RE-Storying homesteading
I am a person of place. I always have been. I experience belonging in relation to the land, often more so than with humans. I trust the land, the interactions I witness in nature make sense to me, whereas many things humans do, just don’t.
At an early age, when human relational trauma tore a hole in the fabric of my soul, I stepped through that hole into relationship with a world soul, and it saved me. That is why I am a gardener, an eco-mystic, a land based artist, abolitionist, healer and alchemist.
When I consider my upbringing and how my connection to land developed, I remember my parents owning a 10 acre piece of rural land that I could roam freely. My mother kept horses, and my dad grew a garden. I learned from my father to be a steward of the oak woodland, wildflowers and the animals that depended on it. I learned from my mother to tap into intuitive gifts naturally through our relationship with horses. We were surrounded by mixed deciduous and oak forest that I used to hike with my dad and tear through on horseback alone. I had access to the wild and I felt safe there.
I was in relationship with the land. In fact, when I became a mother for the first time and was still sorting out how to be in human relationships safely, I adopted the world soul as my mother and as my children’s grandmother.
I found belonging among Jerusalem crickets, Oak and Acorn, Moles, Wood Beetles and Fence Lizards. These are my kin and where I feel safe. We are in relation, and we are response-able to each other. Since becoming aware of this profound connection, I’ve made it my mission to create experiences for children and trauma-affected kindreds of all ages to sense into the world soul as a source of healing and repair.
We belong to the earth, the earth does not belong to us. We are in a deeply entangled interdependent relationship with the giant organism we call earth.
I live with the questions:
How is it that I and others come to experience this profound feeling of kinship with the land?
What has happened that so many no longer feel it?
What is a path forward that conjures a new story?
Part of what made me feel safe in wild places was having a home to return to- a place that belonged to my blood relations, that I felt I belonged. In 2021 I had the opportunity to participate in a spiritual and educational journey with a mystery school. We were encouraged to connect with the land as a guide and journeyed toward an ancestral memory. After the process, we did three rounds of affinity groups that changed each time, like water molecules separating and coming back together. We discovered that we all held common truths about humanity, spirituality and life on earth. Even though we may have had different visions and different narratives to describe it, our experience was common. We were a diverse group of mostly femme identified folks.
A young black woman shared that she was able to access ancestral memory, but connecting to the land as a guide was not resonant. As a result, she didn’t feel supported by the land in her journey. As a group we arrived at an understanding that her ancestors were taken from their indigenous land in Africa and forced to labor on US soil that had been taken from American Indigenous tribes. The land had become a symbol of loss and toil for her, not a doorway to a world soul as a source of healing and repair.
And I understand better now that so many people do not have access to land as a spiritual resource because, like most things of value in a materialist world, land has been commodified and placed into a social class hierarchy within which access is denied to some and bestowed upon others through deliberately white supremacist economic policies. Therefore the relationship each person has with the land will be very different in context.
Context is everything. We are relational beings. No one is free from response-ability with regard to historical land access and its ripple effects today.
The foundation of my spirituality was discovered in the context of owned land. My father purchased the land with the help from the GI Bill, and because my mother was married to him, she could legally lay claim to it too. Historically, women rarely got to own land without the aid of marriage, in fact a woman couldn’t even apply for a mortgage without a husband until the year I was conceived, 1974. I have declined to marry since the death of my husband in 2003. It still required a man for me to get a mortgage 50 years after I was legally allowed to. We cannot divorce ourselves from history as long as systems are in place that perpetuate expired stories about land and wealth.
“We are living off expired or expiring stories. Stories that expire can no longer dance with you. They are lethargic or stuck, they can’t move things in generative ways anymore, but we often feel we cannot let them go. Many of these expired stories give us a sense of security, purpose, and direction- precisely because they seem stable and solid. Thus, we become attached to them and get used to their weight in our lives. If we notice they are dying, we refuse to accept it and we put them on life support because we fear the void left in their place when they are no longer there. We forecast that this void will leave us empty, story-less, and that there will be no vitality in this emptiness because everything will be meaningless, pointless, purposeless, and sad. ”
It’s ironic that right now in 2025, the president of the US is mass deporting immigrants. White European folks literally are the immigrants to America. European immigrants, who called themselves “settlers” stole the land from Indigenous tribes and developed it with the labor of Indigenous African people who were stolen from their home country. And our industrial food system is completely dependent on the labor of immigrants from Latin America. American industrial agriculturalists invited Latin Americans to come here, inventing a special type of visa, to do the farm work that white Americans weren’t willing to do. In essence, white male American leaders have imported the majority of the black and brown labor force that has enabled the amassing of agricultural land and developed the infrastructures that foster gross economic wealth for the ruling class. These are white men’s ideas; not their work or their labor, their ideas. It hasn’t been built with their own hands. It has been built with exploited labor. Now we, as white people, are the ones dependent on black and brown people’s labor to EAT. Yet the rhetoric from the oval office is that any black or brown people or women who cannot gain legal immigration status or earn a living wage in America are a “parasite class”.
Even parasites are smart enough to know you can’t eat money.
