Effective June 5, 2025, the Alameda Native History Project has permanently ended its affiliation with Bay Area MakerFarm. This decision follows MakerFarm’s failure to perform in response to an unresolved food safety hazard posed by its walk-in refrigerator unit that remains structurally unsound, unsanitary, and incapable of maintaining safe refrigeration temperatures.
The Alameda Native History Project initially suspended operations at MakerFarm on May 24, 2025, after repeated warnings were ignored. The organization issued a formal Notice of Suspension of Activities & Intent to Disclose, citing extensive documentation, including:
- Over 400 pounds of rotting produce removed by ANHP from the walk-in on April 16
- Temperature readings of 43°F–46°F, well above the USDA safe threshold of 40°F
- Spoilage of fresh rabbit meat intended for a public event due to inadequate refrigeration
- Manufacturer correspondence confirming the existing A/C unit was under-powered for the space
Despite these warnings and a clearly stated remediation deadline, Bay Area MakerFarm took no effective action. Instead of correcting the hazard, Bay Area MakerFarm minimized the danger,
re-framed documented concerns as interpersonal issues, and failed to uphold even basic standards of care or responsibility.
On June 5, 2025, ANHP issued a final Notice of Permanent Suspension of Activities and Withdrawal of Free Association. This notice cited failure to perform, breach of duty, disregard for public health, and misalignment with the standards of care required for Indigenous cultural work. MakerFarm was instructed to remove all references to ANHP from its website, signage, publications, and promotional materials.
This withdrawal is not about conflict. It is about care.
Food sovereignty requires food safety. Cultural work requires clean, safe environments. Community spaces must be accountable to the people they serve. We cannot, and will not, associate our work with conditions that put our community at risk.
To be clear: the negligence and unsanitary conditions at Bay Area MakerFarm have had no impact on the success of our programming. The Alameda Native History Project remains fully self-sustaining and independently organized. The ACORNS! Project Arc continues without interruption, and upcoming events will proceed as planned.
Our work is sacred and community-oriented. It cannot be shaken by a white-led organization that shrouds itself in the language of inclusion but, in practice, cultivates a hostile environment for BIPOC, non-binary individuals, and anyone whose dissent demands accountability.
Bay Area MakerFarm is structured around process idealism, not functional governance.
For BIPOC individuals entering these spaces, the dissonance is immediate. You’re told you’re welcome, but the minute you name harm or point out gaps in care, the tone shifts. Suddenly, you’re “too intense,” or you’re “not being collaborative.” Your lived experience is pathologized. Your insistence on accountability is framed as aggression. If you’ve ever felt isolated, second-guessed yourself, or wondered if you were overreacting, you weren’t. You were being gaslit by a structure that protects comfort over truth and feelings over safety.
What happened at Bay Area MakerFarm is not an anomaly. It is the default operating mode of too many white-led, self-proclaimed progressive collectives.
These are spaces built on white fragility, trustafarian politics, and a curated aesthetic of care that masks deep resistance to real accountability. They specialize in optics over outcomes, claiming to be inclusive while maintaining structures that ensure power remains concentrated and critique is punished.
These environments weaponize process to maintain the status quo, and perform emotional labor not to address harm, but to center themselves in it.
The ‘confusion’ and ‘hurt’ expressed by leadership are not genuine steps toward repair. They are tactics of delay and deflection. The endless talking circles, the forced emotional exposure, the vague invitations to ‘build understanding’—these are not accountability mechanisms. They are containment strategies designed to absorb dissent and protect those in power.
If you’ve been in these spaces and felt like you were being handled instead of heard, you were.
If you’ve been encouraged to participate in healing rituals while the root causes of harm were never addressed, you weren’t imagining things. This is the blueprint. And Bay Area MakerFarm followed it exactly, until we walked away.
When valid safety concerns, grounded in health codes, USDA guidelines, and food safety best practices, were dismissed as a “fancy A/C purchase,” it was an intentional act of gaslighting.
This re-framing didn’t just diminish the issue. It recast an urgent health risk as a personal whim, discrediting the messenger to avoid responsibility.
It sent a clear message: evidence doesn’t matter, what matters is preserving comfort and control.
