind...
...There, too, she witnessed daring opposition...
...If I wrote about flowers, if I used metaphors, it would be okay," Nestle says, "but I couldn't...
...Although they are entitled to individual plots of land under Bolivia's 1953 land-reform law, the Moxos say they want to collectively own and manage their part of the forest as a common territory to preserve it as an integral ecosystem...
...As a first step, Chinese students in the Boston area have recently chartered a group, United Association of Chinese Students in America...
...According to its brochure, the point is to demonstrate in Bolivia "that conservation can work in harmony with agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and other economic-development projects...
...The government," he explains, "has gone mad...
...The task force, she says, "is a group that's based on the Chamber of Commerce idea and it was simply incapable of moving to the next step of actually dealing with a demonstration against the skinheads...
...Fred Turner (Fred Turner is a Boston correspondent for Pacific News Service, which distributed an earlier version of this story...
...They made, she says, "a clear sexual statement with their style...
...That's not near to the extent, •however, where they've organized against us...
...In its euphoria, the press played up the newly created buffer zone as a wilderness preserve, but that was not what Conservation International had in mind...
...In comments to the Bolivian press earlier this year, Goitia said the Indians want "extensive areas for agricultural production...
...Anna Sochocky and Catherine Siegner (Anna Sochocky and Catherine Siegner are free-lance writers in St...
...The Indians fear the roads carved out by loggers will invite an invasion by land-hungry peasants, who will convert the forest into farms and cattle pastures, as they have in other parts of Bolivia...
...What's wrong with a group of people of color organizing...
...Under its terms, Bolivia agreed to create a forest buffer zone of 3.7 million acres around the Beni Biosphere Reserve, home to thirteen endangered animal species...
...In the "deviant criminalized world of butch-femme lesbians in Village bars," Nestle writes, "I learned how to take brutal insults to personal dignity and keep wanting and loving...
...Knowing the vice squad might arrest them simply for dancing together, these working-class lesbians risked their jobs, daring to claim erotic independence...
...The Chimanes reforestation will begin "this year," according to Roberto Velasco Cuellar, president of the Beni Forestry Chamber of Commerce and owner of a logging company...
...We're talking about apartheid in Idaho," she says, "which is exactly Richard Butler's idea for the Northwest...
...Half Aluni Indian—a landless California tribe—Anderson was raised by her migrant-farmworker father and her cannery-worker mother in Watsonville, California...
...Lesbian Writer Fights Feminist Censors NEW YORK CITY Joan Nestle writes about lesbian life, and members of Women Against Pornography (WAP) picket her speeches and call for censorship of her work...
...That word has a very familiar ring throughout southern Africa...
...They're beating African-Americans to death in the streets throughout the Northwest...
...As a condition for granting the timber concessions in the Chimanes Forest, the government required loggers to reforest, but by mid-May 1989 they had yet to plant a single sapling...
...They want an independent role...
...they can live in shame, or resist: "If desire is a monument to what the reactionary forces in this world would like to destroy, then it can't be a secret any more...
...The work I do is in memory of their courage...
...I tried to work within the framework to get people better educated, but there was a desire, I believe, to keep people a little quiet on the issue...
...Some members of the business community, she adds, cited concerns about a negative effect on tourism and the real-estate market if a demonstration took place...
...Logging is expected to increase again this year...
...I was never really offered a place to do some serious work," she says...
...Now, after learning that two of his friends were killed in Tiananmen Square, Yu believes he "should have been there but wasn't brave enough...
...Motivated by "one prevailing view of how to make the country safe," the House Un-American Activities Committee routed out dissenters...
...For members of the new association, the first goal is to spread word of the massacre and subsequent events in Beijing to other regions of China...
...Those questions weigh particularly heavily on Yu Mao Chun...
...What could we do to fight the regime alone...
...She says watching successful attempts to organize farmworkers showed her it's possible to improve conditions...
...The lumbermen want to do away with everything," says Jose Guasebe, vice president of the Moxos Indian Council...
...Feng Xu Dong, a graduate student in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says many Chinese students here watched news reports of the carnage in Beijing and asked themselves, "Why should they die, why should we live...
...On a recent book tour, Nestle spoke directly with a grass-roots community of lesbian women...
...With students in San Francisco, Chicago, and at least fifteen other cities, they are turning what had been an informal fundraising and information network into an independent, democratic student union much like the one that coordinated the protests in Tiananmen Square...
...Neither the government nor Conservation International had consulted with them before approving the logging...
...The leaders in this community are all white and all male...
...Beyond spreading the word in China, the United Association aims to ease the sense of isolation and powerlessness many Chinese feel here...
