Ethos Statement

At Chicago Cane Cooperative, we don’t shy away from history. Instead, our aim is to educate and improve–ourselves, our community, and the spirits industry at large. 

As a worker cooperative that produces rum, specifically, our organizational model is a direct response to that spirit’s legacy of colonial violence and exploitation. Having emerged on sugarcane plantations in the 17th century, rum has a troubling, bloodsoaked history. In the transatlantic slave trade, in the Haitian and American Revolutions, in countless coups and covert operations, rum and sugarcane together played a central role. But while these goods helped shape today’s world and its globalized economy, their impact is seldom discussed.

Here in Chicago, our city’s working-class legacy is similarly overlooked. The American labor movement was essentially born in Chicago, gaining traction with the hanging of the Haymarket Martyrs. From the 1894 Pullman Strike and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to the antiwar protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Chicago has seen countless brave displays of solidarity.

Noticeably, mainstream histories of Chicago are also Eurocentric and conveniently brief, ignoring the Indigenous people who have lived here for  millennia. Long before the first non-Native settlers arrived in the place we now call Chicago, Indigenous people knew this land as a cultural and geographical meeting point. This land was home to the Potawatomi, Odawa, Ojibwe, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Myaamia, Wea, Sauk, Meskwaki, and Ho-Chunk peoples, who navigated the local portage to access both the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River System. Colonial expansion meant the illegal seizure of lands, environmental devastation, and the mass expulsion of Indigenous people. Yet Indigenous communities remain in Chicago, where they have made the stolen soil into a site of cultural resurgence and anticolonial struggle.

Chicago Cane Cooperative provides an ever-growing platform from which we can draw attention to the above injustices and oversights. Moreover, our commitment to worker-ownership is a means of confronting history’s horrors and taking material steps toward a truly equitable, democratic future. Taking inspiration from centuries of anticolonial activism and labor organizing, we work to better our world and ourselves, refusing to perpetuate the systems of oppression that have marred both rum and the land on which we operate.