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Left-leaning activist movements in the United States have a long history of confronting oppressive behaviors of the State-and non-State opponents- alongside attempts to deal with intramovement power struggles. These tensions reveal patterns of oppressive and aggressive behavior that reinforced gendered and racial hierarchies, which many groups made concerted efforts to dismantle.1 This article provides an analysis of how narratives and counternarratives were deployed to reinforce and resist patterns of abusive and violent behavior within Cascadia Forest Defenders (CFD), a grassroots environmental organization based in Eugene, Oregon. CFD was founded in 1995 by a group of mostly white activists in their twenties and thirties-University of Oregon students, activists from the grassroots environmental network Earth First!, and a few Eugene locals.2 Their first major victory came in 1996, with the halting of logging in an area known as Warner Creek in the Willamette National Forest. The Willamette National Forest-like Eugene and surrounding towns-exists on land stolen from the Kalapuya people during the colonization of the Pacific Northwest, a fact obscured by CFD's suggestion that national forests are "public land."3 In 1998 CFD set up tree-sits in the Clark timber sale, an area of old-growth forest in the Willamette National Forest at risk of being logged.4 The timber sale's proximity to Fall Creek, a popular recreation site, led CFD to choose the latter name for their tree-sits.5 Humus, a white male CFD activist, worked on the Fall Creek campaign and acknowledged the impact that "lots of dysfunctional people, lots of men with anger management issues" had in the early days. John, a white CFD activist, observed some of these conflicts playing out: "There was issues constantly being sorted out by the crew and as usual for the time it was either things didn't get said or all of a sudden somebody's really, you know, on the outs."6
CFD dealt with these issues alongside intragroup disagreements over tactics and strategy. Denali-a white woman who got involved with CFD around 1995-suggested that some original members disagreed with the use of treesits at Fall Creek.7 However, ultimately the tree-sits were put up.8 CFD's sits generally consisted of two pieces of wood-approximately 4 feet x 7 feet- connected by smaller sections of wood to encircle the tree.9 They were deliberately built high,...