“Half of recent US inflation due to high corporate profits, report finds” - That’s one of the many headlines which have noted the skyrocketing cost of living for US consumers since the 2020 pandemic. Utilities, gas, and other basic necessities have all massively increased in price since 2020. Since 2022 the average American pays 25% more for groceries alone. Of course most workers don’t need a headline or a statistic to tell them the obvious - their ability to live an affordable, prosperous, and dignified life has been hugely eroded in recent years. One of the areas worst hit by this ‘greedflation’ is that of housing. Already the largest single expense for the average American, Idaho workers are especially hard hit as places like Boise and Idaho Falls see record growth, and multinational corporations rush in to snap up properties expected to earn them a profit.

The burden of corporate profiteering is all too real for tenants at the 208 Apartments in downtown Boise. The 208 was recently purchased by Primrose Morse, LLC., a massive corporation based in California. Primrose wasted no time in exploiting their new property: raising rent by 25%, increasing laundry and parking fees, and issuing eviction threats to tenants on the strictest basis possible. No doubt the executives at Primrose expected the 208 tenants to quietly continue to fork over their paychecks to line their own pockets. Unfortunately for them that has not been the case.

Since March tenants at the 208 have been fighting back. Working to organize a tenants’ union, Boise DSA members have been gathering complaints from residents in order to eventually present management (Redstone Residential, Inc.) with demands. Potential demands by tenants include: having management fulfill maintenance requests in a timely manner, improved garbage disposal, and better access to utilities. Black mold is nearly universal, and in the past management has simply painted over black mold when reported. Other tenants do not have drinkable water and have had heater repairs delayed for months into the winter. Management has consistently denied or delayed their response to these problems, but has not hesitated to pressure tenants to renew their leases up to 8 months in advance of termination dates. Tenants are fed up and ready to fight back!

Efforts to resist the exploitation of working tenants at the 208 have just begun to pick up steam. While anger with Primrose and Redstone Residential is near universal, the success of the union in demanding better housing conditions and affordability is not guaranteed. The organizing committee of the 208 Tenants’ Union will fight for these demands no matter what happens, but the difficulties of fighting against management have demonstrated how badly Idahoans need an organized tenant class across the state. As the only existing tenants’ union in Idaho, we are limited in how much pressure we can bring to bear against our corporate landlords.

If more tenants organize in Boise and across Idaho our collective power can grow exponentially. By meeting and sharing problems with fellow tenants we can build a real community of tenants and renters in Idaho, a community which will have the strength to stand up and fight back against housing corporations endlessly working to take more and give less. With enough people fighting together we can build an Idaho with affordable, dignified, and secure housing for all!

If you or someone you know is interested in organizing a tenants’ union contact us at organize208@gmail.com or @organize.208

Hello readers, I am writing again about the housing struggle in Boise. As each successive generation becomes more unlikely to ever afford a house, let alone rent an apartment, I find it eternally pressing.

Recently, our state passed HB 545 ending section 8 housing regulations which mandated an amount of housing go to vouchers in the low income program. In addition, the bill also ends the $30 cap on application fees, which means landlords are more capable of accepting applications from people they have little intention of taking as tenants in order to make a quick buck. Meanwhile, I myself have known several people who have had to accept rent assistance from the state. To clarify, all landlords are no longer mandated to comply with any programs regulating how they price their rental properties, there will be no application fee caps, and rental properties that are condemned will no longer require the landlord to return the deposit to tenants.

It is worth noting that there is a sizable population in this state which can hardly afford rentals. The burden continues to get placed on everyone who pays taxes, although our tax rate is flat. This is patently bourgeois in every conceivable manner. First, the flat tax disproportionately affects the poorest earners, where 30% of 1,000 dollars may be less than 30% of 100,000 dollars, but the net is that one person has 700 dollars after taxes and the other 70,000. Second, the bill’s language explicitly states that this deregulation applies to “residential property” owners. Who are those people, exactly?

