It’s been a while, but the beginning of 2019 seemed a good time to roll up our inky sleeves and put our internet face back together. This website update brings a little more info and some new features to our online presence. Plus you can finally use it on your phone 😉 We did our best to help you find the information and resources you need more easily. And to help you take care of your printing business in as fun and efficient way as possible.
We’re your cooperative printer in more than one way. We organize around worker self-management and equal sharing of profits. But we also cooperate with you, our customers, as equals and partners. We will continue standing with you in your campaigns, your businesses, and all your good work.
Berta Cáceras never gave up against the forces of big industry and corruption, and helped save the river sacred to her people.
Berta Cáceres, water protector, Lenca woman, mother, and uncompromising activist developed a distaste for injustice at a very early age. Growing up in the colonial town of La Esperanza, Honduras in the middle of Lenca country, she complained to her mother about the treatment of indigenous people and recognized the savage violence of poverty. While still a teenager, she traveled to neighboring El Salvador to support that country’s rural uprising. Back in Honduras, together with other young indigenous leaders, she founded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), an organization committed to protecting indigenous rights and the sanctity of La Madre Tierra.
Before long, Berta and COPINH found themselves in the middle of a life and death struggle with DESA, a Honduran energy company hell-bent on damming the Gualcarque River —waters sacred to her Lenca people — in order to supply electricity to fuel mining operations and urban development. On March 3, 2016, that struggle took Berta’s life when hired assassins burst into the house where she was staying and brutally shot and killed her.
For COPINH and many Hondurans, hungry for justice, the killers may have murdered Berta’s body, but her spirit will never die. She remains, ¡Berta Cáceres, Presente!
“When we marvel at that blue marble in all its delicacy and frailty, and resolve to save the planet, we cast ourselves in a very specific role. That role is of a parent, the parent of the earth. But the opposite is the case. It is we humans who are fragile and vulnerable and the earth that is hearty and powerful, and holds us in its hands. In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely. In practical terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely.”
– Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
Our 2017 calendar features American statesman Frederick Douglass and his wise words on the importance of justice and equality.
In 2018 Red Sun featured Frederick Douglass, an icon of justice and statesmanship from America’s past.
After escaping from slavery in Maryland, Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) became one of the most important social reformers, orators and statesman of the 19th century. He dedicated most of his boundless energy to the fight for emancipation and equality, but was also a celebrated spokesman for women’s rights, temperance, peace, land reform, free public education, and the abolition of capital punishment. Douglass believed that photography was important in ending racism and slavery, because the camera would not lie. He was the most photographed person of his time, always looking sternly at the camera to convey the seriousness of his work and life.
“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
For visitors to our shop in Jamaica Plain, another famous quote of Douglass and his celebrated visage will greet you as approach the building!
“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”
The 2017 Red Sun Press calendar featured the story of Leaonard Peltier, Native American activist unjustly imprisoned for forty years.
Fulfilling a mission that combines printing and social justice provides fascinating challenges for us a Red Sun Press, where activism has been running through the presses since 1974. Taking up the flag of Leonard Peltier seemed like natural fit. A native American activist struggling for the rights of his people and the land of his origins, Peltier’s case has been a rallying point for the social justice movement since 1977.
Peltier is a former member of the American Indian Movement. He has been in Federal prison for nearly forty years following a shootout on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation that left two FBI agents dead. The case for his innocence and exoneration has been pursued by Amnesty International, the UN High Commission for Human Rights, the Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, Tenzin Gyatso (14th Dalai Lama),Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and many other groups and organizations.
Peltier’s passion and work – Native American civil rights, sovereignty and spirituality – remain landmark issues among US and global liberation movements.
Our calendar places a memorable quote from Peltier against a stylized backdrop with a natural landscape that echoes Red Sun’s co-op and environmental brand.
“No human being should ever have to fear for his own life because of political or religious beliefs. We are all in this together, my friends, the rich, the poor, the red, white, black, brown and yellow. We share responsibility for Mother Earth and those who live and breathe upon her…never forget that.”
– Leonard Peltier (1944 –)
For more information, see whoisleonardpeltier.info or call the White House
202-456-1111 to support executive clemency.
