Basically the poem, The GalGael Peoples of Scotland, it’s a long poem. It was published in 1997 in Cencrastus, the Scottish Poetry Journal. The full text of it’s only available on the web. And it came about because the GalGael had always had strong connections with native peoples around the world. A lot of that went back to Colin’s involvement both with Australian Aborigines and on Pine Ridge. And a group of Native Americans had apparently contacted the GalGael some time after ... a couple of years after Chief Stone Eagle of the Mi’Kmaq Warrior Society had visited. And they asked us to express our understanding of indigenous identity to them. So we had a number of discussions about this at The Pollok Free State, around the campfire, and Colin and the people there asked me if I could weave it together into some kind of a statement. So I started off in prose like, you know:

Written at the request of and dedicated to Tawny, Colin and Gehan Macleod and other powerful gentle warriors at the Pollok Free State M77 Motorway Protest in Glasgow, whose endeavours for renewal are both ecological and cultural.

We, the GalGael, being a loose association of some native peoples of Scotland, extend our hand to all other indigenous peoples in the world. By invitation of First Nation friends in North America we ask to address you with these words.

And then what happened is, as I was writing this, I realised that it was a poem that was coming out. And literally over the course of one evening, this long poem - I mean how long is it on here, about a dozen pages or something - poured out, that I subsequently polished a bit but basically it was pretty much as it came out. So it was like this sort of deeper, poetic spirit was moving from the group through me in expressing these words which are very much about identity. I mean, it starts off ... I call the first part The Shoaling, as in the sense of a shoal of salmon coming in and waiting at the ... waiting in the sea loch at the mouth of the river for the spate to come. So:

Dear fellow creatures, sisters, brothers, children:
for some years now we have been listening
Awakening to hear you speak
in ocean swell across the great Atlantic
in musical rhythms danced from brightest Africa’s savannah
in wind’s feathered mantras fluttering out from prayer flags
of the high Himalaya
in ancient Aboriginal songlines
waulking even through Precambrian bedrock folds
of overworld high roads
underworld low roads
North South East
West of our own recovering discovering shamanic tradition

Now what’s going on there, of course, is an immediate anchoring in the fact that we too have a shamanic culture. That in the Loch Lomond song, when they sing: “you take the high road and I’ll take the low road and I’ll be in Scotland before you,” the low road is the underworld of death because he was going to be executed the next day. He’s saying to his lover: “you go back to Scotland by the high road, by the everyday world, and my spirit will move through the low road.” So we too have these deep spiritual understandings. And then the poem moves to address the fundamental question:

And so it is we here
and more besides
have wrestled long and hard with what it means
to be a Scottish native peoples
of diversity
What does it mean
to be the black among us like the white
the Pole, Italian, Russian and Pakistani
the Tamil, Sinhalese the Japanese and Chinese
English just as Scot or Welsh, Flemish German Moslem Jew pagan
Irish - Protestant and Catholic?
What does it mean for us a rainbow spectrum
to be a Peoples of this place?
Fully indigenous. Fully belonging.

So that’s the identity issue, you see, and the challenge of modern identity, that there’s something of the Gal, something of the stranger, and something of the Gael, something of the heartland people, in most of us today. And if we’re going to reclaim indigenous identity to place, a sense of belonging with place and to place, then a narrow blood-line sense of identity is no longer good enough. Even a linguistic sense of identity is no longer good enough. It has to be rooted in a much more fundamental humanity that can be inclusive, that can be open to all who will honour a place. And that honouring comes about, I think, through connection with the issues that are important for safeguarding that place, for protecting it.

