Biblioterre is located on unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin Anishinaabe territory. We are deeply grateful to the Land and its traditional stewards and are committed to fostering reciprocal relationships with the Algonquin Anishinaabe Nation.

We seek guidance from Algonquin advisors to lead projects, ceremonies, and initiatives that serve their communities. As these relationships grow, we are committed to exploring permanent Land sharing, Land divisions, and Land trusts in allyship with the Land Back movement. Through this work, we hope to inspire similar actions across neighbouring Indigenous territories.

We believe that all Life is interconnected and holds inherent value. Colonization introduced systems of hierarchy that denied the personhood and inherent worth of many forms of Life. These hierarchies and the commodification of the natural world were tools used to create inequality among humans and to strip the Land, plants, and animals of their dignity and personhood.

We are committed to the ongoing work of decolonizing our thoughts and actions by honoring the personhood of all beings and cultivating respectful, reciprocal relationships with the Land, water, animals, and plants. We commit to developing practices that respect and honour all our relations when engaging in Land-based projects, honour death and grief as part of Life, and develop caring and respectful relationships with people of all species and all forms. 

As inhabitants of this Land, we:

• Intend to actively develop sustainable, regenerative relationships with the Land.

• Commit to ecosystem restoration, biodiversity protection, climate change mitigation, and regenerative food production.

• Take accountability for and continually work to change the ways in which we dehumanize and devalue others around us.

• Strive to predict the impacts of our actions on the Land and Waters, and when harm occurs, address it thoughtfully and with care.

• Develop a safe space for animal people, where they can live their lives without exploitation and unnecessary pain

• Establish a Land Trust to ensure the Land is cared for in perpetuity.

We also hope to grow our relationship with the Land by:

• Listening through open-minded, patient observation.

• Developing and learning rituals to live in right and reciprocal relationship with Nature.

• Offering a venue for others to deepen their connections with the Earth.

Together, we can build the skills and understanding needed to collaborate and care for the Land and all our relations in a spirit of mutual interdependence.

*We acknowledge and give credit with gratitude and humility to Anishinaabe knowledge keepers for providing the terminology expressing underlying worldviews and long-held understanding conveyed in our pillars.

We acknowledge the history and ongoing legacy of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism on Turtle Island. We acknowledge that this land was taken through the genocide of Indigenous Peoples and that the wealth of this country was built through the enslavement of Black people, the theft of Indigenous lands and resources, and the exploitation of migrant and racialized labor. These violent systems continue to shape who has access to land, wealth, and security today.

We recognize that people who are racialized, and especially those that live in poverty, face historical, cultural, and socioeconomic racism, oppression, marginalization, and discrimination, which are both systemic and interpersonal.

We recognize that the impacts of racism and oppression are intersectional, and cannot be addressed in isolation. 

As a Land-based cooperative, we acknowledge that there are many people without access to Land and who are oppressed by our current food system.

We acknowledge that racism and all other forms of oppression damage people’s health and wellbeing, threaten their access to healthy food and Lands, and cause violence and death.

We aim to centre Anti-Racism/ Anti-Oppression as a lens through which we make decisions and engage in relationship building. We understand that this is ongoing work and involves a commitment to continual learning, deepening our practice, and holding ourselves accountable, both individually and as a community.

We intend to do this by working towards breaking down systemic barriers to access, opportunity, voice and full participation at Biblioterre. We commit to continuously working towards dismantling power dynamics that impact equity in decision-making at Biblioterre. This includes members committing to the work of solidarity and affinity working groups.

We  commit to prioritizing initiatives that are led by people that are historically marginalized, and engaging in solidarity work in the broader community.

At Biblioterre, harm reduction is a way of being in relationship—with each other and with the Land. We recognize that harm is inevitable in any community, but how we respond to it matters. 

Rather than upholding punitive or perfectionist standards, we choose care, adaptation, repair and accountability over punishment, extraction, or exclusion. This includes our relationships with other humans, the Land, waters, animals and plants. This is ongoing work for those of us who were socialized in a white supremacist, capitalist system. 

Our commitment is to making space for complexity, mistakes, and growth—for each other and for the Land we’re in relationship with. We aim to build a culture of support where we prioritize mutual aid, shared responsibility, and community care over individualism and isolation.

We believe that the interconnectedness among all Life, including relationships with ancestors, influences the health and wellbeing of our community members. We wish to live in connection to the Ecosystems around us and to create a community as part of those ecosystems. The community that we intend to build includes a culture of nurturance, reciprocity, co-regulation, consent, equitable distribution of labour, community sufficiency and interdependence, and community care. In this, we commit to working to develop relationships that are supportive and loving, and to incorporate play, boundaries, open communication, nourishment, rest, ritual, beauty, and creativity into each day.

We acknowledge that many healing practices of the dominant culture have been taken from BIPOC communities without acknowledgement. It is our intention to continually work to deconstruct colonial models that pathologize physical and mental health. We believe that health and wellbeing are deeply impacted by factors that influence a person’s sense of dignity such as access to whole foods, safe, affordable and stable housing, a liveable income, strong support systems and community engagement. 

We are looking to focus on projects that are informed by models of holistic health, community wellbeing, social justice, and connection to the environment. We also commit to centreing projects that work to address how capitalism, intergenerational trauma, systemic violence and oppression impact the health and wellbeing of bodies, communities and ecosystems. In particular, we recognize the harm that the medical industrial complex has caused to Black, Indigenous, Disabled, Trans, Intersex, and Fat bodies, and seek projects that acknowledge this history.

Liberation is for us all and needs to happen collectively. Many of us live in a system that separates us and teaches us to see each other as the problem. However, we need each other. We believe that queer and trans liberation cannot happen without Indigenous sovereignty, racial justice, disability justice, economic justice, migrant justice, reproductive and gender justice, health justice, housing justice, labour justice, Land justice, climate justice, and multi-species justice. We are all in this together and at Biblioterre we are committed to our collective liberation. 

As a community, we strive to continuously work through the tensions of being part of capitalist, colonial, anthropocentric structures by virtue of living within them, while at the same time striving to resist, unravel and disentangle ourselves and our ways of being from these very structures. We aware it is an ongoing process where mistakes have and will continue to occur along the way.

We will do this by developing our capacity to feel what our various privileges have encouraged us to numb out from, by engaging in ongoing self-reflection, dialogue and learning opportunities as a community, by engaging in community activism & solidarity work with the wider community, and by building a culture of accountability taking & a strong belief in the value of generative conflict. 

We also prioritize initiatives (connected to/ part of Biblioterre) that are led by/ for communities that have historically and continue to be unequally affected by oppressive (racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, ableist, ageist, capitalist, colonial, anthropocentric) structures. These initiatives provide tangible ways to forge meaningful connections, uplift voices and engage in joyful resistance. 

Additionally, through sociocracy, we intend to use non-violent communication while working collaboratively to practice non-hierarchical and consent-based decision-making. We also commit to examining our relationship to punishment culture, the ways in which we have internalized these values, and how they play out within our community. Additionally, we commit to encouraging an environment of collective growth and reflection, as well as allowing for imperfection in ourselves and in others, and committing to self- accountability and apology when we have harmed others.

Something vital that sets Biblioterre apart from most “intentional” or similar land-based communities is that rather than set up a bubble for a community to disengage from the world, Biblioterre seeks to provide a viable alternative to dominant forms of relating, all the while being engaged in solidarity movements and internal practices towards a (multi-faceted) vision of liberation for all.