Canadian Government formally apologises to the First Nations people of Canada

Quoted from the Daily Star

"For an entire century, ending only in 1996, a total of 132 boarding schools mostly affiliated with churches took First Nations, Inuit and Metis children away from their families and placed them in schools where they would leave behind their native identity and language and essentially be remade into white kids. Many died and thousands suffered mental or sexual abuse, which manifested itself in later life in drug and alcohol abuse or high suicide rates.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper last month stood up before a House of Commons overflowing with people, in the presence of many indigenous leaders, and apologized clearly, sincerely, and repeatedly. His words were noble, humble, powerful, moving, and worth repeating for some of their key sentiments. He said, among other things:

"I stand before you today to offer an apology to former students of Indian residential schools [for this] sad chapter in our history ... Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country ...

"The government now recognizes that the consequences of the Indian residential schools policy were profoundly negative ... The government recognizes that the absence of an apology has been an impediment to healing and reconciliation. Therefore, on behalf of the government of Canada and all Canadians, I stand before you, in this chamber so central to our life as a country, to apologize to aboriginal peoples for Canada's role in the Indian residential schools system ...

"The burden of this experience has been on your shoulders for far too

long. The burden is properly ours as a government, and as a country ... You have been working on recovering from this experience for a long time and in a very real sense, we are now joining you on this journey.

"The government of Canada sincerely apologizes and asks the forgiveness of the aboriginal peoples of this country for failing them so profoundly. We are sorry.''

Several aspects of this apology are worth noting, especially by protagonists waging protracted and often barbaric conflicts in various parts of the Middle East, whether within or between countries. The apology was part of a negotiated settlement with indigenous peoples that includes $2 billion in compensation to the abused individuals, and the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission - the first such commission created in an industrialized country. This is a living example of how the excesses resulting from European racism can be acknowledged and redressed in part by a combination of gestures, statements and compensatory mechanisms. "

Pumpkins are Singing everywhere

So last year I spent six months looking for the ideal home...
I went so far as to take sublets for two months at a time in order to finally secure a place I could put my roots into a for a few years.... I eventually found the place through a series of magickal events of life at work.... It had a back yard covered in grape vines, raspberry, high ceilings, bright windows, lots of green space (landlord yard next door was massive beyond reckoning with huge trees, compost & huge garden; and we were allowed to share), old fashioned bathtub & the place was just over 100 years old with the landlord's house being 300... it was what was left of the last farmstead/house in Montreal itself... I ended up finding the appropriate companion & partner for me and moved out of that place as the winter ended.....

so now, out of frustration of not having a yard to grow my garden in; I am working with the space I have in my wonderful new home... the third floor porch; which happens to be an unusually large porch....

so out of over 46 seeds I planted (and later planted more + buying the young plants, everything organic), out of the 9 pumpkins I planted, 3 to each pot, it was the one and only orange plastic pot which produced the one and only pumpkin vine....

Hanging by a Branch - circus theatre production at the Montreal Fringe Festival

I am in the production called “Hanging on a Branch”; a circus-theatre interpretation of a Tibetan fairy tale. I do the Face/Body Painting, built the Masks & Headpieces, decorated & I sing in many styles both by myself and with my musical cohert, Nigel Wolf through out the piece while providing sound effects & soundtrack.

I do believe that if you come out to our show you will have alot of fun no matter what age you are. We do have low-grade video up on You-tube but you can’t see the face/body painting or what the masks look like but it gives you an idea of what the experience is. Photographs from the event will also be posted up on my website very soon. Link for low-grade Youtube: (4 parts)
www.youtube.com/watch

The show runs until next week and there is a schedule up on my website under the NEWS section; which you will encounter on the second page...

Cheers;
April-Anna
The Art of April-Anna - www.aprilanna.com

“as you slide down the banister of life,
may all the splinters be facing the right way.” - irish blessing

Tick Warning....

Its that time of the year

TICK WARNING!
I hate it when people forward bogus warnings, and I have even done it
myself a couple times unintentionally...but this one is real, and it's
important. So please send this warning to everyone on your e- mail
list.

If someone comes to your front door saying they are checking for ticks
due to the warm weather and asks you to take your clothes off and dance
around with your arms up, DO NOT DO IT!! THIS IS A SCAM!! They only
want to see you naked.

I wish I'd gotten this yesterday. I feel so stupid.

Volunteer Model Wanted - Upcoming Projects

June 8th - Montreal
I have entered a Face/Body Painting Competition where I have to paint
80% of the body for Color Mundo.... My model just had to cancel so I
am looking for a new model... the event happens on June 8th... I am
also doing a demo on June 9th which I will need a second model for....
(same event).... I am looking for a really pretty model with
yoga/dance type body but alternative/faerie vibes...This year's theme
is "Ecology & Destruction"... This would be entirely volunteer... I am
trying to organize a photo shoot with a photographer friend for after
the competition is finished.... if that works out then I would be able
to give you a disk of the photo shoot....

June 2nd &/or 4th - Montreal
I am doing a photo shoot this day; preperations are in the late
afternoon with photos to be taken in the evening... I am not sure yet
what I am doing as it depends on which models are available. I am
missing some Fashion and Henna images but also want to do some
half/body nude work too. I will decide on my focus once I know who
wants to do this shoot.

Please email me to discuss... www.aprilanna.com
All my contact information is up on my website...

Le Frigo Vert Newsletter "clipping"

INDIGENOUS ANTI-COLONIALISM: AN INTERVIEW WITH GORD HILL

April 15, 2008

Upping the Anti Newswire



Gord Hill is an activist from the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation in British Columbia. A long time organizer for indigenous sovereignty, he organizes with the Native Youth Movement (NYM) based in Vancouver and runs Warrior Publications. He is currently involved in the campaign against the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. In this interview with Tom Keefer, Hill explains why the NYM boycotted the Assembly of First Nations’ Day of Action on June 29, 2007. He discusses how the AFN and band council system were formed as a means of government control and assimilation of indigenous communities and the cooptation of grassroots movements. Hill also talks about the role of non-native supporters in struggles for sovereignty and the importance of forming broader radical anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements within First Nations communities. This interview took place in July of 2007.



Could you please introduce yourself?

My name is Gord Hill and I’m from the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation on the North-West coast. I’ve been involved in native resistance since about 1990 when I started working on Oka solidarity. I was involved in the 500 Years of Resistance campaign in 1992, and in the mid-1990s I started working with the Native Youth Movement (NYM). Today, I publish Warrior Publications, which puts out magazines and booklets about native struggles. In addition to organizing, I also do artwork and graphic design, and I write.

What’s your take on the June 29 Day of Action called by the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) in 2007? Was it a successful action? What do you think it says about the current state of indigenous resistance?

