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Environmentalism
Tre Arrow’s bow to justice
A few figs versus the us military industrial complex
Tavis W Dodds
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My first impression of Tre Arrow is that prison is harder on some people than others: his fingernails have hardly grown back after having fasted for nearly two months, and his frame seems whittled away from how he looks in the video footage of him on the tiny ledge of a building he scaled and occupied for several days.
His eyes are slightly bloodshot and more protruded than I’d seen in photographs, but even on this first impression I can tell immediately from his eyes that they have not yet broken his spirit of defiance against injustice and impression, even here in Victoria BC’s Wilkinson Road Penitentiary.
That Arrow should starve nearly three years in a Canadian prison while fighting extradition to the US is due, in part, to his dedication to a whole-foods diet in which no food is eaten when any plant or animal was harmed in the production of the food, which leaves only fruits and some vegetables like leafy greens gathered from the outside of the plant.
Feed him
At one point in which Arrow’s diet threatened to kill him, doctors made the unprecedented demand that Corrections Canada allow Arrow to have the food that he needs. Since that point, Arrow’s supporters have been allowed to bring food into the prison. Arrow leans over into the plexiglass that separates us in our little visiting cage and says into his phone “If you do one thing for my campaign and one thing only, pick figs.”
And so I find myself picking figs and plums from trees in Goldstream Park, musing about the bizarre injustices in the case of Tre Arrow versus imperialist anti-terrorism.
Once described by Rolling Stone Magazine as “the rock star of environmental activism,” Arrow spent several weeks at the top of the FBI’s most-wanted list, due to accusations that he was involved in blowing up two logging trucks, a charge he denies but for which he is facing a life sentence if US district attorneys have their way. The only evidence against Arrow is the testimony of two others charged with the damage to the trucks. The three accused were subjected to twenty-four hour FBI interrogations, and the other two accused had their sentences reduced by over eighty percent after their testimonies were made against Arrow.
While I was waiting to get into the prison I asked to speak to the prison chaplain who told me that there was no way that he could imagine that Arrow could be guilty of the crimes he’s accused of. “His supporters,” he told me, “consider him a political prisoner.”
Few are aware that when the US enacted its Patriot Act, it was used first against US citizens, so-called “domestic terrorists” or “eco-terrorists,” namely those protesting against the logging of old-growth trees in Oregon’s rainforests. It is a piece of US history that has come to be referred to as the Green Scare. Many of those accused of terrorism fled from authorities and have been turning up all over the continent ever since.
Tre Arrow fled to Canada. He spent time in PEI and saw more of Canada than many Canadians ever do, finally settling in BC. After evading the FBI for years, Arrow was apprehended by a Canadian Tire security guard after he tried to steal bolt cutters to get food out of a locked dumpster. The security guard collected a $40,000 US reward from the FBI.
Picking figs for justice
Picking figs may seem to be a feeble action against such a single-minded behemoth as today’s US military industrial complex. Every soldier fleeing US imperialism has so far been refused sanctuary in Canada, a move that ignores our heritage of having welcomed draft dodgers during the Vietnam War. When Mark Emery was arrested for selling mail-order seeds to Americans, he was arrested in Canada by US agents. All these political prisoners must fight legal battles in a biased court, and Canadians are left with a nagging question: just how much of Canadian sovereignty is a myth?
When I return home with my boxes of figs and plums I call the number of the Tre Arrow defence team, and they tell me to leave the fruit outside my house the next morning. A hippie-looking guy on a bicycle with a trailer comes by and loads the fruit onto his heaping stack of fruit on its way to jail. It’s almost as if those trees are reaching through the bars, the roots slowly growing through the walls, making slow cracks in the foundation of oppression.
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