By salmon’s course
we have arrived
long shoaling at the estuary, waiting, waiting, waiting
but Spate now running So we leap ...
Protesting motorways in Glasgow
Refuting superquarry mountain destruction Bride’s isle the He-brides
Fighting to heat the dampened love-warm crisis-torn homes
of those of us in urban native reservation housing schemes
(where TV up a tower block offers nature’s only window
one fifth of Scotland’s people live in poverty)
And “resetting seeds of Eden”
one foot venturing into Eden
with Muir and Burns, MacDiarmid, White and mostly unnamed women’s song
pressing down “wet desert” sod to replant native trees
in Border dale and Highland strath
and on the blighted bing
Struggling to regain
a music, dance and language
once usurped from forebears’ cradling embrace
usurped to break the spirit
take our land
and even God and gods and saints of old
and scar the very strata deep
with alcohol soaked nicotine smoked Prozac choked
dysfunctionality
Lateral violence of unresolv’ed angst
unable to engage
with power from above
so sideways striking to and from within and all around
... hurting ... hurting ... hurting ...
with intergenerational poverty knocking on from then to now
people disempowered in rent-racked famine days
Half a million Highland folk ...
(Lowlanders before like English further back in time)
... Cleared ... from kindly providential clachan
... Cleared ... to fact’ory or to emigrant ship
... dumped ... Aotearoa ... North America
... recruited ... skirling hireling regiments of “Queen’s Owned Highlanders”
Empire stitched from butcher’s wounds
opp’ressed turned oppressor sprung from opp’ressed’ pain
both sides the Atlantic surging with emotion
Intergenerational Transatlantic Cultural Trauma
a three-way brokenness
native peoples our side, the Ossianic Western edge
native peoples their side, the Eastern oceanic seaboard
and Everywhere that breaking dominant disembedded culture
that is in part
us too.

So that was the fundamental setting of the scene, you see. And then the poem moves through how a reconnection with the very rocks of place, with the spirit of place, if what makes a people and which brings life back into the people. And that’s what was happening at The Pollok Free State, that people were coming out of high-rise housing blocks and so on, concerned that they were going to be cut off from the principal park area. And they would gather around the camp fire, which was a medicine wheel, North South East West. It was a Celtic cross which is the same thing. They would gather around there and they would experience three way community. They would experience community with one and other as a cup of tea was passed and a meal was provided. They would experience community with nature in the sheer beauty, even in the city, of sitting underneath trees, stars up above and all the elements. And I think for many they experienced spiritual community also. They experienced being touched by something that goes beyond their normal conscious self. You can call it god, goddess, a spirit of nature ... I don’t really care what you call it but it’s just about that which gives life and that which opens the doors of love in the human heart.

Many people talk of have being ‘kissed by the camp’, that’s the phrase. Have you heard ... Rosie Kane uses the phrase, people were ‘kissed by the camp’.

‘Kissed by the camp’ puts it very well. Something opened up in people that you wouldn’t have expected in entirely urbanized modern Scots. A lot of people would have believed it was completely dead but there was a tacked boot there and it’s like ... Again I could only express this poetically. I mean, I use the image here of in the old days at night, the peat fire would be smoored by three peats being placed on top of it so it wouldn’t burn but it wouldn’t go out and it would stay alight into the night. And my sense of it was of ... Well, our sense of it ... Well, the challenges that we were facing, remember that Britain was still kind of emerging, it hadn’t yet emerged from the Thatcher era. I mean, Thatcher was gone but Major was in at the time. And my sense of was that in spite of all that had happened to people there was this fire coming alive that ...

forced to put out culture’s flames
(but done with sacred blessing’s triple peat
the embers only smoored so not to chill)
Aye Statues of an Iona cudgelled into modern time by Whitby’s Roman synod
Aye post-Culloden Proscription even of our ancient spirit’ual dress
Aye ... we now bypass you 664, 1609, 1747
We rise now up on eagle wings
above that colonisation of our lands and minds
... as fire in head reheats the sacred salmon’s sap
we watch it run ... a babbling silver stream
anointing wisdom’s ninth Proverbial dwelling place the heart
We hear with inner ear ancestral chorus, look, and See,
And Are Again Of Shining Countenance!
We are the Tuatha de Danann
emerged by standing stone from Sithean, faerie hill
emerged to Be again Free again the mother Goddess Danann’s people
... Holy ... Holy ... Holy ...
No exiled “metaphor for the imagination” any more
the tree ringed mushroom fringed hollow knowe of light
No fortress mound to house true nature’s child
unfree in wider desecrated world to be true nature wild ... but Reality!