The Day of Action was an example of political maneuvering on the part of the AFN, on the one hand, to try to bolster their credibility at the grassroots and then, on the other hand, to win concessions from the government. In terms of winning concessions, I think they were successful. The government did reform the Indian Claims Commission, and Terrance Nelson, who initiated the AFN resolution back in September of 2006, got 75 acres of land for his people. So it was successful in those terms, although I think the Canadian government was also playing into the other objective of the AFN, which was to bolster their credibility with grassroots activists. When the government made these concessions, the AFN looked as if it had successfully mobilized to fight for our rights. The AFN claims that the Day of Action was a huge success and that over 100,000 people participated. I think they were really exaggerating the turnout. Not only that, but most of the people participating in the actions, protests, and rallies were non-native, which speaks to the AFN’s inability to mobilize their people despite all the resources they have. Myself and others called for a boycott of the Day of Action because we believed it added to the confusion among our people and among non-native people about the goal of the AFN. We wanted to try to make it clear that they don’t represent our people and that, when they talk about solutions, their long-term goal is actually assimilation.

For those not familiar with the AFN, could you provide more detail about your analysis and critique of the organization?

The AFN is comprised of all the Indian Act band council chiefs across the country, so it’s a national organization representing those chiefs. The Indian Act was imposed by the federal government in 1876 as a way of controlling indigenous people in Canada. It has three main components: the reserve system, where natives are to be concentrated; Indian status, which determines who is or is not “native”; and the band council system, which provides a local governing structure to implement the Act. It is through these three structures that Canada has historically imposed control over indigenous people, and it is how they have maintained control to this day. The band council system works as an arm of the federal government, which funds it. Its mandate is to implement the policies of the federal government at the local reserve community level. This is why we oppose the AFN: it’s working in the interests of the government and big business.

Are the Native Friendship Centres co-opted like the AFN?

In the early 1970s, when the indigenous movement was emerging and was on the upswing, people were self-organizing and setting up their own groups, and one of the things they did was set up social centres like the Friendship Centres. Consequently, the government came along and started funding all these different groups and agencies in order to co-opt them. They started pumping all this money in as a form of pacification and now Friendship Centres are a state-run institution and basically serve the same function as the AFN. They are generally very conservative, very hostile to activism, and always try to claim that they’re apolitical, even though they’re really a very politicized institution that’s government-funded and delivering government programs.

However, Friendship Centres do serve a purpose and meet real needs in the community. But they meet those needs because people have been so controlled that they’re unable to self-organize. And now people don’t think of organizing things like Friendship Centres because they’re already being funded by the government. They present a facade of being almost like grassroots institutions. It’s the same with a lot of different organizations: most social spaces like Friendship Centres, youth drop-in centres, and sports activities are controlled by different government agencies or through band councils. One of the reasons that they do this is to contain and limit the grassroots movement. If they don’t, grassroots organizers are going to step in, which is why they originally started funding these organizations back in the early 1970s.

What about indigenous movements that don’t operate within the framework of AFN? Are there other national organizations that people can relate to as alternatives?

No, I would say there aren’t. There’s a grassroots movement of people across the country, but no central organization. In the 1960s and early 1970s, we had the Red Power Movement – including the American Indian Movement and the Canadian Alliance for Red Power, which was based in Vancouver. In the 1970s, we had an attempt to set up national organizations, but, owing to the lack of political resources, the grassroots movement didn’t establish a strong national structure. This was the case partly because Canada is so big and our population centres and reserves are so spread out, which makes it very hard to organize at the national level. To a certain degree, the AFN can have a national structure because of the large amount of money it gets from the government. I was working with the Native Youth Movement for quite a few years, and it had some limited success. But overall it wasn’t that successful in establishing a national network. It’s something we work on all the time as we try to establish links and meet with people in different areas, but I wouldn’t claim one exists right now.

Is the Native Youth Movement still a political force?

Like any movement, it comes and goes. Right now, there are a few NYM chapters still active in the Southern interior of BC, but it is not super active.

What about groups like Wasasé? What’s your take on them?

I’m not involved with them. My understanding is that they’re more of a university student-oriented group. They have an annual gathering over in Victoria, which is where Taiaiake Alfred (a University of Victoria professor who wrote a book called Wasasé upon which this movement is built) is based. I myself don’t have much interaction with them, and I’m critical of some of their analysis and strategy for change, such as their reliance on Gandhi. We communicate with each other, and I’m aware of what their positions are on things. On the AFN Day of Action they came out and were critical of what they called the AFN’s half-hearted steps and its militant posturing.

How would you suggest non-native allies relate to native movements if there isn’t a national radical anti-colonial indigenous network for people to connect with?

A lot of the struggles that occur are local and based on what’s happening in specific communities. So when a struggle is coming from grassroots community people, I think this is where you should lend support. It doesn’t need to involve linking up with a national organization; one doesn’t exist and is not organizing or coordinating these actions. Non-natives can support whatever local struggle is going on in their area because it’s the grassroots people who are doing the work. In terms of the AFN and the Day of Action, you could see that a lot of well-intentioned but naïve non-native people wanted to help out and responded to the call for a Day of Action. They assumed that the AFN was a legitimate representative of native people and they wanted to rush out and support the call. But they don’t understand the history of Canadian colonialism and the way it created the band council system and the Assembly of First Nations. Non-natives should support local struggles that are going on in their area and educate themselves about the history of the system and how it’s organized. Then we wouldn’t have people running around and going out to support those who are actually a major obstacle to us organizing and having self-determination.

Do local struggles have a significant impact? Have people on the West Coast, for example, been following what’s been happening with Six Nations or with other struggles like those in Grassy Narrows?

Six Nations is a really big and important conflict. In Vancouver there was a big mobilization of 500 people in support of Six Nations that blocked the Lion’s Gate Bridge for an hour and it really mobilized a lot of people. These kinds of actions show people the potential for resistance. So yes, they’re very important. That’s the thing with a lot of struggles like Ipperwash, Gustafson Lake, and Oka: they were local struggles but they had a very important impact across the country.

What obstacles exist within local native communities to developing radical anti-colonial politics?

There are many different factors that limit the capacity of resistance to take root and grow. One of the most significant obstacles is the legacy of colonialism itself. A high level of social dysfunction exists within our communities, and things like alcohol and drug addiction and imprisonment are really weakening our ability to organize our people and our movements. Another major factor is the assimilation that the AFN and band councils are pushing by bringing capitalist ideology into communities and pushing people to think like white people and to act like individual entrepreneurs.

We also have the brainwashing that’s carried out through the telecommunications network and the educational system. Even the most remote communities up in the far North have satellite dishes, and kids there watch the most depraved and demoralizing forms of pop culture that Babylon is putting out. It’s so debilitating because it implants capitalism and capitalist values into their minds. Generally, our problem is a lack of education and awareness about what colonialism is and how it functions. We also lack resources within our movement. Once a movement gets mass support, it has resources coming from the people, and people are the most important resource you can have. But, at this stage, we don’t have a lot of support from our population. So we have the problem of trying to expand while lacking resources. Those are some of the main obstacles we face outside of the system of the AFN and band councils, which of course contributes a lot to our inability to
self-organize.

Are there specific groups in non-native society that can act as reliable allies in native struggles?

