THE FRAUGHT FESITVAL

THIS IS THE SCHEDUAL FOR THE FRAUGHT FESTIVAL, (everything is totally free and open to anyone)

Saturday Nov 24th, 1-6pm @ the public library:
Public Discussion about local economy, economic diversity in the Yukon, co-ops and collectives, and for this we have invited several "consientious" local businesses to share their history and motivations with us. This will be an oppertunity as well to share perspectives and ideas about community development in Whitehorse and to exchange knowledge and resources. We are emphasising the "sustainable" aspect of community, development, and economy in this discussion. Their will also be food and time to hang out and talk.

Sunday Nov 25th, 1-6 pm @ the public library:
Satuday will be for workshops on how to make things yourself, where we encouge anyone interested in making "crafts" or christmas gifts to come on out: (we are going to supply as much as we can for these workshops, but we encourage people to bring materials and to share with others, there will also be food but we also encouage peoples to bring something if they would like to, but no obligations)

1:00-2:30- Book making with our friends David Kluney Ross and Erin (from the Boys and Girls club) we'll be showing you how to make a couple different styles of book and how to decorate/design them to suit anyones taste (probably)

3:00-4:00- Underware and menstration pads with Amilie and my honey Fabienne. (Clearly these things are alittle gender bias so there'll be a comic/collage making sesh for those who differ) These ladies'll show you how to design and fabricate your own underware/menstration pads using material you probably have around your house, and provide some other relevant knowledges, makes great gifts, you won't want to miss this!

4:00-5:00- Homemade jewlery with Cindy who's gonna show you how to make classy homemade jewlery from things you probably have lying around the house.(again we'll try to offer an alternative to jewlery for those masculine types)

5:00-6:00- Minor bike repair with Phillipe the bike guy, he's gonna show you things I don't know how to do like change a tire, fix a broken chain and probably answer some questions about other things you might want to know.

That will pretty well be it for that Sunday, but we will be back at the library every sunday afterward until christmas for people to work on their projects or gifts and just hanging out, something like 1-6pm, this'll be open to everyone and we'll bring some materials but we also ask people to bring what they can.

Their will also be downtown treasure hunt and spontanous pinata smashing throughout the month as well, however there'll be no schedual for that, just being in the right place at the right time, but I will be making a map that hopefully you will stumble across in your daily journey.
Hope you all will come on out and D.I.Y with us, and tell a friend.

This is a picture of my honey getting Fraught.

A D.I.Y.ing Society presents: THE FRAUGHT FESTIVAL!

A D.I.Y.ing Society is happy to present the first ever Fraught Festival. The festival will begin on Friday November 23 at noon in front of the Elijah Smith Building where a pinata will be broken, a "rendezvous" held and the kick-off to a city wide treasure hunt will be held. Then on Saturday, a panel on fair trade, local economies, the environment and, obviously, alternatives to buying, trading, sharing, and dwelling, will be happening at 1pm in the conference room in the Whitehorse Public Library. The community will be welcome to share their own experiences and thoughts during the panel session and talk with local business owners about the history and motivation of their doings. Then on Sunday we will be hosting a series of workshops at the library on things like book making, jewlery making, underware making and minor bicycle repair.The Festival symbolically begins on the Buy-Nothing-Day week end but continues throughout the month of December with "craft days" also being held at the library for peoples to work on projects, presents and plain old togetherness. Hope to see you all there!!!

DON'T MISS YOUR CHANCE TO SUPPORT THE YOUTHS

I have heard through the grape vine that today at 5pm there will be a demonstration of youth taking place in front the Elijah Smith building on mainstreet to bring attention to the lack of emegancy shelter for youths in the city. So the kids is going to get expressive and hopefully the boys up stairs hear what the needs are. If there is anyone reading this thing please keep in mind that this is a serious problem in the city and if you have an oppertunity to help out DO IT!
Best of luck in your ventures, tune in tommorrow to find out what happens.

To imagine all the thinks you could say...

I had the oppertunity this last week to participate in a 4 day long planning process that the city of whitehorse organized, inspired by the future of whitehorse as a sustainable city, and I was also invited to speak for a brief moment as a first nation's youth, and needless to say that the oppertunity got ahead of me. The speech/presentation was alright, but this is something I wrote and would have like to say alternativly, and this being the power of blogging and in the spirit of Doing It Yourself publishing, this is a bit of what I would have said in an alternate universe:

