I went to the WTO protests in Seattle in November, 1999 somewhat reluctantly. I had many commitments at home, my stepdaughter was in town that weekend for Thanksgiving, and I had lots of leftover pie to finish. But I knew some of the organizers, old friends from many years of nonviolent direct action campaigns against nuclear weapons, militarism, and other forms of injustice. And I had a posse of friends coming from up and down the West Coast—many of us veterans of those same campaigns going back to the Diablo Canyon blockade in 1981.

I also had experience doing nonviolent direct action trainings that went back to the early eighties, and which I felt might be useful to the mobilization. I walked into the convergence space on the Friday before the action and was immediately lost in a sea of khaki-clad youth with dreadlocks. At the time, it was overwhelming. Who are these people, where did they come from, and how did I get to be a quarter century older than most of them? I went back to a friend’s house, where I was staying, had a cup of tea, and thus fortified, returned. This time I found David Solnit, one of the key organizers, who looked up at me and said, “Here comes trouble.” My old friend Hilary McQuie was also one of the organizers, who helped draw up the action plan for the key morning. I was soon hooked into the group of trainers and facilitators, doing trainings in the back of a huge warehouse for a mix of college kids, punks with skateboards, young and older activists.

The excitement level was high throughout the days of preparation. It had been many years since we’d had major street actions in San Francisco, where I live, and many years since we’d done trainings or had a call for them. Throughout the eighties we’d mounted large-scale campaigns at Diablo Canyon, and Livermore Weapons Lab, Vandenberg Airforce Base and the Nevada Test Site, as well as many short term urban actions. Those campaigns were the grandparents of the Seattle organizing model—based on affinity groups that made decisions by consensus, bottom-up rather than top-down power, civil disobedience and jail solidarity.

I found myself once again rolling up newspapers into fake nightsticks, setting up hassle lines where we could practice de-escalating potential hostility from delegates or workers and blockade role plays. We also offered a magical activist training to which eighty or a hundred people came, and a pre-action ritual that was also well attended.

The warehouse was crowded and noisy, and the meetings were exciting. The area surrounding the convention center had been divided into pie-shaped sectors. There were a thousand affinity groups—or so I remember—each taking responsibility for being in one sector or another. One of the facilitators, Lisa Fithian, was a slight, blond woman with all-American good looks, who led meetings and trainings with a level of energy that was a revelation to me. My own style tends to be quiet and laid back, but as I watched Lisa work, I realized that in this setting a much more dynamic style was called for. I didn’t know then that Lisa and I were destined to become close friends, training partners and action buddies in many mobilizations to come.

Our affinity group was made up of Pagans and Witches who had been together many times doing ritual in the midst of mobilizations. We named our group Mud, combining the elements of water and earth. That also allowed us to say, “Our name is Mud,” in check-ins. We’re easily amused. For some reason, we decided we should have preppy names for the action. My friend Wilow took the name ‘Spencer’, I took “Muffie’.

On the morning of the action, I rose early, dutifully wet my bandanna with vinegar and placed it in a plastic baggie, not believing for a moment we would face tear gas. It had been decades since tear gas was used against a street action. We met up with our affinity group and joined one of the marches.

What I remember most clearly was a feeling of incredible joy. We marched through the streets, beating drums, singing, with giant puppets waving behind us and costumed sea turtles dancing. The procession was festive and beautiful—the most wild and beautiful political parade I had seen in many, many years. And I felt so happy! I kept thinking, “I’m so glad I’m here! I’m so glad I didn’t miss this!”

Through everything that followed, that feeling remained.

Our experience of that first day was perhaps not typical. We ended up holding a blockade close to the union music truck, in a spot that remained calm and peaceful all day. Behind us was a line of grim, silent cops who didn’t seem to move all day long. We saw few, if any delegates, and our worst problem was boredom. Occasionally we got a whiff of distant tear gas or heard rumors of fighting in other sectors.

In the afternoon, a few of us went off to scout. Around the corner was a very different scene. It looked and felt like a war zone. There were broken windows, a haze in the air, and far down the street, trash cans burning. Wilow, who is a medic, stopped to help some people weeping from tear gas.

Late in the afternoon, we got word that most groups wanted to declare the day a success and end it. We had successfully blocked the conference from starting, and we felt a great sense of exhileration and amazement. “I’ve been marching for thirty years against one thing or another,” I remember saying, “Always chanting, ‘Shut it down!’ ‘Shut it down!’ But this is the first thing we’ve ever really shut down!”

We went out to dinner. At dinner, we somehow heard that there was a spokescouncil meeting back at the convergence space. I went back there, and was asked to facilitate.

Of the thousands of meetings I’ve facilitated in forty years of activism, this one stands out as the second most difficult. (The absolutely most difficult was in 2000, at one of the pre-meetings for the Prague mobilization against the International Monetary Fund. I was trying to get the anarchists and the socialists to agree on whether they would have one big march or multiple, autonomous actions, and it took nine hours, much of them spent listening to people denounce each other at great length and then waiting while every word was translated into Czech and Italian.)