Within non-native society, we certainly have always had a level of support from diverse social sectors, but I wouldn’t identify any one of them as the main source of support. Certainly, within Canadian society in general, there are specific elements that do a lot of work around indigenous sovereignty, and you could say that overall there is a high level of underlying support for native peoples’ struggles, as you can see in opinion polls. A lot of people supported the call for a Day of Action even if they didn’t understand what the AFN was.

A lot of people sympathize with and understand the plight of indigenous peoples. Even if it’s not always expressed, there’s certainly underlying support for indigenous people and a lot of potential to mobilize for indigenous resistance and other kinds of broader social resistance. Here in Vancouver, we’ve been organizing against the 2010 Olympics and, at this point, have found the
anti-poverty activists to be most helpful. But one of the things about Canada and a lot of colonial systems is that the apartheid system creates two separate worlds. The one world is really ignorant and oblivious to the condition of the other, and that’s a big problem. But again, that comes back to education and becoming more knowledgeable about the world and the country that we live in.

Since indigenous people make up approximately 5% of the total population in Canada, how do you think that they can be successful in achieving what they are fighting for? Does there have to be widespread active support within Canadian society or can native people create enough of a crisis within Canada to get their needs met?

I would say that in any national liberation struggle there is always a diverse range of tactics that people use; there is no one way to advance our movement. As Frantz Fanon said, for anti-colonial activists the international situation is very important because it affects the ability of the nation state to impose its will on the people it is oppressing. With the growing potential for ecological, economic, and military crises around the world right now, international issues can have a major impact on the social conditions of our lives. But it can be difficult to organize under these social conditions, partly because we’re living in a G7 country. Even though native people are the most impoverished and oppressed class in this society, a lot of material wealth and resources have come into indigenous communities. The chiefs are a good example of this – a lot of them out here are multi-millionaires who are running their own businesses.

If we look at the international situation, we can see the effects that wars, economic depression, and competition between capitalist powers have on our local conditions. If we look to the future, we can see great potential for resistance because these conditions have steadily declined. Governments are acutely aware of this, and they’re putting in place police states everywhere. They are looking into the future and have an even better understanding of what the future holds because they’re the ones who are enabling it and using it to their advantage. But they still know that the future holds more social conflict across what is now a truly globalized system.

Are there particular struggles happening in different parts of the world that inspire you or that you perceive as being helpful in understanding what could be accomplished here?

A lot of the indigenous movements in Central and South America are very inspiring, especially in their ability to mobilize so many of their people and to carry out real actions – for example by blockading highways and shutting down the entire economic system, as they did in Ecuador and Bolivia. Their level of community self-organization is really high and they are very inspiring. Another inspiring example is the Zapatistas in Chiapas and what they’ve been able to achieve despite being so poor and lacking so many resources. I was down there in January. They’re proud of not taking government money even though they are extremely poor. In many of their communities they have organized their own health clinics and schools. It’s really only in the areas where they have their own autonomous self-government that health levels and literacy rates have increased. Also, when I look at other countries, I’m inspired by the Palestinians who continue to resist one of the most modern and high-tech military forces in the world.

Up here we have our own band council chiefs telling us the solution is more capitalism and throwing more money at the problem. But of course that’s one of the major causes of the problem. It’s the capitalist system that is breaking down communities and destroying traditional territories and rendering people unable to understand themselves in a traditional way.

Are there non-native thinkers from particular intellectual traditions that you think are useful for native people in terms of understanding current struggles?

There are a lot of insights in the writings of anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon. I would also recommend Mao, since he was a brilliant strategic and tactical thinker. He was able to organize a large mass of people to fight successfully for quite a long time in China.

What do you think about Howard Adams’ attempt to adapt a Marxist analysis to native struggles or Ward Churchill’s talk of anarcho-indigenism? Does this seem useful or are they bringing in political traditions that don’t connect to native people?

I think it’s useful. In order to change the present society you have to have an understanding of it. These are tools that we can use to do that because Marxism and anarchism as movements developed very strongly in resistance to the rise of capitalism. One of the main problems we’re dealing with today is the capitalist system. So using analyses that came from those movements can be very helpful. We cannot adequately resist or liberate territory for people just by organizing with our traditional means because those means can’t answer questions about the capitalist society we now live in. We need to understand how the system functions and operates, and that’s one thing Marxism and anarchism can help us with.

This is especially useful in understanding things like class, which we didn’t have to deal with before because our societies were largely classless, egalitarian, and communal. We were communist and now they’re trying to turn us into super capitalists! Marx and Engels actually got a lot of analysis on what communism could look like by examining indigenous communities and their structures of government. We can learn a lot from them, and Marxists and anarchists can learn from us. Because we’re living in a modern industrialized nation, Marxism and anarchism can help unite native and non-native people. They help us understand we have a common enemy at some point down the road: the capitalist ruling class.

You mention some of the contradictions involved in trying to go back to traditional roots. It seems that these can be really helpful for providing a sense of oppositional identity but can also hold back struggles or become a conservative force. What’s your approach to traditionalist cultural perspectives around native identity and native struggles?

Traditionalist perspectives have limitations because they don’t answer some of the problems we are now confronted with. For example, we need to really self-organize as people and movements so that we can gain autonomy and self determination. Some people advocate going back to the old hereditary chieftainship systems, which were dismantled under colonialism. The traditional leadership was based on a certain type of social organization and culture that has been largely eradicated by colonialism. It’s not that useful simply to advocate that we adopt these hereditary systems when the people who would be filling those roles have been
co-opted, corrupted, or traumatized by the colonial system and would thus be incapable of rebuilding these systems. We have to find a new way of organizing based on common sense and self-organization. Sometimes traditionalism can become extremely confusing and very conservative because people are looking at traditionalism as it existed before colonialism. It is conservative because it’s not able to adapt to today’s reality.

And yet, these traditions are key to our survival. In the future, traditional ways of living together as people and the traditional skills of hunting and gathering and living off the land will be necessary because this society is going to reach a point of
self-destruction and future generations won’t be able to survive. We have to maintain these traditions because, although they may not be the most important aspect of resisting and fighting today, they will be very important in the future in regards to survival.

According to the current media spin, there is a new and heightened level of native activism and that things are really approaching the boiling point. Is this the case?

It’s not just the media and government saying that; it’s also the AFN and the band chiefs who are always saying it’s reaching a boiling point, that they won’t be able to control the people any longer, and that there will be another Oka. They go on about that ad nauseam. They use it as political leverage to say that the government has to negotiate with them or it will have to deal with the young militants coming up. On the one hand, a lot of it is state propaganda to scare people so that they can shift their support to the moderates. But, on the other hand, there certainly is an element of truth to it because when you have oppression you’ll always have resistance. So the state – along with its lackeys in the band councils – is always trying to maneuver its way around to co-opt or destroy the resistance movements. In my opinion, resistance is going to increase in the future because the coming generations are not going to have the same economic stability or security that the most recent generation has had.

