Constellation will be back in 2025, but things are going to look a bit different this year! Instead of one weekend, the festival will span an entire week, from May 15th to the 21st. Like last year, we encourage everyone to submit events to the online calendar (to be relaunched soon). We’ll also be organizing two large events on Saturday and Sunday. Keep reading for more info!
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Anarchist Bookfair Saturday, May 17 – CÉDA
As you probably guessed, the Anarchist Bookfair will be happening again–same place, same time, same general idea. Tablers will be able to set up inside and outside CÉDA (no CCGV) with books, zines, art, and other materials relevant to anarchy. We’ll also have access to a handful of rooms in CÉDA and spots in Parc Vinet for book talks, workshops, discussions, reading circles, and more! We’re hoping that the content of events on this day can be a bit more conceptual or theoretical. Think reading circle of your favourite anarchist essay, discussion on an ongoing social struggle, workshop sharing new perspectives on security culture, and all that kind of fun stuff.
Anarchist Skill Faire Sunday, May 18 – CÉDA
As for Sunday, we are excited to host the Montreal Anarchist Skill Faire (10 points if you spotted the bilingual pun). Remember school science fairs? We want to do something similar, but with more anarchy (trifold displays welcome). We call for a tabling event that brings a chaotic and dazzling range of anarchist-relevant skills together with the purpose of sharing it freely. Maybe you want to give tips on protest first aid, provide a hands-on introduction to lockpicking, or teach people how to set up a mesh network. Anything goes, as long as it centres the diffusion of hands-on knowledge and practical skills. There will also be rooms for more intensive, workshop-length skillshares!
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Anarchists have had an enduring understanding that theory and practice can’t (and probably shouldn’t) be separated. Ideas incite action, practice inspires theory, and politics influence the types of skills we seek to develop. Theoretical and conceptual conversations will touch on practice and have implications for action. Discussions related to hands-on knowledge and practical skills will be shaped by ideas and be of relevance to theory. We’re organizing Saturday and Sunday along these two themes as an experiment, and we recognize that both are equally important and intrinsically linked to one another.
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Kids Zone
We want Constellation 2025 to be engaging and accessible to people of all ages! Once again, childcare and kid-friendly activities will be provided at the Kids Zone in CÉDA. We also encourage festival-goers to organize workshops and skillshares geared toward young people on either Saturday or Sunday.
Get Involved
The table reservation and workshop application forms will be available soon. Check our website or social media pages later this month to learn more. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to reach us at constellationmtl@riseup.net.
Cameras were blocked, tactics practiced and sharpened, trust and affinity were built and clarified. Taking advantage of these dark and long nights, a festive crew piled up some scavenged Christmas trees, blocking the CN tracks on the property of Ray-Mont Logistics in Hochelaga’s Terrain Vague.
A big bonfire and joyful celebration ensued, and we made an escape before the security guards made their regular rounds – with meters high flames burning into the skyline long after we left.
In the yard beside, a graff on an ugly shipping container read ‘LET’S BURN INDUSTRIALISM!’.
Bonne annee! We will mark the passage of time whenever we want, hopefully also by slowly marking the downfall of our targets.
This zine looks at the errors made in the 2022 film How to Blow Up a Pipeline and imagines how the film would have looked if the affinity group took security seriously. Fiction shapes reality, and the analysis is meant to help counter the unsafe practices we see on screen.
Earlier this year, Amplifier Films was invited by Shanipiap, a courageous Innu land defender, to help share her story and amplify the call for action from the heart of her ancestral territory near Lac St-Jean, Quebec.
This video captures the poignant moment Shanipiap stopped a massive logging truck to make a powerful statement: her people are still here, still protecting the land that has always been theirs. With a sacred fire burning in the background, a symbol of hope and resistance, Shanipiap and her community are standing firm against relentless industrial encroachment by forestry, mining, and oil companies, which have devastated vast parts of their homeland.
For generations, the Innu have honored their duty as protectors of the forest, water, and wildlife, fostering a deep connection to Mother Earth. But with the exploitation of Quebec’s natural resources accelerating since the James Bay Agreement, the stakes have never been higher. The sacred fire in Dolbeau/Mistassini is not just a call for help—it’s a declaration of survival and resilience.
