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Profile: Teresa Erickson—Organizing in the West
- Vanderbilt University Press
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43 Profile: Teresa Erickson Organizing in the West Teresa Erickson is the Staff Director for the Northern Plains Resource Council in Montana. She was interviewed at the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC) Board and Staff Meeting in December 2002. I grew up in Western Colorado, the daughter of an underground gold miner. My mother is part Mexican, part Indian, and those two people had much influence on me in terms of how I think about this work. Partly because of being the daughter of a miner, and being sort of ethnic, we saw a great deal of injustice: labor injustice in terms of my dad and then ethnic injustice in terms of my mother. I grew up in Telluride, which is a ski resort now. That experience made me dislike ski resorts because that town is nothing like it was when we grew up and none of the long-time natives could manage to stay there. It’s now very rich. I mean ultra, ultra rich. An incredibly beautiful mountain town that is littered with enormous second homes and other development which is quite unappealing to me. We moved down the valley because my father’s health was so bad that he couldn’t live at the altitude anymore, even though he was born and raised there, because he had silicosis. When we moved away from Telluride, my dad had to move to a mining camp, and I was raised by my mother and her two unmarried sisters in a down valley town called Montrose. So it was my sister, myself, my mother, her two sisters—we have a very strong female orientation. My poor dad, who came home every ten days, had to deal with this gynarchy or whatever. It influenced me. They, my two aunts, more than anybody drilled into my sister’s and my head that you never rely on a man for money. They gave us this sense of independence and neither of us had that drive to get married to be able to quit work and be supported by a husband. They taught us how to take care of ourselves, including managing bills, repairing things, and doing garden and yard work. 44 We Make Change I went to school at the University of Northern Colorado at Greeley and really my pursuit then was to have fun and see more of the world. I had no academic ambitions; I mainly just wanted to get out of Montrose. Greeley is way out in the eastern part of the state. It’s flat land and I had never been to such a place before. When I would come home on weekends and bring my friends with me, people could not believe that we grew up in paradise. It wasn’t until I was nineteen or twenty years old that I realized that we grew up in the most beautiful place on earth, envied by everyone who didn’t grow up there. I became very attached to my homeplace at that age, interestingly. I had no academic goals so I took home economics classes and shop classes and stuff like that because that was more interesting to me. I was a geography major. I took a class called “Diet for a Small Planet” and read the book by Frances Moore Lappé. It politicized me incredibly—and it was a home economics class. It was a cooking class mainly, but the book, the politics around food, the politics around organic, whole food versus processed food just shaped my thoughts so much. It pushed me towards getting involved in the Greeley food co-op. I didn’t even know what a food co-op was or the structure of co-op. So through that class, I got involved in the food co-op, and through the food co-op, I met people who worked for CoPIRG [Colorado Public Interest Research Group]. I went to work for CoPIRG for about a year after I graduated, and that’s how I heard of the term “community organizing.” Through CoPIRG I was exposed to a lot more thought about social justice, strategy, and taking on the bad guys. It wasn’t really organizing—I mean they called it organizing, but it was justice and getting into that tense, conflict-oriented work. My first job was being a mediator of landlord-tenant problems. I had just been a student, and so I totally took the side of the tenant until I saw what students...