In terms of flashpoints, I don’t really know where they will happen because of the localized nature of so many struggles. From the outside, things look like they are spontaneous, but of course they often take years of organizing and struggle to achieve. But they do have a spontaneous element – when the community has had enough, they stand up and resist – so flashpoints could happen anywhere across the country.

A recently leaked Defence Department document shows that the federal government sees the threat of “insurgency” emerging not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also from native struggles in Canada. How do you assess this statement?

I think it’s a real concern for them. During the Oka crisis, they had 4,500 soldiers deployed, which was a clear counter-insurgency operation. This is partly why the Canadian state funds the AFN and pumps $9 billion a year into Indian Affairs: they are literally trying to buy off and pacify our population. They know the potential for explosion if they’re not pumping that money in, and that potential could increase as economic conditions decline. They won’t have as much money, and they won’t be able to buy people off, so levels of struggle are going to increase. During previous major standoffs, there was a low level of widespread protest, as well as occupations and sabotage of infrastructure across the country. They know that there’s a very real potential for this kind of movement to arise because it has already happened in the past and because there are organizers out there who are constantly trying to advance the movement.

Insurgency is a revolt against established authority, and all anti-colonial rebellions or insurgencies involve as many people as they can, so it is definitely a concern for Canada. Internal security in a resource-based economy with infrastructure spread out all across the country is difficult. Rousseau River Band Chief Terrance Nelson talked about this in his recent rhetorical confrontation with the government when he pointed to the hundreds of miles of vulnerable railway lines and electrical power transmission lines across the country, and this registered as a very real concern for the government.

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE PASTEURIZED by Nathanael Johnson

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE PASTEURIZED
Inside the raw-milk underground
By Nathanael Johnson
HARPER'S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2008

The agents arrived before dawn. They concealed the squad car and police van behind trees, and there, on the road that runs past Michael Schmidt's farm in Durham, Ontario, they waited for the dairyman to make his move. A team from the Ministry of Natural Resources had been watching Schmidt for months, shadowing him on his weekly runs to Toronto. Two officers had even infiltrated the farmer's inner circle, obtaining for themselves samples of his product. Lab tests confirmed their suspicions. It was raw milk. The unpasteurized stuff. Now the time had come to take him down.

Schmidt had risen that morning at 4 A.M. He milked his cows and ate breakfast. He loaded up a delivery, then fired up the bus. But as he reached the end of the driveway, two cars moved in to block his path. A police officer stepped into the road and raised his hand. Another ran to the bus and banged on the door. Others were close behind. Eventually twenty-four officers from five different agencies would search the farm. Many of them carried guns.

"The farm basically flooded, from everywhere came these people," Schmidt later told me in his lilting German accent. "It looked like the Russian army coming, all these men with earflap hats."

The process of heating milk to kill bacteria has been common for nearly a century, and selling unpasteurized milk for human consumption is currently illegal in Canada and in half the U.S. states. Yet thousands of people in North America still seek raw milk. Some say milk in its natural state keeps them healthy; others just crave its taste. Schmidt operates one of the many blackmarket networks that supply these raw-milk enthusiasts.

Schmidt showed men in biohazard suits around his barn, both annoyed and amused by the absurdity of the situation. The government had known that he was producing raw milk for at least a dozen years, yet an officer was now informing him that they would be seizing all the "unpasteurized product" and shuttling it to the University of Guelph for testing.

In recent years, raids of this sort have not been unusual. In October 2006, Michigan officials destroyed a truckload of Richard Hebron's unpasteurized dairy. The previous month, the Ohio Department of Agriculture shut down Carol Schmitmeyer's farm for selling raw milk. Cincinnati cops also swooped in to stop Gary Oaks in March 2006 as he unloaded raw milk in the parking lot of a local church. When bewildered residents gathered around, an officer told them to step away from "the white liquid substance." The previous September an undercover agent in Ohio asked Amish dairyman Arlie Stutzman for a jug of unpasteurized milk. Stutzman refused payment, but when the agent offered to leave a donation instead, the farmer said he could give whatever he thought was fair. Busted.

If the police actions against Schmidt and other farmers have been overzealous, they are nevertheless motivated by a real threat. The requirement for pasteurization— heating milk to at least 161 degrees Fahrenheit for fifteen seconds— neutralizes such deadly bacteria as Campylobacter jejuni, Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli, and salmonella. Between 1919, when only a third of the milk in Massachusetts was pasteurized, and 1939, when almost all of it was, the number of outbreaks of milk-borne disease fell by nearly 90 percent. Indeed, pasteurization is part of a much broader security cordon set up in the past century to protect people from germs. Although milk has a special place on the watch list (it's not washable and comes out of apertures that sit just below the orifice of excretion), all foods are subject to scrutiny. The thing that makes our defense against raw milk so interesting, however, is the mounting evidence that these health measures also could be doing us great harm.

Over the past fifty years, people in developed countries began showing up in doctors' offices with autoimmune disorders in far greater numbers. In many places, the rates of such conditions as multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, and Crohn's disease have doubled and even tripled. Almost half the people living in First World nations now suffer from allergies. It turns out that people who grow up on farms are much less likely to have these problems. Perhaps, scientists hypothesized, we've become too clean and aren't being exposed to the bacteria we need to prime our immune systems.

What we pour over our cereal has become the physical analogue of this larger ideological struggle over microbial security. The very thing that makes raw milk dangerous, its dirtiness, may make people healthier, and pasteurization could be cleansing beneficial bacteria from milk. The recent wave of raw-milk busts comes at a time when new evidence is invigorating those who threaten to throw open our borders to bacterial incursion. Public-health officials are infuriated by the raw milkers' sheer wrongheadedness and inability to correctly interpret the facts, and the raw milkers feel the same way about them. Milk as it emerges from the teat, it seems, is both panacea and poison.

Schmidt responded to the raid on his farm by immediately going on a hunger strike. For a month he consumed nothing but a glass of raw milk a day. He milked a cow on the lawn outside Ontario's provincial parliament. This was a battle, he said, for which he was prepared to lose his farm. He was ready to go to jail. Actually, he'd been awaiting arrest for more than a decade. For all that time, he told me, he'd carried a camera with him so that he could take pictures when the authorities finally came to shut him down. "And I upgraded. You know, first it was still, then video, then digital came along."

The fifty-three-year-old Schmidt doesn't have the demeanor of a rabblerouser. His temperament, in fact, is not unlike that of the cows he tends. A large man, he moves deliberately, reacts placidly to provocation. He has thin blond hair, light-blue eyes, and pockmarked cheeks. On the farm he invariably wears black jeans, a white shirt, and a black vest. In the summer he dons a broad-brimmed straw hat; in the winter, a black newsboy's cap.

When Schmidt emigrated from Germany in 1983, he wanted to start a farm that would operate in a manner fundamentally different from that of the average industrial dairy. Instead of lodging his cows in a manure-filled lot, he would give them abundant pastures. Instead of feeding them corn and silage, he'd give them grass. And instead of managing hundreds of anonymous animals to maximize the return on his investment, he would care for about fifty cows and maximize health and ecological harmony. If he kept the grasses and cows and pigs and all the components of the farm's ecosystem healthy, he believed the bacterial ecosystem in the milk would be healthy, too.