Food is political because every person must eat to survive. If you control food, you can control people. This is why so many liberation movements include some form of food sovereignty. For instance the Black Panther’s free breakfast program and food pantry and the back to the land movement.
The back-to-the-land movement emerged in distinct waves throughout history, responding to periods of social, economic, and environmental upheaval. In the Great Depression economic hardship forced many families to reclaim subsistence farming. In the 1960s and ’70s, amid the countercultural rejection of consumerism and war, thousands of young people left cities to form intentional communities. This era’s movement emphasized ecological living, communal self-reliance, and an ethos of returning to nature as a political act. Today, a new generation of “homesteaders” is reviving these ideals in response to climate change, food system instability, and the alienation of modern life. The core belief is that living close to the land is a path to both survival and liberation. I couldn’t agree more.
However, we must learn from the past. We must understand the history of the word homesteading. The term homesteading is deeply tied to the ideology of Manifest Destiny, the 19th-century belief that white settlers had a divine right to expand across North America. The Homestead Act of 1862 granted land—often violently taken from Indigenous peoples—to settlers willing to "improve" it, reinforcing the racist idea that European-style agriculture and land ownership were the markers of civilization. Manifest Destiny justified the forced removal, genocide, and assimilation of Indigenous communities, framing their displacement as necessary for progress. This expansionist ideology was rooted in earlier colonial violence, including the witch hunts of early modern Britain, where women—especially healers, midwives, and those who resisted enclosure of common lands—were persecuted as threats to emerging capitalist and patriarchal structures. Many of the Puritans who later colonized North America carried these beliefs with them, bringing a culture of land seizure, resource extraction, and the suppression of traditional knowledge. The legacy of homesteading, then, is not just about self-sufficiency—it carries the weight of colonial conquest and the violent erasure of non-materialist ways of living.
It’s no surprise to me that when I look at white folks trying to create intentional, land-based communities to escape the system, I commonly see a reversion to strict gender roles and, often, a blatant denouncement of feminism. The subjugation of feminine-perceived bodies is the foundational pillar of all dehumanization and exploitation. I would argue that the intent to maintain the institution of women’s free and exploited labor is a fundamental reason for the violent pushback from the conservative American right against gender expansiveness.
Homesteading is only a viable way to survive off the land if two things exist: free labor and land ownership.
Women’s kinmaking and caregiving labor in the institution of marriage is still free.
Land ownership is still the domain of men and married women.
“I looked up the road I was going and back the way I come, and since I wasn’t satisfied, I decided to step off the road and cut me a new path.”
So while we worry about collapse and try to build resilience by growing our own food, mending our own clothes, raising animals, learning about herbs to treat our ailments, and using plant medicines to expand our consciousness and heal system-created mental illness, can we consider who has access to these technologies? Who needs them most? How can we redistribute ownership, resources, and access? What does a back-to-the-land movement look like without the exploitation of women’s labor and black and brown labor? What does a back-to-the-land movement look like without the exclusion of black, brown and femme bodies?
One of the greatest harms of living in these expired stories, in capitalism and white empire, is that the vast majority of us are required to be disconnected from the land in order to earn money and survive. We are required to disconnect from each other to perform our work days that also exploit the earth. This comes at a great cost to our mental health and a great cost to the living environment on which we all depend. Loneliness creates and worsens physical health problems. Loneliness is the root cause of depression, addiction, and suicide.
When we are connected deeply to and woven into the fabric of interdependent life, we are never lonely because we have a response-ability to Jerusalem crickets, Oak and Acorn, Moles, Wood Beetles and Fence Lizards. When we are in relation in this way, land serves as a bridge to the world soul and nourishes us with the calories and the courage to repair ancestral wounds.
I’m going to take part in re-storying the world by no longer using the word homesteading to describe the generative lifeways I teach and engage in. I trust there are other words for what I do, another story about my relationship to the land that is ready to emerge. I’m now calling my garden coaching services Land Based Self-Determination.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Send me an email or comment on this article on social media.
~
Listen to my interview on First Nations Radio here:
https://archive.org/details/first-nations-202502141400
~
Recommended Resources:
Hospicing Modernity: A Work That Reconnects Network Webinar with Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbmjbURCIms&list=PLiT28WYR6vmvRGWy9XgKGJ0j02Tsh_wxq
Farming While Black
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvQJP8QP-Ng
Poor Prole’s Almanac: White Supremacy and Homesteading
https://poorprolesalmanac.substack.com/p/homesteading-and-white-supremacy
The Witches Child
https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2012/04/21/the-witchs-child-now-in-zine-format/
Caliban and the Witch audio breakdown
https://thebookonfire.podbean.com/e/caliban-and-the-witch-introduction/
The Lock Down Showed How the Economy Exploits Women.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/magazine/waged-housework.html
Alnoor Lahda on For the Wild podcast
https://forthewild.world/listen/alnoor-ladha-on-capitalists-and-other-cannibals-49
Unsettling America website
https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/allyship/
White Supremacy Culture
https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/
Decolonizing Is Not a Metaphor
https://clas.osu.edu/sites/clas.osu.edu/files/Tuck%20and%20Yang%202012%20Decolonization%20is%20not%20a%20metaphor.pdf