Through this film, we hope to amplify the voices of those on the frontlines of this struggle and inspire action. Learn more about the Petapan Treaty, the Innu’s ongoing fight, and how you can stand in solidarity to protect the future of these lands and their people.
Comments Off on Yintah Film Review: Anarchists in the Blind Spot, or the Necessity to Write Our Own Histories
Jan072025
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Yintah is the latest installment of a long tradition of indigenous documentaries speaking truth to power against colonial violence in so-called Canada. The story told is of an anti-pipeline struggle to protect the richness of life that the Wedzin kwa river offers, a decade long fight that involved not only the Wet’suwet’en peoples of northern British-Columbia, but also hundreds of dedicated non-indigenous comrades who fought valiantly alongside them. Except the film chose to cast them aside.
The documentary portrays land reoccupation through the personal projects of Freda Huson and Molly Wickham over the course of ten years, but also makes a point to frame those individual stories in a more expansive and continual relationship of the Wet’suwet’en people to the land. The conflict over industrial and otherwise settler-colonial exploitation of the land is part of the present, past, and future of the territory, and the film does a good job situating the latest struggle against Coastal Gaslink on a longer timeline. The film ends with a strong position of indigenous resilience in the face of lost battles, and should inspire many that the fight is never over as long as we are alive.
A central argument Yintah makes is one most indigenous social movements have been pushing forward in North America, which is that the land should be under local and traditional jurisdiction of its original peoples. This framework opens the door to a legalistic approach to anticolonial discourse (« Who is the rightful decider? »), which Yintah gives legitimacy to for example by recounting the Delgamuukw case as a historical win for the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxan nations. Referring to or using the western legal system is neither revolutionary nor anarchist, and comrades involved in indigenous solidarity work have highlighted this point of tension before. Yintah‘s non-critical approach to legalistic tactics distances its narrative from an uncompromising and feral position against the colonial state. But I guess it also paints a truthful depiction of how unfortunately many activists end up wasting their time and energy in lawsuits and legal cases. If we can briefly hear Freda say Delgamuukw hasn’t changed anything, then why waste precious screening minutes showcasing the legal fight in a positive light beforehand? It only reinforces reformist aspirations to pursue court battles. Relying on the judicial system to recognize indigenous governance also contributes to creating a new class of indigenous elite deciders (sellouts) that move on to exploit the land at the expense of ecosystems. This is happening right now as the Nisga’a Nation, an indigenous political entity legitimized by a treaty signed in 1998, has welcomed and invested in the construction of the PRGT pipeline, northwest of the CGL line.
The question of jurisdiction is not where anarchists and indigenous land defenders share the most affinity. Indigenous jurisdiction, even put through the lens of a pre-colonial political system, opens the door to legitimizing forms of authority that, in a decolonized future, would pit anarchists against indigenous figures of power, and is also today encouraging power imbalance on current shared sites of struggle. Thankfully Yintah does not shy away from including one scene that recounts one of the most discordant moments of the struggle when chief Namoks decided on his own, in fear of police use of force, to open the Unist’ot’en gates to pipeline workers, against the will of companions on site and Freda herself. This was not the only moment when power was yielded in the name of Wets’uwet’en traditional governance and at the expense of the fight against police and CGL. But it was maybe the most impactful one, and I am thankful this movie scene offers a brief moment of nuance in an otherwise sugarcoated version of the power dynamics on the frontline.