Schmidt bought 600 acres three hours northwest of Toronto. There he built up a herd of Canadiennes, handsome brown-and-black animals with black-tipped horns. Most cattle farmers burn off the horn buds—a guarantee against being gored—but Schmidt believes it's better to leave things in their natural state whenever possible. The dangers posed by the horns (like the dangers of drinking unpasteurized milk) weighed less heavily on him than the risk of disrupting some unknown element of nature's design.

The farm flourished under his hand. Schmidt set up a cow-share system whereby, instead of purchasing raw dairy, customers leased a portion of a cow and paid a "boarding fee" when they picked up milk. People were technically drinking milk from their own cows. The animals were, for all practical purposes, still Schmidt's property, but the scheme made the defiance of the law less flagrant, and health officials could look the other way. Then, in 1994, the Canadian Broadcasting Company aired a documentary about Schmidt and his unpasteurized product. A few months later he was charged with endangering the public health.

Because Schmidt believed that his style of biodynamic farming actually secured the public health, he decided to fight the charges. Newspapers began quoting him on the salubrious powers of raw milk and the detriments of industrial dairy. At this time, strange things started happening around the farm. Vandals broke into his barn. Schmidt found two of his cows lying dead in the yard, apparently poisoned. Then an unmarked van ran his cousin's car off the road. Men jumped out of the van's back and forced him inside, holding him there for two hours. Schmidt hadn't been prepared for the struggle to take this turn. He sent his cousin back to Germany, agreed to plead guilty in court, and sold all but 100 acres of his farm to pay the government fines and cover his lost income.

Schmidt is a man of Teutonic certainty, but as he walked into the field soon after he'd sold the land, he was filled with doubt. The morning sun had turned the sky red, and mist hung around the legs of the cattle. While he twitched a stick at his bull, Xamos, to turn him away from the cows, Schmidt wondered whether it was even possible to run a farm in the manner he wanted. If he started selling his milk at industrial prices it would erode his meticulous style of farming. He would lose the direct connection to his customers. He'd have to push his cows to produce more milk. He'd be compelled to adopt the newest feedmanagement strategies and modernize his equipment. Schmidt didn't see Xamos coming, just felt the explosion as the bull struck him. Even as he hit the ground, the animal was on him,

bellowing. It stabbed with one horn and then the other, tearing up the earth and ripping off Schmidt's clothes. One horn sank into Schmidt's belly, another ripped into his chest and shoulder, grazing a lung. Only when his wife charged into the field, flanked by the couple's snarling dogs, did Xamos retreat. Another man might have taken this attack as a sure sign, a demonstration of the folly of seeking harmony with nature. As Schmidt lay there bleeding into the earth, however, he felt only humility. "Nature is dangerous, yes," he would tell me later. "But I can't control it, and I can't escape from it. I can only learn the best way to live with it."

By the time Schmidt could walk again, almost six weeks later, he'd decided to continue farming on his own terms. He announced his intentions publicly, but the regulators must have felt that they'd made their point. For years he continued farming quietly, as an outlaw, until the morning that government agents descended on his dairy. After the hunger strike and the other public acts of protest, Schmidt settled in for the long fight. He hired a top defense lawyer in hopes of overturning Ontario's raw-milk ban.

In the twenty-five years that Schmidt has operated the dairy, no one has ever reported falling sick after drinking his milk. Yet raw-milk illnesses do crop up. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the United States averages seventy cases of raw-dairy food poisoning each year. In the fall of 2006, for instance, California officials announced that raw milk tainted with E. coli was responsible for a rash of illnesses. It is legal to sell unpasteurized dairy in California, and the tainted milk came from Organic Pastures, in Fresno, the largest of several farms that supply the state's health-food stores.

Tony Martin had agonized over buying the raw milk. He'd never brought it home before. He knew that milk was pasteurized for a reason, but he'd also heard that the raw stuff might help his son's allergies. "There was a lot of picking it up off the shelf and putting it back," he said. Chris, his seven-yearold, drank the Organic Pastures milk three days in a row over a Labor Day weekend. On Wednesday, Chris woke up pale and lethargic. On Thursday he had diarrhea and was vomiting. That night he had blood in his stool, and the Martins rushed him to the hospital. Shortly afterward, several other children checked into southern California hospitals. All of them had drunk Organic Pastures raw-milk products, and they all were diagnosed as being infected with a virulent strain of E. coli known as O157:H7. Some of the children recovered rapidly, but two, Chris Martin and Lauren Herzog, got progressively worse. The O157:H7 strain releases a jet of toxins when it comes into contact with antibiotics, so doctors face the difficult decision of allowing nature to take its course or intervening and risking further damage. Chris's doctors administered antibiotics, Lauren's did not, yet both children's kidneys shut down. While Chris was on dialysis, his body became so swollen that his father said he wouldn't have recognized him if he passed him on the street. Chris was in the hospital fifty-five days. Lauren went home after a month but then relapsed and had to return. Both children eventually recovered but may have suffered permanent kidney damage.

The illnesses didn't stop raw-milk sales. Even as the state ordered store managers to destroy the milk on their shelves, customers rushed in to buy whatever they could. Several Organic Pastures customers said regulators had simply pinned unrelated illnesses on the milk. They pointed out that siblings and friends of the sick children had drunk the same milk from the same bottles and didn't get so much as diarrhea. Tests for E. coli in one of the milk bottles in question had also turned up negative. Although it seemed implausible that the state would frame Mark McAfee, the owner of Organic Pastures, it certainly was possible that regulators were predisposed to declare raw milk guilty. When state veterinarians came to search Organic Pastures for E. coli, they were surprised to see that the manure they pulled from the cows' rectums was watery and contained less bacteria than usual. Patrick Kennelly, chief of the food-safety section at the California Department of Health Services, confronted McAfee with these facts in an email, writing, "Not only is this unnatural, but it is consistent with the type of reactions that an animal might have after being treated with high doses of antibiotics. . . . Why were your cows in this condition, Mark?"

McAfee does not use antibiotics on his organic farm. The state tests all shipments of his milk for antibiotics residue and has never found any. Allan Nation, a grazing expert, offered another explanation: the cows had been eating grass. Grass-fed cows carry a lower number of pathogens, he said. And for a few days in the spring and fall, when the weather changes and new grass sprouts, the cows "tend to squirt," as Nation put it. But grass-eating cows have become so rare that, to California health officials, they seemed unnatural. The norms of industrial dairying had become so deeply ingrained that a regulator could jump to the conclusion that all milk is dirty until pasteurized.

Around the time that Chicago passed the first pasteurization law in the United States, in 1908, many of the dairies supplying cities had themselves become urban. They were crowded, grassless, and filthy. Unscrupulous proprietors added chalk and plaster of paris to extend the milk. Consumptive workers coughed into their pails, spreading tuberculosis; children contracted diseases like scarlet fever from milk. Pasteurization was an easy solution. But pasteurization also gave farmers license to be unsanitary. They knew that if fecal bacteria got in the milk, the heating process would eventually take care of it. Customers didn't notice, or pay less, when they drank the corpses of a few thousand pathogens. As a result, farmers who emphasized animal health and cleanliness were at a disadvantage to those who simply pushed for greater production.

