the case of foreign aid, inappropriate use of a valuable tool can serve to reinforce and accentuate exploitive and repressive conditions which prevent the poor from assuming the power that is rightfully theirs. Development has been seen as a matter of "things"—tools, resources, training, etc.—yet the inadequacy of this approach is evident. The example of such countries as Cuba, Tanzania, and Nicaragua lends support for a new definition of development, one that ties economic growth to a participatory, democratic process of change.... From: "Resources in Red Nations" an interview with Winona LaDuke February/March 1980 Winona LaDuke helped found Women ofAll Red Nations (WARN), a Native American organization concerned about government/corporate resource exploitation on Indian lands. In a vnde-ranging interview, she provided RAIN with a provocative Native American view of the goals and strategies of white anti-nuclear activists. ... I think we understand a lot about America and the way American people are, 'cause we spend a lot of time looking at it! But Americans have never been forced to look at themselves.... What we see with the American no-nukes is ... Americans are always responding to a crisis situation, like the Vietnam War, and now we get no-nukes. All of a sudden they decided that nuclear power and weapons are a bad idea, and it's not like coal and nuclear power weren't going on before, but everybody just got scared about it. So they started looking around for allies and all of a sudden they figure out—lo and behold!—Indians got the uranium, let's start talking to them!... These people, like no-nukes or environmentalists, a lot of times they look at a symptom. A nuclear plant is a symptom. ... Weapons plants and all those things are symptoms.... None of that stuff is gonna hurt you unless it's got uranium, and that's where it's got to be stopped. That's what feeds multinational corporations, is resources.... New Mexico [is] the number one urani- um-produdng state in the country—and the Navajos are the ones that produce it. You're talking about coal, you're talking about copper, silver, all this stuff that feeds those companies comes from those places, and that's what has to be stopped if you want to stop this monster. You gotta stop what's feeding it.... From: "A Hard Look at How-To" by Lloyd Kahn December 1979 Appearing in RAIN the same year as Ken Bossong's "Hazards of Solar Energy," this critique of the hype and high hopes that often accompanied appropriate technology projects during the seventies seemed to signal the emergence ofa new awareness and maturity in the a. t. movement. For more than a decade we have been swamped with accounts of how well things work.... Bookstores are loaded with glowing accounts of how to do virtually everything. No problems! My new house/organic homestead/solar heater work great and here's how I did it and you can do the same. No one seems to be asking critical questions.... ... Do I conclude that all of the how-to literature on alternative food/shelter/energy is untrustworthy? Or that organic farming won't work, compost privies lead to disease, and solar heating is a sham? Not at all. It's not that I think you shouldn't work with used materials, or move to the country, or save the kitchen sink water. But I do think inexperienced people need to know what they're up against, and not hyped along into undertaking ventures based on incomplete information.. .. In retrospect, the sixties may have been a time of awakening, of communication of new concepts, and the seventies the years of testing and reflection. The 1980s could be the time when we begin to apply what we have learned___We can profit from honest disclosure of past mistakes.... From: "Helping Ourselves: Reality vs. Rhetoric" an interview with Bruce Stokes January 1982 Bruce Stokes' 1981 hook. Helping Ourselves: Local Solutions to Global Problems, was a particular inspiration to us at RAIN as we prepared our own book on community self-reliance. Knowing Home.In this interview, Stokes described what he considered to be the principal value of the self-help projects being carried out in the United States and around the world. ... Even if you can't show a direct one-on-one relationship where one activity builds to the next and all-of- a-sudden you have a self-reliant local community, people are being trained in citizenship.... People are learning how to organize meetings, how to assert themselves, how to use power, how to identify and solve problems. Those are skills which are terribly useful in crisis situations. As society itself moves toward an economy that is increasingly unsustainable and unstable, an environmental situation that is increasingly dangerous, and a situation where the resource base is being undermined dramatically, we need citizens who are trained in the skills of crisis management. Even if that community garden we orgaruze doesn't do a whole lot to solve food problems, people have learned some skills, and these people are going to be around to react to the next major crisis which happens in their community or in the country at large. I think as we face those crises, the tendency is going to be to move toward centralized responses—highly authoritarian. They may be corporate state responses, they may be socialist state responses, but in either case, they are centralized responses—and that's undemocratic by its very nature. We need alternatives. We need people to say "No, we can handle this ourselves," and in fact repulse attempts by the centralized authority to impose a response on the community. That's the most important result of all these self-reliance activities going on: that people learn the rules of citizenship so that we can ensure that we're a democracy not only in name, but in fact. Oct./Nov. 1983 RAIN Page 27
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