Land is of course absolutely central to anti-colonialism. During the struggle against the Northern Gateway project, the Coastal Gaslink construction and the RCMP’s heightened presence (roughly the 2012-2022 decade), the backroads territory has been the site of an impressive game of snakes and ladders to control the access to isolated valleys. Yintah chose to dedicate a lot of its screening time to traditional uses of the land. We are shown many scenes of harvesting game and berries, the importance of transferring wet’suwet’en knowledges and values to younger generations and the relationship between traditional ways of life and health. Crucial to the #LandBack movement and Indigenous resurgence, I understand why these themes are explored as an exclusively wet’suwet’en story. But the story of confrontation with pipeline projects was not exclusively wet’suwet’en, and Yintah turned a blind eye to the central role anarchists playedin defending the land against industrial invasion. This is what every comrade has been whispering about since the film came out. Over the decade, there has been hundreds of anarchists who, from far away and traveling onsite, dedicated their hearts and their time and sometimes took immense risk to defend wet’suwet’en land. Anarchists organized solidarity actions in both affinity based models and in larger scale social contexts across the country, expanding all the way to Europe and the Pacific Northwest of the US for years, and insurgent tactics have flourished during #ShutDownCanada. According to many first hand accounts, the frontline camps could not have survived without anarchists’ contributions. The struggle was huge and has changed many non-wet’suwet’en people’s lives, many anarchists, and many others as well. Including the solidarity from non-Indigenous peoples would only have strengthened the Wet’suwet’en story of resistance, not diluted it. Do we have the audacity to bring this up as a grievance to our Indigenous friends? Is it totally misplaced to critique an indigenous film that makes no place for non-indigenous peoples? Not PC for sure.
The narrative choice of Yintah to focus on Molly and Freda also sometimes feels almost claustrophobic, and we lose a sense of the scale of the movement that involved thousands. There is a risk that countless people will watch Yintah and think that such a large scale moment of rupture rests on the shoulders of a few key figures, or that indigenous resistance can make do without the solidarity of allies and accomplices across all social identities. Leadership is a natural human dynamic that can organically move people to act, and can shift depending on the relationships in a said group. But there is a fine line between recognizing leadership qualities as natural and beneficial, and the development of a cult of personality that can be created by certain media deformations. The image of Gidimt’en Checkpoint portrayed through its media channels (instagram and youtube) has misled many folks who have unfortunately showed up to camp with unrealistic expectations such as finding a space that is constantly active in preparing confrontation or occupied and maintained mainly by Indigenous peoples. The mediatic focus of the struggle might also have put too much weight on our heroines, and health and the need for a sustainable involvement has been deprioritized. One of my concerns for upcoming struggles is that the film could embolden identity politicians to recreate a social hierarchy that enables abuse of power on future frontlines.
What I find unfortunate is that there is the propensity in activist discourse to constantly portray oneself as a victim. Yintah is unfortunately no exception. The 1h45 minutes of the documentary painfully recounts all the possible events and situations under which the state, the police or extractive industries have oppressed the Wet’suwet’en peoples. Not that we must shy away from truth speaking, or that the string of events of the struggle should be manipulated or distorted (blockades were dismantled, cabins destroyed, people arrested, and so on), but every publication whether it be book, artwork or film, makes choices in the words used, the scenes that are shown and the potential scenes that are left out. The History we remember is the one some chose to write how they saw fit. There are ways to speak of and against domination that are unapologetically defiant, with our sight set on the target. CGL might have completed its construction, but it took them extra billions and a couple years more than anticipated, because a handful of strong hearts were barricading roads, scaring away pipeline workers and sabotaging their equipment. There were countless confrontational moments on the territory that were (maybe, maybe not filmed) left out of the editing. With its narrative constructed around resilience instead of resistance, Yintah might not be able to inspire others to draw their daggers.
It might not be our Wet’suwet’en companions’ responsibility to tell our side of the story, but our complete invisibilisation from the struggle is basically dishonest. If we take a step back, we can see this situation is not new in the historiography of anarchism. Unpleasant to the general opinion and defiant to the leftist movements, anarchist action and involvement in historical events has always been undermined, evacuated, or falsified when it was time to write down a page of History. In some ways the film continues the legacy of writing off anarchists as outside agitators. Instead of recounting how anarchists have been invited to come to the frontlines and have engaged with land defense in a sustained way for years, Yintah litteraly places anarchists outside of the frame of legitimate participants in the struggle, and leaves room for the liberal media narrative of violent hijackers to step forward. This is hard to digest, when we know in reality that there were moments when only masked white anarchists were present and they were asked to pose with warrior flags for a good photo op. As I write this, land defense in northern BC has already kicked off a new chapter of resistance, this time against the PRGT pipeline. When non-Indigenous anarchists show up, they might be once again be met with confusion from Indigenous peoples, just as they were at times during the wet’suwet’en struggle, faced with questions like “why are you here ?” rather than being understood as part of a larger fabric of anti-industiral actors in the region.