From the “mom and pop landlord” (and why should we care if the landlords are big or small, self-made or not?) to the massive complexes such as mine, we have a broad class of landlords who control an ever-increasing amount of the available housing in Boise. Now, with section 8 vouchers effectively optional, landlords can choose their profit margins over actually housing people, further proving that they do not provide anything of value so much as control it, and leverage it against everybody else. Why would a landlord choose section 8 housing besides maybe the opportunistic landlord looking to get “the rest of potential renters?” Given the cost of living in Boise being 5% higher than the national average, with groceries being more expensive than average and houses running for half a million, this legislation is sure to cause a spike in homelessness and also of people leaving the state. Further complicating things is the opportunism of real estate companies and landlords in a time when the housing supply needs to add ~2800 houses in order to meet the demand, and 2000 of those need to be affordable for people who can’t pay more than $600 for rent. Forget “political refugees” (i.e. affluent out-of-staters coming in to save money and finally start their own businesses,) we’re going to have “economic refugees.”

Why does it seem like our legislators are better at passing bills depriving people of housing, stripping trans people of basic dignities, or general culture wars/identity politics, than they are at fixing all the roads, ending the grocery tax, or simply incentivizing working people to even stay here? I predict Idaho becoming a state with one of the lowest working class populations over the next few decades, and what reason do I have not to? Just two years ago I got a job that started me at 8 dollars an hour. With my first promotion, it only went up by two dollars. When rent is around 1000 dollars a month around the valley? I can’t be expected to want to remain in this state — and there are thousands like me.

It’s ironic that people don’t want Idaho to become “another California,” while our legislators actively try to turn this state into a city like Anaheim, which should be known not just for attractions like Disneyland, but also a white, upper class commune resulting from mid-to-late 20th century white flights out of the Deep South.

But I do not mean to instill feelings of hopelessness in the readers, so much as just anger. Thankfully, there are plenty of things we working Idahoans can do collectively — but nothing is ever as easy as just doing it. To this point, might I recommend not merely “voting correctly,” but actually taking matters into our own hands through initiatives like a tenants’ union.

The purpose of the tenants’ union is to take a medium-to-large scale rental property and organize the majority of tenants to demand improved amenities and resist rent increases, which consistently reduces costs of rent. Naturally, the landlords would oppose this wholesale. Why provide things like actually good Internet (or Internet at all,) gas and electric, or even affordable housing when they can keep twisting the knife so they can afford all their pleasures you should be able to afford, all while giving you a shabby box with few amenities to live in? Anyone (and I mean possibly even Joe Normal next door) with a good credit score can take out a loan to acquire a small property and take advantage of tenants, and some even make enough money from this that they can become larger scale landlords. They feed on your labor, and the biggest benefit they can sell you is not having a mortgage, because if you can’t afford the housing, you are simply evicted with haste.

In this capitalist world, the landlord brings less value to the table than even the employer who squanders the workplace. Collectively, as all employers own the workplaces, so too do the landlords have a monopoly on rentals. Publicly-owned housing would solve so many problems and yet we do not have it, because the [establishment] politicians are not our friends and would rather stack a bunch of boulders at the Rhodes Skate Park overpass than house the increasing homeless population.

When the politicians says “property owners” or even something as clear as “landlords,” you should take what they says seriously, because they are not talking about your friend, but the tick that sucks off some of your life force in exchange for you not freezing during the winter. Some consolation prize that is!

Evict the landlords, consider getting into touch with myself or others actively trying to organize tenant unions at their apartment complexes, and may the fight for the world that we built end with it actually belonging to us.

In late March and early April, governor Brad Little signed into law three bills, all of which directly legislate and dictate the ways that transgender Idahoans are able to live their lives.

H.B. 421 redefines ‘men’ and ‘women’ as biological facts, that men are those who produce or should be able to produce sperm, that women are those who produce or should be able to produce eggs, and that any intersex person also fits into one of those categories as assigned by their doctors, regardless of the chromosomes that person has. It also equates gender with sex, defining them as one and the same, a definition that goes completely against the current scientific consensus.

H.B. 538 allows the discrimination of trans individuals by not compelling governmental (including teachers in public schools) workers to use pronouns or language that contradicts someone’s assigned gender at birth.

