Finisia, a fellow rewilder who lives in a post-apocalyptic, horse drawn cart, planting back the native plants in the traditional way has found herself in trouble. While planting, a ranger approached her and well, she ended up in jail! What the fuck?
Click here to donate to Finisia’s legal fund.
From her website:
August 16, 2008
On July 29, 2008 during Finisia’s journey to Berry Camp, she camped along the Salmon River near Challis, Idaho, and was planting native plants along the river bank. A Forest Service officer stopped to question Finisia about her activities. She was uncooperative and was arrested for obstructing/resisting an officer.
As of August 16, Finisia is still incarcerated in the Lemhi County Jail in Salmon, Idaho.
She wrote a letter to the Lemhi County Court and mailed a copy to me, requesting that I post it here for all to read.
Orion,
I gave this to the court. Could you post this to explain my arrest?
(This is an exact copy of what I gave to the court)
I would like it to be known that the reasoning in my violations is a deliberate act of civil disobedience. This was to bring to light that I have been violating U.S. Government treaties of war by engaging in that indigenous life way that was disallowed to force the native onto reservations and to complete the genocide of that life way.
I find life in this civilized way unconscionable and immoral! I find myself without freedom of conscience in it. For twenty-five years I have been planting back the native food flowers of lomatium, cymopterus, bitterroot, yampa, lilies, and berries without permit on public lands. I have done so to complete my cycles and to give life to that which fed me. If I am always planting these flowers there is constantly more of these plants rather than less. This is my duty to God and to Earth. I have been doing this secretly, knowing that I am a violator of statute, code and treaty. I have come out of the closet, so to speak, in order to bring to the attention of all, the injustice of these laws that continue to enforce the genocide on this way of life. I do this only to follow my spiritual convictions, and to have any sense of conscience.
I further am of the opinion that there is criminality in civilization that is not unlawful. It is criminal what is done to the Big Lost River system in favor of farming industries, as is the damning of rivers and the results of salmon depletion, and destroying ozone in nuclear test. I’ve tried many times to assimilate into society but it would require a psychosis of denial to all of these realities. I find I would forfeit my soul and live a fabric of lies in order to enjoy myself in the destruction and extinctions and genocides required by civilization.
I would hope that the destructive results of the civilized world would result in some relinquishment of dominion and that those who destroy this way of life and continue to forbid it could find reason to begin to allow those of us who can to engage in a socio-environmental experiment to show once again how I and others can be effective in enlivening the natural world.
I have many friends who would like to participate in supporting this or being this thing I call human being. I believe all those who will not complete their circle and give life back to mother earth for all that she gives us, are not standing up to their obligation to creator, creation or even their own children. I am asking for your help to establish this way again. I am doing this as a way to blaze a trail to liberty in this way and to open the door to it so that those who would choose this can, without threats of incarceration that I now face for doing such things.
There is now only 2% of God’s aboriginal planting left on earth. I reject that I should be criminal to live a migratory, planting back, walks in beauty way. This hoop in the west is the last place on earth where it is even possible to live in that symbiotic way. All over the earth this aboriginal planting has been done away with. The earth has been made to be like a girdled tree and here in my home in the west is the last small ribbon of bark. Even so, there isn’t any slacking of exploitation of the last 2%. Here even now these plants and animals are being plowed and burned and ground to extinction and those who benefit from these thefts and murders are in denial in order to continue unabated. They are full of self-excuse and justification.
I am at a point in my life I would echo Patrick Henry, “Give my liberty or give me death.”… if I cannot be allowed this life way that my people and my Mother earth cry out for. All of nature is in travail crying out to us to be this kind of people and begin to revisit this old way that provided what Americans called a “Garden of Eden”… to do the work of restoration and re-creation. If I cannot have this, my life is worthless to me and a forfeiture. To be permanently incarcerated in jail or mental institution or grave is better than what I now live. I care for nothing else and for any life outside of this old way. I have strived to not be against anything but it is a fact that to be for a life giving way over a culture of death put me in a perspective where I am an outsider and all is against me and what I am for.
You tell yourselves maybe that you love nature but live outside of it, and the road kill under your tires does not know anything of love from you.
To have hope, I do not say these things in a condemning tone, but to have hope I need to see this liberty to be this kind of person. I am sick at heart to have sneaked around like a criminal for 25 years doing this.
Jesus told you that you make evil good and this good thing evil. I hope that I have illuminated a path where any can see this is now so. Further, I hope in seeing this thing with me, you can help me to change our legacy and give our children an abundant natural world and a chance to see themselves as a beautiful life giving thing in it. I know they all most all can only see themselves now as a plague on earth.
I Hope. Here is my unreasonable delusion: I hope.
Joel, Chapter 2 – The Bible
I will show you a people unique in their ferocity, like a flame of fire, where before them is a Garden of Eden. Behind them a vast, toxic. desert wasteland.
Revelations, 11:18
God should and will destroy all those who destroy the earth.
A tree is known of it’s fruit. A child of creator would even suffer pains of death to give life to creation. A child of the destroyer lives to enjoy and perform the destruction of it.
Finisia Medrano
Lemhi County Jail
Inmate Finisia Medrano
206 Courthouse Drive
Salmon. Idaho 83467