Yintah has only received positive public feedback. What is the point of yet another text doing the devil’s work at pointing at the problems? While I wanted to share what I think is valuable criticism that was discussed amongst friends and companions around me, I still think Yintah tells a beautiful story of two exceptional women that is worth sharing, and a story that hopefully inspires other Indigenous peoples to reoccupy their land and defend it against industrial destruction. What I take away from watching the film is the motivation to support and contribute to anarchists telling their own histories. In a world of overlapping truths, different layers of experiences and their takeaways can compliment and contradict each other. We do not need one official History of the past decade of struggle on the yintah.
“If anarchists don’t make their own History, their enemies will. […] Should we not wish that our stories end up in the hands of those who could only write them to suit their own needs” (Plain Words, Roofdruk/Compass editions, 2024).
In an anarchist history of the struggle on the yintah, the question of jurisdiction and other legal approaches would be presented as hindrances to the liberation of land and life. In an anarchist history of the struggle on the yintah, internal conflict would not be shoved under the rug but taken as an opportunity to try to draw lessons from, so we can continue to deconstruct how we relate to each other outside of civilization’s dogmas. In an anarchist history of the struggle on the yintah, we would recount the dozens of barricades on fire, cop attacks and destroyed machinery to remind us we are truly alive and free in the blissful moment of action. And there would probably be many more anarchist histories of the struggle on the yintah, I am after all just one amongst many anarchists.
Comments Off on How We Stormed Concordia University: De-arresting, Painting, Shutting Down Classes and Exams
Jan062025
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Strategic takeaways TLDR:
1) It does not take many people to change the course of a protest.
2) When the police are busy defending a fixed point it opens possibilities for exciting action in other places.
3) Our comrades can be de-arrested, and doing this against security officers is good, lower-stakes practice for doing it against the police
The takeover of Concordia’s Hall building was yet another instance of the slow building militancy in the Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) solidarity movement for Palestine.
On November 21st, over 85,000 students across Quebec were on strike demanding their academic institutions align with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, drop the political suspensions of student activists, and against police on campus — making it possibly one of the biggest strikes for Palestine, outside of the occupied territories, in world history.
Committed to swinging the protest into a more combative stance, the rough idea was to make the Concordia rally on the first day of the province-wide student strike for Palestine militant enough to force the university to shut down for the day, thereby enforcing the strike mandate and causing maximum disruption. The primary proposal for doing so was to take over a building.
On the day of the rally organized and publicized by Students for Palestine’s Honour and Resistance (SPHR) Concordia, a few anarchists from all over the city (collaborating across Francophone and Anglophone milieus) found each other and shared ideas for ways to make the rally more interesting and disruptive. To avoid another ritualistic demonstration of the same chants and speeches, they decided they would try to enter Concordia’s Hall Building: the center of the University’s student activity, and known target to the broader Tiohtià:ke anarchist community that was hit several times in the fall 2024 semester, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage.
The building was being guarded by a line of private security mercenaries — not exaggeration, everyone would soon find out that these goons were hired by the university from “Perceptage,” a security firm whose CEO advertises his IDF training. After some comrades grabbed hold of the door and held them open, a first group of brave protestors pushed through the security line yelling “move” and beckoning for the crowd outside to join them in storming the Hall lobby. The crowd reacted quickly and did just that. Security also reacted quickly and violenty grabbed the first few comrades pushing through, putting them in head locks and ripping their clothes, but other protesters fought back, grabbing onto their comrades’ bodies and tearing them out of security’s grasp. These were the first sucessful de-arrests since Concordia security began their practice of “citizen’s arrests” at protests, and it showed that our comrades can be snatched back if we move fast. Doing so aginast unarmed security can be good, lower-stakes practice for doing so against the police
Security soon realized they were totally overpowered and outnumbered and stepped aside, defeated. They could only watch as hundreds of students and “outside agitators” stormed the Hall building lobby.