After a century of pasteurization, modern dairies, to put it bluntly, are covered in shit. Most have a viscous lagoon full of it. Cows lie in it. Wastewater is recycled to flush out their stalls. Farmers do dip cows' teats in iodine, but standards mandate only that the number of germs swimming around their bulk tanks be below 100,000 per milliliter.

When I was working as a newspaper reporter in Cassia County, Idaho, a local dairyman, Brent Stoker, had wanted to raise thousands of calves on his farm and sell them to dairies as replacements for their worn-out cows. Stoker's neighbors, incensed by the idea of all that manure near their houses, stopped the project. Stoker wasn't an especially dirty farmer—dairy associations showed off his farm on tours—but, to survive, dairies must produce a lot of milk, which means producing a lot of feces. I called Stoker recently, to talk dairy and catch up. He was in the middle of another fight with the neighbors. This time he wanted to build a large organic dairy. I said I hadn't taken him for the organic type.

"Pay me enough and I am," he said. Organic may mean no antibiotics and no pesticides, but it doesn't necessarily mean grass-fed. When it comes to making milk, grass-fed cows simply can't compete. Stoker's current herd of nonorganic cows produce a prodigious eighty pounds of milk per day. That's mostly because they are fed like Olympic athletes. They eat a carefully formulated mix of roughage and highenergy grains. "If you were to try to pasture them, you'd lose production down to about forty pounds," Stoker said. "Of course, the cow would last a lot longer."

Cows are designed to eat grass, not grain. Unlike mammals that can't digest the cellulose in grass, ruminants are able to access the solar energy locked in a green pasture by enlisting the aid of microbes. These bacteria are cellulose specialists and turn grass into the nutrient building blocks that cudchewing animals need. In return, cows provide a place for bacteria to live— the rumen—and a steady supply of food. This relationship shifts when a cow begins eating grain. The cellulose specialists lose their place to bacteria better suited to the new food supply but not necessarily so well suited to the cow. The new bacteria give off acids, which in extreme conditions can send the animal into shock. Pushing too much high-energy feed through a cow can twist part of its stomach around other organs. This kink backs up the digestive flow to a trickle. The cow will stop eating, and sometimes you can see the knotted guts bulging under the skin. Other disorders also result from the combination of high-energy feeds and high production: abscessed liver, ulcerated rumen, rotten hooves, inflammation of the udders.

It is in a farmer's interest to keep a cow healthy—but not too healthy. If a dairyman decreased the grain portion of a cow's rations to a level that eliminated health problems, he would lose money. A balance must be struck between health and yield. It's not surprising, then, that farmers end up sending grain-fed cows off to the hamburger plant at a much younger age than their pastured counterparts. On average, dairy farmers slaughter a third of their herds each year. As Brent Stoker put it, "We're mining the cow."

There are other bacterial opportunists that move in when a cow's gastric environment is disturbed by a change in diet. Tired cows and ubiquitous feces combine to create conditions that are ideal for the transmission of pathogens. In a 2002 survey of American farms, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found Campylobacter in 98 percent of all dairies and E. coli O157:H7 on more than half of farms with 500 or more cows. When the milk at these large farms was tested, the researchers discovered salmonella in 3 percent of all bulk tanks and Listeria monocytogenes in 7 percent. If that milk were shipped to supermarkets without pasteurization, a lot of people would get sick. Healthy cows with plenty of energy are less likely to take on pathogens.

I asked Stoker if he'd ever considered returning to a smaller, healthier style of farming. "If I had a way to provide for my six kids and have a comparable standard of living I would do that," Stoker said. "The way it is now, I'm more stressed, the animals are more stressed, our crops are probably more stressed. There's nothing I would like more than to go back to that, but I'm too stupid to figure out how."

The problem isn't Stoker's intelligence; it's what he calls the "dishonesty of the market." Advertisers promise that consumers can have the healthiest possible food from happy animals in idyllic settings at current prices. This obviously is a lie, but it's a lie that most people accept. Although American consumers are periodically outraged by the realities of modern agriculture, they never stop demanding cheaper food. Stoker doesn't mind playing the hand he's been dealt. He's good at producing cheap food. But, he acknowledged, "cheap food makes for expensive health care."

The people who buy from Michael Schmidt are atypical consumers. They pay a premium for food they believe will keep them healthy. In their estimation, Schmidt has a biological formula working for him that will be to their benefit. The elements of a dairy farm—the cows, plants, microbes, and humans—have been together long enough to have sorted out their differences. By working within this system, Schmidt can take advantage of some natural efficiencies. Although the life expectancy of a conventional dairy cow is a little under five years, Schmidt's cows are eight, nine, and twelve years old; they are glossy-coated and solid on their feet. Schmidt told me that he hasn't needed to have someone trim his cows' hooves in fifteen years. The cows produce only around twenty-five pounds of milk daily, one third the production of Brent Stoker's animals, but Schmidt doesn't have to pay much for veterinary service. He doesn't have to slap haunches to roust exhausted animals from their beds; his cows actually line up on their own for milking. There's a little trick he likes to show off when it's time for them to return from the fields.

"Watch this," Schmidt said, and he pulled open the door. The cows came jogging in, each one peeling out of line to take her place, unprompted, in the barn beneath a white placard bearing her name: ANNA, SOPHIA, CANTATE, LAURA. They buried their heads in the hay. He beamed. So far the microbes that end up in Schmidt's milk have been benign, possibly beneficial. He says biodynamic farming doesn't open up new niches for unfamiliar forms of bacteria, and it encourages the ones people have adapted to.

It turns out that black-market buyers aren't the only ones who think germ-infested milk is healthy. The yogurt giant Dannon has invested heavily in understanding the benefits of bacteria, and the company now sells dairy products stocked with healthy, or "probiotic," microbes: DanActive, "an ally for your body's defenses," which comes in a small pill-shaped bottle and provides a dose of an organism owned in full by Dannon called L. casei Immunitas; Danimals, a more playfully packaged bacteria-infused drink, designed to appeal to children; and Activia, a yogurt containing a bacterium the company has named Bifidus regularis, which "is scientifically proven to help with slow intestinal transit." Both Michael Schmidt and Dannon may be working to reintroduce bacteria into the modern diet, but Schmidt labours under a principle of submission. He accepts the presence of unknown

microbes and tries to make his customers healthy by keeping the creeks that run through his farm clean, by maintaining the stability of his ecosystem. In contrast, Dannon's is a philosophy of mastery.

