Grants Pass is NOT for sale: Houseless, Indigenous Peoples respond and refuse the ban on our bodies and lives

“Pleeeeease don’t take my mind… please don’t take my mind!” my aunty Rochelle screamed at the cop, crying while they motioned to the orange-vested men hurling her collection of dolls, her torn sleeping bag, and her last tarp into their trash truck. 

One of the cops said: “We will arrest you, Ma’am, if you don’t leave now.” All the cops there were robotic, barely registering my Aunty’s terror, much less her humanity. 

This happened years ago in San Francisco. My aunty was staying with me and mama in our broke-down hooptie, which we parked wherever SFPD wouldn’t arrest or cite us for parking in public while houseless. 

Aunty was a legit doll collector when she lived in LA, but like the fate of so many Black, Brown/Indigenous disabled women and men alone, she lost her home through a violent paper trail of foreclosure and eviction. Along with her house, she lost her little doll store, and when she came to San Francisco to stay with us, she had only 22 dolls left. She kept them wrapped up in a series of old paper bags. When the SFPD and city workers stole and trashed all she had left that day, she equated the loss of these dolls with the loss of her family. Her kin. Her people. Her mind. 

And today, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Grants Pass v. Johnson, a case that had barred multiple settler cities across stolen Turtle Island from citing and arresting people for the sole act of being homeless in public. The Supreme Court — packed with wealth-hoarding, land-owning, classist, racist, ableist haters — ruled 6 to 3 that fining and arresting homeless people does not violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. This ruling allows cities to treat unhoused people like my mom, me, and my Aunty as criminals just for being homeless in public. 

Decolonizing Homelessness 

“200 years ago, before colonization, there wasn’t even a concept of homelessness,” said Corrina Gould, Talking Chief/ spokesperson of the confederated villages of Lisjan/Ohlone and co-founder of the Sogorea Te Land Trust and Family Elders Council member of Homefulness. 

Once the land was stolen and used for cities with made-up names like San Francisco, the colonizers made up homelessness to displace certain people, and now, they make up a law that says homeless people are criminals, too. 

So-called Grants Pass, Oregon itself is stolen land, and should be returned to the Takelma, Shasta, and Athbaskan relatives, who are the first peoples of that territory and many of whom make up the houseless relatives in so-called Grants Pass today. The same has been done to the houseless people in so-called Bellingham, Olympia, Seattle, and much of the Pacific Northwest. Un-reparated, un-supported, original peoples are houseless on their own land. Over and over again, Thieving Fathers’ lying lies — aka the CONstitution — only protects the white, wealth-hoarding, land-stealing class that stole Turtle Island. I can’t recognize this document as law, nor the way they are using it to make criminals of Turtle Island’s original peoples and the other people in houseless community. 

“This (ruling) is horrible. Sleep is a body’s survival need,” said warrior shero Martha Escudero, houseless leader with Reclaiming Our Homes in occupied Tovaangar (LA). “If unhoused people are a concern, then provide housing for them or truly affordable housing options. Rent is too high and wages are low. There are too many people struggling that may be unhoused soon. Elders are the highest population growing as unhoused because they can’t pay rent with their pensions.” 

Not having a home and being forced to sleep on the street is only a crime in this stolen land governed by krapitalism, a colonial system that criminalizes poverty and commodifies Mama Earth. The US CONstitution is a document that not only holds the theft of occupied Turtle Island in place, it also legalizes the theft of poor and houseless people’s bodies and belongings. 

Now is the Time to Fight 

“Today, the Court stated that these ordinances that criminalize poverty are not ’unusual’ because they remain the ‘usual mode[s]’ for punishment. Historically, the “usual modes of punishment” in this country have been slavery, lynchings, mob violence, jim crow, LGBTQ persecution, gender discrimination, the genocide of indigenous communities, and the shunning of the poor, disabled, those with mental illness. 

“Now is the time that we stand up for those experiencing homelessness and those who are in desperate need of affordable housing. Today, we fight,” said Andrea Henson, a lawyer with Where Do We Go Berkeley, a legal advocacy group for houseless people. 

Houseless peoples have already been terrorized by hundreds of laws, current examples being the Sit-Lie Law and the Encampment Ban, 41:18, and Prop 1. These lies (laws) were all written on the backs of hundreds of years of settler-colonial-hate for poor people, creating the historic and current criminalization of so-called public space. This criminalization continues to enforce the racist, classist codes for the public. But it’s not considered illegal for people who “don’t look houseless” to sleep on the grass in a public park nor to park their luxury RVs in paid parking lots and campgrounds across the US. 

“The Grants Pass decision will mean what it has always meant for poor people, houseless people living in every city and town in the United States: we do not belong in your world,” said an advocate from Aetna Street Solidarity, a Los Angeles organization committed to fighting for a world where everyone belongs. “We were born out of resistance to LA Municipal code 41.18 which banned sitting, lying, sleeping on public sidewalks. The Grants Pass decision is an extension of an ideology rooted in white supremacy and capitalism that leads to six unhoused people dying a day on the streets of LA. When LA passed an amended version of LAMC 41.18, we saw unprecedented loss of people living on the streets coupled by state-sanctioned raids led by our city’s sanitation, police, and housing authority. The only services that were offered were permanent fences, the threat of arrest, and nothing else beyond a temporary shelter bed.” 

We are criminalized in our bodies for being poor outside, for living without a roof, sleeping in our car, in doorways, in parks, on streets, or in tents. But no one ever mentions what caused us to live in these doorways and cars in the first place: the legalized crimes committed by a system that commodifies Mama Earth and profits off our poverty and the incarceration of our bodies. And this system offers no justice or real solutions for us either. 

“All the government ‘Solutions’ like Cabin Communities and shelters have failed to create the necessary foundation unhoused people need to be able to rebuild our lives,” said John Janasko, houseless resident leader at Wood Street Commons. 

According to Paul Boden of Western Regional Advocacy Project, “Criminalizing poverty and homelessness not only fails to address systemic causes of mass homelessness, it also exacerbates both the underlying structures of oppression that continue to plague our society: racism and classism.” 

“Man over Mama Earth. Is the Supreme Court going to pay my rent, or should we be knocking on your door? Move over we are moving in,” said Leroy Moore, a formerly houseless, disabled povertyskola with POOR Magazine Homefulness, and Founder of Krip Hop Nation. 

In response, we have created our own justice, and our own solution. Homefulness is a homeless people’s solution to homelessness created by houseless peoples at POOR Magazine. We have just welcomed their 21st houseless family into rent-free forever housing where we can stand together with fellow houseless peoples, advocates, and allies at Wood Street Commons, Reclaiming Our Homes, Krip Hop Nation, Self-Help Hunger Program, and Aetna Street Solidarity. Together, we resist and refuse this recent legal decision on Grants Pass that will allow, enable, condone, and promote the ongoing violent criminalization of our bodies and our lives, and instead, we demand reparations for the land theft, ableism, classism, border terrorism, and violent poLice terror. 

I took Aunty with me to make sure she wasn’t taken to the psych ward at General the day the cops stole her belongings in San Francisco. But my mom and I were houseless, too, so there was really nowhere for my aunty to be safe. 

After they took the last of her dolls, she was never ok again. She used to whisper and cry softly most days, checking for them every dumpster she could. One day without saying anything to anyone she wandered into I-80 Freeway, maybe still searching, but she was never to be seen again. 

The original edition of this article was published on the website www.poormagazine.org.