[Wamvan] Fwd: [dnc-members] May 2012 edition of the Downtown East newspaper is now out!

[Tami Starlight]

FYI

Miigwetch/Thank you/Merci
*Tami M. Starlight*
Unceded & occupied Coast Salish Territory
Vancouver, Canada
tamistarlight at gmail.com




*please forward on*

MAY 2012 EDITION OF THE DOWNTOWN EAST IS NOW OUT

Read all articles online here: http://dnchome.wordpress.com/dteast/

Feature of this issue is outlined by the letter from the editors
included below, The Roots of Violence in the Downtown Eastside and
balanced out with the pullout poster, Good places in the DTES:
http://dnchome.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/mayposter/

We are proud of the range of articles in this issue and hope you have
a chance to read everything online or in print. The print version will
be dropped off everywhere in the DTES starting May 1st and in select
places outside of the neighbourhood.

Other articles include:
City hall approves Pantages condos.
http://dnchome.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/maysequel/
Sham inquiry continues despite a complete absence of credibility.
http://dnchome.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/mayinq/
One woman's story http://dnchome.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/maystory/
How drug prohibition made a nightmare of my life.
http://dnchome.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/maybud/
Cowboy cops performing for the camera
http://dnchome.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/maycops/
Harper government attacks refugees
http://dnchome.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/mayrefugee/
Answering our (pro-displacement) critics
http://dnchome.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/mayanswering/

APPEAL FROM THE EDITORS:

We need your sustaining donations!

We have no institutional funding for this newspaper and it costs $700
a month for 5,000 print issues. All our editors, writers, distributors
and designers are entirely volunteer so all donations go directly to
the printer.

We are completely reliant on individual donations and don't have the
full amount covered yet so every month is pretty stressful. Our target
is to get many $20-$50 a month donations (in the form of post dated
cheques preferably) rather than rely on a few big donors each month.
Please help by donating yourself or passing this request on to your
friends.

Thank you and solidarity!

Downtown East editors


---
Editorial: Roots of violence in the Downtown Eastside
http://dnchome.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/mayed/

By: Downtown East Editorial Board

This issue of the Downtown East has a lot of articles about violence.
We know that other newspapers talk about violence in the Downtown
Eastside (DTES) but it often seems like their coverage is designed to
create still more violence. Their articles treat violence as a natural
part of our neighbourhood. They argue that the only way to get rid of
the violence is through a tremendous act of violent social cleansing,
by condo gentrification or police sweeps. We see things differently.
In this issue we are beginning to investigate some of the worst forms
of violence that we struggle against every day as we organize for
social justice and to protect the best parts of our community.

Displacement is violence. Many DTES residents are displaced people who
have survived violence in abusive families, institutions, prisons,
trans and homophobic and racist and misogynist communities, and
residential schools. We come to or were born in the Downtown Eastside
under pressures of colonialism, unemployment, homelessness, domestic
violence, and environmental destruction. Displacement forces residents
into the discrimination of other neighbourhoods, separates them from
their life saving services and forces them to pay more of their
totally inadequate incomes for necessities.

Hate speech is violence. Hate speech makes it seem ok to treat some
people as less than human. Throughout the 1980s sex worker, drug user,
Aboriginal women were trashed by the media and the government and
pushed out of other neighbourhoods. Their lives were disregarded. When
their DTES friends complained to the police that they were missing
very little happened. Mass murder was the result. This is the worst
example of hate in our neighbourhood. Hatred and discriminatory
language about people who are poor and people who use drugs and DTES
residents in general is used to justify displacement.

Poverty is violence. Downtown Eastside residents live amidst the daily
violence of poverty including the physical violence of scarcity and
hunger, and the emotional humiliation of relying on welfare
bureaucracies, and the constant feelings of discrimination and
exclusion as high end shops and restaurants dominate the public spaces
in our neighbourhood. The city has recently admitted that the median
income of people who live in the DTES is $12,000 a year. That means
half the 17,000 people in the DTES live on less than $12,000 a year.
The BC Dieticians say it is impossible to both pay rent and buy a
nutritious diet, with no other spending even for a tube of toothpaste,
if you’re on welfare. Charity line-ups demand endless gratitude.
Poverty can also mean living in inhuman conditions of homelessness on
the streets, in shelters, or in the crowded and dangerous bug infested
hotels. In this rich county, people who are poor have about ten fewer
years of healthy life than people who are rich.

Policing is violence. The most vulnerable people in our community are
the most criminalized, medicalized and brutalized. Illicit drug users
and illicit drinkers are harassed and beaten by police in public
spaces and ridiculed and assaulted by urban tourists. Survival sex
workers are harassed, beaten, and killed by men who come into the
neighbourhood to prey on them and by police who abandon them to drug
dealers who punish them with violence.

Families and men can be a source of violence. Ninety percent of all
sexual and domestic violent assaults against women are not reported to
police. There are more than twice as many instances of violence
against women in the DTES as in other neighbourhoods in Vancouver.
Women are afraid to report violent crimes to police because the VPD
will not offer waivers or freezes of even the most minor of warrants
to guarantee womens’ safety. And women are often forced to stay in
abusive relationships in a 10X10 room with an abusive man by poverty
and the high costs of hotel room rents, because to leave would mean
homelessness.

This is why we oppose displacement. The Downtown East editorial
mission is anti-violence; we inherit that position from the DTES
Neighbourhood Council constitution. And we accept the challenge to be
anti-violent from DTES residents’ perspectives. It is a challenge
because we know that sometimes DTES residents experience violence at
the hands of other DTES residents in social positions that are quite
similar. And it is a challenge because our vision is to work for
healthy, safe, secure, creative, beautiful, loving lives for everyone
in our community, at the expense of no body. While we recognize that
our community is besieged by violence, we know that our struggles are
the ultimate anti-violence project. The Downtown Eastside community
has created a place of belonging for people who don’t feel they belong
anywhere else. This accomplishment shields us and will hopefully
dissolve the poisonous cycles of violence in an obliterating embrace
of mutual care and love.

---
Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood Council
http://dnchome.wordpress.com
dtescouncil at gmail.com



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