Milk comes to Dannon's Fort Worth processing plant in tanker trucks, arriving wild, full of its own diverse bacteria. It leaves the factory civilized and safe, in four-ounce cups. It takes a lot of machinery to accomplish this domestication: miles of stainless-steel pipes, huge fermentation vats, and dozens of white-frocked, hairnet-wearing workers. Although the process is intricate, the concept is simple: kill the bacteria, then add bacteria. Workers pasteurize the milk not once but twice. All yogurt is made when benign bacteria are mixed into milk. But Dannon also adds probiotic bacteria, and when I visited the plant last year, this is what I asked to see. Dannon employees looked at one another nervously. The bacterial strains are proprietary, and so are the methods surrounding their use. My public relations minder, Michael Neuwirth, exchanged a few words with J. W. Erskin, the plant manager, then nodded. "We can see the place where it's done," Neuwirth said.

The room was lined with freezers. Neuwirth opened one, and frost billowed out. Inside were stacks of what looked like one-quart milk cartons, encrusted with ice. "This is for Activia, right?" Neuwirth asked. "Yep," Erskin said. "Regularis."

The Dannon workers explained that each carton contained thousands of tiny pellets consisting of frozen milk and bacteria. You can buy non-proprietary yogurt-making bacteria for about $40 a bottle from several suppliers. No one at Dannon would tell me the price of the company's proprietary strains, but Erskin said, "When our little friends die, it's very costly."

Workers wait for the moment when the milk reaches the ideal temperature, then add the bacteria. Lactobacillus bulgaricus, a yogurtmaking bacterium, acts first, converting sugar to acid; Streptococcus thermophilus is next. These prepare the substance for the probiotic strains. Every bacterial move is choreographed. Although the Dannon people wouldn't show me how the healthy microbes fit into this process, they did take me next door, to the bottling room, where the precision continued, though in engineering rather than biochemistry. The most beautiful machine there was the one filling little bottles with DanActive. The bottles moved across the ceiling, propelled by compressed air along a metal track, halting, then scooting forward, like a line of penguins. When the bottles reached the machine, an auger caught them in its threads, sending them spinning in an endless line around gears and carousels. The machine cleaned the bottles with acid, zapped them with sterilizing UV light, filled, sealed, boxed, and stacked them—in scherzo—at 460 containers per minute.

Erskin stood beside me, watching through the Plexiglas window. "It's like a ballet," he said.

Dannon's new lines of products lend some credibility to the claims of bacterial necessity made by Schmidt and other raw-milk advocates. Albeit cautiously, scientists have also begun weighing in on whether such technologies as pasteurization have purged necessary bacteria from our food. When I started talking to milk experts, several told me I needed to speak to Bruce German. A food chemist at U.C. Davis, German realized early in his career that if he could determine what a food perfectly suited to our DNA looked like, he would have a Rosetta Stone with which to solve the puzzle of dietary well-being. He would be able to examine each molecular component of this food to understand what it was doing to make people healthy. No plant would do as a model, since evolutionary pressure tends to favor plants that can avoid being eaten. The model food would be just the opposite: something that had evolved specifically to be a meal, something shaped by constant Darwinian selection to satisfy all the dietary needs of mammals. That Urfood, of course, is milk.

The day I visited German, he was hosting a reception in honor of Agilent, a company that had helped develop a machine able to analyze oligosaccharides, sugar polymers found in breast milk. As we walked across the U.C. Davis campus, German brought me up to speed. He's a slight, energetic man, with smile lines creased into his face. His excitement for his work is infectious. Oligosaccharides make up a large portion of human milk, in which they are about as abundant as proteins. The curious thing about them, German said, is that they are indigestible. Which means, he said, one hand chopping the air, that they are there to feed the bacteria living inside a baby's gut, not to feed the baby. As far as scientists know, only one microbe thrives on this sugar, a bacterium a fairly unique genome.

"There's a lot of evidence that we coevolved with this organism," German explained. "It's really specialized to us and vice versa. Mothers recruit this entire life form to help the process of digestion."

Chemists have identified numerous other compounds in milk that are there not just to nourish babies but to create a specific microbial ecosystem. Lactoferrin, lysozyme, and lactoperoxidase kill off only harmful bacteria, not beneficial bacteria. (These selective bactericides, along with oligosaccharides, are also in cow's milk, though in lower concentrations.) Consider, German said, what it means that milk, the model food, has evolved such a sophisticated chemical system that caters not to us but to our microbial friends. It means, he said, raising his eyebrows, that "bacteria are tremendously important to us"—so important that researchers studying the microbes living inside us say it's unclear where our bodily functions end and the functions of microbes begin.

By any rational measure, this world belongs to microbes. They were mastering the subtleties of evolution three billion years before the first multicellular organism appeared. They continue to evolve and adapt in a tiny fraction of the time it takes us to reproduce once. They flourish in polar ice caps, in boiling water, and amid radioactive waste. We exist only because some of them find us useful. Ninety percent of the cells in our bodies are bacteria. The entirety of human evolution has taken place in an environment saturated with microbes, and humans are so firmly adapted to the routine of sheltering allies and rebuffing enemies that the removal of either can devastate our defense systems.

For the past century, however, we've done our best to wall ourselves off from microbes. In 1989, David Strachan put forward the "hygiene hypothesis," which posed that this separation could be causing the increased incidence of immune disorders. As the years have passed, many studies have helped refine his proposal. Scientists found that hygiene itself wasn't a problem. People who never used antibacterial soap were just as likely to have asthma as those who scrubbed obsessively. In a 2006 study of thousands of children living on farms in Shropshire, England, Strachan and another scientist, Michael Perkin, found that raw-milk drinkers were unlikely to have eczema or to react to allergens in skin-prick tests. "The protective effect of unpasteurized milk consumption was remarkably robust," Strachan and Perkin wrote. Then, in May of 2007, a group of scientists published a paper after surveying almost 15,000 children around Europe. They found that children who drank raw milk were less likely to have any among a wide range of allergies. Either there's something about industrial milk that's harmful, Perkin wrote in a commentary that accompanied the paper, or there's something in raw milk that's beneficial.

None of these findings mean that raw milk is safe. Every single study contains the caveat that raw milk often harbors pathogens. From an epidemiological perspective, Bruce German told me, advising raw-milk consumption at this point "would be crazy." Health officials certainly should have a high level of confidence before approving anything risky. But in light of the new evidence, it was becoming harder to deny that something beneficial was being lost during pasteurization. And health offiicials also have an obligation to ensure that they are not outlawing what makes us healthy.

Last March I drove to Fresno to meet Organic Pastures owner Mark McAfee and see how he had fared since the E. coli outbreak. The dairy is made up of a few prefabricated double-wide trailers on 450 acres of pasture extending out into the hazy flatness of California's Central Valley. When I arrived, some 200 cows were chewing their cud on thirty shadeless acres of closely cropped grass. McAfee culls about 14 percent of his herd each year, far below the industry's average but still above Schmidt's. When you have fewer than fifty cows, like Schmidt, it's different, McAfee said. "You have time to give each one a foot rub every night. You can do yoga with them every morning."