...But now the Security Department "might pay special attention to people who try to go back...
...I listen very quietly and carefully to their expressions of pain, fear, or anger," she says, "and I have to pay it respect if I'm going to have any kind of dialogue at all...
...We have lived in these woods since our ancestors," the Moxos wrote to the minister of Indian affairs last October...
...Moreover, with their counterparts at home either dead or in hiding, they are building a network that—if and when they return to China—may allow them to fill the leadership void left by the Tiananmen massacre and the execution of dissidents...
...I am not alone, and I must do what I can...
...And, he adds, "Since we can't have [that independence] at home, we have the right to have it here...
...But on a Sunday in early June, hours after the brutal massacre in Tiananmen Square, Yu Mao Chun found himself marching with 3,000 others through the streets of San Francisco, calling for the overthrow of the Chinese government...
...The Indians should not be left alone and isolated," he says...
...I will never accept it...
...Women have transformed what seems like a totally victimizing situation...
...Instead, upper-class and artistic women became the focus of documented lesbian history...
...A civil-rights activist since her teen-age years, Nestle co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archive in 1972, a depository for the diaries, newsletters, photographs, and paintings, of working-class lesbians-women the burgeoning women's movement had abandoned, she says...
...Since then, lumber companies have been cutting down large numbers of mahogany trees in the forest preserve created by the debt deal, and the Indians who live there are angry...
...Ultimately, Yu Bin hopes the Association may develop into an opposition party— what he calls "a kind of united front for the opposition coalition back in China...
...Last December, they sent a delegation to meet with Bolivia's President Victor Paz Estenssoro and denounce what they call "cultural eth-nocide...
...Goitia says Conservation International's intent is to integrate the Indians into Bolivian society...
...They have volunteered to serve as forest wardens...
...Yu Bin agrees: "As the people at home are silenced, people abroad will become more important in this regard...
...The group saw the forest as a "sustainable resource" to be rationally exploited...
...And the major organizing force of their courage was their sexuality...
...They scorned "the women who looked like men, who were, for most straight people, what lesbians really were...
...Support for the Indians has come from Beni civic groups and from the regional branch of the government forestry agency, but the lumber companies say they are determined to keep what the government has granted them...
...CINAR's future agenda, she says, will involve education on the neo-Nazi threat and attempts to heal the apparent split in approaches to it by progressive groups...
...Politically," she says, "the setting is one that will not save women, and in fact will do terrible damage to sexual minorities...
...Instead, the group has proposed that the Indians be given separate areas forming an "archipelago" within the Chimanes Forest...
...Yu Bin explains that most Chinese students believe the Chinese government's Security Department, which he compares to the Soviet KGB, maintains a special task force to monitor students abroad...
...But fine woods are rapidly disappearing into the band saws of the nation's 175 lumber companies...
...Luis Goitia, who supervises Conservation International's forestry projects in Bolivia, says the group wants "to take advantage of the forest's resources without destroying them...
...Intellectuals," he says, "have a social responsibility...
...Merrill Collett (Merrill Collett is a free-lance writer based in Caracas, Venezuela...
...Loggers went right to work, cutting down about 2,500 mahogany trees in 1987 and nearly twice that many in 1988...
...The Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, for example, argued against a direct face-off with the neo-Nazis because they feared giving Butler more publicity, says Anderson, who sits on its board of directors...
...They are all a part of the business community and all are from positions of power...
...The wood companies are going to have to give up some of the land conceded to them...
...environmental organization, Conservation International hasn't demonstrated any special sympathy for Indians, whom it tends to see as despoilers of the forest's valuable resources...
...Debt Deal Stacked Against Indians TRINIDAD, BOLIVIA Amid all the bad news about Latin America's foreign debt, the announcement two years ago that Bolivia was swapping "debt for nature" seemed too good to be true...
...Of the three Indian groups affected, the Moxos people have the longest history of contact with white society, and they are leading the resistance to the logging...
...But his fear was more than justified, according to Yu Bin, a Stanford Ph.D...
...Their frenzied activity is driven, in part, by survivors' guilt...
...But since then, most student leaders in Beijing have been killed or have gone underground...
...candidate in political science and a member of the State Council's prestigious Institute of International Relations...
...others spoke out against her defense of graphic sexual material...
...While the students were occupying Tiananmen Square, that task force seemed at worst a distant threat, says Yu Bin...
...Mahogany has been nearly exterminated in the department of Santa Cruz, causing lumber companies to move north to Beni...
...I share their sense of being constantly assaulted in certain ways...
...Threatened with harassment by heterosexuals and sometimes shunned by assimilated gays, butch-femme lesbians refused to deny their sexuality...