This is not about collaboration; it’s about conformity to a structure that protects those in power while discrediting those who speak up. Your expertise, your warnings, your truth all become irrelevant the moment they challenge the dominant narrative.
When someone ripped the locking bracket off the door of a shared space with zero consequence, in spite of the fact we were all given the code to the dial lock, it signaled that even basic safety and boundary-setting could be violated without accountability, if you were the right person.
And when that same someone ripped carefully cultivated plants out of the soil, offering a hollow apology deflected by ‘I thought you said…,’ it underscored not only a disregard for labor, presence, and contributions, but a deeper refusal to recognize the agency and personhood of BIPOC participants.
This was not carelessness. It was a pattern: a way of diminishing harm by rewriting intent, shifting blame, and robbing people of the right to define what has happened to them.
The lack of regard, care, concern, or consequences, reinforced a message many BIPOC folks know too well: you’re only welcome for as long as we allow it. It’s not your consent, it’s ours. The moment you assert boundaries, ask for accountability, or disrupt the illusion of harmony, you become the problem.
Bay Area MakerFarm’s consent-based model is ideologically rigid and operationally brittle, built to neutralize dissent rather than incorporate accountability.
Its core principle, that a ‘No’ is an invitation to leave, is framed as a way to prevent obstruction and support momentum. But in practice, it punishes those who raise necessary concerns, especially BIPOC individuals who name harm.
The message becomes clear: if you cannot quietly consent to a flawed process, you must remove yourself. This doesn’t build consensus, it enforces silence. And it enables those in power to preserve their comfort while pushing out anyone who challenges it.
The organization’s reliance on free association, siloed committees, and performative inclusivity enables a culture where responsibility is diffused and no one is held accountable.
Committees operate without real oversight. Urgent concerns are reframed as procedural obstacles. Individuals with lived experience are pushed out when they raise inconvenient truths, especially when those truths reveal deep cultural or structural harm.
For BIPOC participants, this pattern is not a glitch, it’s a feature. Your concerns become disruptions. Your calls for care are labeled conflict. And your presence becomes untenable the moment it asks too much of a system designed to protect white comfort.
To white participants and leaders in these spaces: you may believe you are building collective power, but what you’re often building is a structure of exclusion.
When your systems require emotional neutrality to be heard, and protect the process more than the people, you’re not creating platforms of care, you are reinforcing structures which cause very real and tangible harm.
When you equate disagreement with obstruction, and disagreement from BIPOC people as hostility, what you’re really doing is preserving a hierarchy where safety and belonging are only available to those who never question the rules.
The result is a space that not only fails to uphold health and safety, but also betrays the very values it claims to uphold.
We believe in collaboration without compromise.
As stated in our Working With Us guidelines: “We do not believe in compromising our values to maintain partnerships. We believe that true collaboration is only possible with honesty, transparency, and accountability.“
Our partnerships are grounded in mutual respect, transparency, and accountability. We expect spaces that align with our values to center care, uphold safety, and take responsibility, not just in language, but in practice.
Our approach is rooted in Indigenous principles. We bring our full selves to the work, as Two-Spirit, BIPOC, and community-led organizers committed to food sovereignty, safety, and collective care.
We do not stay silent when harm is ignored, minimized, or redirected through performative process.
When we walk away, it is not to create drama. It is because staying would require us to betray the very responsibilities we carry.
We did not leave Bay Area MakerFarm because of a disagreement. We left because they refused to take accountability. And we will not allow their dysfunction to jeopardize the sacredness of our work.
The Alameda Native History Project has moved on.
To every BIPOC person who’s been silenced, gaslit, or pushed out of a space that claimed to value you… this is your reminder: you’re not imagining things.
You deserve spaces that meet you with integrity, not containment. And you don’t owe your labor to collectives that can’t hold themselves accountable.
We see you. We believe you. You are not alone.
Appendix: Documents
- June 5, 2025 Notice of Permanent Suspension of Activities & Withdrawal of Free Association
- Final notice following failure to remediate unsafe refrigeration, formalizing project withdrawal and disassociation.
- May 24, 2025 Notice of Suspension of Activities & Intent to Disclose
- Outlines unresolved food safety concerns and temporarily halts participation in shared food storage.