"I suppose that I exist in between very differing realities, partly as the child of a woman who's dedicated all her passion in life to advocating the rights of first nations, and specifically women and there children. She had been abducted and fostered out as a child by the same hands that built the soul crushing "Residential Schools". My mother being born Indian in a time when "sustainability" was a term likely used only in reference to the cutting and digging industrial machines "discovering" the hidden potential of Canada. The woman who would grow from this girl had struggled to bring back into remembering all the memories that hadn't been good enough to be human less then 50 years ago.
Another part of my being is a composition of inflicted youth culture, muddy Occidental pigments, and a generic liberal/socialist feelings. In short another illegitimate son of the "New Age". A next generation youth, able to sit in with elders and hear, identify with, and tell the old stories about living in the before time, when people lived "on the land" where now we live "in doors", and when people could identify plants, animals, weather and winds as easily as I can now recall catch phrases, logos or slogans.
They would tell stories about depressions on the land and they would talk about depressions on the mind, and I learned how they equally take casualties. I would learn how the mind is like sky, in essence empty though full of light, and the body like earth, dense and fertile. I would be told how the earth was as the first mother, and the sun the father, and I was informed of the repercussions of taking their power. And instructed how to learn, and bring memories from the past through the land, because everything that is has always been.
I was told to watch all my little brothers and sisters now who walk in the forgetting of all these things. It's because so many children are walking in this forgetting, nowhere land, that the elders have moved away and left us without a testament, because their only will is in the cycles and traditions that reveal nature through the being and all we can care about is saturated commercialism, profit and development, that we are fated to drudge through this existence, future in tow and forever wonder why we struggle the way we do.
It seems clear to me now that we are not recognizing the ability of our communities, in Whitehorse as in any other place. The youth are often being overlooked and reprimanded for expressing themselves with the scant means supplied by our education system. For example, it has taken me years to build a body of vocabulary and references that I may use to be understood by the "dominating" population. It also seems that the city will go out of there way to repress the youths choices of artistic expressions that do not conform into the classical techniques approved by past generations done in the "appropriate" places. I'm talking about street art as a functioning tool for expression and community aesthetic. These two things equally need neutering in the different segments of our community, be it youth, seniors, first nations or any other citizens. This can be conjoined with building beautification and incorporating human elements into architecture that seem to be missing in the majority of our public spaces. Perhaps we could look to the traditional coastal people and there big houses paintings and their use of art as functional aesthetic.
It seems to me as a "new generation" youth that we need to be bringing the old knowledge and traditions into the new world, and it seems as though there are a lot of others who feel the same way. One of the first things I remember learning as a child was that you never take more than you can carry, you never bring in what you can't bring out. This seems to be a good principle of sustainability, especially for the Yukon. And what other ways can the old knowledge be adapted to our new sustainability design? Perhaps more inclusive and integrating education, we might start by reevaluating the curriculum and including history of residential schools and Canada's colonial roots, and showing kids how to make the things that interest and relate to them. We might follow the examples of all the education programs that look to empowering students and recognizing that they are human beings before anything else, and that going through the education system is not like a cattle farm, children do not need to be herded, but like in the traditional societies of canada, they need to be encouraged to discover within natural contexts how the world functions. We are discovering now that book learning and standardized curriculum is not benefiting the majority of children, and we only need to see the recognize how Waldorf or Montessori and other schools are really leading the way to new systems that may bring us out of what I feel to be an educational "dark age". I feel that a reformed education system will also ,in time, bridge the cultural gaps that we live with in our communities, and specifically in the cause of whitehorse, invite the first nations communities into a closer relationship with the entire community."

Kiddies need a place to go...

There was an open house discussion about the future of an emergancy youth shelter last night at the Westmark, and it seemed to have been a productive evening as far as brainstormings. I don't have any information or contacts about it, but I just wanted to put this out there in the event that you notice someway to get involved in that. Yukon winters are no jaunt through a dewy meadow at dawn, these things is cold, so lets not dick around with this and arrange something.

everything to gain...

I have recently come across a quote, and stop me if you've heard this, although you likely have, "live simply so that others may simply live". Now, I'd like to consider myself a somewhat considerate person, and so being, I sat and reflected on this for some time, eventually arriving at a bit of a plateau. To what extent am I to simplify and is context at all a factor? After all, the Great White North isn't a simple place to live. We have needs, and dire needs at that. Extremely demanding needs of dire circumstances at times.
Keeping all this in mind it seems to be appropriate timing that next week I will be attending the Whitehorse Sustainability Design Charrette, where there will be a 4 day discussion on the inevitable future of 48 million bucks for our community infrastructure. In an interview with a organizer of the "charrette" I was asked what type of "hat" I will be wearing. Meaning, I suppose, who will I be representing through these discussions. However, I took this question literally. What kind of hat will I be wearing, and for that matter, what kind of pants, shirt, socks, shoes and jacket will I be wearing? How will I be getting there and what kind of food will I be eating and finally, where will it all come from!!!??? I suppose these are fairly fundamental questions when living in the Yukon. Being that a very vast majority of everything we own and consume must be imported into the territory from far off exotic and ,sometimes incompressible lands, and as most of us know, made in incomprehensible conditions to that of our Canadian working environments. In short, we are relying heavily on very complex systems of manufacturing and distributing. Well the whole thing is a but much for me, But it's a new day, and I'm thinking what the hell, it's not to late to learn how to make my own hat or my own pants, shirt and so on. And maybe I can learn how to grow my own food and possibly in time I might learn to give a dame about my neighbor and help him grow his own food, and help him fix his house or whatever good neighbours do.
What I'm getting at I suppose is that until very recently people knew how to do these things, and not only that but these fundamental abilities were completely integrated into the social structure. Kids weren't bored and adults weren't unemployed, and no one was homeless and food could be sought out, these were basic principles of living, this is simplicity.