H.B. 668 stops gender affirming care, which is life saving in some cases, from being covered by Medicaid. Saga Christian, a trans woman from Caldwell, told the Idaho Capital Sun that had she not started utilizing gender affirming care, she would’ve been found “as a suicide statistic.”

As well as those recently passed into law, H.B. 71 was passed in April of last year bans care, medication, and surgery for transgender youth. Despite an ongoing suit in the Supreme Court against the state of Idaho, this law was allowed by the Court to go into effect.

The question then is how does this affect the trans community and individuals of Idaho? To answer this I conducted an anonymous survey to gauge not only how legislation would hurt trans individuals, but also the experiences in general of living in Idaho. Idaho is consistently rated by the ACLU and other sources as a high-risk state to live in for transgender adults, and actively dangerous to live in for transgender youth.

The survey respondents were in total thirteen people, ranging in location from Boise and Nampa to Pocatello and Cottonwood. Those who filled out the survey listed their gender identities as trans women, men, agender, nonbinary, and “none”.

It must be stated that this survey was only able to cover gender identity as a metric. Race and class are both incredibly impactful with how someone is treated in the United States, and one cannot separate aspects of class when talking about gender just as one cannot separate aspects of class when talking about race.

All participants rated on a five point scale the danger of living as a trans person in this state, with five being the safest. Most respondents rated Idaho a three, citing fears like not knowing if spaces “are actually safe or not”, facing harassment if they are not viewed as cis-passing, and that the state itself is “trying to systematically destroy us.”

When asked about their political orientations, all participants were decidedly left with their politics. Political ideologies ranged from “Marxist”, “anarchist” and “communist” to “Green Party”, “leftist” and “democratic socialist”.

The idea of being trans also cannot be removed from politics, as one participant stated, “being trans itself is a radical act.” And it is - transness is first and foremost a recognition that the system we are born into is not only imperfect but systemically flawed. American culture at large and capitalism specifically is a system of rigid binaries and biological essentialism that demands to be perpetuated and have those binaries placed onto all people at birth. Being trans then is the rejection of that system entirely. Transness lies within the framework that, to make the world better, to make your body better, is to destroy the notions that we come to accept as normal and unable to be changed.

Other answers included that “I have to be leftist to fight for my right to be alive”, that “it’s easy to recognize that me and my politics have to be interconnected” and that leftism is “more than performative politics. It’s about taking action.”

The legislation that was recently passed then would impact not only trans people in Idaho, but all vulnerable communities susceptible to discrimination and hate. This legislation makes it so that it’s harder for those communities to get “access to care that I have desperately wanted my entire life [...] a bill like H.B. 668 makes that dream feel like I may never grasp it”, to make it “harder to work, live, and reside in Idaho” and to be “forced back into the closet.” This legislation not only allows for discrimination, but signs it into law, making underrepresented people and groups that much less represented, signing away not only their rights but their personhood as well.

There are spaces, though imperfect, spaces for trans people to come together in community and fight for a world that takes care of them. Places like “leftist organizations such as the YDSA [Young Democratic Socialists of America] and DSA [Democratic Socialists of America]”, “DIY music scenes” and online spaces.

This survey shows that the problems of trans people in this country, the unique hardships they face, are consistently under attack by those in power. For a liberated working class, there must also be a liberation of all unique sectors of it. And the liberation of trans people begins in community organizations like the Boise DSA and YDSA at Boise State.

It is vital that an ideological throughline for liberation be found within the community, and to stand forever with all those oppressed by the parasitic capitalist class to work and fight together for a world worth living in.

We all seem to understand intuitively that the government doesn’t work for us. Whether one is a warehouse worker like myself, a waiter, or an office worker, we all have this in common: the feeling that our "leaders" don't give a damn what we want or need.

Sure once every four years you’ll go vote Red or Blue but what good has that ever done you? If the Republicans really gave a damn about your rights to bear arms they wouldn’t’ve championed the 1994 gun ban. At two former Republican presidents’ urging they banned many semi-automatic firearms at the federal level for ten years. Likewise, if the Democrats really cared about abortion rights wouldn't they have codified it when they had the power to do so? Of course not! This is a well choreographed dance with each political pirouette designed to keep you focused on hating anyone in the opposite colored shirt. When was the last time either of these parties, composed nearly exclusively of Ivy League nepo-babies, has done a damn thing for the common man? Increasing the minimum wage in pace with inflation for example would drive other employers, like yours, to increase their wages likewise.

