I was a fan, supporter, learner, and motivator of community art action during the Adams Mine protests. Unless you call making speeches and writing to the press an art. If so I was playing a key role. Oh, and I guess if sleeping on the railway tracks that run by the Adams Mine and on north into Mining country, if that can be seen as Guerrilla theatre, then yes I did that.
At the time I was one of 7 people who volunteered to sleep overnight on the rails to prevent trains from supplying the mines north of us. One of our volunteers dubbed us the Seven Sacred Sleepers, with a deliberate poetic reference to railway sleepers. To me this seemed like an act of civil protest in the face of the most unbounded plan to destroy the water system in Ontario, from the headwaters of the Ottawa River down to the Capital. This plan to fill the Adams Lake with garbage from Southern Ontario, most notably from Toronto, Canada’s largest city, was the scheme of a conglomerate made up of waste management corporations and political opportunists. The leading face of support for this appeared to be that of Mike Harris, the Premier of Ontario.
So we spent the night on the tracks, guarded by our supporters and Native Warriors. Our protest kept the trains from running on those tracks for 4-5 days. In hindsight I see that what we did was a highly visible, dramatic acting out of David versus Goliath. This raised the struggle to a new high of confrontation, which in turn garnered new levels of media attention. It was certainly a story written and acted out on the public stage. This should also be seen as Extending Our Community. These kinds of Art are part of disseminating a story or reaching, creating an audience. Works of art like Rodin’s Thinker, or Picasso’s Guernica, become part of a culture’s mind forming heritage. A culture is a community writ large, informed by history, values, and beliefs which members share.
The process of visible, audible protest helped me to become more connected to my community, absolutely. Communities are sewn together by Communication as the two words indicate. People look for expression and art is expression. Language is critical and symbols are critical and together people continually search for common ground through our expressing the internal, emotions and thoughts made visible, shared and thus forming bonds
I discovered that saving the natural world where l lived became the most compelling task in my life. The waters and trees and wildlife grew very large and present for me. I felt urgently connected to them as though saving them was saving myself. I did not want to live in a destroyed landscape.
I found a real power and talent in myself to speak for others, to see and experience my feelings and values by expressing them. In creating community I was creating a home for myself and sharing with others what we held in common. This could only arise from finding out what we did hold in common by means of putting expressions out there to explore and identify what those common feelings and thoughts were. We broke down our isolation and separateness so we could join around what we valued. Without our Art, that is our expression, we could not have found our connections.
I think this is worthy of a major study of how, by means of Art and Expression, we form community and community values, empathy and acts of compassion; this in turn generates more creativity and more art. We change minds and we teach by modeling so that every work of art is an act of genuine creation and education.
My experience of opposing the Adam’s Mine dump was formative in composing my sense of community and this community included the natural world that fosters us, gives us life. So we can see that we were formed millions of years ago to evolve and grow into complex beings who are an integral part of the natural world. Our bonds to the rest of this world are indissoluble and indispensable for our well-being. This story of our Connection to our World through evolution is the primary story upon which all other stories need to be grounded. This is what is meant by The World of Experience. The Mine experience was one of the great learning periods of my life, about my world, my community, and my fundamental values, what I cared about so much that these values informed my life and gave it meaning.
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