You see a sense of magic, a very deep magic that is very strong in Scottish cultural tradition, being set loose. In Scottish literature they talk about this concept called ‘The Caledonian Antisyzygy’. It goes back to Professor Gregory Smith’s book from 1919 called Scottish Literature and he says that a distinguishing characteristic of the Scottish psyche is the ability to hold together the practical and the fanastical. And that’s what you had at The Pollok Free State. You had immense practicality. You know, the architecture in those tree houses, what was being done and the beautiful things being made there and carried through to the GalGael Trust now, was completely interfused with a fantastical sense of magic, of totemic animals. And this wasn’t about anything imaginary, it was about crossing the threshold into the imaginary realm, into the realm of creativity which is where life comes alive. And I think an awful lot of folk who become addicted to drugs, they’re seeking that liminal experience - as it’s called by the academics, a liminum is when you cross a threshold - they’re seeking that liminal experience but, instead of finding that true liminal, what the drugs and the alcohol or whatever do is gives the false liminal, what we call the liminoid. And, in a sense, ‘plastic’ society, consumer society, has hooked people on the liminoid and what GalGael has done, and what The Pollok Free State was doing, it was actually opening the doors of the true liminal and that’s why it was such a profoundly important cultural movement and remains so to this day.

So we’re talking here about very deep cultural healing. In the poem here I talk about how the blood from Culloden has gone down through the heather but it’s composted there, it hasn’t just sat dank. There is movement. You know, you can either process your personal stuff and the culture stuff and turn it into compost that gives life or you can leave it to stink. And I think that what we’ve being doing in GalGael is attempting to process that stuff.

For a’ that and a’ that
sacrificing, sanctifying, down to an ice-age cleans’ed strata
that is both cultural and in depth, archaeological
long stinking but now compost-rendered for new growth
Something poised
... both psychic and somatic
... genetic and prophetic
Remnant sprig from taproot of antiquity
awaiting spring to bud re-formed
and Blossom as is needed in our agitated times
... a cultural cultivation ...
Indeed! Let us observe that
the capacity of nature and of human nature
to be hurt
is exceeded
in the fullness of time
only
by the capacity to heal ...
And that must be joy’s greatest cause for hope.

So really the kind of healing that we’re moving towards is central to that. A strong recognition that fragmented identity - not knowing who you are, what you’re about, what your values are or what your place is - is a huge part of the problem. We’ve had the inner life cut out of us. We’ve been turned into ‘plastic people’ and it leaves us with a profound inner hunger which is what, I think, is a lot of the addictions are trying to fill. And yet there is an alternative which is our authentic culture, it’s connecting with a place.

Aye ... aye ... aye
Scotland understands a thing or two about belonging
We have a Gaelic proverb:
”The Bonds of Milk are Stronger than the Bonds of Blood”
Nurture, kinship, counts for more than mere blood lineage
And so let us propose
an ancient new criterion for belonging here;
All Are Indigenous, Native To This Place. All
Who Are Willing To Cherish
And Be Cherished
By This Place
And Its Peoples
All are indigenous, native to this place. All
who are willing to cherish
and be cherished
by this place
and its peoples.

Which is the GalGael principle. And that principle is coming deeply out of our culture, a culture in which traditionally foster-ship counted for more than blood lineage because in foster-ship you were chosen and you chose whereas in blood lineage it’s just an accident of birth. And so it’s about connection of the heart and not just of the genes.

So this was a poem first performed on the full moon Wolf Night on the 4th of May in 1996, when a wolf totem pole was erected in the Pollok Free State. It was really when the energy of the Free State was starting to decline, it was pretty clear that the motorway was going to be forced through in spite of the protest. And what we were doing at that stage was we were saying: “Well, first of all, across Britain as a whole there’s been tremendous achievements,” that the Labour party was to come to power shortly afterwards was a manifest commitment to curtail the roads building project, something that lasted for at least a decade. But more than that, the whole process had woken up something in all of us. It had woken up this profound sense of indigenous identity and a mechanism by which we could recreate that identity in a way that differs from so much else of what happens with indigenous identity in the rest of Europe, where often this has become the agenda of the political right wing. It’s become a xenophobic agenda, whether it’s the National Front in England or the equivalent in France or Germany or whatever, and we were doing something very different, something that was very distinctively Scottish but I think has a lot of resonances with what can happen elsewhere in the world, what has happened in South Africa ... We were saying that identity’s about your ability to cherish, it’s about: “A man’s a man for a’ that.” And we were putting out a call for a home-coming based around that which is what gave birth to the GalGael Trust. The final stanza of this poem is called Homecoming and again it’s addressed to the native peoples and much wider who had commissioned this poem from the Pollok Free State-cum-GalGael Trust.