...In return, the Washington-based group Conservation International bought up $650,000 of the Bolivian debt and turned it over to the government...
...The project has been granted $1.2 million by the International Tropical Timber Organization, a global organization of lumber buyers and sellers...
...press as a simultaneous solution to Latin America's debt and ecology problems...
...But for now, Yu Bin, like Chinese students across America, can only speculate on his future role at home...
...We have learned to care for and maintain its ecology because we know it guarantees our existence...
...Anderson organized the coalition after getting fed up with the failure of local establishment groups to confront the Aryan Nation...
...Her coalition, formed in response to the increasingly public profile of Richard Butler's ten-acre Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, a resort town seven miles north Lisa Anderson wants to stop white supremacists from establishing apartheid in the Pacific Northwest...
...In her essay "My History with Censorship," the forty-nine-year-old writer recalls the state's tools of repression during those times...
...For Yu, as for the more than 25,000 other mainland Chinese studying in America, the military crackdown in Beijing marks both a personal and political turning point...
...Lumber is a booming business in Bolivia, which has a forest area the size of France...
...Conservation International has lined up with the lumber companies in opposing the Indians' demand for a single, unified territory...
...We have to work together...
...But in Coeur d'Alene, local police and the FBI are paying a great deal of attention to Anderson's coalition...
...He was stopped, he says, by "a fear of not coming back...
...And local officials complain about the expenses incurred to "protect" the protesters at the march...
...She also thinks it kept some people from getting involved in a protest march the coalition sponsored in April...
...They faced the forces of the state in the most vivid and concrete way," Nestle recalls...
...The semi-nomadic Moxos have banded together in their first-ever centralized organization to demand legal title to 500,000 acres in the Chimanes Forest...
...The antipornography movement is helping to create a new McCarthy period in the lesbian community," Nestle writes in A Restricted Country, her 1987 collection of theoretical essays, erotic poetry, and fiction...
...It's not the lumber we're fighting for, but the territory," says Moxos leader Jose Guasebe...
...We have to listen more carefully...
...What seems to anger Nestle most about feminist anti-pornographers is their unwillingness to recognize that women have varied experiences of both sexual danger and sexual celebration...
...During one of the hearings, Nestle and eight other women sat in the front row wearing signs around their necks reading censored...
...One WAP associate traveled to Queens College, where Nestle has taught English for more than two decades, to "warn" students and professors about the writer's work...
...But there are Nazis here and they're killing my people," says Lisa Anderson...
...She fears these women will be exiled from their own communities, then served up for state punishment like the labor organizers and social activists of the 1950s—convicted, Nestle says, "by innuendo, association, and labeling...
...As a graduate student in history at the University of California, Berkeley, he read for his thesis and divided his time between the classroom and the library...
...Now it begins to look as if it was...
...As she sees it, when a way of loving is censored, its participants are put beyond the pale...
...At the time the debt-for-nature swap was signed, Maria Teresa Ortiz, the group's program director for Peru and Bolivia, was reported to say one of the goals was to teach the Indians who live in the forest how to preserve it...
...Neo-Nazi groups want to forge a "white homeland" in the northern panhandle of Idaho, but they are meeting visible resistance from a progressive coalition headed by Anderson, a woman of Native American ancestry...
...That question needs to be asked publicly...
...But she adds, "In the face of all this, women have found ways to be sexual that I don't believe is total victimization...
...The innovative agreement, signed in Washington in July 1987, was praised by the U.S...
...Many of her feminist opponents also come from the lesbian community...
...The country is losing its forests at a rate of 500,000 acres a year, according to a 1988 government study...
...The coalition also plans actions through a network set up among those in attendance at the April march—about half of whom were local, with the rest coming from Seattle, Portland, and Missoula, Montana...
...and I don't agree with giving them permission for that...
...of Coeur d'Alene, tries to identify the fight against the Aryan Nation with the black liberation movement in southern Africa...
...The founder of Citizens for Nonviolent Action Against Racism (CINAR), she believes people should openly challenge the white-supremacist groups...
...Two months before the deal was signed, the government divided up the Chimanes Forest into seven logging concessions...
...There was no "movement" to back them up...
...The swap was supposed to reduce Bolivia's $4 billion debt and, in the process, protect Amazon Indians and preserve a fragile rain forest...
...They don't want to leave a single tree...
...They [local and Federal law-enforcement officials] are protecting them in a way that gives the neo-Nazis tacit acceptance," says Anderson...
...Some expressed gratitude to the writer for "breaking silences...
...The notion that power "trickles down," Lisa Anderson says, must lose ground to the idea of upeople pushing up...
Vol. 53 • August 1989 • No. 8