Workers have precious little political power in this country; we are told to vote once every four years for the color of the next swindler’s tie and be done with it. And what else can we do when things are as tough as they are for the average man? Who’s got the time to get politically active when you’re struggling to feed your family?

That's where the struggle for workers' rights comes in. We endeavor to enfranchise the working class and make policy not on the basis of what is most profitable but instead on the basis of what needs done for the average citizen. We endeavor to be citizens, in the real sense, with power over our government and more importantly power over our future, to be more than just subjects under an aristocracy! After all, it was over nearly the same conditions that the American Revolution was fought in. No taxation without representation? Of course! But what representation do we have now?

Some, understandably, believe the system is broken, but the reality of the matter is that the system is working exactly as intended. From the ground up the State apparatus is designed to keep power AWAY from you and your peers! We toil away keeping the country running while the parasites on top take the lion's share of our labor, sitting in their ivory tower and occasionally feigning interest in our well being to curry votes to maintain their positions of power. So what is there to do?

Join a union!

Unions are the most powerful tool we have for both political potency and financial security. On average union wages are 15 percent higher than comparable non-union jobs. That coupled with better job security and more paid leave is reason enough to start or join one. However, there's an even greater reason, bigger than all of us as individuals: the ability for members of the working class to bargain as a collective and demand not beg, that our conditions be improved. It's only thanks to unions that we have weekends, an 8 hour work day as opposed to 12+, sick leave, paid vacation, and many other labor rights we take for granted. And of course, there are some who have been burned by unions in the past, but this is not an enduring trait of unions' nature, rather the opposite; it is a consequence of the worker being at the mercy of union bureaucrats and of reduction of workers' voice in unions overall. Both are antithetical to labor unions’ explicit goals. We must stand firmly against any structure which acts against the enfranchisement of the worker.

The dictatorship of the elite must be replaced with true democracy, true power for the working class. It’s only by upsetting this unjust balance of power that we can truly be secure in our workplaces and in our nation's future. It’s only by throwing the bosses off our backs that we can be our own leaders and assume our proper place as the rightful stewards of this American experiment which has so regrettably fallen into disrepair. We have the tools to remake it, to construct a country where each and every one of us truly has liberty and justice delivered to us, by us.

We built this country and it’s only fair that we own it, don’t you think?

May Day has been the day of celebration globally for the class which creates all that is necessary to live and to live well, the working class. It is celebrated in more than 140 countries and territories around the world on May 1 or the first Monday in May as a show of international worker solidarity. Although the significance of this day traces its origin to an event in this country, it has been largely ignored here in the United States.

On Saturday, May 1, 1886, thousands of workers around the United States went on strike and marched under the slogan "Eight Hours for work. Eight hours for rest. Eight hours for what we will." Nearly half a million workers from Chicago to New York, to Milwaukee to Detroit marched in solidarity. In Chicago, this is often remembered as leading to the infamous Haymarket Affair in which a bombing took place at a labor demonstration four days later, May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois. Eight workers would be framed and convicted of conspiracy though only two of the eight were even at the Haymarket at the time and the two could not even be connected to the throwing of the bomb. Seven were sentenced to death and one to a term of 15 years in prison. Eventually four were hanged on November 11, 1887, one committed suicide while in prison and the remaining three would remain wrongfully convicted until their pardon in 1893. Just before his execution, August Spies, one of the convicted men, cried out the famous words: "There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today."

In commemoration of the general strike and those workers targeted and imprisoned, worker organizations and trade unions demonstrate on the First of May for the material demands of the working class, the demand for a living wage, a respectable and decent job, and a Democratic way of life which has shown to be unattainable under the rule of landlords, bankers and bosses embodied within the economic system we live in.

U.S. resistance to celebrate International Workers' Day in May stems from a resistance to emboldening worldwide working-class unity. In his book, The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day, British labor historian Peter Linebaugh states "The ruling class did not want to have a very active labor force connected internationally … The principle of national patriotism was used against the principle of working-class unity or trade union unity."