After walking through the dairy, we sat down in McAfee's office. Lab results had found the exact same sub-strain of E. coli O157:H7 in almost all of the children who fell ill after drinking unpasteurized dairy. Yet McAfee remained unfazed. How did it help to show that the bacteria from each patient matched, he asked, when one patient, an eighteen-year-old in Nevada City, claimed he hadn't drunk the milk? The disease trackers I talked to explained this by saying that sometimes germs move indirectly. Someone else in the family spills a little milk. You wipe it up. Then you wipe your mouth. But there was another theory I'd been hearing from scientists working to explain why O157:H7 had burst onto the scene in the 1980s with such virulence. Maybe, they said, it wasn't that the bacteria had changed but that we had changed. In Brazil outbreaks of E. coli O157:H7 are unheard of, though the bacteria exist there. A pair of recent studies show that Brazilian women have antibodies protecting them against O157:H7 and that they pass these antibodies to their children through the placenta and their breast milk. I found this interesting, especially in light of the fact that in every case I learned about, the victims of the Organic Pastures outbreak had just started drinking McAfee's milk. Perhaps those who had been drinking the milk longer had developed the antibodies.

"It's an old story," McAfee said. "You see it again and again in the lists of outbreaks. City kids went to the country, drank raw milk, and got sick; country kids didn't get sick." But, I pointed out, this explanation still implicates Organic Pastures. McAfee shook his head. "Look, if I made four kids sick, I made four kids sick. But show me the 50,000 kids I made healthy. We don't guarantee zero risk. We aren't worried about the .001 percent chance that someone will get sick; we are worried about the 99 percent assurance that you are going to get sick if you eat a totally sterile, anonymous, homogenous diet."

The problem for McAfee is that the .001 percent is shocking and visible. A dying child will make people change their behavior. The diseases that might stem from a lack of bacteria are much more subtle. They come on slowly. It's difficult to link cause and effect. Businesses that contribute to chronic disease often flourish while businesses that contribute to acute disease get shut down. McAfee, now clearly incensed, dismissed this line of reasoning. "If my milk gets someone sick, I deserve some blame, but not all of it. People have to take responsibility for maintaining their own immune systems. And we have to look at an environmental level too. Where did these germs come from? E. coli O157:H7 evolved in grain-fed cattle. It's amazing to me that we've sat by as factory farmers feed more than half the antibiotics in the country to animals and breed these antibioticresistant bacteria at the same time the food corporations are destroying our immune systems. I believe our forefathers would have grabbed their muskets and gone and shot someone over this. They would have had a tea party over this."

Instead of grabbing his musket, McAfee is expanding. He's building a $2 million creamery, complete with a raw-milk museum. He expects to finish construction in 2009. I asked what he'd do if regulators come to shut that down.

"I have an email list of 8,000, ready for immediate revolutionary action," he said. When the California legislature quietly passed a law late last year with such strict standards that it constituted a de facto ban on raw milk, McAfee mobilized these forces. In January hundreds of people packed into a committee chamber in Sacramento carrying their children and wearing black GOT RAW MILK? T-shirts. A legislative study group is now working to come up with new standards.

Aside from the revolutionaries and reactionaries, what are the rest of us to do? When Schmidt's case goes to trial this spring, his lawyer, Clayton Ruby, will challenge the constitutionality of mandatory pasteurization. In Canada, Ruby is one of those lawyers people threaten to hire in the same way people in the United States used to say they were going to hire Johnnie Cochran. He's sure to argue eloquently, but the judge's decision on milk will leave unanswered the larger question of how we should mend relations with our microbial friends. The court won't tell us whether raw milk is good for people or how Schmidt has managed to distribute it for twentyfive years without making anyone sick. Someday scientists may answer these questions. But until then, we will have to conduct our own calculations to determine what constitutes clean and healthy food.

When I sat at Schmidt's breakfast table early one morning, glass in hand, I understood the possible consequences of my choice. All the competing science was there, along with the stories of epic sickness I'd heard. And I have to confess, the thought crossed my mind that if I got sick it would make a hell of a story. But when it comes down to it, here's why I drank the raw milk. The sun had just come up, and we'd already finished three hours of work in the barn. I was filled with a righteous hunger. The table was laden with eggs from the chickens, salami from the pigs, jarred fruit, steaming porridge, cheese, and yogurt. Although dairy isn't for everyone, I come from the people of the udder: my ancestors relied so heavily on milk that they passed down a mutation allowing me to digest lactose. For many generations my forefathers sat down to meals like this after the morning milking. It felt unambiguously right.

This, of course, is the very definition of bias: the conflation of what feels right with what is scientifically correct. But as it was, I could only hope that my biases were rooted in something more than nostalgia. Perhaps they were. The way a place feels won't tell you anything about whether bacteria have breached the wall of sanitation, but it does reveal something about the overall health of an ecosystem. Humans have relied on such impressions to assess the quality of their food for most of history. Someday the uncertainties of dietary science will fall to manageable levels, but until then I will rely on my gut. I drained my cup and poured thick clabbered milk and apple syrup on my porridge. If any bacteria disagreed with my body, the conflict was too small to detect.

Sad news.....

www.positivecreations.ca
www.positivecreationsclothing.com

Myspace- www.myspace.com/positivecreations
Tribe- people.tribe.net/positivecreations
Flickr- www.flickr.com/photos/21676722@N04/

(the following letter was sent to me by Chris Dyer's brother, Peru Dyer)

Greetings ladies and gentlemen,

I was recently reported by my brother over the phone (as I am in Ottawa at the moment) that during his bbq jam, his laptop, hardrive, monitor and scanner where stolen from his room...Im sure some of you may know this by now. This totally broke my heart, specially when he started to cry, so I am trying to get a little fundraiser for him up before he leaves on this expensive trip so he can get another laptop which he desperately needs. I figure he's such a loved character in the scene and does so much for so many selflessly, so Im hoping people will respond. It wont get all that work data back but it will lift a little weight off his shoulders.

I will be going to his place tomorrow evening and possibly staying overnight before he leaves on Tuesday. You can either respond to this email to say how much you can contribute (even if its 5 dollars he will appreciate it), I will be in Montreal and will happily meet up with you..I work on St. Laurent and live on Duluth so we can arrange something. Theres no point or resources on my side to make a whole even for this of course so feel free to contact me also at this number - 514.526.5826

Oh, and he does not know about this so dont go calling him telling him how much you'll contribute, I'll do the honorable mentions myself :)
(And in any chance of these electronics where to be returned, I would also return the donations..)

I hope youre all enjoying the sun and treating yourselves to some ice- cream
much love
-Peru Dyer

A walk to my old house....

Our old room-mate, Gaetan, video recorded 7 minutes of our walk home (that includes walking up the stairs into the living room) while we
were all just a little tipsy (and I was stoned out of my gourd). The recording includes random scraps of random conversations about almost
nothing. Keep your eyes peeled for a fly by flashing of the man behind the recorder. This was one of the last nights that our house-hold lived together.

Enjoy!!

www.youtube.com/watch

Trasitions

take a look at this website from the UK: www.transitiontowns.org/

You should also check out this article: www.guardian.co.uk/society/...ssilfuels