Meanwhile, the riot police – who are often a significant factor at protests in Tiohtia:ke due to being highly equipped (tear gas, pepper spray, etc.) and trained more specifically for “crowd control” than riot cops in other cities, were busy forming a barrier around a small group of zionist counter-protestors. As was seen a number of times over the summer, when the SPVM have a fixed point they must defend, it can open up possibilties for protesters.
Having flooded the Hall building lobby, pacifying speeches on a megaphone began once again, and anarchists were seen continuously beckoning the crowd to remain dynamic and to begin going upstairs by chanting “Who’s school? Our school!” Some protesters spoke to the people giving speeches, who then announced to the crowd that people were moving upstairs. A critical mass began to move and a snake-demo through every floor of the Hall building ensued. Protesters were seen spray painting, disabling security cameras, tossing garbage cans onto the floor, creating chair barricades outside classrooms, even expropriating expensive university equipment, all as security just sat back and watched helplessly.
The dynamic movement created a real feeling of empowerment, and hopefully will encourage more serious attempts to liberate space and resources from the university. What felt powerful to see on this day was that it only took a handful of protesters to secure the doors, and with 15-20 militants on hand the protest shifted from a standard rally on the street, to a disruptive snake demo through a 12 story building. This taking of the school by force was something the secuirty was clearly desperate to avoid, and they responded by sending out an emergency alert encouraging people to avoid the area, as well as a message to professors that resulted in some classes and exams being cancelled into the evening. The day’s success was made possible partly due to activists at Concordia continuously organizing and trying to increase militancy and build relationships; there had been many previous unsuccessful attempts to escalate.
Surely thanks to a large portion of the crowd being in full kuffiyeh, black or student bloc, and totally concealed, as of this day, no one has faced legal or academic consequences for Thursday, November 21st actions.
There were also reports that an hour earlier, at McGill university, fire alarms were simultaneously triggered in every building on campus, forcing students out into the lawn where they could join the walkout happening at the same time.
The strikes served their function very well in this case, freeing up student time and energy and creating the conditions for an action that otherwise hasn’t been pulled off.
The 21st was unequivocally a success, yet there were a few things which could have made it even better and more impactful:
It became very clear that, once the snake-demo up the Hall building had begun, very few people had made plans for such a successful scenario, perhaps this comes from anarchists’ unfamiliarity with success in attempted manoeuvres, or the amount of work militants put into planning to enforce the strike instead of the possibility of other actions. Regardless of reasons, strategic or symbolic targets could have been plotted out beforehand, and further plans beyond just “getting into the building” could have been executed.
While people were beginning to flood into the Hall Building, one protestor who remained outside put up a nazi salute towards the zionist counter-protestors and shouted “The final solution is coming for you”. Regrettably, no one in the demonstration intervened when they saw this happening. While student associations, the Concordia Student Union, and community groups across the city denounced it after the fact, there needs to be a strong, shared understanding that nazis be immediately and physically confronted, and are in no way welcome in the movement for a liberated Palestine.
There is very little shared analysis that “If we desire an end to this world of genocide the university, too, must be destroyed.” Few students, or even non-students, understand the university as a location of social reproduction that enables capitalism and genocide and that must be attacked. This was seen in the general lack of antagonistic behavior on the 21st, in a scenario of possibility and freedom.
Despite having full access to the building, the intense repression students have faced from the university in recent months likely led them to police their own actions on that day, despite not having anyone physically stopping them. This self-policing could be counteracted by encouraging more non-students to join university actions, and encouraging students to be disruptive at each other’s schools. In addition, hopefully actions on the 21st can spread confidence and the skills to de-arrest and protect each other at our own schools.
Despite there being room for improvement, we can still celebrate and try to reproduce the palbable feeling of liberation, freedom and empowerment that filled the hallways of the university that day.