In efforts to encourage working people to forget this history President Grover Cleveland signed a law making the first Monday in September of each year a national holiday to remove any association of the original May Day. Much later in 1958 President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared May 1 "Law Day" dedicated to the principles of law and order, and in 2021 President Joe Biden declared May 1st "Loyalty Day" further burying the history of the working people in their struggle.

In the global south, May Day celebrations also commemorate anti-colonial/pro-democracy struggles associated with the nation’s history. In South Africa, the public holiday has come to signify not only the sacrifices made on the long road toward building worker power, but also the bitter battle against Apartheid in which trade and labor unions played a key role. Continuing with this tradition, this year on May day, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa released a statement calling on workers around the world to mobilize for Palestine. “The working class are the creators of wealth, and it is the united power of the working class that has the power to overthrow hateful, brutal regimes like Apartheid Israel … On this Workers Day, we call on workers of the world to unite in defense of Palestine so that its people can be free, from the river, to the sea!”

It is quite remarkable that a spark lit by the oppression of workers in Chicago more than a century ago continues to be a source of inspiration for workers globally towards building worker power.

Today there appears to be a great amount of anxiety stemming from the rising cost of living. While most people have been hanging on for the last few years, and I know very well people are hanging on and still finding places to rent at or under 500 dollars a month, this will soon not be the case. From the city to the countryside, there seems to be a general sense that the working class will be gradually emptied out of the area and replaced by upper middle-class individuals that move from out of State.

This environment has produced interesting sentiments in the cities and the countryside. In the cities there are young middle class people who don't see a future here in Idaho and plan to run away to another state. For the working class in the cities, those that cannot afford the mentality of “escape-ism,” the prevailing sentiments have been hopelessness for some, anger for many, and annoyance for all. In more rural areas we see a common distaste for real estate agents. There are a great number of people there who believe, and it is hard to blame them for believing, that real estate agents are going where money/demand is: marketing almost exclusively to wealthy and out of state individuals, and leaving locals behind. In the rural areas one might have heard the whispers of laws restricting commissions of real estate agents in the state, many of these whispers have great distortions within their contents, but the feeling that something is wrong is more than observable.

On top of all of this, trust in the current political institutions and the two political parties are so remarkably low that statisticians are having a field day with “all time” or “ever before” types of headlines. Pew Research has been talking about “historic lows” with their statistics that, according to them, demonstrate that Americans have less trust in the Government today than they did during the Vietnam War. While partisan hostility has grown between Democrats and Republicans, apparently between 3-4/10 Americans do not feel well-represented by either party and see both quite negatively. “63% of Americans say they are dissatisfied with the candidates who have emerged so far,” and this does seem to line up with the uncommitted votes cast in the Presidential primary and Reuters polls that demonstrate that regardless of race, gender, and age everybody is unhappy. At least on paper, many Idahoans do not affiliate with either Party. According to the Idaho Secretary of State’s office, not only a mere 23.1% of the voting age population actually voting in local elections, as of January 2020, out of 872,794 registered Idaho voters, 308,784 are unaffiliated to any party. According to the Idaho Secretary of State’s office, the largest block of registered voters are Republicans at a little over 400,000, then in second place, unaffiliated voters, and in third place is the Democratic party at 112,000.

This means, to put it frankly, not even half of the population of the City of Boise, considered a liberal bastion within Idaho, are registered Democrats.

Shedding the exhausting baggage of the two Parties is a crucial move in Idaho to reach an ever-growing trend within the United States of dissatisfaction. With dissatisfaction, there also comes exhaustion with both the Left and Right. While working people juggle ever busier schedules, the absurd politics of democrats have been on the decline. At the same time, the insane policies of the right have effectively brought government bureaucracy into our lives in ways never before imaginable. The State Government is now obsessed with questions of the books your children can read, words your children can say, and bathrooms your children can use. What was before The old party of so called “limited Government” has apparently taken most questions out of the hands of parents and school boards and made them all matters of the State. The tiresome politics of a perpetually fragile and guilty left and a perpetually paranoid, frantic, and emotional right has had most people looking to boredom with a sense of longing to be bored again.