There were probably a thousand people crowded into the warehouse. Half of us were reeking with tear gas or pepper spray, in spite of the medics’ best efforts at decontamination. The mood was elated and anxious, and the noise was thunderous. There were at least seven different proposals on the table about what to do the next day. And every few minutes, someone would run in and interrupt, yelling, “The cops! They’re ten blocks away, and they’re tear gassing everyone.”

I would get the group focused, and then someone else would run in. “The cops! They’re five blocks away, and they’re tear gassing everyone!” Then three blocks, one block, and at last ‘The cops! They’re right outside the door, and they’re tear gassing everyone!”

“Shut the door,” I said. “And let’s focus and figure out what we’re going to do tomorrow.”

In the end, we came up with a number of different plans. The Mayor had declared downtown a closed area, a no-protest zone essentially under martial law. Many of us decided to challenge that ruling in classic civil disobedience style—we would march down, refuse to leave, and force them to arrest us.

I woke up early on a second morning. We were, unfortunately, out of apple cider vinegar and I was forced to wet my bandanna with something strong and Japanese which was almost as hard on my lungs as tear gas. Of our affinity group, only one other woman wanted to risk arrest, Amy Moondragon. She had never been arrested before. I had, but it had been a long time since I’d done a civil disobedience action or been to jail. I was older, creakier in the joints and more wedded to personal comforts. But I was ready.

We made our way down to the meeting place, joined a small march and entered the forbidden zone. Within a few blocks, we were surrounded by police. We sat down, linked arms, and the police dragged us away, one by one, or else we stood up and walked.

We got loaded onto busses, handcuffed, and driven out of town to some faceless, cement building. I rapidly wriggled out of my handcuffs and dispensed water and rescue remedy to my fellow prisoners. After a long time on the bus, we got taken into the building and placed in one corner to wait.

At that point, we decided to organize some jail solidarity. We decided that we would refuse to move any further until we could speak to our lawyers. We would not cooperate with booking or processing, but would just sit tight.

The cops had set up a long line of tables which divided the room. On the other side was a group of men who had been brought in together. They began singing something which sounded like Gregorian chant. Finally I managed to make out the words:

“We want our lawyers now,
They’re just outside the door!
We want our lawyers now,
Or we will chant some more!”
We had been singing one of our chants from the ritual:
“Rising, rising, the earth is rising,
Turning, turning, the tide is turning.
She changes everything she touches, and
Everything she touches, changes.”

At one point, the guards lunged at a young man in our group, grabbed his backpack and began to drag him off. Without thinking, I did what I had been training everyone to do: I threw myself on top of him, and others followed me, forming what we call a puppy pile. The guards shrugged, picked up their paperwork, and backed away.

In retrospect, it was probably our jail solidarity that was the reason other people ended up stuck on the busses for ten or twelve hours. Eventually, we decided we had made our point, and went ahead and let them book us. We were shackled with iron cuffs, separated into women’s and men’s groups, and taken off to jail.

The jail was the central Seattle jail, a big cement-block structure built in modern jail style, with a central room that could look into the day room through a glass enclosure. We spent a long time being shuffled from one holding area to another. We entertained ourselves, telling stories, singing songs, even doing a spiral dance and creating a small ritual. Somehow during the day we got snippets of news: the longshore workers had shut down the ports. There were a couple of women in our group who were not part of the protest—they had simply been walking in the streets when they got swept up and arrested. They were upset and furious, at first, at us, but after a number of women in our group spent time with them, comforting them and explaining why we were doing what we’d done, they calmed down and actually joined in the spiral dance.

During the day, I noticed something that struck me oddly. From time to time, the guards would come in and utter threats or make promises, trying to get us to do one thing or another. Now, in blockades past, I was always struck by how compliant many of the women would become as soon as we got into jail. They were able to stand up to authority enough to get arrested in the first place, but as soon as they were in custody, they began to either comply, withdraw, or sometimes rebel in a belligerent way. It struck me so strongly that I ended up writing a whole book on the psychology of power, Truth or Dare, Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery.

But these young women just laughed, as if the guards were trying to push buttons that just didn’t exist. It reminded me of the way my stepdaughters would laugh at me if I said, “Finish your dinner, children in Africa are starving.” I always felt terribly guilty when my grandmother told me “Children in Europe are starving,” although by the time she was telling me that, they weren’t. Still, I dutifully finished everything on my plate, whether I wanted it or not. My stepdaughters just snorted and said, “What are you going to do, wrap up the leftovers and mail them?”

It seemed to me that this was a whole new generation, and again I had that sense of amazement and wonder. Where did they come from? Suddenly it occurred to me—we raised them! They were the daughters of the women of my generation, raised by old hippies and feminists and sixties activists, naturally born, breast fed, empowered and encouraged from birth.

And they were an amazing breed. Some of them were fulltime organizers, who seemed to be armed with lists of media contacts. As soon as we were put into a day room with phones, they were making media calls and giving interviews.

