{ Part 2 : Winter } cont.

One week later a note was wedged into the fence behind the papaya trees. The note was crafted by taping together two postcards. On both the postcards were aerial views - one of a beautiful stream on the island of Hawai'i and the other of the eastern shore of Oahu's coastline. On the back was a note addressed to the Diggers in the same handwriting as the earlier scrawls. Almost entirely smeared by rain, we could barely make out its suggestion - that we seek out the help of a mediator.

We chose not to respond or to seek out a mediator. The Diggers project must be considered in two separate ways - whether we succeeded in providing the stuff of life for free, and whether we succeeded in shifting consciousness regarding community, resources and authority. While there was a remote chance that we may have convinced the State and/or Kamehameha Schools to allow the plants to grow, it was much more important to simply not acknowledge the legitimacy of their state- and market-mandated authority. Thus, instead of well-lobbied pleas for tolerance, or the cooptation of our action by Kamehameha Schools to ensure its own continued existence, we chose to hold our ground. Knowing ours was a small gesture with great potential, we waited and watched to see what those around us would do.From eavesdropping and our completely non-scientific observations, we believe that those who encountered the Diggers project were either ambivalent or supportive. Furthermore some seemed to have followed the exchange that took place with interest. One neighbor, without knowing that she was speaking with a Digger, commented on the mean-spiritedness of the authorities in not allowing the papaya plants to grow.

Like the first Diggers, our project performed a David and Goliath story to decolonize imaginations about land and its usage by asserting a politics of communal eating that made evident how difficult it can be for community members to use the land to develop communal practices of self-sustenance. Our action sought to re-present the figure of the ‘activist’ as one engaged in more than symbolic protest. Since broad social relations such as those of class, ‘race’ and gender are shaped by how people struggle to make their lives viable, expanding our consciousness of what is possible can only occur in any meaningful way when we can imagine changing the everyday material reality of our lives. Quite simply put, change happens only when we change things.

front and back of note
to enlarge+