What Is To Be Done?

First, any solution must be able to shed the old party politics and the agents of chaos which exist within these two parties. These parties are certainly not popular amongst working people, but an alternative, which can be legally secured with canvassing, has not been offered yet. Labor already has a base of voters that, with their signatures alone can initiate aThird Party. A third party, so long as it appeals to both rural and urban citizens, can effectively attract those who might casually vote Republican in rural Idaho, and those that might casually vote Democratic in urban Idaho. We are not looking for those who are especially energetic about either party, and fortunately there appear to be only a few anyway.

Second, after shedding the two Parties any solution must understand the cynical and heinous nature of the “Culture War” we currently see. The appeal of Farmer-Labor on this front would be in positioning itself as an attempt to bring stability to the lives of the great majority of the exhausted working class through common good politics. The common good politics I describe will confuse those on the Right and those on the Left. It rejects the right-wing obsession with the market and instead takes the concept of Self Government as the North Star. It rejects this strange hatred of the foreigner, the immigrant, and all those “different” as not only entirely irrational and immoral, but also as a criminal attempt to distract working people from their real adversaries. The hatred of those who are born outside of this country, those with a different color skin, culture or those who are not heterosexual is plain to see in so many people today, and this must be combated on the terms that this divides the camp of the working people. The consequences of division is ancient knowledge even described in the bible (Mathews 12:15), that “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.”

Farmer-Labor, in the same breath rejects the liberal obsession with the self and all its “individualized” truths. Common good politics does not find an ally in trains of thought which demand the acceptance of all points of view or interpretations as wholly legitimate just because a person has them. This negates more than it affirms. Instead, I see Farmer-Labor championing the concept of toleration even with those whose views on social norms one may privately disagree with. Conversations on social norms and taboos are worth having in a Democratic society, and this requires toleration of views but also the ability to not accept and even disagree with views regarding social matters. To be a mass-movement, a truly mass movement, a common shield is required to protect all people on the basis of toleration. This does not mean that one must advocate nor accept all views another has, only be willing to hold up their end of the shield.

However, there is a line, the outlawing of one way of life is a serious matter which strips democratic and human rights away from a people. Broadly Farmer-Labor, and every decent person, opposes such a thing and offers to protect all sections of the working class from abuse, maltreatment, and persecution. This does not mean that one must advocate nor accept all views of those Farmer-Labor will protect, but a strong democratic culture requires broad unity for the defense of democratic and human rights, a common agreement to hold up the shield. If there is no room for this way of thinking then there is no tolerance, there is no mass movement to begin with.

Third, to put it plainly, the Farmer-Labor solution is an attempt at mass “common good” politics which appeals to the city and countryside with a sense of democratic life. Farmer-Labor values self-government and democratic life in Idaho and identifies threats to self-government in a small elite group of shareholders who profit while the great majority suffers. It is here that the argument for expropriation and nationalization, even a Workers and Farmers Government, are best found. Farmer-Labor identifies the monopoly of industry, credit and communication in the hands of a small group of shareholders as a great contradiction to the concept of self-government. The development of a small elite few has meant that the lives of the rest of the population have been entirely dictated by the needs and interests of a small group’s profit motive. Contrary to the principles of self-government, the real center of political and economic life today is not the demands of the citizenry, but the profitability of a very small group of shareholders. This violates what I see as Common Good politics that starts from the undeniable fact that a stable, democratic political order of self-government must be in the hands of the great majority - that is the working class.

This is only possible of course, through a more democratic government, a Republic worthy of the name Republic - a Workers and Farmers Government.

Those things and people harmful to the tenets of Self-Government, namely those economic players and practices that breed mass dependence, are the chief enemies Farmer-Labor identifies.

What a fresh idea it is, Farmer-Labor will finally actually publicly identify enemies honestly, a practice unheard of in American politics.