Lisa and I were together for a short while, and started a deep conversation about power and the pitfalls of leadership. But the group was reshuffled, and we were separated. My old friend Oak was in another group of arrestees, and we glimpsed each other through the bars at one point but were never put together. We were eventually put into small cells for two prisoners each, that opened into a larger day room that held twenty of us.

By some stroke of magic, my cellmate was Amy Moondragon. I was very glad to be with her—it’s a great comfort to be with someone you know and care about.
As part of our jail solidarity strategy, we were refusing to give our names. We were pressing for a meeting with the lawyers, and demanding that they drop all charges. At some point that first night, they woke us up and asked for a representative from each cell block to go downstairs for a meeting with our lawyers. Katya Komisaruk, another old friend and longtime action buddy, had organized much of the legal support and the jail solidarity training, and the lawyers were well briefed and helpful. (In later actions, this has not been the case and jail solidarity has been much more problematic.)

Time passed. One day, then another. We were withholding our names: the system was holding on to us. We were at an impasse. I got our support people to change my flight home to a later date. We told stories, offered each other trainings, played games.

By the third day, I was not feeling well, and by the fourth day, I was very sick. I had a fever, and all the aches and pains of the flu, coupled with a bad cough that finally turned into asthmatic wheezing. I resisted the temptation to ask for medical care, because I knew that if I did, I would be taken out of the group. In spite of the fever and the headache, I was still happy.

At the end of the fourth day, we decided to shift our tactics. We were told that if we gave names, we would all be released on our own recognizance, with no bail. We decided to shift to court solidarity, to plead not guilty, and demand our rights to a speedy trial.

By dawn of that last day, my wheezing had gotten so bad that Amy Moondragon got seriously alarmed. She managed to bang and yell and get the attention of the guards, to let them know that I was having trouble breathing. They told her the nurse was in another part of the jail, but would come in an hour or so.

When she came, she took me down to the guard’s station, put a monitor on my finger and informed me that my oxygen level was okay, and that I was probably having bronchitis, not an asthma attack. I asked for some Tylenol or something for the fever. She looked at me and said, “I don’t know if I can dispense medication to someone who hasn’t given their name.” To my dying day, I will regret that I didn’t say to her, “How do look at yourself in the mirror at night?” But what I actually said was, “But I have given my name!” because at that point, I had. So I got my Tylenol, and the relief was so great that I felt chipper and perky in spite of the terrible cough and wheezing, which lasted into the next week.

We spent a long day waiting to be released. Now that we had given our names, we could introduce ourselves and tell each other what we actually did. We went around and shared our ages. I was forty-eight at the time. Amy Moondragon was thirty five. One other woman was thirty, and the others were all twenty-five or under. It was, indeed, a new generation of activists. Several of them were full time organizers.
“This has been a completely radicalizing experience!” one of them said, and I wondered, “What’s going to happen to me? I’ve already been a radical for my entire adult life.”

I got out of jail just in time for my dear support people to greet me, hug me, and whisk me to the airport to catch my flight home. I remember sinking into the seat, thinking, ‘How soft! How comfy! Why do I complain so much about flying?”
In retrospect, it was a bad idea to leave so quickly, with no chance to debrief or get closure, or even a meal. But at least I went home to a supportive group of people, my housemates who had also been at the action and with whom I’d been through many others in the past.

After the action, I read much of the media coverage, and got mad. I decided to write up my own account, and I wrote a short post called “How We Really Shut Down the WTO in Seattle.” I sent it out to all the friends I could think of who might be interested, including some in other countries. I was new to the internet at that time, and this was the first time I had used it in that way.

To my surprise, I began to get responses from all over the world. People forwarded the post to their friends, printed it up and put it on websites. It’s still up in the archives on my website, here’s the link:
http://www.starhawk.org/activism/activism-writings/shutdownWTO.html
And here’s links to two other stories I wrote:
http://www.starhawk.org/activism/activism-writings/openletter.html
http://www.starhawk.org/activism/activism-writings/initiation.html

What happened to me is that I spent much of the next five or six years organizing, training and going to mobilizations. I’ve written accounts of many of them, and they are all archived at www.starhawk.org. Many, including the post mentioned above, are also in my book, Webs of Power, Notes from the Global Uprising. New Society, 2002, which includes accounts and analysis of the growing global movement.

Those young activists at Seattle are now entering their thirties, having babies and building their lives. There’s a new cohort of protestors who were subteens in 1999 and for whom Seattle is merely a legend.

The Seattle blockade sparked a global movement that contested every important meeting of the major agencies of globalization for years afterward. It poked a sharp spike into the balloon of perceived legitimacy of the WTO as an institution, and helped to undermine faith in the Washington Consensus that promoted corporate globalization as an economic dogma.

Nine years later, the WTO is faltering and the IMF is nearly bankrupt. The FTAA, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, is dead. Thousands of people around the world have engaged in direct action around issues of global justice, and built networks and relationships that represent a very different kind of global connection, one based on solidarity, friendship, and the power of ordinary people to take destiny into our own hands.