Dear fellow creatures
native brothers sisters children
in other heartlands of the real, the reel
We ask from you acceptance
of our peoplehood
We ask you weave our native threads
to fabric of one scintillating cloth
that is the mantle of the world
We pledge to you support
for all work sourced in love
recovering right relation’ship your territories
And ask from you forgiveness
for past injustice, ignorance and spoils of fear or greed
We need your help with Spirit’s grace
to find clear paths through tangled modern Waste Land tares
to seed as oaks as Gods each one proclaiming Jubilee
To fly in fair formation as wild geese ...
To hear afresh that deep poetic story
of magic set in time when place began ...
To make a life worth living ...
To save this Earth ...
... And play from down the hollow hill
A hallowed music
Sacred dance
That is our soul ...
... our soil.

And so what’s happening now in the GalGael Trust is that we’ve recognized, as one of our participants put it to me: “Heroin took away my pain but it also took away my soul.” So the people have been fobbed off with a liminoid, they’ve been fobbed off with a ‘plastic’ solution. And the name of the game has to be a true recognition of the pain which people from very broken family backgrounds - broken by poverty, broken by cultural, history ... etc - have suffered and, literally, a calling back of the soul individually and collectively. And how do you do that? Well, the way we start is how you’ll have seen, it’s by putting a hammer and chisel in somebody’s hands and giving them a block of something that comes from the place - a block of wood from a tree - and giving them an idea or letting them choose and idea of something to carve based around that, something beautiful to make. And they realize their capacity for beauty. They realize their capacity to connect with the totems of the place, with the spiritual values embodied in the wolf or the eagle or the wild horse or whatever. And as that process develops you can see the soul coming back into people and it’s infectious, you know? Just as addiction is infectious in a social sense, so “un-addiction” becomes infectious because power of community started to give people life. In other cultures they call it “calling back to somewhere” and I think it’s exactly the same for us. That’s one of the things we’ve learned from other native cultures and in so doing we’ve realized that we too are a native culture, a community of people of place.

Shall we go back to Stone Eagle’s visit? In the sense that that’s one point where that connection was made. I know it goes back into Colin’s life too.

In the summer of 1994 I was invited to give some academic lectures in the United States and Canada. And one of my hosts for that, Professor Alesia Malts of the College of the Atlantic, she said to me while we were touring around Canada: “Why don’t you connect up with Warrior Chief Stone Eagle of the Mi’Kmaq Warrior Society because he has helped his people to stop a superquarry in Novia Scotia.” So I tried to contact Stone Eagle but he wasn’t there but his wife gave me permission to go to the Mi’Kmaq secret cave. And after I came back to Scotland I contacted him by phone and managed to persuade him to come over and help us and a campaign, then taking place on the Isle of Harris, to stop what was going to be the biggest road stone quarry in the world on Mount Dronevil, which is on the south of the national scenic area of South Harris. Now of course the parallel between a superquarry destroying a beautiful natural area with an indigenous culture and the motorways was a direct one, so GalGael were very supportive and involved in that whole process with me. When Stone Eagle came over I took him up to the Isle of Eigg so that he could see what was happening with land reform there. He was astonished to see that we too had a native land rights campaign. At that stage it hadn’t been successful, we’ve now got 2% of the Scottish land mass within community land ownership and the 2003 Land Reform Act in place. But at that stage it was all just a pipe dream so he was very helpful in encouraging people in that. Then we went up to the Harris superquarry where he testified, in terms of what that kind of large development does to small communities, and then on his way back out to Novia Scotia he stopped for a night at the Pollok Free State where he addressed people about what they were doing there. I was profoundly inspired by it. And he used his authority to make Colin ... To do something that had never happened before. He made Colin into an honourary member of the Mi’Kmaq Warrior Society and subsequently that move was confirmed by their council back in Canada. So it was the first time apparently that a white man in another territory had ever been given this type of honour but he could see that, although what Colin was doing was non-violent, he could see the spirit of it was one of taking no nonsense from those who would trample on and destroy the spirit of place.

What do you feel was the significance of Stone Eagle’s visit for other local people, for Pollok people and the Glasgow people that were part of the Free State?