Students here in New York and across the country are staging protests and encampments on university campuses in solidarity with Palestinians under siege in Gaza for over 200 days. The student movements are united by a common call for their institutions to divest and boycott the state of Israel, companies, and institutions complicit in Israel’s occupation and ongoing genocide in Gaza. In response to this vast mobilization of students, the university administrations at Columbia, NYU, CUNY and elsewhere have handed out mass suspensions & even threats of expulsion to students involved in the encampments, in addition to unleashing NYPD to arrest students protesting peacefully on their campuses. Tonight, we will hear from the students themselves. We will hear from Britt, a student organizer at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at CUNY City College, about the ‘Five Demands’ of the students to the CUNY administration. We will also be joined in-studio by Erin, a student at NYU and a member of the National Coordinating Committee of YDSA, to hear the latest from the NYU encampment and what YDSA is doing to meet the national moment. 

*This episode was recorded at 7pm Tuesday night before the NYPD sweep and mass arrests of students at Columbia and CUNY. Go out and provide jail support for the arrested students & comrades opposing genocide at One Police Plaza  

Link to CUNY Gaza Solidarity Statement: https://twitter.com/cunygse/status/1785677626431934751/photo/1

As Ron DeSantis and his ilk across the country seek to further enshrine a white supremacist version of history in our schools, libraries, and cultural centers, “organized efforts to document and broadcast the truth of our past are the most significant defense we have against disinformation.”

Place names are an enduring and omnipresent way of remembering the past. The choice of place names informs whose version of history is commemorated and given precedence. Our daily interaction with the names of streets, parks, rivers, and buildings continuously reinforces a specific version of history and consciously and subconsciously informs our relationship to the places we live.

A Brief History of Place-Naming in Michigan

People have been naming places for as long as there have been people in places. Indigenous place names often relate to the intrinsic nature of the land. Teuchasa Grondie, the place of many beavers, is the placename Iroquois speakers call the place we call Detroit, and Maskigong, based on Ojibwe “mashkig” meaning “swamp,” describes the large wetlands at the headwaters of the Maskigong Ziibi (Muskegon River). Descriptive place names value the land for its innate properties and allow for the creation of practical maps that share knowledge of how to get from one place to another, using narrative stories, poetry, and song, as well as pictorial images.

Settler-colonialism brought with it the practice of naming places to claim land ownership. British, French, and Spanish colonizers asserted the collective ownership of their rulers and cultures by naming places for kings and queens, Christian saints, European towns and cities, and famous figures from their history. Hence across the river in Ontario there is a town called London and a river called Thames, and any number of places across the U.S. named for St. _____ and various Charleses, Marys and Georges.

Individual colonizers claimed ownership of land by affixing their names to the places they settled. To give just two of many examples in Michigan: Pellston was named by William Pells in 1882, to claim his ownership of a camp on the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad [1], and on the Lake Michigan coast, Bliss was named for Rhoda Bliss, the first white woman to colonize there [2]. Many of the places the colonial settlers slapped their names on already had names. Some of these names were erased and replaced, such as Teuchasa Grondie by Detroit, and some were erased and rewritten in English, such as Maskigong to Muskegon, Michigami to Michigan, and Michinimakinaang to Mackinaw.

Later settlers took over not only Anishinaabe land but also Anishinaabe language to name places. Peter White, iron mining tycoon, appropriated the Anishinaabemowin word “ni-ga-ni” meaning “he walks foremost or ahead,” and anglicized it to Negaunee, to name a colonial settlement on the Upper Peninsula in honor of the “pioneer” ore furnace in the region. Henry Schoolcraft, U.S. “Indian Agent” in Michigan, who incidentally has a street named after him in Detroit, made up place names by combining Anishinaabemowin and Latin. For instance, Arenac is a combination of Latin “arena” meaning sand and Ojibwe “ac” meaning land or earth, made up by Schoolcraft to mean “sandy land” or “sandy place.” Some other Schoolcraft-appropriated names include Alcona, Alpena, Iosco, Kalkaska, Oceola, and Oscoda. Before assuming that a place name is Indigenous in Michigan it is worth researching to ensure it was not made up by Henry Schoolcraft [3].