Next week things like this will be discussed as concerned with Whitehorse and the Yukon, and it's my impression that it's a serious attempt towards a healthier, and globally consious community being built over a period of some odd years.
But in the meantime we's got some livin' to do, so maybe we ought to get busy learning how to do somethings, simplify and make your own life, and get involved with community developement because if you don't, I garentee that someones going to get involved for you.

There will be a public open house each day of the Charrette, from Monday Oct 22nd to Thursday 25th at 7pm to 9pm to hear and comment on a summary of the days dicussion up at the Mt. McIntyer sport lodge (just above the Cananda Games Center)

A new day...

I would like to introduce everyone to the Subversive Pink House, not so submisive or perverse, though loveable and diverse.

This is a link to Youtube about how to make a zine,

You can create 'zines in a ton of ways and for many reasons, maybe you want to show people your writing or drawings, you want to let the world know your political oriantion or just an interesting way to reinvent the "Christmas card", do it zine style... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh1W15BWCUk

The incomprehensable spectrum of D.I.Ying...

Doing It Yourself applies to a great and many varity of thing, and we're gonna explore these many things over time, and stoke the fire of D.I.Ying in the Yukon, and make it known that DIYing is a varitable force to be reckon with. Not merely reserved for home decorating or fixing your car, DIYing has basically been the foundation of many basic social revelations in one way or another, take Gandhi for example reducing his needs to only what he could produce, or Martin Luther King getting out on street corners revolutionizing american racial policies, these is some pretty radical DIYers. Get with the times and do it yourself, it's the wave of the FUTURE!!!
By the way, these are some pretty hilarious dolls my lady and I made, dolls aren't as lame as you probably think they are.

DIYing is down with community eventfulness...

So your sitting around asking yourself "what can I do while waiting for The Fraught"? Litterally itching to D.I.Y? Well I suggest you keep in mind several community events:
- The Poverty and Homelessess action week (PHAW) kicking off today, Oct. Monday 15 and going until Friday 19th. I'm gonna be checking out the YOUTH TOWN HALL on Thursday 18th @ 7pm, location to be announced. And it looks as though there will be some youth arts hung in the entrance of the YTG building.
- Also I'd recommend looking into the "Town Hall Meeting" @ the High Country Inn on Wednesday 17th at 7pm, where people will be discusing "TILMA", which seems to be some kinda plague-typeness threatening our community well being. Find out more at www.yukonfed.com
-Then the week after there will be "Chattette" at the Canada Games Centre ( I think, keep an eye out) from Monday 22nd- Thursday 25th with "Public Open House" from 7-9pm everyday. This is going to be conversations on a Sustainability Design for Whitehorse, so if it's in your interest that Whitehorse doesn't become the next Fort St.John or Fort Nelson (this is to imply my personal distaste for these communities, sorry) please make a point of dropping by.
- And finally, don't forget the "Longest Night Cabaret" (again, I think that's the name...) located at the Wood St. school on the 2nd and 3rd of November. I have been working on some cardboard puppets for one of the evenings acts, so bring your happy feet and faces.

Support community culturalings!

The Fraught Festival it is...

The Fraught Festival will be on the run from November 24th - December 24/25th and located primarily at the public library, with an opening chalk full of community togetherness loosely sewn together with discourses and strewn with a varity of craft-y-fullness the likes of Martha Stewert(?) has never seen. The planning and manifesting has just begun, though is growing steadily and thus far you can expect such
"Do It Yourself" events as:
-City wide treasure hunt spanning days possibly weeks in duration.
- Pinyata Pandemic, where essentially pinyata's will be getting smashed up at any possible moment of any possible day.
-Workshops and information bananzas on a whole range of things one can do and think, ex: make your own underware,
make your own books, make your own cleaning solutions, dolls, zines, jewlery, collages, and menstruation pads and so very much more!!!

So keep an eye out for posters interupting your cognitive brain processes and related scheduals as to dates,times and where-abouts and if your interested to get involved somehow, be it in presence, knowledge or just plain ol' fraughtfulness, email us at
adiyingsociety@hotmail.com

The Fraught Festival?

This blog is the documentation of A DIYing Society, locatedly in the fair city of Whitehorse Yukon. A DIYing Society is happy to present the Fraught Festival, a tentative title, for all those makers and shakers, not so hell bent on the persuaded stylings of the hapless minded consumeristic coupling of corporate Y.T Canada.