I think the significance of Stone Eagle’s visit to Scotland, which was widely covered in the mass-media, was kind of summed up the morning after his talk at Pollok Free State when we went out to Glasgow Airport for him to fly back, and of course he was a pretty visible character wearing his buck-skin and his sort of ... Stetson is it, hat? One of these big ten gallon hats, whatever, a pretty significant looking figure. And no fewer than three people came up, complete strangers came up, and shook his hand and said to him, I remember the words of one of them: “Thank you for what you are doing for the people of Scotland.”

Let’s talk more about land reform issues I guess and ... in the historical sense, within Scotland, of land protests connected to that. So back ... (inaudible) ... in Knoydart and ...

Well, I was involved with the land reform campaign on Eigg from 1991 and I was inspired by that by my experience in Papa New Guinea, where 98% of the land is community owned and I had worked there for four years. So basically I had been turned on to the significance of land in my own culture, or disconnection with land in my own culture, by people on the other side of the world, by native people on the other side of the world. And that’s what got me involved in the Eigg campaign. Now Colin got to hear about this and found it inspiring and when I subsequently connected up with him, I think via Gehan coming to the centre for human ecology, that led to a very rich fertilization of ideas. Because what the Pollok Free State showed me is that land reform is important, not just for people in remote rural communities like on Eigg, but it’s also important for the urban poor, who are the descendants of those, who in the past have been pushed off the land, during the Clearances and Enclosures.

Also there’s the fact that Pollok was given to the people as land and Cowglen Road which is the ... Cowglen area is the old commons land, it’s old droving area.

That’s right. Basically, up until the late Sixteenth Century, in the West Highlands of Scotland there was no concept of private land ownership. It was King James VI who required that people come and register title deeds and developed the concept of private property. Prior to that, clan chiefs had held land, sometimes tyrannically but by no means always. But they held land on behalf of the clan as a whole and what happened at the end of the Sixteenth Century was the notion of land as a private commodity that could be bought and sold to the highest bidder on the market started to creep in. And that intensified during the Seventeenth Century until in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century when we had the Highland Clearances, where the landowners recognised that it was more profitable to have people off the land than living on it. So they moved an estimated half a million people off the land, dispatched them on emigrant ships or to work in the cities where they became the urban poor etc. And in that way the empty Glens were created. In that way we live in a Scotland today where, in a rural area, it would typically cost about 50 thousand pounds to buy a housing plot. So you’ve got that on your mortgage even before you start building the house, and yet we’re living in a Scotland of about 20 million acres with just five million Scots. So there’s about four acres per person, that’s about three football pitches per person, of land in this country. And if that was liberated to some degree, like has now started to happen with land reform, just imagine it ... To support a mortgage of fifty thousand to buy your housing plot, to buy the value of the land, you’re having to earn, after tax and National Insurance, about six or seven thousand pounds a year. Imagine the cost of people being freed from that simply by opening up the land and giving it back to people to live in.

I guess the issue of the clearances also connects. I think in some ways it’s the idea of the GalGael in the urban context ... The counterpart to pushing people off the land was accumulating rural communities in cities like Glasgow to become the workforce in the Industrial Revolution which created the slum districts in Glasgow, it created these pockets of the urban poor. And if you read accounts from the time of the Industrial Revolution talking about the Gaelic Scots coming to Glasgow, they’re talked about as though they’re foreign. They’re talked about as a foreign people by the English speaking Scots within Glasgow. Do you think that in some ways the GalGael and the Free State is a reversal of this? This creating the indigenous people as foreigners in their own country ... Those who were indigenous people were turned into foreigners in their own country in this process of industrialisation?

Well, I think that when people are not able to connect authentically with place, something in them withers. They become disempowered, they lose their basis for hope and that’s particularly true of Celtic people, to use that term in a very generic sense. And I think a lot of the emptiness and despair and materialism that you see around in popular culture is because people have been deprived of a meaningful connection with place and that if it was possible that people have their patch of land where they could make or not make what they wanted of it but they had their patch then it would restore a sense of dignity in a way that you see to this day among crofting people. They may not be living from the land but it’s important to be living with the land. And that’s what we’re trying to rekindle with GalGael. Our ideal would be to have a rural resettlement project, an area of land where people can build houses and establish themselves as a rural community. But also to retain the link with the urban area so you’ve got an interchange going on between the urban and the rural so people are no longer prisoners up high rise flats. You no longer have people like one of our trainees who was weeping on the return from a journey we had made. When asked why she was weeping she said: “Because today a dream has come true, for the first time in my life I have seen Loch Lomond.” You know, that’s some poverty, to have grown up in Glasgow and never, until you’re in your early 20s, to have seen Loch Lomond but that’s the reality we’re talking about.