Place naming for individuals did not just rename the land, it redrew the map. Instead of explaining, verbally or pictorially, how to get from A to B by describing the features of the land, maps now facilitated navigation using the names of the local colonizers. This orientation around ownership claims removed a layer of connection to the land as people walked or rode along the path navigating, not by the wetlands at the headwaters of the river, but by Pells’ Railroad Camp.

Redrawing the map erased and rewrote history. Many books, blogs, historical societies, websites, and Wikipedia posts have been dedicated to the stories of settlers who named places for themselves. All these sources, directly or indirectly, legitimize colonizers’ land ownership claims and orient us to place from a settler colonial perspective. Trying to dig beneath the layers of William Pellses, Rhoda Blisses and Arenacs to learn the original place names and the stories of the people who called them home is not an easy task.

A New Gazetteer for Downtown Detroit

To visit downtown Detroit is to be immersed in a space created to laud a specific version of the city’s past and perpetuate a vision of the future where that vision is seen to be the natural, and only possible, order of things. This space is created using monuments, statues, parks, fountains and, most ubiquitously, street names. In his work on the naming of Martin Luther King Jr. Streets in the Southern U.S., Derek Alderman notes, “Naming is a powerful vehicle for promoting identification with the past and locating oneself within the wider networks of memory” and “[street names] make the past intimately familiar to people in ways that other memorials cannot [4].”

What does it feel like to move through a land where your place names, language and history have been erased or ignored? For People of European Descent, with our language and history so prolifically and seemingly indelibly inscribed on the land, it is almost impossible to imagine.

This map shows what downtown Detroit would look like if you erased the streets and street names that honor the colonizers. When you go downtown to enjoy the holiday lights, open this map on your phone and, even if you think you know where you are going, try to use it to navigate. While in no way parallel to hundreds of years of human, land, history, and language theft and erasure, may this little exercise give you pause to acknowledge that theft and to recognize the impact of its inscription on the land.

Click here to open the map in ARCGIS

Unlike removing monuments or changing the names of private buildings, such as university halls, changing street names is a hard and expensive task and one that, frankly, we do not have the time to organize around given all the other needs of our communities. We also cannot boycott or divest from street names, they are everywhere; on signposts, maps, your ID, your mail, every form you fill out, your online billing statements, your eventbrite RSVP, and many more.

This Gazetteer asks us to change the conversation by subverting the street name narrative to tell another version/s of our shared history…

Click here to open the map in ARCGIS

This project is not intended to be the final word on street names. I am in no way any more “qualified” to be naming Detroit’s streets than the city’s so called “founders.” My intention is to inspire Detroiters to use street names to tell different narratives of place that expand our learning of history and thus our vision for the future.

In working on this project, I noticed I was only able to find Black and White honorees for the street names. I want to recognize that this is directly related to the legacies of colonialism and imperialism as discussed above, and to the legacy of slavery, which erased the indigenous names of enslaved people, and replaced them with the names of their White enslavers.

If you would like to share an honoree/s (it could be anyone from the past or present, well-known or unsung, a personal hero or a family member, or someone who is both of those things) and their stories for the gazetteer, either for any of the streets on the current map or other Detroit streets, parks, plazas etc., please click here!

[1] Petoskey News Review, 14 April 1966

[2] The Petosky Record, 19 September 1883

[3] Walton, I. (1955). Indian Place Names in Michigan. Midwest Folklore, 5(1), 23–34. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4317501

[4] Alderman, D.H. (2008). Martin Luther King Jr. Streets in the South: A New Landscape of Memory. Southern Cultures. (14)3. 88–105. University of North Carolina Press.

The Detroit Socialist is produced and run by members of Detroit DSA’s Newspaper Collective. Interested in becoming a member of Detroit DSA? Go to metrodetroitdsa.com/join to become a member. Send a copy of the dues receipt to: membership@metrodetroitdsa.com in order to get plugged in to our activities!

Whose Streets? Our Streets!: A New Gazetteer for Downtown Detroit was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

DSA San Diego has endorsed Power San Diego, a ballot measure to move the City of San Diego to its own municipal electric utility. The measure is currently gathering signatures to qualify for the November 2024 ballot. DSA members are helping gather signatures, including at some of the events you can find on the Power San [...]

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