Recognizing Mutual Aid’s scarred history of government co-option and infiltration is key to preventing the erasure of black and indigenous care networks. This is a pre-requisite OR the impact is white-washed mutual aid.

The reality is that mutual aid has its roots in community resistance by Black and Indigenous people, who have been criminalized for these exact practices that are now celebrated by the white mainstream. ¶ Criminalization of mutual aid in BIPOC communities¶ In so-called Canada from 1885 until 1951, Indigenous communities of the North West coastal regions – like the Haida, Nuxalk, Tlingit, Makah, Tsimshian, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw – were forbidden from practising their gift-giving ceremony of Potlatch. Under the Potlatch ban, Indigenous communities were punished for their anti-capitalist tradition with mandatory jail sentences if caught practising potlatch. Even so, many communities continued the tradition underground. ¶ On December 25, 1921, 25 Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw community members from ‘Mimkwamlis were arrested and charged under the Criminal Code for breaking the Potlatch ban. Twenty Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw people were sent to Oakalla Prison in the Lower Mainland and served two- to three-month sentences for practising their tradition. It is important for non-Indigenous people to understand that the criminalization of our ceremonies is a tool used by colonizers in our ongoing genocide. ¶ When Black and Indigenous people work to end their communities’ dependency on the settler state through community care, they threaten the foundations of settler colonialism and capitalism. ¶ It is no coincidence that our inherently anti-capitalist ceremonies are seen as a threat to the colonial status quo: they prove that alternative lifeways are possible. Mutual aid invites community members to take care of one another through shared respect and accompliceship, ending our dependency on waged labor and profit. It ushers in community sufficiency, challenging us to share – rather than hoard – wealth and land. The belief that land can be owned is inherently colonial, and a lack of access to the resources of the land is why communities need mutual aid in the first place. In the settler-colonial state’s drive to dismantle and destroy Indigenous Peoples’ ability to be self-sufficient, the theft of land is its most obvious tactic. ¶ For a more recent example of government interference in mutual aid efforts led by people of colour, we can look to COINTELPRO’s infiltration of the Black Panther Party in the so-called United States. COINTELPRO was a series of secret projects in which the FBI spied on, infiltrated, defamed, and murdered members of political organizations from 1956 to 1971. COINTELPRO specifically targeted individuals and groups that the FBI deemed subversive, including feminists; anti-Vietnam War organizers; and activists of the civil rights movement like the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, and the Young Lords. ¶ The Black Panthers were infiltrated and violently dismantled – and a number of their members were murdered – specifically to destroy their mutual aid efforts, which included free food, education, child care, health care, and legal aid programs. The Black Panthers even offered sickle cell screening programs, and were so successful that they opened 13 free health clinics across the country. ¶ These mutual aid programs were perceived as a threat to the U.S. government. In a 1969 memo, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote that the Black Panthers’ Breakfast for Children Program “represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities [...] to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.” ¶ We are being quite literal when we say that mutual aid, when practised by people of colour, has led to community members being targeted, incarcerated, and murdered by the government. ¶ To try and undercut the Breakfast for Children Program’s success, the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched a breakfast pilot program in 1966, giving free meals to children whose families were below the poverty line – but without the radical political education the Panthers’ program provided. Former Black Panther Norma Amour Mtume said in an interview, “I really do believe that the government [expanded] their program because of the work we were doing.” ¶ The Black Panthers were committed to a decolonial and anti-capitalist lifeway, and their efforts were systematically destroyed by the federal government. We are being quite literal when we say that mutual aid, when practised by people of colour, has led to community members being targeted, incarcerated, and murdered by the government. It is imperative for those who are practising mutual aid to know these histories.