Do you think the Free State ... Not so much in terms of the literal ... Do you think to some extent it was the realisation of another way of creating a modern, urban community to some extent?

To me, the Free State does not stand for ‘modern’ or ‘post-modern’ community. It stands for a re-discovery of ‘pre-modern’ community, which is why we often refer to it as ‘tribal’ or ‘clan’ community. What do we mean by ‘pre-modern’? The modern world has been characterized by the idea that we can dominate nature, that we can control everything around us including what goes on inside our own heads. The ‘post-modern’, I think, is an acadamic aberration of that. The idea that nothing really has any relevance, everything is deconstructed, everything is a mishmash ... To me, you don’t survive very long with a ‘post-modern’ mindset if you’re on a mountain or if you’re on a boat in a rough sea. In such situations you see that reality is not a socially constructed reality. Reality is bottom line ecology and if you don’t get it right you’ll freeze to death or drown. And this is the power of reconnecting with reality. Now the ‘modern’ mind and the ‘post-modern’ mind have tried to short-circuit that and rise above it. We are saying that not only can you not short circuit it - and climate change, for example, is demonstrating that - we’re saying that by short-circuiting it, by that spiritual arrogance, by that hubris, you cut yourself off from what is most profoundly human. And that once you start to reconnect, to understand your relationship with the natural environment, then life as a human being starts to flow back into you and your community.

What do you feel, on a personal level, what did you gain from ... ? In what way were you ‘kissed by the camp’?

I think, on a personal level, at the time the camp was operating, I was lecturing in Human Ecology at Edinburgh University. It was becoming an increasingly difficult situation because the powers that be were moving to shut us down, mainly because that my work was land reform but also they didn’t much like involvement in the Pollok Free State and what have you. These things were seen as being ‘unseemly’ for an Edinburgh academic to be engaged with so ... an increasingly difficult time. And I would come out of a week teaching at the university and wrestling with university politics and I would go to the Pollok Free State, I would camp overnight, and it was like a fresh surge of life coming into me. It reminded me of the values we were really standing for. It reminded me that we were existing not to publish academic papers that can only be read by other weighty academics in journals that aren’t of any interest to anybody very much. We are there to serve the people of this land and the land itself and if we forget that we become unstuck. In other words, in Plato’s sense, it was a return of the academy, of the university back to the grove. He was saying that it’s not good enough just to be an academic up the ivory tower; you must also have a foot in the grove amongst the trees. Which is what Plato’s Socrates discovered about two and a half thousand years ago when Phaedrus took him out of the city, down to the grove by the river and Socrates woke up to something. He said: “Upon my word, what a beautiful place this is, we must give thanks to the Nymphs and to Pan.” And that was where he made one of his great expositions of the philosophy of love, out in nature. That’s what we need to do as well; otherwise we’ll lose touch with essentials like love.

Of course the Free State had it’s own university too. Were you involved in that?

At the Free State there were all these school children going on strike and all of these ordinary folk could come out and they were sitting at the campfire and what do you do? You start talking. Because of the context, you start talking about meaningful things. We recognize that we were a centre of learning and that’s what a university in the original sense of the word, bringing together a universe of knowledge, is about. What is philosophy but philo-Sophia? Love of the Goddess of Wisdom. So we were doing that. So we did this thing where we called ourselves: “The People’s Free University of Pollok, where courses were offered in Living.” And on the curriculum were things like “How To Chop Wood” and “How To Make A Path” and “How To Sow Seeds” and “Scottish Culture” and all that kind of stuff. And it only lasted for a short time, only for a few weeks, but it was kind of what seeded the GalGael because we recognized that we needed to be doing that same kind of thing but on a more permanent footing.

Would you see that as having some connections with the ideas of democratic intellect?

Well, it is free democratic intellect and we were very aware of all of that, that the “People’s Free University of Pollok” was fulfilling the democratic intellectual principle that, in Scottish tradition, yes, knowledge creates an elite but the duty of that elite is to serve the people. It is a democratic duty. It’s not just to go off and do the Oxbridge thing, to become more and more specialized and disappearing up your own academic backside. But the test of knowledge is: “Does it serve the community?”, “is it what the community wants?” Traditionally the young scholar would leave the village with a sack of meal and a little bit of money that had been provided by the village, would go away to one of the great Scottish universities, receive an education and then either come back and serve the community directly or send money back and serve it indirectly. Your focus was not on yourself, in getting an education; it was on your community. And that’s what we were rekindling. And we were doing so very consciously against the mainstream backdrop, where academia was becoming more and more a battery conveyor belt process in which students are seen as being consumers of knowledge, building their investment of knowledge in anticipation of a rich rate of return later on in life. And what we were doing is standing in contrast to all of that and saying: “No, that is an abuse of the sacred nature of knowledge and we’re going to stand for knowledge as a sacred gift. Philo-Sophia: love of the Goddess of Wisdom.”

In some way, I’m wondering also if some of what you’re saying stands in relation to ... One point that some people have made is there was ... The media certainly portrayed the Pollok Free State as being this ... something created by activists, that came from outside Glasgow. But it’s also clearly not the case. You speak to people who came from the local initiative, the local people, the local community. But when the camp broke down there did seem to be a parting of the way that some people ... They felt that some activists just came for the campaign and then when they felt it wasn’t (inaudible) they just kind of went off. Do you feel there’s a sort of dichotomy amongst activists?

I never felt very much dichotomy at the camp itself, I mean I was only there the occasional weekend. I wasn’t there all the time. But what did clearly happen was that the camp was an open space, the GalGael principle of being open to people wherever they came from was applied. There was no doubt that we had learned a lot from what was happening in some of the big motorway protest sites down in the South of England, like Twyford Down, so there was an influence from that we welcomed, like there was from many other parts of the world. And I think what the media caught onto ... my perception of it was that there was one occasion when we had this wonderful event called “Car Henge”, when all these cars had been planted nose down in the route of the motorway as if they were standing stones. And then at night they were doused in petrol or something and set light to so you had this dramatic art installation going on, making a powerful ancient statement about what the car culture, what Maggie Thatcher called “The Great Car Culture,” was doing. And a lot of people came from all over Britain for that. There was a convoy came up form England for that. And the media grabbed onto that and tried to make out that these folk, some of whom were perhaps a bit loud-mouthed and inappropriate in the way that they spoke to the media on behalf of the camp ... They were trying to make out that this was what was organising it whereas that wasn’t the case. It was just the Free State’s openness to support from wherever it came that led to the possibility of the media putting that spin on it. If there hadn’t been that they would probably have accused us of being insular and exclusive in what we were doing. So one way or another there were forces in the media, some of which were strongly out of support for what we were doing and others out to ridicule it.

Was there ... ? In your book you talk about the idea of a mutual economy as a key aspect of a rural economy. Do you think the Free State established that in a way? Because we were talking about aspects of that mutual economy ... ?

By mutual economy, I basically mean an economy where people give what they are able to give and take what they need for basic human dignity, for sufficiency but not for surplus. And the Free State ran entirely on that basis. People would pool their resources. Often you’d be sitting down late at night, maybe a bit hungry, and a van would pull up and it’d be some restaurant that had leftover food and they would unload boxes of hot meals and we’d all tuck into that. There was tremendous giving going on in that dynamic, that was one of the things that people learned. So without doubt it operated on a mutualist basis.

It seems like very much, from speaking to people, that the Free State didn’t actually come to an end and didn’t get taken apart but rather ... Are the different directions that have come from the camp that are still alive in Glasgow today?

I think the most fundamental direction that has come from that camp is a spiritual fire came up in people, that is still very much there, that very much directs it. And as long as you tend that fire, as long as you honour it, it stays alive and that fire is about human worth. It’s about helping one and other to become fully human, socially; environmentally and socially. It’s about community in the full sense of community. That’s what’s come out of the Pollok Free State and is what drives the GalGael today.